Across the Pond

by R. J. Scott

  “… so if we could retain you to back us up on email, that would be great.”

  He was waiting for an answer, for me to say that it was wonderful that the team put so much faith in what I’d been doing, and that yes, I’d love to carry on working with the Raptors, remotely, from my home office in the UK.

  Only I didn’t want to say that, because even considering part-time distance support meant I was leaving, and about now, I wasn’t ready to leave.

  “Uh-huh,” I offered, and his face fell.

  “Of course, I get your other contract work fills your time and that we couldn’t pay you for the fixed period, but you added value here, Seb, and we have so much more we need you to work on. We could pay you,” he added a little desperately. I knew gate receipts were up, but I wasn’t sure they were up that much. Hell, it wasn’t as if I needed the money, anyway. Still, this was a big decision to make.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, and then because Jason looked like a kicked puppy, I clapped him on the shoulder. “But I’ve loved working with the Raptors, so why would I want to stop now?”

  That was enough to make my friend smile, and with that done, I was free to escape him and Mark, who had also suggested some long-distance contract work. They both understood my home was England, but what about Alex?

  If I went home, we’d maybe see each other a few times a year, a long summer, and that was it. I was the one with the dual passport, so I could be the one who split my time between England and Arizona. Would Alex want that? Was he counting on me just being here for a limited time? Why was I even doubting him? Or me? I loved him, and he loved me.

  “Hey.”

  Talk of the devil. Alex appeared, still in his suit and tie, heading for the locker rooms and suiting up for the game.

  “Hey,” I stayed neutral in case my tone gave away things I didn’t want it to.

  “So I was thinking,” Alex said with a frown as he examined my expression.

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to spend time with Henry over the summer, maybe stay with him some, but you know what? I tracked down a trainer who moved away from the US, set up a place near Oxford, and you know what? I’ve never been to England.”

  I turned to face him, not entirely sure I was hearing right.

  “Alex?”

  “You’re going home. I have time. Maybe I could go to England for a few weeks. You can show me—”

  “Yes.”

  He grinned, then winked at me before heading for the lockers. I could delay thinking about what happened after the summer because for a little while, I would have Alex in my house, and that was a hundred kinds of awesome.

  “You look like the Cheshire cat,” Colorado observed as he passed me. I had nothing to say to that because I was smiling too damn hard.

  I had so much to show Alex. As soon as we landed, I was telling him things.

  “And Windsor Castle isn’t that far from here either. We could go if you want to?” I think that was about the tenth thing I’d suggested to him in the space of a few minutes, and he looked at me with wide eyes and mouth open.

  “Is that before the place where King thingy married Princess whatever, or Stonehenge or not Stonehenge because it’s too commercial, or Bath where the Romans were, or is it after the whole City of London tour?”

  He was teasing me, I knew that, and I felt the heat in my face. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to tell him everything about my home. History was everywhere around me, and I’d just assumed those were the things an American new to the country would want to see.

  He laughed then and placed a hand on my knee. “I’m messing with you. I want to see it all, but most of all, I want to meet your mom and see your house, so can we do that first?”

  “We can do that.” I took the exit onto the motorway and headed northwest, away from London and out to the Cotswolds, and we settled into our journey as if we’d driven together forever. There was music, teasing, and just short of two hours later, we pulled up outside my place.

  “Oh wow,” Alex said and clambered out of the car. I wondered what he saw when he looked at the yellowed stone building, the middle of three former workers’ cottages, complete with slate roof and roses climbing around the front door. I loved my house, my security, and that my mom and aunt lived next door was just an added benefit. Could I leave this? A pang hit me as I even touched on the idea.

  “It’s like out of a film.” Alex shook his head. “It’s beautiful.”

  “It was built in the 1700s—”

  He kissed me, right in front of my house, behind the rose bushes, and I held him close.

  “Thank you for bringing me. I love it. Will I hit my head in there? Are there beams? Is there an open fire? Can we have a fire?” He added the last part with a dubious tone. “I guess that’s only for winter, right? Which house is your mom’s? Can we meet her?”

