Middle of Somewhere Series Box Set

by Roan Parrish

  I pressed him back against the desk, pushing the chair away so I could get his pants off. My movements wild, I kind of squashed him backward, and he grabbed for my laptop, catching it before it toppled off the desk. We both froze for a moment, and he laid it gently on his drafting table, on top of the drawing he’d been working on.

  “Top marks for enthusiasm, but I’d hate you to have to explain to your professor how you couldn’t turn in your paper due to busting your laptop in a freak desk-sex accident.” I didn’t even know how he could say “desk sex,” which was a real tongue twister, when I could barely think in more than grunts, so I just nodded and went back to kissing the shit out of him. It was, after all, my job.

  I bore him back onto the desk, and we ground into each other, arms clutching, hands everywhere, mouths meeting so heatedly my lips buzzed, and I could feel them bruising. And I loved it. I loved any evidence of Will’s passion that I could keep with me on my body. Whenever he left marks on my skin, I’d track their progress as they lingered on me, feeling bereft when they faded, like without them my skin was too uncomplicated.

  I couldn’t get enough of him. I dropped to my knees before him and kissed his belly, exalting in the way his hands fell immediately to my shoulders to keep in contact. I cupped his hips and dipped my head lower, nuzzling into the crease of his groin, kissing the insides of his thighs until they trembled. I buried my face in his crotch, mad with the need to touch him, smell him, taste him everywhere.

  “Ah fuck,” Will groaned as I sucked the base of his cock, pressing my thumb behind his balls. He canted his hips forward, and I slid my mouth over his erection, the taste of him exploding on my tongue, all heat and salt and sweet sweat. Will’s legs softened as he gave himself over to my mouth.

  I worked him slowly at first, then lapped at the tip of his cock to make him shudder and pull away, only to press closer again. The sounds that were coming from above me sent bolts of arousal through me that gathered in the pit of my stomach and made my ass clench.

  I stroked Will’s balls until he whined. I pulled off him and rested my forehead against his stomach, trying to calm down a bit. Will ran sweaty fingers through my hair and held me to him.

  “One sec,” he said and pulled me up, twisting away. He tore open the condom and rolled it on me, and I bit my lip at his touch. I couldn’t look away from him. He was sweaty and flushed with arousal, his hair a mess and his lips swollen. His jaw and around his mouth were pinked from the stubble I hadn’t bothered to shave the last few days, and his eyes were wild.

  I wanted to tell him how beautiful he was, how absolutely stunning, but I was afraid he’d hear only the emptiness of the words he’d heard so many others say to him in the past.

  Someday I would find a way to tell him that his beauty wasn’t separate from him for me. That it was animated by the real him he let me see—made complicated and imperfect and specific because of his Will-ness. And I thought maybe he saw some of it on my face, because he softened for a moment, his eyebrows drawing together slightly and his eyelashes fluttering as he leaned in to kiss me, just a sweet press of his mouth to mine as we stood together.

  “I want you so much” was all I said.

  “I want you too,” he whispered against my lips.

  I took his shoulder and turned him onto the desk, chest down and ass up. I kissed down his back to the perfect curve of his ass and bit lightly at one cheek, patting the other.

  “This is a whole new level of ass-kissing to try and get a higher grade, Leo. You know, you already—nnggh!” He groaned brokenly when I licked his hole, holding him open for me.

  He swore wildly, and I huffed out a laugh against his skin. “Okay, okay, do your job, please,” he said finally, breathing heavily.

  “Wow, was that a please I just got?” I stood up and leaned over Will’s back to kiss his neck.

  “It’s all you’re gonna get unless you get on with it right fucking now.”

  “Always something to say, huh?” I spread his legs wider, felt his opening relax to my cock as I pressed against him.

  “You love it,” he retorted.

