Wade transforms an offhand remark about Stravinsky into an unforgettable night at the theater—orchestra seats positioned perfectly for Jesse’s good ear—proving that true romance lives in the details someone bothers to write down. What follows is a leap of faith both literal and figurative, as skydiving strips away Jesse’s carefully managed defenses and leads to a first time together that’s as tender as it is raw. This is intimacy rendered in slow motion: two men learning that patience isn’t just waiting—it’s paying attention, holding back when holding back matters, and discovering that the deepest connection comes when attachment arrives before anything else.
[NOTE: I broke this Chapter in two parts because it clocked in near 12k words. I’m releasing both parts on the same day so you’re not waiting a week for the second half. As something new, I am including an EPUB version of the entire Chapter so you can read it on your Kindle or other book reading device.]
Wade’s Point of View
I called the AT&T Performing Arts Center on a Monday in early August. The woman on the phone had the patient voice of someone who’d been selling tickets to rich people for twenty years. I asked for two orchestra seats for the Thursday performance. She asked if I wanted to make a donation. I said not today.
Jake stood at the kitchen island eating a sandwich he’d assembled from my refrigerator without asking. I’d been on the phone for four minutes, and he’d already figured out what I was doing.
“You’re taking him to the theater,” he said when I hung up.
“I’m taking him to the theater.”
“The kid mentioned Russian composers once. At the lake. Six weeks ago.”
“He mentioned Stravinsky,” I said. “Specifically. The Firebird. Specifically.”
Jake chewed his sandwich and looked at me the way he looks at code that’s doing something unexpected. “You wrote it down.”
I had. I’d been filing details about Jesse Tretiak for weeks in a note on my phone. The Stravinsky mention. The Frank Reaugh landscapes. The way he took his coffee. The fact that he swam every night. The pho place in Denton he’d mentioned exactly once on the dock in June. I wasn’t keeping a dossier. I was keeping a record of the things that mattered to him, because he didn’t repeat himself and I didn’t want to miss anything.
“You’ve never earned it before,” Jake said.
“Earned what?”
“Any of it. You’ve never had to try. Every person you’ve ever been with just let you catch them.”
I looked at the tickets on my screen. Orchestra right, row D, seats three and four. The credit card charge was obscene.
“I know,” I said. “I’m going to keep doing it, anyway.”
Jake finished his sandwich and stood up. “Thursday. That’s three days from now.”
“I’m aware.”
“He works Thursday nights.”
“He got the shift covered.”
Jake’s expression shifted into something that almost resembled a smile. He’d been watching me circle Jesse for six weeks with the patience of a man who’d seen me fail at this exact thing more times than either of us could count. He’d watched me wait through a month and a half of Saturdays at the lake, dinners where I paid and Jesse ordered moderately, conversations that ended with Jesse driving back to Denton alone. He’d watched me not push.
“Don’t screw it up,” he said.
“That’s your advice?”
“That’s my advice.”
He let himself out. I looked at the tickets again. Then I opened the note on my phone and added orchestra seats, right side, so his good ear is toward the stage and then closed it and went back to work.
The theater was smaller than I’d expected. Not small, it was the Winspear, and everything in that building cost more than my first car. But it was intimate in a way that made the orchestra seats feel like they were inside the music. I’d dressed carefully. Button down, not a t-shirt. The jacket I wore to business dinners. Jeans that cost too much and looked like they didn’t.
Jesse arrived five minutes before the curtain. He’d come straight from work. The scent of the restaurant on him, faint under something clean. He’d changed his shirt in the car. The collar was still settling.
“You didn’t have to do this,” he said.
“I know.”
He looked at the seats. Then at the stage. Then at me. His face did the thing it does when he’s computing something he doesn’t have words for yet. The slight jaw tightening, the stillness around the eyes.
“You wrote it down,” he said. “I mentioned Stravinsky one time. At the lake. I didn’t think you were listening.”
“I’m always listening.”
That was too honest. It landed in the space between us and sat there. Jesse didn’t look away. Then the lights dimmed, and the orchestra began tuning, and we both turned toward the stage.
