Every time Max spoke to me, my hands shook.

The first time he said something to me, back at work, it was because I was taking too long at the copier. I’d only been at work an hour, having spent the last week in and out of the hospital as Grandpa recovered from surgery, and the mountain of work waiting for me had my head spinning before I had even started to drink coffee.

I didn’t notice Max coming up behind me until he spoke.

“Are you going to take all fucking day?”

I dropped the pages from my hand. He barked out a loud laugh. “Great, go slower. Waste more of my time.”

I swallowed and avoided his eye as I grabbed the pages. The double edge of his words weren’t lost on me, even as our coworkers raised their eyebrows and avoided us. I finished copying what I needed and went back to my desk without saying anything.

The second time, I spilled coffee on my pants. It burned, sharp and hot, but at least Max didn’t see it. He had just been taking lunch orders, and asked if I thought I could make up my mind; he had already turned around before I had spilled the coffee.

His hostility was close enough to his normal jabs at me that no one in the office really noticed. I was the only one that saw his smile wasn’t laughing, but hurt, his eyes narrowed in pent-up anger instead of amusement, like they used to be.

It was sandwiched in between him looking at me with a month’s worth of apologies etched on his face. I was sure mine looked the same. I was sure that some of the others saw that I had all but stopped responding at all, but I had never been very close to anyone at Spectrum. No one said anything.

Just Max—and each time, it shocked the hell out of me. It hurt, too.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. I didn’t know how to fix us. I didn’t know if there was an us to even fix, or if anything was worth it at all.

I was sorry—really sorry. The farther away from the trip we got, the more I could see that Max hadn’t really meant anything by the lies. Clearly, he hadn’t been trying to get me fired. It had been two weeks, and I was still here. If anything, my job had gotten better—the other higher-ups now knew that Harris would call on me to do tasks for him, and were giving me better work because of it.

The fight we’d had—it was something we could work past.

I wasn’t so angry about the lying anymore, and Max—

I knew that it wasn’t how he lived his life. I knew that not being about to come out was something that he couldn’t understand, wouldn’t understand. But just because I couldn’t tell my grandparents about me didn’t mean that Max and I couldn’t figure something out. We could work around it.

Except that every time I went to say that to him, Max would turn his wide, hurt eyes on me, the blue almost blinding in its brightness, and I couldn’t get the words out. I couldn’t get any words out.

Two weeks on the dot since we’d been back and Max came to work with a haircut. It was ridiculous for me to miss the wild curls, to think that the close cut had something to do with me.

I looked away and swallowed back a new round of pain.

Work was too busy for me to be obsessing over Max, but that had never stopped me before. Just because the obsessing was different now, worse now, didn’t make it any less true.

I was in the office supply closet, searching haplessly for the little air cans that cleaned keyboards, when Max walked in.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, head snapping up. His eyes narrowed when he saw it was me. “Oh.”

“Hi.”

It sounded weak to my ears. I winced. Max’s jaw ticked.

“Am I in the way?” I asked.

Max huffed. He crossed his arms over his chest. “No.”

“Oh, good,” I said lamely. He took a deep breath, as if he were trying not to say something.

I bit my bottom lip.

His eyes focused on it.

A bit of hope flared in my chest. “Max, can we talk?”

“No,” he said sharply.

I nodded. Max didn’t move.

I took a step toward him. He slammed the door closed behind him. The sound was quiet, though, the door automatically slowing even though I could see how hard he’d thrown it.

He was angry—I could work with that.

I took another step. He clenched his jaw, tilting his face away from me.

“Max.” His name felt good on my lips, against my tongue. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said it, just for him, like this.

It was my fault. I was the one who’d gotten angry first. I was the one who’d ignored him when we got back, who’d refused to talk to him when I saw him at the hospital.

This was on me.

I had no idea how to fix it.

“Max,” I said it again. His eyes closed. I took that, clinging to it. “If we can’t talk, what can we do?”

Max’s eyes flew open.

They locked onto my lips. Inadvertently, my tongue slipped out and swiped across the swell of my bottom lip. I swallowed nervously at the hard inhale of breath he gave.

Slowly, Max closed the distance between us. His hands hesitated before coming up. One grabbed my wrist while the other hooked a finger inside of my pant loop. He spun us around, throwing me against the door. It lit a spark of pain in my back, but nothing bad—just bright. Just something tangible, something I could feel.

I licked my lips. Said his name again.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked raggedly.

I nodded quickly. “Yes.”

He didn’t waste another second. His lips found mine, harsh and sure, as our mouths reconnected for the first time since that night against his car.

