by Gregory Ashe
But Matty had already moved on, lingering at the built-in bookshelves, studying the titles, tracing a finger along the spines of the three paperback editions of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, and then drifting forward again, shuffling through a pile of bright red briefs that Shaw had worn and forgotten to wash—there had been an article about the psycho-sexual energy of colors; red briefs had seemed like a surefire way to get past the fucking Berlin Wall of hangups that Shaw had constructed after Carl was killed, but North had somehow wheedled the explanation out of him and laughed so hard that he had actually slid out of his chair, and after that Shaw hadn’t even bothered to pick up the underwear, and now Matty was literally trampling it—
And Matty kept going. He bumped into an extra yoga mat that Shaw had bought for North, and it unfurled ahead of him like a red carpet, and Matty touched the frame of a painting of the Mississippi—Shaw forgot the artist’s name, but he had picked it up at one of the street art festivals. North had told Tucker how much he liked it, and Tucker had laughed and said they could get the same thing online for fifteen bucks. In another year or two, when Tuck wouldn’t remember, Shaw could wrap it and—
Matty had come to a stop in front of Shaw. He’d shoved back the unruly wave of blond hair, and his amethyst eyes were wet. He was shaking, Shaw realized, and clasping his elbows as though he were holding himself together.
“Are you cold? Are you—Matty, are you ok? You’re safe here, I swear. Nobody’s getting through that door, and even if they did, they’ll have to deal with me first, and you remember what I promised you, right?”
Matty was still shaking, his eyes turned down.
“I promised you I’d keep you safe. And I will.”
“What’s so messed up about me?”
“What?”
Matty ran his hands under his eyes and then clasped his elbows again. “I mean, I didn’t want to be gay. I didn’t ask for it. I’m a good person. Or, I mean, I thought I was. I tried to be. I thought I could be a good enough person that it would go away, that I could be happy.”
“Matty—”
Matty shook his head so fiercely that Shaw stopped, and Matty drew his fingers under his eyes again. “But I was wrong. I couldn’t be happy. I just kept getting worse and worse. And I’d think terrible things. I’d want people to do terrible things to me so that . . . so that I wouldn’t have to make a choice. I would walk around and all of the sudden I’d wish somebody would just rape me.” He let out a single sob and then choked the rest back. “I would think how much better it would be to be raped, to be held down and fucked—” The word sounded awkward and grotesque in his mouth. “—because then I wouldn’t be responsible, then I could at least have someone touch me and I wouldn’t have to feel guilty. And I know that’s messed up. I know it’s wrong. I know it isn’t even true, because people who are raped, it’s the worst thing in the world; nobody deserves that. But in my mind, because I was so desperate, it made sense.”
He looked up at Shaw as though waiting for an answer, and Shaw knew any word would be the wrong one, so he just nodded once.
“And then when I finally got brave enough, when I finally decided to make that decision and not let someone else make it for me, when I finally decided to be honest about who I am, I met—I met that guy. And he videotaped it. And he . . . and he didn’t even care about me.” Another sob broke from Matty’s throat, and he pressed the heels of his hands to his face, bending slightly at the waist like the weight of it all was going to snap him. “So what’s wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with me that he could look at me and do that to me? What the fuck is wrong with me that I can’t—I can’t even—”
Whatever he couldn’t do, Shaw never learned because Matty burst into tears, and he fell forward into Shaw’s chest. Shaw cradled him, stroking Matty’s hair, holding up the boy while tremors threatened to rip him apart. And after a while, Matty’s sobbing slowed, and he turned his head so that his breath hit Shaw’s neck like air from a furnace, and he hooked the fingers of one hand under the collar of Shaw’s shirt, the backs of his nails smooth and sharp as they glided across Shaw’s chest.
“Matty—”
And then Matty kissed him. Shaw had never had a kiss like it before. His kisses with Carl, before everything had gone wrong, had been intense. They’d been like controlled detonations inside Shaw’s head. They’d been fueled by teen hormones and by the frantic excitement of a first relationship.
