10
We have the cabin for the weekend after Labor Day, about the same time as when we used to come to Lost Lake as children. To me these weeks always had a party atmosphere, because they were the weeks leading up to my birthday. Sometimes if we came late it was just after my birthday, like the year when I’d just turned thirteen and Rocco came back from Italy with his first tattoo, and one year we actually celebrated my birthday here, with a store bought cake that Dad told us all to loudly agree wasn’t nearly as good as Mom’s.
So it feels weird driving up these half remembered roads with just Matt for company. Eerie, almost, because the voices of the kids we used to be keep echoing in my head. That and I have a sense of dread that has nothing to do with slasher movies; mostly I’m just wondering what the hell we’re going to say to one another. Conversation never flowed that easily between us, because we always had an unholy knack of bumping up against one another’s raw edges all the time. I picture screaming fights and door slamming rages and I want to stop the car and say, “Can’t you see this is a terrible idea?” but it’s already too late. The cabin is right up ahead.
There’s a car there already – sticking a silver nose just beyond the side of the building. Meg? The relief at not being alone with Matt is shocking in its strength. If she’s here…
But no. It’s not Meg’s Prius. It’s an unfamiliar car, but the figure waiting on the porch is all too familiar. Long legs in black, skinny jeans, tapered fingers tapping out an unheard rhythm on the boards. I know every inch of him. I know the texture and weight and heft and heat of him, and some nights I scream into my pillow with frustration because I can’t see a time when I’ll ever be able to get the smell of his hair out of my head, or the taste of him out of my mouth.
When Rocco sees me he looks just as horrified as I must look right now. His mouth is still half hanging open when Matt tosses him the keys.
“Open up, dickhead. What are you staring at?”
I hurry to join Rocco at the door. “Oh my God. What are you doing here?” I ask, in a piercing whisper.
“He asked me,” says Rocco, fumbling with the key. Just being close to him makes me want to put my hands all over him. I’m never going to survive this. “He never said anything about you being here.”
We step inside the cabin, a dark but cozy space that smells of furniture polish and fresh linen. And we’re alone.
I can see it in his eyes that the same thoughts are running through his head. We simply don’t know what to do with each other if we’re not doing what we want to be doing. My palms itch and my spine tingles. I want his mouth, I want his hands on my face and his eyelashes fluttering against mine. I thought I was doing better – just a little, not much – but I was kidding myself, because I want.
“Did he say anything else to you?” I say. “About why he wanted you to come up here?” Maybe he knows. Oh God, what if he knows? Seventy-two hours of aggrieved Matt-drama: how could you do this to me? With my brother? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
“He said he wanted to apologies,” says Rocco. “I thought he was just making amends.”
That sounds familiar. “Wait, is that a recovery thing?”
“Yes. You say you’re sorry to the people you’ve wronged and you sit down to talk about how you’re going to rebuild your relationship.” He casts a furtive glance at the open door, and I know why. Matt never mastered the art of being alone for more than five minutes, and the seconds are ticking away. “Daniel, we cannot tell him about what happened between us. Who knows how he’ll take it?”
“What if he knows?” I say, still feeling paranoid from those paparazzi pictures. “What if he saw those photos of us and this is just some…”
Matt flings the door wide. We blink like insects in the light. “Hey,” he says. “You two gonna give me a hand with the bags or what?”
This is torture. This is hell. As I haul the bags into the cabin I scramble through my memories of school, trying to remember which author it was who defined Hell as the absence of Heaven above everything else. Milton, perhaps – it sounds simple and Protestant enough to be him. Us Catholics don’t simplify Heaven and Hell: we invent complicated points systems in Purgatory and – like Dante – create baroque punishments of the pit to scare little kids out of touching themselves.
And it’s all bullshit, because if that was Milton’s definition? The old Puritan had it nailed. This is exactly what Hell feels like, being constantly aware of the celestial bliss you can never, ever have again.
“Isn’t this great?” Matt says, grinning all over his face. “Just us guys. The way we were when we were kids, only better, because there are no parents to tell us when to go to bed.”
Yay. I can stay up all night, yearning pointlessly. What a treat.
Rocco opens the door of one of the bedrooms, spots the double bed and dives for it, starfished out on top of the patchwork quilt.
“Get up,” says Matt. “You can’t do that.”
“Can too. This is my bed now. I found it first.”
Matt glowers. “I got this place. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me.”
