Page 51 of The Lipstick Flip

And then it was over, and I was slumping forward, my head on his shoulder, my chest rising and falling with my ragged breaths. The bleachiness of his load mixed with the smell of my sweat. My skin was stuck to his skin. All the walls were down, and in the whole universe, there was only the two of us, and I wanted to cry.

Then Noah scruffed my buzzed hair, and he made a pleased sound, and I remembered who he was and who I was and everything else. I blinked a few times against his shoulder. I peeled myself away and eased him down.

16

Noah went into the bathroom first, to clean up. After a while, the shower ran. When he came back, he turned on one of the lamps. His skin was pink from the warm water, and his blond hair was dark. He was naked, the pink tip of his dick visible as he walked in front of the light. The tension I’d noticed in his body earlier was gone, and he moved around the room with a loose-limbed ease that I hadn’t seen from him in a long time. How was that for a stress cure? The doctor prescribes long-dicking at regular intervals.

“Are you okay?” he asked as he came over to the bed. He trailed his fingers up my shin and smiled.

“Am I okay? I’m fucking fantastic. How are you?”

He tilted his head to the side, and the grin widened.

I put my arms behind my head. “That good, huh?”

He slapped my foot, laughed, and said, “Go shower.”

So, I did. And when I was done, Noah was curled up in bed, right where I’d been lying. That was a Noah thing; he was like a dog or a cat, always ready to steal the spot you’d been in. He said he liked that the sheets were warm, and how could you argue with that?

Was I supposed to stay? Was I supposed to go? So much for all those boundaries—we’d fucked our way right through them. Noah had always liked cuddling after sex. He liked foreplay, too, not that you could tell from tonight. But he’d played it so cool after the last time we’d gotten off together, and maybe that meant this was all supposed to be casual and low-key and whatever else impossible-to-understand twinks called this kind of thing.

As usual, Noah was about a light-year ahead of me. Still curled up around my pillow, he laughed at whatever he saw on my face and said, “Your Christmas PJs are on the chair.”

Sure as hell, there they were: green plaid bottoms, a red top.

“Or,” Noah said, and he gave a little stretch that made his bare back curve, and the sheet slid down skin as smooth as silk, and the top of his ass was visible again. “You could put them on in the morning.”

The thing about Noah is that he’s always been smart.

I climbed into bed. It took us a few minutes to straighten out the sheet and the blanket and for Noah to decide if he wanted to be under my arm or across my chest or curled up with his ass against my dick.

“How much sleep do you think we’re going to get like that?” I asked.

Noah laughed, but he did a little wiggle with his butt that made me think the answer was probably not much. He pulled my arm across his chest; his back was pressed against me. He kissed my knuckles. “It’s time to sleep,” he whispered. “Be good, or Santa won’t bring you anything nice.”

I wasn’t sure about that. But I bit him on the shoulder, just in case.

More laughing. A little squealing. Noah turning around in my arms and trying to wrestle me out of the bed, and somehow that turned into him tucked up against me again, and me kissing that spot on his shoulder. His skin was flawless except for the faint mark of my teeth.

He must have meant to turn the lamp off. Or I would have done it myself if I hadn’t been so tired. I caught myself drifting, though, and in one of the last moments before I was gone, I heard his breathing, and knew he’d fallen asleep first, and pulled the blanket over him so he wouldn’t get cold.

I came home to the screen door closed, but the front door open, and my first thought was that Mom had passed out again, because it was too cold to have the doors like that. And then I was inside, in the living room; I never remembered going through the door, never remembered walking. I remember, though, that I left it open behind me. And that it was mid-afternoon. And it had snowed, and the snow hung in the trees like angel wings.

The TV was on Jerry Springer, and the banner at the bottom said CAUGHT IN BED WITH ANOTHER MAN. The volume was up the way it was when Mom was trying to piss off Mrs. Morgan next door. It was so loud that the first thud, from farther back in the trailer, didn’t really register. The coffee table was out of place. The mail and Us Weekly and the empty packs of cigarettes had slid to one edge. A forty of Old English lay on the floor, empty now, the carpet dark around it, and the air smelled like malt liquor. Like battery cleaner. The lamp was on the floor, but it didn’t matter because there was so much sunlight coming in. It was a bright day. The snow was like a mirror bouncing all that light into the trailer.

The Playgirl was near the hall. Cover up. Spread open. It made me think of wings again. The guy on the cover was lying on his stomach, his head propped on one hand. He had dark hair cut like guys with office jobs, and he was naked. His tan body stretched toward the top of the cover. Smooth skin. Great ass. The teaser or whatever you were supposed to call it on the front said, Seven Ways to Make Him Scream. Which was funny, because nobody needed an article for that. Somebody was always screaming.

Somebody was screaming.

Buzzing yellow light. Something tangled around me. Sweat.

For another moment, the dream held on. And then the jigsaw shapes made sense again: The lamp. The sheet. Noah’s room. Or his room at the Airbnb. Or whatever I was supposed to call this fucking room—and something almost like a laugh tried to bubble up inside me. My chest rose and fell as I sucked in air.

Next to me, Noah was still asleep—he’d done what he always did when we slept together, which was move around until he was sleeping diagonally across the mattress, head buried under the pillows like he was a kid who didn’t want to wake up.

It was a dream. It was a long time ago. It was a dream.

I had to get up. The sheet was tangled around me, and I couldn’t find the edge of it, and then it was somehow wrapped under one leg and over the other, and the longer I pulled on it and tried to get free, the more whatever self-control I had frayed until my breathing came in ragged bursts, and my eyes were hot, and I could hear myself making these pathetic noises.