Page 20 of Five Hole

I am wrong about that at once.

His mouth is on mine before the door is shut. My back is against it. The wood takes our weight. The order is not a language I speak anymore. There are no words in it for the heat coming off him. For the weight of him against me. For the sound he makes into my mouth when I get my hands under his shirt and find skin. Warm. The low of his back. The way he arches into cold fingers instead of away from them. He pushes a thigh between my legs and finds how hard I already am. He makes a low pleased sound against my mouth and rolls his hips into mine until I am the one who breaks the kiss to breathe.

The order goes out of me. Not set aside. Gone, the way a language goes when you have not spoken it in years. It should frighten me. It does not frighten me. That is the second thing I lose tonight.

His hands are everywhere and none of it is careful. That is the shock of him. He does one careful thing in his life and it is read a shooter’s hips. Everything else he does like the house is already on fire. Like he decided somewhere along the way to enjoy the fire. He gets my shirt off. His mouth goes to my collarbone and I feel his teeth, light, and I make a sound I did not give him permission to. His mouth drags lower. His hand works my belt open and gets inside and wraps around my cock. Skin on skin. The first time anyone has touched me there in longer than I will say out loud. My hips buck up into his fist before I can stop them. He strokes me once, slow, root to tip, and my head goes back against the door hard enough to hurt and I do not care.

“Is this okay?” He pulls back just far enough to look at me. His eyes are dark and there’s a real question in them, under the want. He’s checking. Even like this. Even wrecked. Some part of him is reading my face the way he reads everything. “Cas? Do you want this? Tell me yes. I need the word.”

“Yes.” It comes out rough. It comes out true, all the way down. No lie anywhere in it. Which is new for my mouth. My whole life is careful answers and this one is not careful at all. “Yes. Don’t stop.”

He does not stop.

We get to the bed. We lose the rest of it. Jeans, everything, kicked off and gone. The cold room is not cold anymore. It is his heat and mine trading back and forth until I can’t tell whose is whose. His weight comes down the whole length of me, bare the whole way, his cock hot and hard against mine, his mouth working at my throat. Then his hand wraps around us both. Sure. Unhurried now, where a second ago there was no patience in him at all. He strokes us together in his fist. Slow. The drag of him against me pulls a noise out of somewhere I keep locked. He swallows it. He says my name against my skin. The first one. The real one. Over and over. Low. Like he is learning it. Like it is a word in a language he means to be fluent in.

He kisses down my chest. My stomach. Lower. He isn’t shaking anymore. I feel the whole of his attention narrow to me. To this. The way it narrows in the net to a puck that has not been shot yet. He wraps his hand around the base of me. He looks up once. Dark eyes. That maddening near-grin. Then he takes me into his mouth.

The sound I make is not a sound I have made before. It is torn out of a place I have kept shut my whole life. He takes me deep and works me slow. His tongue flat against the underside of me. His hand following his mouth, wet and tight. He is greedy about it. God help me, he is greedy. He finds the places that undo me and he stays there. He pulls off to drag his tongue over the head of me and takes me down again. I lose the thread of my own thoughts. Which does not happen. Which never happens. My head is a radio that will not turn off, and he reaches in and turns it off with his mouth. I say his name. I say it wrecked. I reach for something to hold and there is nothing to hold. There is just him. The wet heat of his mouth. The storm he is making of me. I would be embarrassed by the noises. Embarrassed, if he did not make a low pleased sound around me every time he pulls one out of me. The hum of it going straight up my spine. Like each one is a save he wanted.

I put my hands in his hair. I let myself have the wanting.

I have never done that. Not once, in my whole ordered life. The whole of me was built to keep me from it. Brick on brick, laid down since I was a boy. It comes down now. It comes all the way down, and I let it. What is under it is not the collapse I always feared was down there. Not the fall with no bottom. What is under it is him. His weight. His mouth on me, hot and wet and merciless. His hand working what his mouth cannot reach. The catch in his own breath when I move under it. When I give him what he pulls for. He feels what it does to me and he does it again. Again, harder. Learning me the way he learns everything, except he isn’t saving it for later. He is using it. Right now. To take me apart on purpose.