The performance was The Firebird, the full ballet score, and the woman conducting was maybe five feet tall and built like a welder. She didn’t so much conduct as conduct surgery. The strings came in like weather. The brass section woke up, and the room got smaller, got hotter, got more alive.
I watched Jesse more than I watched the stage.
He remained completely still. His hands rested on his knees and his head tilted slightly to the left, his good ear toward the orchestra, and his mouth opened just enough that I could see his bottom lip. He was breathing through the music. I’d seen him look at art like this, at the painting in my hallway that first night, at the Reaugh landscapes at the university gallery. He didn’t consume things. He let them happen to him.
The Infernal Dance hit and his shoulders moved. Just once. A small, involuntary thing, like his body had gotten ahead of his brain and signaled before the signal was complete.
The woman on the podium was five feet tall, and she rearranged the molecules in the room. The final chord landed and the silence after was the loudest thing I’d ever heard.
Then the applause. Jesse blinked like he was coming up from underwater.
On the sidewalk afterward, he grew quiet. The valet had my truck and we stood under the overhang while other people took pictures of each other and talked too loudly into their phones. The night was August warm and the lights from the opera house shone gold against the glass.
“She had too much power for the room,” Jesse said.
I waited. He was still looking at the building, not at me.
“The orchestra couldn’t keep up with her in the third movement. You could hear them running. She was conducting something they didn’t have the horsepower for.”
“You’re criticizing the conductor.”
“I’m making an observation.”
“Most people would just say they liked it.”
“Most people weren’t paying attention.”
He said it flat, the way he said everything, and I realized he was talking about me. Not the music. I’d been watching him and he’d known I was watching and he’d let me.
The valet pulled up. I tipped him too much because I wasn’t thinking about money. Jesse got in the passenger side and pulled the door closed and sat with his hands in his lap. I pulled out onto Flora Street and headed toward Interstate 35.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Jesse said.
“Do what?”
“Be someone that someone does things like this for.”
I didn’t answer right away. The truck was quiet. The AC was on low and the vents were humming. Dallas slid past the windows in its weekend skin. Couples on sidewalks, a group of women in dresses that matched, someone playing music out of a Bluetooth speaker on a patio.
“You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “You just have to let me.”
He turned his head. Looked at me across the console. His face in the dashboard light was unreadable, which meant he was feeling something he didn’t want me to see.
“Okay,” he said.
We drove the rest of the way back to Plano without talking. The silence wasn’t heavy. It was the kind of silence that happens when something has been said that doesn’t need to be said again.
When I got home, I added another line to the note on my phone. Too much power for the room. And then, because I was already in too deep to pretend otherwise, Let him. Just let him.
Jesse’s Point of View
I found myself in orchestra seats on a Thursday in mid-August knowing that Wade Mitchell had written down an offhand comment from weeks ago and held it. Held it until the right tickets went on sale. Held it until he could put me on the right side of the auditorium so my good ear was facing the stage.
He hadn’t mentioned the hearing. He’d just done it.
The conductor was a woman who looked as if she’d been built to conduct Stravinsky. She was small and fierce and she attacked the podium like it owed her money. The orchestra came in behind her and the sound hit my chest the way sound does when you only hear it in mono. All of it, everything at once, no separation, no space. It was like being inside the instrument.
I’d told Wade once that art was the first language that was entirely mine. I hadn’t told him that music was the second, or that I’d stopped going to live performances because the hearing made it complicated. People talked during the quiet parts. The person next to you would lean over and say something, and you’d miss a whole movement because you couldn’t lock onto their voice and the music at the same time. Going alone meant going and then not talking about it afterward, which was its own kind of lonely.
Wade didn’t talk. He sat beside me for ninety minutes and didn’t say a word. I could feel him watching me. I can always feel it, the weight of someone’s attention. But he didn’t ask if I was enjoying it, didn’t lean over with some observation about the bassoonist, didn’t try to make the experience about him.