  “Yes, you will hit your head, no to the fire, and come with me.” I took his hand and tugged him down the path and up to the front door of my mum’s place. I didn’t have to knock, and I knew my mum and aunt would have been waiting for us.

  “Sebastian!” Mum shouted as she opened the door, pulling me close and holding me tight. This woman had sacrificed everything for me, and I loved her for everything, and so I hugged her just as hard. When we parted, she immediately gathered Alex in for a hug. All I could think was that my mum at just over five foot was tiny compared to my boyfriend. “You must be Alex. Come in, come in, welcome to England. Sebastian tells me that you play hockey, on a team in the desert. How does that even work?” I listened to their voices fade as they headed for the kitchen, and then my aunt Olivia was hugging me and telling me how much they’d missed me.

  “I missed you all too,” I agreed with feeling and allowed myself to be led into the kitchen, where they’d outdone themselves with food. “Your mum said we didn’t have enough, but we can always get more.”

  “A scone?” I heard Alex ask, he and my mum bent over the kitchen table, which seemed to be in danger of collapsing under the weight of food.

  “That’s right, and we put jam and cream on it, clotted cream mind you.”

  “Clotted? Okay, you’d better show me how. This is the jam, right? Jelly, you mean, which goes first?”

  “Mum, you need to let us get in the house before you try to feed him.”

  Mum glanced up at me. “Oh, sweetheart, Alex is adorable, and he tells me that he’s going to show me hockey, and we’re going shopping.”

  How the hell had all that happened in the space of a minute? God knows, but my mum was fast.

  “Aunt Olivia, this is my boyfriend, Alex.” Olivia and Alex hugged, Mum and I hugged again, Alex and I hugged. Hell, we were all hugging so long that I thought we’d never sit down. When we eventually took our seats, I watched Mum show Alex how to build the perfect scone for his cream tea, explain what Battenberg cake was, and how to make a good cup of tea, and through all of this, Alex was smiling, and it didn’t even dim when Aunt Olivia pinched his cheek, then patted his head. He was so happy here, and I wanted to keep him in this kitchen forever.

  When we’d eaten and promised to pick both ladies up in the morning for a day visiting Roman ruins—Alex’s choice—we headed for my place. I cleared hanging space for him, and we unpacked our cases from the bed. “Just put everything of yours on the left of the wardrobe.” I pointed at it just in case.

  “Closet.” Alex smirked.

  I picked up a pair of his jeans. “Yep, put your trousers in the wardrobe.”

  He moved closer and took the jeans off me, then tossed them onto my chair. “You want me to put my pants in the closet?”

  “Yeah, trousers—” He kissed me to stop me from talking, linked his hands behind my neck, and then broke the kiss.

  “Say something else,” he ordered. “You get me so hot.”

  “About my wardrobe?” I smirked into the kiss.

  “And sidewalks, tell me all that again.” He pressed himself against me, and whil
e I’d never thought my English accent was particularly sexy, I mean it was just the way I talked, it seemed to be having an effect on Alex, who was hard against me. I guided him to the bed until the back of his legs hit it, and then I went full-out Brit.

  “Later I’m going to take you out for a stroll on your holiday, along the pavement, and find fish and chips from a takeaway, and then when we’re done, I’m going to bring you back, and after you’ve used the loo, we’re going hang your trousers in the wardrobe, close the curtains, turn off all the lights, and then use a torch to find—”

  I didn’t get any further with my ridiculous Brit-speak story as he yanked me onto the bed, bags pushed off onto the floor, and he showed me just how much my talking had turned him on.

  I’d never been happier to be British.

