by Roan Parrish
He tilted up his chin and Alex kissed him slow and deep, braced on his forearms on the bed. Corbin sank into the kiss and he pulled at Alex’s shoulders to press them even more tightly together.
“I want you to crush me.”
Alex stopped holding himself up, lay full out on Corbin and wound his arms around him.
“Yes, please. Everywhere.”
Alex squeezed him so tight he couldn’t move at all, and almost couldn’t breathe, then he began to lick at his neck. Alex licked and sucked at Corbin’s pulse point, and waves of heat rolled through him. Alex bit lightly at the curve where neck met shoulder and the scrape of his teeth was electrifying. He kissed Corbin’s throat, up over his jaw and behind his ear, and Corbin’s hips thrust up in arousal, but he couldn’t move.
Corbin dragged in a breath. “Kiss me, please kiss me.” Alex kissed him, devouring his mouth, sucking on his tongue and nipping at his lips until Corbin was so hot he felt feverish. He shifted his legs out from under Alex’s heavy weight and wrapped them around Alex, rubbing them together.
Alex eased up enough to align them perfectly, then thrust their hips together. Bolts of pleasure shot up Corbin’s spine and he felt himself thrusting and thrusting, seeking that sensation again.
When Alex moved away, Corbin whimpered and grabbed for him, not wanting to lose the contact for a moment. Alex stripped them both quickly, never breaking eye contact as Corbin panted. Alex opened the bedside drawer and put the lube on the table, then he paused.
“You don’t have any condoms, do you?” Corbin shook his head. “I got tested right after I moved here, and I haven’t been with anyone else since then. We can wait if you want, though.”
“No, I don’t want to wait. I want . . .” Corbin had never thought about this part, precisely, but what he wanted was so clear, suddenly. “I need to feel you, please. I want you like that.”
“Fuck, me too,” Alex ground out.
Alex spread Corbin’s legs with thumbs on his hips and kissed and sucked the join of his thigh. He sucked up blooms of blood under the pale, untouched skin and Corbin felt the bursting of each blood vessel, he was so attuned to Alex’s mouth on his flesh. Alex scraped stubble against the insides of Corbin’s thighs where he’d scratched himself in days gone by, but this was a rasping pleasure he had never felt.
“Yes, please,” Corbin gasped, and Alex rubbed his cheek over the delicate skin until it pinked. When Alex’s mouth closed over his cock, Corbin nearly flew off the bed. He felt like his very arousal itself was being swallowed by a vortex, sucking him inexorably into a black hole. Pull after pull of pleasure left him wrecked on the bed as he quivered toward an explosion.
Then it all stopped and Corbin lay shaking, his body on fire.
“Alex,” he insisted, and Alex groaned out, “Fuck, please, I need to be inside you,” and Corbin said, “Yes, yes, yes.”
Slick fingers slid inside him, and Corbin thought absently that they didn’t feel like his own at all. The way they moved, the size of them and the pressure, the unpredictability, it was all so different that it seemed an entirely other sensation.
Then he lost the ability to catalogue difference because Alex was kissing him and fucking him with his fingers and he was so overwhelmed by the onslaught of sensation that he kept thinking he was orgasming, but when he looked down his cock stood, hard and swollen and leaking against his stomach.
“You, you, you,” Corbin begged, tugging at Alex’s wrist. Alex’s fingers slid out of him and he slicked himself up, breathing shallowly.
He kissed Corbin’s lips and bumped their foreheads together. “I do love you,” he murmured in wonder. “I really do.”
Corbin tried to say it back, because incantations were all about repetition, but he found his heart had taken up residence in his throat and all he could do was nod and hope his eyes spoke for him. He thought Alex understood.
“I hope if your hot-as-fuck brain goes someplace amazing you’ll tell me about it,” Alex said with a smile, and Corbin closed his eyes, peace washing over him.
