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He slid inside Zachary and it felt like coming home. The slow parting of flesh was a divine welcome and Bram didn’t want to ever leave.
Zachary scrabbled at the sheets and gasped, arching his back.
“Okay, baby?”
Zachary nodded and Bram gathered him close and kissed the nape of his neck, waiting. When Zachary relaxed, Bram began to move. Zachary felt like heaven around him and his every nerve ending sizzled.
“I missed this,” Zachary said into the pillow. Then, turning to look back at Bram, “I missed you.”
“I missed you too.”
Bram couldn’t get close enough to Zachary. He wrapped him up in his arms and thrust faster, searching for the angle that would make Zachary scream.
When he found it, Zachary went wild in his arms and he let the full weight of pleasure crash down around him.
Zachary came with a broken cry and it snapped Bram’s control. Pleasure spilled from him, cresting in an orgasm that roared through him like a tidal wave. He groaned into Zachary’s neck, wanting it to last forever.
When they were lying together, sleepy and touch drunk, Zachary murmured, “Does your family hate me now?”
“What? No. Of course not. Why?”
“You tell them everything. I figured you told them how mad at me you were.”
Bram winced. “Well. Yeah, I did. But being mad at someone doesn’t mean hating them.”
“I know,” Zachary said, but the relief Bram could see in his face said otherwise.
“They don’t hate you,” Bram said, and kissed him. They fell asleep wrapped in each other’s arms.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Zachary
The week since they’d reconciled had been one of the best weeks of Zachary’s life.
Every evening, they’d worked on their decorations, and today they’d taken a long ride on Bram’s motorcycle. As they looped back toward home, Bram said, “I want to show you something magical.”
They walked into the woods and Bram told him to close his eyes and take his hand. After a few minutes (and one near miss with a low-hanging branch), Bram stilled him with hands on his shoulders and said, “Okay, open them.”
They were in a clearing in the woods in which several trees and numerous plants seemed to glow.
Zachary started to laugh.
“Right?!” Bram said, grinning. “How are they glowing? I don’t know but it’s magical as hell!”
Zachary shook his head.
“Wes.”
“Hmm?”
“Wes planted these. My friend who works with bioluminescence.”
Bram narrowed his eyes. “For real?”
Zachary realized in all the diagrams he’d drawn to show Bram the pieces they needed to build for the ghost ship, he had only described the eerie lighting, not said it would be coming from bioluminescent algae. Not wanting this to be another instance of assuming Bram knew things he hadn’t told him, he decided to just show him.
Zachary directed Bram to Wes’s house and texted they were on their way.
“One sec,” he said as they dismounted. “How do you feel about spiders and snakes.” He didn’t want Bram to be scared.
“Good,” Bram said.
“Okay.” Zachary took his hand and led him up the stairs.
Wes opened the door and ran a hand over his shorn hair.
“Hey, guys. I hear you found my secret place,” he said to Bram.
“It’s amazing. When I wandered in there I seriously thought I was hallucinating. Then I thought maybe magic was real.”
Something in Bram’s voice gave Zachary the sense he was a bit sad to realize magic was not real.
“Cool. You wanna see some more?”
“Absolutely,” Bram said.
Wes hesitated for a moment and Zachary said, “I already asked him. He’s not scared.”
Wes looked relieved and gestured them inside.
Though they’d been friends for years, Zachary had only been inside Wes’ house a handful of times and each time there was something new going on.
“Is that a biogas generator?!” Bram exclaimed, walking up to it.
“Yeah. You know about them?”
“Oh yeah. My mom made one once to try and run our house with biogas and solar power only. It was amazing, until—”
“It exploded?” Wes guessed.
“Big-time. Unfortunately right when my brother, who was going through a phase where he was super embarrassed that we lived off the grid, brought this girl he really liked home. He was trying so hard to make her think we were a normal family, and then this bag of rotting food goo exploded all over her.”
Wes winced, though it was unclear if it was for the girl or the biogas generator.
“God, my parents would love to hear about bioluminescent plants. Would you mind if I told them about it?”
“No, that’s great. I’m trying to create sustainable alternatives to electric light, so it would be useful to talk with people who’ve transitioned into...”
And that was the point at which Zachary tuned out and went in search of Bettie, the tarantula, for company.
Bram and Wes were fast friends, discussing everything from sustainability to the benefits and detriments of daylight savings time, and Wes gave him a tour of his basement, where all his experiments in bioluminescence took place. Zachary found Bettie and Bram took a selfie with her sitting on his head that he gleefully sent to his family, along with the promise that he had some very exciting things to tell them about bioluminescence.
