22. “Give me my Romeo”

22

"Give me my Romeo"

Now

We're back home, and Selby's even drunker than I am. She's bouncing around topics, starting and stopping, talking loudly enough to strip paint off the walls. "I'm telling you, Rome, if they don't get that print delivered by Monday, they're going to regret it. I'll go down there to speak to the manager. Don't think I won't." Rome? Rome? My blood boils. He's not a fucking Italian city! He's a lover. The world's best, most passionate lover. I turn to correct her, but fortunately, she's moved on to the next topic already. "Did you give it to him?"

"Give him what?" asks a tired-sounding Romeo.

"His birthday present, dumb-dumb." She laughs and slaps her thigh but misses, momentarily upsetting her balance. She corrects with some effort. "You took so long to find it, and now that he's here, you've forgotten to give it to him. I swear, you'd forget…" She looks around the room, mentally ticking off things Romeo has forgotten or misplaced in the past, laughing so hard she hiccups. " Holy shit, I can't see a single thing in this room you haven't already lost or forgotten."

Romeo smiles thinly and says, "It's late. I'll give it to him tomorrow."

"Noooo," wails Selby. " Now! Give it to him now!"

I'm watching them, my head flicking back and forth between them, and the room spins slightly each time I do it. I can't tell exactly what I'm feeling about the fact that Romeo seems to have bought me a birthday present without knowing he would be seeing me, but I'm definitely feeling something.

"Now!" Selby says again, this time landing a hard, tacky slap on Romeo's ass to spur him on. She turns to me conspiratorially. "It's terrible, Jude. Tell him you hate it so he knows I was right. 'Kay? Will you do that for me?"

Romeo returns, his mouth a hard line, and presses a gift into my hands. The paper is thin and crumpled and there's a rip in it where a card has been torn off. I open it before I'm sure of where I've landed on telling him I hate it or not. I can't quite decide who I want to upset more right now, Selby or Romeo. The paper tears easily, exposing soft, buttery fabric and a loud, garish print. It's pants. Pajama pants. Orange with a black stripe.

"Whoa," I say as the biggest, dumbest grin of all time takes over my face. "Tiger pants. Neat! "

"Oh, Jude." Selby shakes her head in a cocktail of sympathy and disgust. "They're so ugly. Try them on. You'll see. Go." She waves me down the hall to the guest room and takes a purposeful step or two toward me with her arm swinging back. I take one look at her face and set off at a brisk trot before she has time to swat my behind as well. "Go, go, go!"

While I'm in my room changing, I make three frantic calls to Lexi. I'm shocked and outraged when she doesn't answer, despite the fact it's well past midnight and I know full well she has her phone on downtime between nine p.m. and seven a.m. She calls it balance and Adulting 101. I send her several messages, the urgency cranking up with each one, and then check Romeo's Instagram out of pure habit. Nothing has changed. He still hasn't posted in years. Not since he posted the photograph of me and him sitting on the couch at my house, mouths stuffed full of popcorn, the summer I thought would never end. After that I scroll through my followers, trying yet again to work out which one of them is Romeo's alternate account. Again, I can't find one that stands out.

When it finally dawns on me that I'm keeping everyone waiting, I step out into the hall, shirtless and barefoot, the drawstring of my tiger pants still undone .

Romeo leans against the wall opposite my bedroom door. The house is darker than when I went into my room. Most of the lights downstairs have been turned off. Only the stair lights are still on.

"Where's Selby? I thought she wanted to see me in the new pants."

He shrugs and tilts his head toward the stairs without breaking eye contact. "Guess she got bored of waiting."

"Oh."

The mood has changed. It was light and loose when I went into my room, but now it's different. That's probably my imagination. It's probably more a product of me being a drunken idiot than anything else. I suddenly feel more stupid than usual, and self-conscious on top of it too. "W-what do you think?"

Romeo's gaze slides down my body like something hot and runny. Something I feel on my skin just as surely as if he were touching me.

Huh?

Hang on. Did that really just happen, or do I need to add hallucinations to my ever-growing list of mental health concerns?

Jesus. How drunk am I? Of course he didn't look at me like that. His wife, the woman he married, is waiting for him upstairs. In bed .

Romeo leans his head against the wall behind him and grazes his teeth over his bottom lip, leaving the soft, pink flesh glittering in the low light. "I think you should do up the drawstring before you find yourself with your pants around your ankles…that's what I think."

