13
The hospital hallway is painted in soothing shades of blue and gray. On the wall opposite is a painting of a sailboat, a bland, nothingy thing with a violet horizon and a pinkish tint to the clouds. It’s the opposite of art, but it does what it needs to do in this place. It provides something to stare at, and I do so gratefully. Sink into the pink clouds and the chalky blue sky. Fill my head with soothing pastels to try and drown out the bright, arterial red. I breathe through my mouth, suck the antiseptic hospital smell over my tongue and pretend – as hard as I can – that I can’t still taste blood in the air.
Rocco shifts his grip on my hand and I make the mistake of looking down. The whole cuff of his shirt is red and I feel faintness creeping back around the edges of my vision. A darker gray than the halls, and much more soothing, because it promises escape.
“It’s going to be okay,” he says, because he has to say that. He can’t talk about the things that are going to come up later, no matter which way this thing goes. I see myself back in Claudia’s office, tearing Kleenex from the box as I relate the things that have been filling my nightmares lately. The glimpse of bone as Rocco lifted Matt’s hand above his head, the way the blood seemed to almost leap out of the cut, like it was desperate to vacate his body. Oh, he hadn’t been fucking around. He’d gone from wrist almost to elbow, and once again I’m furious, because that was what he was planning to leave me? A bellyful of guilt and a bathroom full of blood?
He’d better live. He has to live. Because I’m going to kill him.
A door opens and Rocco and I look up, alert as Pavlov’s dogs. The doctor emerges. She’s a slight Asian lady with her hair pulled severely back from her face in a tight ponytail. Very young, like she’s still being put through her paces. Rotations, I think they call them, perhaps because they feel like circles of hell to sleep deprived medical students.
Rocco gets to his feet. He’s a full foot taller than her, but she has composure on her side. That and she’s not covered in gore like us. Rocco’s shirt looks like he escaped from a Dario Argento movie. There are streaks of blood at his hairline where he wiped his sweating forehead and smeared it everywhere. I tried to get the worst of it off, but there simply wasn’t time.
“Is he…?”
“He’s lost a lot of blood,” says the doctor. “We’re going to keep him in for observation. And a psych consult, obviously.”
It hits me slowly. I’ve been braced for worse news, so it takes me a moment to parse it. A psych consult means he still has a mind, a working, living brain.
“He hates therapy,” I say, and I don’t know why I say that, but I don’t know why I do anything right now. I’m moving through the world slow as molasses, numb the way I was when Rocco broke up with me. And once more, in the distance, I’m aware of the awesome size of the wave that’s coming for me. It’s lost a little of its power in the last couple of minutes, but oh – it’s still big. And it’s going to be bad.
“Too bad,” says Rocco, with a flash of anger that makes me feel slightly less alone. “Can we see him?”
“He’s sedated right now,” says the doctor. “Don’t expect too much from him.”
“No. Of course.”
She shows us into the room. Matt sits propped up on the pillows, holding his injured arm tight to his body like a tourniquet. They gave him a transfusion, but he still looks pale as a ghost. There’s blood in his hair, his eyebrows. Even in his ears. His eyes look too big for his skull and swivel too slowly towards us as we enter the room, but I’ve never been so happy to see him in my life.
“Hey,” I say. “How are you doing?”
He turns his large, sad eyes on Rocco, who shakes his head. “Jesus Christ, Matt,” he says. “What the fuck?”
Matt’s face crumples. His mouth opens and for a moment no sound comes out, but then it all comes out at once, a loud, honking sob that makes us both cluster tighter around him. We have no idea what to do or say, but we can be here.
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Everything’s going to be all right.”
He’s bawling like a baby, drool streaming from his lower lip. My brother is absolutely broken and I have no idea how to fix him. I’ve never felt so useless in my life.
“I’m nothing,” he manages to say, between huge, wracking sobs. “I have nothing.”
“No.” I pick up a tissue and wipe his chin. It comes away pink. The blood has somehow found its way inside his mouth, too. “No, I’m here. I love you. We love you.”
Rocco somehow squeezes into the ungainly huddle on the bed. Matt looks at him with a kind of desperation, like this is some last ditch attempt to make Rocco do what he wants him to do, but I know it’s got to be more than that. Matt hasn’t tried to kill himself in almost twenty years, and it’s not a thing you do lightly. Especially not him, with his monster ego and self-belief. Maybe that was why he never told me how much pain he was really in. Maybe. But that’s a thought for later, when the blame game begins.