Max was still angry, I knew that. But this felt—different.

It wasn’t rough or biting. It was—hard, desperate. Max kissed me like he was desperate to tell me something. I didn’t know what—but I knew what I was trying to convey with my own desperation, my own deep, slow kisses.

I reached out to grab at his hair, short as it was now. Max caught my wrist. He grabbed both of my hands and raised them above my head, holding them there with one hand. I complied; his other hand fell to my pants.

“Max, what are—”

He cut me off with a hard kiss. I could understand this one: shut the fuck up.

Max’s tongue swept across my bottom lip before licking his way into my mouth. His fingernails dug into the skin on my wrists. He undid my belt easily and popped open the button on my jeans.

He worked his way down my throat, light kisses and sweeps of his tongue that wouldn’t leave any more marks. I missed the hard way he’d kissed me, the way he would suck punishing bruises into my skin just to mark me as his.

I wanted to tell him it was okay—that he could do whatever he wanted. I was afraid of saying anything that would break the spell.

I missed Max. His mouth on my skin, his fingers deftly slipping beneath the waistband of my pants—I missed him more now than I had when he hadn’t been speaking to me.

“Is this still okay?” he asked against my throat.

I nodded and, when I realized he couldn’t see me, let out a shaky, “Yes.”

His hand dropped from my wrists, and in a second he was on his knees, tugging me out of my boxers.

“Tell me if you want me to stop,” Max said, locking eyes with me.

The blue of his eyes was nearly all replaced with pupil. I swallowed hard.

“Okay,” I whispered. I was trembling against the door. I could hear the shuffling of papers outside, chairs scraping and keys tapping away. Anyone could come in here—the door didn’t lock, and it opened out. If anyone wanted to walk in, I’d go falling, and Max would probably bite my dick off.

I wondered if that was part of the plan.

And then he licked a stripe up the underside of my already hard cock, and I didn’t care.

“Max,” I moaned out.

He glared up at me. “Can you keep fucking quiet?”

I swallowed. As soon as I nodded, he parted his lips and swallowed me down.

I bit hard on my hand, eyes squeezing shut as I tried to keep myself from letting out sounds. I hadn’t even touched myself since that night, and after missing Max so much the past few weeks, even this first touch was enough to have me nearly crazy.

I wanted to reach out and feel his short hair against my fingers, wondered if it’d be different now to hold him against me when there was less to grab. But he hadn’t reacted very well to me trying to touch him. I held my hands in fists at my side.

Max was not holding himself back at all.

His tongue and lips moved in quick succession as he bobbed his head up and down, fingers digging into my ass. He held on to me for purchase and used me to fuck into his mouth, his throat. He was messy, spit and precome trailing down his chin as he worked fast, sucking hard against me. He tongued at my slit, and held my hips still every time they canted forward.

This wasn’t Max giving in, wasn’t Max forgiving me—this was a new form of punishment. I just wasn’t sure which one of us he was punishing.

My chest ached as I grew harder against Max’s tongue.

He moved one of his hands to the base of my cock, slowly wrapping his fingers around me and tightening his grip. He started to slowly pump me up and down as his head bobbed faster and faster. He peppered light licks and kisses with the hard grind of his warm fist, using his other hand to force my hips up to meet his pace.

I felt it building in my stomach much too quickly. Heat was spasming across my gut, up my chest and through my veins. I was absolutely on fire. Max licked and ran his thumb over my slit at the same time, and my hips jutted forward hard.

I bit down hard enough on my hand to draw blood. I hissed and dropped it. “Max,” I warned, my voice soft and breathless and unrecognizable to my own ears. “Max, please.”

He wrapped his lips around me again and took me down as far as he could, slowly, his nose buried in the soft curls at my base, his tongue running up and down the hard, pulsing ridges.

I groaned out his name once more before I couldn’t hold it back any more.

It came over me fast, my vision blanking as my head threw back against the door, hard enough to hurt. My fingers dug into my thighs, and I gasped as my abdomen shook with twitching muscles, my cock pulsing inside of my Max’s mouth again and again as he harshly sucked, drinking me down.

My knees went weak. Max looked up at me, his dark eyes locking with mine as he ran his tongue across me. I pulsed helplessly once more in his mouth, and then he was pulling off of me.

He stood up quickly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Max—” I reached for him.

He shook me off of him. “It’s fine.”

“What?” I asked incredulously. I unceremoniously stuffed myself back in my boxers and took a step toward Max. He was hard, straining against his pants, a bright blush on the highs of his cheeks. His lips were swollen.

“We have to get back before someone notices,” Max said. He still wasn’t looking at me.

