6
I can hardly find words to explain how sweetly he wooed me. That’s the only word for it. I was wooed, courted at every turn. There was the time he filled the bedroom with cut lilacs because he wanted to chase the thrill of our first kiss, or the time he taught he to make alfredo sauce – “Al burro. The real kind, not that ranchy shit in jars.” We’d wandered into the kitchen because we were hungry, and he wouldn’t let me get dressed, so I ended up grating parmesan in the nude and completely lost my shit laughing when I realized how the motion made my unsupported balls jiggle.
For Memorial Day Weekend he pulls off a miracle and gets us a cabin in the Olympic National Park. “One of the few perks of being a famous reprobate,” he says. “Record label had to deal with a bunch of metalheads who were on the verge of going all Some Kind Of Monster and packed them off up here to deal with one another.”
“And they ax murdered each other up in the forest and now we’re about to get into a slasher movie with their vengeful ghosts?” I ask, on the drive. “Because that doesn’t sound like a relaxing vacation.”
“It’s fine. The whole thing blew up before they left LA and they never made it up here. As far as I know they’re still in West Hollywood going to group therapy, assuming they managed to reattach the drummer’s thumb, that is.” I catch his eye in the rearview mirror and he laughs. “Trust me, you don’t want to know. This is what being in a band is like, a lot of the time. We make our own drama and most of it is really fucking dumb.”
When we arrive at the cabin the first thing I hear is water. There’s a tiny kitchenette and a living room overlooking a deck, and to my delight I discover that the deck almost overhangs a small but fast river. I try my best to imagine the place inhabited by a bunch of heavy metal musicians with Gallagher-sized grudges against one another, but I just can’t manage it. The place is too small, too tranquil. The only evidence of their planned presence is a guitar propped against the corner of the fireplace wall. Rocco pointedly ignores it and goes directly to open the doors. I follow him out and fall in love; the view is all white water and a million shades of late spring green, from the emerald velvet of the mossy banks to the deep dark shade of the evergreens.
“This is so beautiful,” I say, looking out over the river. “What’s the catch?”
He comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist. “Why does there have to be a catch?” he asks, pressing a kiss behind my ear.
“Because there’s always a catch. Are you absolutely sure we’re not going to get ax murdered?”
“Fairly sure,” says Rocco. “Although I should warn you, there is something of a vampire problem up in these here parts.”
“Oh shit. The sparkly kind?” Figures. The nearest town is Forks.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Fuck. They’re awful.”
“I know, right?”
“God. If they start playing baseball all night I’m totally gonna complain to the management.”
He laughs and kisses the back of my neck, one hand moving from my waist to caress my hip. I can’t help but lean back into him and he pushes very gently against my ass, letting me know that he’s good to get our long weekend off to a sexy start.
“You remember when we used to go up to Oregon?” he says. “Up at Lost Lake?”
“Yes.”
“Look at us now. From the kids we were. Would you ever have imagined that one of us would be in rehab and the other two are having an affair? With each other?”
My heart gives a funny little skip, and I turn around to face him. I’ve been staring at shades of green for so long that his blue eyes look violet. “Is that what we’re doing?” I say. “Having an affair?”
I love the sound of it. It sounds absorbing, illicit and intensely erotic. Late night phone calls. Motel doors slamming in the rain. Toes curling against the sheets.
“It feels that way,” he says. “Doesn’t it?”
“God, yes.”
His kiss is slow but hungry, like the steady building burn he enjoys when we’re leisurely and going for an encore. “Let’s go to bed,” he says. “Start as we mean to go on.” He smooths my forehead with his thumbs. “No more frowning. No more worrying about house sales or contracts or podcasts or meetings. Let’s just have this weekend all to ourselves.”
We find our way to the larger bedroom, the one with the romantic mahogany bed. He strips me quickly, but once we’re naked we take it soft and slow, trailing our fingertips over skin, swallowing one another’s sighs. He comes in my mouth and I crawl on top of him and finish between his thighs while he kisses me, lapping the taste of himself from the inside of my mouth with lazy, sated licks.
Afterwards we lie quiet, my ear over his heart and his arms around me. This still feels so much like a fantasy, but lately it’s been dawning on me that my fantasies about him were just that. All those years I thought I was in love with him, when I wasn’t. Not really. I couldn’t have been, because nothing that came before ever felt like this.
