5
It’s raining again. I can hear the hiss and patter of it behind his ragged breaths. I lie still beneath him, my legs wrapped around his waist, my fingers in his hair. His breath is warm on my neck, our sticky bellies slowly gluing together as we dry and cool. Rocco’s lips trace the line of my jaw, and when he finds my mouth his kiss is slow, sated and gluttonous. He shifts his weight and rolls onto his side, and I tumble with him, still kissing, still not completely sure about what just happened. Did he really just tear into my motel room and – with no experience, or so he says – fuck me so sweetly and thoroughly that I exploded all over him like a teenager?
He draws back slightly to look at me. His eyes appear almost black in the dim light. “You okay?” he asks, his hand on my hip.
“You’ve done this before,” I say, because there’s no way he hasn’t. He handles my male body without even the smallest flicker of hesitation.
“I haven’t. I swear.”
I shake my head. “You licked…” I start to say, but that’s as far as I get, because the memory of it steals my breath away.
“I know I did. Your selfie made it look really tasty.” His smile is everything. “And it is, by the way, so – you know – congratulations on that.”
The laughter catches me unaware. It starts as a tight, scrunch-nosed giggle and then he’s laughing because I’m laughing and we’re caught in a loop. I can feel the tension pouring out of me and I’m not dreaming. We really did just do this, and it’s so fucking stupid that I have to laugh. Stupid and delirious and wonderful. Oh God, my heart; he could knock me dead with a flutter of his eyelashes right now.
“This is insane,” I tell him, but I can’t stop grinning.
“I know,” he whispers, trying to kiss me, but it doesn’t work, because I’m smiling and he’s still laughing. We’re giggling like a couple of kids, half appalled and half breathlessly impressed at our own daring, because we know we shouldn’t be doing this.
“What happened to playing with fire?” I say, and he shakes his head and manages to plant a hard, purposeful kiss on my lips, squashing the shape of my smile.
“Fuck it,” he says. “Just…burn me.”
I open my mouth to him. I can barely believe I’m kissing him, but this is real. This is really, truly real. He’s here and he’s warm and I have the rest of tonight to learn the heft of his limbs and the taste of his skin and the texture of his hair as it falls across my face. I’m almost ashamed of how greedy he makes me feel; I can’t stop touching him, his back, his tattooed arms, his thighs, his chest. My hands find their way to his face and I map its features like a blind person, feeling the ends of his eyelashes, running my fingertips over the sweep of his brow, the tip of his nose, the curves of his lips. When he opens his mouth a little my fingers crowd in and I’m running my fingers over the edges of his teeth as though he were a horse and I was trying to guess his age. He laughs at my oddity, his tongue soft and wet on the pad of my middle finger.
“What are you doing?” he says, in the back of his throat.
“I have no idea.”
He closes his lips around my fingers and suckles them sloppily. That first time only took the edge off my desire and the feel of his tongue makes it stir restlessly once more. I have a premonition of not being able to get enough of him, and it’s both entrancing and scary as hell.
“Your fingers taste seriously sexy right now,” he says. “Is that me or you?”
“Both, I think.”
“Mm. All mixed up.” He pulls me close, burying his face between my neck and shoulder as he squeezes me tight enough to make my ribs ache. “God, I love the way your body feels.”
It’s his turn to exploring now, his hands learning the shape of my ass, the width of my back. He maps my collarbone with the end of his tongue and finds my mouth once again. The whole world is skin and hands and kissing and I feel as though I could swoon under his touch.
“Is this real?” I ask, just to be sure.
“I think so,” he says, settling beside me, his cock hard against my hip, his hand on my belly, where the silvery snail trails of come have turned translucent and cracked.
“You think so?”
“I’m not totally sure myself,” he says, his fingertip tracing circles around my navel. I’m hard again, but he doesn’t touch me. “It’s…weird.”
“Good weird, I hope.”
His finger stops moving. His hand is flat on my stomach as he kisses me. “Wonderful weird,” he says, his eyes shining. “God, Daniel – what were you thinking? Sending me a dirty picture like that?”
“I’m not sure. I think on some level I was trying to put you off.”
“Uh, ok-ay. Put me off by sending a thing that said ‘Come and get it’?”
I giggle. “I don’t know, okay? I wasn’t sure you knew what you were asking for. Some guys get all kinds of bicurious until there’s, like, a dick in their faces. Then they back off real fast.”
