Except now it didn’t. Now, the silvery glow seemed to fade around my skin, and I was grateful. So grateful. I said another prayer for Darren’s soul as I handed off Harry’s bourbon.
He accepted gratefully and took a gulp. "He’s okay now. He’s okay."
I sat next to him, closer now. "He’s okay. Are you?"
Harry laughed. "I have no idea." And he laughed again, harder, squeezing his eyes shut. Tears slid down his cheeks.
I put my arm around his shoulders and pulled him close. Harry soaked my shoulder with tears, his bony body rocking gently with noiseless sobs. I didn’t know if it was sadness or relief that broke him, but seeing as the two weren’t mutually exclusive, I didn’t need to ask, either.
***
Thackeray and Matt officially hired Harry as their researcher the next day. Though Harry’s eyes were a little swollen and his head a little groggy, he looked delighted. They wouldn’t accept a fee from him, since they’d had free room and board the whole time, and he was a member of the team now.
Thackeray took the offending magic mirror and promised to keep it somewhere safe. We checked all the other ones out, and they were just run-of-the-mill old-school looking glasses. Harry put them all up on eBay the following weekend.
I saw him off and on after the full moon. I’d stop by and visit for a drink in the evenings, or he’d come down to the store and talk to Mama, then grab lunch with me between his classes. We talked about his new job, we talked about his upcoming classes, we talked about how empty his house felt, knowing Darren was gone. We didn’t talk about him crying, and something told me he was grateful for that.
But then, Sunday evening, we met as usual for dinner. And the first thing he said was, "Thank you for being with me, that night. While I sobbed like a baby."
I smiled and glanced away, not wanting to be too in-his-face about it. "I wasn’t gonna bring it up."
"It’s okay." Harry reached out and took my hand.
It tingled, warmed my entire arm slowly.
He went on, "I don’t mind. I’m not ashamed that I was relieved and sad and happy all at once. And I’m not sorry you were there to see it."
"I’m not either," I said, thinking he was a braver man than me.
But then, I’d never been brave. I’d always been better at hiding who I was. And it was goddamn exhausting.
I squeezed his hand. "You can cry on me anytime."
"Same goes for you."
"So it was all of that? I wasn’t sure, but I had a feeling," I said.
He paused to order the wine for us, as usual, and then when the server left, replied, "Yeah. All of it. I wasn’t sad for him, just for me. As alone as I was for the last few years, I didn’t really think about the fact that I never was really alone. And now I am."
I tried to look sympathetic.
He grimaced. "I know. Being watched by your dead ex all day and night doesn’t exactly sound like having company."
"I wasn’t gonna say it," I replied.
"But you were thinking it." He chuckled. "And you’re right. But it was my life for a long time. I’m glad, even more for his sake than for mine, that it’s not anymore. But I never considered that I’d feel the loss of it, too."
"It’ll take time," I said quietly, layering the words with meaning.
He nodded slowly. "Yeah."
"I’ll be here."
He looked sad. I was too. I wished I could just take him home with me and kiss him until neither of us could breathe. Undress him and see him in the dark, his pretty eyes alight like they were right then with the need for something more. Give him that something more, at long last, give us a chance.
After a long moment, he sighed. "Well, I’m more happy than anything. I feel like the whole world is brighter, knowing he’s not trapped anymore. That he’s where he should be."
"Me too, actually," I said. "I liked him."
"He obviously liked you." Harry snorted.
"He only liked me because you did," I said.
"Doubtful. Darren had a lot of opinions, and he got even louder when they were at odds with mine."
But that was all the talk of Darren, that night, and it was strange for it to be past tense--but, I got the feeling, also a little freeing for Harry.
His life was beginning again.
***
I thought it’d take months, at least six of them, maybe more. I was very, very wrong.
Two weeks after that dinner conversation, Harry showed up at the shop just before closing on Saturday. "Hey, uh, let’s go get a drink?"
"Long week?" I asked.
"Oh yeah."
So I locked up and we wandered down the block to a local dive with cheap Moscow Mules, where we knocked back several. Harry’s natural pinkness flushed bright when he hit the liquor, and tonight was a shining example. We sat in the corner, trying not to be too conspicuous about our flirting, though neither of us had said it was a date. It totally wasn’t, because I could wait as long as he needed me to.
On our third drink, Harry took a deep breath and suddenly said, "I haven’t been sleeping great."
I frowned. "Nightmares?"
He shook his head. "No. I keep--I keep dreaming about you."
"What about me?" My stomach roiled. Had something gone wrong with the magic and somehow attached us? Done something to his mind, or mine, or someone else’s? Left residual magical scars we could never see or find to fix?
Harry leaned closer until his gingery breath brushed my cheek. "Dirty dreams."
Heat raced through my veins, starting in my balls, of course. I coughed. "Oh. Uh. Is that--weird?"