He stirs beneath me and I shift, rolling onto my side. We lie nose to nose and kiss, drowsing in the rainforest light streaming through the bedroom window. “You have the softest skin,” he says, his hand on my hip. “I love when we’re spooning and it’s just this round, silky little butt pressed up against me.” More kisses. “And then I get inside and you feel like velvet.”
I close my eyes because if I look at him right now I’ll say it. My heart feels too big for my chest. His hand is on my cheek, his mouth grazing mine once more. “You sweet, sexy thing,” he whispers. “So unexpected.”
I love you. The words are bursting behind my ribs, but I can’t. I mustn’t. We shouldn’t be doing any of this, but wasn’t that part of the thrill in the first place?
I trace the line of his eyebrow, my finger lingering over the scar of an old piercing. It makes me think of the seersucker texture of the inside of his wrist, and the pink, puckered mess of his left inner thigh.
He must see the anxiety flash in my eyes, because he frowns slightly and strokes my hair. “What is it, baby?” he says, the first time he’s ever called me that. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m afraid,” I say. “I’m so scared that I’ll hurt you somehow. And that you won’t be able to cope.”
“I’m not that fragile.”
“You are that fragile.” I look down at the scar and he sighs. “I try to keep that in mind.”
“Daniel, I’m an adult. I made this decision for myself.”
“I know that, but let’s be honest – your decision making skills have been a little…spotty for the last few years.”
He sighs again and I touch his thigh. The front part, not the scar tissue. I’m not quite used to the texture yet, and the first time I touched it I almost recoiled because it felt so thick and unnatural. Carefully I run my fingers over it, determined to get used to it, even though the way it gives in the middle makes me squeamish. At one point they had to repack the hole in his leg with gauze every day, he said, and he actually looked forward to it, because it meant he’d get more morphine.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“Now and again. Aches when I walk for too long, but I can’t complain. I was lucky not to lose my leg.”
“Nobody told me how bad it was,” I say, remembering the news filtered back to me via Matt. I’d been afraid for Rocco, but not so afraid that I’d beat a path to the hospital to be with him. Not the way I would now. “I never really knew…”
“I don’t think anyone did,” says Rocco. “There were agents and managers and all the usual Hollywood assholes keeping a lid on things. And I didn’t have a clue. Apparently they gave me the last rites in the ICU, but I don’t fucking remember.” He pulls the covers up over us, concealing the scar. “That was the only thing my folks could do to make themselves feel even slightly better. Call the priest. Couldn’t even salvage a crumb of comfort from the thought of organ donation, because I’d made such a goddamn mess of myself. Who’d want a pair of fried fucking junkie kidneys? Or a liver with possible hepatitis? All anyone could do at that point was keep pumping me full of antibiotics and saying rosaries.”
How close we came to this never happening. “You don’t remember any of it?” I ask, running a hand over his hair.
“Some parts. I remember waking up thirsty. Thirstier than I thought it was possible to be and still live. My tongue didn’t even feel like a tongue any more. It was like a strip of mummified leather.” He touches the back of his front teeth with his thumb. “Here. I had to peel the tip of my tongue off my teeth, and I tasted blood. It was fucking horrible, but the worst thing was that the first thing that popped into my head was ‘I need a hit’. Not ‘There’s a hole in my throat and my tongue is so dry it’s bleeding.’ I wouldn’t have even imagined it was possible to want anything more than I wanted cold, clean water in that moment, but it was.”
“Do you still…” I trail off, but he anticipates my question and sighs.
“Honestly?” he says, meeting my eyes with something like difficulty. “Yes. I do still want it. It ate my life and almost ate my leg, and I have to keep reminding myself of that, because heroin is awesome. Nothing can hurt you when you’re on smack. It wraps you in cotton wool and keeps you from all the jagged edges of life, and that’s why it’s such a fucking monster. The temptation to run right back to it when things get rough…it’s bad, Daniel. The first few months of my recovery I felt like a raw nerve. Everything hurt. Not just physically, but emotionally. If a friend didn’t show up to meet me for a cigarette I’d take it so personally that I’d want to open a vein. All that kind of social armor that you build up over the years was gone, because when you have heroin you don’t need it any more. You can always count on heroin to make you feel good, but when you stop you’re just…naked. No more armor. You have the emotional continence of a toddler. Or Donald Trump. It’s horrific.”
The joke is jarring, a desperate attempt to ease the anxiety that I’m sure must be written all over my face right now. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’ve made a lot of progress since then.”
