Cruising

by Sean Ashcroft

  Also, he was lying along the couch we’d claimed with his head in my lap, letting me stroke his hair.

  This? This was perfect. This was the most perfect moment of my life so far.

  “Are people staring at us?” Rowan asked. Opening his eyes was apparently too much like hard work.

  “They all want you for themselves,” I teased. “If looks could kill, I’d be a dead man.”

  Rowan hummed, snuggling closer, and I could hardly believe this side of him existed, let alone that he was letting me—and everyone else—see it.

  But then I had worn him out last night.

  “You okay?” I asked, still stroking his hair like he was an oversized cat.

  “Aside from sore in places I didn’t know I had?” Rowan asked.

  I laughed. “Can’t say I didn’t warn you. This is why we waited.”

  Rowan sighed, turning his face away from the sun, toward my stomach. He wasn’t nearly as sore or exhausted as he was pretending to be, but I wasn’t about to stop him.

  When I’d met him, I wouldn’t have dreamed he was so much of a cuddler as he’d turned out to be. I didn’t even have to ask, Rowan started it more often than not.

  “Good afternoon, gorgeous,” I called out as Tyler and Andries appeared from around the corner.

  With Benji trailing after them, looking sleepy and satisfied, yawning and stretching dramatically as they approached and took the opposite lounge. He settled between them, resting heavily against Andries’ side, but reaching out to take Tyler's hand.

  Rowan turned to blink sleepily at the trio, brows knitting together a moment while he figured out what I’d suspected.

  They were getting along just fine.

  Andries and Tyler didn’t need me or Rowan. What they needed was a Benji. Soft, cuddly, and happy to be completely spoiled with affection.

  “Thought you were talking to me,” Rowan murmured, smiling fondly.

  “Hangover?” Andries asked, nodding to Rowan.

  Rowan snorted, turning onto his side but not bothering to sit up. I didn’t mind being his personal pillow, but seeing him this relaxed was a surprise.

  Maybe he’d taken to heart what I’d said about liking him soft and relaxed. I was enjoying this. I’d wanted to see him like this since the beginning.

  “I’m not hungover,” he objected. “Just… sore.”

  “Me too,” Benji piped up, snuggling closer to Andries.

  I laughed, and that set everyone else off, Rowan included.

  What more could I have asked for? The sun was hanging just over the horizon in the distance, the breeze was drying the sweat on my skin, I was surrounded by people I genuinely liked and wanted to spend more time with, and Rowan was making the world’s most public claim on me.

  I was ruined for all future vacations. Nothing would ever be like this again.

  “Ah,” Andries said. “Well, you’ll just have to recover quickly, then. I was coming over here to ask for a place on your dance card. Both of you.”

  Dance card?

  Oh. Right. I’d completely forgotten there was supposed to be a moonlight ball on deck tonight.

  I hadn’t ever asked Rowan if he wanted to go. Hell, I hadn’t decided whether or not I wanted to go.

  … no, that was a lie. As soon as Andries had reminded me, an image of slow-dancing with Rowan like we were seventeen and it was prom night had popped up in my head, and now I couldn’t get rid of it.

  “I don’t dance,” Rowan said, popping the image like a soap bubble.

  “Yes you do,” Andries insisted, giving me a meaningful look. My disappointment must’ve shown on my face. “In any case, you will when I’m done with you. And you wouldn’t leave Lee to go all alone, would you?”

  Rowan looked up at me, pale blue eyes glistening like snow in the sunlight. I watched the whole internal debate play out on his face and wondered how I’d ever thought he was hard to read.

  He was so expressive that I could almost hear his thoughts, torn between fear of embarrassing himself and fear of disappointing me.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You’re tired.”

  “I’m not that tired,” Rowan insisted, finally sitting up to demonstrate. I missed him instantly, but he took my hand in the next heartbeat, and that was okay.

  I still couldn’t believe he kept doing that. Without being begged, without even being asked.