  “Yeah. I do,” I said, and I thrust inside him, pleasure shooting up my spine and down the backs of my thighs as I joined us together. We both groaned, and I stilled inside him, enjoying the closeness, the heat, the fucking delicious pressure of his body around mine. I could feel his heartbeat and smell his sweat, and I pulled out slowly to feel the drag of his ass, then slammed back inside him, groaning as pleasure tore through me.

  We went fast and hard, and I bent my knees to get the angle right, governing my body by Will’s every reaction.

  “Oh fuck, yes, harder,” he demanded when I changed position slightly, and I did as he said, the desk slamming into the wall. “Oh my god, if you break my apartment, I will kill you,” he groaned, then, “Fuck, don’t stop!”

  I laughed into his neck as I tried to fuck him harder and not break his apartment at the same time. Finally, I just grabbed his hip and his shoulder and pulled him back against me as I pounded him as hard as I could.

  I felt him come apart in my hands, his back bowing, his head thrown back, his hands scrabbling at the wood of the desk. I bit the side of his neck and used every muscle I’d developed in yoga over the past year to maintain enough of a crouch that I could thrust upward at just the right angle.

  He went wild around me and then froze, letting out a broken cry as he came all over the desk. He grabbed his dick, stroking hard and groaning as he kept coming.

  “Oh god.” I slammed into him in a rush of hot pleasure, my hips moving even after my orgasm had wrung me dry, body seeking each shivery tendril of sensation. I collapsed over Will’s back, and he whimpered. Then the whimper dissolved into a laugh and I looked down to see that he’d come all over my notebook.

  “Omigod,” I said into his neck.

  “Good thing I moved your laptop.”

  “Thanks,” I murmured absently, kissing up his neck and jaw to his ear. He shivered a little, so I did it again. After a minute, I eased out of him, biting my lip at the loss of his heat. I turned him around and pulled him to me, kissing his mouth. Then I wrapped my arms around him and just hugged him. He always tensed at first, and then he always softened. I waited for it, and when it came, I squeezed him even tighter.

  “So, what’d I get?” I asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “Well, you said this was fifty percent of my grade. That’s a lot, especially during finals.”

  Will grabbed my ass and squeezed. “An A,” he said softly. “Definitely an A.”

  His voice was gentler than I expected, and there was no tease in it at all. He didn’t let go but kept holding on to me, wrapping his arms around my waist.

  It felt… heavy somehow. But good. Right.

  “What?” I teased, just a little, so he didn’t get self-conscious the way he sometimes did. “Not an A plus?”

  Will squeezed me, and I could feel his smile against my collarbone.

  “NYU doesn’t give A-pluses, silly. You know that.”

  Two days, many bagels and coffees, and not enough hours of sleep later, my last paper was turned in and my final final taken. I thought my physics project had turned out well, despite changing it again at the last minute.

  After Gretchen and I left sunrise yoga, I’d been floaty, almost drunk on the morning, but for all that I’d considered grand notions like measuring love and every yoga-related physics experiment I could think of, the image I couldn’t get out of my head was of standing with my friends and hallmates in the middle of the night, during finals of my first year in a brand-new city, and picturing Will bathed in the light of the same moon.

  It was sappy and personal, and no one would know that it had anything to do with Will except me, but I couldn’t help it. I measured the gravitational force of the moon.

  At first I wanted to measure its effects on me and then on Will, so I could have actual data that would show how much of it we shared. But when I sat
down to actually design the experiment, I realized I’d have to measure the fluctuations in weight over a twenty-four-hour period, during which we’d have to basically stay totally still in the same spot. And, like, not eat or pee or sweat or anything, so that wasn’t really feasible. So I just measured its effects on a glass of water instead. After all, we were seventy percent water, so whatever effects the moon had on water it had on us, right? Plus, you know, it was a way easier experiment.

  Anyway, call it a love letter sent in the form of a final project—that was as romantic as sending the sounds of your love into space, right? Even if Will would never know about it.

