Jeremy
Kevin had been weird since he’d gotten back from the doctor’s appointment. I wasn’t sure if it was that the questions brought up memories of the kidnapping attempt again or if it was something else. Was it bad that I hoped it was the old dreams coming back?
Probably.
But those I could deal with. Those I understood. In those, I was his hero. I was afraid that in the new nightmares, I was the problem.
We’d gotten back to the house at about the same time. But where we’d have normally hung out, Kevin had been avoiding me. Or, at least, I thought he was. We did most things together but not everything. It wasn’t odd when he wanted to play some online games on his own. But when he wanted to read instead of watching a movie with me after dinner I knew something was wrong.
Usually, when our parents were out for the evening, it was a time for us to relax. Hang out and let our guard down. Not as much as I’d been fantasizing about lately but to at least cuddle on the couch and watch a movie together. Over the past couple of years, we’d watched countless movies together when they went out on a date or had late meetings.
We’d started out sitting side by side like any other friends. However, over time, we’d gotten closer and closer until we didn’t just sit when we watched movies. We cuddled together like a couple. I don’t think there had been a parent date night over the past couple of years where we hadn’t had a date night of our own. At least, that’s how I thought of those evenings.
Maybe that wasn’t how Kevin saw them.
Lying in bed, staring up at the plain white ceiling, I knew this was just another reason we needed to talk. I imagined waiting at home for him in college, waiting while he went out with someone else. The thought was painful and heartbreaking.
When we had started making plans for college, I think we’d both assumed we would continue to live together. We were lucky enough that our scholarships had money for living expenses.
Doing the math, we figured mine would pay the rent on a small one-bedroom apartment, and his would buy food and other stuff like utilities and things. He’d never mentioned needing a second bedroom or dating, but what if he’d thought it was obvious? We needed to talk. But I didn’t know how.
The money I’d saved from my part-time job at the graphics design company would help pay for a bigger apartment until I could get another part-time job. I’d been planning on trying to develop my own freelance company since I wouldn’t have to work. But if I needed to put that plan on hold, I could.
What if he didn’t want to hear how I felt about him?
I didn’t know how to tell him. It didn’t even make sense when I tried to analyze it myself. How do you explain to your brother you’ve fallen in love with him without it going incredibly badly? When I was awake, it was harder to see how it could turn out like I wanted, but when I was asleep, everything always worked out perfectly.
In my dreams, we were sharing the new apartment like any other couple. One bed, not two, and no more hiding what we wanted. My graphic design business had taken off, and I had my own company that would support us both. In my dreams, we were together.
I was realistic enough, most of the time, to know that in reality when Kevin found out, it would probably turn out to be more of a nightmare than a fairy tale. Sometimes I thought I wasn’t fooling myself. Sometimes when he looked at me, it was more than one brother watching another.
Sometimes there was heat and longing in his eyes.
I’d wandered around the house most of the evening and had tried to keep myself occupied till it was late enough to call it a night. At nearly ten o’clock, I’d decided it was a reasonable enough time to go to bed, even during the summer. Besides, I was going to do something stupid if I walked around the house bored any longer. Something like asking Kevin what was going on.
When I’d told Kevin I was heading up, he’d given me a blank look and a simple nod. I hadn’t even realized he was coming too until I’d heard the water in the bathroom running while I was in our room changing clothes.
We always had the same routine going to sleep. Kevin would come into the bedroom and grab his pajamas. Always the same thing—flannel pants and a T-shirt. Then he would go to the bathroom and change clothes while I got ready in the bedroom. When I was feeling like torturing myself, I would try to imagine if he had anything on under the pants. Absolute torture.
Personally, I thought sleeping nude would be more comfortable, but that wasn’t something practical in our situation. When Kevin first started sleeping with me, I’d only worn similar cotton sleep pants and a T-shirt to bed, but as things began to change, I had to start sleeping in my boxer briefs too. I hadn’t wanted him to see the hard-on I was waking up with every morning.
I didn’t realize he hadn’t come into the bedroom to get his clothes until he walked in with only a towel draped precariously around his slender hips. Like it could fall at any minute with one deep breath. I’d seen him in swim trunks and bare-chested countless times. But somehow, covered in just that towel, his naked chest was more naked than I’d ever seen.