Rocco sits up. “I’m taller than you, you hobbit. I need more space to spread out.” He catches my eye and there’s a flash of his old mischief that makes me ache.
“Rock, paper, scissors,” says Matt.
Rocco holds up two middle fingers. “Rock, paper, bite me,” he says, sticking his tongue out. Great. So now they’re regressing.
Matt sighs. “Asshole,” he says. “Fine. If you get the double bed, I get grilling rights.”
Rocco’s smile collapses. “Grilling rights?” he says, as Matt sweeps off towards the kitchenette, leaving me leaning in the doorway.
“There’s an outdoor grill,” I say. “He brought steaks.”
“Oof. Che palle. He’s going to burn the shit out of them.”
“You might have to surrender the bed then.”
Rocco gets up. “No way. He can grill all he wants, but I’m gonna marinade.”
I don’t step out of the doorway fast enough and we almost collide. His hand lingers on my upper arm, his gaze on my lips. It would be so easy to reach out and close the gap between us right now, but I can’t. I mustn’t. It’s over. It has to be, because if it wasn’t I’d have already kicked the bedroom door closed and shoved him back down on the bed, regardless of Matt.
“You look good,” Rocco says, and I wince. I know it has to be this way, but it’s such an ex-boyfriend thing to say, and it hurts.
“I don’t,” I say. “But thank you anyway.”
He sighs. “Are we okay?” He wants us to be. He does. I can see it in his eyes.
“Yeah,” I say, even though we aren’t.
I pick up my bag and take it into my room. It’s the same one Mom consigned me to when she said I wasn’t allowed to sleep in the tent with Matt and Rocco. I think it might even be the same bed. It’s definitely the same wardrobe, because there’s the butterfly shaped bare patch in the varnish where Meg once attached a puffy sticker and Matt told her to take it off.
Funny how things work out.
When I go back out again, Rocco and Matt are going at it over the steaks, Rocco turning food-snob the way I knew he would.
“Liquid smoke?” he says. “Artificial flavoring? Really?”
“Yes, really. Look, you got the bed. You knew the score. Now fuck off.”
“I can’t do that. Do you know how much pain it causes me to see you dumping MSG on those beautiful steaks? You need herbs. Did you even get some fresh rosemary?”
“Rocco, stop bugging me or I’m going to cram this spatula up your ass.”
Rocco groans and turns to me in desperation. “Tell him, Daniel,” he says. “Tell him about that Tuscan black pepper beef I made that time. With that slow reduction.”
Right. That slow reduction. “At least three hours,” Rocco said. “So we’ll just have to find something nice and leisurely to do while it cooks.” And we did.
The pain is unexpectedly fierce and I can see the immediate regret in his eyes. He knows he’s stepped on a landmine, and I have a horrible sense of how this weekend is going to go. “You know he can cook, right?” I say, determined to move past it.
“I can cook,” says Matt.
“Okay,” I say.
Rocco shoots me another apologetic look and then spots something else in the grocery bag that he can disapprove of. “You’re using a tenderizer?”
“No duh. Did you bring a steak hammer?”
“Smash it with a rock.”
“A rock?” says Matt. “What are we? Cavemen?”
“Sometimes,” says Rocco. “Best thing I ever bought for my kitchen was a marble mortar and pestle. It’s basically two rocks that you smash together and it still does more than any other kitchen gadget I’ve ever bought. Crushes garlic without all that dicking around trying to clean a garlic press, makes pesto, grinds hazelnuts…”
Matt shakes his head and reaches for the carton Rocco was just sneering at. “Yeah, but that’s clean marble. That you bought from a store. Not some dirty rock from the lake with fish shit or whatever all over it.”
“So you wash it.”
“Yeah, okay, Nature Boy,” Matt says, elbowing him out. “So put your money where your mouth is and go find a rock, then. Quit standing here telling me how to…” He trails off, knowing Rocco well enough to know what he’s just walked into.
“Beat your meat?” says Rocco, with barely restrained delight.
“Fuck you.”
“And you. I know you know don’t need any lessons when it comes to that.”
As he goes out, Rocco gives me one of those sad, conciliatory smiles I’ve already come to hate. I root my feet to the spot, because I’m scared of what I’ll say if I give into the desire to follow him. Oh God, why did he have to mention that Tuscan beef recipe? I remember the way it perfumed my apartment all afternoon. We left the bedroom door wide open so Rocco could be sure of smelling it scorching and it mingled – mellow and rich – with the sharp, animal smells of our lust.
