“Cole, what are you doing?” I ask suspiciously.
“Just getting comfortable,” he trills, winking at me over his shoulder. He strips off his jeans, too, leaving him in nothing but a pair of tiny black briefs, then turns back to the closet. He selects one of my white dress shirts, leaving it open in the front and rolling up the sleeves. The shirt is much too large for his slender frame, but seeing him in my clothes is stirring, and I can feel myself becoming decidedly interested.
But I’m not going to tell him that. “Feeling better?”
“Muchbetter,” Cole grins. He returns to the bed, flopping luxuriously against the pillows and artfully arranging his limbs on the coverlet. I keep my face turned toward the screen, but I sneak glances from time to time, appreciating the elegant line of his body sprawled on my bed.
We continue that way for about an hour. I plug away at my work, and Cole reads his book, or pretendsto. From time to time, he shifts position, finding some new perfectly languid pose on the coverlet, my shirt only framing and enhancing the peaks and valleys of golden skin. I’m desperately hard, but I feign indifference, letting the tension in the room build. Finally, when the last comment is written, I push my chair back from my desk, stretching my arms over my head. Cole looks up hopefully.
“You hungry?” I ask, standing up and making my way over to the kitchenette. “I was thinking I might start dinner early — or I could make you a smoothie?”
I point down at the Vitamix that Sabrina and Seth gave me after their shower, still unopened in its box.
“You can be a real bastard, you know that?” But Cole’s laughing as he stands up, walking over to drape himself against my cabinets while I reach for the battered recipe box on top of my refrigerator.
“So what will it be?” I flip through the cards. “Aunt Barb’s tuna salad? Chicken parm? Shepherd’s pie?”
“Do you even have the ingredients for any of that?” Cole laughs, reaching for the box.
I hand it over and shrug, leaning into his side as he pulls one of the handwritten cards out of the box and studies it.
“Where did you get these, anyway?”
“They were my mom’s.” I pull out the card for macaroni and cheese, running my fingers over the carefully inked words. “You remember that I ended updoing most of the cooking — you know, after she passed. I figured somebody had to keep Dad alive. And it felt like having a piece of her with me, whenever I made something I remembered her making. So when I finally moved out for good after college, Dad said I should take them, because I’d earned them.”
Cole looks at me for a long time, a strange light in his eyes. “Ezra, I know you think you push everybody away, but deep down — you are a really beautiful person.”
“Am I?” I take the box from him, shutting the lid and putting it down on the counter. “Because just a little while ago you said —”
“Please shut up and don’t kill the moment.”
His kiss is soft at first, just a brush of gently parted lips as he slides a hand around my waist. But then he presses in, lifting me nearly onto my toes as he bends down, wrapping me in a warm embrace. And I’ve spentsomuch time kissing Cole in the last two months, hot and desperate or fun and playful, but somehow this feels different in ways I’m not sure I could possibly name. He’s nearly naked, a willow sapling in my arms, pliant but strong, and as he winds himself around me I have the wild thought that nothing has ever been better than this. Somehow, with him, I know who I am.
We’re stumbling across the room, dodging the piles of books as we make our way towards the bed. I go down first, perching at the edge of the mattress, my feetplanted on the ground, and he straddles my lap, one hand in my hair as he sighs, keeping our mouths pressed together.
“Can I take this off?” he murmurs, plucking at my shirt.
I raise my arms to let him, returning the favor as I push the white shirt off his shoulders. But then we stay where we are, our chests pressed together, his hips twitching as he rocks against me, our hands clutching and caressing. It never fails to send a shudder through my body, the sheer fucking joy of feeling his bare skin against mine, and I can’t get enough of it, running my hands up and down his back, along his lean thighs. And he’s cradling my face, drinking me down as if I’m keeping him alive, his heart thudding against mine.
Somehow we collapse onto the bed, with Cole beneath me, winding his limbs around me to hold me in place. Somehow we break apart long enough to finish undressing, until we’re both completely bare. Somehow I remember to reach for the drawer in my bedside table, to gather the supplies we need. But when I reach for his shoulder to turn him over, he lifts a hand, wrapping it around my wrist.
“Can we — would it be okay if we do it like this?”
His words thud against my skull, but his eyes are shining, so I nod. “Um — okay.”
And so he settles against the pillows, his knees hugging my sides, and when I slide into him I can watchthe tiny fluctuations on his face, his parted lips, the little lines of concentration that appear between his brows as I find that spot inside him. And it’s everything, to see him this way, to share his breath, to lean down and kiss him as the tight heat of him envelops me, to feel his arms around my neck, his little cries against my ear. We movetogether, and as I take him apart, as I feel my peak building inside me, he reaches a hand between us to bring himself off, so that we’re panting as one, both of us striving, seeking —
I’m not sure which one of us lets go first. But suddenly I’m spilling, shuddering, and he’s convulsing in my arms. There’s a mess between us, but I don’t care as I fall onto his chest, pressing kisses along the side of his throat. The building could fall down around us, and I would still be here in this bed, still wanting this, still —
A sharp gasp against my ear cuts into the afterglow.
“Cole? Why are you crying?”
He’s trying to cover his face, but I pull his hand away to see the tears trickling out of the corners of his eyes and into his hair.
“Don’t worry — it’s not a big deal —” He gives me a watery smile, dashing the tears away. “I just get like this sometimes, when the sex is really good. I think you melted my brain.”
I frown. “You never did — before —”