Wait. What?

It's not just me, right? That was sexually charged, wasn't it?

I look down, head spinning from the motion, and find he's right. The pants hang low on me, and the waistband is loose, clinging to my hips with less than a breath to spare. I watch my hands fumble with the ties, fingers thick and spongy, all signs of dexterity well and truly lacking. I take a step or two toward him, so distracted by the effort of tying a bow that I momentarily forget to fight the force that draws me to him.

I find myself a hairsbreadth away from him.

His hand floats up, long graceful fingers stretched out toward me. For a really mad second, I find myself thinking he's going to rake them through the trail of hair that leads from my naval to my cock. He used to do that. He did. I remember that. He liked it. I know he did. I'm fucking sure he did .

"A-are you trying to seduce me?" I whisper as if keeping my tone low somehow makes the question less embarrassing.

His eyes spark like moonlight hitting glass as they continue to roam my body. A wave of lust washes over me. Before I have time to brace, another one hits me. And another, and another. My words hang in the air, bobbing and dipping between us.

He speaks at last. "But, Jude," he says reasonably, "if I was trying to seduce you, wouldn't I be naked with your dick in my ass?"

My breath hitches, catching in my throat and strangling me so hard it leaves me spinning. It's not just that he said it. It's that he said it. That he acknowledged what we were, what we used to do to each other. What we used to be to each other. What I like, and what he likes too. He never used to talk about it. In all the time I've known him, he's never talked about it like this.

It makes me physically ache. For what we were. For what we could have been.

It makes me want to scream. It makes me want to open my lungs and roar for the ages. For the men and women like us. For the people who don't fit neatly into either of those distinctions. It makes me want to break time, to tear it open with my teeth and howl the same thing my heart has been weeping since that awful night five years ago. " Give him back. Please, give him back to me ."

"So, like, do you buy me something every year for my birthday, or what?" Not sure how I managed to string all that together, but I'm pretty pleased with the effort.

"Yep. Birthdays…" he says dreamily. "Christmas too."

"Oh." I nod as though that makes complete sense when, in fact, it makes less than none. "What do you do with them? The gifts, I mean."

"Box in the attic." He raises a shoulder as if that explains everything.

He leans back against the wall again, blinking slowly. This time, as he does it, his mouth twitches. His lips quirk, parting slightly up and to the right, giving me a tiny glimpse of a glossy canine. It's a small thing, the space between his lips. A little half-moon between a fleshy top and bottom lip.

My brain cuts out.

My dick sees an opening.

I lower my mouth onto his without any warning and press my tongue into that space, sweeping it across smooth enamel, licking and tasting him before I can stop myself. His eyes fly open in shock. Mine do too.

I mean to pull away. I do. I mean to pull away, apologize, and castigate myself wholeheartedly for the extent of the fuckery at hand. I can't, though, because he's wrapped a hand around the back of my neck like a vine, locking me tightly in place. He opens his mouth, moans into mine, and my soul starts to fray, coming loose at the edges. Romeo moans again. It's a soft and husky sound, and it feels and tastes and sounds like one thing. One thing only.

More.

My jaw drops open.

We crash together and his tongue finds mine and takes it as if it's his. As if it's always been his. My body reacts instantly. Every cell is aflame. On fire. I'm a rampant inferno of want. Years of tears come to a head and erupt. Spilling out of me in a lust so thick and dense, he's forced to swallow it down, taking it from me and twisting it, turning it, changing it until it's something else altogether.

He kisses me hard, teeth scraping my lips and colliding with his. He tears at my skin, my arms, and my back, slamming his hips against mine, grinding our cocks together until I'm blind with desire.

Reality shrieks my name, hitting me like a splash of ice water to the face, and I push him back so hard I hear the hollow sound of air leaving his lungs as he hits the wall behind him. I step back, too, gasping for breath and hoping like hell the rush of oxygen will bring a strong dose of common sense .

" Romeo! What the fuck are you doing? You're married." He looks dulled, removed, struck dumb. He fingers his bruised bottom lip, stroking it and pushing it into his mouth, running his tongue slowly across it as if he's savoring the taste of my kiss. When he releases it, I say, " You're married." This time, I say it for my own benefit more than his. It's a hiss. An accusation. A demand for an explanation.