He wasn’t just shirtless; it was more erotic than that. I wasn’t sure why, but watching the little droplets of water winding their way from his hair down to his chest had me completely mesmerized.
Kevin made a little sound in his throat that pulled me back from doing something stupid. Glancing up, I saw a look flash across his face. It was gone too soon for me to understand it, but if anything, it was humor of some kind. A darker humor than I’d seen on his face before.
Did he understand what seeing him in that towel was doing to me?
I couldn’t help but stare as he shut the door, then walked over to the dresser we shared and started opening drawers. His voice was gravelly and low and he cleared his throat before he could begin his sentence. “I forgot to grab my stuff.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t sure what to say. It wasn’t much, but considering all the blood in my body was much lower than my brain, I couldn’t complain. Thank God for the covers on the bed because even with pajamas and tight boxer briefs, I knew my hard cock would have been completely obvious.
Kevin surprised me again when he dropped the towel and started to get dressed right there in the bedroom. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t for him to unceremoniously let it fall to the floor. If I had thought it through, I would have turned away. Brothers didn’t watch each other without clothes on like I was staring at him, but seeing his full, lush ass naked and on display was too much to resist.
His slender body and incredible ass were almost feminine but not in any way that screamed woman. He was all male—but softer somehow. If I had any doubts, the quick flash of his long semi-hard cock reminded me just how much of a guy he was.
I’m not going to deny I’d spent many long showers picturing how he would look naked. I might lie to anyone else who would ask, but I was trying not to delude myself. In my fantasies, though, I hadn’t expected him to be so hung. I guess I’d pictured him more proportionate to his body size. He was a lot shorter than me and so slender it never occurred to me he’d be just as hung as I was, maybe even more.
It made my whole body shiver and when Kevin froze for a moment, I was worried I’d said something out loud. He didn’t say anything, just continued digging for clothes. I let out a quiet sigh of relief. My reprieve was short-lived when he reached into the top drawer on his side of the dresser and pulled out a pair of boxer briefs I knew would be even tighter than the ones I usually wore.
Kevin leaned over and seemed oblivious to how much of his body he was flashing at me as he pulled the small briefs up his legs and over his ass. When he reached down the front of his shorts and adjusted his cock, I knew I hadn’t managed to hide the little gasp that escaped. But Kevin didn’t seem to notice because he finished adjusting himself and then reached into the next drawer down and grabbed a T-shirt.
I had seconds to get myself under control because when he slid the soft, white cotton T-shirt over his head, he turned and started walking to the door. He must have seen something in my face because as he turned off the light, he said in a low, tense voice, “It’s too hot for pants.”
The click of the door lock echoed the silence as he made his way over to the bed. It was an innocent sound that filled my mind with naughty thoughts. We never locked the door. Sometimes I dreamed of the things we could do behind locked doors, but I’d never worked up the courage to see what Kevin would say if I did it.
I didn’t question him. I didn’t want to know what he was thinking. The images in my head were probably hotter than whatever he was really doing. It was okay, though. The memories of him changing clothes and locking the door would give me fantasies for months—if not longer.
I knew he didn’t understand what he was doing to me, and if he’d have guessed how I saw him, he would have never changed in front of me. But even realizing it was wrong, I knew I was going to jerk off to the memories because the real images of him were hotter than anything I’d ever managed to picture.
I heard him slowly walking over to the bed; the sound of his clothes moving against his body was incredibly loud in the darkness. Even though he’d climbed into our bed countless times over the last couple of years, something about tonight was different.
Maybe it was the lock or his clothes, but it seemed more about his attitude and whatever he’d been thinking about than anything else. It was probably only my imagination but something in Kevin seemed different. Definitely my imagination.
He went through the normal steps of messing up the covers on the other bed and setting the alarm before climbing in with me, but even the normal routine seemed like more tonight. Did he know how the moonlight coming in the window highlighted his slender, nearly naked body?
By the time he slid into bed, I was hard and so filled with emotion I was shaking. Some of it was lust, but the desire to touch him and hold him was so strong, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to resist at least cuddling him tonight. I hoped he wouldn’t be able to tell how much I needed him.
Kevin might not have desired me in the same way I wanted him, but he slid over and cuddled up close, resting his head on my chest. With his soft hair rubbing against my neck and his hot breath working its way through my shirt, it was almost more than I could handle. We hadn’t cuddled like this in months; normally we would lay side by side within touching distance but not near enough to make Mom and Dad go nuts if they peeked in and saw us.