  It had been hard to leave Will’s the other night. After we had sex, he was in a mood I didn’t recognize. Like he had something to say but was holding back. Everything in me wanted to stay and pry it out of him, but I reminded myself of Tonya’s words and I made myself let go. My work now was to finish finals. I knew I had to have a major conversation with Will, but that wasn’t the moment.

  Our dorm room looked like a whirlwind had hit it. An FBI-profiling, serial-killer-tracking genius whirlwind. The filing cabinet seemed to have taken up permanent residence on Charles’ bed, and I didn’t even think he was paying attention to where he was in any schedule, thirty-six-hour days or otherwise, because he had, as far as I could tell, been up for two days straight, finishing the write-up of his behavioral psychology project. I couldn’t really bring myself to care much, though, and, since the filing cabinet wasn’t on my bed, I dropped onto the messy covers and was asleep before I could even think the words filing cabinet.

  Later, I’d just gotten out of a much-needed shower and was feeling shockingly not dead when I got a text from Will telling me to come over whenever I was done and we could watch the Lord of the Rings extras in celebration.

  When I’d been at my parents’ house in Holiday, I’d grabbed the DVDs out of my bedroom. I had been teasing him ever since about how in love I was with Viggo Mortensen and how Will would have to sword fight him to compete for my affection. And I’d extracted the promise from him that when I was finally done for the year, he’d watch them with me. All of them. I couldn’t fucking wait. I also couldn’t wait to tease him about looking like Legolas, who he always referred to as “that elf douche.”

  As I stepped out of the elevator on Will’s floor, Mrs. Gemelli was leaving her apartment, flowered silk scarf wrapped around her hair, pink lipstick bleeding into the wrinkles around her lips. We had bonded over fabric softener in the laundry room when I stayed here over January term.

  “Hi, Mrs. Gemelli.”

  “Hiya, DaVinci. What’s cooking?”

  “Just finished up with finals, so I’m free!”

  She clapped her hands in front of her, pink press-ons clacking together.

  “How’s Toadstool?”

  “Oh, the little shit started taking a wee in my shower. It was too much. I put him on Prozac, so that should help. Damn cat’s out of his mind.” She shook her head.

  “Wow, I didn’t know they even made Prozac for cats.”

  “Honey, this is the twenty-first century. They make Prozac for everyone.” She winked at me and walked slowly to the elevator, her hand resting on my shoulder for just a moment as she passed, light as a leaf, leaving a whisper of violets behind her in the hall.

  It was quickly overpowered the second I opened Will’s door, though, the smell of Thai food making my stomach lurch with hunger.

  “Did you know they made Prozac for cats?” I asked as Will came over to me.

  He kissed me hard. “Uh-huh,” he said, then he kissed me again.

  I gave him the highlights while we ate, the most significant of which was that Milton’s roommate had had some kind of breakdown and they’d had to call his parents in the middle of the night. It was horrible and Milton felt awful because he was convinced he should have said something earlier when he noticed that Robbie was staying in the room more—honestly, though, Milton was almost never in their room and they weren’t friends, so I thought he was being too hard on himself.

  Will didn’t want to admit it, but he was so into the extras. It was a cool, breezy night and we had the window open, the sounds of the city drifting in to mix with the sounds of the New Zealand-created Middle Earth. Will kept saying “Whoa”—as the timeline for creating the Shire was revealed, as horses galloped over the plain, as huge blocks of foam were carved into the exterior of castle walls. I think he was even kind of developing a crush on Orlando Bloom (out of costume, that was), much to his horror. “He kind of reminds me of you, actually,” Will said. “He’s all… twitchy and soft.”

  “It’s strange watching these now,” I said when we’d finished one branch of the extras tree. I hadn’t seen them in a few years and the first time I saw them I’d been a kid. “The way they make all new friends and they’re far from home and everything—it’s like college.” I ducked my head, embarrassed to admit it. “I actually hoped it was what college would be like.” Will raised an eyebrow. “That sense of becoming part of a group, mostly. Of making a place feel like home because of the people there. Well, and, you know, I hoped it would be like the Shire.”

