by Roan Parrish
Rhys fidgeted in his chair, and I got the sense there was more to the story.
“Do you want to? Record your own stuff?”
His hypnotic gaze slid from me to the ceiling over my head.
“You know what?” he said. “I think I do.”
His brow furrowed, and he nodded, as if he’d just decided something, and leaned back in his chair. Then he gave me the warmest smile, and I felt myself smiling back, like being a part of whatever decision he’d just made for himself meant I was a part of something wonderful.
We talked for hours after that. The food went cold but we kept picking at it so we had an excuse to keep talking. I’d never talked to anyone as much as I talked to Rhys. Even with Grin, we’d mostly shot the shit, or made plans, or aired our daily grievances. We’d kept each other sane with jokes and distraction. But Rhys asked question after question, told story after story. And by the end of the night—the morning, really, by that time—I felt like I knew him. I felt like he wanted to know me.
When we were both yawning and my voice was raw from talking, we finally gathered our coats and walked outside. It had begun snowing, lazy, fat flakes drifting to the ground like they could almost resist gravity. They kissed my upturned face, and the whole world felt vertiginous.
The sun was rising, painting the eastern tips of the buildings and making the air around the snowflakes glow with the promise of a new day. The promise of something magical.
I was clumsy with exhaustion now, but my mind was racing. Things felt momentous somehow, like I was standing on the edge of something more.
Was it possible for everything to change in one night? For my life to transform into something as familiar yet unrecognizable as one of Rhys’s songs?
“Matt.” Rhys said my name softly, but his expression spoke volumes. After so many hours we were vibrating at the same frequency. He took a step toward me and I leaned back against the window of the diner. When his lips touched mine, something unspooled throughout my whole body. A bright, sweet pulse of something like possibility. Like the sun rising and driving away the shadows of night.
My hands were in his hair and his arms were around me and we were kissing, kissing like we’d never have to breathe again.
I whimpered into his mouth, thinking that finally, this was it. Everything in me cried out for him.
Then he pulled away with a groan and dropped his forehead to mine.
“Matt,” he murmured again, teeth clenching as he pulled away. He held my hand and pressed a kiss to my knuckles, then stepped back. “Can I have your phone number?”
“My— What the hell. Are you leaving? Are we not…?”
He tugged me back to him and kissed me again, softer this time.
“You’re so fucking gorgeous,” he said. “Please give me your phone number.”
I shook my head, nonplussed. “Yeah, okay.”
When he entered my number in his phone, he insisted that I tell him my last name, and when he texted me so I’d have his, he wrote, This is Rhys Nyland. We ate the whole diner together. I hope you’ll hang out with me again, Matt Argento. You’re a delight, and three smiley faces.
I looked up at him from the screen.
“You’re…” I was on track to say strange. But it wasn’t what I meant, really. He looked like a Viking and moved like a rock star. He kissed like he wanted to fuck me through the wall of the diner and touched me like he wanted to wrap me up in a bear hug. And all of it just made me want more. “Sweet,” I finished. “You’re really sweet, huh?”
“Sometimes,” he said. Then he slid a hand to my lower back and pulled me flush against him. “I contain multitudes, Matt.”
The tension between us was undeniable. His large, muscular body was kicking off heat even in the falling snow, and his eyes bored into mine like he could see everything I was thinking. My breath caught, and I got half hard just standing close to him. Then he winked, breaking the tension, and took a step back.
“I’m gonna text you,” he said, brandishing his phone. I nodded, trying to get myself back under control. “You gonna answer?” And damn, there it was. That shade of vulnerability—of such explicit desire for my company—that offset what would otherwise have been arrogance.
I nodded, and his grin was brighter than the rising sun.
* * *
—
Several times that day and the next, Rhys texted to tell me random things he saw or thought. To ask me questions about what I was doing. Not often enough to be annoying, just often enough to make it clear that he was interested. And I…I couldn’t believe he cared.
A few days later, he asked me out. Did I want to take a walk with him, from the Brooklyn Bridge subway station to a pizza place he liked? It was specific enough that all I had to do was say yes or no. And of course I said yes. How could I say anything except yes to this man?
As we walked he asked me about what it had been like in foster care, and I told him about St. Jerome’s, and about Grin. I told him about hearing people at school complain about their parents—how strict they were, or how clueless, or how cheap. How their parents hovered over them and bugged them about their homework. About hearing the annual September conversations full of family vacations and summer activities. I told him how it had felt like they were living in a different world.
He told me about his own family, and how he guessed he would’ve been one of those kids talking about vacations at the beginning of the school year. He looked a little guilty, but there was something more than guilt. That shadow was back—the one I’d seen in the diner.
A few days after that, he asked me out again. It was early on a Saturday morning and I was sitting in bed and trying to figure out what I’d do with my day. I still wasn’t used to having the weekends off, and usually I just wandered around the city.
Will you go with me to buy a new sweater? he texted. You clearly have great taste and I really need your opinion.
