by Roan Parrish
My throat was raw and scratchy, and I pushed up on my elbows to swallow after Rhys pulled out. Then Rhys was kissing me, cradling my head, and pulling me into his arms, then to my feet. I slid my underwear back on as Rhys buttoned up his jeans, and then we leaned into each other again.
“I’m gonna just grab some clothes,” I said. Rhys’s eyes sparked again at the roughness in my voice, and he followed me up the stairs. I tugged on sweats and a T-shirt, and Rhys shrugged and stripped down, exchanging his clothes for his own sweats and a tank top. With his powerful arms, the expanse of his chest, and the flat plane of his stomach on display I almost said fuck it to baked mac and cheese and pushed Rhys down on the bed. But his stomach gave a growl.
I sat him at the kitchen table, wishing I had some candles or something, noticing how stark the light looked. We didn’t usually eat in here.
“Happy late birthday,” I said. His smile was radiant. “Oh wait, I forgot.” I went into the dark living room where I’d put the flowers the night before and grabbed them. Back in the kitchen, I held them out to Rhys.
Rhys took the flowers with a soft look in his eyes and kissed my mouth. “Thanks, baby.” I knew he remembered. Knew he would understand that I was saying he was worth everything too, even if the flowers he’d bought me were beautiful and these were a supermarket special.
I dished up the mac and cheese, making Rhys stay seated since this was supposed to be his birthday.
I had the strangest feeling, like I’d missed a step and was waiting for a jolt. His sudden presence in the house again was overwhelming. Probably I just needed to settle into it again.
“I can’t believe you cooked real food,” Rhys said and took a bite. The look on his face was so tender that it tugged my mouth into a smile. That was better. It was always better with Rhys looking at me.
I took a few bites of my food before I remembered to pay attention to how it tasted. Over the years, I’d gotten so used to just eating without noticing what I was eating, since the food was often bad—just calories in and energy out.
When I tuned back in, though, I realized that something was very wrong with this food, even though I could swear I’d followed Mona’s instructions to the letter. It tasted like I’d dumped a bucket of salt in it.
“Fuck,” I muttered and dropped my fork, gagging once the taste registered.
“Aw, babe, it’s not bad,” Rhys said and took another bite. “Just a little salty. And I love that you thought to make it for me, Matty, seriously.”
“Don’t eat that shit, Rhys,” I said. I snatched the bowl away from him and dumped the food into the trash.
“Hey, come on. I wanted that,” Rhys said. I shook my head. I was not letting Rhys eat something that tasted like a fucking salt lick. I scraped the entire contents of the casserole dish into the trash.
I tried to laugh at myself, but my throat felt tight and my fingers were slippery with cheese sauce, the casserole dish sliding out of my grip. Rhys grabbed it before it could fall into the trash, and deposited it in the sink. I stared at the mess in the garbage, and the garish supermarket flowers.
I thought of Noé’s descriptions of his pictures from this morning.
What if it wasn’t the lens you saw shit through that was fucked up. What if it was actually fucked up because you couldn’t do a single goddamned thing that was worth anything, even with someone else’s mom telling you how.
“Matt. Matty, come back to me.”
“I’m here.”
I wasn’t there.
I washed my hands and squeezed soap into the bowls and the casserole dish, filling them with water to soak. I was standing in someone’s kitchen, washing someone’s dishes, and their house was full of their things. I got to use them. I got to be here. I was welcome to be here whenever I wanted. Wasn’t that nice?
“Matt.” Rhys’s voice was low and calm, and it made something inside me tremble. Not only did I fuck everything up, I also made Rhys take care of me afterward. I winced.
But when his arms came around me, holding me close, I couldn’t pull away. All I could do was hold perfectly still and feel the warmth of his body seeping into mine. Breathe in and out and think for the thousandth time how good Rhys smelled and how just his touch made everything feel better.
“I wanted it to be perfect. I’m sorry,” I murmured, then pressed my mouth against his chest so I couldn’t apologize again.
