The Wedding (Starting Over Book 3)

by Matthew J. Metzger

  On a whim, Gabriel darted in for a kiss, and the laugh was snuffed out. A hand settled in the small of his back. Lips sought his like they were as shy as their owner, and Gabriel coaxed Chris out from behind his armour. He had no hair to play with, but maybe that was for the best. Gabriel could concentrate that way. Chase the taste of him. Push and push and push, until they were backed into the fridge and both of Chris’ hands were mapping out every dip and curve of Gabriel’s back.

  Then Chris broke it to nuzzle at Gabriel’s neck and breathe in as though Gabriel were life.

  “Hello,” he whispered.

  “Hello.”

  “Missed you.”

  Gabriel pulled back, dragging their joined hands out between them until they slipped apart.

  “Me too,” he admitted gently, then grinned. “Wanna show me how much?”

  “I was thinking…takeaway and TV in my room?” Chris offered. “Jack will be out all evening, so—”

  “Sounds like it’s time get comfortable, then.” Gabriel cocked his head, grinning. “Wanna help me out of this bra?”

  The flat might have been grubby, but it was warm. And fighting the bike up the stairs—well, Gabriel wanted a shower. Maybe with company, maybe without. He turned his back and shucked his T-shirt. For a brief second, warm fingers traced up his spine then fell away.

  “I’m—I’m good, thanks.”

  Gabriel chewed on the corner of his lip, then turned around. Chris’ eyes flickered down, then darted away again. Gabriel hesitated then reached out to clasp Chris’ wrist. Maybe it was time to chip away at the little wall that had gone up in Chris’ head.

  “You wanna try thinking those thoughts out loud?”

  Chris clenched his jaw and shook his head.

  “Why not?” Gabriel prompted gently.

  Chris huffed. “I don’t understand them. You won’t. They’ll— They’re not good. And—and I want this weekend to be good.”

  “Try me.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me anyway,” Gabriel said. “Or maybe I could do some thinking out loud and you could tell me if I’m way off base?”

  Chris’ gaze stayed riveted to the floor. Slowly, Gabriel reached out to take the other wrist and slid a little closer.

  “I don’t think you like sex.”

  Chris flinched. Gabriel held on.

  “I think sometimes you need it, but you don’t actually like it. I don’t think you want to sleep with me, but if you do, it means you can go longer than if you just jerk off. But I think you still want to go out with me, and maybe that’s confusing too. Because you want me, but you don’t want me.”

  Chris wriggled his forearms. His wrists slid through Gabriel’s grip, but then his fingers caught and curled about Gabriel’s own.

  “I—”

  But that was it. He coughed and stopped again, shaking his head. Gabriel nudged a little closer, until the lace of his bra faintly touched Chris’ T-shirt.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Is it?”

  Chris’ voice cracked in the middle, and Gabriel squeezed.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Sure it is,” Gabriel whispered. “I like you for more than just your dick, you know?”

  A tiny laugh bubbled up—then the bubbles burst and Chris’ face crumpled. Gabriel let go of his hands just to catch the back of his neck and draw him in. The tears were hot on Gabriel’s skin.

  “It’s okay,” Gabriel repeated. “It really is, I promise. I didn’t catch a train today because I like your dick or the way you fuck me. I caught it because I like the face you pull at fantasy movies and the smirk you give me when you win our cycling races. I wanted to see Somerset with you from our bikes and talk you into tossing that stupid diet and having a doughnut with me from Greggs. I wanted to see you. I can have penis up north, you know, it’s not that backward. I don’t need a train for that.”

  The strange mixture of crying, hiccupping and laughing rocked into his shoulder and Gabriel grinned, squeezing tight and warming to his theme.

  “You make me feel warm,” he continued. “You give me that funny little swoop in my chest sometimes. Aled says he knows when you’ve texted me kisses because I make a dumb face. And I want that more than I want to have sex with you. I can have fantastic sex from any guy who can rock a cock, but there’s only a couple of people can make me feel like that. And one’s right here.”

  “Why.”

  It was a harsh demand, and Gabriel rolled his eyes.