“Everything is going to be okay,” Rocco says. “I promise. We’re going to get you help.”
“The best,” I say.
Matt begins to wail softly again. “No. No, no, no…”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t,” he says. “I can’t go back across the water. Everyone there will know I’m a fucking failure.”
“Okay,” says Rocco. “You don’t have to. We’ll find somewhere else. How about that place I went to near Santa Fe, huh? If they can patch up my sad, junkie ass I’m sure they can fix you.”
Matt sniffles and nods.
“They’re going to send someone up to talk to you soon,” I say, smoothing his matted hair. “Someone who can help.”
“I need it,” he says, in a small, choked voice. “Oh God, I need help. I need help.”
My eyes sting, but I manage not to cry, even if the tears are mostly borne of relief. Thank God. He’s finally admitted it. “You have no idea how happy I am to hear you say that, Matt. You can’t imagine.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know how to help myself. I thought I did, but look what fucking happened…”
“Shh,” says Rocco. “It’s okay. Right now you just need to get some rest. The shrink’s gonna come up and talk to you later, but right now just get some sleep, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Matt swallows hard. “Daniel?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t tell Mom. Please don’t tell Mom.”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah,” I say, even though I have no idea how that’s going to work. She’s going to find out sooner or later, but now’s not the time to have that conversation. Or any conversation. I’m a wreck. Although my hands have stopped shaking every other part of my body is still vibrating from the shock of seeing Matt bleeding all over my bathroom.
Rocco takes me home. It’s only when I get to the front door that I realize why he’s treating me so very gently all of a sudden, and he tries to steer me swiftly past it and into the bedroom, but it’s hopeless. Rerun has trodden through the blood and there are little red paw prints leading from room to room. Worse, she’s taken advantage of my absence to do the forbidden thing and jump on the bed, so that even my sheets are stained.
In the end it’s the mess that breaks me. The thought of changing the sheets proves to be the last straw and I let out a weird howling noise, startling the cat, who’s kneading her pink stained paws on the pillow. My knees refuse to support me any longer and Rocco is right there, holding me as I slide slowly to the bedroom floor. There is blood everywhere and I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to not see it. I can’t stop crying. I’m crying the way Matt was crying in the hospital, loud and open-mouthed and hopeless.
Rocco helps me up. He strips me and sits me under the shower in the ensuite bathroom, the one that isn’t covered in blood. “I’m gonna change the sheets,” he says, and hands me a little blue pill. “Here. Take this.”
I shake my head. “What is it?”
“Valium.”
“Are you going to take one?”
“No. I can’t, but you can.”
I shake my head again. “I’m not taking it if you can’t. It’s not fair on you.”
Rocco kisses me desperately on the mouth, and I can tell he’s holding it together by a thread. “Baby, please,” he says. “Take the pill. You need it. You need to be strong for Matt, and you can’t be if you don’t get some rest.”
“Okay.” I take the pill and wash it down with the water he hands me.
“That’s it,” he says. “That’s good.”
The wave roars, calling my name. “Oh God. Why didn’t I see it, Rocco? Why didn’t I see how far gone he was?”
“Shh…”
“I should have seen it. I should have known.”
He shushes me again and kisses me. “Please, Daniel – not now. Not right now. Just sit tight. Let the water wash over you. I’m gonna go put some clean sheets on the bed so you can get some rest, okay?” He runs his fingers through my hair, stroking steadily. “You can go to sleep, and everything is going to be so much easier when you wake up. You’ll see. We’re going to get through this. I’m gonna take care of you, baby, I promise. But please don’t start blaming yourself. Not now, because I’m in no mental shape to be having that fucking conversation, okay?”
I snuffle and sob. “Okay.”
“Thank you,” he says, which seems like a strange thing to say, but maybe that’s the Valium kicking in. He kisses me again on the mouth and I can tell he’s close to tears himself. “I love you, and I’m going to take care of you. I swear. Above everything else, I’m going to be here for you.”
*
I don’t dream.
My sleep has a fuzzy, bluish quality, which I guess is probably the Valium. I wake up alone in my bed, coming up slowly, as though my brain is cushioning me against the shitstorm that lies ahead. I remember watching water circle the drain in the shower, my cheek against the tile and my knees folding gently under the weight of that little blue pill.