But this. This kiss was like fracking: it worked its way into the bedrock of Shaw’s soul and exploded, shifting the very groundwork of Shaw’s existence. There was so much need. There was so much want. There was so much hurt. It was a cocktail of pain and desperation and desire that worked on Shaw in a way nothing ever had before. He was hard. He was so hard it hurt. His skin had shrunk. His bones ached. Shaw gripped Matty’s jaw with one hand, forcing his head back, kissing the boy harder, taking what he had wanted to take for a very long time.
Then, gasping for air, Shaw broke the kiss and forced himself away from Matty. He shook his head; he couldn’t talk, not yet, but he could shake his head.
Matty made a mewling noise and pressed toward him.
“No.” Shaw cleared his throat. “No. You’re a—you’re a client. And you’re vulnerable. You’re hurt. You’re not thinking clearly—”
“I am thinking clearly. For the first time in my life I’m thinking clearly. Please, Shaw. Please. I want you. Make me beg if you want me to beg. I’ll beg. Please. Please. Please.” Matty ducked his head, but his eyes met Shaw’s as he said, “Please give me your cock.” And it sounded so awkward and so genuine that Shaw felt his whole body pulse in response to it. “Please,” Matty said, “please. Please. Please.”
Shaw wasn’t sure how, but he managed to shake his head again.
“What’s wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with me?” Matty took a step back. “Oh my God. I can’t believe this. I can’t fucking believe this. What the fuck is wrong with me? Why? Why won’t you? Just tell me why. Just tell me what’s wrong with me and I’ll leave.”
“I don’t want you to leave. I want you to sleep on the couch. And in the morning, things’ll be better, I promise.”
“I hate you. I fucking hate you so fucking much.”
“Fine.”
“I wish you were fucking dead.”
Shaw nodded; he couldn’t meet Matty’s eyes.
Another minute passed, a long minute, and then Matty grabbed his bag and wheeled it down the hall and into the living room. Shaw stood there. He wanted to go into the bathroom. He wanted to splash water on his face. He wanted a cold shower. But he was afraid of stepping into the hall—of pulling back from the water, lowering a towel from his face—and finding Matty there.
So instead, Shaw kicked off his shoes and dropped onto the bed. He was still so hard that it felt like a cramp, and he was afraid if he touched himself that he’d explode, so he stared up at the plaster ceiling and tried to breathe.
It had been so long.
That was the thought that came through most clearly. It had been so long since Carl. It had been seven years. Seven years, and in those seven years, Shaw had kept the world at a distance. Part of it was the trauma; Shaw knew that much. But a part of it had been North. Tonight, staring up at the ceiling, he could admit that much. He could admit how long he had carried on this stupid crush. He could admit how very stupid this crush had been all along. Because North might tolerate him. On good days, North might actually enjoy being his friend. But North didn’t care about him, didn’t have feelings for him, didn’t love him. For a moment, Shaw was back in the April night, staring into the yellow glare of the windows, listening to the soft pop of the leather strap. If North had trusted Shaw, he would have told him what was happening. He would have asked for Shaw’s help. Instead—instead, North had lied . . . and lied . . . and lied.
What hurt most was letting go of the dream—the fantasy, Shaw corrected—that some d
ay, it would be North who helped Shaw over that Berlin Wall of hangups. What hurt most was letting go of a collection of imagined moments, tiny dream-shards that Shaw had gathered waking and sleeping, that he had composed into a fantasy of the night that North finally made love to him. The roughness of North’s hands on his skin. The smell of North’s hair. The feel of his tongue low on Shaw’s belly. The incredible gentleness with which North would have taken Shaw. That gentleness was really the hallmark of North McKinney—not the blue-collar show he put on, not the teasing and joking, not even the intelligence he tried to hide. His gentleness.
For a moment, Shaw put all the pieces together and let himself drift in the fantasy. He had never really allowed himself to do this before. Those dream-shards would come to him in the middle of something else—while he was filing paperwork, and then the sudden clarity in his mind of what it would feel like to have North’s hands run up the inside of his thighs—and Shaw would always squirrel the thought away. It was dangerous, thinking things like that. And inappropriate because he knew, or he thought he knew, that North was happily married, that nothing would ever really happen between them. In part, that had been what made North the perfect choice for Shaw’s dreams. Not because North was gentle—even though he was—or because Shaw could trust North—even though he could—but because North was fundamentally inaccessible. And so he was perfectly, totally safe because he would never happen.
