The Bookseller's Boyfriend

by Heidi Cullinan

  Rasul made yeah, yeah motions with his hand and retreated to the kitchen.

  For a few moments Jacob was aware of the tick of the clock, the clink of dishes and water in the sink, Rasul humming softly to himself as he worked, and then the world fell away as Jacob melted back into the story. He cradled the bowl of stew against his body, warming his hands as he ate the food and ingested each page.

  It was an unconventional, drawn-out courtship, Jacob realized as Adam and Milo started working together, neither of them confirming they were from a different dimension but both, it seemed, highly suspecting it. Adam admitted, at least to himself, that he was in love with Milo, and he sometimes dared to dream Milo might feel the same way. He worried a lot, though, that he was projecting onto him, that perhaps Milo wasn’t even there with him.

  At ten, with half the box of chocolates gone and several pots of tea having sent him to the bathroom multiple times (he took manuscript pages with him), Jacob hit the middle of the book, where Adam’s longing for Milo sent them both into a tiny pocket universe, a craggy and ethereal lighthouse surrounded by a veil of stars. On the deck of that space, Adam spoke to Milo, admitting that he was aware of everything happening, that he remembered every jump, and that he was sure he’d somehow been accidentally been manipulating the universe and its dimensions. He also learned that Milo thought he was the one manipulating everything.

  The two of them teamed up to try to solve the mystery of what was happening to them, learning the lighthouse was the central point from which all their manipulated universes converged, and with effort they could choose which one to leap to next. But when they found the one they were fairly sure led back to their own timeline and dimension, Adam panicked, not wanting to go back to the world where he wasn’t with Milo. His reluctance destroyed their jump and sent them into alternate worlds where they weren’t together, and the only way to make it back to the lighthouse was to admit to the void how he felt about Milo, for Milo to shout it back. When they arrived at the lighthouse again, they were awkward around each other for a few seconds, then gave up, kissed passionately, and fell from the ledge into a universe of softness and wonder.

  Rasul had written sex in his other novels, but it had been just that, a manipulation of bodies or a descent into pleasure. It had never been a union like this, a personal, meaningful connection, an exploration of each other. It touched Jacob, made him nostalgic, and aroused him.

  Eventually, the boys acknowledged they should go back to their world. Though they vowed to stay together, Milo worried aloud that perhaps none of this was real either. That Adam was a figment of his imagination. That Adam, or he, would forget upon reentry. Adam tried to dismiss this playfully, but it worried him too. What would happen if they went back and nothing had changed?

  They make love one last time, not exactly a goodbye but something like it, a grounding in case the worst happened. In case they got lost in other dimensions this time and couldn’t find each other again. In case they both forgot. As they leapt through the veil for the last time, they held hands until the pressure tugged them apart.

  As Adam fell, he felt the magic that had pulled him into this universe twist and fade away, rendering him a normal seventeen-year-old boy. He started to doubt his adventures had happened. He doubted if Milo had ever been there at all. When he woke, he was in his bed, his mother fussing about him having a fever.

  He anguished as his memories of the veil begin to fade, but he held on to the memory of the stars, insisting they remained even only as a vague, distant field inside his mind. When he finally went back to school, his stomach churning with nerves, he did his best to prepare for the fact that Milo might not recognize him, might not care. He held tight to the feeling, real or imagined, that they’d had a connection, and told himself even if he was the only one who still possessed it, it would be enough. He acknowledged he was the one who put himself behind the veil, that even if he had to build it all over again, he could do it, that even if he could never connect with Milo in this reality, he could connect with someone else this way. That no matter who he found or who he lost, he could always find a way to be okay, starting with loving himself.

  Jacob had to stop and blow his nose and hold tissues to his eyes.

  Then he read to the end of the story. He read how Adam walked through the crush of people, pushed aside the veil, went straight up to Milo, and said hello.

  Milo turned, smiled, and Adam felt the rush of the universes surrounding them, lifting them up, carrying them forward into new adventures.

  In the margins of the last page, filling every available inch of space, was Rasul’s handwriting, the same thing over and over and over.