The Infernal Dance hit and my shoulders moved without my permission. It took up residence in my spine. The music was wild and specific and I lived inside it, truly inside it, the way I am inside a painting when it’s good enough to disappear into.
After, on the sidewalk, I told him she had too much power for the room. The first honest thing I’d said about the performance and it came out before I could stop it. Wade didn’t argue. He didn’t do the thing people do where they turn your opinion into a conversation about your personality. He just listened.
In the truck, I told him I didn’t know how to be someone that someone did things like this for. I hadn’t meant to say that either. It came out because I was tired and the music still echoed in my chest and Wade had spent probably four hundred dollars on tickets and an hour and a half watching me instead of the stage and I didn’t know what to do with any of it.
He said I didn’t have to do anything. Just let him.
I let him.
The text came on a Tuesday.
Saturday. Clear your afternoon. Wear something you don’t care about.
I was between shifts, sitting in my car in the restaurant parking lot with a protein bar and a bottle of water. I read the text three times. Then I texted back: Should I be concerned?
Probably.
I looked at my phone for a long moment. The parking lot was hot. The asphalt was doing the thing where the heat made everything shimmer. I had work in twenty minutes and class in the morning, and this man was texting me cryptic instructions about my Saturday afternoon.
I didn’t ask follow-up questions. I’d learned that with Wade, follow-up questions didn’t get you answers. They got you more cryptic instructions.
I texted: Okay.
The place was in Mesquite, a low building off the highway with a sign that said SKYDIVE DALLAS in letters that had been faded by the sun. We pulled into the parking lot at ten in the morning,
and I sat in the truck and looked at the sign and then at Wade.
“Skydiving,” I said.
“You said you’d never been.”
“I said that six weeks ago.”
“I know.”
He was wearing a t-shirt with a hole in the collar and shorts that had seen better decades. He looked like a man who had done this before and knew that whatever you wore was going to get ruined.
“You’re serious,” I said.
“I’m always serious.”
“You are never serious.”
“I’m serious about this.”
I got out of the truck with jet fuel and cut grass on the breeze. There was a plane on the tarmac that looked like it had been assembled from parts of other, better planes. A man in a jumpsuit was standing next to it with a clipboard.
“Wade,” I said.
“Jesse.”
“If I die, I’m haunting you.”
“That seems fair.”
The instructor’s name was Ron. He’d done this twelve thousand times. He told me this while he strapped me to his chest in a harness that had obviously been designed by someone who hated humans.
“Twelve thousand jumps,” I said.
“Give or take.”
“Have you ever had anyone die?”
“Not on my watch.”
“That’s not a no.”
Ron tightened a strap and my internal organs rearranged themselves. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “Just don’t think about it.”
The plane was louder than anything I’d ever encountered. We climbed for twenty minutes. A piece of metal that looked like it had been installed as an afterthought made up the door. Ron was behind me, and Wade was somewhere in the plane. He’d gone up first, as he’d put it, “to make sure the ground was still there.”
The door opened.
The noise was everything. It was wind and engine and the absence of anything solid. The sky was blue in a way that hurt to look at. Ron said something I couldn’t hear and then we were moving and then there was no plane.
We fell.
I screamed. I know I screamed because my throat was raw afterwards, and Ron laughed into my ear and said something about everyone screaming. The wind was a physical force, a wall of pressure, and my body existed separately from my brain for the first time in my life. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t plan. I couldn’t manage my expression or monitor who was watching me or calculate what I was supposed to be feeling. I was just a body falling through the sky.
The chute opened and everything hushed.
We floated. The ground was a green and brown grid, and the highway was a ribbon, and the cars were ants. Ron was talking but I wasn’t listening. I was looking at the horizon and the sky and the way the world looked from twelve thousand feet, which was small and manageable and somehow unbearably beautiful.
I laughed. It came out of me before I realized it was coming. A raw, uncalculated sound that I didn’t recognize as mine.
“First time?” Ron said.
“Yeah.”
“Good. You’ll remember it.”