  “Fuck, I don’t know. It’s just like that, I guess. I don’t know why I fell in love with Aled either. I’m just…there. I am. Like I am with you.”

  It had taken a long time to admit it with Aled and Gabriel smiled into the top of Chris’ shoulder as he realised what Aled had bloody well done. Domesticated him. The utter bastard. There was a time when Gabriel would have balked at the idea of being in love. He wouldn’t have wanted to feel it and he’d have been scared of what it meant. He’d taken so damn long to admit what he felt for Aled—and now here he was, throwing it out like nobody’s business.

  “S’not normal,” Chris croaked eventually.

  “Bugger normal.”

  “No thanks.”

  Gabriel snorted with laughter. Arms locked around his waist and he rocked gently on his hips, swaying them idly side to side as Chris burrowed into him.

  “What’s not normal?” he prompted.

  “Not—not liking it.”

  So he was right.

  “It’s probably not normal to get off on pretending to be raped,” Gabriel said gently. “It’s kind of weird to enjoy being beaten by your boyfriend. And you know what I found out the other day? Greg’s got a thing for feet. That’s just—ew. Feet are gross.”

  “Feet are pretty,” Chris mumbled.

  “Says who? Hobbits? Feet are gross. All verrucas and hard dead bits and toe hair. Fucking toe hair. What’s pretty about that, you freak?”

  It worked like a charm. Chris broke away with a barking laugh, shaking his head, and Gabriel followed, seizing him by the ears and demanding to know what dirty secrets he had.

  “Next you’ll be saying ankles are sexy! Bones jutting out isn’t sexy, oh my God!”

  He chased Chris through the little flat—the grubby kitchen and the threadbare living room, past a still-steaming bathroom and into a messy bedroom with paint peeling off the walls and a cute framed photo on the bookshelf, of the pair of them on the Trans Pennine Trail the first week after Aled had gone to America. They flopped down into the narrow bed and Gabriel inched over until he was lying across Chris’ arm. He pressed a light kiss to his shoulder, then took his hand and placed it lightly against his right breast.

  “Do you like touching it?”

  Chris swallowed.

  “It’s okay if you don’t,” Gabriel murmured. “I’m not going to get mad.”

  “I—”

  For a split second, Chris’ fingers spread. Gabriel didn’t have large boobs, and it was almost completely covered by Chris’ palm, disappearing entirely under his fingers. then the hand slid sideways, coming to rest in the dip between hip and shoulder.

  “No.”

  “Okay,” Gabriel said, squeezing his wrist. “What does it feel like?”

  Chris licked his lips.

  “I feel—”

  Gabriel waited, stroking the fine hairs on his arm lightly.

  “I want to pull away,” Chris whispered eventually.

  “Repulsed?”

  Chris flinched again. “You’re not—”

  “S’not about me,” Gabriel said.

  “But it is. I l—like you. I should—”

  “I knew this guy once who’d puke about body fluids. Ironically,” he added tartly. “He had to wear a rubber, and I had to take it off when we were done. We used to play doctors because if he fingered me, he had to wear a glove.”

  “Seriously?” Chris’ expression was suspicious. “You’re m
aking that up.”

  “Swear on my life,” Gabriel said. He smirked. “If I was mad at him, I’d deliberately sneak off to the bathroom beforehand to jerk off so I was so wet he’d feel it anyway.”

  Chris raised a single eyebrow.

  “Really, being turned off by a boob isn’t that unusual.”

  “S’not just the boob though, is it?”

  “What else is it?”

  “Everything.”

  “My waist?”

  The hand lying on said waist flattened out a little.

  “No,” Chris said. “But that’s not—”

  “Do you like to hold my hand? To hug me? To kiss me?”

  Gabriel already knew the answers to those and knocked his knuckles against Chris’ breastbone when he nodded.

  “Doesn’t sound like everything.”

  “Everything sexual, then.”

  “That’s not very much in the grand scheme of things,” Gabriel replied.

  “I guess…”

  “So why did we have sex those other couple of times?”

  Chris grimaced. “I—nothing’s wrong with my dick.”