  I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

  The paper crinkled in Jacob’s hand as his vision blurred, until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Putting the page down in his lap, he covered his eyes with his palms and sobbed. And sobbed. And sobbed.

  I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

  Still wiping his eyes, he displaced the cats from his legs and stumbled through the apartment, but he couldn’t find Rasul anywhere. For a second he felt a flare of despair and betrayal—he’d said he wouldn’t leave—but then Jacob remembered there was another floor to the building.

  Trembling, he crept down the stairs and into the bookstore.

  It was full of stars.

  The netting and lights from Rasul’s apartment were here now, making a tunnel through the stacks to an open area in the back, where Rasul sat in an easy chair, wearing his glasses and reading. He glanced up as Jacob approached.

  He looked hopeful, but mostly terrified.

  Jacob froze, too many competing emotions inside him to allow a reaction. He wanted to be cool like Milo and smile, to mirror the end of the novel. He wanted to sob and ask Rasul how he dared to do such a thing, to reach all the way inside him and pull him inside out, to mimic I Capture the Castle in subtle and overt ways. He wanted to thank him. He wanted to drag him into his arms and make love to him.

  He wanted to tug him into their own magical universe and never, ever leave.

  In the end, all he could do was whisper a ragged “Rasul,” and sag against the nearest bookshelf, draped in acres of tulle and dotted with lights.

  Putting aside his book, Rasul rose, crossed to Jacob, and pulled him into an embrace.

  Their kiss was wild, drugging, a desperate attempt to convey emotions that would not fit into words. At some point one of them tugged at the tulle, they slipped, and then they were rolling around on the floor, literally wrapped in a veil of stars.

  “I love you,” Rasul whispered in the nook beneath Jacob’s ear, along his jaw. “I love you more than anyone or anything.”

  “I love you more.” Jacob curled into him, the lasts walls of resistance, futile as they were, crumbling inside him. “Your book is wonderful. Perfect. I never wanted it to end.”

  “It’s for you. Every word. I don’t care if anyone else likes it or not. Only that you do. It’s yours.”

  “Everyone will love it. It’s your best work by leaps and bounds.” He clutched at Rasul’s shoulder, the back of his head. “If I could have found a book like that when I was seventeen….”

  “I know. I know.” He kissed Jacob’s cheek, his chin, sucked on his bottom lip. “I want to make love to you. Right here in the middle of your bookstore, surrounded by lights and tulle with my book still burning your brain.”

  Jacob wrapped his arms, his legs, his soul around Rasul. “Yes.”

  Their kiss was full of fire and passion, but it was a conflagration springing from months of stoked kindling and well-tended embers. Not a flash but a crest, an unstoppable force that ignited something deep within Jacob. It cracked open the part of him he’d kept shuttered away, the part of him that had decided years ago to draw him to the side, to keep him quiet, to create a veneer of safety out of the fact that he was only partially living. Freed, Jacob unfurled, a sail catching the wind from
their joined blaze, lifting him out of the shadows, sending him directly into the flames.

  Gripping Rasul’s hair, he kissed him hard and deep, as if he could take the marrow from him. Tongues and teeth clashed, hands grabbed and tugged as they tried to climb inside one another. Clothes came away, skin scraped against skin. Jacob shivered as his fingers brushed Rasul’s nipple, delighted as, when he made another pass to stroke it, Rasul was the one trembling.

  He’d never dared to dream of something like this. Not with Rasul, not with anyone.

  He wouldn’t ever stop dreaming again.

  Rasul practically purred as Jacob pushed him onto his back and straddled him. “I knew you had this in you. This fire. I saw it at the gala. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.”

  “I’m going to fuck you, Rasul Youssef,” Jacob declared as he parted his lover’s legs and settled between them. “I’m going to claim every inch of your body and turn you so inside out you can’t speak. We’ll have to sleep in the stacks, because neither one of us is going to be able to walk.”

  Rasul’s gaze was soft, unfocused, wild with lust and love. “Get to it, then.”

  Jacob did. He licked his way down Rasul’s body, across his chest, nipping at the curling hair there, sucking at the quavering skin of his belly. Whenever Rasul tugged at him, trying to urge him on, Jacob gently pushed his hands away.