I landed gracelessly. My legs collapsed out from under me, and I hit the grass and rolled and ended up on my back staring at the sky. Wade was already on the ground, standing about twenty feet away with his arms crossed and a grin that took up his whole face.
“How was it?” he said.
I couldn’t stop laughing.
We ate barbecue afterwards. A place in Mesquite with vinyl tablecloths and a waitress who called us both honey. I couldn’t stop talking. The words were coming out of me in a rush, and I understood I was being animated in a way I rarely permitted myself, and I didn’t care.
“The door,” I said. “When the door opened. I thought I was going to die. And then I didn’t die. And then I was flying.”
“You were falling.”
“Same thing.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“It felt like the same thing.”
Wade was watching me across the table with an expression I couldn’t read. His brisket was getting cold. He didn’t seem to notice.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing. You’re just . . . different like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re not thinking about how you look.”
I put down my fork. The restaurant was loud around us with families, a birthday party in the corner, someone’s kid screaming about pickles.
“I’m not,” I said. “Thinking about how I look. Right now. I’m not.”
“I know. It’s good.”
I picked my fork back up. Ate a piece of Texas toast that was mostly butter. Thought about the way my body had been in the air, weightless and out of control, and how I hadn’t been managing anything for the first time in weeks. Months. Maybe years.
On the drive back, I said one thing. “Thank you.”
Wade glanced at me. The truck was warm, and the sun was going down, and the highway was open.
“For what?”
“The tickets. The skydiving. Not being weird about any of it.”
“I’m always weird about everything.”
“You know what I mean.”
He was quiet for a moment. “You’re welcome.”
We drove the rest of the way back to Plano with the windows down and the radio on low and the August heat coming in off the asphalt. I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t need to.
Wade’s Point of View
We got back to my place around six. The sun was still up, but the light had gone gold and the pool was doing the thing where it caught the color and threw it back at the house. Jesse was still buzzed from the jump. I could see it in the way he moved, looser, lighter, like someone had taken a weight off his shoulders he’d forgotten he was carrying.
Mercer met us at the door. He’d learned to recognize Jesse’s footsteps and now he greeted him first, which I had complicated feelings about that I wasn’t going to examine.
“I need to sit down,” Jesse said. “My legs don’t work.”
“They worked fine at the barbecue place.”
“That was adrenaline. This is the adrenaline wearing off.”
He walked into the living room and lowered himself onto the rug. Not the couch. The rug. Lying on his back with his arms spread out like he was still falling.
“The ceiling is spinning,” he said.
“You’re not still falling.”
“I might be.”
I stood in the doorway and looked at him on my living room rug with his arms out and his hair a mess, and a grass stain on his knee from the landing. Something in my chest did a thing I didn’t have language for.
“I’m going to kiss you,” I said.
“Okay.”
I got down on the rug. The light was gold through the sliding glass doors, and the pool was blue beyond them, and Mercer was somewhere behind us deciding whether to be offended. Jesse looked up at me with an expression that was open in a way he almost never permitted.
He laughed that raw, uncalculated laugh the skydiving had pulled out of him. I was down on my knees beside him, blocking the late-afternoon light, and then I was kissing him and he was kissing me back with his whole mouth, open and wet and tasting like the beer we’d had with the brisket. The rug fibers prickled through my shirt. Mercer gave a low grunt and retreated to his bed.
I pulled back just long enough to get Jesse’s shirt off. He lifted his arms and let me, which he did sometimes when he relaxed enough to stop managing things. The adrenaline had burned through his usual guard. His skin was warm under my hands, damp from the day, the chlorine still faint in his hair. He was summer and charcoal smoke and the clean sweat of a man who’d been outdoors for hours.
“You’re staring,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to do something about it?”
I pulled my shirt off and tossed it somewhere. Then I rolled him onto his back and pinned his wrists above his head and kissed him again, harder. He made a sound into my mouth—a small, involuntary thing—and his hips bucked up against mine. We were both still wearing shorts, but the friction was enough, the hard line of him pressing against me through two layers of fabric.