  “It gets hard and you gotta go?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that what happened? You were hard and I was there?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Did you like it?”

  Chris mutely shook his head. He looked utterly miserable and Gabriel nudged his nose against the tip of Chris’ before carrying on.

  “Why not ignore it?”

  “I need to,” Chris croaked hoarsely. “It’s—like—I get sexually frustrated sometimes. And when we did it, it lasted way longer before I needed to do it again than if I just jacked it. I just—I don’t—I hate it. The throbbing and the heat and it leaks and—”

  Gabriel made a soothing noise, rapping his sternum again when Chris’ voice started to roll into a panicked babble.

  “You reckon it’s going to happen while I’m here?”

  “Probably.”

  “So why don’t we try something?” he suggested softly. “If it happens, let me deal with it. I think I know something that might help.”

  “What’s that?”

  Gabriel nudged their noses together, waiting for the tension in Chris’ shoulders to ease before he started whispering.

  “Let me take care of everything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t touch,” Gabriel murmured. “You don’t look. You keep your eyes on mine, and I will do everything so you don’t have to. I’ll get you off, nice and easy, and you won’t have to see it or smell it or go through the motions if you don’t want to.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time Gabriel had had to do all the work, but it would be the first time it wasn’t a game. Chris could get hard on his own—Gabriel already knew that from experience—but if he didn’t want to touch anything, then he didn’t have to.

  “I can only take off what I have to. I’m not going to be exactly upset if you don’t want to get involved with all my curves. It’ll be drier if we use a condom. We can play music or a film, or you can just talk to me if you’ve got the skills to do it.”

  Chris huffed a weak laugh. “Seriously? Skills?”

  “Hey, a lot of guys can’t. I usually can’t.”

  “That’s weak.”

  Gabriel bit back a laugh. That was…yeah, he was increasingly sure that Chris had an asexual streak. A wide one.

  “It doesn’t have to be anything more than a bit of sitting in your lap and a nice warm grip. That’s it.”

  “You’d—you’d do that?”

  “Hey, I like the feeling of something inside me just as much as the actual sex part. And I have other guys to drill me.” Gabriel pressed his smile against Chris’ cheek for a brief moment before backing off again. “I like you. Not your dick. And at risk of upsetting your male ego, it’s not the most magnificent dick in the world, so you shouldn’t be that surprised.”

  The trick worked. He earned another little chuckle.

  “You need me to help out sometimes so you don’t feel bad,” Gabriel whispered. “Don’t you think I of all people know what that feels like?”

  He let the question hang in the air. For a brief moment, Chris’ gaze dropped. They hadn’t talked about it, not since Gabriel had first told him that he wasn’t the girl Chris had assumed him to be at first sight. Chris had just said, “Oh,” then asked him on a date anyway. And okay, Gabriel had avoided the subject because he hadn’t wanted to be Chris’ gay/straight experiment, but—

  This wasn’t what he’d thought.

  This was a sexual-or-not experiment, and that was nothing to do with anybody’s bits.

  “I might be a sex fiend, but I know how to make it so it’s about as sexy as waiting in line for a bus, too,” Gabriel said. “Next time you need to and I’m around, let me try that. It might help.”

  “And—”

  He knew what was coming next.

  “If it doesn’t,” he murmured, “then we just try something else until we figure out what fits.”

  Chris bit his lip. His hand slid up Gabriel’s side, skirting around his tits like they were on fire, before sliding into his hair and slowly teasing it up into its usual unruly spikes.

  “Why are you like this?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Chill. I’m bust. What guy doesn’t like to fuck? And you’re just—chill.”

  Gabriel laughed. He pushed himself up, shoving Chris over onto his back and straddling his waist. For a split second, Chris tensed—then relaxed as Gabriel flopped into him and nestled his head into the juncture of Chris’ neck and shoulder.

  “I like stuff that most people would call totally crazy,” he said. “I don’t even have to get off sometimes and I still liked the fuck. A man who doesn’t like sex isn’t that weird.”

  “Keep telling yourself that,” Chris mumbled.

  “I will. ‘Cause it’s true. You know what else is totally crazy? Guys with vaginas—oh, wait.”