Corbin’s fantasies of a man fucking him had so often been oceans and planets and stars. As Alex pressed inside of him it was earth. The hot honesty of ground and flesh and rock. Alex’s hips pressed flush against Corbin’s and he paused, completely inside. He leaned forward slowly and pressed a kiss to Corbin’s mouth. They stayed that way for a moment, lips touching, chests touching, bodies interlocked. To Corbin, it felt like time stopped.
Alex slid forward on his knees and slung Corbin’s legs over his shoulders, and Corbin closed his eyes and let himself feel everything. The flesh inside him swelled impossibly large, pressing against muscle. As Alex began to move in deep, heavy thrusts, Corbin started to shake. Each stroke of Alex’s cock teased him open, and he squeezed himself tight around it until Alex groaned and swore.
As the thrusts grew harder and more powerful, Corbin lost himself. He clutched at Alex’s shoulders because he thought otherwise he might be pounded to pieces that would fly apart in all directions. His ass, his cock, his stomach, his thighs, all of it was one reverberation of pleasure as Alex moved, stroking over his prostate until he felt liquefied and mad with pleasure.
Then it happened. He could feel it. Alex’s cock swelled and grew and broke through something inside him, pressing deep, deep, like the tree roots, deep, like the ocean waves, deep, up through into his stomach. Still, Alex moved, hot and slick like he’d been formed of clay to fit perfectly inside. Corbin cried out, and that great pressure moved deeper still. Into his chest where he felt it in his heart and all through his lungs, as if his every breath would be Alex.
He pulled Alex down so he could feel even more of his weight, so it was Alex all around him and Alex all inside him, taking over every empty space and churning it all to throbs of pleasure.
“Alex, Alex, Alex,” he chanted, “you’re so deep in me, you’re everywhere, you’re the earth,” and Alex’s groan was a desperate thing pulled from him like sucking poison.
In his throat now, and if he swallowed he knew he would be swallowing around Alex, and his ears were full, his nose, his mouth, and then Corbin smiled with the brightness of ten thousand suns because he was free. He couldn’t tell Alex because he couldn’t speak, he was so perfectly full of him.
Fuck, baby, and Oh god, and their moans rose together, and Alex’s hand closed around Corbin’s swollen erection and he was coming in great gasping screams of joy, each faraway piece of him exploding.
When Alex cried out his pleasure, Corbin felt a blast of heat inside him that seared him everywhere. Burning in his ass, up in his guts, his heart and lungs, and lingering in his throat. He could taste the clay of Alex, mineral and elemental.
Seconds, minutes, hours, millennia, and Corbin came back to himself. Alex tried to pull out, and Corbin wrapped arms and legs around him so he couldn’t move. He needed to feel this just a little while longer.
Alex was stroking his face and the curve of his thigh and kissing him softly, whispering things Corbin couldn’t understand, but he felt them anyway.
Finally, they separated and lay facing each other, noses nearly touching.
“You’re incredible,” Alex said, but Corbin knew he hadn’t done anything.
He shook his head and kissed Alex. “You were everywhere,” he whispered.
A shudder ran through Alex. “You don’t know what it does to me to hear you say that.” But Corbin thought he did know.
“Alex.”
“Yeah, baby.”
“I want to get you something for Chanukah. It’s not over, is it.” Corbin wasn’t great with time.
“Nope, two more nights.” He ran his palm up and down Corbin’s side under the covers. “You want to know what I really want?”
“Yes.”
“I really want to stay here with you for the next two days, and walk through the woods with you, and eat with you. I want to take a shower with you, and cook eggs with you. And I want to do this about ten more times.”
He smiled, a soft sincere smile.
“I want that,” Corbin said, shifting closer. “Is that a Chanukah present.”
“It’s the best present I can possibly imagine. And you never know. Maybe some Chanukah magic will shine down on us, and you’ll know for sure that the curse is broken.”
“I know you’re teasing me, but . . . you did say magic was the possibility of something that seemed otherwise impossible. Well . . . This all seems pretty impossible to me. You. Us. This.”
