Off Plan

by May Archer

  Yeah, definitely not a sacrifice.

  “Pickles’ is not the best place to buy sex accouterments, FYI.”

  “No? Surprising.”

  “This was their entire supply of lube, and I refused to ask Jim if he had more out back, especially since I thought you’d be buying some, and I didn’t have a car to go—”

  “I have some already. In my room.”

  “Oh.” He flushed. “That’s right, because you’ve… right.” He buried his face in my armpit.

  I snorted. This guy. “You know, lube is useful for other things besides anal sex. Like, jerking off in the morning when I’ve had to spend the night in my own bed the night before, the way I did last night.”

  Mason’s face emerged and he looked somewhat mollified. “Yeah?”

  “Definitely, yeah. And you know, you could drive my car if you had a non-lube emergency. As long as you understand that the Charger is my most precious possession, vow to never drive her over the speed limit, park her at the very back of every lot, and put her back exactly where you found her. Big Rafe has a spare key.” Then I added grimly. “For now, anyway.”

  Mason’s eyes widened. “I can drive your car? Oh my God. Does this mean we’re going steady? Are you giving me your letterman-jacket-thing, Danny Zuko?”

  I set my beer next to his on the nightstand.

  “You. Are a dork.” I rolled on top of him, bracing on my forearms, and dropped a kiss on his lips.

  Mason laced his fingers behind my neck and grinned. “So. Why will Big Rafe only have a key for now?” He mimicked my deeper voice on the last two words.

  “Because he pissed me off.” I sighed. “Worse than usual.”

  “Yeah? He had a banner day today. What did he say?”

  I focused on the wall behind Mason’s bed. “That I need to stop letting the past hold me back and start planning a brighter future. Total bullshit.”

  Mason’s fingers tangled in the hair at the back of my neck. “Why’s that bullshit?”

  “Because I’m fine with the life I’ve got now. I don’t want more. I don’t want to want more.”

  Mason stared at me steadily for a minute. “This is about that guy in Texas.”

  “No, Uncle Rafe, it’s really not.” Not a hundred percent.

  “Oooh, Big Rafe caught that, too, huh? No wonder you’re pissy.” Mason’s fingers tugged on my hair. “If we’re going to do this, you need to be a hundred percent honest with me about what’s going on in that brain.”

  “I’m not pissy. And your Fenn-voice needs so much work.”

  He grinned. “I’ll keep practicing. Now start talking.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Not sure if you noticed, but I have a hot guy nearly naked underneath me, a beer cracked open, and a plentiful—” I eyed the nightstand. “—okay, adequate supply of lube waiting for us to get to it. I do not wanna talk about Thad Chambers right now, Mason.”

  “Thad Chambers.” Mason bit my jaw. “Now we’re getting somewhere. He even sounds evil. How’d you meet?”

  I huffed out a breath and pulled back to press a kiss to the center of his chest.

  I didn’t talk about this stuff at all. Even my family only knew the bare bones of the story. There was a reason for that—no one liked to be reminded they’d been a fucking idiot. But there was something about Mason’s bright eyes and the quiet room, the slivers of sunshine peeking through the curtains and the way his fingers smoothed down the back of my neck—gentling me again—that made it feel okay.

  I propped my chin on my hands just above his breastbone.

  “I told you my stepdad got me the job at an oil company in Texas, right? It was a whole thing Neil worked out with his buddy Paul back when I was in high school, and Paul came through. He was the head of the whole Texas division, and he treated me like a second son.” I bit my lip. “Thad was his first son. He was a lawyer for the same company.”

  “Ah.” Mason’s fingers didn’t stop their stroking. “Was he cute?”

  I nodded. “Had a chin dimple like Henry Cavill.”

  He whistled appreciatively. “This does nothing for me, mind you, but I get the appeal.”

  “Uh-huh. I had a crush on him the first moment I met him, but office gossip said he had quite a reputation with the ladies, so I figured that was that. Then Paul invited me to the family ranch for dinner, and Thad took me on a tour of the grounds… And he blew me against the door of the pool house.” My lips twisted. “Thus proving that every porn has some basis in reality.”