Seven months ago. It’s no time at all, really. “I know,” I say, choosing my words with care. “But you have so many things in your life that you need to put back together. Like, what about your music?”
“My music?”
“Rocco, you looked at that guitar like it was a live cobra. That’s not you. Music is your life.”
He sighs again. “Do you know you have a knack of asking really awkward questions?”
“I’ve been told, yeah. Have you played at all since you stopped using?”
He shakes his head. “I’m scared, Daniel.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. I told you, I don’t have that emotional armor yet, especially not the spiked and reinforced kind you need to deal with making any kind of art for a living.”
“So forget about that. You already made your fortune. You don’t need to make a living right now. Just focus on loving it again for its own sake, the way you did when you were seventeen and playing Bach in my parents’ garage, even though you knew it would piss my brother off.”
Rocco kisses me and runs a hand over my body. “You’re so good for me,” he says, his hand on the back of my waist.
“No. If I was truly good for you I wouldn’t be here. I’d wait until you were a year sober.”
“Yeah, well. That one’s on me. I came on to you, after all.”
“And I should have told you not to.”
His smile is wicked and rueful all at once. “But you didn’t,” he says, and trails his fingers over my hip, ruffling my pubic hair. “And here we are.” The lower registers of his voice are superbly sexy, especially now that I know the precise tone that says he wants to fuck. He stiffens before my eyes as he takes hold of me at the root and strokes me back to full hardness. It’s too good. I want him inside me again.
“We have to be sensible, Rocco,” I say, determined to make my point. “We can’t just plunge into things the way we have been.”
His lips graze mine. “I could say something terrible about ‘things’ meaning ‘your ass’ right now…”
“…yeah, well. Don’t. Not helping.”
He sighs and rolls me over onto my back. “Okay,” he says, sobering. “I know what we have is…intense–”
“–it’s an affair. You were right. Only we’re not cheating on people. We’re cheating on your recovery.”
“Yes,” he says. “I know it’s not ideal, but there are two golden rules, right?”
“Right.”
“First one is that you don’t get into a relationship in the first year…”
I wrap my legs around him. “Sort of gleefully set fire to that one…”
“…and the second is total commitment to recovery programs. You can’t say I haven’t done that. I’ve never missed a meeting. I’ve been completely abstinent from all substances, except tobacco. And I’ve almost quit that.”
I can’t argue with that. He hasn’t slipped once, even when he’s pouring wine for me. He kisses me again and this time I can’t resist. He’s so magnetic. Even as a teenager, he was the one they all looked at – the talent, the moody one, that beautiful boy staring off to the side of the photo.
“I can’t live my life in waiting for a time when I’m strong enough to cope with it, Daniel,” he says. “If I do that I feel as though I might never start living again. And you…” He starts to drop small, soft kisses all over my face – my lips, my eyelids, my forehead. I arch helplessly up to him, our cocks crushed between our bodies.
“You are life,” he whispers. “You’re a beating heart. You’re fire…and sweetness, and all the colors I thought I’d never be able to experience again.”
“Stop it,” I say, because I’m sure I’m going to cry. “You know we can’t. You know we shouldn’t.”
“Shouldn’t what?” He lowers his lips again, feeling the texture of my eyelashes against them. I think he’s determined to make me say it.
“Fall in love,” I say, in a small, squeezed voice.
“I know that.” The look in his eyes makes my heart ache. “But here we are.”
*
I wake to the sound of water moving over rocks. The river sounds a lot like the music that was flowing through my dreams. Beside me the bed is empty, but I know he was there. There’s a strand of black hair on the pillow, a translucent clutch mark where one of us must have grabbed the sheet with a lube-slick hand. When I turn my face into the pillow to breathe in the smell of him, I feel a dull but not-unpleasant ache inside me. He fucked me last night, hard on my hands and knees, then later slow and tender, with my ankles around his neck and my head thrown back and my mouth a perfect flushed cooing oohh of pleasure as he slid in and out and whispered to me.
“I love how you feel in there. So warm, so hungry for me. I want to learn every last little flutter and clench that tells me you’re about to come.”
Somehow I’m hard again. I huff the smell of him like it’s glue and push my hips against the mattress; it’s insane to want someone this much.
That’s when I hear it. I wasn’t dreaming it; the music is real, because he’s playing. Something Spanish and wistful, drifting between the notes of the river. I snatch up a robe and go into the next room. The sliding door is open and I hear the music clearly, and at once I think I’m going to cry, because I’m so happy for him.
