by Alexa Land
“The glass will shatter.”
“I promise I’ll try to help,” he said. “I’ll go home and get everyone to start looking through my archives to try to find a way to hold you together.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
He looked sympathetic when he told me, “If you want me to, I’ll be there. I’ll stay with you on your birthday, so—”
I finished for him. “So I don’t have to die alone.” He nodded, and I exhaled slowly. “You can’t be there. No one can,” I said, as Fig bumped my leg and I picked him up. “A massive release of energy would kill everything around it. You weren’t kidding when you compared me to a nuclear bomb.”
“But we don’t know how much your powers are going to increase. They might just double or triple, and you might be able to vent the energy fast enough. There’s still a chance you’ll survive this.”
“What do you think my odds are? Be honest.”
“Maybe…fifty-fifty.”
“So, it’s a coin toss. Heads I live, tails I die.”
After a pause, he asked, “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to spend every minute I have left with Ari. He rented a house for us out in the desert for my birthday. We’re going on Thursday. I thought you’d be mad when you found out I was leaving town and would have to take a break from our lessons, but I guess it really doesn’t matter now. There’s nothing left to teach me.”
I shifted my dog in my arms as I continued, “When I feel the pressure starting to build, I’ll drive out into the desert, far from everyone. I’ll make sure no one gets hurt because of me.” I hugged Fig and told him, “I’ll leave a letter for Ari, and I’ll ask him to take care of you. I’m sure he will, because he’s loved you right from the start. I don’t know what else I’ll tell him. I don’t know how to explain—”
A lump in my throat cut off my words, and August said, “This isn’t over. I might still be able to find a way to help you. Or, maybe you’ll end up being fine. We don’t really know what’ll happen, or how much your powers are going to increase.” I tried my damnedest to hold on to that shred of hope, but it felt so flimsy.
And this didn’t just affect me. “I really wanted to help Tyler,” I told him. “I wanted that so much, for both of you.”
“I know, and I’ll always be grateful for that. I’m not giving up, though. I’ll never stop looking for a way to bring him back to me, as long as I’m alive.”
“He’s so lucky to have you.”
“No he isn’t.” There was pure heartbreak in his eyes. “What’s happening to Tyler is my fault. I was arrogant and thought I could mitigate all the risks. Shows how much I know.” It was only then that I realized how much guilt he felt for what was happening to his husband. He changed the subject by indicating the clock on the mantel. “You need to go pick up your boyfriend. I know you don’t want to be late.”
When I agreed, he followed me outside. I put Fig in my car before turning to August and saying, “I guess there’s no reason to continue our lessons.”
“I’ll still come and teach you if you want me to. You were getting good at those blue balls.”
I grinned at his attempt at humor. “It’s okay. That’s time you could be spending with Tyler.”
“Like I said, my family and I will keep searching my archives up until the last possible minute, and if we find a way to help you, I’ll contact you right away. How can I reach you when you’re on your trip?”
I found a pen and paper in my car, wrote down Ari’s phone number, and handed it over. Then I shook his hand and said, “I’m glad I met you, August. Please take care of yourself, and Tyler, and your wonderful family.”
“This isn’t goodbye. We could still fix this. Or maybe you’ll come through your birthday just fine.”
I nodded and got behind the wheel of the convertible. Surprisingly, Fig climbed onto my lap, and I kissed the top of his head before starting the engine and rolling down the driveway. The gate was still open, thanks to the vampire and his magic.
When we reached the street, I turned left, and August turned right. He’d become a good friend, and I was sad to see him go. No matter what he said, that had felt an awful lot like goodbye.
Despite all the disappointment of the last hour, I couldn’t let it cast a shadow on my time with Ari. There was no way of knowing what was going to happen on my birthday, and all I could do in the meantime was make the most of every day, hour, and minute I had with him.
I was a few minutes early when I pulled up in front of the coffee house. Ari and a young woman were behind the counter. When he spotted me, he gave her a hug and said something before jogging out to the car.
He climbed in the passenger seat and kissed me before petting Fig’s head, and I asked, “Don’t you have to stay and do your closing routine?”
“No. Jenny’s been training with me all week, and tonight she’s ready to take over.” As I pulled away from the curb, he added, “That was my final shift.”
“Did you quit because they wouldn’t give you the time off for our desert vacation?”
“Exactly, but please don’t feel responsible. I’m happy with the choice I made,” he said. “I can always find another job, but how often do I get to spend your twenty-fifth birthday with you in a gorgeous, exotic location?”
“In that case, what do you think about going sooner than we’d planned? If the rental house is available, I’ll gladly pay for the extra days.”
“Let’s find out if that’s an option.” He pulled his phone from his pocket, accessed the vacation rental website, and sent a message to the property owner. Then he told me, “It might take a while to hear back from them.”
Fortunately, he was wrong about that. About five minutes later, he glanced at his phone, tapped the screen a few times, and exclaimed, “Great news! It’s ours as of tomorrow if we want it. Is that too soon?”
“That’s perfect.” After he sent another message and returned the phone to his pocket, I asked, “Are you up for a drive? I’d like to show you something.”