He was always close enough that I could reach out and touch him in the night but almost never like this. It was beautiful torture. There was nothing else I wanted more in that moment than to reach my arms around him and pull him tighter to me. But I couldn’t. I was frozen with fear, and the only thing I could manage was to bring my hand up to his head and run it through his hair. It was still too intimate.
“Was the appointment hard today?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer, but something had him off all afternoon, and if for no other reason than because I was his big brother, I needed to know why.
“It was more boring than anything.” There was a long pause, and I thought I might have to say something else, but he started talking again. This time in a low, soft voice I had to strain to hear. “He seemed to be trying to get me to admit things and was completely convinced he already knew what the problem was.”
“Why did he think that? This was your first appointment.” I knew Kevin had been to enough therapists to understand that they spent most of the time asking people questions, especially at the first meetings.
“Our wonderful parents evidently told him what had to be wrong with me.”
There was something in his voice. “The nightmares?”
Another long pause had me worried, but after a few minutes, he started again. “Not just that. I think they told him other things.”
He didn’t say what the other things might be, but I could hear it in his voice. They’d told the therapist what they’d suspected about us. How close we were. How much time we spent together. It could have been anything from the truth to their warped version of it. More than likely it was nothing that resembled what was actually going on.
“What did he say?” I didn’t want to know, but I had to ask.
“Nothing about…about…nothing about us.” The words came out even lower and he was obviously uncomfortable, but once he got them out of the way, the rest came out more confidently. “Just stupid stuff about how I’d feel better if I got things off my chest and if I opened up about the nightmares.”
I had to say it. “Maybe he’s right. If the nightmares are back, then—”
“They have nothing to do with what happened back then.” Kevin said it with such conviction I had to believe him, but if it wasn’t about what happened before, then what was it? Did I even want to know?
“The appointment didn’t help at all? I don’t want you to have nightmares again.” I could say that with certainty. I didn’t want whatever demons were chasing him in his sleep to win.
“No, if anything, it made me frustrated, and dragging up old crap is probably going to give me more bad dreams than I already have.”
His words were full of emotion, but I wasn’t sure what he was feeling. I felt paralyzed because I didn’t know how to help. In the past, I’d always known what to do to chase the demons away, but now I was afraid I was part of the problem.
Kevin must have felt something from me—maybe my stormy emotions or maybe my stillness—because he brought his hand up to my chest and started softly stroking me. It wasn’t much more cuddling than we’d been doing, but something about it felt different. It might have been the emotions behind it or the fact that we were physically closer than usual but it felt more raw, more intimate.
I don’t know what gave me the courage, but when I opened my mouth, words tumbled out in slow motion. “If it’s not the old nightmares coming back, what is it? Is it me?”
I didn’t want to know, but I had to know. Was this…us…this weird limbo we were living in giving him nightmares? Kevin wasn’t able to hide the hitch in his voice when he finally spoke. “No.”
His voice was quiet, and he said the word convincingly, but there were other unspoken words that filled the silence. There was something he wasn’t telling me. Was I unintentionally hurting him by keeping him that close? Did he know how much he meant to me but was afraid to tell me he didn’t feel the same way about me? Could it be something else entirely?
I started to pull my hand away from where I had been caressing his head, but his hand shot out and stopped me, grabbing onto my wrist. His left leg, which had been tucked against me, came up to wrap around mine. “NO! Don’t let go of me.”
The words were forceful and firm but full of need. I brought my hand back automatically to his head and wrapped my other arm tightly around his body. The worn cotton felt soft as it rubbed against his skin. It was a lovers’ embrace and more intimate than I’d ever expected to feel from him. I’d hoped for so much, but I’d never thought I’d get it. “Okay. I won’t let go of you.”
There was nothing else I could say, nothing else I wanted to say. With his nearly naked body wrapped around mine, the heat soaking in, and a suspiciously hard length pushing against my leg, there was no place I would rather be and no one I would rather be with.
“I won’t let go.” And for the first time, I was starting to believe he didn’t want me to. Emotions swelled in my chest and I ignored the wetness starting to form in my eyes. I wrapped my arms around him tighter and closed them. For now, I could pretend I had everything I’d ever wanted.