“Huh.” Rocco takes hold of my cock. “Not what you were expecting?”
“Well, I definitely didn’t expect you to burst in here and try to put it in your mouth, no.”
I’m giggling again, partly because I’m nervous and partly because I’m dizzy. He’s not messing around: he has me firmly in hand, stroking deliberately from root to tip. I can feel him hard as a stone against my hip.
“You should have seen your face,” he says. “Hot as fuck.”
His thumb finds the tip, spreading the dot of wetness he finds there. I’m sure this can’t be his first time, but I’m not going to ask right now.
“I’m going to need instructions,” he says. “Just so you know.”
I hold my hips still with some difficulty. “You’re doing very well on your own.”
He watches my face intently as he lengthens his stroke once more. “Not even freaking out,” he says. “See?”
“Yes.” Oh God. He’s good at this, too.
“I like it,” he says, dropping a close-mouthed kiss on my shoulder. “It’s silky. And hard. And pretty.”
“Pretty?”
He starts to sink downwards on the bed, and my blood is already racing in anticipation. “Sure,” he says, his hand moving down to cradle my balls. “It’s part of you. Of course it’s pretty.” He works a finger behind them and I don’t know how I’m ever going to survive him, because he is fire. “You like that?”
“Oh God.”
His tongue teases my nipples and keeps going, his hair trailing over my belly. I feel him licking just below my belly button and I have to say it now, or I never will. “Turn around,” I say.
Rocco raises his head, frowning. He wanted instructions, after all.
“Turn around.” I twirl a finger in the air. “We’ll sixty-nine.”
He scrambles up to kiss me, an unholy light of lust in his eyes. I made him look like that. “You’re incredible,” he whispers, and positions himself, his head towards the foot of the bed. Even after all these years of trying to imagine what his dick looks like, I’m not prepared for the real thing. Giulia has been partly lost in a tangle of vines, the G and the tail of the A sprouting tendrils that swirl and twist and go all the way down into the forest of his black pubic hair. His cock is as lean and sinewy as the rest of him and I pounce on it like a slut, thrilled to the core by his moan when my mouth finds him for the first time. His hands are on my hips, trying to adjust my position, but I don’t even care if he doesn’t suck me, just as long as I can keep doing this to him. My mouth is full of flesh and heat and I don’t see how this could possibly get any better, but then his tongue finds me and it does. Oh, it does.
*
I’m so tired. We hardly slept. I think I dozed off – exhausted – in his arms as the sun was coming up, but I can’t have had more than four hours. I hoped the sea air would revive me but it just makes me sleepier, and my eyes feel gritty and raw as I watch the opposite coast recede into the distance. Already I feel like I’ve spent half my life on the Southworth ferry.
Rocco comes up behind me and winds his arms around my waist, startling me into something like wakefulness. For a lot of straight men it’s one thing to fuck you behind closed doors, but quite another to so much as meet your eyes in public. But then Rocco is full of surprises, and probably not all that straight.
“Hey,” he says, tugging gently on my wrists, pulling my arms up at sides. “Wanna do King of the World?”
I laugh, completely beguiled. “No. Firstly, it sank, secondly, we’re going the wrong way and thirdly, why do you get to be Leo?”
“Because I’m Italian,” he says. “Eat me.”
I turn away from the rail. “Already did.”
“I know you did,” he says, and just like that he kisses me full on the mouth. “Horny little beast.”
Once again I have to pinch myself. He was my fantasy for over half my life and now he’s here, already acting like a doting boyfriend after one incredible night. This feels too good to be true.
“Here,” he says, nodding towards the bench where two large coffees are waiting. “I got us some coffee.”
I pounce on mine. “Thank you. God, I’m so tired.”
Rocco sits down beside me and carefully removes the lid from his own cup. “I know,” he says. “Me, too. You want to crawl into bed when we get back?”
“Depends. Are you ever going to let me crawl out of it?”
He grins and snuggles closer on the bench. “Probably not.”
The wind catches his hair and it flies out across his cheek. Heart in mouth, I reach out and tuck it behind his ear, because I can. He looks at me the same way I looked at him a moment ago when he went full PDA on me, and I feel a rollercoaster tug somewhere in the center of my spine. This is dangerous, but I’m already in freefall, plummeting into love. “This is so cool,” I say, like a teenager.
