14. “The day is hot”

14

"The day is hot"

Then

The summer after the first year of college was long and sultry. Charged in a way that was beyond anything I'd ever felt. Everything was intense. Every interaction between Romeo and me was exaggerated and seemed in crystal clear focus. Everything that wasn't him was pale and lackluster.

His new college friends were around a lot. Kellie loved reading and seemed blissfully unaware that people don't usually read during conversations with others. She hung out with Romeo a lot but didn't participate in many discussions other than to look up and say, "What the fuck?" now and again. Sean was studying art history and English literature. He had a lot to say about almost everything. Some of it was actually pretty funny. Just not as funny as Romeo thought it was.

When I met them, Kellie dropped her book a fraction and peeked over it, nodding and giving me a little smile .

"Well, well, well," said Sean, "check it out, Kel. If Romeo's to be believed, we've just met the best human being in existence."

Romeo slung his arm loosely around my shoulder and pulled me so close his hair brushed against my cheek. His laughter was soft, but that close, I could feel the sound reverberating in his chest.

If I'd been shot at close range right then, I'd have been unharmed. Completely unscathed. Not a scratch on me.

That was the power Romeo had over me.

Summer crawled by in a way that left me in no doubt whatsoever that there really was a tear in time. Days were long and weeks were short. It was boring and lovely and carefree, and I was so desperately in love with Romeo I could hardly think straight.

At the end of July, my parents rented a camper van and took a road trip to Isle Royale National Park. Lexi had finished college by then and was working in Detroit, and I'd already spent a full year at college. Still, it was the first time my parents felt comfortable leaving me home alone for more than a night or two.

I loved it. I used all the money they left me and ate nothing but pizza for the first three days. I hung out at Romeo's pool during the day, and at night, he came over and chilled at my place. The pace of life in Alabaster must have been getting to Kellie and Sean because, for the first time that summer, they found things to do that took them out of town.

I had Romeo all to myself, and let me tell you, I lapped that shit up. I gorged myself on his attention. I saw him morning, noon, and night and still wanted more. The day in question was a Thursday. It was mid-afternoon, and we'd eaten all the good snacks at Romeo's house and were at my place looking for something better.

"I could make nachos," I said after staring into the pantry cupboard for long enough to feel sure its contents weren't magically going to morph into something that didn't need cooking or effort.

"Hmm," said Romeo in that wistful way that let me know his attention was drifting. "Maybe later." His eyes didn't drift as much as I had expected. They started to wander and then stopped and livened instead. He tilted his head toward my dad's booze cabinet. "How 'bout something stronger?"

Now, Romeo and I had raided my dad's booze cabinet before. We'd taken our first drink together while sitting on Inferno a few years back after sneaking out one night. Both of us laughed our asses off at the faces we made as the liquor went down. We'd each gone to college with fake IDs in our wallets, but neither of us was a party animal. We had the odd drink now and again, but we didn't get shitfaced, let's put it like that.

Romeo suggesting a drink wasn't unheard of. It was something that had happened a bunch of times before, so I didn't think anything of it. I poured the bourbon—neat—into two of my dad's cut crystal tumblers and handed one to Romeo. Normally, when we drank, we took rushed swigs straight out of the bottle or decanted it into a mug or something like that for plausible deniability. The crystal made us feel so fancy we took turns saying, "Cheers" in terrible British accents and clanking our glasses together.

There was a heady freedom to knowing my parents were well and truly miles away. Maybe we still felt a little illegal about what we were doing, though, because we took the bottle and our tumblers upstairs to my room instead of drinking downstairs. Romeo sat on my bed, long legs crossed in front of him, back squished into the corner between the headboard and the wall. I had a big exercise ball in my room, and I sat unsteadily on that. Half-bouncing, half-rocking.

The bourbon went to my head. I could literally feel the first sip burn its way down my esophagus and then shoot up my chest and throat and sizzle my brain. My face felt warm. Too warm .

Romeo had grown pensive. When that happened, he either dipped into his own world by himself or pulled me in with him. That time, he did neither. He popped back up and gave me a mischievous quirk of his lips.