Rhys squeezed me tight. “You’re perfect. It was such a sweet thought, babe. Wanna order pizza?”
I snorted miserably and then nodded as Rhys’s stomach growled even louder.
That night in bed, Rhys fell asleep almost immediately, wrapped around me from behind, face in my hair. I tugged his arm around my stomach even closer, and arranged it so that his hand was at my throat, and held it there. If my chin dropped forward, I could feel it, pressing into my windpipe. I drifted off with its promise at my throat.
In the middle of the night, I woke suddenly from a dream to find myself gasping, my head fallen forward. Rhys stirred sleepily and draped himself more firmly around me.
“Okay?” he murmured. I turned over so I was facing him and pulled him back over me. “ ’M gonna squish you.”
Yes. That was what I wanted.
I pressed us together so our hips were flush, Rhys making a happy, sleepy, half turned-on sound as our dicks settled together. He dragged me even closer and leaned over me, thrusting our hips together perfectly. He fell right back to sleep, and I wound my arms around his waist and breathed in slowly through my nose to feel how my chest and stomach couldn’t quite expand fully with his weight on top of me. How my whole world was limited by his body, the edges where I ended and he began intruding into one another.
I lay there in the dark and made each half-breath a reminder that Rhys was here. That he wanted me. That I wasn’t going to sit up in the morning and find him gone. Because in this position, his heavy body stretched over me, touching at every limb, I’d wake up the second he tried to leave me.
* * *
—
We spent a lazy Saturday morning in bed and Rhys told me about the tour. It was going well, he said. A better turnout than they’d expected, more online buzz, and a bigger spike in album sales than they’d anticipated. Rhys’s eyes glowed as he talked about the thrill of being in front of a live audience on the road again. He hadn’t toured since Caleb went into rehab the final time.
He loved the people who were playing with him, he’d developed a brotherly relationship with Mal Omin, the woman who was opening for him, and he’d written two new songs. He played them for me naked, with his guitar in his lap and his eyes closed.
“How do you do that?” I asked, awed, when he was done. It was what I always asked, so I didn’t expect an answer.
Having hung out with Theo and Caleb, I’d found I could see the bits of their speech, or expressions of feeling, or details they noticed that I could draw lines from to their songs. Unlike them, though, Rhys’s songwriting brain seemed so different than his usual brain that hearing his songs was always shocking. It was like he tapped into a part of himself that I had no access to at all.
This time, though, instead of a grin and a kiss, or a shy eyebrow raise in response to my question, Rhys said, “I was missing you and that’s what came out.”
I swallowed hard and put a hand on his thigh so I could feel the music reverberating through his body. “Play them again.”
Caleb and Theo brought food over for dinner and I got to hear all the details about tour and venues and sound equipment that Rhys had edited out for me.
As Caleb and Rhys began dissecting some detail about Mal Omin’s songwriting process, Theo scooted closer to me.
“How’d the birthday dinner go?”
“Don’t ask,” I said, wincing all over again at the previous night’s mishap. We sat in silence for
a little while before I realized I was doing the thing that made Theo think I hated him. “I thought I did it right, but the food just tasted like salt. I don’t even know what happened.”
“Oh. Wow. Well.” His eyeliner-smeared eyes were wide, and his perfect mouth screwed up into a grimace. “At least next year will probably be better?” he offered.
Next year, next year, next year.
* * *
—
Sunday dawned warm and clear, and I felt a moment of rightness before I realized Rhys was leaving that night and the stone in my stomach became a boulder. I burrowed under Rhys’s arm and went back to sleep.
This time I woke to Rhys pulling me on top of him and lazily stroking my back. I breathed deeply, relishing the closeness and tried to stay relaxed, but my heart wouldn’t stop pounding.
“Hey, Matty,” Rhys said, voice a low rumble from his chest against my ear. He hesitated. “Are you all right?”
“Mhmm,” I said into his chest. “ ’S nice.”