“Yes. You are.”
“Me?”
“You,” says Rocco, gently bumping his knee against mine. “I always admired you. You were like that cat from the poem – the one who walked by himself.”
“I was?” I had always been kind of a loner as a kid, but I’d never imagined that was a thing worthy of admiration. If anything it was just another thing that people made fun of me for, not least Matt, who had lots of friends.
“Sure, you were,” says Rocco. “Do you remember when you came out?”
“No.” I honestly don’t. Nobody threw a party or threatened to throw me out of the house. I think it was always taken as a given, because as a child I’d been imaginative, bad at sports and way too compliant when Megan was playing with make-up and wanted to put lipstick on me.
“You must have been about sixteen,” he says. “And Kevin was there.”
Ah, Kevin. The drummer, the one who plays way too hard into the doofus drummer stereotype. (Sample conversation: Rocco says “We need to talk about Kevin,” and Matt says “Why? Is he eating paste again?”)
“We were all in your mom’s kitchen,” says Rocco. “And you wandered through on your way upstairs. Then Kevin asked you if you had a girlfriend yet and you just said ‘Nope. I’m gay,’ and kept on walking.”
I laugh. “I don’t remember that at all.”
“I do. It was the coolest coming out I think I’ve ever seen in my life. You just tossed it over your shoulder. You always had this…this distance. Your sister has it too, to some degree, but you were just so cool, so detached and self-contained. Total opposite of Matt, who needs all the attention all of the time.” He reaches out and touches my cheek. “I think that’s why I was always drawn to you.”
“Drawn to me?” I kiss the inside of his wrist and do a tired, creaky burst of mental arithmetic. “If I was sixteen then you were twenty-one. And you’d already won your first MTV award.”
“What? So I had no business being impressed by you?”
“Well, yeah.”
He laughs and shakes his head. “Daniel, I do what I do because I’m a massive fucking attention whore. I get up on stage because I want people who don’t even know me to look at me and love me. No, not even love me. Adore me. And I know it’s dumb and shameful and a symptom of some serious dysfunction on my part; I guess that’s the only difference between me and Matt–”
“–no, it’s not,” I say, interrupting because I can’t get that moment between them out of my head. “You’re different in lots of ways. You don’t have it in to you to be cruel, for a start.” I run my hand over his hair. “I’m so sorry for what he said to you last night. That was hideous.”
Rocco shakes his head. “It’s okay. He wasn’t himself.”
I told myself the same thing at the time, but that was only to keep my head. Secretly, I know that my brother has a side so dark that it scares me. “The way he touched your hand,” I say. “It was almost…I don’t know.”
“Almost what?”
“Like…like a lover.”
He smothers a giggle, annoying me. “Don’t laugh at me, Rocco.”
“No, I’m not,” he says. “I’m just trying to understand what you’re getting at. Are you trying to ask me if I ever slept with your brother?”
“You were always close.”
“And we were always straight, to all intents and purposes,” he says, unable to hide his amusement. “Okay, we made out once, because we were having a threeway with a girl who wanted us to do it, but it went wrong.”
“Wrong. How?”
“We couldn’t stop laughing,” he says. “We were trying to kiss but we kept laughing and she was getting madder and madder because she really wanted to watch us, and the more annoyed she got the more we cracked up. She ended up kicking us both out of bed and finishing the job with her vibrator. But I just couldn’t do it. Even on molly it felt wrong, like I was making out with my brother.”
“Okay,” I say, but I’m still not entirely satisfied. He sees it in my eyes, because he prods me.
“What?” he asks. “Talk to me.”
“I’m really the first?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I feel my face burn hot in spite of the chill wind. “Rocco, you swallowed.”
He grins. “What can I say? You’re an excellent source of protein.”
“That’s disgusting.”
He laughs and kisses me. “You loved it,” he says, and I bury my smile in his collar, because I did. I went to bed with Rocco Ponti and I loved it, and when we get back to Seattle we’re going to get right back into bed and sleep and snuggle and fuck each other until we can no longer feel our toes.
“I don’t get it,” I say, kissing his pierced earlobe. “You’ve spent your entire adult life surrounded by people who want to have sex with you and you’ve never indulged your curiosity about guys until now?”
He shrugs. “Lack of opportunity, I guess.”
“Okay, how?”
