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It feels even better that the next words out of his mouth have nothing to do with what he sees on the tiny screen. “Do you play those too?”
He points to the instruments by the TV.
I shrug. “A little.”
“Show me?”
For him, anything. Though the old lady who lives next door is going to tell me off in the morning.
I swap the būgnas for a banjo and bring it back to the couch. I play for Poet and he watches my hands move with such fascination it hurts my heart. A good pain, but it still hurts.
“There,” I say when I am done and the banjo and būgnas are back where they belong. “You know all my skills now.”
I have returned to the couch. Poet is in my arms again. In answer, he licks the seam of my mouth. I bite his bottom lip, a soft nip that draws a rough sound from him. A low moan that goads the side of me that wants to throw him down and do things I have only dreamed about.
Except, most aren’t dreams anymore. Instead, they’re fantasies unlocked. All-consuming dreams I never thought of until him.
Tracing his clavicle with my tongue.
Kissing the hollows behind his knees when he lies on his stomach and holding his cock in my throat until he throbs and digs his fingers into my shoulders, groaning his release. But as we lie on the couch and our bodies mould together, I find I’m not thinking about sex. I am thinking about comfort. For him. For Poet. Even if he doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, he’s vulnerable tonight and it matters to me more than I know what to do with.
And so I hold him.
I keep touching him, I cannot stop, and my thoughts swirl around how good and right it feels to hold this strong man in my arms. How strange and bewildering it is to know I’ve been keeping a part of myself back from him. A part of me I can’t be sure he even wants. If it occurs to him to want it. Or if I want it from him.
Stop thinking.
An instruction that lands too loud to have come from within.
I zone back in to find I am on my back. Poet has his chin on my chest and he’s smiling as he gazes up at me. Because he spoke and I missed it.
“Sorry. It has been a long day.”
He hums and again I learn more than ever about him from how the low sound ripples through me. “It’s late,” he says. “I should go.”
Our legs are tangled together. Shirts rucked up. Energy—connection—pulsing between us alive and impossible to resist. “It is late,” I agree, and my next words arrive with little thought and no hesitation at all. “So maybe you should stay.”
15 POET
Oscar says maybe. But it doesn’t feel like a question. It feels like he is compelling me, and I do absolutely nothing to resist as he coaxes me from the couch and leads me upstairs.
“I need a shower.” He nuzzles my cheek. “Get into bed.”
His bed.
It shouldn’t seem so monumental. And it doesn’t. Except…
It kinda does.
He steps into the bathroom.
I keep walking and find his bedroom beside the one with dinosaurs crammed onto the windowsill.
One of the stuffed toys holds the wand I gave to Aras made from an apple branch I cut into a fork, sanded smooth, and rubbed with beeswax. Until now, I’ve forgotten about it. But the sight of it in Oscar’s house pours more water on those green shoots inside me. The ones telling me things aren’t given a place in Oscar’s life by accident.
His bedroom is cool and quiet, and smells of him. I sit on the edge of the bed and pull my shirt off. My boots are downstairs, my socks tucked inside them. It leaves me a pair of shorts and my underwear to discard, but I hesitate and I don’t know why.
By now, Oscar and I have been to bed together more times than I have fingers. Naked, sweat cooling on our skin, wrung out by each other. But I suppose that’s the point—together. Oscar’s not in the room, and I miss him. I feel him as he slips into the room and shuts the door behind him.