  “You won’t rush me.” He dragged his nose down the side of the vee leading to Rasul’s groin, his bobbing cock. “This time it’s going to be about you. About pleasuring you. No performing for your partner like you usually do. No worrying about me. My pleasure tonight is seeing to yours. Just the way you’ve always wished it would happen.”

  Rasul gasped, his hands clutching weakly at Jacob’s head. “How—?”

  “It was a hunch before, but when I read the sex scene, I knew.” Jacob pushed Rasul’s knees back and kissed the inside of each thigh lovingly, as if he had an eternity to shower them with attention. “The longing Adam had as he reached for Milo, the way his whole soul let go when Milo took charge. Plus it just makes sense. Everyone thinks you’re some legendary lover. Everyone’s trying to use you. I never will, Rasul. I swear to you, I never, ever will.”

  Rasul put a hand over his eyes, but he couldn’t hold back the quiet sob.

  Jacob lifted his head to kiss Rasul’s abdomen once more. “Let go. You’ve done so much. For yourself, for me, for so many people. Relax and enjoy this. I think we’ve both earned it.”

  Rasul did relax, at least until the blowjob Jacob gave him sent him writhing. Jacob drew their lovemaking out as long as he could, stoking Rasul’s arousal only to cool him down with kisses against the back sides of his knees, to flip him onto his stomach and kiss the globes of his ass before parting them and making him howl with want. By the time he was actually ready to fuck him, Rasul was a limp noodle Jacob had to hold up and arrange into position.

  “You’re my everything,” Jacob whispered to him as he drove inside, as Rasul clung weakly to his shoulders, head tipped back as he let Jacob ride him. “My whole world.”

  As they crashed back to earth, with the veil of stars twinkling beneath their bodies, Jacob pressed a kiss to Rasul’s ear.

  “I love you, Rasul.”

  Rasul buried his face in Jacob’s neck. “I love you too.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  THEY CRAWLED up the stairs to Jacob’s bed around four in the morning. Or rather, Jacob hauled Rasul and his bandy-legged ass up the stairs. He was still weak in the knees at nine when his bladder insisted he waddle to the bathroom, and as he fell back into the mattress, snuggling against Jacob’s warm back, he reveled in the sensation of a well-used backside.

  It had been a long, long time since he’d been fucked like that. Not just the epic edging but the demand he surrender in every way. Absolutely nobody, though, had ever ordered him to quit trying to please them and simply let himself be done.

  Sweet God Almighty, but he could get used to that.

  He really, really wanted to get used to that.

  When he next woke, it was one in the afternoon, his stomach was eating itself, and Jacob sat in the bed beside him.

  Reading the manuscript.

  “Again?” Rasul pushed himself groggily onto an elbow and leaned against his lover.

  “Yes, again.” Jacob laid the page he’d been reading neatly on the pile on the other side of him. “I always read your books several times in a row before I even begin to let myself think too much about them. Why you think this one would be any different is beyond me.”

  Rasul kissed Jacob’s elbow, then nestled his head against his hip. “Is it weird this time, because you know me?”

  “It’s different for a lot of reasons. Part of my brain is still processing that I fucked you on a visible representation of the story in the middle of the stacks. Right next to the romance section. Did you do that on purpose?”

  Rasul had, but he’d never admit it. “It was closest to the door.”

  Jacob ruffled Rasul’s hair idly. “You worked very hard on the story, and it shows. Have you sent it to your agent yet?”

  “No.” He found Jacob’s hand and tangled their fingers together. “I wanted you to read it first, to give me feedback.”

  “My feedback is that it’s excellent.”

  “It has some rough spots. I think I could tie a few things together better. It doesn’t vibrate right yet in my head. I was hoping I could ask you about some of it.”

  “Of course you can.”

  Rasul did. He started while they lay there in bed, until his stomach gurgles grew loud enough Jacob insisted they relocate to the kitchen. Once there, he tried to make breakfast, but Jacob waved him into a chair. “I can cook you some oatmeal. Unless you’d rather have lunch, since it’s afternoon? Also, tea or coffee?”