"So, like, you still a virgin, or what?" he asked. There was a steely seriousness to him that didn't match his words or his smirk.

I considered a lot of what had happened between Romeo and me before I left for college to be sex, but I knew what he meant, so I said, "Yeah. I am." It was the early rumbling of a conversation, just the bare bones of a dialogue between friends, but there were warnings going off in my spine that made me feel like it might be the exact exchange I'd dreamed of for years. "You?"

He smiled because we both knew the chance of something major happening to him and Romeo not calling to tell me immediately was slim to none. "Yep. Still got it. My cherry's intact. My V-card is unpunched." He took a small, careful sip of bourbon. "I'm pure as the driven snow." I snorted at that. I couldn't help it. "You surprise me though, Tiger. No girls for you?"

"No," I said quickly.

"No guys?" There was a lightness to the way he said it. An openness. An olive branch drenched in total acceptance .

Even though what Romeo did later was worse—way worse—that was my opening. That was my best friend saying It's okay if you're gay and I'll still love you and Let's be honest with each other , and I didn't take it. I lied. The lie wasn't that I'd been with other guys because I hadn't. I hadn't so much as kissed another man. No one but Romeo existed for me. Still, it was a lie. A big, serious lie that was woven into our friendship and would come back to haunt us. I've often asked myself why I lied, and the truth is uncomfortable in its simplicity: I lied because I'd played out the conversation we were having a million times in my mind. A million or more. And I didn't want my coming out to derail it.

"No," I said even quicker, "no guys." For good measure, I said it with a little indignance.

"Hmph." He stared into the bottom of his glass, turning it slowly in one hand as if looking into a Magic 8 Ball. "Lots of girls like you."

"Probably 'cause I'm so handsome," I teased.

"You are handsome." He said it as if it were a fact, and that tilted my entire world on its axis. "I've always wondered why you don't have sex with them."

"Dunno. Maybe I'm shy."

"You're not shy, Tiger."

He wasn't wrong. "Nah, I guess not. "

"I had the chance, you know, to have sex."

"You did?" That was news to me. I was interested. Not jealous exactly, just heightened in the same way I always was when Romeo spoke about things that pertained to his dick.

"Yeah, I did. It was this girl, Laine. She's a good friend of Kellie's, and Kellie unequivocally confirmed that she wanted to have sex with me. She wanted it for sure. It definitely wasn't my imagination."

I stifled a laugh. "So why didn't you do it?"

"I don't know." His voice had gone huskier than usual. "Maybe 'cause I really am shy." He looked vulnerable when he said it. Defenseless and unguarded. And, I swear, Romeo's vulnerability was like crack to me. "I kind of panicked, I think. I was going to do it, and then, I-I just felt like I couldn't because"—he raised his glass slightly so his mouth was covered, distorted by crystal—"because I hadn't done it with you first."

He said it so quietly I thought I'd imagined it. So quietly that it took me a while to piece it together.

If multiverses existed, if there are parallel realities out there, there is a Romeo somewhere that's locked in that moment. A Romeo that says because I hadn't done it with you first over and over, and a me that sits on the big exercise ball at my desk in my childhood bedroom, totally dumbstruck. Unable to move or speak. Unable to do anything but look into the pale, ocean eyes of the man I love.

That was it.

That was my moment.

The moment I'd spent so many hours thinking about that, sometimes, I think I somehow invoked everything that happened next.

"I could…we could…we could, like, take turns to…do it," I spluttered at last.

"Yeah?" He set the glass on my side table and sat up a little straighter.

I was talking fast and thinking slowly. "Yeah. I mean, it doesn't have to be a big deal or anything. We can just see what it feels like, and then we'll know, and—"

A kaleidoscope turned. Shyness and uncertainty dispersed and evaporated. Cool, calm, and assured replaced them. "So, who's going first?"

There was a pencil on my desk. One of those cheap yellow ones schools buy in bulk. I picked it up and snapped it between my fingers. "Long straw fucks, short straw has to take it?"