  We had four weeks and toured around the countryside, just being in love. Work waited, and apart from a couple of hours here and there, I had my first real break since university. I introduced Alex to the awesome that was an English country pub, we went over the border into Wales and spent a long, hot, sexy weekend in Cardiff, and we visited so many places that I hadn’t seen myself. Sometimes we held hands when no one could see us, but the paranoid part of me thought that one photo was all it took to get back to the US. Who would recognize Alex here I didn’t know, but one Raptors fan holidaying here, and his secret was toast. We never talked seriously, not until it was two days until Alex’s flight home and he’d been growing progressively quieter and more thoughtful. I carefully avoided any mention of his impending return to the States, letting him set the agenda, but so far, he’d stayed very quiet about anything like a future.

  We’d gone for a walk along the river that ran through the small town of Bourton-on-the-Water, crossing each of the five bridges as we talked about hockey and us, but by the time we arrived back, it wasn’t as if we’d come to any kind of resolution over what came next.

  I sensed that Alex had something to say but wouldn’t say it, and my heart was scared for what he might say, so I found myself changing the subject whenever we got serious.

  I know that I wanted to offer everything but didn’t want to overwhelm him and force something on him that wasn’t right for him.

  Like this, we were at a miserable impasse. Reaching the house, he paused at the gate, and instead of pushing it open, he turned to me, and I sensed this was the moment everything in my head, all my fears and worries, would come true.

  “I’ve always wanted to play hockey,” he blurted.

  “I know. You’ve said that before.” I was cautious and didn’t think it was wise to ask him why he was telling me this.

  “But I could be a tour guide, in Bath or Cardiff. I could learn it all and stay here with you. I could give it up for you if you asked me to.”

  My chest tightened. This wasn’t what he wanted, not really.

  “Let’s go inside,” I encouraged, and somehow we made it inside and shut the front door behind us. “That’s not what you want,” I said when he just stared at me as if he was in shock. “Your family means so much to you, and I couldn’t accept you giving up hockey, for goodness sake. The ice is your home, and you come alive out there.”

  “I don’t want this to end,” he said, almost desperate.

  “Maybe it’s run its course,” I suggested. “You need to go out there and see what else you can have. You don’t have to settle for the first man you fall for.”

  He slumped into the nearest chair and hunched his shoulders. “Is that what you think? I can’t believe you really believe that. I love you.”

  “And I love you.” I took the chair opposite.

  “Then why are you pushing me away?”

  “I’m not, Alex.”

  “You won’t talk about us seeing each other again.”

  “I was waiting for you to start the conversation.”

  “And I was waiting for you.”

  We were talking in circles, but one thing was clear—we were both avoiding the elephant in the corner.

  “Alex, talk to me.”

  “Come back to America with me. I mean, you wouldn’t have to live there, but you said your dad was American, so you could get a passport if you wanted.”

  “I already have one.”

  “Oh.” His eyes widened. “Oh,” he repeated.

  “That doesn’t mean I want to leave England.”

  “I know that you wouldn’t want to move to the US, but what if I could get a place a bit farther away from the arena. You could stay for longer periods of time, maybe even a few months in the winter? I’m sure there are plenty of contracts and places that need your help. Even if you came back a couple of times, we could Skype other times…” I knew he was waiting for me to say something. I moved to sit next to him.

  “I love you,” I began.

  “Shit, you’re going to give me a but, aren’t you,” he murmured.

  “The but…” I sighed. “Alex, I’m the first guy who you’ve been with, and you should—”

  “You want me to go out and fuck some guys? Huh?”

  I winced at the crude word. What we did wasn’t fucking. We made love. What we had was real and special.

  “No.”

  “You’re so experienced at thirty-freaking-two,” he snapped. “Is that what you did, fucked your way around England?”

  Mostly, I’d spent all hours I was given working to get my consultancy off the ground, but yeah, I’d done my share of shitty relationships, only none of them were like this. I’d never fallen in love before, and who was to say whether falling in love at twenty-two or thirty-two was the right way of doing things.

  “No, and we don’t fuck. We make love. There’s a difference. If I thought for one minute…”

  “What?” he prompted. “What do you think? Seb, talk to me?”