“I told you,” said Rocco. “The rock star life is not nearly as glamorous as you think it is. You spend most of your life in transit and the rest wrangling tantrums and drug habits. That and the fact that I’ve had about four one night stands in my entire life. Usually when I’m into someone I’m into them. Like Mona. I met her, I married her and then after the divorce I got into a whole big thing with Amanda on the rebound. There’s no reason I wouldn’t have been with a man had I fallen for one, but it just never came up. I’m kind of a serial monogamist, although obviously the record label wanted to keep that quiet. They were selling the image of a horny, hard-drinking slut.”
I take his hand, conscious of the things I could tell he was trying not to say in front of Matt last night. “That’s going to be difficult, isn’t it?” I say. “Keeping up the image. You get clean. Matt gets sober…”
Rocco sighs and looks out to sea. “Yeah,” he says. “I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”
*
George Mallory got naked a lot.
There are nude studies and photographs by the artist, Duncan Grant, who – when he wasn’t banging John Maynard Keynes – seemed happy to let Mallory wander into his Cambridge digs, strip naked and play muse for him. There’s even a photo of Mallory naked on the Everest expedition, wearing boots, backpack and an impish smile. He looks like he’s having a great time, although it always makes me wonder how fast a penis gets frostbite.
And maybe because all that flesh is an unsettling reminder of where he ended up, face down, arm outstretched, his layers of clothing flayed by the wind so that his mummified back showed white and flawless as marble. Back when Mallory circled the edges of the Bloomsbury Set, a horny Lytton Strachey compared Mallory’s body to that of an athlete sculpted by Praxiteles. A compliment turned prophecy, turned dark.
Rocco is in the shower, and I managed to restrain myself from following him only because I have to do some work at some point. And now I’m annoyed, as I knew I would be, because I’m neck deep in nude pictures and gay love letters and the inevitable testimony of those historians. The ones who insist that although Mallory posed naked for homoerotic art studies, wrote love letters to gay men and hung around with a bunch of famous bisexuals, a flow chart of whose love lives looked like a plate of spilled linguini, he was a macho mountaineer, and therefore straight.
All of that incredibly gay stuff he did? Oh, it was performative. It was just a playful way that men related to one another in those days and shouldn’t be judged by modern standards. They only flirted with each other to be outré. The same way they posed nude for each, wrote one another steamy letters and – in some cases – went to bed with each other. In a strictly no-homo way, you understand. With some of these historians you could dig up an old photo of John Maynard Keynes with Duncan Grant’s actual dick in his mouth and they’d still say “Oh, well, standards were different then, and actually John Maynard Keynes – like George Mallory – went on to marry a woman.”
Is bisexuality really that difficult a concept? I’ve been having sex with one for the past few days. Was he just striking a pose when he let me finger his asshole, because one time he was married to a woman – a woman who is currently married to another woman, by the way – and that means his sexuality must be set in stone?
God, it’s such bullshit. I look back at one of the Grant photos, of Mallory with his bare back to the camera, an eerie echo of the way his body would be found seventy-five years after the day he disappeared. Long, long legs, thick round ass, the light lingering on the small of his back. There is no way the person who was pointing that camera hadn’t thought about fucking him at some point. How could they not? He was beautiful.
Rocco opens the bathroom door and I look up. With the picture of George Mallory still in my head, Rocco’s tattooed body looks exotic, jarringly modern. He’s standing in the doorway drying his hair and somehow he looks even more naked than he was when I left him in the shower twenty minutes ago.
It takes me a moment. There’s just so much to look at with him. The knives, the hand of glory, the Calavera Catrina tattoo from Mexico City when they played a gig the day of the dead. My eyes are drawn to the thorny vines and black roses that bloom over his hip, and then I see why he looks twice as nude as before. His pubes are gone and I can see how the thin tendrils curl around the root of his cock. He’s already thickening under my gaze.
“Holy shit,” I say. “How much did that hurt?”
He looks down and laughs. “Oh, not much. I only passed out twice. You like it?”
“I don’t know. On one hand you look like a walking wet dream and on the other hand my dick feels like it’s trying to invert itself back into my body in sympathy. Just…ow.”
Rocco hangs the towel on the bathroom door and joins me on the bed. He stretches out beside me and I run a hand over his hip as I futz with the laptop with the other. “Poor Giulia,” I say. “She got lost in all those vines. When I first saw it I thought you’d covered her up.”
