Page 38 of Catching Sparkles

“Rhys?” She asked, probably because I was taking way too long to answer. “Did I lose you?”

“No. Uh, yeah. I’ll be home soon.” Fuck. Fuck. Damn it.

“Okay! See you soon, honey. Bye, Kendall!”

“Bye, Mom.”

I listened to the little blip noise signaling a finished call before dropping my phone into my lap and dragging my palms over my face with a frustrated groan.

“Sorry. I didn’t know what to say.”

“It’s okay,” he said. Even without looking at him, I could tell he was trying not to laugh. So he was taking this whole cockblocked thing more gracefully than I was. Not too surprising. He was the kind of person to take disappointments gracefully. Not like me. “You could have just said we’d be home in an hour. She wasn’t exactly grilling you.”

I didn’t want to be home in an hour. I didn’t want to rush through everything, blow my load, pull up my pants and pile back into the car to go home so we didn’t look suspicious. I wanted to take my time, and let him talk me through it. I wanted to fuck him, and then after we’d caught our breath and wallowed in each other long enough to recharge, fuck him again.

I wanted the serenity I’d briefly felt in his silly pink palace of an apartment when I’d stayed over before. But this time I didn’t want to sneak out like a guilty kid who’d missed curfew. I wanted to bask in it. I wanted to see his bedroom, roll around in his sheets, and talk about the things that had happened in the decade we hadn’t known each other for.

I wanted intimacy with him.

Fuck. That was even worse. So much worse. Immeasurably worse. What the fuck kind of flag was I supposed to use for that?

“… Yeah,” I agreed. I didn’t want him knowing any of that yet. I needed to understand how I felt about it before I could even think about opening up to that degree. “I could have just said that. I kind of panicked. Sorry.”

“Rhys.” Why did my name always sound so cute and endearing coming out of his mouth? “It’s really okay. You don’t have to apologize. It’s just bad timing.”

“Yeah, so I’m kind of cursed, if you haven’t noticed. Unfortunately you’re just going to kind of be along for the ride while you’re hanging out with me, so get used to it.”

He shook his head a little, but I could see the corner of his mouth was perked up a little.

“You’re not cursed.”

“No, I am. Really. I’ve been cursed since I left for college.”

I didn’t need to say it out loud. I’d fucked up my knee and ruined the career I’d worked so hard for and dreamed about since I was a kid. I’d gotten married and sucked at that, too. I hadn’t even been able to keep a corporate middle management job, something that some of the biggest morons on the planet could do.

He didn’t say anything for a while, leaving me in the quiet with only his soft music and the ambient sounds of the road. Dark tendrils of stress crept down from my brain to poke and sting at my body until he spoke again.

“I don’t think you’re cursed, Rhys. But even if you were, it would be worth it. We can just… Be cursed together. It’s fine.”

I snorted at the sweet and casual tone and they way it juxtaposed with the words and sentiment, but his statement had those prickly little needles lifting away. Pulling the tightness from my chest so I could breathe again. And suddenly the need to be pressed up against him again, skin to skin, mouth to mouth, was an urgent, nearly painful ache.

“Turn left here, Sparkles,” I directed him, as we pulled up to a stop sign near the neighborhood my parents lived in. He gave me a curious look before doing as I said, even though he was clearly aware that left wouldn’t lead to my house or his apartment.

“Go right,” I told him at the next turn, when he did. We ended up on an empty, quiet back road lined with woods on either side. “Slow down a little,” I said, squinting a bit as I scrutinized the area. It had to be around here somewhere… “There,” I said, as I finally located the tiny, nondescript dirt path that looked like it led to nowhere. “Turn in there.”

“This isn’t somebody’s driveway, is it?” He wondered, but still carefully maneuvered the car onto it.

“Nah,” I said. “There’s this little hangout spot we used to come to back when we were in school. On skip days, or at night when we didn’t really have anywhere to party. Take this little curve here.”

“Maybe you used to come here on skip days,” Kendall mused, giving me a wry look as his tires slowly crunched over the dirt and gravel. “I was never invited to anything like that.”

“Where did you hang out on skip days?” I asked.

“Your house.”

“Right.”

The quaint little spot, a circular gap in the woods that centered around a fire pit had grown over a bit. It wasn’t littered with beer bottles and fast food wrappers as it had once been, but the ivy vines beginning to curl around the legs of the battered lawn chairs, along with the thick layer of dirt on everything suggested no one had been here in a good long while.