I blinked rapidly. “Max, come on, I—”

“No.” He finally looked up at me. If I couldn’t see how clearly aroused and affected Max was from what he’d just done, I would have thought he hadn’t been into it at all. He looked as completely devastated as he had in the hospital parking lot. My chest ached with a hollow hurt.

When he spoke again, there was no anger; it was deflated and nearly kind. “There’s no time. Wouldn’t want anyone to know about us.”

He glanced down and then, once satisfied that I was appropriately covered, blindly reached on the shelves and grabbed a pack of Post-its before passing me. He paused when our shoulders brushed, but then shook his head and opened the door.

I watched him go.

Swallowing hard, I made my way back to my desk.

I didn’t know if that counted as progress or not. I did know that I missed Max a hell of a lot more now than I had an hour ago.

Grandpa was discharged on Friday, and I went straight to their house after work.

Surgery had taken a lot out of him. He was weaker, paler, skinnier. It made my chest ache with a different sort of pain every time I looked at him.

I was so tired of hurting, just from looking at the people that I—cared about.

I had been over nearly every day, fixing everything in sight, cleaning. I wanted to make sure that neither of them had any household chores that required so much as lifting above their heads for the next few months.

Grandma told me I was worrying too much. I didn’t know if she was right or not. All I knew was that if I was worrying about them, I wasn’t thinking about how much I was fucking everything else up.

I helped Grandma with dinner and checked on Grandpa every fifteen minutes, until he threatened to lock the door and climb a ladder just to get away from me.

I knew he would be fine—a broken hip wasn’t any sort of joke, but the doctors assured us that Grandpa was recovering spectacularly, and this was just a minor setback in the scheme of things.

It was still terrifying.

We sat down for dinner, and I tried very hard to not to worry every time Grandpa took a bite.

Grandma sat her fork down with a clang. “So! Lukey, you won’t believe who I ran into the other day.”

I shoved a forkful of meatloaf in my mouth. “Hmm?”

“Jenny! You remember Jenny Hawn?” Grandma looked at me expectantly.

I looked at Grandpa. He shrugged and ate more mashed potatoes.

“Um. I do not.”

“Oh, Luke,” Grandma laughed. “Of course you do! Blonde. Smart! Bakes good pies.”

“Is it possible you are talking about yourself?” I asked.

Grandma waved me away while Grandpa snorted. “You two went to Sunday school together.”

Ah. That explained it. A gay man in a Methodist church. I had repressed the hell out of those memories. “Right. Jamie.”

“Jenny.”

“Jenny, right.”

“Anyway,” Grandma continued. “I ran into her at the market. Lovely girl. Single.”

Grandpa sighed. “Are you trying to set the poor boy up?”

“He’d like her!”

“He’s a grown man. He can find his own dates.”

“If that’s true, why don’t I have great-grandbabies?” Grandma turned to look at me. “Where are my great-grandbabies, Luke?”

I held up my hands. “I just came to clean the gutters.”

Grandpa laughed. Grandma pouted. “She’s a lovely girl.”

“I’m sure she is,” I said, just to keep the peace.

Grandma perked right up. “So I can give you her number?”

I blinked in surprise. “Um. Yes.”

Yes? What the hell?

Grandma clapped her hands. Grandpa rolled his eyes at her, and she swatted him playfully.

I stared at my meatloaf and tried to not have an existential crisis.

What the hell was wrong with me? I was a grown man—a grown, gay man—who was in love—who had a really messed up relationship with his coworker. And now I was agreeing to go on dates with lovely girls that my grandma knew?

What the hell?

Max was right.

I couldn’t keep living like this. It was more than just not wanting to come out, more than trying to keep the peace. I couldn’t date some poor girl because it would make my grandmother happy.

If I kept doing shit like this, what was to stop me from just dating her for a long time to make her and Grandpa happy? Getting married to her, having kids with her, just to make them happy?

I didn’t want to be in the closet my whole life. I didn’t want to sign some unsuspecting girl up to being in a loveless marriage as my beard.

I couldn’t go on like this.

If I kept living a lie, kept living with one foot in and one foot out, I’d never make anyone happy. Grandma would always worry about it; Max would never forgive me. I’d just make everyone miserable, for my entire life, because I was too scared to risk hurting them.

I looked at Grandma and Grandpa as they finished their meal, bickering sweetly. I wanted what they had. I wanted a partner—someone who loved me, pushed me, cared about me. Someone who knew me.

I wanted—

I needed to stop lying to everyone. I needed to stop lying to myself.

I wanted Max.

Fuck, I wanted Max.

I loved him.