“No,” he says. “Why would I do that? She was my first. It’s only fair that the lady should get to plant a flag on me.”
“My dad always said you’d regret it.”
“Nah. There are bigger things to regret in life.” From here I can see at least one of them, the ugly, still pinkish scar on the inside of his thigh. He takes hold of my hand on his hip, pushing his fingers through the gaps in mine. “Am I bugging you?”
“No,” I say, trying not to look back at the page in front of me. “I’m just…I kind of love my work.”
“I know. Promise you’ll tell me if I get annoying; I know I’m needy as hell.”
“You’re beautiful,” I tell him, and he sits up and plasters himself all over my back, his mouth on my shoulder and his dick finding the crack of my ass like it’s home already.
“Do you realize we’ve been naked for about three days straight now?” I say, opening my legs underneath him. “I think the only time I put on pants was to answer the door for the pizza guy.”
Rocco nibbles gently on the back of my shoulder. “You should always be naked. Your skin is so lovely.” He humps me slowly and I feel, behind the hard length of him where there’s usually hair, how he’s smooth and soft and freshly shaved. “What are you working on? Still Mallory and Irvine?”
“Yeah.” I can’t get it to connect for some reason. The narrative themes aren’t coming together. “Thorny questions of bisexuality. I don’t know.”
“What’s thorny about it? Sometimes you fuck men and sometimes you fuck women. It’s not complicated.”
I close the lid of the laptop and catch a glimpse of us in the closet mirror. Rocco is crouched over me like a lion wanting to mate, and I feel a thrill fizz through my balls and between my legs. “You would think,” I say. “But we have to get into all kinds of bullshit about performative levels of homosexuality among the Bloomsbury set and how yes, they sent one another love letters and took homoerotic photographs of each other in the nude, but they did it in a way that doesn’t conform to twenty-first century standards of gayness and therefore is not exactly gay.”
Rocco kisses the back of my neck. “That sounds pretty gay to me.”
“Of course it was fucking gay. They were all banging each other like screen doors in a hurricane, but we always seem to have to get into this ridiculous game of historical no-homo, because some people have a huge problem with historical figures…” He thrusts and I feel him nudging at my asshole. “Um…do you know what you’re doing back there?”
“It’s strictly performative,” he says, catching my eye in the mirror and making me laugh. He slithers downwards, his tongue tracing the length of my spine. “Go on. You were saying.”
His hands are on my ass. He hasn’t so much as asked any of those usual banal questions about whether I’m a top or bottom and it’s refreshing. When Rocco takes charge he does so with a near intimidating sexual confidence that doesn’t care about politics or power games. All he seems to care about is getting us both off as spectacularly as possible.
“Are you serious?” I say, as he licks whorls at the top of my ass crack. “You want me to keep on talking about turn of the century sexual attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group?”
“Sure. You know I love your podcast. Can I lick your asshole?”
I laugh to hide my excitement. “Now?”
“Yes.” He spreads my cheeks wide and lets out a soft moan. “Oh my God. Would you look at that cute little pink thing? Even your butthole is pretty. I love it.”
I feel his breath on me and then my mind empties, unable to process anything but his hot, wet tongue. Once again his confidence leaves me reeling and before I know it I’m arching my ass like a slut, gasping at his proficiency. He licks from the underside of my balls to the top until I’m twitching, my spine melting and my cock like iron. He teases with back and forth flickers and then I feel his tongue stiffen and probe, and I cry out in shock and lust.
“Oh fuck. Oh my God…where the hell did you learn to do that?”
He laughs and I feel it hot on the inside of my cheeks. “You know women have assholes too, right?” he says. His finger is right in the middle and I push back against it; I’m so wet and soft that he barely has to push. I hear his breath catch as he goes deeper and I squeeze eagerly around him.
“Where’s the lube?” he says.
“Right hand drawer.” I dig my knees into the mattress, raising my hips. In the front I’m all weight and heat, hard cock and heavy balls, but in the back I’m soft and hungry, a hole that needs to be fucked. “There are condoms in there, too.”
“You mean you want me to…?”
“You’d better. You started this.”
He pulls away to search. I can’t help but thrust gently against the mattress. It’s very, very quiet in the bedroom and I listen to the tacky, latex rustle of him rolling down the condom.
