by A. P. Moraez
Ash shoved him away playfully and resumed their dinner. Logan had left a sack of baguettes nearby, and they were simply divine with the soup. Ash abstained on drinking more grape juice, though. He had to mind his sugar intake.
After going for seconds and thirds, Ash slumped back, back hitting the c-shaped couch behind him, and groaned. “I think I’m going to explode.”
Logan laughed and pulled him into a hug. He’d finished eating a few minutes ago. They just stayed there, together and warm under the candle lights. It was heaven, just being able to rest, his belly full, knowing that he was safe in his lover’s arms.
“You know,” Logan whispered, mouth close to Ash’s left ear, “Not to be all sappy and gross again, as Alec would say,” he squeezed Ash’s waist and bit Ash’s earlobe lightly, making Ash squirm, “but I’ve been dreaming of this day forever, it feels like.”
“What do you mean?”
Logan cleared his throat and tension coiled inside Ash’s stomach as he waited for Logan’s next words.
“You might think I’m crazy,” he finally started, voice almost inaudible, he was speaking so low, “but when I bought this place… I always envisioned that, someday, we’d be here, like this, together, exactly as we are right now.”
“Really?” Ash was shocked. “But I was… I mean, for all you could’ve known, we’d never see each other again.”
Logan’s chest rumbled and he squeezed Ash tighter against his chest. “I didn’t care about it. I just refused to stop believing in my dream.”
“Your dream?”
Logan nodded against the top of Ash’s head. “I’ve always dreamed of settling down and having a family. A quiet place away from the spotlight and paparazzi. And I wanted it with you, and only you.”
Ash’s arms tightened involuntarily around Logan. That had been his dream when they were just starting out as boyfriends, still as kids. He’d never thought in so many details, but whenever he thought of his future, Logan was always there in the picture in his head. Until that day his father did what he did and all those dreams vanished in the wind, carried away with daisy petals.
“Sounds crazy, right?”
“No,” Ash croaked out, then cleared his throat. “No, absolutely not. If anything, I… I’m glad you never gave up on me. That you kept hoping.”
Logan snorted, lips brushing lightly on the column of Ash’s neck. “So you’re glad I hunted you down and made you see how madly in love with you I’ve always been?”
Ash chuckled. “Kinda, yeah.”
“Best decision I’ve ever made, buying that plane ticket.” He paused for a moment, then snorted out another laugh. “Even if Diana wanted my balls there for a minute.”
Diana. Ash hadn’t thought about the sophisticated, kinda bitchy woman in a while. Logan was keeping her at arm’s length, in the safety of her heavily guarded condo in LA, far away from Hoofslope while Leo was still such an unpredictable threat.
“Why was she mad at you?”
“’Cus I canceled a multi-million contract for three movies that’d have been enough to pay for the overhaul she’d been planning to do in her penthouse back in LA.”
“Is she still mad?”
“Nah. I mean, she might be, but she doesn’t bother me about that anymore.”
“Are you two close?”
“Yeah,” Logan answered after a moment. “We met through the guy who used to be my agent. She was his secretary. After a few years I noticed she had a much better grasp of everything than he did, so I fired him and hired her. We became close friends over the years. For a while back then, she… she was a big part of why I didn’t go insane. She and Ian, actually.”
Ash leaned back from their hug and positioned himself between Logan’s powerful thighs, so that they could talk face-to-face.
“How come?”
Logan studied him for a moment, as if unsure whether he should tell him all this, or how he could.
“After a few years working for Nick, when my career finally took off, I became a bit too much of a… workaholic. I focused on my job and on finding you, and that was it. I was losing myself…” Logan trailed off, hands resting on Ash’s thighs. “I was just a twenty-year-old who was pissed at the world for having lost the love of his life and being unable to find him,” he said with a yellow little smile, “and I was making too much money; way more than I knew what to do with.”
“I’m sorry.” What else could Ash say? The fact that he’d been responsible for that pain hurt him, even though it was a thing of the past now.
