I stood and glared at the sofa that’d hosted me last night, jaw clenched, fists balled at my sides, as if it was somehow responsible for all this. But…no. It came from me, that…thing …that happened, there, last night, and it owed nothing whatever to my expectation that I would find Halley was female, and not a lot to him being on the handsy side of things.
It happened because I was into him. Into him, knowing he was a him…I flopped down on the sofa and dropped my head in my hands. Fuck…
Should I just leave? I thought. No, I can’t. I’d have to have an explanation, and there isn’t one. He knows I got my shifts covered. He knows I’ve been looking forward to this for, like, forever. He knows I had a great time last night. He was there.
Now I was back at the scene of the crime, the dream itself kept intruding. In some ways I didn’t want to dwell on it, but in other ways I absolutely did – because it was a superb dream. I mean, I wanted to not be thinking of it like that, but I was anyhow, and…well, it was.
Ugh, it totally was…the sun was still slanting in, currently bathing the spot where I sat, and now I wasn’t encased in a sleeping bag, it was nice. Relaxing.
I sat up, leaned back, closed my eyes – relaxed. After a while I drifted into that beautiful half-sleeping state where time goes all bendy and nothing really matters, and Halley was there on the inside of my eyelids, lit up and dancing, dancing just out of reach…
I wanted to touch him. I ached to touch him. His vampire-pale skin, his eyebrows so expressive, his hair so…Halley. I loved the way he bit a corner of his mouth just before he smiled, like every time he was trying not to, and failing. Mmm, and the way he wore his whole self on the surface, and god I loved the length of him, the way he drooped and draped over his surroundings…
His surroundings, including me…last night while I slept those handsy hands of his were everywhere, and the sense of it lingered even now. My skin hummed with the memory, electric and enlivened, and it felt good. It felt amazing.
I started to touch myself, just gently, reveling in my heightened sensitivity as I grazed the skin of one arm with the very tips of the fingers of the other hand, eyes closed. Up and down, up and down, imagining it was somebody else exploring me…
The latch clicked and Halley appeared through the door in dark pants and a somewhat smeared white jacket with two rows of black buttons and a little embroidered logo at the breast. He did a slight double take before grinning quizzically at me.
“Um, hello…?”
If the vision of him I’d been entertaining in my head was hot, the reality, as it stood before me, was too fucking much…
“God. Damn.” I hissed, and unfortunately there was no mistaking my tone. Honestly, where’s the brain-mouth filter when you need it the absolute most?
But Halley never flinched. Instead, he laughed.
“You don’t want a piece of me ’til after I’ve showered off the sweat and cornstarch,” he said. “Trust me on that one, bud…”
He flitted away in the direction of the bathroom, leaving me blinking in confusion, my mind filled with half-formed questions. Whoa. What was that? What did he-? How am I gonna-?
I hadn’t got even halfway through the list before Halley re-appeared, towelling his hair, his lower half featuring badly ripped jeans perched low on his hips, and on top another iteration of the white jacket from before, this one crisp and pristine – unbuttoned.
He dropped the towel on the floor and ran both hands vigorously through his hair before perching on the sofa beside me, angling himself slightly my way, and swallowed nervously.
“I, uh, put a clean one on. Because…you seemed to like it?”
I nodded wordlessly. I did. I do. But I like what’s underneath it even more…My hand slowly crept toward him almost of its own accord. I watched, still wondering what this was, where it came from. I didn’t need to ask myself where it was going. That was becoming increasingly obvious…
The backs of my fingers just grazed the nubs of the banana bar at his bellybutton – god it suited him – before my hand disappeared behind the jacket’s curtain and made contact with his side, at the soft part, between hip and ribs. The flesh shrank under my palm as he inhaled, then returned warm and yielding when he let go. I swept higher, feeling the undulations of his ribs, and underneath skin and bone noticed the same rapid give and release of breath…
I brought my hand to the centre, spreading on the hard plane of his sternum, out in the open now, where we could both see – see that this was actually happening…
I am touching you. You.
Finally, I dared raise my eyes to his, and I saw my own internal state mirrored there. The confusion, the questioning, the fear, the fascination – and the raging whitewater appetite scouring it all away down to the rock, the bone, the ineluctable fact – of this.
Halley took my hand and put it in his lap, palm up, holding the thumb with one hand and the pinky with the other. He squeezed briefly, cleared his throat, moistened his lips.
“So…” he began, “um, confession time, Bede. I haven’t…I mean, I guess I always knew I was bi – in theory – but I’ve never actually done anything with a guy before. Just – yeah. Mm.”
He was wiggling my fingers now, kinda rolling each of them between his own thumb and forefinger.
I watched. Confession time. Yeah.
“Well, if you always knew then you’re a step ahead of me, because this just hit me…kinda…yesterday…”
He bit his lip, but the grin leaked out. “And now?”
And now? Now I had the strangest feeling of fate having led me here, to this day, these precise coordinates. A sense that this was always gonna happen at some point. I may not exactly have realised it, but I knew it all the same. A big gay moment was pre-ordained in my timeline, and now it’d found me, I understood I’d been waiting for it all my life…
I grinned back. “I’m all in.”
It broke some kind of dam, me saying that – some something that’d been holding him back from just reaching out and taking. He stood, closed his fingers around my wrist, hauled me to my feet and started for his bedroom. Two paces later he stopped and whirled around, leaned in, looming over me, the jacket swinging wide for an instant, exposing his gloriously bony torso as he reached out and took hold of the nape of my neck, fingers spreading up into my hair, and-
God, it was the weirdest thing. I’d pulled that exact move myself so many times, but never been on the receiving end…it felt so alien and new but then when he kissed me and I could just sag back and rest in his palm, it made all the sense in the world…
I don’t remember how we got to the bed. I do know that we never came apart on the way, and that once we got there the intensity ramped up even more – it was messy and desperate and visceral, like we were each trying to climb into the other, and the only reason it wasn’t working was because we were canceling one another out – which obviously meant we had to try harder. And harder.