“Um…it’s purple,” he says, and I briefly glance over my shoulder to see it peeking above his thigh, side on as he sits on the side of the bed. It is purple, and it takes my lust-frazzled brain a second to figure out why.
“Oh. They’re rainbow ones. They were handing them out at Pride.”
Rocco gets back onto the bed behind me and I get up on my hands and knees. Now I can see us both in the mirror and I catch his eye. “Okay?” he says, and I feel his finger again, slick and gooey as it slides into me. I stifle a cry and he looks at me with such lust in his eyes that I’m practically waving my ass at him.
“Fuck me, Rocco. I can take it. Just fuck me.”
His gaze is dark and horny as he pushes inside. I almost close my eyes, but then I realize I want to see this. I need to see this. God, his face as he finds his way inside me. He frowns and I see the tension in his jaw as he tries to keep it together, but his eyelids flutter shut in pure pleasure and he leans forward, his weight on one hand as he bends over me, covers me. His dick shifts inside me and I moan. He echoes, the fingers of his other hand digging hard into my hip. I hope they leave bruises.
“Oh Jesus,” he whispers. “I’m in you, Daniel. I’m inside you. And you feel so fucking good.”
He rocks his hips slowly and I move with him. “You, too.” I clench gently around him, goading him on. “Go on. Give it to me hard. I love it.”
“Like that?” He leans back on his knees. Hard, short strokes now. The weight of my cock and balls tug at my groin as we fuck, sharpening the edge of my hunger. I look back at the mirror and I can’t believe how hot we look. I’m flushed and slutty and he looks like he can barely believe what he’s doing, but he’s doing it. Oh God, is he ever doing it. I drop my hips and feel him where I want him, nailing that sly, secret spot inside me and making me cry out.
“I fucking love your sex noises,” he says, in a voice that makes me think of something sizzling. I open my mouth and moan for him, giving him a look in the mirror that’s pure porno. He bites his lip as he goes in for the next thrust. He really does do that. Oh my God.
All my sweaty adolescent fantasies catch up with me in a rush. His balls are slapping against my ass, my cock bouncing between my tiring thighs. “Gonna come,” I manage to say, and he grabs my dick, pulling me – wailing my pleasure up to the ceiling – over the edge.
“Holy shit,” he gasps, and I know he’s there too. I feel his thrusts turn sharp and shuddery, then his arm is around my waist – smearing come all over my skin – and he holds me tight as it pounds it home, hard, deep and slow. I count four strokes of his dick in my fluttering hole and then my legs refuse to hold me any longer.
I lie face down, listening to the thunder of my heart. He presses a kiss between my shoulder blades and reaches for the tissues next to the bed. “Roll over,” he says. “Let me clean you up.”
“Kind of late for that. I’m already filthy.” I feel limp and whorish, infinitely desirable. His kiss is wet and lingering, and his hand moves down between my legs. With an unerring taste for obscenity, his fingers find my soft, fucked asshole and push inside.
“Does that hurt?” he asks, misinterpreting my gasp.
“No. God, no. I’m still all shivery in there, is all. Don’t stop.”
He opens me wider and I sigh against his lips. “I fucked you, Daniel,” he whispers, kissing me almost chastely, a stark contrast to the things his fingers are doing as they move in and out of me. “I fucked you.” He teases my lips apart with his tongue. He’s still fucking me, stretching me wide and swallowing my moan, half pleasure, half pain. “I fucked you.” I realize I’m going to feel this tomorrow, and the thought excites me. Maybe I’ll make sure he notices that I’m sitting down gingerly, and watch his eyes flash with guilty lust.
“Was it good?” he asks, sliding out again. His intensity scares me almost as much as it lights me up inside. “Did you love it?”
“Yes. So much.”
He softens and smiles, his eyes searching my face as he chews his lower lip. Banal question or not, I guess it’s time for it to come up. “So I guess top or bottom…is this an answer?”
“No.”
“No?”
I love that I can still surprise him. “I like to switch.”
Rocco raises a lecherous eyebrow. “Interesting. Does this mean I’m gonna get fucked at some point?”
“If you want to be, yes.”
“I want,” he says, and it almost takes my breath away. “I want everything. All of it. Everything you want, I want you to have.”
I grab him then, and kiss him hard, because I don’t trust myself to speak any more.