I’ve never worn a sweater in my life, I replied.
He responded with a GIF of a dog poking its head through a Christmas sweater and the message, That’s okay, it’s for me ;)
Rhys must’ve tried on fifty sweaters. They all looked great on him, so after a while it was clearly a pretense to spend time with me. I started picking uglier and uglier ones and taking pictures of him posing in them. But with his broad shoulders, beefy arms, and snapping blue eyes, he looked frustratingly good even in the ugly ones.
Finally I picked a fuzzy, baby pink one from the women’s section. It looked like it had glittery thread woven into it. He pulled it over his head and leered at me, but for some reason it looked great.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.
“Hey, nothing wrong with a little glitter,” he said.
“No, not that. It looks great on you. You’re all…blond and ski lodge–y.”
He grinned, eyes going hot. But I felt strange. Overly warm and shaky at the same time. Picking out clothes with him felt intimate, and the idea that he’d put on something just to make me happy? I swallowed around the lump that had formed in my throat.
To distract myself, I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of him, turning it to show him. In the picture, you couldn’t see the glitter, just his blond hair, blue eyes, and the sharp planes of his face set off against a pink so pale it made his skin glow. Rhys raised an eyebrow at me and stripped the sweater off. But that night, I set it as his photo in my contact info. I must have looked at it a hundred times.
* * *
—
A few days later: Want to come over and watch a horror movie with me? I want to see it but I’m scared to watch by myself! Then a blushy emoji, a grimacing emoji, a stabby knife emoji, and an angel emoji.
It would be the first time I’d been to Rhys’s apartment. It was a small economy owned by the studio he was currently recording the
album for, he’d told me, and it was used by whoever needed a place to stay. Usually he stayed with a friend—I assumed it was the same friend whose music career he’d been focusing on instead of his own all these years.
It would also be our fourth date, and we still hadn’t done more than kiss, so I figured the scary movie thing was a pretext to get near a bed so we could finally fuck. Which was aces as far as I was concerned. I had begun to think maybe Rhys wasn’t attracted to me after all.
But I got to the apartment to find that Rhys had ordered Thai food and had the movie all queued up. When we settled on the couch, he pulled me close to his side and then proceeded to spend half the movie with his face buried in my shoulder, hiding during all the scary parts.
At one unexpected scare, Rhys startled hugely, muttered, Oh shit, and grabbed for my hand, and I…I felt something wash over me that I didn’t understand. Tenderness wasn’t something I had much experience with. It took me the whole walk home that night (after still not having done anything more than cuddle) to even identify the feeling.
It was then that I realized Rhys wasn’t playing some long game where he was trying to prove himself to me or elaborately romance me. He was just being himself, just doing exactly what he wanted to. And that seemed to indicate he assumed I was doing the same.
So, the next night I did just that. I texted him, Do you have sex?
He wrote back immediately: Yes.
I responded: Great. Wanna have it with me?
Rhys: More than anything.
And I was left speechless yet again, completely undone by his endearing brand of deep impact honesty.
OK I’m coming over, I wrote finally, suddenly convinced the whole thing would fall apart if I waited.
Yay! Rhys responded, and I found myself grinning despite myself.
* * *
—
“I was starting to think you weren’t into me,” I said, nerves swamping me when I got to Rhys’s. You’d think I’d never done this before or something. Although, I supposed I never had done this before—this having sex with someone I’d come to care about first. “Or weren’t into sex in general. Or both,” I rambled. “Or—”
Rhys slid a hand to my neck and looked deep into my eyes.
“I’m exceedingly into you,” he said, voice low and rough. “I promise.”
He tugged me close, but instead of kissing me, he wrapped his arms around me. For a moment, my whole body reacted to his size automatically, as a threat, and I tensed up. But when he started to ease off, I let my arms come up around his back and forced myself to relax. When I did, I felt the heat of his skin against mine, felt the strength of his body, and took a deep, slow breath.
“So why didn’t we fuck before?” I asked, my words half-garbled because my cheek was pressed against his shoulder and I didn’t want to move.
“It hasn’t really been that long,” Rhys said softly.
I shrugged. “I was ready to fuck you when we left the bar.”
“I know.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said, shoulders tensing defensively.
“Shh,” he said, running a soothing hand up and down my spine. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”
I pulled away so I could see his face. It suddenly seemed vital that I understand. “Then why?”
Rhys’s eyelashes fluttered and he bit his lip, then smiled self-consciously.
“You’ll laugh at me.”
“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” I said.
He ran gentle fingertips over my mouth and nodded, eyes hopeful, leading me to the couch.
“I thought you were…special. That night. I can’t explain it, but I knew there was something about you that I needed to get to know. At the diner, I didn’t want the night to end. I wished I’d ordered double the amount of food so I could keep talking to you.”
My heart beat an unfamiliar rhythm and I swallowed hard.
“Why—”
“I told you, I don’t know!”
I elbowed him and glared. “I was gonna say, why would I laugh at that?”