"You're hard," he says as if that's an answer.

"Fuck you, asshole," I spit. "Hard? You think this is hard?" I drag the heel of my palm over my raging erection, expelling a rushed groan through my teeth from the storm of sensation it wakes. My anger dissipates, dissolving and scattering as he watches. "This isn't hard. I'm not hard. It's more than hard, Romeo. It's pain. I'm in pain ."

His eyes cloud and his Adam's apple rides up and down his throat as he swallows something that doesn't go down easily. Regret, I'd say if I still had any faith in my ability to read Romeo, but I don't, so I'm stunned when he whispers, "Let me help you."

"Don't," I warn, but instead of staying where I am, I find my body moving toward him again, dragged closer by a gravitational force I'm powerless to resist. "Don't you dare touch me. "

He presses his lips together, stifling a whimper, and nods, taking hold of the tip of the tie of my pants while taking care not to touch my body, and pulls at it gently. I tied it tightly in my earlier stupor so it doesn't come undone without some convincing, but he doesn't give up. He works it, pulling carefully but hard, still not touching my skin, until, at last, the thing keeping us apart unravels.

For all he's done, for all the misery he's caused me, he has the decency to respect what I've asked of him. He doesn't touch me. He sinks to his knees at my feet, fully dressed but undone, looking up at me with stars in his eyes as he inches my pants over my hips slowly. I buck and writhe, blinking frantically in an attempt to wake up.

If this is a dream, I need to wake up.

Now.

I need to wake up now because it will kill me to wake up later and find that it didn't happen.

It's no dream, though, because when the throbbing heat of my cock is exposed, he inhales like he's been holding his breath, mouth open, eyes wild, and I feel the air he expels like a soft caress on my naked balls.

That doesn't happen in dreams. Believe me, I know. I've dreamed dreams like this more times than I can count. I know how they start and how they end. He holds his right hand out near his head, palm open in surrender, as if that's meant to set me at ease. The left drifts toward my cock, clenching into a fist that he digs his teeth into when it gets too close to me.

"Please, Jude," he whines against his knuckles. I can't tell if it's the sound he makes, or the way he looks up at me, or maybe it's the fact I wasn't lying. I am in pain. I'm so hard, there's a high, whirring sound in my ears and my heart is beating like it means to harm me. Either way, my hand clamps around my dick without a single thought in my head, and I jack it like a man possessed. Pleasure and pain engulf me. Visions of Romeo then and Romeo now taunt me. Laughing and lapping at me until I'm leaking. Long strokes, short strokes, then quick frenzied tugs that make my eyes roll back in my head. Romeo doesn't blink. He doesn't move other than to let both hands fall to his thighs and open his mouth, showing me the soft, pink wetness inside. I almost black out from the sight of Romeo. My Romeo. My lover, my enemy, my life, on his knees at my feet.

There's a pause in pleasure, a full second or more when everything falls silent, when all that's left is a quiet certainty. An unshakable inevitability. A promise of gratification that can't be undone. It's already been written. There's a beat, and then my orgasm rips through the walls and the floor. Through me and through time .

Despite the force and brutality, I have time to decide, to weigh my options. Do I aim for the floor, or do I blast my seed all over Romeo's perfect face?

To my surprise, I go with neither.

Instead, I grab him by the hair and fuck hard and deep into his open mouth, unloading a lifetime of heartbreak and resentment, choking him on the pain that's defined my adult life.

He doesn't falter. He swallows everything I give him and, for good measure, wipes the last drops off his lips with his thumb, then raises it to his lips and licks what's there too.

And to think I thought I was a mess before last night. Comparatively, I had my shit together big time. Back then, I was just a heartbroken fool. Now, I'm a man who messaged his sister thirty-four times and the guy managing the renovation at our house nine times last night. Each message grew more desperate and more unhinged, urging him to grout the family bathroom upstairs and turn the water back on so I can move back into my house tomorrow or the next day. Added to that, I jerked off to Romeo on his knees so many times I still feel a little drunk this morning.

I am very hungover, though, so I don't think I am drunk-drunk, just cum-drunk, which, when you think about it, is way worse, given that I'm now also a cheater. An adulterer.

Wait. Am I the adulterer, or is Romeo?

Or is it one of those works-both-ways kinds of things?