  “And does it?”

  “New York, not quite yet. But, school? Yeah. And here.” I gestured around his apartment.

  He smiled. “You gotta give New York at least another year. Takes that long for the shock to wear off.”

  I had been waiting for the right moment—a good opening or the perfect segue, but this wasn’t an essay for school and it was bound to be a hard conversation whenever we had it, so I let the idea of the right moment go. I slid closer to Will and took his hands in mine, the haunting menu screen music hiccoughing momentarily, then the loop restarting.

  “Listen,” I said. “I have things. To say.”

  Will was immediately on guard, and I squeezed his hands and moved closer.

  “No, no, I don’t want to fight, just talk, okay? We’ve kind of been… you know, doing our thing, but we’ve both been so busy we haven’t really talked about what it is.”

  “How about we just make out instead?” he offered, but I could tell he knew it wouldn’t work.

  “I need to explain something,” I said. “I’m not quite sure how to say it and I don’t want you to get mad, so just listen, okay? Because it sounds wrong if I can’t say the whole thing.”

  Will gave me a whatever eyebrow raise and waved me ahead.

  I cleared my throat nervously, still unsure how to say everything I wanted to say even though I’d rehearsed it on the subway coming here.

  “Okay, so. This thing happened where I was at sunrise yoga—” Will snorted. “No, yeah, I know, anyway, and it was kind of part of my physics project because I was realizing that I could try and measure effects instead of the thing itself, and so I had to convert it to entropy and like what is the flavor of love and then when I was looking at you the other day it was like your… your whole… gorgeousness became this other thing, and I realized what you’d been saying about its effects, and then that made me think about the laws themselves, and that to be laws they have to be applicable for always, but in this scale that’s so massive that it almost doesn’t matter anymore, like the sun kind of massive, and really that’s not the level of constancy that any relationship demands, you know? Or any person. And you’ve been right to say that I don’t know for always, but then the point is that always isn’t the scale that makes any sense to use given where we are right now. So Tonya was right too about it being about the present moment and things are always shifting and changing and there’s no law because the second you learn something you’re changed forever, and then everything’s different anyway, you know?”

  Will was silent for a beat and then he nodded. “Yeah, totally.”

  “Yeah?” I let out a breath of pure relief.

  “No! I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about! Key terms I heard: sunrise yoga, which I really want to refer to a cocktail; flavor of love, which I think was a re
ality show on VH1; entropy, which I know is a band; and changed forever, which is what I hope this topic is about to be.”

  I giggled nervously. That did not go well.

  “Can I get like even a Jeopardy category idea of what this conversation is about?”

  About fifteen cute, cheesy, romantic answers popped into my head that I knew I could use to change the subject or alleviate the awkwardness. A hundred ways I could give up. And then we could go back to watching the extras, cuddling on Will’s couch, which was pretty perfect just the way it was. But I didn’t.

  “The Jeopardy category is ‘Our Relationship.’”

  “Ugh, is there anything less than a $100?”

  I shook my head. “They’re all Daily Doubles.” I pushed the blanket aside and kind of clambered into his lap. “Will, kiss me.”

  He kissed me tentatively, like maybe there was a catch.

  “Okay, now lemme try again.”

  Will’s sigh was long-suffering but he ran his fingers through my hair. I hadn’t cut it all year and it had gotten pretty long.

  “Babe….”

  “No, let me. Okay. You tease me about being a romantic. And you’re right. I like to imagine that things make sense. That everything isn’t just chaos and meaninglessness. That things are predictable, or knowable.”

  “Like physics.”

  “Yeah, like physics. Where there are laws that govern things. Only, the thing about physics laws is that what makes them laws is that they’re so enormous and universal that, yeah, they explain things, but they’re also too big for those explanations to be super useful in the particular. Like, okay, sure, gravity, but, like, if my question is why did I fall down, then yeah, I know it was gravity in the universal sense, but what I mean is what the hell did I just trip over and who the hell left it there.”