“Oh, sorry. Um. People have just made it clear to me that they wanted to do the casual sex thing and weren’t interested in anything…relationship-y.”
“They laughed at you for liking them?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “For being…more traditional than is usual for the people I hang out with, I guess. Ugh, I’m saying this all wrong.”
“If you’re worried about offending me because you came from a perfect family and, like, know how to love, and I’m basically a Dickensian waif, don’t bother,” I said.
He laughed. “The idea of you as a Dickensian waif is adorable. Also strangely hot. Years ago, I was seeing this guy. We’d slept together a handful of times, hung out with mutual friends. I kind of just assumed that meant we were dating, because I was young and, um…”
“Very wholesome,” I offered, ducking when Rhys reached out to swat at me.
“Yeah, okay, terribly wholesome.” He rolled his eyes. “Anyway, my parents were coming to visit, so I told them they should come to the show we were playing that night. They’ve always been really supportive of my music.”
“Of course they have,” I said, very seriously, and this time Rhys just chuckled.
“So, after the show, I introduced the guy to my parents. The next day when I saw him at rehearsal, he kind of…he made it clear that it had just been sex between us and that I’d gotten the very wrong idea about everything if I’d thought he wanted to meet my parents.”
Rhys’s expression was studiedly neutral, but his gaze drifted away from mine to stare at the white walls of the small apartment. Everything looked fresh and clean—very different from my own grungy digs. I squinted at the album posters studding the walls, wondering if Rhys had played on any of them.
Based on his stoic expression, I got the feeling that while this guy might’ve been the first to say that to Rhys he wasn’t the last to express it.
“So you felt like the freak for having this super normal family?”
“Yeah, kind of. And I felt guilty. Sometimes I’d do or say things and people would just look at me like I was being such a dad or something. This one girl called me Normal Nyland.”
I snorted at that. Rhys groaned and fiddled with some papers on the coffee table.
“Look, I get how whiney and ridiculous it sounds to complain about people teasing me about my nice family,” he said. “It was more that…” He plucked at the seam of the couch cushion and didn’t quite look at me. “It kinda seemed like I’d have to choose between a music career and a partner. Every time I met a new person, heard someone was in a relationship, anything like that, I paid attention.”
“And?”
“Well, the data wasn’t promising,” he said.
We sat in silence for a minute. I had no idea what it would be like to have a partner. Mostly I picked up men in bars and screwed them without exchanging more than ten words. More often than not I never thought of them again. But Rhys…Rhys had already taken up residence somewhere inside me, the territory he commanded expanding with every contact. I shook my head to clear it.
“Anyway,” Rhys said. “Jesus, sorry. That wasn’t necessarily the conversation to have when you came over here so we could have sex, huh?”
He grimaced sheepishly, and he looked adorably like the grimacing emoji he’d texted me. My restless fingers fiddled with the fraying hem of my sweatshirt.
“You said the other day…That’s still what you want? Someone…”
Special. He’d said he wanted someone special, and he’d meant a partner. But hadn’t he just said that I was—
“Special,” he said, leaning close to me again and taking my hands in his. “I know this is new. I know I’m probably getting ahead of myself. But,
yeah. That is what I want.”
I swallowed hard. “But, why me? I’m not…I’m just…” I shook my head.
You’re not special. You’ve never been special to anyone. That’s why everyone, everyone, everyone, has thrown you away.
“Matt.”
His voice was serious. For all that he was a happy, sunny man, there was a gravitas to everything he did. A deep, immovable confidence that couldn’t be shaken. It made me feel safe and brave.
“I get the feeling that if I told you all the things I think about you, you’d bolt,” he said, and I heard the unspoken end to that sentence: Just like all the other men did.
He was looking at me so intently I had to close my eyes.
Before I could disappear into myself, Rhys’s mouth was on mine. His kisses devastated me. They made me want to open myself up to him and let him take me apart. I’d had the sense, from our first kiss outside the diner, that he’d like it if I did. That he’d take care of me, even if I laid myself bare.
When I threw my arms around his neck, seeking closeness, he stood, lifting me effortlessly, and walked to the bed. I caught a glimpse of ice-blue eyes darkened by pupils blown so wide he looked high as he lowered down on top of me, then I lost track of everything that wasn’t his mouth, hot against mine, and his hard body pressed against me.
His slick tongue, his rough hands, his hard cock, the straining planes of stomach, back, thigh. All of them were mine. I pulled his clothes off as fast as I could, and then I couldn’t stop touching him. His skin was flushed with desire and the blond hair on his chest and stomach and thighs was a shade darker than the hair on his head, the hair around his thick cock a shade darker than that.
He was heat and power and desire, and I wanted all of it. I tried to get out of my shirt and sweatshirt, and for a moment my hands got tangled up in the sleeves. Rhys moved to help, and paused, looking at me. Then slowly, so slowly, he pressed my wrists to the bed over my head instead of freeing them, and a shudder of heat pulsed from my cock to my throat. Rhys’s eyelids fluttered.