"I wasn’t having them before," he whispered. "I think it’s because--my mind is free now, you know? And it just wanders…"
His hand came to rest on my thigh.
This was not the kind of place where two men could sit in the corner and make out without causing a scene. I knew most of the regulars, and they knew who I was, but still. I covered his hand with mine anyhow, assuming the table would block it from view. "So, that keeps you up at night, huh?"
"I needed a drink so I could tell you," he confessed, as if to a priest, serious, eyes wide. "I tried to, the other night, but I couldn’t get it out."
"Vodka makes you talk dirty?"
He grinned. "Maybe."
I swallowed hard, desperate to find out. "Harry…"
"It’s okay, Lucas," he said, squeezing my leg and looking me in the eye. So much sincerity, and something else in there now, a fire that had flashed so many times, only for us to douse it. "I’m okay."
It’d always be with him, but there was okay and then there was not okay, and he was the only one who could say what was what. Or maybe that was just my dick talking.
I’d been reigning it in for a long time now, though. "If you’re sure."
He said, "If you don’t take me home right now, I will blow you under this table, I swear to god."
And if you’ve never heard a nerd in thick glasses and a cardigan talk dirty in a shitty dive bar, then you haven’t lived, my friends.
We practically ran down the block, then up the stairs to my little suite of rooms--which we bolted behind us. He threw his jacket across my couch, and I threw mine on top of it, then led the way to the bedroom. When I closed that door behind me, he pushed me suddenly against the door and pressed me between it and himself tight, hip-to-hip, one of his thighs sliding between mine. His clever little fingers pried at my waist, untucking my shirt. "I’m sorry I had to drink to do it. I couldn’t wait, though. And I knew you would if I didn’t say something. And I can’t."
I wrapped one arm around him and used the other to ruffle the hair at his nape, then thread my fingers through it. I tilted his head back, and he leaned forward into a kiss. I hummed into it, cocktails heavy on our breath and fire in my veins. My heartbeat raged, pushing me onward, but I forced myself to slow down, linger in the new taste of him, the warmth of his body pressing into mine, the slide of his lips and the flick of his tongue
.
He pulled away gasping after a moment, turning a pleading look on me. "I can’t wait."
"I wasn’t enjoying it either," I managed, though my voice felt and sounded strangled.
"You do--you do want me?"
How that was even a question, I had no goddamn idea. "I always did," I whispered. "Before I even knew what it meant. And when you walked back into my life…"
I couldn’t finish, but that must’ve been enough because he dove in for another kiss, longer, deeper. His tongue slid across the roof of my mouth, and his hands worked my shirt out of my pants, then slipped between us to start unbuttoning. I took off his glasses, dropped them on the nightstand nearby, and he pulled back to suck in another breath, his gaze fixed to mine. Without the glasses between us, the green ring around the brown iris was even more arresting. Fascinated, I ran my fingers over the length of his high cheekbone, then down to his crushed-pink lips.
He kissed my fingertips and started undoing my belt at the same time.
Time blurred. Peeling the layers off of us one by one, slow and then fast again, moments to pass a look, a kiss, a touch between us that was more about reminding each other who we were than getting off. We shrugged off shirts and sweaters and pants and boots, undershirts and socks until it was just us in our underwear. Though we were of a height, his body looked longer somehow, legs and arms that had never outgrown lankiness, just the faintest softness at the belly from all his wine, and broad but bony shoulders. I traced the hard lines of him with my hands, his angles and lines like roads on a map to somewhere I was desperate to go.
I kissed at his neck, long and graceful, and he grabbed my ass and pulled me tight against him. "God, you always had the finest ass," he whispered, a little laugh at the end of it that sent my heart tripping.
I rocked my hips into him, rubbing my swelling prick against his. Maybe I had the finest ass, but his dick filled out those boxers real nice. He made a little sound of surprise that turned into a moan, and it was so goddamn sexy a wet spot appeared at my dickhead.
"I’m not gonna last very long," he huffed, all apologetic.
"Me neither."
"It’s been a really long time."
"Me too."
"Three years?"
"Okay, not that long." I smiled.
He pulled away and dragged me to the bed. When he backed me up against it, he tugged the waist of my boxer briefs down almost to the base of my dick. He licked his lips but looked me in the eye. "You saved me, Lucas."
I shook my head. "Someone would’ve--"
"Shut up and let me be grateful." He put one hand on my bare chest and pushed.
I sat back onto the bed, then lifted my ass to let him yank off my underwear. My dick stood up straight, dark and hot with need, leaking just a little. This unexpected bossy side was a welcome fucking development, all right.
It was always the ones who seemed a little too proper and controlled, wasn’t it? I said, "Jesus, you’re hot when you get sassy."
"Just wait." Harry knelt and pushed my knees apart, crawling between them.
