Chapter 11 - NamidJayce

Chapter 11

Namid

I don't know how to not want Jayce. It's been a month since we spent the evening together on my porch, and every day, it gets harder to keep my hands to myself when we're together. I want to slip my fingers between his when we walk down Main Street with our coffees. I want to lay my head on his shoulder in the park, pull him into my arms in the shop, and brush my lips across his every time he smiles at me.

When we spent the night lying side by side, watching the stars, I wanted to slide over and curl up against him with my head on his chest. I wanted to kiss him and ask him to stay. I wanted to take him to bed and show him that I could be enough if he'd let me, that I'd give him everything I am, and that I'd be everything he could ever want.

I can't be what he wants though. I can't kiss him or touch him or tell him he's everything I've ever wanted. He's straight and he's my friend, and in all the time we've spent together, he's never felt anything remotely romantic for me. For one brief moment when he showed me his studio, I thought…maybe, but then it was gone. He cares for me and he enjoys being with me, but there is nothing more. There is no rush of joy or excitement when he sees me. There is no longing, no want, no need . He doesn't feel the way I feel. I wish I could at least pretend that he does.

All I feel anymore is Jayce. All I feel is desire and frustration and love, and there is nowhere for any of it to go.

I need to get him out of my system. I need to fuck into someone hard and fast and watch their fingers curl into the sheets as they scream my name. I need to lick the taste of salt from the back of a stranger's neck and dig my fingers into sharp hip bones until bruises are left behind. I need to dull my need for him with something more than my own hand and memories of his smile haunting me. I need to lose myself in another body until I stop wondering what his looks like undressed. I need something. I need someone. Anyone.

Tourists usually stay out of the old part of town. They rent small cabins along the river and rooms in the tiny condo complex that was built specifically to bring summer tourism money into our small town. Once in a while, they stray far enough during the day to eat at the diner instead of the summer restaurant or pick up cereal and milk and apples at the grocery store, but that's about it. They normally book locals as wilderness guides to take them hiking in the woods and fishing on the river. They sit in the sun and enjoy the trees and remember what it's like not to have six a.m. meetings and eight p.m. kids' basketball games every day.

The tourists who come to this town are mostly families, parents with their 2.5 children who have saved up enough money to go somewhere other than Disneyland for their one-week-a-year summer vacation. There are also men's groups - packs of two, four, or six men in their fifties or sixties who have talked about fishing in Alaska together since they met in college and are finally making their dreams come true. There are fathers trying to build memories with their teenage sons and young couples on their honeymoons. They have evening glasses of whiskey on their small balconies and split bottles of wine while they barbecue in the fire pits at their rented condos or guzzle martinis in the restaurant bar. They don't venture to the Hole-in-the-Wall bar on Main Street.

Occasionally, there are other tourists. There are groups of men in their twenties and thirties who come for bachelor's weekends before one of their members gets married and abandons them forever. Rarely these groups do find their way to the bar. Once in a great while, one of their ranks is gay or bi or curious-only-while-on-vacation-in-the-middle-of-nowhere.

I've spent the past three weeks at the bar on Friday and Saturday nights. It's grating on me, the onslaught of unchecked drunken emotion that I can barely manage to keep at arm's length. The whiskey helps. I sit at the bar night after night, trying to find someone, anyone, to help me carve out the longing in my chest for a fraction of a moment. Shelly slides me over a third drink. We're not friends. Before Jayce, I never really knew what it was like to have a friend, but she's kind to me, and she's one of the few people in town who doesn't feel uncomfortable simply because I'm around. Aside from Ken, she's the only person in town who knows I'm gay, and it doesn't seem to bother her. I don't make a habit of trying to pick up men in her bar - I've only attempted it a handful of times in the decade I've lived here, and I've only been successful twice. The last time was four years back. That was the last time I had sex.

I'm sitting in the corner, watching the throng of bodies laughing and dancing while I nurse a bourbon and a headache, when a hand brushes across my lower back. The lust that rolls off the stranger is unmistakable, and it's strong enough that I'm almost sure everyone else is somehow able to feel it, even without my abilities. As the man leans over the bar and orders another tequila shot, his hand lingers on my T-shirt, one fingertip slipping lower to brush the thin strip of exposed skin between my shirt and belt. He leaves a twenty for Shelly, downs his shot, and heads for the front door without a backward glance.

I follow.

He's leaning against the bar's red brick fa?ade, lighting a cigarette when I walk out, and when I walk the nine steps to the edge of the building and turn down the alley, he follows.

I pluck the cigarette from his hand and flick it into the street before hooking my fingers through his belt loops and pulling his body close. His mouth crushes mine, the taste of tequila and tobacco and ash filling my senses as he grinds against me. He's desperate as his hands work the buttons of my jeans. Good. I'm desperate too. I need this. I need the scent of bar and smoke and liquor, so different from leather and cinnamon and motor oil, to fill my senses. I need to yank and groan and feel teeth on my skin, so different from the gentleness that fills my soul when I'm around Jayce.

I shove the stranger's pants over his hips. He does the same to mine, and then I'm in his hand. He has our cocks crushed together, and he's stroking fast, dry skin on dry skin, and it's so rough it nearly hurts. It's too cold to be doing this outside, but that's good too. It's different and distracting and perfect, and I let my head fall back against the cold brick and try not to think about work-roughened hands and auburn scruff and pale jade eyes hovering over me.

It's not working. My soul feels him all the time now, and it's almost like he's with me, like he's close. He's felt close all night. I didn't see him in the bar as I glanced through the writhing, sweaty bodies and tried to sort through the emotional onslaught that accompanied them. I felt him, but I didn't see him. I always feel him now. He's always with me, even when he's not.

I squeeze my eyes tighter and groan as a mouth sucks along the underside of my jaw and a rough beard scratches the skin of my neck. It's not Jayce's beard. I lean down, catching the mouth with mine, demanding the taste of smoke and the tongue that thrusts itself just a bit too hard down my throat. I need this stranger to make me forget.