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“Are you okay?” he asked.
The mac and cheese with beans was actually pretty good.
“Dane.” He slid his legs over mine, a welcome weight anchoring me in the present. “You look awful. Talk to me!”
“It’s not your problem,” I said, rubbing a soothing hand along his leg.
“So, what, it’s okay for me to tell you my stuff because you think I can’t handle it myself, but you play all noble and I don’t want to burden you and I can take it? That makes me feel pretty shitty, you know.”
His jaw was set and his brows drawn together in anger, but his eyes were hurt.
I shook my head and squeezed my eyes shut. “Sorry.”
I could listen to other people spill their intimate truths all day long, but voicing any of my own made me nauseated. I shoved the bowl onto the table. The words were stuck in my throat and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t dislodge them. Or maybe that was the mac and cheese.
“Keep your eyes closed, okay?”
Felix’s voice was soft, and he brushed my eyelids with his fingertips.
“Don’t think about it. Just tell me the first thing that comes to mind. Now,” he added when I said nothing.
“I— How do you know if you’re a good enough person?”
My voice was strangled. I heard Felix’s intake of breath and started to open my eyes, but he put a gentle hand over them.
“Good enough…for what?”
“Don’t know.”
“Try.”
“Good enough to pay back the world. Good enough to stop trying so hard. Good enough for…” I cleared my throat and swallowed hard. “Fuck, I don’t know.”
Felix took my hands in his, thumbs running over my knuckles. He leaned in and pressed a soft kiss to my cheek. It made my chest ache.
“I wanna tell you something, but I don’t want you to get upset,” he said.
I opened my eyes. “No promises.”
“Okay, well, just try and really listen, then.”
“Okay,” I breathed, tucking waves of hair that had escaped his ponytail behind his ear.
“I know I’m not an expert on addiction, or a therapist, or a philosopher. But paying back the world isn’t possible. The world is made up of people and ideas and desires and roaches and, like, hunks of plastic, and puppies. It’s not a…thing that keeps score. If you’re looking for a sign from the world when it’s had enough of you being good, you’re never going to get it.”
“I’m not—”
He clapped a hand over my mouth.
“What you feel? That’s guilt, baby. And guilt’s fucking useless. The people you’ve helped? They don’t care why you’re helping. If you’re doing it to feel good about yourself, or out of empathy, or charity, or whatever. It still helps. Feeling guilty only hurts you. And, honestly?”
He cupped my cheek.
“Me, now. Because your schedule, your routine, all the things that you do to avoid, like, having any feelings, they don’t let you have feelings with me either. Which sucks for me. Because I want you to have feelings. I want it so much.”
“I have feelings,” I choked out.
“Yeah?”
I nodded.
“Okay.” He kissed the corner of my mouth.
“People need me,” I said.
“You know helping the entire world has lots of other names, like hero complex and martyr. Super-strict rituals have other words too: compulsions. Addictions.”
I closed my eyes again.
Felix threw his leg over my lap and came to his knees on the couch, hands on my shoulders, facing me.
“I’m not saying stop helping people.”
He kissed along my jaw, and I shivered at the brush of his smooth lips.
“I’m just saying you don’t have to help everyone. Just ’cuz you’re, like, made of muscle and determination, it doesn’t mean you have to actually hold the whole world on your shoulders.” He scrunched up his nose. “What’s that dude’s name?”
“Atlas,” I murmured against his hair.
“Yeah. Well, he was clearly a martyr because that’s too much for any one person.”
“He didn’t choose it. He was condemned to hold up the skies by Zeus.”
“Well, there you go. Even the guy who everyone thinks of as holding everything on his shoulders didn’t choose to do it. So you definitely shouldn’t.” He squeezed my shoulders.
His mythology needed work.
“But what if—” I caught Felix’s hands and squeezed them. “What if that’s all I have to give?” My heart pounded sickly in my gut.
His expression went impossibly soft.
“It’s not, baby. I know it’s not.”
“How?”
“Because you give so much to me.”
I shook my head. Not enough. Never as much as I wanted.
“Let me?”
“What?” he purred at my neck. “What do you need?”
“Need to make you feel good. I want…want you to use me. Use me however you want to make yourself come.”
My cock swelled tight and hard just saying the words.
Felix tipped my chin up and his pupils were blown wide. He spoke so close that I could feel it on my lips.
“Yeah? You want me to tell you what to do? Take whatever I want?”
