Then Ash’s and Cooper’s cocks rubbing against each other, surrounded by Cooper’s secure grip.
Not too loose and not too tight.
Just right.
The world began to spin around him. Ash felt his power gather at the core of his being, and as he finally let the dam break, bright light flooded the whole universe.
He floated on the tides of time. The space around him warped, scintillating with particles he could not name, energies swirling, lights flashing like explosions of far-away stars. He was vaguely aware of Cooper’s hand, slick with his own essence, and the way the delicious touch became too much all of a sudden.
Cooper came with a roar, all tense and focused, and utterly unrestrained. Wet, sticky heat flooded Ash’s belly, and Ash smiled, because he knew Cooper had taken his fill. The physical manifestation of his lover’s pleasure brought Ash to the here and now. With great effort, he cracked his eyes open, smiled, and said, “Hey, we’re still here! The world’s still standing.”
Cooper kissed his nose, sweat dripping from his hairline into Ash’s eyes. “Of course we’re here,” he said. “Where else would we be? Or... were you thinking of someone else instead?” His voice was full of mischief, and Ash knew he didn’t really mean all that. Cooper was just teasing, happy and languid and utterly content, maybe for the first time ever.
Ash looked around, taking in the plain walls of the room, the dime store furniture, and the twin bed that was uselessly pushed against the wall. The familiar surroundings grounded him just as much as Cooper’s presence did. “I don’t know what happened just there,” he said. “I don’t think I was here. In spirit, I mean. It was just so... so powerful! And so different.”
The dim bedroom seemed darker than before. Air shimmered with static, yet the humid air refused to move. A bright blue flash lit up the room, glowing through the closed Venetian blinds like a neon sign.
A sharp crack split the silence, followed by the unexpected hiss of rain and the fresh smell of ozone.
“Did you do that?” Cooper propped himself up on his elbow and looked down on Ash with amazement in his eyes. “You weren’t supposed to do that. I am grounded! I am wearing the ground-stone. I don’t think I did anything.”
Ash sat up with great effort. He bunched up a pillow and stuffed it under his butt. Then he drew his spine up, nice and straight, just like uncle Owen had taught him. He settled into a meditation pose, not quite crossing his legs into a full lotus. He inhaled, and let the breath sink deep into the pit of his belly. When he was ready to let the air out, his eyes drifted shut. He extended his senses and explored the weather system overhead.
It didn’t take but five minutes. Ash clapped his hands, using the sudden crack of sound to draw him out of his meditative trance. “Interesting. That weather system? It’s just over this neighborhood. Although it’s moving, and I think your neighbors will thank us for watering their gardens.”
Cooper gave him a thoughtful look. “What this means,” he said, “is that even though I’m grounded, and I’m not causing earthquakes, I am inducing you even when I’m the one who’s wearing the stone.”
Ash could feel his face lengthen with dismay. “Oh, hell. And here I thought I was the one without a control issue! But there has got to be a way around this!”
Cooper sprang off the bed and stretched his back. “Well, you figure it out. First, I want to shower. Then we can decide what to have for dinner. Don’t forget, my parents were known for frequent camping trips. It could be that this energy discharge side effect isn’t all that unusual.”
Ash’s heart filled with something warm and fuzzy, something that he was afraid he would lose if Cooper happened to walk out of his life as easily as he disappeared through the door. Not until now had he known how desperately lonely he had been in this new city and how badly he wanted that special, unique balance they were forging together, day by day.
CHAPTER 5
Now that Cooper wore the ground-stone around his neck and was confident that it would anchor him properly, mid-July rainstorms became common in the North Hills neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Fortunately, the bed of the Girty Run creek had been upgraded after hurricane Ivan over ten years ago, small bridges had been elevated, and the local infrastructure was now able to absorb their lust without any harm to the neighborhood.
He had been tempted to loan Ash his ground-stone, just to see whether it would truly have no effect on the rain issue.
Cooper had to keep the ground-stone, though, because the risk of causing an earthquake while they were together was in the forefront of his mind.
Still... If he only had two of those, the problem would be solved, wouldn’t it? They could go and build their house right over the rogue node with its wild-flowing ley line of turbulent energy, and wouldn’t bother the ley lines at all. And their energy wouldn’t affect them either.
Although Ash had mentioned that he had overheard a few teens grumble over the unpredictable storms, which had gotten them chased out of the public swimming pool. Maybe they should try and have a bit of consideration for the pool schedule when it came to their rough-housing and its unintended side-effects.
TWO WEEKS OF rain later, when he was on the phone with his father, Cooper asked how difficult would it be to make a ground-stone for Ash as well.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that, son.” Nikko Anneveinen cleared his throat self-consciously. “I’m afraid only a blood relative can fashion a proper ground-stone for another person. Or, at least that’s what the old books say.” The discussion got technical after that, with a lot of talk which Cooper didn’t quite understand – not in the context of their gifts. In engineering and architecture, being on the right frequency made a lot more sense than when applied to something as fluffy and fuzzy than just feeling his way through the world. How could he know the stone recipient’s power signature? He couldn’t possibly measure it. He had to tune it the way a musician with a perfect pitch created a reed flute to a key of his own choosing.