Shaw wedged his bare feet under the knotted sheets. He stared up at the ceiling. He was looking past the ceiling. Looking at himself, he realized for the first time, that North McKinney was never going to gently ravish him, get him past the hangup of being a twenty-six-year-old virgin with an ugly scar on his balls. He was realizing that part of him had always known this. He was realizing that North McKinney couldn’t rescue him from his virginity the way he had rescued Shaw from his apartment and the dishwater light and the days when Shaw couldn’t bring himself to walk as far as the front door. He was realizing that part of him had wanted the safety of never having to take any risks, and so it had been easy to go on dates, easy to fend off others’ advances, easy to lie—even if the lies had been unspoken.
It had been so long.
And Shaw was tired of waiting.
The walk to the living room was short. In the doorway, Shaw paused, his heart pounding so hard that he could feel the pulse in his armpits, in his groin. The only light came from the street, coating everything in a silver nimbus: the stand lamps he’d rescued from Goodwill, his parents’ old couch, the slope of Matty’s shoulders, his neck, the unruly lick of hair that should have been blond but was bleached of color in the street light. Matty was sitting, facing the doorway. Matty was waiting.
Shaw crossed the room. Matty drew back. Shaw hooked the coffee table with his heel. Matty drew his knees against his chest. Shaw swung the coffee table, and its legs skittered on bare wood, and Matty flinched like Shaw had landed a slap. Shaw took one step. And then another. His bare feet found popcorn that had hidden under the coffee table from the last time North had made him watch all four Lethal Weapon movies in one weekend. Then his knees bumped against the couch, and Matty was a tight bundle between Shaw’s legs.
Shaw shifted forward, straddling Matty, the old couch sagging under his weight. Then he took Matty’s face in both hands. He could still see tear tracks on Matty’s face like lunar oceans. He kissed Matty and tasted salt.
After a moment, Matty kissed back.
“I’ve never.” Shaw didn’t let the sentence hang. He didn’t punctuate it. He just let those two words spill out, and it was like some part of him had been bound tightly for too many years and could now move freely.
For a moment, surprise etched itself into Matty’s features, and then something else, a vicious happiness that pooled in the shadows under Matty’s eyes before evaporating. He put his hands on Shaw’s hips, his fingers soft as they teased along the waistband of Shaw’s pants.
Reaching forward, Shaw caught the cardigan and turned Matty out of it. Then he ran his hands down the misbuttoned shirt. It was high-quality cotton, but right then it felt rough enough to start a fire under Shaw’s fingers. He could feel the outline of Matty’s slim chest—not the rippling physique of Jadon Reck, not North’s chiseled mass, but a toned boyishness that made Shaw bite his lip.
Wordlessly, Matty caught Shaw’s fingers and guided them to the buttons. “I’m sorry,” Shaw whispered, and Matty laughed. Shaw worked the buttons, tried to free them. He got one. And then another. And then he got to the first one that had been done up wrong, and the shirt was pulled too far askew, and he whispered, “I’m sorry,” and Matty’s laugh was just a whisper too, and finally that button popped free and then Shaw was on to the next one, and this one snagged and refused to budge, and he whispered, “I’m sorry.” His lips were buzzing like he’d been bee-stung.
Matty wrapped his shaking hand in both of his own and said, “Why are you sorry?”
Shaw didn’t know. He didn’t have any idea.
Matty undid the last button and wriggled free of the shirt, his skin smooth and glowing in the street light, the faint definition to his chest rising and falling with surprisingly even breaths. The part of Shaw’s brain that sounded like Dr. Farr was saying that this was probably good for Matty, probably good for Matty to be the one in control, to be the experienced one, and all of that made perfectly rational sense. But the rest of Shaw’s brain was basically just a series of lightning strikes, and that rational voice didn’t matter. What mattered was the way Matty’s hands moved to Shaw’s waistband again, fumbling with the clasp at the front, and the way Shaw’s whole body hitched like someone had thrown a noose around his neck and tried to pull him straight into the air.