  “Excellent,” Andries said, beaming at us.

  “I want a spot on that dance card too,” Tyler added. “Both of you.”

  I grinned at him. “Accepted, I’d be delighted.”

  Benji looked at the two of us shyly, clearly not confident enough to ask. “On the condition that I get a spot on Benji’s.”

  His eyes lit up, and I knew I’d said exactly the right thing. I nudged Rowan, who was already leaning heavily against my side after sitting up.

  I had worn him out last night. A swell of pride filled my chest at the thought that he was as satisfied as he’d ever been—more, probably.

  And so impossibly sweet in the aftermath, too. Some part of me had known this was what he needed.

  To feel wanted, and maybe even a little bit loved. Just like the rest of us.

  I was starting to understand a lot of what Tyler had said to me about him and Andries. What they meant to each other, and why. There were still some things I didn’t understand…

  But I did understand that Rowan was volunteering to dance with me just because he thought it’d make me happy, which I was pretty sure made me at least the luckiest man on this cruise ship.

  Rowan, unsurprisingly, scrubbed up beautifully. I watched through the bathroom door as he settled his hair into place, fussing with it for a solid five minutes longer than I ever would have, and couldn’t stop smiling at him.

  He was perfect. I kept having that thought, and it seemed truer every time it came up.

  “Are you still watching me?” he asked without breaking eye contact with his own reflection.

  For a man who really didn’t see just how attractive he was, he was so vain.

  No, not vain, that wasn’t what was going on. It wasn’t vanity that drove Rowan to straighten his borrowed bowtie forty times.

  Rowan was trying to make up for his own perceived lack of attractiveness by at least showing that he was well-groomed and trying.

  “Working out the most efficient way to get you out of that suit,” I teased.

  “Not until after the ball, you’ll disappoint our friends,” he responded, and for a split second it felt just like a moment of domestic bliss, like Rowan and I had been together for years and years and came as a unit and had friends that were ours, jointly.

  And in the split second I was imagining it, I wanted it more than anything in the world.

  My heart leapt as Rowan, who’d just spent what felt like a lifetime putting his hair into place, picked one strand from the middle and tugged it out, letting it flop over his forehead. The way I liked it.

  For me.

  I’d watched him dress and I knew he must have hated to see it like that. But when he turned to me and met my eyes for approval, I couldn’t stop myself from grinning.

  “C’mere.” I held a hand out to him, watching him stride over, all polished and perfect except for the one strand of hair that was for me.

  How did people know this man and not fall in love with him? They should have been falling over themselves to catch Rowan's eye, and yet here I was, standing in the middle of our accidental shared cabin, holding his hand.

  I raised it to my lips, kissing the knuckles like something out of a period drama, and then squeezed his fingers while he blushed all the way to his hairline.

  “I’ll have to keep an eye on you,” I said. “Could easily lose you looking like that.”

  Rowan looked down at our joined hands, smiling a tiny, shy smile.

  “You won’t,” he said, squeezing back. “You won’t.”

  21

  Rowan

  Lee had joked
that he could lose me in this crowd, but I didn’t think I’d ever come closer to losing him. He looked incredible all dressed up, polished like silverware and outright sparkling under the strings of Christmas lights glittering overhead.

  If he’d had eyes for anyone but me, he could have had them. People had always looked twice at him, but now they stared openly, and glanced at me as though they couldn’t understand why he was on my arm, of all possible choices.

  “Told you the devil-may-care look suited you,” Lee murmured, leaning close enough to my ear to tickle the hairs on the back of my neck as he spoke. “Told you I’d have to watch I don’t lose you tonight.”

  “You won’t,” I assured him again.

  I wasn’t stupid, I knew this wasn’t real life. That we were both living a fantasy right now, and eventually we’d have to go back to the real world.

  But for now, Lee had me and he wouldn’t lose me. Not to anyone.