I couldn't feel my face when he nodded. I could barely make my hands work. I turned my back and shuffled the two halves of the pencil, lining the splintered ends up evenly and holding them out to Romeo. He was on his feet when I turned around, standing less than a foot away from me.

He chose the one on the right.

It was the long one.

He balled both fists, punched the air, and cried, " Yesss !"

It felt like my entire life had built to that moment. Like that very second was the reason I was made. The reason I existed. Everything between Romeo and me converged. Every smile, every laugh, every shared glance and inside joke. They all rushed toward me and met on the edge of something major. Something amazing.

I yanked my T-shirt off so hard and fast I heard a seam ripping. I dropped it on the floor, a little shocked and embarrassed by how fast I'd moved. I was about to start questioning whether it was too much or whether I should have acted a little cooler when Romeo reached out and dragged his fingers lightly through the trail of hair that ran from my navel and disappeared underneath the waistband of my shorts. A wave of arousal surged through me, so strong my vision rippled.

I started tugging at my button and stepping out of my shoes at the same time. I was moving at lightning speed. Romeo was in slow motion. His hands curled around the hem of his T-shirt, and he lifted it unhurriedly. More and more skin was gradually exposed. The same thing happened with his shorts. He undid them, eased them over his hips, and let them fall to the floor in a puddle around his bare feet.

It was the first time I'd ever seen him completely naked, and it was a sight so beautiful it was permanently branded onto my brain. His chest was smooth, nipples a soft dusky pink. Sal's pendant rested on his sternum. I'd seen it on him for years but had never touched it. I'd wanted to many times, but I hadn't. I did then. I touched it as if it were sacred. I touched him the same way. I ran a flat palm over the slight swell of his pec and down his left side. My hand inched down his belly, pausing and losing direction at the indented V that led to his cock. He was hard. His dick jutted out from his body at a slightly aggressive angle. Pink at the tip. Swollen and thick all the way to the base.

In all my dreams of that moment, I'd always imagined I'd be the one doing the fucking. I don't know why. It's just the way it was. Seeing Romeo hard and ready and knowing what he was going to do to me was an unfamiliar, vicious turn-on.

He was a little smaller than I was, which was something I loved thinking about, but still, I'd never put anything close to his size anywhere near my ass. The most I'd done was stick my middle finger up there when I jerked off. I'd done it a few times. It's not that I didn't like it. It felt kind of good. It just didn't rock my world the way guys on the internet said it would.

I was starting to have a little crisis of confidence, and at the same time, the urge to grab Romeo's dick and shove it in my mouth was becoming overwhelming.

I broke away from him before I did anything stupid and rummaged in my top drawer, whipping out the lube I kept there and tossing it to Romeo. My face colored from the mild shame of owning it at all, and for some stupid reason, I thought briefly about telling him I only used it on my dick.

If he felt any surprise that I had lube at the ready, he didn't show it. He flicked the cap and squirted a healthy amount into his hand. The reality of the situation I'd found myself in hit me in earnest the second he started coating his dick.

Fucking fuck.

He meant it.

It was happening. Not happening maybe at some distant point in the future. It was happening right then.

I took the two wooden steps required to get me to my bed and crawled onto it. I didn't look back, but I knew Romeo was smiling. Not smirking. Not quirking his mouth to the side. It was a soft, gentle smile that ran down my back and warmed me from head to toe. It took some of the awkwardness I was feeling and lit it on fire.

I knelt on all fours and spread my legs. When that made me feel too exposed, I grabbed a pillow and smooshed my face into it. Being face down, ass up didn't help at all with the feeling too exposed part, but it did give me something to bite down on when Romeo ran his hand up my inner thigh.

"I think I have to, like, open you or something," he murmured behind me.

I nodded into the pillow and didn't move a muscle. His touch was firm and sure. There was no hesitation. No warning. He sent a finger up my chute all the way to the knuckle.

"Fuck," he said softly.

" Fuuuuck ," I said loudly.

I groaned in shock as he started to move his finger in and out of me. A confusion of sensations assaulted me. A fullness. A sting. A burn that changed my groan into a grunt.