He twisted. Not to get away, but to flip us. I let him. He ended up on top, straddling my hips, his hands on my chest, his grin wide and unguarded. The light caught the edges of his hair and turned it pale gold. Behind him, the ceiling fan turned lazy circles.
“You’re stronger than you look,” I said.
“People always think that.”
“I don’t.”
He leaned down and kissed my neck. His mouth was warm and almost careful, finding the spot below my ear that made my breath catch. I ran my hands down his back, over the muscles that shifted when he moved, down to the waistband of his shorts. I palmed his ass through the fabric, and he pressed back into my hands, a small, instinctive grind.
“These need to come off,” I said.
“Yours first.”
We solved it the way you solve things when you’re too worked up to be graceful. Shorts and boxers kicked away into the corners of the room, bare skin against the rug, the afternoon air cool on damp flesh. Jesse’s body was a thing I never tired of looking at. Broad shoulders, narrow waist, the ridge of his hip bones, the dark gold trail of hair that led down from his navel. He was half-hard already, flushed and heavy against his thigh, and I wanted every part of him.
He leaned down and took my cock in his mouth without preamble. The wet heat of it made me groan, my head dropping back against the rug. He worked me with that same deliberate focus he’d shown in the studio weeks ago, but looser now, more playful, his tongue doing something impossible along the underside, his hand cupping my balls with a gentle, rolling pressure. I watched the muscles in his back flex as he moved, watched the way his ass rose into the air, round and pale and perfect.
I wanted to be inside him.
The thought hit me with the force of something physical. We’d been taking things slow. I’d been patient. But right now, with the adrenaline still singing in my blood and Jesse’s mouth on my cock and his body spread out across my living room rug, I wanted to go all the way. I wanted to feel him around me, tight and hot and real.
“Jesse.”
He pulled off, looked up at me. His lips were slick and swollen, his eyes were slightly unfocused.
“I want to fuck you,” I said. “If you want that. If you’re ready.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded. “Yeah. I want that.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
I kissed him. Tasted myself on his tongue. Then I got up with my legs unsteady, my cock bobbing absurdly, and headed to the bathroom for the lube. The bottle was in the medicine cabinet, half full, and I grabbed it and a towel and came back to the living room. Jesse was still on the rug, on his back now, one hand resting on his stomach, watching me with an expression that was eager and nervous in equal measure.
I spread the towel beneath him. Then I kneeled between his legs and ran my hands up his thighs.
“Tell me if anything hurts. Tell me if you want to stop.”
“I know.”
“I mean it. You say the word and we’re done.”
“Wade.” He reached down and put his hand over mine. “I know.”
I leaned down and kissed the inside of his knee. Then his thigh. Then the crease where his leg met his groin. I took my time. I wanted him relaxed, wanted the tension to drain out of his shoulders, wanted his body to remember that this was supposed to feel good.
I poured lube onto my fingers and warmed it in my palm. Then I pressed one finger against him, just circling, not pushing. He tensed. It traveled through his whole body.
“Breathe,” I said.
“I am breathing.”
“Breathe more.”
He exhaled. I kept circling, my touch feather light, letting him get used to the sensation. When the tension in his thighs eased slightly, I pressed the tip of my finger inside.
He inhaled sharply. I stopped.
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Keep going.”
I pushed deeper, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time. He was tight. Tighter than I’d expected, the ring of muscle clenching around my knuckle. I held still and let him adjust. His hands were fisted in the rug. His jaw was tight. But he didn’t tell me to stop.
“You’re doing good,” I said. “You’re doing so good. Just breathe.”
He breathed. I worked my finger in deeper, then pulled back, then deeper again, a slow, steady rhythm. I watched his face for signals. The furrow between his brows, the slight parting of his lips, the way his eyes had closed. When the furrow smoothed out, I added more lube and pressed a second finger alongside the first.
His whole body turned rigid. His hand shot down and gripped my wrist. Not pushing me away, just holding on, his fingers digging into my skin.
