Falling (15 page)

“I want to suck you,” he says, still breathless.

“Just your hand,” I say shaking my head and burying my face in his hair. Some things I want to save for in private, so I can lose myself. Out here we are far too exposed.

Carefully he unzips my jeans and strokes my cock like he can’t get enough of the feel of it, both hands rubbing, quick then slow, hard then soft. I’m so turned on I feel vulnerable, ready to do anything to keep his hands on me. Though I can’t quite let go like Angus did—I’m still shocked by how quickly he lost all his inhibitions and trusted me to take care of him like that. None of my quick hookups ever lost it like that.

And I never felt like this.

I grip him tight as I feel my orgasm build and Angus settles into a rhythm, stroking me hard and fast.

As he pulls me over the edge, I feel I am charging through the dark into oblivion. My breath sobs in and out, and I hope that Angus doesn’t hear it, that he doesn’t know the way I just about broke inside.

We keep our arms around each other. I’m afraid to pull away, afraid to face his expression. Afraid to face the world outside of this moment, the line I have crossed.

“People say first times are always crap. They are so wrong,” he whispers, and I can hear the way he is smiling, feel it against my skin.

“That was your first time?” I swallow, pulling back to look at him.

He looks completely elated and so sexy and warmly inviting—all dark eyes and swollen lips—whereas I’m feeling pretty crap that his first time was a quickie in the back of my falling-apart car.

“Yeah.” Again he looks as though he wants to say something more but he doesn’t.

His face and neck are still flushed with arousal and I know he could probably go another round (as perhaps could I), but not here.

“We should, um, clean up,” I say gently, sensing movement, people nearby.

What we just did was a little reckless, and being reckless isn’t really my thing. I wipe myself with a tissue and zip my jeans back up, still feeling sticky and a little gross.

“You’re not… you don’t… regret it?” Angus asks hesitantly as I open the door to get out.

“Not a single fucking second,” I say thickly, my gaze fixed on his.

“I
THINK
you should get your foot checked out to make sure it’s not infected,” I say as we’re driving back toward London. “You never know what sort of crap is chucked in the sea. There could be sewage, anything.”

“And I was thinking you taking me to see the sea was all romantic.”

Angus can’t stop smiling. I don’t think he’s stopped since… well, since we got each other off in the back of the car.

It’s only early afternoon, but already the sunlight is hazy as we drive across the downs. I can’t remember a more beautiful winter’s day—clear and cold, the world icily defined at the edges, the colors all muted greens and grays.

I try to keep my eyes on the road, but I know Angus keeps looking at me. I don’t mind, I just… don’t know. Every time I catch his eye, I feel a giddy rush of
something
, as though I’m back at school crushing on someone so hard it takes my breath away. And it is ridiculous to feel like that at twenty-five, so fucking ridiculous, but at the same time, it’s wonderful, and there is no way I want it to stop.

We don’t talk much. The tension between us is nice, and I don’t want to spoil it with my stupid mouth. I can’t believe how utterly beautiful he is. How he can possibly want the same thing I do. But my dick is still mostly in charge of my brain and I am running with how good this feels for once. Maybe I’m still feeling the effects of being ill. Maybe it has canceled out my sense of self-preservation—or perhaps just my sense.

“Have you got time for a detour before we go home?” Angus asks as we reach the outskirts of London. “I want to show you something.”

His tone is light, though I can sense an undercurrent here, a deeper motivation, but he’s still smiling, so I nod.

I am never this easy. I’ve never been this easy in my entire life. But right now it’s as if I’m in the middle of the stream instead of clinging to the bank. It’s drawing me along, and it feels good. Because of Angus, it feels so good.

“Head toward Selhurst and then Thornton Heath,” he says pointing at the signs as we drive through Croydon.

Once we reach Thornton Heath high street, the traffic becomes a lot heavier, and Angus tells me where to turn off and guides me through back streets without even seeming to think about it.

He knows this area. He knows it really well.

For the first time in an hour, Angus’s smile begins to slip.