Ari grinned at me and said, “I’m up for anything at all times,” so I drove past my house and kept climbing into the hills. A few minutes later, we pulled into a turnout, and he murmured, “This is amazing.”
Before us, all of Los Angeles sparkled and glowed, lighting up the night. I picked up Fig and brought him along, and the three of us sat on the hood of my car and enjoyed the view. There was a touch of fall in the air, and when Ari shivered a little, I took off my hoodie and draped it over his shoulders. He hugged me while Fig leaned against me, and I put my arms around both of them.
After a pause, I asked Ari, “Do you think it’d be alright if I started calling you my boyfriend?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. I didn’t know if you’d think it was too soon.”
“I’ve been calling you that for a while now, so it’s definitely not too soon,” he said, with a sweet smile. “You mean so much to me, Griffin.”
There were so many things I wanted to say to him, but all I could manage right then was, “I feel the same way about you.”
Eventually, we got back in the car and drove home. Ari kept his hand on my leg, and I rested my hand on top of his. Once inside, I made the three of us a late dinner, and we sat with Fig for a while as his telenovelas played. “I’m starting to like this one,” I admitted, as I gestured at the screen.
“Me, too.”
“Can you understand what they’re saying?”
“I understand enough to know Julia is way too good for Rafael,” he said.
“She totally is!” Fig shot us an annoyed look before turning his attention back to the screen.
After a while, we left him to his programs and went upstairs to get ready for bed. “I think I’ll take a shower,” Ari said. “I smell like coffee.” I actually liked that, but I nodded in agreement.
When he stepped out of the shower a few minutes later, I was waiting with a big towel, and he sm
iled at me as I wrapped him up in it and dried him off. He laughed when I picked him up and carried him to bed, and as I placed him on top of the covers, I said, “I owe you one.”
I kissed him before parting his legs and kneeling between his thighs. His skin was still a bit damp as I licked and kissed my way across his smooth chest, pausing to suck his pink nipples before sliding my tongue down his stomach. When I took his cock between my lips, it swelled and hardened in my mouth.
His breathing sped up, and he began to writhe with pleasure as I sucked him. It was so gratifying to watch him like that, to know he felt good, and I was the cause. I rested on my elbows and wrapped my hands around his waist, and he rocked his hips slightly, in time to the rhythm of my lips sliding up and down his shaft.
I’d been worried about the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing. But it didn’t seem to matter much, because in just a few minutes, he cried out and came in my mouth. The taste was subtle and delicate, and I swallowed without hesitation.
He was trembling when he finished, so I gathered him in my arms and shifted around, then pulled the blanket over us. Ari clung to me and tucked his head beneath my chin, and after a while, he whispered, “There’s so much you don’t know about me. I haven’t even told you where I came from.”
It was easy enough to imagine a miserable childhood with an unaccepting family who rejected their gay son. He was clearly carrying a lot of pain with him, and I hated the thought of him reliving any of that, so I said softly, “You don’t have to tell me, because I know everything I need to about you, Ari. I know you’re kind, brilliant, loving, and the most talented person I’ve ever met. You also have an amazing capacity for finding joy in things other people overlook, and you make every day feel special. Instead of looking back or ahead, I’m all about living in the here and now and cherishing our time together.”
He met my gaze and smiled, and then he kissed me as I held him securely.
Chapter Seven
The next day, I let Ari sleep in while I went to the grocery store. By the time he got up, I had a big cooler filled to capacity and was taking a second batch of cookies out of the oven. He wandered into the kitchen looking adorably rumpled in just a T-shirt and briefs and told me, “You should have woken me so I could help.”
“You needed your rest, because we have a big day ahead of us.” I ushered him to a seat at the kitchen table and kissed him, and then I attempted a latte and brought it to him.
I followed that up with fresh fruit, scrambled eggs, and toast. After we’d both eaten, we went upstairs, and I turned my attention to packing. Ari indicated the stack of notebooks in a corner of the room and said, “You’re bringing your novel, right?”
“Actually, I’m bringing these.” I held up a trio of new notebooks, then put them in my suitcase, along with a pencil case containing my favorite pens. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and that novel isn’t what I want to work on. It was good practice, and I learned a lot by writing it, but I think that’s all it was ever meant to be. Now it’s time to move on.”
Once the car was loaded, Fig got comfortable in the back seat. I’d dressed him in a T-shirt, sun visor, and his driving goggles, and I’d made him a bed out of his favorite blankets.
We stopped off at Ari’s warehouse, and I discovered his packing style was delightfully haphazard. He threw an armload of clothes into a suitcase, seemingly at random, then carried a towering stack of books over and put them on top of the clothes. When he saw he still had some room, he got a second stack of books and added those, too. I could barely lift it when I went to put the suitcase into the trunk.
Next, he gathered up every blank canvas he could find. There were six in various sizes. I took them to the car while he transferred a lot of his paints and brushes into a milk crate, then topped it off with a few sketchbooks and a handful of drawing pencils. While I rearranged the trunk, he packed an assortment of tote bags and brought them to me, then said, “Oh wait, we need entertainment.” He rushed back inside and returned with the bag of games, bubbles, and miscellaneous items he’d brought along on our first picnic. It seemed like ages ago.