I need to say something. Something normal, but Matt is futzing with the steaks and seems almost artificially absorbed. One of those brotherly silences where he has absolutely no idea what to say to me. We have so little in common.
So I slip out.
Rocco is wandering down by the edge of the lake, head down. He sees something on the ground and kneels, and I approach. Tuscan beef, I think. Really? You had to say that when you knew it would remind me of the time I had my tongue so deep inside you that you came without so much as a finger on your cock?
But I don’t say that. Obviously. “Are you really looking for a rock to use as a steak tenderizer?” I ask.
“Yes,” says Rocco, squinting up into the sun behind me. “I take paleo way too seriously.”
I’m grateful for his ability to make me laugh. All at once it feels slightly easier between us. “Here,” he says. “Help me look. You were always the amateur geologist.”
I kneel beside him, my heart thundering at being so close to him again. I want to bite the flesh of his neck, pull his hair the way he liked me to do when he went down on me. I want to taste his mouth again, feel his hands on my skin, wrap my legs around his waist and cross my feet the way I used to do whenever I laughingly told him I would never, ever let him leave my bed.
“Sandstone,” I say, tossing away a rock. “That’s no good. Weird. I would have thought there’d be more metamorphics around here.”
His shoulder nudges mine. “How have you been?” he says, deciding to address the elephant in the room.
“Not great.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his hands moving over the wet stones, flipping them over. “No,” he says. “Me neither.”
On one hand I’m gratified that he’s been suffering without me, but I know that not doing so good is a whole world of danger for someone like him. “You haven’t…you know…slipped?”
Rocco shakes his head and fishes a chip from his jacket pocket. This one is bright orange. I wonder how the color code system works. Is it like judo where you start out with a white belt and work your way through the colors up to a black? What constitutes a black belt in sobriety? Is there such a thing?
“Eleven months,” he says. Close to our watershed. One more month and we could legitimately make as much whoopee as we wanted. If we hadn’t already broken up.
“Congratulations,” I say, and hand it back to him, resenting – as always – the words around the edge of the chip. “God, I hate that fucking quote.”
“‘To thine ownself be true?’ Why?”
“Because it’s stupid.”
Rocco looks at me like I just cursed in church. “Shakespeare is stupid?”
“No,” I say. “Polonius is stupid. And Shakespeare knew he was stupid. He wrote him that way. He’s a half-bright old blowhard who manipulates his kids and gives them shitty, clichéd advice, like ‘to thine ownself be true’, and Laertes only goes and fucking takes it and comes back to Elsinore to avenge the scheming old fart. Which gets him killed. And Hamlet killed. And Gertrude. And just about everyone else who’s still alive in the play at that point.”
Rocco hands me a lump of something quartzy and potentially useful, but I’m ranting now, and I can’t stop. “A much better piece of advice would be ‘Don’t trust your own judgment all the time, especially if you’re an enormous idiot. And definitely don’t listen to your old man, because if he knew anything he might have noticed that the new king wears ear protectors to bed and looks really shifty whenever anyone mentions his dead brother. In fact, just operate from the assumption that everyone – including you – is probably a fucking idiot. It’s just safer.’”
I stop for breath. Rocco turns over another stone. “Yeah, I don’t think that would fit on the chip,” he says, and this time I crack up. It feels good to laugh with him, but oh God, it hurts, this reminder of how happy he can make me.
I know he feels it, too, because his hand finds mine and his eyes go soft. “Daniel, I have to…” he starts to say, but then there’s a loud scrape of metal from the direction of the cabin, and we both turn to see Matt on the rear deck. The scrape was the sound of him lifting the lid of the grill, and now it looks like he’s happily squirting what looks like lighter fluid over the coals.
“Oh shit,” says Rocco, scrambling to his feet. “He’s going to set himself on fire.”
And that’s the end of that. It’s going to be hard – if not impossible – to find a second to talk without Matt around. Rocco may call himself an attention whore, but he’s never had anything on Matt.