Logan just smiled meekly at him and continued. “Fact is, I was veering toward a dark path, burying myself in prostitutes and even starting to mess around with drugs. When Nick and Diana got a whiff of it, man…” Logan’s face split into a huge grin, full of fondness, “…they were pissed. Cornered me and staged an intervention. I was pissed for a few weeks, that they thought they could tell me what to do, but when Nick gave me an ultimatum that he wasn’t interested with dealing with shit like that, with people who didn’t respect themselves, it downed on me that I was possibly throwing a whole career away for nothing; for things that didn’t matter.”
“You’re lucky. Not everybody has people like that. Friends that make you see reality when you need it are hard to come by.”
“Yeah,” Logan mused, clearly lost in memories. “They told me I needed to fill my time with things I liked, but I couldn’t find anything that I liked other than my job. Told me I had to make new friends, but I wasn’t interested in that, either. I was… focused; grumpy, some would say. Truth is, I didn’t have time for that. I just wanted to work and spend the rest of my time looking for you.”
Ash bit his lip as guilt consumed him. The words were starting to choke him. It hurt him to think of a grumpy Logan working his ass off, making plans for a future he didn’t have any reason to actually believe would come to pass.
“That’s about the time when Ian and Diana started to become closer friends of mine. Ian was already that, of course, but when they saw that I hadn’t managed to make almost any friends in more than four years, aside from Alec, Nick and Amadeo and his family, they started to come by sometimes. We’d have lunch together frequently. And they… they’d help me get in contact with agencies once in a while, when I got into a mood to spend some buck trying to find you again.”
“Fuck, Logan,” Ash exhaled, hands gliding to the back of Logan’s neck and squeezing him hard. “I had no idea.”
Logan huffed out a laugh. “That’s the second time you cursed today. Who are you and what’d you do to my man?”
Ash laughed and punched him lightly in the chest. “So you told Diana about… us? Our pasts?”
“Yeah, she knows. Some night or another I got too drunk and spilled all of it to her.” He paused for a moment. “It helped a little. It was good having someone to talk to.”
Ash nodded, then his heartbeat picked up when a thought occurred to him. “You guys ever been together?”
Logan was gazing at him with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. “What makes you say that?”
Ash shrugged. “Dunno. It’s just the way that she looks at you, I guess. And at me.”
“And how’s that?”
“Sometimes she looks at you weird, like… I don’t know. Maybe I’m being stupid. She… she looks at me like we shouldn’t be together or something. Like… like I don’t measure up.”
Logan’s expression darkened and Ash caught it, even though Logan was quick to mask it.
“I’ll be honest,” Logan said, voice firm but gentle, “we fucked once, but it was just that one time, and then I stopped it.”
Ash didn’t know how to react. Just imagining that woman in bed with Logan made his stomach lurch. He dropped his eyes, suddenly wary of gazing directly at the sapphires. He didn’t want Logan to notice how upset that news got him.
“I stopped it,” Logan repeated, more firmly, using a finger to lift Ash’s gaze to his, “because it didn’t feel righ
t at all.”
Ash frowned, not getting it. Logan was bisexual. They had talked about it a few times. What could possibly not have felt right?
Logan took a big breath, before explaining, “I told you before. I fucked around a lot. Modesty aside, I was popular, rich, attractive. People practically fell on me without me even trying. But all those times… I mean, maybe not all, but most times I was beyond drunk, completely out of it. I’d just drag someone to the car and Ian would drop us at my apartment. Next day I’d wake up naked with someone completely meaningless in my bed, most times not remembering their name, how the fuck we’d ended up there, and not even what we’d done the night before.”
Ash sucked in a deep breath, trying not to let the emotions that story was spurting on him take hold of his actions. But, yeah, hearing about the man he loved fucking other people wasn’t exactly great.
“That one time I had sex with Diana, though, it was different. We were both sober and well aware of what we were doing. I don’t even know how it started. I think it started as a stupid game or something, and before we knew it, we were going at it in my living room. But I hated it, because it felt like betrayal. Like I was cheating. Because I couldn’t take my mind off of you.”
