“Touch you,” I mumble into his mouth.
He nods against our kiss, dropping his hand from my face only long enough to shove down those ridiculous swim trunks and free his cock. I hold him, touch him as he touches me, as we kiss, slow and deep.
I’m washed in pleasure. God, the pleasure, the joy of not feeling only pain, radiating out to my fingertips, sparking across my skin.
Oliver pants into my mouth, pumping himself into my hand, but then he pulls away abruptly, starts kissing his way down my chest. “I want to taste you,” he says roughly.
My hand sinks into his hair. “Fuck, yes.”
His mouth wraps around me, makes my hips lurch, agony shear through my back. I force my body to grow still, to let myself simply receive what he’s giving me, pleasure blunting the sharpest edges of my pain. His mouth, wet and hot, his tongue gliding along the tip. He’s slow and teasing, his touch wandering my body as he takes me into his throat and groans.
I watch his shoulders roll, his hips shift.
“Touch yourself, Oliver.”
Air rushes out of him. He drops his hand.
I brush his hair back off his face, slide my fingers through the wet, silky locks, guiding him, praising him. “That’s it. That’s perfect. So, so good.”
Need pounds through me, coiling tighter, hotter, an intensifying ache that demands I move, thrust, fuck. “Close,” I whisper.
He smiles, pops off long enough to look at me, his hand sliding slow and firm, fisted around my cock as he thumbs the slit and makes me gasp. “You think I don’t know?”
“Get over here.” I tug him by the shoulder, kissing him hard, desperate.
I love you. I kiss those words, say them with my hands as I touch him. I’m too taken with pleasure, heat, euphoria, to panic as the word pounds in my head in time with my heart:
Love. Love. Love.
I’m too focused on the sweet warmth of his mouth, the little sounds he makes, pants and pleas, as we kiss.
I slide to the edge of the chair, and Oliver leans in. Our bodies meet, chests, stomachs, hips. Our hands find each other, the water pouring overhead easing our way.
“Yeah,” I whisper as he fists me in one hand, sinks his other into my hair. Our kisses are our mouths making love, deep and slow.
“Gav,” he groans. “God. I lo—”
I kiss the word away. More terrified to hear it from his lips than from mine. While there is no one more worthy of being loved than Oliver, do I deserve his love, his loyalty? Do I deserve his future, the best years of his life meant to be faced head-on, instead spent glancing over his shoulder for me?
I feel him thicken in my hand as his breathing grows jagged. He buries his face in the crook of my neck, bites me, chases it with a deep, hot kiss that makes my hips lurch, makes me come, hard and long, frantic in his hand as he works me, the water and thick ropes of release, wetting his hand as he pumps me hard. I slide my hand lower, rub him behind his balls, which are tight and heavy.
“Oh God,” he yells, crushing his mouth to mine. “I have to—”
“Come for me. That’s it.”
He shouts hoarsely into our kiss, hips punching as he spills into my hand again and again. I clutch him to me, crushed against my chest, the pain in my back a shadow to the bliss of holding him. Lazily, he wraps his arms around me, our kisses turning slow, gentle, between gasps of air.
Nothing but the steady pound of water, our rough, fast breaths. I drift my fingers through his hair, kiss his forehead.
Oliver sighs, content, nuzzling my neck, pressing a kiss to the base of my throat.
Slowly, he pulls away. His hands slide gently along my thighs.
I smooth back his hair, feeling a ridiculous smile lighting up my face. Oliver leans in, gives me another savoring kiss. He frowns and bites his lip, examining me.
“What is it?” I ask.
A guilty smile lifts his mouth. His thumb swipes down my neck. “I gave you a hickey.”
I roll my eyes. “I don’t fucking care.”
“Well, good, ’cause I can’t do anything about that.” Our eyes meet and his smile softens, shifts, tender and vulnerable. So fucking beautiful. “What I can do something about”—he reaches for the razor, squirts shaving cream into his hand, his eyes meeting mine, familiar and sparkling, a new precious closeness as he kisses me once more—“is that spot I missed.”
The smell of breakfast fare greets me when I finally emerge from my room, the pop and snap of food cooking over high heat.
I catch my reflection in the glass of a photograph framed in the hallway. Dark circles. Lines of pain bracketing my mouth, lining my brow.
I stare down at my aching legs, strained muscles, compromised, swollen joints, swallowing thickly. Dr. Chen’s debrief in the hospital said it all. There’s no chance I can make a meaningful comeback after this. At my age, the prognosis with my herniated discs and the likelihood that I’ll need surgery, with my injury history, it’s over.
I’m done.
And he’s only just beginning.
Can I endure it? Can I be happy for him? Celebrate his triumphs without constantly mourning my own? Will I feel lost? Defeated? Will I resent him?
Until I know that, what business do I have asking Oliver for more? What do I risk saddling him with—a sore, sour fucker with a handful of grandpas for friends who have better social lives than me, an ornery cat who pisses in my shoes, and, barring some unforeseen early death, another forty-some years of me twiddling my fucking thumbs?
I watch him, standing in my kitchen, tall, shoulders back, whistling quietly to himself as he slides bacon and eggs onto a platter which already holds a massive stack of thin pancakes that smell like heaven.
“Gotta tell you, Hayes,” he says, sliding one last over-easy egg onto the platter. “I feel your eyes on me like an X-ray, so if you’re trying to be subtle about staring at my ass, I have news for you: you’re not.”
Heat fills my cheeks. I clear my throat. “You should go home and get some sleep.”
“And you should be resting in bed,” he says, flashing me one of those dizzying smiles that make me want to crush my mouth to his. “But you can’t always get what you want.”
“Do not start singing.”
The smile deepens. “Who, me?”
I glare at him as he finds the loophole and starts humming the Rolling Stones song, trying very hard to resolve myself to find some way to get him to go without scaring him off for good. What do I say? Hey, Oliver. Mind just waiting in the wings while I figure out if I can be with you without feeling like my heart’s being ripped out of my chest? If I could love you the way you deserve, if I’m worthy of even asking you for everything I want?
But Oliver’s holding my gaze with that same quiet, sure confidence he had the first time he ripped off my clothes and made me come undone, when he strolled in tonight with his arms full of food and looked into my eyes and told me with his body and his touch that he is not always the easygoing man he often seems to be.
“I was going to bring you breakfast for dinner in bed, but here you are, so let’s eat outside,” Oliver says, pointing to my outdoor dining table out back.
I peer out the glass panes of my back door, seeing a bright starry sky, a mellow spring breeze swaying the first blossoms in Oliver’s colorful garden. Sighing, resigned, I tell him, “Fine.”
25
OLIVER
Playlist: “Yellow,” Frankie Orella
Gavin’s grumbling under his breath as I slip a pillow behind him when he eases down to his chair and leans back. There’s something wrong with me, wires crossed in my brain, because his foul-mood muttering just makes me smile.
I’m not happy he’s in pain or struggling with me seeing him like this. I am relieved that he’s okay enough to get clean and shave, to grumble and gruff; that he’s hungry and willing to indulge me as I set our places, light a few votives, then sit across from him.
I know he wants me gone. I know he only thinks he’s safe to hurt and heal on his own.
But I can’t leave. I can’t stop replaying that moment when I realized he was on the ground, writhing in pain. I can’t stop the panic that tightens my throat again, that makes my heart fly in my chest all over as I remember how scared I was. How it felt like the world was collapsing and all that mattered was reaching Gavin, holding his hand, feeling how hard he squeezed back, his eyes screwed shut against the agony making him writhe on the field.