  “Shit,” Mason said ruefully. “So many things about the way you first thought of me make sense now.”

  “Yeah, but that’s on me, Mason. You’ve never been like him.” I tweaked his nipple with my thumb, just to ground us both in the here and now. “I figured out pretty fast that you’re honest.”

  “I try to be.”

  “Whereas Thad got off on the lies,” I admitted. “At the time, I didn’t get that. I’d been out in college, but quietly. My mom and Neil very much hoped it was just a phase—still do, I think—so I was used to not talking about my sexuality. When things started with Thad, it seemed natural to not flaunt it. I was twenty-two and he was ten years older than me, and the shit he said—that I made him weak, that I was too hard to resist, that I tempted him—I thought it was all compliments. It wasn’t until a lot later that I realized how fucked-up it was. In the moment, I thought it was fun that he’d ignore me all day at work, or when his parents had me over for barbecues, and then show up at my apartment at night. It was a game. A competition to hide from the idiots we worked with.”

  “I get it,” Mason said. “A little bit taboo, a little bit the two of you against the world.” His fingers carded through my hair, and something inside me settled.

  I hated this story. The idiot in this story wasn’t the person I wanted to be. But it didn’t seem to faze Mason in the slightest, and that helped me keep going. To tell him the whole fucked-up thing.

  “Thad said it wouldn’t be like that forever, though. Once he got a promotion, he’d come out. We talked about the kind of house we wanted to live in, and how many kids we wanted to adopt. He told me he loved me. And I believed him.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” Mason sighed, and his hands clenched my hair. The light from outside grew dimmer, and I figured if Beale’s Universe was real, it appreciated some good mood lighting.

  “But then he got the promotion. And he didn’t come out. He couldn’t. Not yet. His dad was still in charge of the division, you know? We’d both lose our jobs. We just needed to plan better. Save up. His dad would be retiring in a year, two at the most. We could hold out that long, right? I loved him that much, right?”

  I winced. “I went on a site visit a few months later, and when I came back, I heard Paul had made a company-wide announcement that Thad was engaged to Misty Bowles, his high school sweetheart.”

  “Baby.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want sympathy or pity, and he needed to hear this part so he’d really understand who he was sleeping with.

  “I called it off. I did. Told him we were done. But he came over that night and I… fuck. I just wanted to believe him so badly. He said Misty meant nothing. He planned to break it off before the wedding, he just had to play the game a little longer. I want to tell you I saw through it, but… I didn’t. I was so fucking naive. I told Thad I was gonna talk to his dad. He liked me, right? He wouldn’t love that Thad was gay, but he’d accept it eventually. I wouldn’t let Thad talk me out of it.”

  I kept my eyes on the center of Mason’s chest, where I traced a random pattern with my fingertip. Outside, I could hear the wind picking up, sending raindrops skittering against the windowpane.

  “That night, Thad didn’t show up, but a bunch of his buddies did. They beat the crap out of me. Broke two ribs. Then they went to Paul Chambers and told their lies to him and to the police.” I shrugged. “Paul came to see me in the hospital, and I… There’s no way he actually believed what I was accu
sed of, you know? Not a chance. But it didn’t matter. Everyone else believed what he told them to believe, including my mom and Neil.” I shrugged again. “So I called my dad for the first time in years. And for once in my life, he stepped up. He brought me here.”

  Mason’s voice was unbearably kind. “Then he left you, too.”

  “Well, no. He died,” I corrected. “Heart attack.”

  “As a wiseass once told me, ‘Potato, potahto, really.’” He sat up and rolled us over so we were sideways across the bed and he was on top, and then he pressed a hundred tiny kisses onto my cheeks, my lips, and my chest.

  “I don’t need pity, Mason.”

