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“Fuck, Matty,” he groaned. “You feel so perfect.”
He pulled out and maneuvered me so I was bent over the side of the bed. Then he pushed back inside and grabbed my hips, and I could feel every inch of him sliding inside me. I’d stopped him before he could add more lube, so there was more friction than usual, and if I clenched around him he felt impossibly deep. I put one knee up on the bed, and Rhys pressed even deeper.
“More, please,” I moaned.
“You’re mine, baby,” Rhys said, and now we were moving hard and fast and it was a blur of pleasure and need and Rhys. He started to groan deeply and I knew he was close. He pushed me harder into the bed and closed his hand around my cock, his thrusts sliding my swollen dick against the bed and through his hand.
I cried out as my orgasm sparked, and then I couldn’t make a sound as it ripped through me. I was coming and coming and shaking with the pleasure of it, clutching at the sheets and clenching every muscle. Then Rhys froze, groaned, and unloaded deep inside me.
“Ugh, fuck,” he moaned, giving one more thrust. Splayed out with one foot on the floor and one on the bed, I shivered as every nerve ending lit up.
He pulled out slowly, kissing my shoulders, and crawled up onto the bed with me.
“You know you own me too, Matty. You know that, right? You know I’m yours. So fucking yours.”
Chapter 7
I turned downtown instead of up when I left work and walked for miles.
It had felt like I was floating half-asleep for the few days after Rhys left again, and walking felt better than staying still.
I was looking for Sid.
Grin had texted around, but half the people he tried didn’t answer and no one who did knew where she’d gone after she left the stationery store. I walked the neighborhood, looking for . . . I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly.
Around seven, my phone buzzed, and I saw that it was Rhys’s mom calling me. She’d called the day before too, and again, I let it go to voicemail. I couldn’t stand disappointing her with how thoroughly I’d ruined her recipe.
I headed uptown again, looping all the way back through Harlem and past Mariposa. Somewhere along the line, I’d cut west, and now the streets were differently familiar. Washington Heights. I hadn’t been around my old neighborhood since the year after I’d left St. Jerome’s. Then, I’d come back almost like I was hypnotized, to walk the streets of my youth. For weeks I’d walked the neighborhood, remembering.
Then I’d made myself forget again. I hadn’t been back since.
Because this isn’t your life anymore. You’re not the little boy who lived here, not the boy who got ditched, not the boy, not the boy, not the boy. You’re a man now.
Now, I turned a corner and stopped dead in my tracks. I’d circled closer than I’d realized. It was my street. Though it was long past dark, I could almost see the other kids playing ball in the street and the laundry drying on lines in the sun, smell the grilled meat, spice, and car exhaust, hear the shouts and the music spilling from open windows.
And there it was. The front stoop I’d sat on a thousand times. As my cousins ran in and out past me. As the neighborhood kids played around me. The front stoop I’d sat on, head turned in the direction of the 181st Street station, waiting. The direction my mom always came from when she came back.
Only one day she didn’t.
The buzz of a text made me jump. Grin: Any luck?
Nah, I replied. After a minute, I wrote. Im in wash heights.
Grin called me immediately but I didn’t answer. I couldn’t talk to anyone. When I didn’t answer, he texted instead. U ok?
I didn’t write back. He would know I wasn’t.
* * *
—
Friday night I couldn’t sleep at all, even though I’d walked in the city for hours before coming home. I pulled on one of Rhys’s sweatshirts and wandered down into the living room to get a book. I didn’t want to read one of mine, though. I wanted something new. Something of Rhys’s.
On the bottom shelf was a hardcover I’d never opened. It was an anthology of illustrated short stories and there was a greeting card a third of the way through like a bookmark. The card had a full moon on the front and inside it said, I’d like you better with a pumpkin for a head! Congrats, bro. <3 It was from Morgan. The bookmarked story was “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” She must’ve given it to him when he’d bought the house.
I’d never actually read it, even though you couldn’t avoid knowing of the story, living in Sleepy Hollow. Now I flipped the book open, leaned back against the couch, and began to read. There was an illustration of the headless horseman, black cape billowing, horse’s eyes red, sky overhead swirling threateningly. Tree branches cut across the stormy sky and woods lurked darkly in the background.