“Breathe,” I said again. “Just breathe through it. It gets easier.”
“I know.” His voice was strained but steady.
I stayed still. Didn’t move my fingers. Just let him feel the stretch, the pressure, the slow, strange burn of being opened up. I leaned down and kissed his stomach. Ran my tongue along the ridge of his hip bone. Took his cock in my mouth to distract him, working the head with my tongue while my fingers stayed buried in his ass.
He made a sound that was half gasp, half moan, and his muscles around my fingers fluttered. Progress. I pulled back, then pushed in again, a little deeper this time, and the sound he made was closer to pleasure than pain.
“Okay?” I asked, lifting my mouth off him.
“Yeah. Don’t stop.”
I curled my fingers. Found the spot. His back arched off the rug and his cock jumped in my hand. A bead of pre-cum welled at the tip and I leaned down and licked it away.
“Wade.”
“Good?”
“Really good.”
I worked him open for what seemed like a long time. Three fingers, then four, twisting and scissoring, stretching the tight ring of muscle until it started to give. The lube was slick and warm, and I kept adding more, not wanting any friction, any burn that wasn’t the good kind. Jesse’s breathing was ragged but steady. His hands were still fisted in the rug. A fine sheen of sweat covered his chest, his stomach, the inside of his thighs.
I pulled my fingers out, and he made a sound that was almost a protest.
“You ready?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
I poured more lube into my palm and slicked myself up, my cock so hard it was almost painful. Then I positioned myself between his legs, the head of my cock pressed against his entrance. He was open enough, I could feel it, but he was still tight, still resisting.
“Last chance to say no.”
“Wade, I want this. I want you.”
I pushed.
The head of my cock slipped past the first ring of muscle and Jesse went rigid again. His whole body seized. His hands came up and grabbed my forearms, hard enough to leave marks, and his face contorted with something that was not pleasure.
“Fuck,” he breathed. “Fuck, that’s—”
“I can stop.”
“No.” The word was sharp. “Just . . . give me a second. Just a second.”
I held still. Absolutely still. The head of my cock was inside him, and it was all I could do not to move, not to push deeper, not to bury myself in the tight, hot grip of his body. I felt the muscles around me clench and release, clench and release, his body fighting the intrusion and then slowly, grudgingly, accepting it.
“More,” he said.
I pushed deeper. An inch. Two. His legs came up around my waist, his heels digging into my lower back. A tremor was running through him, the effort it was taking to stay relaxed. His eyes were shut tight and his jaw was clenched and his breath was coming in short, sharp bursts.
“Look at me,” I said.
He opened his eyes. They were wet. He wasn’t crying, but he was close, the shimmer of someone holding back pain with sheer force of will. His pupils were huge, his face flushed, his lips parted around ragged breaths.
“You’re doing amazing,” I said. “You’re taking me so well. Just breathe.”
He breathed. I pushed deeper, an inch at a time, pausing after each small advance. He was so tight. So impossibly, perfectly tight. The heat of him was like nothing I’d ever felt. Not Andrew, not any of the men I’d been with before. This was different. This was Jesse, and every inch of him was a gift he was giving me, and I was going to take it the way it was meant to be taken.
I bottomed out. My hips pressed against his ass. We were flush, connected, nothing between us. I stayed there, not moving, letting him adjust to the fullness.
“Okay?” I whispered.
“Yeah.” His voice was thin but steady. “Yeah. Just . . . go slow.”
“Always.”
I started to move. Slow, shallow thrusts at first, barely pulling out before pushing back in. The friction was exquisite. Every nerve in my body was concentrated on the place where we were joined. The pulse of his heartbeat reached my cock through the thin walls of his body. He clenched around me, tight and then tighter, his body still learning how to accept this.
He reached up and pulled me down into a kiss. It was messy and uncoordinated, his mouth finding mine in the space between breaths. His legs tightened around my waist, his heels pressing into the small of my back, pulling me deeper.
“More,” he said against my mouth. “I want more.”