“I’m sorry,” Shaw tried to say, but it came out in a stutter of noises that he wasn’t sure made any sense.
“Ok,” Matty said, “it’s ok,” and his hands dropped away and found Shaw’s, carried them to Matty’s chest, placed one on Matty’s right nipple and the other on a frail clavicle that might have been a bird’s wing. “I like it when you touch me here,” Matty breathed. “And here.”
His skin was smooth, except for the pebbled tension of the nipple, and Shaw let himself pinch once, and Matty’s groan made Shaw’s dick throb so hard he thought, for one panicked instant, that he was coming.
“Yes,” Matty moaned, turning to nuzzle Shaw’s hand on his neck. “Please.” He reached up, found Shaw’s face, and pulled him down. “Kiss me.” He traced the skin where his neck joined his shoulder. “Right here, right—ah!” The sound was so exquisitely pleased that Shaw actually pulled away, convinced he had somehow hurt Matty. Then he saw the blissed-out face, felt the stiffened nipple under his hand, twisted again. Harder this time. And Matty whimpered, bucking up against Shaw’s weight, his head thrown back while Shaw kissed and sucked and bit.
It might have gone on like that forever except Matty had tricky hands, and somehow he had bunched up Shaw’s Lululemon shirt, and his fingers slid down Shaw’s chest, tugging on the wiry hair, caressing the faint hint of abs that no amount of exercise could bring out, gliding back up, tweaking one nipple, then the next, and Shaw could hear his own breath, wild and frantic.
“Not a nipple guy, huh?” Matty said with a smile.
“I’m sorry.”
Matty kissed him on the lips. Kissed the side of his mouth. Kissed his cheek. Kissed his jaw. Kissed his ear. Slid his tongue inside Shaw’s ear, and Shaw heard someone squeal, just fucking squeal, and he thrust into Matty so hard that both of them bounced off the back of the couch.
“I’m—I’m—I’m—”
He was still sputtering when Matty dragged the shirt over his head, and the rush of air across Shaw’s shoulders made him tremble. Matty leaned up, grinding into Shaw, the hardness between Matty’s legs making Shaw burn like he had a firebrand down the front of his pants. His hands slipped behind Shaw’s head, and Shaw felt a faint tug on his bun, and then Matty paused, a quest
ion in his eyes.
Shaw nodded. He was still trying to say he was sorry. But he nodded.
With a single twist of his hands, Matty pulled the band free, and Shaw’s hair spilled down, a silken whisper against his neck, his shoulders, his back. It raised goosebumps all over him, and suddenly Shaw was crying. Huge, racking sobs that shook him, that sent his hair swishing across his back like a cold draft.
“I’m—I’m sorr—I’m sorry—”
He couldn’t even say what it was because it wasn’t any one thing. It wasn’t the fact that it was Matty instead of North. It wasn’t the fact that it was all those wasted years. It wasn’t the fear or the desire or pent-up need. It was a little of all of them. It was more. It came from deep places, primal places that Shaw had cordoned off long ago and now broke forth like artesian springs.
“Don’t be sorry, don’t be sorry, don’t.” Matty was doing some kind of complicated acrobatics that ended with Shaw on the couch and Matty kneeling on the floor. Matty’s mouth was dry and hot like a burning page of poems. He kissed the hollow of Shaw’s neck. He kissed the center of his chest. He kissed the wiry trail of hair over those little abdominal bumps. And then Matty looked up. Shaw was wiping his eyes, trying to breathe a single, normal breath, and he couldn’t meet Matty’s gaze. He called himself a fucking coward a few times in his head and reminded himself of all the wasted years. His foot scuffed over a forgotten piece of popcorn and he thought, very clearly through the haze of hormones, that he could still go back: back to weekend movies with North, back to dancing around each other, back to waiting for something that was never, ever going to happen. And then he chuffed a breath and nodded.
Matty’s breath. Shaw hadn’t expected it, hadn’t even guessed how it would feel when Matty tugged his pants down and warm breath coasted in over Shaw’s dick. It was beyond anything Shaw had ever felt. If his breath felt this good, if his breath made Shaw keen a high note in his throat, and lurch like his whole body might come apart—if just his breath did that, what would the rest of it be like?