  Benji waved at us from across the crowd with the same youthful enthusiasm he always had.

  As it turned out, he was only twenty-four, which explained… a lot.

  The same age Lee had been when he met Craig.

  “He’s got such a crush on you,” Lee murmured again as we headed toward them.

  “Me?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “I feel like we’ve had this conversation before,” Lee said. “I think he likes you because you seem… settled. Grown up.”

  “Seem?”

  “Well, you are.” Lee shrugged. “But you’ve got a fun streak. It’s buried deep, but I’ve always liked a treasure hunt.”

  I laughed as we approached Andries, Tyler, and Benji, who looked more and more like they all belonged together every time I saw them.

  Lee had done Benji a good turn. Which made all the sense in the world—he knew what Craig was like, and he was a kind soul. He wouldn’t have wanted Benji to go through what he’d been through if he could do something about it.

  Benji, for his part, was glowing with happiness in a way I hadn’t seen in him when we first met. This was the kind of happiness that came from the soul.

  I wondered if that was what I looked like when I was with Lee.

  “Ah, there is a civilized man in there somewhere,” Andries said, looking Lee up and down appreciatively. Tyler batted his arm.

  “He does this to me, too,” he said. “You’d think after five years of marriage and dragging me to an endless string of black tie events, he’d be used to it.”

  “Your beauty always strikes me anew,” Andries said, pecking his husband’s cheek and then extending a hand toward me. “Come. You promised me a dance.”

  Lee let go reluctantly.

  “I’m coming back,” I promised, squeezing his hand before letting it slip away, joining Andries on the dance floor.

  He eased his way between couples swaying lovingly in each other’s arms and others laughing as they tried not to step on their partner’s feet, guiding me to a relatively clear spot.

  I felt, more than I ever had in my life, like an idiot.

  “How serious were you when you said you don’t dance?” Andries asked, as though I might have been hiding five years of competition ballroom dancing up my sleeve.

  “As a heart attack.”

  “Ah.” Andries looked me up and down. “I’ll lead, then,” he said, taking my hand and putting it on his shoulder before pulling me closer by the waist.

  I’d read once that when it’d first come into fashion, dancing like this, face to face with a partner, had been declared indecent by various religious and morality-policing groups.

  I suddenly understood their point as I stumbled over my own feet trying to follow Andries, stomach swooping at the unexpected intimacy.

  “Don’t look at your feet,” he corrected. “Look at your partner. Neither of you will care so much about your feet that way.”

  “Is this how you wooed Tyler?” I asked.

  “Perhaps, in a way,” Andries responded, smiling at the mention of his husband. The love between them was so real and solid it felt like something I could have reached out and touched. When they were together, I could feel it.

  So I understood why Benji was happy to be close to them. I was glad he was happy to be close to him, and as a bonus, it served Craig right.

  He was nowhere to be seen yet, though my gaze kept travelling back to Lee, keeping an eye on him. He probably didn’t need me to swoop in like a protective mama bear, but I couldn’t help wanting to.

  “I believed you were very taken with him from the beginning,” Andries said, pulling my attention back to him. “And I think that was because you were.”

  The back of my neck itched as heat crept up it. “I was,” I admitted quietly. I’d been convinced Lee was out of my reach, and I was still shocked to know he wasn’t.

  Andries smiled. “And yet you worry,” he said. “You have no cause. He hasn’t stopped looking at you the whole time we’ve been over here.”

  He spun me away with a flourish, which made me feel one part like a princess and one part like a newborn foal that hadn’t quite figured out walking yet.

  “Stop worrying,” Andries said. “About your feet, about Lee, about anything other than this moment. Take it from me, your next decade will move so quickly you’ll look back at forty and wonder where it all went. Learn to stop and smell the roses while you still can.”

  “You’re hardly old.” I spun back, squeezing Andries’ shoulder as I settled my hand on it, taking his advice to stop worrying. The worst possible thing that could happen was me tripping both of us up.

