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“Yeah. It’s under control. I’ve been thinking about you all day.”
I cupped his face, marvelling that I dared, and that it was easy. The roughness of his jaw prickled under my thumbs. “D-do you want tea? Or to talk? Or to…kiss me?”
“That one.”
And he did.
He kissed me and kissed me and kissed me all the way down the hall. I only noticed we were in the dining room when my hips nudged the table, and then he was lifting me onto it, and I was twining myself around him, and it was perfect. All this heat and wanting.61
“God, Edwin.” His voice was rough again, like when we had stood by the river, and it thrilled me that I could do this to him, and he would share it with me. “Touch me.”
I reached out and undid the buttons of his shirt, one by one, my fingers as unsteady as my breath. In the flickering light, he was marble and flames, shadows and secrets, and I ached with need for him. Except now my body hesitated, stumbling on the threshold of itself, like my words, all my words, stuck unspoken on my lips.
I looked up at him, foolish and pleading and lost. “I… H-how?”
He caught my wrists and brought my hands to his mouth, kissing the tips of my fingers, before he pressed my palms gently to his chest. Everything I’d exposed. My fingers brushed his collarbones, and I stroked my way across the ridge of them to the tender dip between. I was tentative, at first, but then he threw back his head and groaned, and suddenly I was greedy. For him, for his skin, and for all his sounds.62
I explored him, inch by inch, moment by moment, freckle by freckle. The hard muscles of his upper arms. The curling, gold-tipped hair that covered his chest. The strong, smooth planes of his back. And he gasped for me, and shuddered sometimes, and muttered my name, and yes, and there, and good, and god, and yes, and yes again. When I leaned in to lick the taste of sweat fromhis throat, he tore himself away, and stared at me, his lips wet and slightly parted, and his eyes shiny dark with lust.
And I stared back. “I want…” I began, dreading thewand so surprised by its surrender I almost forgot what I was saying. “I want you s-so much.”
He smiled, and it was a dazed, slightly silly smile, but I loved it. “Believe me, you’ve got me.”
That was all it took to bring him back into my arms. His body pressed mine flat to the table, and it was a little bit uncomfortable, but in the best possible way. He took me in a deep, hard kiss, and I arched under him, moaning softly, unashamed and eager.
It was at once difficult and far too easy to imagine the picture I must have made, kiss-swollen and aroused, and sprawled on my dining room table. And, for a moment, all I felt was a terrible sadness that this ridiculous, wanton, about-to-be-ravished person was someone Marius had half-glimpsed yet never truly believed was there. But it passed swiftly, and what remained was only gladness, gratitude, and excitement, because I was here now.
And I could be this with Adam.
Beneath his body, touched by his hands and his lips and his breath, I found words and set them free. They were wild words, rough words, raw and full of passion, the sort of words I’d never imagined I’d have the courage to say.
But with Adam I wanted to say them.
And I knew he heard them, and I wasn’t afraid.
CHASING THE LIGHT
To the feral & the restless
And you, you will come too, young brother; for the days pass, and never return, and the South still waits for you. Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! ’Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new! […] You can easily overtake me on the road, for you are young, and I am aging and go softly. I will linger, and look back; and at last I will surely see you coming, eager and light-hearted, with all the South in your face!
1Kenneth Grahame,The Wind in the Willows
1
I didn’t want to think of myself as someone who was late for Wigilia, but there were a lot of things I didn’t want to think of myself as and had become anyway. In fact, my conscience barely gave a squeak as I tossed “late to Wigilia” onto the pile.2
By the time I arrived, everyone was already sharing oplatki. Guess that made me the niespodziewany goscof my own family.
“Marius?” Mum was the first to notice me. “We thought you weren’t coming.”
“Clearly.”
Unfortunately, Mum had been building up an immunity to sarcasm for years. Probably she took a little bit every day along with some iocane powder. She came over to hug me, which I didn’t pull away from in the hope that being someone who let his mum hug him made up for being someone who was late for Christmas Eve. “Spelnienia marzen,” she told me, waving her wafer at me until I broke off a corner.
All I managed in return was a half-hearted “WesolychSwiat,” having largely embraced the traditional monolingualism of theBritish. And I was just trying to deal with having all the moisture sucked out of my mouth by a piece of unleavened bread when I found myself staring directly at my ex-boyfriend.
Andhisboyfriend. Some great ginger lout wearing, without irony, a flannel shirt.