  Mason snorted. “I’m not pitying you, I’m fucking pissed for you. That should never have happened. And if those guys ever come to Whispering Key, I will kick their asses. In medical school they teach us ways to kill a man without leaving a mark.”

  I snorted and felt my mouth stretch into a smile that shouldn’t have been possible with the air in the room as heavy as it was. “Is that so?”

  “Hell, no,” he admitted. “But I watched a lot of WrestleMania when I was a kid and I could figure something out.”

  I laughed out loud and curled my abs so I could lift up to kiss him.

  “And this explains why you don’t plan for the future at all, huh?”

  I sighed wearily. “Yes, Mason! Every time I put an appointment on the calendar, my deep, psychological man pain overwhelms me. Every time the dentist sends an appointment reminder, I take to my bed for a week—” I broke off with a laugh as Mason jabbed his fingers in my ribs.

  “I’m being serious, Fenn!”

  “I know. But it’s not that serious or that… conscious. I just don’t see the benefit of planning when everything in life gets fucked around anyway. What’s that expression? ‘Man plans, God laughs?’ All good things end? Why put your energy into something that might never be?”

  Outside, thunder boomed and Mason’s eyes went unfocused for a second before he refocused on me.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “You wanna tell me why you’re so scared of storms?”

  “Uh, no. We’ve already covered my past psychological trauma, Fenn. Today’s about your man pain, m’kay?”

  “Have we, though?” I demanded. I sat up, taking him with me, forcing him to straddle my lap. “I think it’s your turn. I shared a truth…”

  “Oh, we’re playing truth or dare again?”

  “No, baby. On the first day we met, you told me this is how friendship works, remember? I share something, you share something…”

  Mason laughed.

  “Besides, haven’t we gotten past the point where we have to dare each other?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Mason

  Yeah. Yeah, we were definitely past that point.

  For all that I’d studied the human body for years, the way the human brain worked was still a total mystery to me. Sometimes I couldn’t stop myself from overthinking the dumbest shit, and other times, like right that minute, I knew something with 100 percent certainty, and no way of explaining how I knew, since I’d never experienced it before.

  I was in love with Fenn Reardon.

  It was a hot coal in the center of my chest that I could hold without burning, a light that radiated outward and made me look at everything and everyone around me with a little more joy and a little more empathy… except for a bunch of assholes in Texas I would happily maim on sight.

  This was not an emotion I’d ever felt for Victoria, nor for anyone else. It was nothing like the way I felt for my family or for Toby. And I didn’t believe for a second that it meant I was guaranteed a happy ending or anything like that, because this was not one of those cheesy TV movies Constantine liked to watch, and because, from what I’d seen, love wasn’t like a life preserver that kept you from drowning, anyway. It was more like a reason you kept swimming long after any sane person would have given up.

  “Mason?” His fingers ghosted up my back. “You gonna tell me?”

  “Nah. It’s a really dumb story,” I croaked.

  He frowned in concern, and I knew it was because I was all choked up over my fucking lurve revelations while he thought I was suffering through some horrible memory. Figured.

  “No, seriously. It’s a stupid story,” I repeated. “In a whole line of stupid stories about my childhood. Not any worse than any others, I swear.”

  When his jaw set like he wasn’t going to be appeased, I sighed and relented. “My grandmother had a root cellar on her property where she stored vegetables. Sorta like Rafe’s office bunker, except the floor was dirt, not cement, and the door was wood, and there was nothing climate-controlled. It was cold in there and full of spiders, so we all sort of avoided it, but once when I was seven, I played hide-and-seek with my sisters and some of the kids staying with us, and I hid there.” I rolled my eyes at myself. “I thought it would be fine, since the door wasn’t really fitted well, and there was plenty of light coming through. But then someone—I never figured out who—thought it would be really funny to lock me in, and it took flipping forever for them to find me, so I ended up spending the night there.”

  “No one noticed you were gone?”