I gave him more. Longer strokes now, pulling out halfway before sliding back in, building a rhythm that was still gentle but deeper, more complete. The rug was rough against my knees. The afternoon light had shifted to gold, slanting through the glass doors and painting stripes across Jesse’s chest. He was beautiful. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and he was taking my cock with a determination that made my chest ache.
I wanted to go wild. I wanted to flip him onto his stomach and fuck him into the rug, hard and fast and without restraint, the way I’d done with men before, the way my body knew how to do. I wanted to hear him scream. I wanted to leave marks on his hips.
But his hands were still trembling against my arms. His jaw was still tight. His body was still fighting the stretch, and I could feel it every time I pushed deeper. The slight hitch in his breath, the way his fingers dug into my skin, the involuntary clench of muscles around my cock.
Not yet. Not now. Maybe not for a long time.
So I stayed gentle. I kept my thrusts slow and measured, pulling back until just the head was inside him, then pushing in with a smooth, steady pressure that made him gasp. I leaned down and kissed his throat. His collarbone. The hollow at the base of his neck where his pulse beat against the skin.
“You feel incredible,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Jesus, Jesse. You have no idea.”
He laughed and the laugh did something to the muscles inside him, making them flutter around my cock in a way that made my vision blur. I groaned and dropped my forehead onto his shoulder. His hands came up and buried themselves in my hair.
“Faster,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
I sped up. Still gentle, still careful, but faster now, the rhythm building into something that was almost urgent. The slide of my cock into his body was wet and slick and the sounds we were making filled the room. My rough breathing, his sharp gasps, the rhythmic slap of skin against skin. He was still tight. Still struggling. But his cock was hard and leaking against his stomach, and the sounds he was making were closer to pleasure than pain.
“Touch yourself,” I said.
He reached down and wrapped his hand around his cock. Stroked himself in time with my thrusts. The sight of it, his hand moving on his own flesh while my cock moved inside him, nearly undid me. The orgasm was building at the base of my cock, the tight rise of heat that meant I was close.
“Jesse. I’m going to come.”
“Do it.” His voice was rough. “Inside me. I want to know what it feels like. When your body comes and you’re inside me.”
He clenched around me deliberately. A tight, pulsing squeeze that was his body learning how to give me pleasure and I came apart. The release hit me like a wave, rolling up from the base of my cock and spilling into him in hot, rhythmic pulses. I buried my face in his neck and groaned, long and low, my hips jerking against his ass as I emptied myself inside him.
Jesse came a few seconds later. The hot spatter of it against my stomach, the way his body arched up into mine, the broken sound he made that was almost a sob. I held him through it, my cock still inside him, my arms wrapped around his back.
We stayed like that until the trembling stopped. Then I pulled out gently and collapsed beside him on the rug. The towel was somewhere under us, probably not doing its job. I didn’t care.
We lay side by side, breathing hard, staring at the ceiling fan that was still turning its lazy circles. The pool was blue through the glass doors. The light was going from gold to gray. Somewhere in the house, Mercer had decided it was safe to emerge and his nails clicked on the kitchen tile.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Jesse turned his head on the rug. His face was red, his hair was a disaster, and his eyes were still somewhat teary. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
“Was it too much?”
“It was a lot. But good. It was good.”
I reached over and placed my hand on his chest. His heart was still hammering. “It gets easier. The more you do it, the more your body learns.”
“I know.” He put his hand over mine. “I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it with you. It’s been time for a while now.”
Something in my chest cracked open. I didn’t have a name for it. I pulled him closer and kissed the top of his head. Chlorine was still in his hair, even now, even after everything.
The silence between us was the comfortable kind, the kind that didn’t demand to be filled. I thought about the way he’d said I wanted to do it with you and the way his body had opened for me, slowly, painfully, without complaint, and the way I’d wanted to fuck him hard and couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Because he wasn’t ready, and because I was learning to be the kind of person who could wait.
“You pulled something,” Jesse said.
“What?”
“Your shoulder. You’re holding it weird.”