  “If I thought that you were truly ready for the kind of forever I want with you, if I didn’t feel as if I was making you commit to me—”

  He was getting way too good at shutting me up with kisses, but I stopped him. “Alex—”

  “I want forever. With you. And one day I want to come out and be an inspiration to hockey kids and buy a place together and have you be there sometimes when you can. Bring your mom out and your aunt. When I get the big contract, I can pay for it all, and Christ, Seb, I love you so much I can’t bear the thought of this being it.” His tone was exasperated, desperate, and then he just sounded overwhelmed. “What do I have to say to make you see—?”

  This time I shut him up with a kiss, and then I pulled back. “I love you. Let’s make this work.”

  “Together, in the US, here, your mom visiting, the house, you want everything?”

  Now that was an easy question to answer.

  “I want everything. With you.”

  Epilogue

  Alex

  “Lift your leg higher. Yeah, that’s… yeah.”

  He writhed under me, his body tightening around me as I went deeper.

  “Ah hell,” Sebastian crooned, his fingers tugging the fitted sheet free as I bumped his prostate over and over.

  His back was slick with sweat, stuck to my chest, his face resting on the bared mattress. I loved this so much. The hard male body under me, the masculine grunts, the way his ass felt, the heat and pressure. This was my world, my man, my whole being, all swaddled up in this massive bed in a lovely Cotswold home.

  “Do that again… no, yes.” He arched his back, and the sensation nearly made my head blow off my shoulders. The pleasure of being inside him was unexplainable. No words could ever do it justice. Sebastian was such a giving teacher, and I was an eager student. We’d not worked up to me bottoming yet, but neither of us were in a hurry. Seb loved it, and I was nervous, still, after all this time. Some habits were hard to break.

  “Faster, please.” His heated words pulled me from the thoughts of an Alejandro who didn’t exist anymore, or so I liked to think. Obviously he did. He’d pop up from time to time, berate and judge me, call me sinful an
d dirty, but then Seb would be there to steer me out of the dark past and into this brilliant present. I spread myself over him, wiggling his legs even farther apart, my hips pumping.

  He angled up to meet my thrusts. I came first, him just a second behind me, his soft cries of completion floating up to the ceiling to join mine. I was shuddering and slick. Then my elbows folded. I fell on his back, enjoying the shivers as he pumped his load into the sheets and his hand.

  “Ah, bloody hell,” he gasped, rolling his hips round and round, milking his cock.

  I licked the nape of his neck, pushed deep one last time, and then pulled out, my feet hitting the floor. Sebastian moved to his back. I could feel his gaze on me as I padded to the bathroom. I tied and tossed the condom into the trash before stepping into the shower. We had a plane to catch today. Our summer in England was over. It was back to Arizona, the Raptors, and my family. Communication between me and ninety percent of the Santos-Garcia clan had been spotty. I spoke daily to my siblings and Abuela. My mother weekly, my father not at all, but he wasn’t a fan of social media. Mom asked for pictures but never commented on the ones with me and Seb together. Which was kind of hurtful, but at least she was talking to me. My cousins? Not so much. Some of that was on me, but a lot of that gap was on them. I’d pulled away from America the best I could during our time here. I needed to learn how to be a gay man in a committed relationship. I needed to find myself and my spirituality. I needed to be free from the racial tensions. I just needed to be. I’d found great peace here in this picturesque village. The people were delightful, the food to die for, and the TV above par. And then there was Sebastian.

  Who was, I noted after leaving the shower with a towel around my neck, sound asleep with a contented smile on his lips. I covered his pale ass up, pulled on some comfortable travel clothes, and went to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Tea was the norm now. I missed coffee, especially the sweet Mexican coffee Mamá brewed every morning. The instant stuff they sold here was disgusting, so I’d made the switch to tea. As the kettle chugged and steamed, I went to the wide bay window in the corner nook and gazed at the back yard, or garden as Seb called it. See, to me, a garden is a small plot where you grow vegetables. I smiled at the gentle prodding I’d taken over here the past few weeks, all good-natured teasing from Seb, his mom, aunt, and the neighbors about my silly way of speaking or telling time.