Dinner is good, and even Rocco doesn’t roll his eyes too hard at my brother’s all-American taste in steak seasonings. But there’s a restlessness in the room, a consciousness – mostly radiating from Matt – that something is missing. And I know what it is. We’re three men, eating meat on the edge of the wilderness, and it’s only right and proper that there should be beers around here somewhere. Ice cold, the glass beaded with moisture and the labels peeling away. I don’t even care for beer that much, but Matt’s thirst is so contagious that I’m thinking of the shape of beer bottles with a wistfulness I usually reserve for pictures of Chris Evans’s abs. Rocco – who knows a thing or two about distractions – suggests a card game, and Matt pounces on the idea of poker.
“I can never remember the rules,” I say, sure that poker is the worst possible idea right now. Poker goes with beer and cigars, and we have neither. “What about blackjack?”
“Boring,” says Matt.
“Okay. Strip blackjack.”
He sits up. “Less boring.”
“And the first one naked has to jump in the lake,” says Rocco. I notice he’s the only one of us wearing socks.
“Hey, unfair advantage,” I say, pointing to his feet.
He laughs. “Uh uh. The rules are that you play with what you’re wearing at the moment when someone suggests strip blackjack.”
“Oh, you’re an expert on the rules of strip blackjack now?”
Matt gathers up the cards and heads over to the dining table. Rocco holds out a hand to help me off the couch. I take it and he pulls me to my feet. “You’ll just have play that much harder to get me naked,” he says, and I feel my cheeks blaze hot. His smile makes me tingle all over.
“Oh, I will,” I say, dizzy at the thought that we’re flirting right under Matt’s nose. Something is going to happen tonight. I know it. I can feel it. It’s been hanging in the air since that moment by the water.
“Take your seats, gentlemen,” says Matt, impatient. “Aces are high. Sit your asses down and let’s get this party started.”
He deals first. I wind up with an ace and a ten on the first go. “Boom,” I say, slapping it down next to Rocco’s meager seventeen. “Lose a sock.”
“Jesus, Rainman,” says Matt, handing me the deck. “Give the guy a break. No wonder you wanted to play blackjack.”
“I told you. I can never remember the rules of poker.” I deal. “Stick or hit?”
“Hit.”
“Hit me, too,” says Rocco, frowning at his cards. “I thought you had a great memory?”
“He does,” says Matt. “But even Total Recall here has gaps here and there. Like his freshman year at UCLA. Hit me again, Danny.”
I deal another card. “Rocco?”
He shakes his head and shows his hand. “Fuck it. Nineteen.”
Matt sucks in air through his teeth and puts down his cards. “Ooo – twenty. Other sock, Rocky.”
I laugh, delighted. “Advantage eliminated.”
“Hey, do earrings count?” says Matt, tugging at one of the many hoops in his ear.
“No,” says Rocco. “And neither does the ring in your Prince Albert, so don’t ask.”
“Oh my God. When did you get a Prince Albert? Whose deal is it?”
“Mine,” says Matt. “And I have no idea. I was an even bigger drunk than you were in college, remember?”
“No.”
“My point exactly,” he says. “You went hard when you were off the leash, Daniel. Like that time I had to pick you up from Rocco’s place because you were that fucked up you’d called him instead of me.”
“I did?”
“You were crying,” says Matt. “Because you were afraid to call me because you were worried I’d kill you.”
“I don’t remember that at all.”
“You were extremely drunk,” says Rocco, and shows his hand. “Ventuno. Looks like I’m taking the shirt off your back, Daniel.”
I remove my shirt. “What is this? Tag team gaslighting? Wait, weren’t you guys on tour for my freshman year?”
“Most of it,” says Matt. “But we were in LA at the start of the year, as I seem to remember.”
“Working on the third album,” says Rocco, dealing the next hand.
“And Mona,” Matt says, waggling an eyebrow. “Sacre bleu.”
“Oh my God, yes.” Rocco laughs and tosses me an eight. “It was Valentine’s Day. She was so fucking pissed. She gave me this whole thing about how she was too cool and French for all that corny American Hallmark bullshit–”
“–okay, that definitely sounds like your ex-wife,” says Matt, and loses the hand. And his shirt.
“And I was like ‘Okay, so we won’t do any of that,’ but I think finding a drunk teenage boy in her bed was a little too offbeat even for her.”
“What?” I say. “I was in your bed?”
Matt throws back his head and howls. “Yes, you were, you drunken little shitbag. I got the whole gory story in the morning.”
I toss the cards out. “Fuck you. This is straight up gaslighting. I don’t remember any of this.”
