Boston Boys [01] - A Life Without You (11 page)

My eyelids are so heavy, but before they can pull me into what A Life Without You
79

I hope to be a dreamless sleep, I hear rustling from Jesse’s bed.

He slips under my covers a minute later.

“You win,” he says, convulsing all over.

I turn to face him and wrap my body around him, resting his head against my chest. His figure settles into mine as if it was created to fit there. It’s not lost on me that this is the first time I’ve gotten to touch him for a whole week. “Sheesh, you weren’t kidding. You’re like a friggin’ icicle,” I say and try to relax my body to keep it from shivering.

“Hey, you knew what you were getting yourself into when you made that offer. You promised to keep me warm, so stop complaining and do your job.”

I smile into his hair and pull him closer. He’s completely naked. He didn’t even bring over his sheet. The knowledge of him being naked in my bed again has my mind reeling.

“Hey!” Jesse says when my penis hardens against his stomach.

I smile. “Sorry. Can’t be helped. Yours will do that too once you’ve stopped spazzing.”

“No it won’t,” Jesse mumbles.

But it does. After a few minutes he has stopped shivering and I feel the warmth spreading through his body. The first indication, though, was the hardness against my hip.

Jesse groans and buries his face further into my chest. His hand goes under my arm and clutches the shirt on my back.

And there it is again. His quiet, internal battle. He wants me. That’s evident from his lower regions, his stiff body, and his irregular breathing. He wants me, but he won’t betray Chirpy again. Or will he? For a moment I wonder exactly how far he wants me to go to warm up his body.

I slowly stroke my palm over his back, and let it linger suggestively at the base of it, right where his spine turns into a tailbone. My other hand is pressed against his shoulder blade, and I’m pulling him tightly against my chest so that he can’t tear himself free.

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“Adam,” he whispers. I can barely detect the moan he’s forcing back down his throat. He wants it so badly. His body is smoldering hot, just like mine. I want to yank off my clothes to be as close to him as I can, but I’m pretty sure that’s past the hands-off boundaries he’s set me.

“Adam, just talk to me, okay?”

“About what?” I whisper into his hair, my own voice deep with desire.

“Just, anything.”

“Anything?” I ask, trying to focus on anything other than Jesse’s intoxicating presence and his hard cock piercing my hip.

I can’t think of anything. “How about you breaking up with Anne?” slips out before I can stop it. As much as I try to suppress the subject it’s always foremost in my mind. I close my eyes and sigh through my nose.

“I don’t want to argue tonight,” he says after a moment of silence.

“Then can we talk about it without arguing?” I suggest, removing my hand from the small of his back to rest securely between his shoulder blades.

“Fine,” he says with a defeated sigh. “But it’s not gonna do any good. I’m not breaking up with her and I won’t cheat on her again.”

“Technically you aren’t, since she only makes you promise not to touch other girls,” I point out with a curl of my lips.

I hear the smile in Jesse’s breath. “It’s cheating. That first kiss thing was a dare, that bathroom thing just sort of happened, but a week ago…was deliberate on my part. I consciously cheated and I feel like shit about it. It’s just that I never thought I’d be the unfaithful type.”

“And if I dare you to let me suck you again?” His reply is a brief burst of a laugh.

“Would you have kissed a girl if Eric dared you to that night at the party?” I continue.

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“No, that would have been different,” says Jesse.

“How so?”

“I don’t know…it just feels more like cheating than kissing a guy.”

“So you wouldn’t be cheating if you were with me, right?”

“Nice try,” he laughs. “This has gone so much further than just cheating, Adam. It’s a bad thing to cheat by having sex with someone else but a whole other thing when you start having feelings for that person.”

I tighten my grip on his body while he continues.

“I just feel so guilty. I don’t even know if I should tell her I’ve been messing around with someone… She’d go nuts.
I’d
go nuts if the shoe was on the other foot.”

“If she cheated on you with a girl?”

Jesse opens his mouth against my shirt to answer but closes it again.

“Tell her, Jesse,” I whisper into his hair, but change tactic when I feel his body tense up for protest. “Tell her that you’ve been fooling around with a guy,” I say, going in for a tease.