  “Ah, nope. Everyone figured I was with someone else. And it wasn’t like we had mealtimes or bedtimes, people just did what they did. No rules at all. And then it rained, just to make the story sadder, and the floor got all muddy. Oh, and I was forced to eat jars of peaches for dinner. Like, five jars all to myself.” I grinned. “I was scared to death at the time, but now it just pisses me off that I have this reaction I can’t figure out how to get rid of.”

  “Why does this not surprise me?”

  “I feel like it’s getting better recently, though!” I defended. “Accidental exposure therapy.” And also possibly because I’d spent many nights sleeping next to Fenn.

  “And maybe also because you’re strong as fuck, and you know the past can’t hurt you anymore?”

  I kissed him softly. “I like the sound of that.” Then I pulled back. “Anyway, that was probably why I am too broken to fall in love,” I said, lifting my hand to my forehead dramatically. “Boy, we are a pair, hmm?”

  “Too broken to fall in love?” He lifted one dark eyebrow.

  I waved this away. “Just something Victoria once said.”

  Fenn’s eyes narrowed. “After hearing that story, that is what she said? And do you believe it?”

  “Are you kidding? I never told her that story. Pfft. Don’t be silly. And no, I don’t believe it. Victoria said I was passionless, too…” I rubbed my nose lightly against Fenn’s, which happened to put my mouth in proximity to his, so of course I had to suck his bottom lip between my teeth and bite down lightly, like that was the kind of thing I’d been doing all my life when it absolutely wasn’t a thing I’d ever wanted to do until Fenn. “So clearly she wasn’t right about everything.”

  Part of me wanted to tell Fenn exactly how I knew she was wrong, because I’d accidentally found myself in love with him, but after the story he’d told me… I wasn’t sure how. That jerk in Texas had dangled love in front of Fenn with no possibility of a future. And it seemed really cheap to give Fenn promises of love now when I had no idea whether a future would be possible for us either, or whether he’d want that.

  I remembered Fenn telling me, the first day we met, that people shouldn’t do things because someone gave them pretty words. That people should care about how you treated them when you had nothing to gain from the interaction. And I wanted that, right now, with Fenn.

  “You feeling passionate, Mason?” Fenn demanded, but the smile on his face said he knew.

  Thunder rolled outside the window and rain lashed against the walls, but in here, I had everything I needed to feel safe.

  “Very,” I said, rubbing the tented bath towel against his stomach as proof.

  I pushed Fenn down onto his back again, and he let me,
sliding his hands down my thighs as he went, and he even lay there patiently while I examined him like one of the puzzle boxes they had in the tourist shops on Cooter Key, looking for the hidden mechanism that would crack him open completely and reveal all his secrets.

  “I’m suddenly feeling like I’m a helpless gecko and you’re a snake waiting to pounce,” Fenn said.

  I shuddered just a little. “If you continue to compare yourself to a gecko, this is going to end very quickly and unsatisfactorily for both of us.”

  I grabbed his hands in mine and leaned forward, pushing his wrists against the mattress. “Now just lie there,” I whispered hotly in his ear, “and take what you’ve got coming to you.” Then I proceeded to tell Fenn exactly how I felt about him without words.

  That place just under his jawline where his pulse beat fast? It was beautiful, so I kissed it. His nipples were hard and waiting for me, so I flicked them with my tongue. That navel with the happy trail that led down past the band of his boxers needed attention, so I licked it. That freckle on his hip was begging for my mouth, so I bit it lightly, wishing I could mark it for good. Claim his body like a new continent, wash up on his shore, and just decide to stay forever. And the whole time he writhed and moaned beneath me, I thought mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.

  I stripped his boxers in two seconds and took him in my mouth, lavishing all the love on him that I couldn’t give him in words. My skills had improved quite a bit over the past few weeks, if I said so myself, and I pulled out every trick he’d taught me, holding him by the root, taking him all the way to the back of my throat, bobbing my head and working my tongue, though my eyes watered and my nose ran, because none of that mattered. All that mattered was making him feel what I felt, for as long as I—

  “Mason.” Fenn’s voice was barely above a growl. “Get up on the bed.”