Would the few weeks of living with Ash be enough to fashion an item like that, or would it take months? Years? Knowing Ash intimately was, all of a sudden, very different from truly knowing him well.
“Okay, dad. I get it, I get it. He’ll just have to manage on his own.” Cooper was at that point where his father’s technical talk – if you could use the term technical to all this – was way over his head. He paused, and after a few beats of silence, he decided to clarify the stone’s function once and for all. “So you’re saying only I can use my ground stone. If I loan it to Ash, it won’t do him any good.”
“That’s right,” his father said. “Well... it won’t do you any good if you leave it behind, either, so you’re taking an earthquake risk.” He paused, hesitating. The silence was pregnant with things untold.
“What, Dad?”
Nikko Anneveinen cleared his throat. “I probably shouldn’t even tell you. Ash is capable not to cause damage. He’s done good work in other areas. I think it’s just the physical attraction between the two of you that’s complicating your control issues.”
“You shouldn’t tell me what, Dad?” Cooper insisted.
“Okay. I don’t want you acting on this, okay? But... if you use the ground-stone to neutralize a frequency it’s not attuned to, it will do it only once.”
Oh, now that was interesting. “Only once? And what will happen then?”
His father paused. “I... uh. It’s happened twice before that I’m aware of, but the stone will break.”
“Break how, Dad?” Cooper could barely breathe with excitement. All that over-the-head technical talk had probably explained all this, and he only wished he had understood it better.
“So loaning it to Ash will make it a disposable item,” his father elaborated. “And before you ask, no, we can’t make a bunch of disposable ground-stones for Ash. It takes a lot to make one, son.”
A vague, half-formed thought sprang to being in the back of Cooper’s mind. “So it can n
eutralize discharges at wrong frequencies... but only once?”
“That’s pretty much sums it up.” His father gave an uneasy laugh. “Don’t try anything stupid with it, okay?”
“Sure.” The answer came automatically. They spoke about the cousins next, and how some of them were talking of moving to Pittsburgh. The excitement of meeting family members he knew as kids pushed idle speculations out of Cooper’s mind, but even after they ended their call, a curious sense of unease persisted.
Cooper shook his head and fingered the smooth surface of the ground-stone, whose cool weight pressed right above his sternum. He was onto something, but he didn’t know what, just as he knew that worrying the thought wouldn’t produce a sudden flash of enlightenment on command.
It would come in due course.
Cooper forced himself to push the stone out of his mind. Fussing about with domestic chores would help him bleed off most of his nervous energy. Whatever was eating at him could wait, and he’d figure it out later.
IT TURNED OUT that since Ash was only a bit shorter than Cooper, Cooper’s bicycle fit him well enough. Therefore Ash perched himself on the high seat, toes barely touching the pedals, as he careened down the hill from Cooper’s apartment on Mary Street. He slowed down as he turned onto North Street and carefully navigated the dense morning fog. Once he zig-zagged his way out of Millvale, he heard the muted buzz of Route 28 early morning traffic overhead.
Ash zoomed through a weathered tunnel, the faded graffiti tags just flashes in his peripheral vision, as he neared the railroad track.
He slowed down to a crawl, and listened.
No train – and no warning of one, either.
Ash lightened up in the saddle while crossing the railroad and relaxed into a smile. Before him, the Millvale Riverfront Park opened into a milky mass that only hinted at open space. A regular person could hardly tell what lay ahead.
Ash sent his water-sense through the dense fog, way past where his eye could see. The fog was water, thin water, but water nonetheless. He saw its white mass billow before him, and he felt the way its fluffy, cool pillows boiled up over the crest of the cliff, as though the water tried to reach him all the way from the river.
Ash rode through it, gripping the handlebars tight against the vibrations of the cinder path which cut through an expanse of groomed grass. The turf flashed past the right side of his front wheel, ghostly and colorless. The wooden gazebo and the picnic pavilion, structures he sensed as absence of water, appeared and disappeared in the thick morning haze. their lumber looming dark with morning dew as he came close.
When he could almost see the vast expanse of the rowing club building, Ash dismounted.
He peered through the thicket of staghorn sumac and wild grapes in search of the river. Its slick surface was down there somewhere, accessible through an opening in the wall of fragrant greenery that would let him pass.
He found the staircase that Cooper had shown him only weeks ago, hid Cooper’s bike in the bushes, and made his way down the steep, slippery metal steps, barely touching the rough wooden railing.
He didn’t see, but felt, the current beneath him through all the fog, but the hushed susurrations of the river told him the stream was high and moving fast. No wonder, considering the frequent and hard rainfall of the last few days.
The rainfall he had caused.
The lower he descended, the further he was from the park that spelled civilization on the cliff. The river now called his name, wild and primal, and its eddies beckoned playfully as though he was known and recognized from afar.
Ash bit his lip. He wouldn’t give in to his temptation to walk the river bottom. His goal was different today.
He kicked off his sneakers, stripped out of his T-shirt, and waded in. This was the shallow part, where the sandbar piled with the flat stones that Cooper liked so much. Cooper, who liked to just wade in and cool off, lounge for a bit, and get out, would’ve now stayed out of the lively water entirely. Even here in the shallows, the current tugged at Ash’s calves in a playful effort to wrestle him down.
