Where We Left Off

  “You want to be with me?” Will echoed.

  “Yeah, I know you’re not into it. We don’t have to go through it all again.”

  Will shook his head. Frustrated? Irritated? I wasn’t sure.

  “Does that… I mean, does it hurt you, that I slept with someone else?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Not… not exactly.” But his hands tightened on my shoulders.

  “I kissed him first,” I said because it felt important for Will to know that I hadn’t just gone along with something. That I’d wanted it. Not the way I wanted him. But that had nothing to do with it.

  Will looked at me intently, throat moving as he swallowed. “How did you kiss him? Show me.”

  I blinked at him, but he just looked at me.

  “Um, well.”

  I moved toward Will and touched my mouth to his. I kissed him as if he were someone I had no physical history with. A kiss that wasn’t a promise but an exploration. That carried no past, only a potential future.

  When I broke away for air, Will was breathing hard, his eyes intent on mine. “What happened next? Show me.”

  I took Will by the hand and led him to the bedroom, since unlike the table in the geology lab, there was no furniture here that would take our weight. I unzipped his pants and pulled them off. He started to strip off his shirt, but I stopped him.

  “He didn’t take his shirt off.”

  I pushed him down on the air mattress, pulling my own pants off and kneeling between his legs to kiss him. I could smell the unfamiliar shampoo in his hair and the unfamiliar soap on his skin, and a bolt of longing for Will’s usual homey smells hit me.

  “He kissed my neck,” I said, touching the spot where my shoulder met my neck, and Will latched on, kissing me, scraping his teeth over my skin. When he shifted to the other side, I reached into my bag and got lube and a condom, handing them to Will.

  Will moved to push the lube away like he often did, but I pressed it on him.

  “I don’t need that,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “Oh. He… okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Will bit his lip and slicked his fingers, never looking away as he reached for me.

  “Do you want me to tell you how he—?”

  “No.” Will pulled me toward him, kissing me hard. He pulled my shirt off, getting lube all over it, then pulled off his own. When he pulled me back toward him, his kiss was desperate, his movements clumsy, his fingers sticky in my hair. I groaned and wrapped my arms around his neck, pressing him back down into the pillow.

  Will fumbled with the lube again and then slid slick fingers inside me, his breath catching. I ground against him and held on tight. When I was panting into his mouth and he was hard beneath me, I knelt up.

  “The way he—”

  “Stop. Please,” Will said, squeezing his eyes closed.

  “Okay,” I said, kissing him softly on the mouth.

  Will propped himself up against pillows and rolled on the condom, then pulled me into his lap. I braced myself on his shoulders, fingers just touching his neck so I could feel his pulse. I sank down on him slowly, opening to him as he slid inside. I bit my lip, forcing myself to breathe through the strangeness of penetration, waiting for the inevitable shift from invasion to heat.

  His hands came to my hips, and his stomach muscles flexed with the effort of keeping still. We looked at each other and moved at the same moment, our mouths meeting desperately as our hands tangled together between us.

  I started to move my hips in circles slowly, the feel of him inside me turning to sparks of pleasure as my body adjusted.

  “Oh fuck,” he said, kissing me again, then putting his feet flat on the floor so I could brace against them. I lifted myself up and slid down, building the rhythm between us, watching the flush spread from Will’s face down his throat to feather across his pale chest as his breathing grew ragged. He was watching me intently, his eyes endlessly blue. I rose and fell, then rested my weight down, pressing him deeply inside of me, feeling so full and so light at the same time.

  “Touch me?” I said, and Will sat up, grabbing hold of my straining cock and kissing me at the same time, my legs sprawled on either side of his hips, his arms around me, his mouth on mine, and his dick inside me the only things keeping me from falling.

  I was sweating, getting tired. I allowed the distant thought that I really needed to add more bridge pose to my yoga practice in case we were going to make this position a regular part of our repertoire, but I let it go when Will swore, frustrated, and dropped back on his forearms, pulsing his hips up, fucking me from below as I moved on him from above.