Ash gasped. “But that doesn’t even make sense. For all you knew, I could’ve been dead. What if some weirdo had never dropped a video of me on the internet? What if it never made YouTube’s front page? Then, what? You’d have spent your whole life unable to connect with anyone else? Feeling that you owed me some sort of… of loyalty?”
Even as the words left his mouth, Logan reacted, and the pain was clear in his eyes. They’d hurt him a little, and Ash felt horrible for that, but it was true. He hadn’t known Logan’s mental had been so down in the dumps like that. It was shocking and heartbreaking.
“You can’t tell your heart how to behave, Ash,” Logan sneered. “You can’t tell it to just let go of the person who made it feel the most just like that. It doesn’t work like that. I tried. Believe me, I tried. But everywhere I’d look, there was your face. I’d see strangers out on the street and rush to them, only to die a little bit more inside when they’d turn around and it wasn’t you. And the more I tried to forget and get a grip on my life, the more I surrounded myself with you, even without meaning to. Hell,” he smoothed a hand through his dark brown hair, using the other to make a broad arch, gesturing to their surroundings, “look at this place; the other house, too. What do you see?”
With a flutter in his stomach, Ash shifted his gaze, unsure, from Logan’s troubled sapphires to the room around them. Other than the gazillion candles and the ostentatious decor, with all the thick, expensive rugs, gigantic TV mounted on the wall, and the state-of-the art kitchen behind them, he didn’t see anything abnormal.
“I don’t get it,” he spoke, voice low, shifting back to face his boyfriend.
Logan snorted out a wet laugh, then he took Ash’s right hand in his, turned it palm up, and pressed a firm kiss right to the middle. “Baby,” he whispered, “what color is the rug we’re sitting in?”
Ash looked down between their legs. “It’s light brown.”
“Light brown,” Logan repeated reverently. Sapphires were burning a hole right through him, so intense. They never left his eyes as Logan trailed soft kisses from Ash’s hand, over his wrist, all the way to the inside of his arm. “Light brown, like your lovely skin.”
“Log—”
“What color are the furniture? This table, the kitchen?”
“Dark brown.”
A single tear had escaped Logan’s left eye, and he didn’t even bother to wipe it away as he lifted his hand to Ash’s neck and rasped out, “Dark brown, like this fucking beauty mark that always drove me crazy.”
Ash was going to hyperventilate. And die. He was going to hyperventilate and die if Logan didn’t stop being so fucking sweet and demented and an asshole.
“I get it now, Logan. I g—”
“What color are the cushions all around us?” Logan cut him off.
Ash’s chin quivered as he replied, “They are a l—”
“A light brown, almost yellow, aren’t they?” Logan growled, apparently having difficulties getting a hold of his emotions as much as Ash himself. He leaned forward and Ash closed his wet eyes instinctively as Logan’s lips closed in on them. He shivered when Logan pressed gentle kisses first to his right eyelid, then the left, and said, “Like your ridiculously gorgeous eyes, that I couldn’t help seeing every time I closed my own, during all those years, and still can’t.”
“Fuck, Logan,” Ash said, words wobbling, as he flung himself forward, on his knees, and hugged the man for dear life. “Fuck you, you asshole.”
Logan was chuckling his trembling chuckles, hugging him right back. “Seriously, three swears in a day. We should celebrate.”
Ash was sobbing like a little bitch, probably blocking Logan’s airways, but he just couldn’t let go. This was just so fucked up. For years he’d suffered in silence, unseen, seeing those sapphires everywhere he went, even in his sleep. Everywhere he looked and saw even a smidgen of blue, that was it: Logan was right there, even if Ash hated that he was there. For years, he’d convinced himself that this man right here was just a fake-ass idiot who’d played him and discarded him like low-class filth. And while he went through all that, thinking himself a masochistic idiot for just being incapable of letting go of his first love, who was probably fake? Well, Logan had been as stuck with him as Ash had been with Logan, surrounding himself in all colors and little details that would remind him of Ash. So fucked up. So sweet. He wanted to hug and kiss and punch Logan in the face, all at the same time.