We turn into an estate. There are three square tower blocks around a central car park and a few short streets of two-story maisonettes dwarfed beneath them. It’s not the most run-down estate I’ve seen, but it’s not the nicest either. It still makes me feel paranoid and as if I should check I’ve locked the car doors.

There is a kids’ play park, but it looks mostly dismantled, and we get stared at as we pass by the dozen or so kids standing around the outside of it.

I pull over down one of the side streets and turn the engine off.

“This is where your dad lives, isn’t it? This is where you grew up.”

“I just wanted to show you,” Angus says quietly. “But now I’m here, I wish I hadn’t come.”

“Why?” I ask softly.

“Bad memories.”

He draws his bare feet up and rests them on the dashboard. If we were back in the alternate universe we usually inhabit, I would tell him to take them down. Instead I take hold of his hand as he stares straight ahead out the windscreen.

“I’d like to see it,” I say. “I’d like to see where you lived.”

“I don’t want to get out of the car,” he says. “Just drive past.”

“Okay.”

The house is on the next street over. It’s not the worst house on the street. It just looks a little uncared for and neglected. A leaking drainpipe has watermarked the brickwork above the front door. The tiny front garden is haphazardly paved, with the occasional weed poking through. A pair of faded curtains are drawn across the downstairs window so that we can’t see inside. The upstairs window just looks blank and dark.

I try to imagine Angus living here, but I don’t like to think of him unhappy. Angus sinks lower in his seat and folds his arms across his chest as we pass by.

“I never told you why I left, not really,” he whispers. “Mum doesn’t even know why.”

I’m surprised because Angus doesn’t seem to be the type to hold on to secrets. He’s the sort of person who needs to get everything out there in the open to deal with it. This could be why he’s telling me, though, because he does need to get it out, because keeping it in is hurting him. So I keep driving, just around and around the estate, knowing he’ll probably find it easier to talk if my whole focus isn’t solely on him.

“Mum thinks I was so angry at him about the college thing that I finally got the balls to tell him I hated living with him and was going to live with her instead.” Angus shakes his head, his expression displaying a bitter self-hatred I know far too intimately. “But it wasn’t like that. I didn’t confront him about anything. I’m too much of a coward for that. Instead I ran away. Just took off one night. That’s why I was so afraid when he started hanging around. I’m so fucking weak. He’d just have to tell me to get in the car and go with him, and I probably would.”

I steal another quick glance, not wanting to take my eyes off this obstacle course of a street for more than half a second. Angus may think he’s weak, but that’s not my impression at all, especially not these past few weeks with all the crap he’s dealt with. For a while he just stares out the window.

“Did something happen to make you run?” I prompt gently, sensing there is more to this story.

“Have you ever had someone be disappointed in you, and yet you know what disappoints them is just who you are and you can’t do anything about it?”

I stop the car and meet Angus’s gaze, but I can’t answer that or think too deeply about it without opening up a whole lot of pain about my own past.

“I’ve spent my life trying not to disappoint my dad. But he was disappointed with everything about me—with how I turned out, with how much I’m like my mum sometimes. That I’m shy, that I… I get emotional, though I tried so hard to hide it because he thinks it’s pathetic. And then one day I realized I was never not going to disappoint him. It just wasn’t going to happen. What disappoints him is who I am,” he says miserably.

“You are not weak,” I say solemnly.

Right now he’s once again proving how strong and determined he is. He’s pushing the boundaries between us, bringing us closer together, the way only revealing secrets can. I take his hand, and I squeeze it tightly.

Angus stares at our joined hands.

“I wanted to go somewhere I could be myself for once. Somewhere I wasn’t constantly on guard and having to hide. I wanted to explore what it meant to be
gay
”—he whispers the word—“and if that’s what I really was.”

I get the impression
this
is the crux of it.

“So are you?” I say, giving him a half smile despite myself, unable to stop the flood of thoughts that assault me—Angus in my arms earlier, inhibitions blown out to sea.