Rocco laughs. “Yes, because you’d had so many margaritas that your head was basically functioning as some kind of disgusting novelty garden sprinkler,” he says. “You ralphed everywhere, Daniel. You were so sick. At one point I thought I was going to have to take you to the ER.”
Oh God. Something stirs in the distant depths of my – admittedly spotty – memory of freshman year. I remember red paper hearts hanging from the ceiling, and doing bong hits with a sorority girl named Heather. And a parakeet, for some reason. “Wait,” I say, as Rocco loses the hand and peels off his shirt, all scars and tattoos and blazing beauty. “Was there a bird? Like a parrot or something. One of those white ones with the yellow…”
“Yes,” says Rocco. “Paco Banane.”
“Paco Banane?” I’m so confused. “Isn’t that a cologne?”
“Paco Rabanne,” says Matt, taking the cards.
“Yeah, that was the joke,” says Rocco. “We named the bird Paco Banane because he was yellow – like a banana – and because it rhymed with Paco Rabanne. Because Mona said she’d kill me if I bought her anything as obvious as perfume for Valentine’s Day, you see. So I bought her a bird and named it after a perfume.”
“Oh, well that makes perfect sense,” I say, because it doesn’t. At all. But it doesn’t matter, because against all odds we are somehow having a good time.
“What happened to the bird, anyway?” asks Matt, as I lose my pants. I’m now down to my shorts.
“She got custody,” says Rocco. “I loved that fucking bird. He was really smart.”
“Wait, you named your bird Paco Banane and when I told you why I named my cat Rerun you looked at me with pure pity? That’s a way worse joke.”
“It was situational,” says Rocco, unrepentant. “Am I dealing?”
“Yes. Jesus, get your head in the game.”
Rocco flashes me a look. God, we’re practically naked. It’s then that I realize what my shorts are covering. That tattoo. Oh shit.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m still confused. Why was I at your place?”
“Because you called me,” says Rocco. “You were shitfaced drunk and you called me instead of Matt because you were worried Matt would murder you for being so fucked up. You were still drunk when he came to pick you up from my place the next day. To this day we have no idea what you were doing at that party.”
“Uh, everything, I think,” I say, trying to remember. “There was a girl named Heather with a bright pink bong and I was like ‘Oh, my God, it’s a Barbie bong’ and she thought I was funny so we smoked up for a while. And something in the bathroom. Could have been coke, could have been speed – I don’t know. I just remember snorting lines off the top of a toilet and going back into the room feeling like God.”
“Coke,” says Rocco, knowledgably. “Definitely coke.”
“Okay, so that.” I say, and tap the table for another card, which takes me up to fourteen. “And then I made out with some guy and totally failed to get laid when I puked in his lap.”
Matt elbows Rocco. “See? I told you we should have gone to college. Look at all the debauchery we missed out on. That was just his freshman year.”
“You gonna stick?” asks Rocco.
“No,” I say. “Hit me again.”
He deals me another card. Aces are high. “Shit,” I say, and reveal twenty-five. “I’m bust.”
“And nude,” says Matt.
I stand up and start to lower my shorts. “Fuck it. I was in the mood for a swim anyway.”
Matt laughs and covers his eyes. Rocco doesn’t. He sees the ink on my hip and his laughter catches in his throat. His mouth stays open and his eyes are like saucers, and I love that I can still surprise him. And that he still wants me. Yes, he does. He does.
Leaving my shorts on the floor, I stride off out of the door and down to the pier, unable to resist shaking my bare ass a little as I go. I break into a run as I hit the pier. Have to get in quickly before Matt sees I have his best friend’s name tattooed on my body. I jump and hit the water with a yell; it’s cold, but exhilarating.
Matt sails over my head with a scream of “Cannonball!” and then Rocco comes flying off the end of the pier like some crazy bird, long limbs waving in mid air.
“Oh my God,” Matt says, surfacing and shivering. “Jesus fuck. Are you kidding me?”
“It’s bracing,” I say.
“It’s freezing. Fuck this noise.” He starts to swim for the shore.
Rocco laughs and splashes him. “You pussy. It’s not that cold.” His hair is streaming wet, plastered to his neck and shoulders. The water’s cold, but the look he gives me makes me feel like I could heat the whole lake with one blush.
“It’s awful. I hate it,” shouts Matt, as he stomps back up to the cabin, his bare ass lily white in the sinking sun.
