“Of making you come on my tongue and all over my face? Yeah, that’s a real fucking snooze fest, you’re right.” He makes a show of rolling his neck like he’s exhausted before his lips pull back, incredulous. “No, I’m not fucking bored.” But his eyes snap to my fingers, my thumbs picking at my nails, and his head pulls back. “Did he make you feel—”
“I don’t think it was that I was boring, specifically. But ... it was a task.” My voice drops, embarrassed. “A chore, like I said. And if I ever asked for it or wanted it ... there was something ... wrong with me.”
“It’s not ... wrong to want to have sex. It doesn’t make you bad or needy or whatever the fuck Scott got into his head.” A muscle jumps in Miller’s jaw and he shakes his head. “You didn’t—you didn’t feel ... bad or anything about wanting to have sex with me last night? Or again this morning, right?”
Heat flares across my cheeks, entirely different from the kind baking down on me from the sun, when I think of him, climbing over top of me on that island. Bending me over it. Cleaning me off in the shower afterwards. “No,” I whisper.
“Good.” His eyes find mine, and something that’s not quite a smile curves his mouth, and his eyes pinch closed before he says, “I don’t think you really need anyone, but, uh, I think it’d be an honour, to be needed by you.”
“You think so?” I sniff, half laughing.
But Miller looks entirely serious when he answers, “Yeah, I do.”
It’s funny—because I think it’s an honour to be needed by him. And he does seem to need me, in a way no one ever has.
He says he needs me, right then and there on the dock.
He says he needs to taste me again, and he finds himself between my legs, groaning encouragement and placing kisses all along my thighs with each one. He swallows down every orgasm, happily, until I ask him if he’d mind if I practiced something else on him.
He doesn’t mind at all—turns out he really is a great teacher. But he seems to like just about anything I do when I take him in my mouth.
He says he loved it, actually. And, with this smile and these eyes glinting that don’t look like they’ve ever seen anything bad at all, that if I want to keep practicing, he’d be more than happy for me to keep using him. He falls asleep on my chest, and I do get back to reading, and each time I read the wordsherd behaviour, I hear my best friend, and I think about the difference between the wordscan’tandwant.
I can be alone—I have the last four years as proof.
And I have this person I want, awake and lying beside me now, stretched out in the sun, the hand marked with this ever permanent, ever painful loss behind his head. This person who isso silly and wonderful, and so, so brave—who makes me feel like I can be all those things, too.
He said I made him want to try again, but I think he makes me want to do the same thing.
“Ren?” he asks quietly, while he stares up at the cloudless sky before he rolls over to face me. “When we go back—when we go on our practice date? Please don’t make me pretend.”
My finger finds the corner of my mouth, still on fire and probably burning forever, and I shift to face him when I whisper, too, “I don’t want to pretend either.”
Miller
We spend the next few days not pretending.
We don’t pretend all over the cottage. On the island again. On the couch. In the shower. In the bed we share each night.
In that same seat on the boat in the middle of the lake after I teach her how to drive.
But it’s not just the sex that isn’t pretend. Don’t think I could fake not wanting her in every humanly way possible for another single second, anyway.
We don’t pretend when I kiss her awake each morning. When she brushes my hair off my face and blinks sleepy eyes at me, cheeks creased from my pillows. When we sit, feet tangled together each night, making our way through the entireJurassic Parkfranchise.
She was right. The new ones are nothing to write home about, but the original holds up.
It’s not pretend when we buy a shared aquarium pass. Not when I tell her I won’t waive my clause because I don’t think I’m really interested in being where she isn’t, even if it’s a placeMatt never will be again, and not when we lie out on the dock, stretched out under the stars and she tells me she doesn’t want that job. That she just wants to be herself after all this time—even if that means she’s never anything more than Ren Jacobs, Collections Manager of Vertebrate Paleontology.
I don’t tell her that she was always more than that, and always will be. That I could make an endless list of all the things she is and all the reasons I think she should always, always be herself.
I don’t think there’s anything pretend about the plans we start to make—the ones we say out loud, and the ones I keep to myself.
And I don’t think, when I drop her back off at her townhouse that really could use some organizing, that when she kisses me on the porch and whispers against my forever-ruined-with-her mouth that she’ll see me in a week, that there’s ever been anyone on this planet, or any single other one, that’s as lucky as me.
Ren
Exhibits of any kind—vertebrate or invertebrate—don’t typically have fairy lights strung from the ceiling, or tealights placed strategically around the fossil mounts. But the new saurolophus family does look particularly great, thrown into shadow by all the different hues of yellow and white.