The sheets are clean, and so is the floor. Even the cat – sprawled in the morning sun on the window seat – is clean, the pads of her paws that photogenic jellybean pink against the white of her socks. Beside me Rocco’s pillow is undented, his side of the bed as pristine as it must have been when he made it last night. The fluffy blue fog is fading now and I want to blow it away somehow, because I have a funny feeling that it’s not going to help me deal with what might be coming next. Where is he? How many triggers got tripped last night? How many buttons pressed?
I get up and open the bedroom door. The first thing that hits me is the smell of disinfectant. The hallway floor has been scrubbed so hard that there are matte patches in the finish. I hear the sweep of bristles in the bathroom and – taking a deep breath – I nudge the door open.
Rocco is on his hands and knees. His hair is tied tightly back and there are flecks of bleach on his sweatpants. The bathroom sparkles, but he’s still working on a single strip of grout with an old toothbrush dipped in bleach.
“Rocco?”
“Hey.” He doesn’t look up. “I won’t be a minute. I just want to get this out. It’s a tough stain.”
From here the grout looks white to me, but when he looks up I realize I have no idea what’s going on in his head right now. His attempt at a reassuring smile looks more like a rictus, and the look in his eyes says he’s scared to death.
“Oh my God,” I say. “Have you been doing this all night?”
“It’s okay. I’m nearly done.”
“Stop.”
He sits up on his knees and frowns down at the grout. “We’re almost out of bleach,” he says. “Do you have any more in the laundry room?”
“Rocco, stop. Please. Leave that for a moment. Let me make you some coffee.”
He gets up and follows me into the kitchen. My head is already spinning with the number of things I might have to do today. First things first, check on Matt – then what? What do you do when someone tries to kill themselves? Is there paperwork? Is there procedure? And the press – oh my God. What if they know?
“I called the hospital,” says Rocco, leaning against the kitchen surface. He looks too thin, the shadows under his eyes a nerve-wracking reminder of his old gaunt, junkie self. “They say he had a good night. Slept well.”
“Oh, well. That’s something.”
“Yeah. They want to do a psychiatric hold or something, so they need you to sign off on it. Because you’re a relative.”
“They want me to commit him?”
“No. It’s just for a brief period. While they assess him and figure out a treatment plan.”
“Do they know not to call Mom? Oh my God, what if they called her? What if the press find out? She is not hearing this via TMZ or whatever. Over my dead body.”
Rocco winces. “Please don’t say things like that.”
I put my arms around him. He feels delicate, and reeks of bleach. “Sit down,” I say, kissing him lightly. “Drink your coffee. I’m going to go get my ducks in a row, okay? Make some calls.”
“Okay.”
I take my own coffee, pick up the phone and call the hospital. Yes, there’s a lot to do here. Paperwork, procedures and all of that. And at the center of it all is my poor brother, drugged, scared and helpless. I speak to various shrinks and admin people, and eventually to a soothing hippie lady named Rowan, who works at the rehab down in Santa Fe. She asks me about a billion questions and apologizes for them all, but – she says – “We need to be thorough, so we can meet all of his needs as best we can.” I’m immediately reassured, and it occurs to me that nobody from that place by Olalla communicated with me in this way. Maybe the relapse wasn’t all Matt’s fault after all. Maybe that place just wasn’t good enough.
Right away I want to share my relief with Rocco, but when I go into the kitchen he’s not in his chair. I hear a low, whining noise and realize he’s on the floor, curled up in a tight ball with his back to a cupboard door, his face buried in his folded arms.
“Rocco? What are you doing down there?”
He starts to shake and sob. I get down on the floor beside him and then the floodgates open. He cries and cries and cries, drenching my shoulder with his tears. “God, you suck at taking your own advice,” I say, when he’s slowed enough to breathe normally again. “Look at you, poor baby. You’re exhausted. Why didn’t you come to bed?”
“How could I?” he says. “There was blood everywhere. Like something from fucking Macbeth.”
“Shh, shh.” I kiss his wet lips, pull him close again and whisper every endearment I know as I rock him in my arms. His breathing steadies, reminding me strangely of the way it slows when I’ve just fucked him and we’re panting together in the afterglow. The thought of sex right now is almost bizarre. It feels distant and trivial. Something we did together when we were different people, and not the sad, bruised creatures we are in the wake of this unholy goddamn mess.
“Did I do this?” he says, in a creaky voice.
“Do what?”
“This. Matt.”
“Baby, no. No. Of course you didn’t.” The blame game. Here we are. It had to start sometime.
He sniffs hard. There are still streaks of blood in the white of his hair. “Right,” he says. “You don’t think it’s in any way significant that right after I smash his dreams to pieces he goes into the bathroom and opens a vein?”