“I mean…you’ve just seemed…since I got back, you’ve seemed like you’re a bit on edge. A little down.”
I shoved my face into the crook of his neck.
“I know it sucks to be apart,” he went on. Then, voice softening, “I miss you so much when I’m not here. I just want to make sure you’re okay, and that we stay connected when I’m gone.”
I nodded, wanting to reassure him that he hadn’t messed things up by going on tour.
“And you know you can call me anytime, right? I always want to hear from you.”
He’d said it every time he called me or I texted before I called to make sure he was free. He’d said I could just call and if he wasn’t free, he wouldn’t answer. But I liked to check first. Calling and not getting an answer felt worse.
“Is something else wrong? Stuff at work? Grin okay?”
His hand on my back was so perfect. It belonged in a wholly different world than the world of shadows the house became when he wasn’t there.
When you leave, the ghosts come and the branches scratch and claw to get in. When you’re not here, the shadows swell and leak inside and drain out all the air.
I shook my head hard to get rid of the intrusive thought. No. I’m not Grim; I’m Matt now, I insisted, and I kissed his throat.
“I just missed you,” I murmured, and Rhys’s arms came around me instantly. “It’s…lonely without you.”
“I missed you too, baby. So much. I hate going to bed without you.”
I nodded into his neck and held on tighter as Rhys rolled us so we lay on our sides facing each other. He looked at me, traced my features with his finger, and I felt like he was cracking me open and seeing inside. Seeing everything.
And as had happened so many times before, I wondered why I didn’t just tell him everything. Why did I keep things to myself when it felt so good to tell him?
“There’s this guy at work,” I said. “A new client. He…he reminds me so much of me and Grin. How angry we were. Scared.” Rhys’s hand moved to my neck, a warm, reassuring weight, and my words came out in a rush. “We never thought things would work out because all we’d ever seen was stuff falling apart. We didn’t have anything, and we wouldn’t trust anything we got anyway because it would just get taken away.”
The expression on Rhys’s face was the one he always got when I talked about my shitty childhood. And that, right there, I reminded myself, was why I didn’t tell him things. He looked so desperately sad for me. So offended at the world. He looked like it was his responsibility to make sure my life was perfect now, to balance out the seesaw of before and after. I could see it in his eyes every time. Not on my watch, he’d tell himself. Not my husband.
I cleared my throat and changed directions. “Um, anyway, my client, he wants to take pictures but he doesn’t have a camera. He can’t get a job. I was thinking of maybe getting him one. A camera. Well, and a job, hopefully. But he can’t know it came from me or he’ll never take it. So I thought…maybe I could start some kind of fundraiser. Like a…drive to get stuff like that. Cameras and art supplies and like…I don’t know, other stuff that we could lend out to our clients. Maybe.”
Rhys cupped my face and smiled, his heart in his eyes. “That’s a great idea, Matty. You’re gonna make your clients so happy. Let me know if I can help, okay?” His thumbs stroked my cheekbones.
I loved this about Rhys. He was such a problem-solver and so capable. But when it came to things that were my purview, he never intruded.
“I have something else you can help with.” I pulled Rhys’s hand between my legs and watched his eyes flash and his lush lips part.
“Mmm, and what can I do for you, love?”
My heart pounded as waves of desire and waves of shame washed through me.
“I want…I want to feel like I belong to you. So I can remember.”
When you’re gone. Once you’ve left me again.
I swallowed hard and Rhys groaned. It got him hard so fast when I said stuff like that. For all that Rhys was open about how much he liked to feel like I belonged to him, too, I knew there was more. The way he reacted sometimes to little things—when I forgot my wallet and turned to him to pay, when I brought him takeout in the studio on his break, when I asked his opinion on how something looked, or I told him that something had made me think of him. When he called me his husband.
Intimacy. Intimacy turned him on like nothing else.
I tipped his chin down and looked into his eyes. “I want you to fucking own me, Rhys.”