Corbin pressed his face into Alex’s neck and breathed in his smell. Freshly turned earth, heavy clay, salt, and the sweet hint of almonds.
As Alex’s hand came around him, squeezing the back of his neck, Corbin sighed in pleasure.
Something deep inside him settled into an unfamiliar pattern of knowledge.
Love was a curse. No love was a curse.
Solitude was a cure. Solitude was a torment.
Distance was safety. Distance was crushing.
There was more in the world than he’d ever been told. And there was less.
And here he lay, tangled up with the person he was in love with, for better or for worse. If the curse wasn’t broken, it was too late. The trap had already been sprung.
But if it was broken. If he could have a future. With Alex, and with this version of himself that could see more than signs. Then he wanted it. He wanted to fall asleep with Alex each night, knowing that there would be a morning to wake up to with him. And a morning after that. And enough mornings that they would hang together into something he could call a life.
He was nearly breathless with how much he wanted it.
“Maybe it is magic,” Alex murmured sleepily into his hair. “Feels perfect to me.”
Corbin breathed deeply as he drifted off to sleep in Alex’s arms. Earth from Alex and sea from himself. Fire between them. Outside, winter air gusting fresh snow to bury everything, and on the breeze, the barest edge of green apple and moss whispered of possibility.
Alex brushed aside Corbin’s long hair and kissed the back of his neck. He’d come home to find Corbin asleep at the kitchen table with his head on his crossed arms, and at the press of Alex’s lips he came awake slowly.
When he straightened up, Alex kissed his mouth, tasting sleep and ginger and the heat of Corbin’s tongue. It was what Alex always did when he got home: kissed Corbin until Corbin’s body remembered that this was real. Because sometimes, when they were apart, it folded back in on itself out of habit.
But after a year, the habit was slowly shifting. Now, some mornings Corbin awoke to find his arms had already sought out Alex in sleep, clutching him close. Some evenings after dinner, when they left the house for their nightly walk through the woods, Corbin’s hand would reach out automatically, searching for Alex’s.
These were the moments Alex held inside himself with quiet satisfaction. The remaking of Corbin Wale was a constant overturning, like the ocean tides.
The remaking of Alex Barrow had been far less tempestuous. It had been a deepening, an underscoring. He had sunk into his love for Corbin with the inevitability of gravity. At unexpected moments, he would see Corbin and be caught breathless at the insistence of his need. When Corbin reached for him, he felt that need like magnets finding their way close enough to snap together.
It was what he’d never had. And now that he did, he could recognize the foolishness of thinking he hadn’t wanted it.
They’d made a life that fit them. They’d made their own rules and followed their own whims. And neither of them had ever been happier. For Alex it was a magnification, for Corbin a revelation. But both of them tended it like a fire, feeding it with care, so it warmed and sustained, but didn’t consume.
Now, as Corbin came back to him in the kiss, Alex wrapped his arms around him and held him close.
“I made up two new muffin recipes. And I finished the chapter,” Corbin said into his neck. Corbin still wasn’t much for hellos or pleasantries.
“Yeah? Tell me.”
Tell me. They were the magic words. The ones that made Corbin believe his thoughts were welcome, believe his desires and fantasies were cherished, believe his suggestions were valued. Tell me had the power to turn him inside out. And Alex kept every secret, every word, safe.
Corbin stretched, shoulders popping from hunching over a counter and a table all day. He’d been up with Alex before the sun. Corbin had come to cherish these predawn hours, when people were still asleep, but nature was stirring. They felt precious and delicate. And Alex’s kiss before he left for the bakery felt equally precious, lips lingering as if he could hardly tear himself away.
He still baked in the kitchen of And Son twice a week, but now he preferred to work on recipes from home. He’d turned out to be good at it once he’d allowed his mind to wander in that direction. And he loved the feel of the ingredients in his hands. Loved to watch Alex eat what he’d prepared. Some of his wilder experiments produced inedible results, and Alex tasted them with the same enthusiasm, then teased him with affection and not the slightest hint of rebuke.