I stop watching him back. That is how I know I am gone. Past the order. Past the shelf and the sequence. Past every wall I ever set between myself and this. Saying yes and his name and yes. Until it breaks over me. Like nothing in my ordered life has ever once been allowed to break. I come in his mouth. He takes all of it. He works me through it with his tongue gone soft against me until I am wrung empty and shaking, my name still on his breath. I come apart under his hands. With no ritual anywhere in the room to catch me.

He comes back up my body. His mouth finds mine and I taste myself on him. He is hard against my hip and slick at the tip, wound tight from working me. I get my hand around his cock and he goes quiet. All his noise gone at once. His forehead dropped to my shoulder. I stroke him the way he taught me in the dark without ever saying a word about it. Slow to start. Then with everything I have. His hips push into my fist. His breath breaks against my neck. I feel him let go. He spills hot over my knuckles and I hold him through it the way he held me. Neither of us says a word. Because there are no words for it. No words that are not too big to fit in the room.

For a while after, we do not move. His breath is hot against my neck, coming down slow. My hand is in his damp hair. I do not reach for the blanket, because reaching would mean moving, and moving would mean this is a thing that ends. I have spent my whole life certain that some part of me stays awake at the back of every room I am ever in. It is not awake now. It went under somewhere I cannot mark and it has not come back up.

Afterward he does not leave. That is its own kind of danger, the worst one yet. He stays. A heavy warm line down my side. His heart still going hard under my hand. Slowing.

“You’re not going to say anything,” he says into my shoulder. It is not a question and he is not sore about it. “That’s fine. I’ll do both parts. Watch. Emile, that was. And I go, yeah, it was. And then you say nothing at all, and I say I know, and the two of us lie here feeling deeply understood.”

“Emile.”

“Yeah.”

“Be quiet a minute.”

He is quiet for a minute. For him that is closer to an athletic feat than anything he has done on the ice this year. Then he says, “Was that a minute?” and I do not answer him, and he laughs low against my collarbone and stops asking.

He traces something on my chest with one finger. No pattern in it. No order. Just touch for the sake of touch. Which is a thing I did not know a hand could do to me. I lie there in the wreck of every rule I own. And I feel, for one stolen stretch, something. Something I have no word for that is not a lie. I do not reach for a word. Because reaching would end it.

* * *

He falls asleep. I do not.

When his breathing goes even. When it drops into the long slow tide of it. I get up. Careful. I lift his arm off me a knuckle at a time and set it down on the warm place I leave behind. I stand in my own room in the dark.

The room is wrong.

The books are still upright. The lamp is still squared to the corner of the desk. Nothing has moved. Not one object in the room is out of its place. And the room is wrong. Because there is a boy in my bed. Because the day is not set down in its order. It is scattered across the floor with our clothes. His jeans over my chair. My shirt somewhere by the door. I cannot pick any of it up without waking him. So I stand there in the dark. I find that I do not want to pick it up.

There it is. The frightening part. Not that the order is broken. Orders break. Sticks drop two rooms over and I go back to the top and start clean. It is that I do not want to fix it. The not-wanting is the most frightening thing that has happened to me. Since the winter the dark got into the house and took my sleep and did not give it back for years.

I understand, standing there. I have handed a variable the one thing. The one thing I swore no living person would ever hold.

Here is the thing I did not know until tonight. The order was never really about pucks. Pucks are the part I let people see. Pucks are the acceptable version. The one you can put on a shelf and call discipline. The order was always about this. About building a house you can keep the dark out of. A sequence you can run when the whole world will not hold still. I built it so I would never need a person. Because a person is the single thing on this earth. The one thing you cannot square on a shelf. The one variable that gets a vote. The one that can leave.