  “Oatmeal and coffee sound perfect, thank you. Can I have raisins and brown sugar? In the oatmeal.”

  “Of course.”

  While Jacob cooked and brewed coffee, Rasul continued to voice his concerns over the draft. Sometimes Jacob interjected questions or remarks, but mostly he listened. As Rasul had anticipated, Jacob had good judgment. He didn’t hesitate to point out if something that bothered Rasul hadn’t seemed an issue to him, and on a few notable occasions he turned around and quietly threatened Rasul if he changed a particular part. Other times he either agreed with Rasul’s assessment that something could be revisited, and twice Jacob suggested places to look at again himself.

  “This is an interesting exercise,” Jacob said. “I honestly enjoyed it as it was, but I can see how editing shapes a story into exactly what you need it to be. Or perhaps the more appropriate phrase is what you want it to be.”

  Rasul nodded as he took another hearty swig of coffee. “Especially with how they all got their hands on this one when I was initially creating it, I want to keep it safe until I’m sure it’s right—to me. I anticipate them balking at the sex scene.”

  “Why on earth would they do that? It’s amazing. It illustrates so much about what each of them needs, and shows them giving it to one another. It’s practically essential to believing the ending will be a happy one.”

  “Thank you.” He clutched at his mug. “They’d want to cut it because marketing likes to err on the side of safe. The problem is they’re underage.”

  “They’re seventeen. Heavens, even in Copper Point I’d had sex by then. Is it because it’s two men?”

  “Probably in part? People have random moral boundaries regarding sex in media, especially in the United States.” He scratched his head. “I thought about setting it with them in college, but it’s absolutely not the same. It’s that sense of being not quite hatched, still in your family’s cradle, but biologically and mentally a functional adult. Honestly, I don’t think it’s a young adult novel, not in the sense people usually mean. It’s a novel for adults who had a messed-up teenage experience and want to rewrite it.”

  “No, it’s for a certain kind of tee
n too. Someone tuned in to that sense of being on the cusp, who understands all your universal metaphors in a way only they can. An adult reading sees those time and place shifts as a way of going back to their own experience, their wish for better outcomes even as they acknowledge their path had to be their path. For a teen, they represent possible futures, safe ways of exploring. This is going to blow people out of the water.” He shrugged. “And probably upset some people too. But how is that different from your first two books?”

  “Yeah, the blowback on Carnivale was rough.” He scratched his chin, thinking. “You know, I can’t get over how much calmer and freer I am when I’m not on social media. I also know more people here than I ever did in LA. Some of that is the function of geography, I’m sure, but I also attribute it to having to actually go talk to people with my face.”

  “You’ll want to go back at least in part once you’re done drafting. You like to be on the pulse of things.”

  A subtle thread of tension in Jacob’s tone made Rasul glance up, and he saw the answering lines on Jacob’s face. Something about you’ll want to go back had extra meaning.

  Oh. Rasul’s coffee turned into sludge in his stomach. Jacob was talking about social media, but he was thinking about Rasul leaving Copper Point.

  It was the first crack in their harmonious bubble. Rasul had been so focused on simply finishing, on shedding the albatross of failure from his neck. Of going to bed with Jacob, of sharing his story. The future hadn’t seemed to contain anything else.

  It was here now. He needed new goals, but he didn’t have any.

  Clearly the future had never been far from Jacob’s mind.

  Rasul clutched at his mug. “I don’t want to go back to who I was before I came here.”

  “You are the person you were before you came here. You can’t change who you are.”

  “I can get my shit together.” Moriarty was huddled on the chair next to him, and Rasul absently stroked the cat’s head. “I think this book rattled me so hard in part because I’ve been trying to have a conversation with myself for a long time, and now I’ve had it. I didn’t want to be scared anymore. Not so much that I had to stay on the run from invisible demons. And as for social media and staying on the pulse of things—you’re right, I enjoy it to a point. But I don’t want it to be something I let consume me ever again the way it did. There were too many days I didn’t open Instagram or Twitter, curious to see what was happening in the world. I opened the apps braced for battle. How is that helpful? I mean, at least Adina has gotten over me, but there will always be an Adina.”