He’s perched on the wide wooden bench seat against the wall, with the guitar in his lap and his legs apart so that I can make out the end of the long, chewed-bubblegum scar that disfigures his inner thigh. The morning sun picks out the silver in his hair, but when he looks up at me and smiles he’s the boy I fell in love with when I was just a child.
Everything is a blur and I realize my face is wet. I don’t usually cry easily, so it takes me by surprise. It’s as if I’ve simply overflowed, and the tears are warm and welcome.
“I love you,” I say, because I have to. It won’t stay inside any longer and it’s out, now, for good or ill. “I love you.”
“Daniel…” He sets aside the guitar and moves to stand, but I shake my head, motioning to him to stay put. He looks at me with the same mixture of fear and wonder as last night, when we were both trying hard not to say the words we shouldn’t, and I know he feels the same way.
I drop my robe and stand naked in the cool morning air. His thighs open a little wider and the way his robe barely covers him makes me desperate to taste him. I kneel and push his legs apart and he’s already breathing faster as he fumbles with the knot of his sash. He’s not as hard as I am, not yet, but when I lower my head to lick the length of the scar, he cries out. The smooth, hard tissue feels strange under my tongue, but I need this. He needs this. I cradle his balls in my fingers as I take him into my mouth and feel the tension in his thighs as he tries to resist the urge to fuck. It reminds me of last night and the bruises left by his sharp hip bones, and I moan around his cock.
“Come here, sweet thing,” he says, his voice ragged and his hand in my hair. “Come here and kiss me.”
My heart thunders in my ears as I scramble up over him, the bench hard on my knees either side of his lap. He’s as naked as I am now, his tattoos standing out dark against his white skin. His hands sweep up my back, pulling me down, his neck stretched up for kisses. I tease him, grazing my lips lightly over his, drawing away when he tries to go deeper.
“Tell me you love me.”
He looks up at me, his eyelashes matted and wet, like mine must be. “I love you,” he says, all ink and indigo and a heat that makes me tremble. “I love you, Daniel.”
I lower my hips and give him my mouth as reward. His hands move down to my ass, kneading my cheeks and spreading them indecently, baring me to the forest. “Let’s go to bed,” he says, but I can’t wait. I’m already grinding in impatience, my dick hard against his.
“No. I want it now. Right here.”
“Right here?” His fingers find the center and at once I want to be fucked again, because I can’t get enough of him inside me. I almost relent and lead the way back to the bedroom, where there are condoms and lube, but then my gaze finds the bottle of sunblock on the sill behind him, and I reach for it, almost dropping it in my haste to get it open. I squeeze it too hard and the stuff flies out in a white arc so comically ejaculatory that Rocco laughs for a second before I slick my hand and go to work, taking hold of both of our cocks in one hand.
“Jesus,” he whispers, slipping under my grip. “Give me some of that.”
He goes to squirt some of it on his fingers but in doing so lets go of me, so that I almost overbalance on my knees and fall off his lap. “Fuck it,” he says, and – doing it completely blind – reaches behind me and squeezes the bottle. It spurts all over my lower back and ass, dribbling down the crack. Rocco drops the bottle on the deck behind me and grabs my butt once more, only this time I’m slippery and messy and even further out of control. His fingers find my asshole again and I grind down onto them, crying out as he enters me.
“Oh, look at you,” he says. “Look how much you love it. You’re so fucking beautiful.”
“So are you.”
He bites his lip, thrusting up into my touch. He pushes deeper, fucking me with his fingers, and I feel him right where I want him, tightening my balls and ratcheting the tension even higher. “Oh God, I feel you,” he says. “I can feel it in you. You’re coming, aren’t you?”
Yes. God, yes. I clutch the sill with my other hand as I ride his touch. He goes off within less than a second of me and I watch in open-mouthed bliss as we both fountain over my clutching fingers at the same time.
Our breaths slow. We uncurl and slump and he moves deeper into me, seeking out every last shiver with his sensitive, talented fingertips. I steady myself against the sill, the bench hard under my knees now. He looks up, studying my face as he explores me the way he loves to do whenever I’m soft and slick and still panting. I see a bead of sweat on his temple. It’s fat and full and about to drop. I want to taste it, but when I lean forward I almost overbalance and crash headlong into his lap. His fingers slip out of me and end up on my ass, steadying me. I can feel the sunblock melting down the back of my thigh.