His body relaxes for a moment before he shakes again with giggles. “Yeah right. No way in hell will those words ever pass my lips.”

I laugh with him, but no matter how often he says that it stings every time. He makes the idea of us being in an open relationship sound so unnatural and dirty.

“I know I’m being a jerk to you, Adam, and I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

I don’t answer. I just move my hand to stroke his cheek tenderly. He doesn’t see that he’s not just being a jerk to me; he’s being a jerk to himself if he truly loves me. He’s also being a jerk to Chirpy for planning to marry her without being in love with her.

We lie still for a long time before he speaks again.

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“I’m so sorry you don’t have a family to go to over Christmas,” he whispers. “Is it okay to ask how your parents died?”

“Yeah, it’s fine,” I say into his hair. “My dad left when I was little, so it was always just me, my mom, and my grandma. I was eight when my drunken mom was crossing the street and got hit by a truck. She died two days later. Then my grandma died last year for no apparent reason other than old age. And about a month after that, I got a letter from a lawyer saying that my dad had passed away, too, from a heart attack. He didn’t have another family, so I inherited his money which I’m using to pay for college.”

“That’s a lot of deaths. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks, but I’m really okay. We weren’t exactly a loving bunch. Mom was very indifferent, always choosing booze over food. I don’t remember her ever giving me a hug. Grandma fed me, but she was a feisty old woman who hated the fact that I was gay. She even tried to beat it out of me. I didn’t know my dad; I didn’t even go to his funeral.”

“God, I’m so sorry. That’s so different from my family,” Jesse whispers and tightens his embrace.

“Well, I suppose it prepared me for life, so it was a good thing after all. I’ve learned to rely on myself, to take people at face value, and to never get my hopes up.”

Jesse buries his head further into my chest. I wonder if he’s also thinking that I’ve been struggling with that last one for the past few months.

“What will you do on Christmas?” he asks, his voice a little muffled.

My hand moves from his back and slides down his thigh. I pull his knee over my leg, just like I did last time, and Jesse’s breath rattles. I could use this. He’s sympathetic and I could use it to make him give in. But it wouldn’t be right.

“Adam, please,” Jesse whispers into my chest, his breath hot through my shirt.

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I move my hand back up and keep it on the middle of his back, forcing myself to keep it still. His knee stays where I left it against my hip.

“What will you do on Christmas?” he repeats.

“I’ll be here, thinking of you. Missing you,” I whisper into his hair. I clutch him against my body and bury my face in his soft hair. It smells so fresh with faint lime fragrance.

I don’t know which one of us fell asleep first. I remember Jesse’s breathing slowing with my own, just as I could no longer keep my eyes open. When I woke up, our bodies were still wrapped around each other, feet still entangled, his face still firm against my chest. The only difference was that his hand had found its way under my shirt and was resting on my bare back.

The sun rose and cast a warm ray over us. I had a sudden flashback of our first night together, only I wasn’t wearing clothes back then, and we weren’t quite so intimately pressed against one another. I realized that we had come a long way and yet it seemed like we were still on square one. But still, I had made love to his body, I had kissed his soft lips, and I had confessed my love for him in every way without using the actual words and he had done the same. I realized that I had never felt so helpless, desperate, happy and hurt at the same time before.

But tonight is the night before he goes home for the holidays and I want to cling to his feet and cry like a toddler to make him stay. I don’t want to be a whole month away from him. I don’t want him to see Chirpy again. I especially don’t want him touching Chirpy.

There’s a raving party in every dorm, kids celebrating the last day of exams. Bass thumps along the walls from downstairs and I hear the faint shrieking and laughter of people. Jesse is stuffing his bag with dirty clothes so his mom can wash them. He’s been piling up for the occasion.

“Adam, have you seen my red T?”

“In the bathroom,” I reply. I have Jane Eyre in front of me, but I keep reading the same line and yet I have no understanding
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of what I’m reading.

Jesse retrieves his t-shirt, turns on the shower, and tosses his shirt into the bulging bag on his bed.

“You okay?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder to where I’m sitting on my bed.

“Fine,” I mumble and turn a page. This page is Latin to my eyes as well. I’m not being good company right now. I’m sure that if I keep this up, Jesse will go downstairs and join the party.

