“Okay.”
“Okay?” Aaron cut into a slice of bacon and put it in his mouth, lashes flitting down as he looked at his plate before curling up again so those beacons could look into Oscar and undo him.
“Okay,” Oscar repeated. Maybe he’d forgotten language.
But Aaron’s mouth softened, and ifokayeased him like this, then Oscar would be happy making it his entire lexicon.
“Okay,” Aaron replied.
Oscar told himself he was imagining the blush that raced across Aaron’s cheeks and nose, turning his skin the color of pomegranate seeds. But he wasn’t.
Aaron blushed. And it was beautiful.
Oscar wanted to make him blush forever. He wanted to make him giggle with his murmurs, to draw his sighs with soft feathery kisses, to make his skin go flush with his touch. Oscar thought about Aaron calling their meeting fate in that waiting room and knew that he believed it.
For the first time in his life, Oscar believed in more fairy tales than just the one where the frog became a prince.
For the first time in his life, Oscar believed that people could be happy.
That Oscar could be.
The chuckle that trilled out of Aaron, breathy and beautiful, sounded like music, like Papa plucking guitar strings in the basement, telling Oscar he’d grown rusty but showing him anyway. Because Papa was honest like that and real like that. And Aaron was real, too. And he was sitting in Oscar’s kitchen, eating the breakfast he’d cooked for them.
But Oscar hadn’t been born for the serious, no matter how much of it life had thrown his way, making him a boy in the house of a woman who would not understand him, givinghim refuge in a man who would die before Oscar turned fourteen, gifting him a brain that wanted to destroy him more than anybody else ever had.
So he shouldn’t have been so surprised when Luigi broke the spell like the stroke of midnight, pumpkining the carriage of this blossoming thing between them as he leapt on the table, knocking over Oscar’s coffee.
“Oh, shit!” Aaron said.
“It’s fine. Let me…” Oscar leapt off his chair, reaching for the paper towels, slapping a far thicker wad than Papa would have approved of.
Papa had always loved the trees.
Papa had always loved everything.
Even Oscar’s mother.
Even Oscar. Especially Oscar.
So maybe Papa would forgive him if he knew how nervous he was, leaning over the table, hovering a hair’s breadth from Aaron’s head as he wiped the spill. Could Aaron hear his heart thumping in his chest, banging at the walls of his body, aching to cling to the other man and go home with him after he inevitably left?
Maybe he could. Maybe that was why Aaron tipped his head back to look up at him.
A nervous one-note chuckle slipped through Oscar, turning into a choke as Aaron’s fingers wrapped around the front of his shirt, pulling him in.
He’s going to kiss me.
He’s going to kiss me.
He’s going tofuckingkiss me.
But Aaron didn’t kiss him. Aaron gazed into his eyes like they’d traded colors, like Oscar’s were the ocean and Aaron wanted to go for a dive. His other hand rose, sweeping the air an inch from Oscar’s face, and then his thumb pressed the corner of Oscar’s mouth.
Aaron must have made a vow to kill him with anticipation. His lips curved.
“You had a bit of egg,” he murmured.
“Okay,” Oscar replied.