Angus huffs out a laugh and rolls his eyes. “What do you think?”

I hold his gaze. His eyes are beautiful, I know I’ve thought this before, but they really are—the delicate tilted shape of them, the unusual color. I remember when I first saw him, it was his mass of near-black hair that caught my attention, and I kind of missed the way he shone beneath it.

“You hide behind your hair,” I say gently, letting my finger trace his jaw. “And you really shouldn’t.”

“I’m not confident like you.”

I frown.
Since when did I become the epitome of confidence?

“I guess we all have things we hide behind,” I say.

The admission has barbs, and I try not to wince as they dig deep.

I know he sees so much more of who I am than everyone else, but I long to tell him that with me, it’s
all
a front. So much front I’m scared there’s nothing real behind it anymore.

And I realize I have no right to tell him not to hide.

“I don’t want to hide anymore. One day I want to have the courage to look him in the eye and just be myself.”

When Angus says this, it makes me want to turn the car around and go and confront that bastard of a father who has made his pure, beautiful son feel so ashamed of who he is. It’s so fucking wrong.

“Are you angry?”

Taking a deep breath, I let go of Angus’s hand and start the car. If I don’t move, I might end up doing something stupid.

“There’s a thing or two I’d like to say to your dad,” I reply tightly.

“Don’t,” Angus says quietly. “Just… can you please take me home now, Josh?”

I know he doesn’t want to be anywhere near this place anymore. With a heavy heart, I put my foot down and drive away, heading mostly on instinct toward home.

T
HE
WHOLE
journey back, my gut is in knots. Angus doesn’t speak at all, and whenever I glance over at him, he looks lost in thought, his head resting against the window, his eyes staring at nothing.

It’s just about dark when we arrive home. I kill the engine as soon as we pull up outside the house, and we sit in silence, making no move to get out of the car.

All in all it’s been a strange day. Though there are definitely some parts of it that will be replaying in my head tonight.

My anger at Angus’s father has somehow squashed any ideas I had of dragging Angus up to my flat—my bed—for a rerun of earlier. But perhaps that is for the best. I don’t want to rush things with him—if there is even anything to rush—and if that was his first time, he probably needs some space to get his head around it before he decides he actually
wants
a rerun.

I need to get my head around it too. In a big way.

But I have no desire to run right now, no desire to push him away.

“Come on, I’ll help you inside,” I say eventually. “With your injury, you and Oskar will have a matching set,” I add, trying to lighten the mood.

Angus looks at me gratefully—perhaps for just letting go of what we were talking about and not going on about my feelings for his father.

“You sure you haven’t got some weird foot thing?” he asks wryly, leaning into me as he hops. We make our way cautiously across the cold pavement, looking out for any other sharp objects. I take as much of his weight as he will let me and carry his shoes in my free hand.

“A fetish?”

Angus blushes. It strikes me as funny that he can be so uninhibited during sex and yet so shy talking about it.

“It’s just a word.”

“I know,” he says coyly.

“Looking at my flat, I’ve probably got some sort of word fetish or book fetish, though.” I’m not actually being serious, but for a moment I do wonder if it’s true.

“Maybe I’ve got one for you,” Angus says quietly.

Though his head is down, I can see him smiling through his sheaf of hair.

“That’s not a fetish—that’s just the normal reaction to my presence,” I whisper jokingly, thinking for a second that I sound just like Soren.

As I grip my arm around him tighter and feel his muscles tense beneath my fingertips, suddenly I become aware of how good he feels pressed against me, how good he smells, all sea washed and windblown, how his dark hair…. Fuck, at this rate we are definitely going to end up in my bed tonight.

“Want a hand?” a voice calls, interrupting my thoughts.

Oskar stands at the front door, looking concerned. He must have been watching us through the window. How he thinks he’s going to be any help with his broken foot, I have no idea. I suspect he just wants to get in the way. Although he did give Angus some well-intended, if not kind of strange advice about where he was going wrong with me, so maybe he’s not trying to. Maybe he’s just worried about Angus.