“Not now,” Ash whispered. “Now I need to just settle down with you. Let’s have a little look.” Talking to the river didn’t seem odd to him, not while they were alone.
The current laughed and ran on, apparently content to ignore him for now.
Ash found a deeper area upstream of the rocks, and settled on one that was flat on top and tilted just right, making it comfortable for Ash to face upriver. He was looking into the sun, a pallid yellow orb whose fuzzy outline brightened a circular shape in the fog, yet didn’t quite manage to burn a hole through it.
That would come later in the day.
Ash focused on the swift stream that passed him, caressing his skin and informing his water-sense of the happenings far away.
Except he didn’t need to know all that right now. Inquisition was not his task today. As the current of the Allegheny tried insistently to lure him in, Ash let his shoulders drop.
His mind settled.
That spinning vortex at his center was the focus of his undivided attention, the whirling, undulating eddy with a tight sphere of energy at its center. This was what let his extra senses connect to the water around him.
He exerted his will.
That sphere grew smaller and smaller.
It spun faster and faster.
Ash was rooted to the stone under him and to the river around him. A steel-solid shaft of force grounded him from his spine all the way into the muddy, waterlogged river-bottom silt. As long as there was water in the rock, he could talk to it. He could ask for favors, rely on it to hold him, question it for intelligence.
This time, Ash was not asking anything specific. His goal, his task, was to do the smallest things he always did, except with more control.
Some people said that practice makes perfect. According to uncle Owen, they were sadly mistaken.
Practice made permanent.
Every time Ash practiced something, he reinforced that particular process into his neural synapses. The energy channels he used, however they were connected to his physical body, became stronger with every single vision quest, with every focused meditative practice.
If he kept calling a storm, he would be even more likely to call a storm the next time he lost control. Therefore, he had to outnumber his storms with controlled meditations. With river talks, with river walks. With anything that would give him the edge of fine control over a gift that, useful when he had been alone, was a hazard while Ash was in a relationship.
Giving up Cooper was out of question.
The vision of chasing Cooper away scared every frivolous thought out of him, and the cold fear of such devastating loss helped him focus.
Gaining control was everything.
COOPER SURVEYED HIS dated, functional eat-in kitchen. The water in the kettle was heating up. The coffee grounds were carefully measured into the French press, and six eggs he had whisked and seasoned sat in a bowl next to the pan.
The bread waited in the toaster. As soon as Ash got back from the river, Cooper would get breakfast going.
As he walked from the kitchen into the room that most people would use as a living room, but which he used as an office, he gave it a critical look. There was no way this little one-bedroom apartment could provide a comfortable home for two grown men. The L-shaped desk in the corner groaned under his computer set-up, and the shelves bristled with reference books and client files. There was no television, and the old sofa he rescued from the curbside was hardly fit for polite company.
Ash counted, most definitely, as polite company.
A peek through the large double door that led into what counted as bedroom filled him with further dismay. Cooper knew better than that. As an architect, he was visually inclined and fairly artistic. He could certainly do better than Ash’s queen size mattress on the floor, his old bed stuck to the wall, and a slew of various unpacked boxes stacked around the room’s perimeter.
&n
bsp; Yet he didn’t want to undertake the massive clean-up on his own. Those were Ash’s things, mostly, and Ash would have to participate. However, while he was gone, Cooper could spend his time better than wondering how to better reshuffle all those boxes. He’d never decide for Ash and present him with a fait accompli.
Designing a house, however, that was something he could do all by himself.
COOPER SETTLED INTO his chair, turned off his Wi-Fi without bothering to check his email, and opened his high-end architecture program. The screen came alive slowly and in layers. Menus popped up. The familiar thrill of excitement filled him as a three-dimensional grid defined his virtual workspace. He leaned back into his comfortable computer chair, laced his fingers behind his neck, and stared at his screen for a while.
When he and Ash hadn’t been causing weather disturbances over the last two weeks, they had been applying their handyman skills and painting the new drywall of the rowhouses. The numerous hours it took to mask off the windows, the floors, and all woodwork in protective plastic and tape, had given them ample time to discuss their dream house.
And later, as Ash wielded the paint spray gun and applied an even layer of white to the ceiling and an inoffensive beige to the walls, Cooper busied himself with the never-ending cleanup tasks that always accompany a project of this magnitude. While he was washing brushes, cleaning clogged spray nozzles, and stirring new cans of paint, he let his mind wander into the new and exciting area of Ash’s wish list.
They wanted something self-sufficient, off the grid if at all possible. A tidy house with a clean, Scandinavian design. But Japanese, too – open spaces, miniature landscapes inside and out. A garden was a given, but instead of the traditional koi pond, Ash had suggested a more modest hot tub and a bonfire circle. The living room’s fireplace would serve to heat the space, not merely look decorative. How about fieldstone instead of tiles or wood? How about... oh, heck. There was so much. One thing was for certain, though. The house and its garden would have to be hidden from prying eyes, and the access to it would be strictly controlled.
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