I drift towards the shelter of the pier, and Rocco swims over to join me. It’s just shallow enough to stand and we tiptoe there in the water for a second, breathing hard at the sudden cold and the knowledge of what we’re about to do. His lips meet mine with a soft ‘mm’ that I’ve missed so much that it takes me out at the knees. I almost sink and he laughs and grabs me around the waist. He tastes of water and flesh and home.
“You nutcase,” he says. “You went and got a tattoo?”
“You were under my skin anyway.”
We kiss and kiss, gasping at the cold. “I’m not over you,” he says. “I might never be over you. Oh God, Daniel – I’m so in love with you.”
“I love you, too. I love you…” I can’t get enough of his lips, even if they are beginning to turn blue. “I love you.”
“Will you come to me tonight?” he asks, running a hand through my wet hair.
“Try and stop me.”
He holds me tight and shivers. There’s nothing for it. We’re going to have to get out. Even the inside of his mouth is starting to feel cold. I’m already thinking of tonight, of being warm in his arms once more, of being kissed and cherished and steadied against his thrusts. It’s freezing but I’m already burning for him.
“Hey,” Matt calls, from somewhere at the top of the pier. “Did you guys drown?”
*
The bedrooms in the cabin have two doors each. One on the inside, one that leads out onto the porch. My room is at the end, Rocco’s in the middle.
I lie in the same bed as I did when I was thirteen, my heart fluttering too fast in the bottom of my throat. It’s insanely quiet out here, and I wonder if he’s lost his nerve, knowing how sound carries through these thin walls. I slide my hand into my pants and touch myself. I’ve been hard for so long I’m starting to feel light headed, but I know this isn’t going to cut it. I need him. I need his hands, I need his mouth, I need his cock.
Then I hear it. A faint creak on the boards outside. I hear the rasp of a lighter. That’s my cue.
I smooth the front of my pants down, but it does nothing. As I walk to the door I can feel the weight of my erection tugging gently at the skin of my groin. He’s standing on the porch, looking out into the darkened trees. When he breathes in the firefly glow of his cigarette flares brighter, illuminating his cheekbones and his long, moth-soft lashes.
Rocco holds out his hand to me and I take it, moving closer in my bare feet. “You’re going to taste like an ashtray,” I complain, because I can.
“Shh,” he says, and holds the cigarette up to my lips. Smoke breath is like garlic breath, only obnoxious if only one of you has it. I suck and roll the smoke over my tongue, trying not to choke as my breath hitches, because his other hand has found the tented front of my sweatpants. He bites his lip as he works his fingers under the elastic, and I clench my teeth on the filter as he delves inside, caressing me at first, but then he works the waistband down and pulls my cock fully out into the cool night air.
He takes the cigarette from my mouth, takes one last drag and extinguishes it in a cup of water on the porch rail. “Wouldn’t want to start any wildfires,” he whispers, and leads me – literally by the dick – into his bedroom.
The door closes. We’re alone, the way we’re not supposed to be. And we’re doing this. He releases me and walks round to the other side of the bed. The covers are turned down like in a hotel. He strips off his t-shirt and drops his pants, revealing a cock as hard as my own, and then slips into bed. I join him in a kind of daze and we come together, stifling tiny moans of pleasure and relief at the longed for touch of one another’s bodies. Just the sound of our mouths seems deafeningly loud in the hushed Oregon night. Matt is in the next room.
We sink down, pulling the covers fully over our heads. “Have to be quiet,” I say, more to myself than to him, because it’s crazy how well my body remembers the way we fit together. Rocco’s cock finds its place alongside mine, and I’m already moving, already pushing my hips against him.
“I know,” he says. “Just let me have you. Let me love you.”
I smother my sigh in a kiss and roll on top, finding perfect purchase with my knees either side of him. His hands are on my back and their touch speeds my pulse close to madness. I don’t dare fuck him too fast because I have a feeling the bed will squeak, so it’s going to have to be this way. I rock very gently and he pulls me down, whispering to me under the covers.
“Like this,” he says, his hands moving lower. “Soft and quiet.”
“Yes.” His tongue darts out, teasing my lips. Oh yes.“We’ll make it sweet. And slow. And tender.”
“Yes.” Yes. Right there, right there…oh God. I think my heart is going to explode. You can’t love someone this much and live. It feels impossible. “I love you.”
“ I know,” he whispers. “I love you, too. My sweet thing. My Daniel.”