I pull his head back onto my shoulder. “What were you supposed to do? Lie to him and tell them you were good to go back on tour?”
“Yes. Why not?”
“Because. What was the alternative, love? You lie to him all the way through his recovery? Dangle a promise that you were never, ever going to be able to deliver on? You knew he was going to take the truth hard anyway. Dragging it out like that…no. You did the right thing, Rocco. Lying to him, building up his expectations like that, only to dash them later…it could have gone a lot worse.”
He gives a snotty, humorless laugh. “How could it have gone any worse than last night?”
“He might have used a gun,” I say. “Statistics. Men succeed at suicide more often than women because they usually go for the gun. Or the noose.”
Rocco flinches. “I should have said something else,” he says, eager to change the subject. “Something better.”
I run my hand over his hair. “Please. Don’t torture yourself. You weren’t to know how far down the fucking rabbit hole he was. I didn’t. When you were that depressed you were like the living dead, but Matt can be dying inside and still be…Matt. You know he doesn’t give anything away like that.”
Rocco sighs and leans back against the cupboard door. “Who knew the frontman had so much…front?”
“Exactly. He’s spent like the last fifteen years of his life learning to swagger in front of the kind of crowds that would make most people pass out in pure terror. I came down with the vapors when I hit a hundred thousand downloads for the first time, and I don’t even have to look at my listeners. Doing what Matt does…no. It’s kind of a miracle that he’s managed to stay even slightly sane.”
“When you put it like that…”
“Yeah. You start to see why the rock and roll business has such a disproportionate fatality rate, don’t you?”
He leans his head on my shoulder. “I love you. You’re so smart.”
“And you’re so tired.” I kiss his temple. “Why don’t you try and grab some sleep while I go over and sign the paperwork?”
Rocco sniffs hard, and when he speaks again there’s a crack in his voice. “Daniel, please…please tell me you love me. I don’t mean to be needy, but I am…”
I gather him quickly in my arms again as he begins to sob once more. “Oh, my love. Come here. I do. I do. I love you so much, and I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“I’m an idiot,” he says, getting a hold of himself. “I should have slept, but I stayed up all night scrubbing. I’m obsessive…” He dries his eyes on the back of his hand. “It was so hard, Daniel. So hard.”
Oh God. “Talk to me.”
He swallows, his eyes downcast. “It’s not even difficult to cop these days,” he says. “The guys who run the black tar business have it sewn up so tight that you can order heroin as easily as a fucking pizza.”
“But you didn’t,” I say, because that’s what he has to say next.
He shakes his head, his forehead against mine, and my heart sinks. “I wanted to,” he says, and I breathe once more. “I thought I was over wanting it, but it came back full force last night – the want. It could have taken everything away in an instant. All the hurt. All the guilt. All the confusion. Everything’s simple on heroin. It’s just ‘more heroin’. That’s it. Life is so complicated, Daniel. Maybe I’m just too much of a flake to cope with it.”
“Rocco…” I look him in the eye. “Did you use?”
He shakes his head again and my stomach does a rollercoaster swoop. Thank God.
“No,” he says. “Although I might have scrubbed some of the varnish off the hardwood in the hallway. So, you know…sorry about that.”
We laugh through our tears. I’m so relieved I could float out of the room. “I love you,” I say. “And I’m so, so proud of you right now. I can’t imagine how hard this must have been for you.” It’s not like he can just pop a Valium and go to sleep.
“Thank you,” he says. “That’s what I needed to hear.”
“It’s what you deserve. You’re so strong, baby. So tough.”
He wipes his eyes with the heels of his hands and gives himself a shake. “Mm…okay,” he says, with a small, brave smile. “Needy asshole moment over. What do you need from me, sweet thing?”
His smile is like the sun coming out. After that long, dark, awful night it makes me feel as though there might be hope again. Solutions sought, treatment planned. We can do this. “You’re not a needy asshole,” I say. “But I do need you to get some sleep. Come on. I’m up, I’m refreshed, I’m on duty. I’m relieving you, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re going to do this, Rocco. We’re going to whatever it takes to help him, but right now you need to get some sleep.”
*
Ten days later I drive to the airport, waiting for the Southwestern flight from Santa Fe.
He comes through the gate with his navy peacoat open, although fall has well and truly set in here in Seattle. I know how he’ll shiver and button it up when he feels the cold. Since spring I’ve become intimately familiar with the way his clothes cover his body.