  Chris laughed, and it felt real. It rocked up out of his chest and disturbed Gabriel’s boneless slump. He complained and Chris rolled him off the bed entirely—before sitting up and smiling gently down at him.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “No problem,” Gabriel replied, and reached up to squeeze his knee. “I love you. If you’re asexual or whatever, then…still love you.”

  Chris gripped his wrist and squeezed back.

  “Asexual,” he echoed.

  Gabriel didn’t think that it was a question.

  Chapter Twenty

  Penzance train station was surprisingly busy.

  The sky was turning orange as the sun sank towards the horizon. Aled lounged against the wall as the northbound train left again and the bubble of passengers slowed to a trickle. Originally the plan had been that Gabriel simply jumped on the connecting service to St Ives, but Suze’s bellowed argument with her future mother-in-law had put paid to that idea. So here Aled was, pushing himself forward and opening his arms for a hug as Gabriel came bouncing in from the platform.

  “Good weekend with Chris?”

  “Yep. How’s wedding planning going?”

  “Kill me,” Aled deadpanned. “I was less stressed about my own damn wedding and we had to get it done and dusted before Dad passed away.”

  “Christ, that bad?”

  “If there’s not a murder by the big day, I’ll be impressed.”

  Gabriel whistled lowly as they paced out to the car. It had been an intensely hot day, and twilight had done very little to alleviate it. The dying light ricocheted off Gabriel’s black hair until it turned an inky blue. His skin glowed like marble and Aled rolled his eyes as the aviator glasses were fished out of a pocket and slid into place. And—of course—heads started to turn.

  “Slag,” he muttered.

  “And proud. So what’s happened to make shit hit the fan?”

  “Tom’s mum thinks Suze is pregnant.”

 
“So?”

  Aled smirked. “Somehow she had it in her head that her lovely boys only married virgins.”

  Gabriel snorted. “One of her lovely boys brought his boyfriend to my flat and they took turns fucking me to see how much cum I can hold before I start leaking.”

  “What, once each?”

  “Lying fucktard.”

  Aled dodged the blow and laughed. He beat a hasty retreat to the driver’s seat but was smacked anyway when Gabriel got into the car.

  “So Mrs Hooper’s from the dark ages, then?”

  Aled shrugged as he turned the key and the engine fired up. The air conditioning was in fine form, and he cranked it up before carefully easing the car back out of the space.

  “Is Suze pregnant?”

  “Dunno. Probably.”

  Gabriel grinned and called it exciting. Aled pulled a face and grumbled about being too young to be an uncle, his focus more on negotiating his way out of Penzance without killing an old lady or twatting a campervan than Suze’s reproductive status.

  “Well, I’m not Cornish,” Gabriel said once Penzance fell away and they were ripping through the countryside, the sea shimmering on the left and open fields glowing on the right, “but this isn’t the way to St Ives.”

  “Nope.”

  “Where are we going, then?”

  Aled had planned just a long pub dinner and a long drive home, so the hotel would be quiet and both Brenda and Suze in their respective beds before they got back. But—

  Gabriel was lounging in the passenger seat, all long limbs and loose cotton. He was dressed in a pair of trainers, a baggy tank top, a pair of board shorts and nothing else. No socks. No binder. No bra. The faint loop of his nipple ring was barely there against the fall of his top, and when he lifted his arm to point at a bird of prey wheeling out over the Channel, the faintest shadow of a curve could be seen beyond his armpit. His slim legs had darkened from their usual marble white after doing whatever he’d been doing with Chris all weekend. There were freckles dancing under his sunglasses, and in the creases of his smile. He looked lax and pliant. An odd mixture of alluring and innocent.

  Aled wanted him.

  “Beach.”

  “Why?”

  Because Aled knew a cove with hidden corners not far from Penzance. Because the sun was going down. Because the tide was still out. Because there’d be nobody there now. Because Gabriel was in high spirits, basking in the dusk as they slipped along the slowly darkening coast, and Aled couldn’t decide whether to add fuel to the fire or whether to snuff out the spark.