  Heat collected at the base of my spine and each clench of my stomach muscles drew my orgasm closer, my whole body clenching up. As I lost the rhythm hopelessly, Will groaned, grabbed me, and flipped us. His expression was desperate, his focus intense. I landed on my back, and he pulled me toward him by my shoulders, thrusting into me and burying his face in my neck. I spread my legs wide and rolled my hips back, giving him more room, and we rocked together, every movement flooding me with heat.

  Will touched my cock and I moaned, pulling him to me and lifting my chin to beg for a kiss. He jerked me off as we kissed, and pleasure seized me, all heat and tension and then a release like a supernova. I exploded between us, dragging Will down on top of me and holding him inside me as the orgasm took me over.

  Will was flushed, his teeth gritted and the tendons in his neck standing out with his efforts. I squeezed my legs around him, pulling him closer to me. He circled his hips and let out a whimper, and I kissed him, biting his full lips. He looked like an angel of vengeance, all blond hair and burning blue eyes. He pulled back once more, thrust hard and came, his mouth open on a silent scream, eyes closed, hair dark with sweat.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, collapsing next to me, chin on my shoulder. He licked a line up my throat, and I shivered, then he kissed salt back to me. We cradled each other’s faces as we kissed. Then, exhausted, we just lay there, looking at each other.

  I didn’t ask and he didn’t offer. We just pulled the covers up over us, foreheads nearly touching, sharing each other’s breath, and went to sleep.

  I WOKE, warm and comfortable, my back pressed to Will’s front and his arms around me. My whole body said Yay! at being snuggled up with Will and my mind said… well, mushy things about the way Will had opened up to me since I got here.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the moment he’d stopped me from playing the game he’d begun. The moment he stopped being able to bear thinking about me with someone else. It made my heart beat fast and my palms sweat. It made the roots of my hair tingle and my teeth itch. It made every surface of my body alive with the effort of holding back my feelings for Will. Of stopping myself from waking him up to ask him what it all meant. Where we stood.

  But things weren’t about me right now. It was one hundred percent not the moment to pull focus from Will’s stuff with his family. So I just brought Will’s hand to my lips and kissed it. I got up and took a shower. I sliced bananas into bowls of instant oatmeal because it was the healthiest thing I could think of and that felt like something I could do to show Will how I felt. I made coffee and put it all on the table, and then I sat there waiting for Will to wake up.

  When he slouched into the kitchen and flopped down at the table, he stuck his face in his coffee and didn’t look at me right away. After the first cup had kicked in, though, he took a bite of oatmeal and made a face, looking up at me like I’d betrayed him.

  “There’s no brown sugar here,” I told him. “But it’s good for you.”

  He pouted and pushed the bowl away, then dropped his head on my shoulder and buried his face in my neck, talking into my sweatshirt.

  “What?”

  His arms came around my waist and he turned his head slightly.

  “I hate stuff that’s good for me.”

  MY FLIGHT left from Detroit
at 9:30 a.m., but Will was staying until the next day so he could try to talk to the parent of one of Nathan and Sarah’s friends about providing some support if Claire needed it.

  Will drove me to the airport in silence, flicking through radio stations and finding nothing he wanted to listen to, then flicking it off again.

  We were both exhausted. The easy intimacy of the morning had given way to a day made long by necessities. We’d gone grocery shopping for Claire while she met with a psychologist, then I hung out with Nathan and Sarah while Will took Claire to buy new things for the house.

  We hadn’t had a moment to talk, but it wasn’t as if I’d know what to say anyway. Things felt… different? Will seemed different. But he was also in the middle of a crisis and away from home, so I reminded myself for the umpteenth time that it was definitely not the moment to address it.

  “Thank you,” Will said as he pulled to a stop at the curb. “For coming here. It never really occurred to me that you would, but… it should have. I—hell, I should’ve known you that well by now. Anyway, thanks.”