He was on me in a second, eyes wild and cheeks flushed and mouth on mine. We’d slept naked but after a minute of furious kissing, he stripped even the sheet off me and threw it to the floor, leaving me flat on my back with him straddling me, one hand flat on my chest.
“Stay there,” he rasped. My breath came fast as he looked at me. “You’re so beautiful, Matt.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Look at me.” I opened them.
Rhys seemed huge, looming over me, his powerful arms and broad chest, muscled shoulders and thick thighs. His cock stood up, hard and ruddy. I noticed for the hundredth time the way his stomach and chest were gilded with hair one shade darker than his stubble, which was one shade darker than the blond hair on his head. His very body made sense.
“Sweet Matt,” Rhys purred. He flipped me over. “Do you know how you look at me when I touch you?” With my face buried in the sheets, I shook my head. “You look so surprised at first. Like you forget that you like it. But then you melt. When I touch you—” He ran his hand down my spine and over my ass, and I felt myself relax. “When I taste you.” He kissed the path he’d just touched.
Then he was spreading my legs, and I felt the hot slickness of his tongue at my opening. It sent little shivers through me, and I pressed closer to him.
“Mm, you want more?”
I whined and Rhys’s velvet tongue speared me open. He licked at me until I was wet and writhing against the bed.
“Fuck, I wanna come in here,” he said against my hole and a bolt of lust shot through me.
“Do it,” I groaned. Rhys fumbled for the lube and then his fingers were sliding inside me, slick and rough. After a minute, though, I pushed his hand away. “Now,” I said. “Just fuck me. I’m yours.”
Rhys’s moan rumbled against my back. “That’s right, sweetheart. You’re mine, and I can fuck you any way I want.”
I nodded, gasped Yes, and tilted my hips up in encouragement. Rhys swatted me once, then grabbed my hips and slid inside in one powerful stroke. I tensed up everywhere, groaning around the intrusion.
“Okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You want me to own this ass, baby?”
“Yes, fuck—hard, okay?”
Rhys groaned. He kissed my ear, then my neck, then he sank his teeth in and sucked.
Then Rhys started to fuck me. Hard. I couldn’t brace myself against it, and I kept sliding across the bed. I struggled to stay still, but he was too strong. We both growled in frustration, and Rhys planted his forearms on the bed and clasped his hands, like a cage around my shoulders on the bed. Now when he drove into me, he kept us still, and I let the feeling of it slam through me. My raging erection hit my stomach and the bed with every thrust, swollen and leaking, but I didn’t want to touch it. I wanted Rhys to make me come.
I tilted my hips so every thrust was stretch and friction and burn and then that gorgeous zing of fuck yes as he hit my prostate. I was hard and tight and liquid and loose all at once, and all I wanted was whatever Rhys gave me.
“Fuck, Matty,” he groaned. “You feel so perfect.”
He pulled out and maneuvered me so I was bent over the side of the bed. Then he pushed back inside and grabbed my hips, and I could feel every inch of him sliding inside me. I’d stopped him before he could add more lube, so there was more friction than usual, and if I clenched around him he felt impossibly deep. I put one knee up on the bed, and Rhys pressed even deeper.
“More, please,” I moaned.
“You’re mine, baby,” Rhys said, and now we were moving hard and fast and it was a blur of pleasure and need and Rhys. He started to groan deeply and I knew he was close. He pushed me harder into the bed and closed his hand around my cock, his thrusts sliding my swollen dick against the bed and through his hand.
I cried out as my orgasm sparked, and then I couldn’t make a sound as it ripped through me. I was coming and coming and shaking with the pleasure of it, clutching at the sheets and clenching every muscle. Then Rhys froze, groaned, and unloaded deep inside me.
“Ugh, fuck,” he moaned, giving one more thrust. Splayed out with one foot on the floor and one on the bed, I shivered as every nerve ending lit up.
He pulled out slowly, kissing my shoulders, and crawled up onto the bed with me.