“Shower,” he says. “We’re a mess.”
We get to our feet. My knees feel weak and I don’t want to stop touching him even for a second. I’ve never been naked out of doors before and it’s exciting. Perhaps if it rains later we could go out in it and stand here just like this, kissing as the water courses over our bodies.
“Come on,” he says. He picks up our robes from the deck, but doesn’t put his on. “Before you catch cold.”
Hand in sticky hand, we go indoors, turn on the shower and step under the spray together. We wash one another, taking every possible opportunity to touch. He kisses me through the screen of hot water sluicing between us, laughing when our attempts at open-mouths mean we’re swallowing the spray.
Afterwards I sit naked on the end of the bed, looking out through the windows at the wall of green beyond. Everything feels different, now that I know that Rocco is in love with me. Everything else feels dim and gray and unimportant, and immediately I wonder if anything else in my life will ever measure up to the wonder of this time we have together, when the colors of the forest are so bright they hurt my eyes, and just the movement of air against my skin feels like a caress.
He steps out of the bathroom, drying his long black hair. His body is like a treasure map, each tattoo a clue to a story, of lonely roads in the desert and girls from Rome and brushes with death. He’s lean and hard and so very beautiful that I want to cry, because he loves me.
“Do you think we’ll ever put clothes on at some point during this vacation?” I ask.
Rocco pushes me back on the bed and crawls over me. His tongue finds mine and his hands move over my body, as covetous as my own. “Why the hell would we want to do a thing like that?” he asks, his voice a low rumble.
“I don’t know. So we’re just going to wander around naked in the forest? Like animals?”
“Sounds good to me,” he says, and looks at me with this bright, tender incredulity that I’ve seen before, but takes on a whole new meaning now that we admit it. “Jesus Christ, I love you,” he says, and we’re lost all over again, kissing and clinging and whispering it back and forth – I love you, I love you, I love you.
“Can you even believe this?” he says, laughing softly. “The things we’ve done. The love we’ve made. The things we feel.”
“I know.” I kiss the lids of his eyes. “It feels like a dream, doesn’t it?”
He cups my face in his hands, our legs tangling. “I never imagined…all this beauty. No, don’t look at me like that. You are beautiful. Your eyes, your lips. The tip of your nose.” He kisses the ski-jump tip that I hate, because of the way it makes me look like some startled small mammal sticking its nose out of a burrow. It’s been called cute, but that doesn’t make me more likely to forgive its effect on my profile. I’m thirty, which is around the age when ‘cute’ begins to look a little Baby Jane Hudson.
“I remember when you were eighteen,” he says. “In your first year at UCLA, and Matt was shitting bricks because of how pretty you were. You were all legs and eyelashes and he was so worried about the effect it might have on some people. Bad people.”
“I was fine,” I say, reluctant to talk about Matt right now. “I could handle myself.”
“You were…confusing,” says Rocco. “You still are.”
“Why? Because I still look girlish? Is that what you mean?”
“No,” he says, softening my sudden bristle with a kiss. “I want you because you’re a man, and that part is still kind of confusing. Or maybe confusing is the wrong word. Perhaps ‘unexpected’ is better.” He runs his hand over my hip. “I was always curious, but I guess I had no idea what it would be like, having a male lover. I wasn’t expecting…this.”
I shift closer, wanting him to feel how I’m hardening again. I’ve had other ‘straight’ lovers who were confused, who were happy to fuck me so long as they got to treat me like a lady, and although I know I never had to worry about that problem with Rocco, the insecurity lingers. “What’s this, exactly?” I ask.
He kisses me again and works his hand into the space between our bodies, curling his fingers around my cock. No, I never had to worry about that with him. He loves to touch and play and stroke and suck. “I don’t know,” he says. “This…this love.”
I melt and sink back on the bed. His hand delves lower, cupping my balls, a finger seeking out the soft skin behind them. I swell to full, delicious thickness.
“I always thought men were harsh, grunty things,” he says. “Who don’t talk about their feelings. I guess with a man I thought it would be intensely sexual, and it is. You are, but you’re also soft, and sweet and…and open. We talk all the time, and roll around in our feelings…” He smiles down at me. “And it’s…it’s enchanting. Fascinating. Totally absorbing.” His mouth is warm on mine, his fingers finding the root of me once more. So good. “Is it always like this?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s never been like this before for me, either.”