  And he kissed me, leaning over the cup holders and gearshift. Kissed me like it was a thing we did again. Then he was gone, saying he’d see me back home, leaving me standing at the curb staring after his rental car with my head a total mess and my heart a quivering, hopeful thing.

  Chapter 15

  March

  CHARLES WASN’T back from spring break yet when I got to the dorms. I wasn’t used to having the space to myself, but it came in handy because apparently the only thing that I was capable of was pacing. I knew I’d done the right thing by not asking Will a zillion questions about the status of our relationship before I left Michigan. And I wasn’t looking for a marriage proposal or anything, but it was disconcerting as hell not to know where we stood.

  I forced myself to go down to the dining hall, where I choked down a bowl of cereal and then sat staring at nothing as I used the vanilla soft-serve machine to make Coke float after Coke float. When my knee started bouncing out of control, I realized I had just majorly over-sugared and over-caffeinated myself at nine o’clock at night, and forced myself to go back to my room, pocketing a few cookies for later.

  The hum of the fluorescent light drove me to distraction without the incessant tapping of Charles’ keyboard and finally I grabbed my phone and sent an SOS, knowing I’d be useless until I made some sense of things.

  Can you skype for a sec? I sent to Daniel. It’s about Will so you won’t like it but pleaaaase?

  Do I have to kill him again? Daniel wrote back almost immediately. Then, Yeah, signing on.

  I blew out a deep breath in relief and threw myself onto my bed, flipping open my laptop and opening Skype. Then I waited. Daniel always thought you went online to sign into Skype before he remembered it was an application, so I figured it’d take him a minute.

  “Hey,” he said before his camera was turned on. “Sorry. I thought I was opening it but I accidentally redownloaded the thingie. Anyway, what’s up? What’d Will do now?”

  “Click your camera button.”

  “Huh, oh. Now?”

  I nodded as his face appeared on the screen. He was sitting on the floor, leaning back against the couch. His dark hair was mussed, like he’d been running a hand through it, and he squinted at the screen for a moment, then took off his glasses and tossed them on the coffee table, rubbing his eyes.

  “Hi.” He waved. He always waved on Skype even though he didn’t do it in person, and I couldn’t help but grin at him despite vibrating with caffeine and feeling like I was about to puke from my guts being tied in knots of uncertainty—although, maybe that was just all the soft-serve.

  “You grading?” He only did that particular eye rub after staring at student papers.

  “Yes, god help me. Rough drafts. Why did I ask to see rough drafts? Seriously, kill me where I stand.” He shook his head as if cursing his former self. “Anyway. What’s the deal with Dickface?” Then he jerked away from the screen. “Oh shit. I forgot. His sister. Is she okay?”

  “Yeah, she’s doing better. Will’s staying out there another day to help her get some stuff sorted.” I wasn’t sure how much of Claire’s personal info Will would want me to share, especially since he and Daniel weren’t exactly buds. “Saw the cabin. I think it misses you guys.”

  A wistful expression played across Daniel’s face. “Yeah. I miss it too. I think….” He looked around. “I think I might take Rex there over the summer. Like, surprise him or whatever.”

  “Aw, that’s so sweet!”

  Daniel looked away and got all self-conscious like he did whenever I said anything like that, so I changed the subject quickly.

  “So, in Holiday, we… like, I guess, slept together again, but I don’t know if that means we’re… back on the way we were, or…. It seemed different or something. And I can’t talk to Will about it yet because, duh, family crisis and stuff, and also because he’d be about zero percent interested in discussing it, but it’s honestly killing me and I won’t be able to sleep or work or do really anything until I know more. Just… more. Also, sorry, full disclosure: I’ve had, like, a lot of Coke just now, so. The soda, I mean. And ice cream. Like. A lot.”

  “Yeah, I thought my picture was shaky, but I guess you’re just vibrating.”