“Hey,” he says and sits down next to me. “So I’ve been thinking,” he says but doesn’t continue. He explores his palm with the thumb of his other hand. His dirty-blonde bangs droop into his eyes.

“What?”

Jesse takes a deep breath. “It’s just that a month is a very long time, and it’ll just be you and Eric in the house.” That’s right. Eric made a last-minute cancellation on his trip to visit his parents because they won an overseas trip over the holidays. He’s been bitching non-stop about them not taking him with them.

“And?” I ask. Jesse’s gone quiet again.

“It’s just that when we were at the mall that time, when I was asking you all these questions about your past and you talked about you doing your ex and stuff...” His voice fades.

I stare down at Jesse, but he’s still focused on his palm. “What has that got to do with anything?”

“I’ve told you this before,” he mumbles. “I don’t…like the idea of someone touching you. Or you touching someone…” –

he glances up at me – “…else.”

“Jesse, that was long ago. Long before I met you.”

“I know, I know. I just don’t want anyone else touching you, that’s all. And I know it’s so selfish because I have a girlfriend and all, I just wanted to…
remind
you that the idea of you being with someone else makes my whole body ache.” A Life Without You
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I can’t suppress the smile spreading over my lips. Yeah, he’s being a bitch by asking me to be faithful to him when he’s got no right to. There’s also the fact that he’s not gonna be faithful to
me
.

But how can I tell the man that I love to shove it and mind his own business? Especially when he phrases it like that?

“Don’t worry, Jesse.” I cup his face with my palm and force him to look at me. His eyes flicker from the wall behind me, to my eyes, and back to the wall. “I won’t let anyone else touch me, and I wouldn’t dream of touching anyone but you.” My lips hover over his, just an inch from a kiss. He wants me for himself and that makes me so happy that I wouldn’t know how to begin to explain it, but I still don’t know how he wants this to play out. I don’t know what he wants our relationship to be like if he’s going to insist on me being exclusive to him. It sparks another gleam of hope in my chest. I think I’ll need to confront him about this after he gets back, but I don’t want to talk about it now, because I know we’ll end up arguing. But once he gets back I’ll need to know where I stand. I’ll need to know if I mean enough for him to become exclusive to me as well.

“Oh hell,” he whispers with a breath just before he reaches for the kiss. Soft, wet, and deep. I slide one hand around his slim waist and hold his head firmly with my other. I don’t know if I can go gentle on him this time. The hunger inside me is ripping me apart.

I break our kiss to pull the shirt over his head. Jesse gasps when I push him down on the bed and yank off his pants. He’s not wearing underwear as usual and I shudder with pleasure at the sight of his cock, big, hard, and ready for me.

“Adam, wait,” he whispers when I begin to stroke his cock.

“No Jesse, I have to have you. Now,” I half-whisper half-growl.

Jesse swallows hard and takes a few panting breaths. “It’s just that I was gonna take a shower – umn.” I kiss him full on the lips and suck on his tongue and lower lip with a groan. I loosen my jeans and pull off my shirt. “I want
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you, Jesse. All of you. I have to have you,” I whisper against his skin, fully aware that I’m forcing him into it, but if he wants me exclusive over the holidays he will let me do this.

“Mmh,” Jesse moans when I slide my tongue back into his mouth.

I grab his cock and move it back and forth. Jesse leaks precome and I’m about to go down to lick it when he stops me, using force to keep my upper body against his.

“Jesse, I –”

“The shower,” he whispers into my ear. “I want to do it in the shower.”

As if I wasn’t aroused enough already, hearing those words makes my heart throb in my throat. I give him a long, deep kiss before I pull him off the bed and push him into the shower where I corner him against the tiles and lace my fingers through his. My blue jeans hang on my hips and soak through in no time.

His lips taste so sweet, wet and slippery. I lick the water from his chest, shoulder, neck and cheek. Jesse moans and when I slide my tongue over his nipple he throws his head back with a whimper. I pull his thigh over my hip and explore areas I haven’t properly touched before. The firm sacks between his legs, the line that runs between them, the tight rim of his ass.