When we got back in the car, he was wearing a pair of sunglasses and a red baseball cap, and he flashed me a huge smile as he said, “This is so exciting!” I had to agree.
Joshua Tree National Park was only about a hundred and fifty miles from the Hollywood Hills, but it looked and felt like a different planet. I was used to desert landscapes, but what made this one so unusual were the trees that had given the park its name. Most of them stood alone, spread out like sentinels around the dry, tawny landscape. Each tree sported a small number of thick, spiny branches, which grew upward from a straight, equally spiny trunk and branched again before ending in clusters of green spikes. They looked like something Dr. Seuss would have drawn, on a day he was feeling cranky.
A few miles west of the park’s entrance, Ari used his phone’s GPS to direct us onto a cracked asphalt road. After a while, we turned onto a narrow dirt road, which took us into the hills.
When the rental finally came into view, I was pleasantly surprised. The modern, stylish house sat by itself near the top of a hill, surrounded by a rugged landscape punctuated with rocks and boulders. Two Joshua trees bracketed the glass and metal structure. It was clear they’d been there far longer than the home.
Ari punched in a code to retrieve a key from a lock box, and once he got the door open, Fig and I followed him inside. The home consisted of a big living area, which connected to an open kitchen, plus one bedroom and a bathroom. The roofline was lower at the back of the house, and then it soared to about eighteen feet at the front, where it met a wall of glass. The interior was mostly white and subdued shades of gray, which put all the emphasis on the spectacular, panoramic desert view outside those huge windows.
I told Ari, “This is fantastic. Thank you so much for finding it.”
“You haven’t seen the best part yet.”
He led me through the house and out a side door, and we found ourselves on an absolutely gorgeous patio. It included a seating area and a firepit, as well as a hot tub and an outdoor shower. When I turned to the right, I exclaimed, “It has an outdoor bedroom!”
A king-size bed was made up with lots of pillows and indigo blue and dark orange linens. It was surrounded by a tall, wooden frame, which was draped in long, airy panels of dark blue linen. The top of the frame was uncovered, and I said, “We can lie in bed and stargaze.”
“Exactly. That’s what sold me on the house. It actually made me think of the painting on your ceiling, but we’ll have to imagine the space ships and dirigibles.” I grinned at that, and Ari took my hand. “Did you see the telescope in the living room? We can bring it out here tonight. There are supposed to be books on astronomy in the house, and field guides to the native plants and animals. I hope we see some wildlife while we’re here.”
“This is perfection.”
He met my gaze and asked, “Do you really like it?”
“I absolutely love it. Seriously. I can’t imagine anything better.” That put a big smile on his face.
We went back inside to check on Fig and found the dog stretched out in the center of the mattress in the bedroom. I brought him a bowl of water as Ari turned on the TV and found a Spanish-language station. I loved the way he just totally bought in to my dog’s idiosyncrasies.
I told Fig, “This room is yours, unless it starts to rain. Then you’ll have to share. But lucky for you, we’re in the desert, so that probably won’t happen.”
After Ari and I unloaded the car and transferred the food from the cooler to the fridge, I asked my boyfriend, “What would you like to do first?”
“I want to get in that outdoor bed with you.”
“That’s an excellent idea.”
We took turns in the bathroom and got cleaned up a bit before stripping down to just our briefs. It was pretty warm out, so we settled in on top of the thick, soft duvet, and I admitted, “This is the
first trip I’ve taken in over fifteen years.”
“Really?” I nodded, and when I reached out and brushed a lock of hair from his eyes, he caught my hand and kissed it. “I want to show you the world,” he said softly. “There’s so much beauty out there, and I want you to experience all of it.”
“This is a perfect start.”
Ari ran his fingers into my hair as he brushed his lips to mine. We spent a long time kissing, and we were both pretty turned on when he sat up and said, “I’ll be right back.”
He tumbled out of bed and hurried inside, and then he returned less than a minute later with a canvas bag and some other stuff. As he closed the door behind him, I asked, “What’s all that?”
“I made us a sex kit. But if you think it’s too soon—”
“It’s not. Can I see what’s in it?”
We sat cross-legged facing each other, and he dumped out the bag’s contents as he said, “I did some research online, but I couldn’t determine which lube was optimal, so I bought seven different types and brands. And the condoms are probably pointless since we’re both virgins, but I thought having the option might be an idea. As far as the other stuff goes, here’s what happened.” I picked up a pair of handcuffs, and he colored a bit as he admitted, “I went to a sex shop, and my imagination ran away with me.”
I smiled at him and said, “That’s fantastic.”
“This obviously isn’t all meant for our first time, but I thought it’d be fun to have options down the road.” When I flipped a switch on a semi-translucent dildo, it began to hum, and the top three inches started swinging around in a circle. Ari’s eyes went wide, and he blurted, “I just thought that vibrated. I had no idea it was so vigorous!”
I burst out laughing and shut it off again, and as he returned most of his purchases to the bag, I said, “Thank you for planning ahead. All I thought to do was buy lube this morning when I was at the market.”