  I filled him in on what had happened between Will and me in Michigan, but I found myself not quite wanting to describe Will’s shift in attitude. His vulnerability. The way he seemed to need me. Not just because Will might want to murder me for telling personal details about him to Daniel. But also because I felt protective of this side of Will that only I knew. As if keeping it to myself made me somehow closer to him. It was our secret.

  A door slammed on Daniel’s side of things and Rex walked behind the couch, arms full of grocery bags. He did a double take at the screen and bent down.

  “Hey, Leo.”

  Daniel smiled as Rex came into the screen and twisted around to him, though the couch was between them. He focused back on me when Rex went to put away the groceries.

  “Okay, so, where did you leave things?”

  “Well, he drove me to the airport and he thanked me for coming. And he really meant it, I could tell. But I don’t know what it means. Like, before the… um, Tiramisu Incident, we were sleeping together but not dating or whatever.” I rolled my eyes at the word. “But… Will just seemed different in Holiday. Like he thought of me differently?”

  God, that sounded so stupid. But Daniel nodded.

  “But Will’s made it clear from the beginning that he doesn’t want a relationship. Like, very clear. Will doesn’t really pull punches when it comes to being honest. Or blunt. Or, well, you know. He doesn’t actually pull punches, period. So… I guess I don’t know why I think things’ll be different.”

  Daniel ran his hand through his hair like he was trying to find a way to say something I wouldn’t want to hear.

  “Oh, just say it, it’s okay,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” he drawled. “You know Will isn’t my favorite person, but that’s not why I’m saying this. Just, usually if someone tells you they don’t want a relationship, then… uh, they don’t want one.”

  “I know.” I sighed. “But….” I could see how it sounded. Like Will had told me no and I was looking for excuses not to take him at his word. “Look, the thing is that he… he acts like we’re in a relationship sometimes. You know? And, in Michigan… fuck, I dunno. You’re probably right. Will means what he says; he doesn’t, like, play coy or whatever.”

  The knot in my stomach tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the ice cream.

  “I’m sorry, man. I wish shit were different. I mean, I don’t really get the Will thing, but I get that he’s different with you.”

  My face, in the Skype window, was pathetically miserable, and I made it tiny so I didn’t have to look at it.

  “He is,” I said. “He really is.”

  Rex appeared onscreen, sliding onto th
e couch and putting his hands on Daniel’s shoulders.

  “I couldn’t help but overhear,” he said, nodding toward the kitchen.

  “’S okay. I mean, you probably know Will better than either of us.”

  Rex’s face did this very thoughtful, serious thing and he shook his head tightly.

  “I don’t think so.”

  The tiny me onscreen looked like he’d been given a Christmas present. God, Will really hadn’t been kidding the times he’d said I was easy to read.

  “Can I ask you something?” Rex said.

  “God, yes, any thoughts, opinions, questions, and insights are extremely welcome.”

  “You said that Will means what he says.” I nodded. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  I opened my mouth, but then forced myself to really think about it. Rex asked these questions sometimes—questions where you thought the answer was obvious but then later realized you had no idea.

  “Will’s the most honest person I’ve ever met,” I said. “Like, you’re really honest, but… you’re polite and stuff so sometimes you just don’t say things. Like if they’d be rude or offensive or whatever. Will… he’s even super blunt about things when it makes people uncomfortable, you know?”

  Rex was silent for long enough that I got paranoid the call had dropped, but I could see them moving.

  “I know what you mean,” he said slowly. “But being blunt isn’t the same thing as being honest.” His hands tightened on Daniel’s shoulders and Daniel leaned back into him. “Just because Will is okay with offending someone or telling someone a hard truth about themselves… that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get scared. For himself, I mean. It doesn’t mean he always volunteers the truth about what he’s feeling.” He paused again, like he was trying to find the right words. “And sometimes he says things so strong to make it easier for himself.”

  He shook his head and looked at Daniel.