It took a long time for them to stop bawling in each other’s arms and squeezing the life off of each other. When Logan finally pressed a kiss to his temple and leaned back, Ash’s knees were sore from the pressure of holding his weight by themselves for so long.
“Diana couldn’t stop pestering me about it,” he said with a cute lopsided smile. “If we ever go spend some time in LA, in my apartment there, you’ll see. It’s worse than this. It’s a top-floor penthouse, with floor to ceiling windows, and the interior is all tones of browns and beiges. She couldn’t shut up about it making no sense that I’d choose such dark tones in a place that could feel so open and light with a lighter palette.”
“She was right,” Ash said, trying not to cry again at Logan’s admission. It was just crazy to think that he’d been living and sleeping and cooking in a place that reminded him of Ash so much. On purpose at that. For years. “You’re fucked up.”
Logan barked out a laugh, then joined their hands. “I am,” he admitted. “I’m all fucked up and crazy about you.”
Ash smiled, raising his eyes to sapphires which threatened to consume him.
“You’re it for me, Ash Reid. I knew it when I was fifteen, and I know it now. I want you by my side, get it?” Ash was gonna have a heart attack and die at a young age and it was all this man’s fault. “I want you, and only you,” Logan continued in a trembling whisper, “forever and always.” He paused and fished for something in his back pocket. “That’s why,” he continued, hands leaving Ash’s to open the little box, “I’m here down on my knees before you today, asking you if you’d make me the happiest son of a bitch alive and give me the honor of marrying me.”
IT WAS LIKE the whole ground had disintegrated from under his knees and the whole Universe had condensed down to that tiny little navy-blue box, with that little silver ring inside. Ash’s mouth was opening and closing, but no words came out. It was a gorgeous ring, made even more special by the message it contained. A pinecone made of interlacing metal and tiny little diamonds. It was masculine, somehow, and discreet. Something that he could wear proudly out on the streets without fear of being robbed or thought of as ostentatious. It was… perfect.
He lifted a trembling hand until his fingers almost touched the tip of the pinecone, but then retreated, not wanting to damage it.
<
br /> When the capacity to breathe came back to him, Ash jumped to his feet and whirled around, trembling.
“Ash?” Logan’s voice had never sounded so insecure; so vulnerable. “I’m starting to freak out a little bit here. Any moment now, you could, you know… say something.”
With a choked laugh, Ash spun around. “Of course I’ll marry you,” he whispered, voice failing him. Nothing had ever looked as sweet as the huge smile, all teeth, that downed on Logan’s face as he rose from his feet and stepped forward.
They were both trembling when Logan retrieved the ring from the box and slotted it on the proper finger. Ash tried his best not to start crying again when Logan stared at his hand, as if in awe, for a couple seconds, then brought it to his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut, pressing a firm kiss right there over the finger he’d just put a ring on.
“I lost about another ten years in just a few seconds when you turned away from me,” Logan said, eyes still closed. Then he opened his eyes and gazed right into Ash’s eyes. “Try not to do that again, uh?”
Ash was still smiling when he leaned up and their lips joined. It was all wet from both their tears, and hot, and messy. Ash shivered against Logan’s firm body when the man snaked his thick arm around Ash’s waist and pulled him up, smashing their chests together as they kissed.
Ash squealed — not even in the slightest proud of himself — when Logan hauled him up, hands kneading Ash’s ass as they kissed. They were moving, tongues still tangling as Ash was laid down with the utmost care into a mattress. He opened his eyes then. They were in the bedroom. It was easily three times the size their bedroom back in Hoofslope, all following the theme of white walls and light-gray marble floors. The bed was probably custom-made; too large to be a normal king. And it was lower than normal, so close to the floor that it was easy to spot the dozens of little candles that illuminated the whole room. The mattress was soft and the bed covers white as snow, and everything was covered by the same rose petals that had adorned their path into the living room and the living room itself.