He’s cut an inch or two from his hair and it barely brushes his shoulders. When I put my arms around him I can smell the conditioned air of the plane clinging to it, and maybe just a whiff of the desert.
“How was it?” I ask. “Is he settled in okay? He didn’t hate it on sight, did he?”
“Shh,” says Rocco, and cups my face in his hands, his suitcase at his feet. “Wait. Let me look at you.”
His eyes are always darker than I remember, a deep indigo blue, with gray limbal rings so dark they’re almost black. I love the black of his lashes and eyebrows, and how the stray brow hairs shine out so dark and distinct against the delicate white skin beneath them. And he’s looking at me. That look in his eyes is all for me.
Rocco closes the slight gap between us. His kiss is soft but heartfelt, and I know what it means. It’s that light, stop-talking pressure of lips that tells me his body is eager to move in any way I direct it, to rise to my touch and rock into me. A full, bedroom kiss in the middle of a crowded airport.
“I love you,” he says, with an intensity that makes me anxious. “I love you more than anything else in the world.”
“I love you, too, but what’s going on, Rocco? Is Matt okay?”
He smiles, and I relax. “He’s good,” he says. “A little sunshine, a little silence. It’ll do him the world of good. You’ll see. He’s gonna heal.”
“And us?”
Rocco rubs his thumbs over the corners of my eyes. “We have some healing to do, too.” There’s a flicker of heat in his gaze, and then I understand why the intensity, why that kiss. I’m still so hurt, and desire right now feels like scar tissue stretching over disused muscle, but it’s there. Oh, it’s there.
“Let’s go home,” I say, picking up his case.
When we’re alone together in the house it feels like a sigh. A breathing space. Matt was here for a few nights, moving slower than usual and frowning over the lids of pickle jars because he severed some of the tendons in his thumb. And Mom and Dad were here, by mutual invitation. And Meg. My whole family has been in and out, sitting on the couch, crying on each others shoulders and offering one another finger food the way they might have done if things had gone in a different direction and we were doing this while dressed in black. If the bolt on the bathroom door hadn’t been loose. I keep flicking that thing back and forth in my head, lately.
I lead Rocco into the bedroom with my pulse beating slowly in my throat and under the front of my jeans. We haven’t done this since before that awful night. We’ve kissed and cried and clung to each other under the covers, but I’ve simply been too crushed for anything else. And I want it, I do, but sex feels like a lot right now, like a headlong dive back into the stream of life, and I’m still shaken from almost drowning.
But I close the blinds anyway. When I turn from the window he’s there waiting, and his kiss is too much, too deep. It makes me gasp and he draws back, his fingers on the buttons of my shirt.
“Honey, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”
I shake my head in spite of myself. “I don’t know.”
“We don’t have to do this.”
“No…I do…I think I want you.”
Rocco frowns. “You think?”
“No. I’m sure.” I sit down on the bed. He comes over to join me and we kiss once more, sliding back onto the pillows together like we’re starring in another one of my teenage fantasies, the one where he came into my room and made out with me. I can feel him hard in his jeans and I’m stiff in mine, but there’s something inside me that keeps me from falling into his arms the way that I used to. Guilt, perhaps, that Rocco and I were finding so much joy in one another while Matt was so miserable.
Rocco’s mouth finds my nipple. He wets it with his tongue and blows to cool it, and when his fingers pinch I buck too hard, because he takes it for a flinch and hesitates. “Are you sure?” he says, like I’m some virgin who gave him permission to ruin me.
“Yes.” I push my hands up under his t-shirt and he pulls it off for me. The touch of him is so sweet but it strikes some poignant chord in me, and I can’t tell if the ache I feel is lust or something like loss. We’ve shifted gear once more and I’m sad to leave the old times behind – all our tendernesses and dirty whispers and frantic couplings. “I still want you so much,” I say. “But I feel as though I might shatter, as though I’m not strong enough to feel too much at once just yet. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”
“No, I get it,” he says, his hand warm on my belly. “You’re raw.”
“Yes. That’s it.” Of course he gets it.
“And you’re afraid,” he says, kissing my cheek. “Of letting yourself feel happy again.”
“Yes.” Tears leak out of the corners of my eyes. “Because I don’t know if I’ll be able to stand it when that feeling goes away again.”
Rocco leans over and licks up my tears. “It won’t, baby. Not as long as we have one another.”