It was all so new. It felt nothing like when I'd done it to myself. I'd felt my own efforts on my finger and I felt this in my core. The burn turned to a simmering heat and the fullness quickly turned decadent. Everything doubled when he inserted another finger. He moved slowly, taking his time as my body and mind began rushing.

"D'you think that's enough, or should I—"

There was an urgency in me I hadn't felt before. A necessity. A need. It raged through me, leaving my thoughts blurry and my speech garbled. "Yeah, it's enough. Just do it," I slurred.

"Are you sure?" he checked.

"Are you definitely going to let me fuck you?"

"Yeah. I will." There was that smile again. Deeper and darker that time.

"Swear?"

"I swear."

"Then I'm sure."

I spread my legs wider and pushed my ass back. Behind me, I heard a barely audible gasp.

Fuck me, I loved it. That little gasp. I loved it more than I could remember loving anything. It injected warm honey into my veins and made my heart race.

Romeo dabbed a little more lube on my opening and lined himself up. The slick, blunt head of his cock hit a little too high and then a little too low before settling right where it was meant to be. He notched it into me and thrust gently. At first, that's all it was, a firm, constant pressure that gradually got harder. I shifted my hips and tried to keep my breathing even. The pressure on my hole intensified. I felt myself stretch, a deep, slow burn that made my face feel hot. My ass spasmed and tried to clench shut. Romeo's hands on my hips held me in place as he kept pushing in. A sudden bright burst of pain ripped through me as my muscle gave way. I buried my face in the pillow and cried into it, terrified he'd hear me and stop.

It hurt, but it hurt in a way that made me want more. It hurt in a way that spoke to something inside me. Something that knew it was about to get good.

And it did. Romeo worked me over slowly and thoroughly. Dipping his dick into me more and more with each thrust. Sawing in and out of me, soothing the burn and rubbing pure pleasure into me. It flowed through me. Up me and down me. Hitting me in the chest and making me throw my head back and roar. As I did it, Romeo caught me. He wrapped a hand around my chest and pulled me toward him, reaching around and taking my dick in his hand.

At first, he just held it in that too-soft, too-hard way that drove me insane. My hips started bucking to get more sensation on my cock. I got more dick in my ass for my efforts as well.

"Feels good, Tiger," whispered Romeo. His voice was hoarse and broken. " Feels so good."

I bucked harder, and Romeo's cock slid deeper inside me. So deep it took my breath away and began a slow dance between pleasure and pain. I didn't stop or slow down because I could tell Romeo liked it. He'd started to moan in time with my movements, and that drugged me with pleasure. It wasn't just the physical sensation I was into. It was mental too.

I loved being in his arms.

In his hand.

I loved taking him into my body.

Accommodating him. Housing him. Making him feel good.

"It's warm inside you." His hand had moved from my dick to my throat, and when he spoke, I felt his lips move against the nape of my neck. "So hot and so good."

My hand clamped onto my cock and started to jerk as if my life depended on it. Romeo's thrusts had grown spasmodic and hard. Frantic. Feral. He wasn't just moaning anymore. He was shouting his orgasm through tightly clenched teeth. A hot jet of semen erupted inside me, coating my insides, amplifying the slick sounds of his body crashing into mine.

My ass started to clamp down on him almost immediately, white-hot pleasure swelling inside me until survival seemed unlikely. It was unbearable. Intolerable. I couldn't contain it. I couldn't keep it inside.

So I didn't.

I let go.

I was powder. He was fire. He lit a match and razed me to the ground.

I let him.

When it was done, I fell forward onto my belly. He set me down gently and pulled out of me. The emptiness was a shock. I hated it. I whined from the shock before I had time to stop myself.

Romeo soothed me with soft sounds and hot hands on my back. He held himself up over me on his hands and knees, crooning into my ear, waiting until I calmed.

As he got off the bed, he leaned down and dropped a kiss right between my shoulder blades and another on the small of my back. Off-center. To the right of my spine.

Both kisses were soft. Feathery and light. So light I may have thought I'd imagined them if his lips hadn't punched open a portal straight to my soul.