The inches between us get as heavy and saturated as it is outside. I feel a weighty tenderness bloom inside me, and I lean my head against his, looking down at our hands. The music has stopped altogether and the record skips.
He gets up to stop it. I can tell by the back of his neck and shoulders that I’ve done something wrong.
“Asher…”
He holds up a Five Satins record. “How about this?”
I lower my gaze, shrug.
He puts the record on and the first swaying beats play. He sits back on the bed with a cigarette, hunched. After a couple minutes, I almost feel as if he’s forgotten I’m here.
There’s a prickle on my spine, an ache. And a fear.
I get up to stand in front of him. I run my hands over his head, gentle. My fingertips brush his ear, the back of his neck and shoulders. He exhales against my stomach. I get down on my knees in between his. His cheeks are wet, and I’m patient. I don’t force it when he turns his head away from me, smoke streaming from his nostrils. I get closer, put my arms around him.
“Don’t do that.” His voice is razor sharp.
Sometimes I like getting cut. “I won’t let you go.”
I tighten my arms around him. His head falls heavy on my shoulder.
“I won’t let you go.”
It rains the rest of the afternoon and into the evening.
There’s a kind of cloudy light over us in the bed. It gives his skin this unearthly glow, blue eyes hazy. I tangle my legs in his, get his hips against mine. I’m already getting hard again and he is, too, but I’m thinking something else. Something different.
I maneuver myself underneath him when he kisses me. His hips rest in between my legs. His kiss isn’t as urgent as it is concentrated, as if he hasn’t had a taste of me in months and he’d like to savor it. It’s darker underneath him; his body looms and his skin has that orangey spice with the breath of rain that comes in through the screen door. It makes me dizzy.
I think about being in his sitting room that first time. It couldn’t be only a week has passed. I feel as if the man above me has been with me for lifetimes.
His hips rut against me. My dick hardens.
He does it again.
“Are you going to —” I start and stop.
His brows stitch together in confusion, then it dawns on him what I meant.
“I want it to be with you.” I blurt it out, stupidly.
His expression shutters, briefly, then his fingers rest on my cheek. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
I know what he’s saying, but on the surface of my mind, I let that slip into a crack. “Then don’t.”
He sighs, his forehead coming to rest against mine.
I convince myself it’s something I can give him. For what he shared with me. For the hurt it caused him, and although I know, realistically, the hurt isn’t my fault, I think it’s a way to accept. I tell myself I won’t be silly after. I won’t be pathetic. I won’t be like I have been, coming over, following along, and foolish. I could withstand however it would be between us. Because there isn’t anybody else, and entwined underneath him like this, I feel sure there never will be again.
He gets up, and it’s cold where his skin pulls away from mine. I sit up on my elbows. His dick is bigger than the two fingers I’ve managed before. The first time I tried it, I’d seen a picture of two men fucking. It was a complete accident.
When my fantasies of Valentino got redundant, I went to the library and perused the magazines. I’d look at the sports ones to get ideas, images stuck in my mind. Sometimes I liked the drawings better than real life. It was the illustrated men with broad shoulders and thick arms, so different from my own, that I liked the most. I could imagine them wrapped around me. Or myself gripping them. Tightly.
Then there was a picture.
It wasn’t supposed to be in there. Someone slipped it in. One guy was on his back, legs in the air. The other was over him, still wearing a shirt, round ass bare and his cock halfway in. Mine hardened in seconds, my face heated, and I almost dropped the magazine. It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about before. Or even considered. But once I knew, once I saw, I couldn’t stop. That night, I bit my knuckles to keep from crying out I came so hard.
Asher returns with Vaseline. He gets into bed with me, hands wandering. Mine do too. Bolder, reaching down to grip his bare round ass, I pull him against me in a suggestion and in a long-awaited want.