I was. The muscle I’d strained earlier was now a dull, persistent ache that was apparently going to be a problem tomorrow. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. You’re forty-one and you just had sex on the floor.”
“On the rug. Rug is nicer.”
“It’s a rug. You pulled something.”
“It was worth it.”
He laughed. The real laugh, the one I’d first heard in the airplane door at twelve thousand feet. I lay there with my bad shoulder and my ruined rug and the sound of it filling the room and thought I would pull every muscle in my body if it meant hearing that.
We eventually got up. The shower was slow and careful and involved more tenderness than any shower I’d ever taken. I washed his back, and he washed mine, and neither of us said much. The words weren’t necessary.
Jesse pulled on a pair of my sweatpants and a t-shirt that hung off his shoulders. He looked like he belonged in my clothes, in my house, in my bed. Because he did belong there. Because I’d asked and he’d said yes and he’d taken me inside him despite the pain because he wanted to be close to me.
“You’re staying,” I said. Not a question.
He looked at me across the bathroom. His hair was wet and his face was still flushed and he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in a room that was full of expensive things I’d bought to try to feel something.
“I’m staying,” he said.
The next morning, Jake let himself in at nine. He found me at the kitchen island with a heat pack on my shoulder and a cup of coffee going cold in front of me. He poured himself a mug and sat down and took in the scene: the heat pack, the wince when I reached for my mug, the way I was smiling despite the pain.
“You pulled something.”
“It was worth it.”
“Jesse stayed.”
“In my bed.”
Jake drank his coffee. He was silent for a moment, the way he is when he’s deciding whether to say something. Then he set the mug down and looked at me. His expression was thoughtful, assessing, the way it got when he was reading code for errors.
“He’s different,” Jake said eventually. “Not just from the others. Different from how he was. When he first started coming around.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he’s letting you in. Not just physically. The rest of it. He’s backwards from the guys you usually date. With them, sex comes first. Before any attachment. With Jesse,” he paused, “with Jesse, I think the attachment has to come before the sex. I think you may be further along than you think. Don’t screw it up.”
“I’m not going to screw it up.”
“I’m saying it, anyway.”
I adjusted the heat pack. The muscle was going to take a week to heal, and I’d pull it again the next time we had sex on the rug, which I was already planning. I thought about the night before. The way Jesse had tightened around me and breathed through it, the way he’d said I wanted to do it with you, the way he’d laughed in the shower while I tried to wash his back without upsetting my shoulder. He’d let me in. He was still letting me in.
“He couldn’t take me,” I said quietly. “Not the way I wanted to give it to him. He was trying so hard, but it was hurting him the whole time. I could see it.”
Jake was silent.
“I wanted to just let go. I wanted to fuck him the way I’ve fucked other people. But I couldn’t. Because he was right there with me, taking it, not complaining, doing everything right, and I couldn’t be the thing that hurt him.”
“That’s good,” Jake said.
“I know it’s good. It was still hard.”
“It’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, you wouldn’t be doing it right.”
He had a point. I sat with it for a minute, the weight of his words settling alongside the weight of everything else. The builder. The closet. The group dinner where Jaegen had poured Jesse three shots. The slow, patient work of building something that was going to last.
“He told me he wanted to do it with me,” I said. “Specifically with me. Like it mattered that it was me.”
“It did matter. It does matter. Like I said, I think he’s getting attached.” Jake set his mug down. “You’ve never had to be patient before. Not for anyone. The fact that you’re learning, that matters too.”
He left after that, with a clap on my good shoulder and a last “don’t screw it up” called over his shoulder. I sat at the kitchen island and drank my cold coffee and thought about Jesse, sleeping in my bed, wearing my clothes, taking his time waking up. Tonight I’d bring him dinner, and we’d eat on the patio, and I wouldn’t try to push for anything more than he was ready to give. Because that was the thing about patience. It didn’t end just because you’d gotten one yes. It kept going. It kept being hard. And if you did it right, if you really did it right, eventually it stopped being something you were doing and became something you were.
End of Chapter 5.1.