I capture his mouth in a kiss. “Are you sure you want this?” he says, again, and I wriggle halfway out of my jeans to show him that yes, yes I do. I take his hand, our fingers curling around my cock together. Tiny moans. Hitches of breaths. Oh yes…this is better. This is working.
He laps at my nipples again, sucking as he strokes, making me arch and shudder. I want to be naked. “Clothes…” I say, and we strip each other bare and fall on each other, sighing as our skins touch.
“Oh God, you feel like home,” he says, into the hollow of my neck, and I overflow all over again, because I think it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever said to me.
“Are you okay?” he says, when he sees the tears, but I’m better than okay. I roll him over, crying and thrusting all at once, out of my mind with love for him. He shifts his hips and we slot together the way we did the first time, his hands on my ass and his tongue in my mouth. I come fast and fierce, but I need more. I need to give him more. I spread his legs and bury my head between them, licking the taste of myself from his cock. I tighten my lips over him and start to suck, and he buries his hand in my hair and moans, reminding of just how defenseless he sometimes sounds when I have his dick in my mouth. Faster now, swirling with my tongue, and then he’s crying out and coming, coming, coming…oh yes, my baby is coming, hot and salty and slightly acid on the back of my tongue. “Ohjesuschristiloveyou…” he says, and I swallow gratefully and crawl up into his arms again, sticky and exultant.
We lie quiet for a while, until he shivers and I suggest we get under the covers. Snuggling down beside him feels better than anything right now, because we’re buzzed and sated and eagerly seeking out one another’s warmth. Rocco always says that he feels most like a human being when he’s floating naked in water, but this is where I find my peace. Here. Curled up skin to skin, with my ear over his heart and my thigh between his. I feel clean. Renewed and refreshed.
“Do you remember the first time we kissed?” I say. “Right here in this room?”
“Sure,” he says, in a remote, half-asleep voice. He rolls a strand of my hair back and forth between his fingertips.
He’d never done anything of the sort before, but he was the one who made the first move. “What were you thinking?”
Rocco sighs in though, his chest swelling against my cheek. “I don’t know. I think I’d moved beyond thought by that point. Every moment we spent together I fell a little more in love with you, and by the time we got here…I think all I could do was want.”
He shuffles down the bed so that he can look at me. “You were the sweetest thing,” he says. “When you said ‘please just kiss me’ all in a rush like that…I thought my heart was going to burst.”
“And I thought I’d wandered into one of my own fantasies. Do you ever wonder what it might have been like if we’d hooked up years ago? When I was at UCLA?”
“Yeah.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve pictured that. Mainly the part where you were eighteen and naked in my bed. Only this time you’re sober.”
“Interesting.”
“It is,” he says, with a filthy grin. “You’re sober, you’re begging me to be your first and somehow – and don’t ask me how this part works, because it’s a fantasy – I already know all the ways to make your eyes roll back in your head and how to make you make that funny little mewing noise you make when it’s really, really hot.”
“I make a mewing noise?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of like ‘uhh’, but in the very back of your throat.” Oh my God. I do make that noise. I’ve heard myself making it, usually when I’m bucking and shuddering through a drawn out orgasm and he’s still sucking. Rocco, being Rocco, knows the exact pitch and part of the throat it comes from, and his imitation is so note perfect that I start to laugh, partly out of embarrassment.
It’s the first time I’ve really laughed in almost two weeks, and I’m surprised at how good it feels. I think he knows it, too, but he doesn’t say anything. Just kisses me and laughs along with me.
“Do you ever feel like we lost our way?” I ask, as he smooths the hairs of my eyebrows, his deep blue eyes intent on me. “Like, we were supposed to come together all those years ago, but we didn’t?”
“No,” he says. “Which is to say, yes. I’ve thought about it, but I think it’s better the way things worked out. Me and you – all those years ago – it would have been a disaster. I was married, you were practically a child, and I was off on tour for half the time. Not to mention Matt would have fucking murdered me if I’d devirginised his eighteen year old brother.” He runs his fingers through my hair and smiles. “No. I look back and think maybe everything happened for a reason. Even the bad parts.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yeah, I do. Look at who we are now. Look at what we’ve come through together. How solid we are. How strong.” He leans forward and kisses me. “When I’m with you I feel like I could take on the world.”
“You don’t need me for that,” I say, remembering my pride when I realized he’d mastered temptation. By scrubbing floors, of all things. “You have your own strength now.”
Rocco smiles. “Maybe,” he says. “But God, it’s nice to have company.”