Oh shit. Shit, this was really about to happen. I mean, he’d said it not long ago, he was gonna blow me under that table, but I hadn’t really allowed myself to--
"Kiss me." He tilted his head up, exposing his throat. I brushed my fingertips down it, into the hollow, and flattened my palm at his collar bone as I obliged. When he pulled away, he nipped at my bottom lip, a bright, sharp little pain like the flash of Matt’s knife in the moonlight.
He used his torso to push my legs further apart, then cupped my balls with his left hand. Involuntarily, my ass lifted. He pushed me back down firmly, his fingertips doing something amazing not-quite-close-enough to my asshole. His soft hair brushed at my prick as it gave a little jump, and he looked up at me and smiled, then nuzzled at it, eyes fluttering closed.
He loved it. He fucking loved everything about this moment, maybe as much as I did, even. His mouth opened, tongue emerging, and I balled up the covers in my fists as he licked my dickhead clean of pre-cum. That pink mouth was so warm and pretty, goddamnit, I was not gonna bust on his face before he even got started, I was not.
He looked up through his eyelashes and bangs again. "Don’t think badly of me if I come from sucking you off? I’m not always that easy, but right now..."
"Can you--can you do that?" I wondered.
"If you knew how bad I want to do this, you wouldn’t even ask." The smile on his face morphed into something wicked.
My dick gave another jump.
He rubbed his cheek against it, his soft five o’clock shadow bristling gently. "Every time you sit on my couch, this is what I’m thinking of."
"Goddamn--ah, fuck!" I never got to say more than that, because he took me into his mouth of a sudden, then went down on me till his lip hit my belly. I gritted my teeth to stave off a too-quick orgasm again, growling under my breath to keep it in check.
He was merciless and beautiful at it, like a starving man--and I guess he was, come to think of it--his eyes clouding with pleasure, his throat contracting around me with ecstatic moans. I ran my fingers through his hair, then tightened them there, and he glanced upward. I could’ve sworn he was smiling around my dick, that sweet little face of his, dirtied up as could be with lust. I tugged at his hair and he went all the way down again, pushing his fingers closer to my asshole.
I spread my knees and slid down a little. "Fuck, yeah."
He spread his own spit all over me and teased my ass, causing sparks and jumps here and there until they all started to bleed into one giant swell of joy. Maybe I should’ve held it back, let the moment linger, gotten the most out of it. But by the time I had the thought, it was too late, the spiral had begun, and all I could do was say, "Gonna--"
He went all the way down and moaned around me, sucking the orgasm right out of me before I could finish my warning. I bucked up into his throat, clinging to his hair like a lifeline, and busted so hard I went damn near blind for a full thirty seconds.
"Jesus, you’re good at that," I finally huffed as he began to stand. His prick hung heavy, still hard but flagging; cum dripped down his thigh. I grabbed his ass, pulled him forward, and bent to lick him off. His cum was thick and salty-sweet, or maybe I just thought it was sweet because it was his, but I loved it all the same.
He moaned once more, swayed a little as if he wasn’t quite steady on his feet.
I sucked his cock into my mouth, cleaning up every last bit of wetness I could get. He steadied himself with a hand on my shoulder. His prick was hot and eager in my mouth, in spite of having blown his load, and I teased it gently, letting him watch me pop it in and out of my mouth. He traced his fingers around my lips, gaze cloudy and affectionate. After a moment, he laughed and stepped away--it had become too much--and said, "I’ll save it for you--next time."
"Next time as in tonight?" I asked.
He nodded and crawled up onto the bed beside me. "Goddamn right. Now come here and let me feel you."
I did. We wrapped around each other, faces buried in necks and fingers buried in hair, clinging in the dark and comfortably silent. Together.
And where that was going to lead us, well, we had a long while to find out.
THE END
About the Author
Katey Hawthorne is an avid reader and writer of superpowered and paranormal romance, even though the only degree she holds is in the history of art. (Or, possibly, because the only degree she holds is in the history of art.) Originally from the Appalachian foothills of West Virginia, she currently lives in Ohio with her family, two cats, and two huge puppies. In her spare time she enjoys travel, comic books, B-movies, loud music, video games, Epiphones, and Bushmills. Her favorite causes include animal rescue and bisexual representation in media. She is an unashamed fangirl and collects nerdy tattoos like she’s trying to prove it.
Find her at:
http://www.kateyhawthorne.com
https://hawthornetaylor.tumblr.com/
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Also by Katey Hawthorne
The Superpowered Love Series:
http://www.kateyhawthorne.com/p/superpowered-love.html
The Kanaan & Tilney Investigations Series (with Jenna Rose):
http://kanaanandtilneyinvestigations.com/
The Alchemiya Series:
http://www.kateyhawthorne.com/p/alchemiya.html
And lots of other queer love stories, some for free!
http://www.kateyhawthorne.com/p/free-reads.html
Witchy Boys: The Complete Collection Page 20