His words are measured and careful when he finally replies.
“I think there are a lot of different kinds of intimacy, and some of them include sex and some of them don’t.” There’s a pause, and it’s weighty enough I know I’m not going to like whatever he says next. “It makes sense that when you have a fundamentally fucked-up relationship with intimacy and relationships—family relationships as well as sexual ones—it’s normal for those lines to feel… blurred. Or confusing.”
I wince, unable to stop myself. I already knew he saw me as a walking disaster because how could he not? But it still hurts to hear him say it.
“So, you think my dad beat the shit out of me instead of loving me and it fucked up my head so much I turned into some kind of incestuous freak?”
Micah’s eyes widen for a second, then he huffs and rolls them—hard.
“So dramatic,” he mutters under his breath before grabbing my face with his other hand and wiggling even closer to me on the bed. “No. Is that what I said? Because I think that’s really fucking far from what I said, Tadhg.”
His tone is snappy, but he pauses to take a deep breath, and I can see the way his eyes soften. There’s tension running through every inch of me, but it still doesn’t stop me from reaching for him, wrapping my hands around his warm, tight waist in the way I’m quickly becoming addicted to. I can’t get my fingers all the way around him—he’s slim but not that small—but I can hold enough of him that it feels anchoring.
“And I was talking about myself, as well as you,” he continues. “We had shitty parents. It fucks you up. That’s not rocket science. We were hurled together when we were little kids and had no one else to rely on, and it makes sense that we became a little codependent. It wasn’t sexual, because we were kids, but I think in hindsight it also wasn’t as familial as we maybe thought it was. It was just intense. Because it was all the intimacy we had going around. And now it’s shifted. It’s notincestuous.” He huffs again. “We’re still not—nor have we ever been—actually related. And you’re not a freak. You’re damaged. So am I. It doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to figure our shit out and be happy.”
The thought buoys something inside me, but it’s tremulous and I know that if I look at it too long, it’ll crumble under the inspection. So instead, I close the few inches between us and wrap my arms all the way around him, burying my face in his warm, solid chest and closing my eyes.
His hands come to my head on instinct, fingers threading through my hair and scratching gently at my scalp. I want to purr like a cat in a perfect sun spot, but I control myself.
“Honestly, Tadhg, I thought you’d be freaking out about the gay thing more than the stepbrother thing,” Micah adds, and Ihatehatehatethe piece of wall that starts chipping away at in my mind.
I have no intention of dignifying it with a response, so I growl instead and concentrate on the important thing—planting wet, open-mouthed kisses over every piece of skin I can find on Micah’s abdomen. He shucked his shirt at some point during our post-sex make out session, so I have plenty to work with, and I’m enthusiastic about exploring it all and turning the volume on my brain down to zero.
My cock is on board with this plan. I can already feel it thickening a little, and this is hands down more response than I’ve gotten from that little motherfucker since I went through puberty.
It figures that my cock would only be interested in whatever was the most inconvenient, weird situation I could put myself in. I couldn’t get turned on by normal shit, of course not…
Thinking of this—of him—as ‘not normal’ is a kneejerk reflex, but something about it doesn’t sit right with me. Even in the solitude of my own thoughts, it feels out of place. Like a crooked seam, or a shirt tag that’s impossibly itchy.
That’s another thing I can circle back to come to terms withnever.
Micah lets out a breathless little giggle when I hit a particularly sensitive spot just above his hip bone. I can feel him getting hard too, but instead of escalating, he grabs at the broad expanse of my naked back and tugs like he’s pulling me toward him.
“Come on, big guy. We should probably eat something and drink water and brush our teeth and all the other shit functional people do. Even if it is the middle of the night. We can go back to bed after we’ve peopled for a little while.”
I groan but let him move me however he wants. I like how it feels.
Thirty minutes later, we’re cleaned up, half-dressed and sitting in the living room with plates of eggs and sausages that I cooked, while Micah watched me as if this was some sort of a miracle.
“See, I’m not a completely incompetent person,” I say around a mouthful of food, once we’ve started eating.
“Yes, dear.” Micah pats me on the head as he says it, and I’m still a little offended by how clearly he doesn’t believe me when I say Icanfunction outside of the realm of gangster bullshit, but as soon as I started eating, I realized how fucking hungry I was and that became the priority.
I’m sitting on the floor in front of him, and he’s got a leg slung over each of my shoulders, so at least he can’t really see the way I inhale my food. I don’t really know why I sat on the floor when we came in here. Micah didn’t comment on it though. He just hooked his legs over me like a suit of armor, bracketing me in between him and the couch, and then used one hand to keep doing that absent scratching thing he keeps doing to my hair while he eats with the other.
My food disappears quickly, and the fullness lulls me into a hazy space of contentment. My mind drifts, and I let myself lean back against him while he picks at his meal. We don’t really talk, but we don’t need to. We talked a lot already, and I’m sure he’s going to make us talk about all the other shit later.
Right now, it’s nice to justbe.
I’m so unnaturally calm that when someone knocks on the door, it takes four or five seconds for my body to react. But as soon as it snaps into focus, I fucking react.
It’s the middle of the night. We’re only awake because of how jacked the past twenty-four hours have been and the fact that weboth work nights. No one could possibly be at the door right now for a normal reason.
I jump up, knocking my plate on the floor but deciding to worry about that later. Turning to Micah, I signal to him to go lock himself in the bedroom, but he rolls his eyes at me. Which was cute before, but it’s so fucking far from cute right now.
Instead of listening to me, he runs his hands soothingly down my bare arms and makes a shushing noise, like I’m a child. It makes me bristle, and I feel myself rising up to my full height on instinct.
His eyes narrow, and I get a weird thrill of premonition that I’m going to pay for this later. But unlike every other time in my life when I’ve felt that way, this is something that I might actually enjoy.