  A week ago the thought of embarrassing myself like that in front of all these people would have horrified me.

  Now, I wasn’t worried. Lee's effect on me had been profound.

  I was convinced he’d still like me even if I did trip over my own feet and take Andries down with me, which meant it didn’t matter if I did. He didn’t care that I’d turned out to be a completely normal human, flawed and imperfect.

  I still didn’t understand why, and I wasn’t sure I ever would, but I was beginning to make peace with it. It didn’t matter why. It only mattered that it was true.

  “There,” Andries said as the song finished. “Now. Go and impress Lee.”

  Impress might have been a little much, but I could at least dance with him. As it turned out, the point wasn’t knowing what I was doing.

  The point was not being afraid to do it.

  Lee's eyes sparkled when I offered him my hand, and he gave me yet another of those broad, honest smiles, the ones I’d been carefully cataloguing and saving for later, when I might need them more.

  “Dance with me,” I said, tugging him toward the floor.

  He laughed the whole way, the sound I’d come to love most in the world ringing in my ears as I searched for a relatively clear spot.

  Lee didn’t bother with the couple of inches Andries had kept between us, holding me close instead and letting his forehead rest on my shoulder.

  He also didn’t care about where my feet were or what I was doing with them.

  With Lee close enough to breathe in the scent of his aftershave, I didn’t care, either. I didn’t care about the throng of people around us, or the possibility that I’d trip us both up, or anything else.

  My whole world narrowed down to him.

  “Thank you,” Lee murmured near my ear.

  “For what?”

  “For coming out tonight,” he said. “Being seen with me, I guess.”

  “I’m honored,” I responded, because it was true. Not only could Lee have anyone, which made choosing me enough of a miracle, but past the surface-level friendliness, I’d come to realize he was a man who had just as much trouble letting other people in as I did.

  All the same, he’d let me in. Even when he had no reason to trust me.

  Lee chuckled, sliding his hand under my jacket. His thumb stroked my waist, a satisfied sigh making my heart do a little backflip with happiness.

  I woul
d have kept him exactly like this forever. Content and at peace, snuggled close to me, two lost souls clinging to each other.

  “You can’t dance either, can you?” I asked. We weren’t so much dancing as swaying, with no sense of rhythm to speak of.

  Lee snorted. “Not like this. Although I am having a lot of fun.”

  “Me too,” I admitted, though fun didn’t seem to cover the depth of how good this felt.

  The song changed, and slowed, and Lee didn’t even make an attempt to let go of me and I didn’t want him to, anyway. I would have stayed here until dawn if he’d let me.

  After a full song of silence, Lee pulled back, looking me in the eyes.

  “Rowan,” he said, the faintest tremble in his voice. “I…”

  Love you.

  “You must need a break by now,” he finished.

  Oh. Of course.

  Now that the moment had passed, the wishful thinking seemed ridiculous. Of course that was never what he was going to say.

  “I’m okay,” I said, and meant it. I wasn’t as fragile as I’d been letting myself pretend earlier.

  I’d just wanted to be Lee’s, for a little while, and let him play doting, caring boyfriend.

  No one else had ever done that for me. I’d always been the caretaker, the adult, and until last night I’d thought the same thing was true with Lee, that I was looking after him.

  But he was looking after me, too. Had been the whole time, in little ways that I was still piecing together from memories that were already too distant to examine properly.

  Lee cared. That was what made him different. He looked at me and saw another human being, with thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams of my own. Not just someone who wouldn’t complain for fear of losing the only human companionship they had between working as much overtime as I could get my hands on and sleeping.

  Lee lit up, more magical under the twinkling lights than ever.

  “One more song, then?”

  “One more song,” I agreed.

  22

  Lee

  The sex was slower this time, more deliberate, quieter. Rowan rocked between my thighs, gentle as the ship around us, hands everywhere, kissing me breathless.