Fuck. I don't know.

Maybe I should call Lexi and ask her? Seems like the kind of thing she'd know.

But no. Obviously not. No, I'm not going to call her. I can't. After the messages I sent her last night, I might have to drown my SIM card and torch my phone. Might have to change my name legally and leave the country all together.

"Jude!" Selby calls brightly. She's mixing pancake batter with fervor and her mood is that of a person impervious to hangovers. "Morning! How did you sleep?" Before I can answer, she gives Romeo a knowing smile and cocks a brow at my sleep shorts. "See, I told you he wouldn't like the pants."

The pants in question are currently covered in so much semen I've rolled them into a ball and shoved them into the bottom of my luggage because I'm not sure what else to do with them. I don't think there's a wash cycle in the US that can bring them back from what they've been through.

Romeo gives me a look. A smile with his eyes, not his lips. "Oh, he likes them just fine."

My hand shakes so much as they bicker that coffee runs down the side of my mug. After breakfast, I offer to clean up. "And thanks again for having me," I say to Selby, guilt stabbing at my side so hard my eyes water. "Really, it's, uh, a lot, and I-I appreciate it."

"Oh, it's nothing." She waves me off and looks in Romeo's direction. "It's been nice to see that one with a smile on his face for once."

I keep my eyes firmly down to avoid looking at "that one" and say, "I'm going to get out of your hair today, you know, give you guys a little time to yourselves."

My attempt not to look at Romeo has failed. He's watching me with an intensity that could cut glass. His eyes are hooded and dark. Unreadable except to tell me I'm playing with fire.

"Yeah?" he says, taking care to keep his tone light. "What are you going to get up to?"

Asshole!

He knows damn well I don' t have plans.

"I, er, lake. The lake. I'm going to take a drive to Glen Lake. Haven't been there in years. I'm going to get lunch out there and won't be back until dinner."

Selby's lost interest in my dumb, spluttery ass, so she turns her attention to Romeo. "Hey, what do you say we take the gallery pics down in the bedroom and get the wall ready for the new print?"

"Sure," Romeo says. "Why not."

"I just hope they deliver it tomorrow. I'm going to lose my mind if they don't. It's been two and a half weeks since we got back from the honeymoon redo already. Almost three, actually. I mean, Jesus, I know it's a small town and all that, but surely there has to be a smidge of customer service, you know? Just like a little attention to detail and effort."

Romeo sighs, though I can tell he's trying not to, and I hear my voice interject, clear as a bell. "Honeymoon redo? Why'd you have to have a redo? Didn't you honeymoon in Hawaii?"

I know for a fact they did. Selby posted pics of beaches and palm trees with cliché romantic quotes on her social media the entire time she was there. Each post made me sicker than the last. At the time, I thought it would kill me.

Romeo's face goes as hard as I've ever seen it. Selby's comes to life .

"Well," she says, widening her eyes in a way that lets me know she enjoys the hell out of telling this story. "We had the worst time on our first honeymoon."

Huh? What now? Who has a bad time on their honeymoon?

"Seriously, it was a disaster. Can't believe Rome didn't tell you. Men. God, you really don't tell each other anything. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, so it started before the wedding even ended. We were still at the venue and Romeo took a bit of a turn. You know when he goes all quiet and spacey?" I nod. "Well, it was like that, but he was white as a sheet. Now, to my mind, it was the shrimp. What else could it have been? The hotel has sworn black and blue it wasn't. Excellent suppliers, top-notch chefs, perfect food preparation practices, you name it, they threw it at me when I complained, but I know it was that fucking shrimp. You know when you just know something?"

I nod again, or I think I do, at least. I'm not sure.

"We'd already paid for the hotel, and I figured, it's fiiine , he'll rally, but when I tell you he didn't…I mean, he didn't at all . He barely left the chalet the entire time we were there. He couldn't eat. He could barely lift his head off the pillow. We didn't consummate the marriage until three weeks after we got home. "

She laughs riotously, and Romeo says, "Jesus Christ, Selby."

A chill runs down my spine. I remember that night. The wedding. I remember it as if it happened yesterday. I remember it as if it's still happening now. As if part of me has lived there, in that parking lot, for half a decade.

I look at Romeo until he has no choice but to look back. When our eyes meet, his are haunted. There's a truth in them. A terrible, vast, boundless truth.