“One for summer. I felt so summery this morning,” he murmured absently. Alex kissed his jaw. “Sweet cornbread muffin made with browned butter, a few cherries, and a tiny splash of almond extract.” He’d daydreamed the sweet summer corn in the garden and the way Alex’s lips looked like cherries when swollen with his kisses.
“Mmm, that’s a really good idea.”
Alex’s praise, Alex’s esteem, undid Corbin like nothing ever had. Well, nothing except Alex’s command.
“And, um,” Corbin went on, distracted by Alex’s mouth at his throat, stubble electrifying his skin. “Gingerbread bran muffin. With molasses and crystallized ginger.” He’d daydreamed Alex’s constant steady nurturance, studded with moments of spice and snaps of annihilating sweetness.
Alex pulled him closer and hummed. “I could taste it on you. The ginger.” He tipped Corbin’s chin up and kissed him again, tongues tangling, until Corbin went boneless in his arms.
“You can taste them for real,” Corbin whispered, nodding at the counter.
“Muffins for dinner?” Alex said with a last kiss to the corner of Corbin’s mouth.
Corbin’s sudden smile was shockingly sweet. Sometimes things delighted him that Alex could never predict. And to see Corbin’s joy filled Alex with a satisfaction too deep to measure.
“Can we have pancakes too.”
“Pancakes too.” Alex brushed a kiss over Corbin’s mouth and pressed him close, before turning to the refrigerator.
As Alex made the pancakes—Corbin got too distracted and always burned them in the pan—Corbin perched on the counter and told him about the chapter he’d finished.
Corbin was drawing a comic. One morning, a few days after Alex had moved in, Corbin had flipped through his notebooks and felt a pang of loss. He hadn’t drawn his friends in weeks. He settled in to reconnect with them, and was startled to realize that it wasn’t them he missed. It was drawing itself.
He still thought about them often, but he made up stories about them less and less.
Corbin had turned blank pages in his notebook—three, for luck and distance—and began to draw. Began to draw something else.
For the first few days, he hadn’t been sure of what it was. There were peaked roofs and the tips of pine trees swaying in a green breeze. There were two moons over a rambling garden, and two matching women tending giant pumpkins and cabbages and herbs that scented the air.
And there was a little boy between them, looking out into the woods at the animals he could hear there.
Corbin drew and drew and little by little, the pieces came together.
This boy wasn’t lonely because he was loved by all the animals. This boy wasn’t afraid because he could fly up toward the moons and look down at the whole of his world and see that it was complete, it was safe. This boy would grow up some day and he would be happy, but slowly, slowly.
Now it had been months and the story
had grown larger as his imagination unspooled. They had cleared out the attic, with its mellow wash of light, for him to draw in, and the wooden boards were strewn with drawings, the walls covered in them.
Corbin wasn’t sure what he would do with it when he was done. He wasn’t sure if he would ever be done. But it made him happy, and that was something he’d come to believe was valuable.
After dinner, ginger and cherries and maple syrup still lingering on their tongues, they left the house hand in hand, boots and sweaters and coats pulled on against the snow. When they reached the tree line, a familiar bark rang through the air, and Wolf came to their side. Other dogs barked happily in answer. They’d emerge in time.
The quiet of the air was hypnotizing, and they made their way slowly through the snow.
“Alex.”
Alex still felt a thrill every time Corbin said his name. “Yeah, baby.”
“It’s almost been a year.”
Corbin had felt the season approach like a motor running down in his stomach.
“It has. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t know what will happen. I . . . If I did it wrong, if the curse didn’t break . . .” He shook his head. They both knew what Corbin thought it meant. “I’m scared I’ll lose you.”
Alex stopped him with a tug to his hand. “You’re not going to lose me.”
“I might.”
“Nope. Not going to happen.”
“Alex.” Corbin knew that Alex didn’t believe in the curse, not exactly. But he believed in the power of people to make things happen, or to succumb to them. He might not worry about the curse itself, but he worried about Corbin’s thrall to it.
Alex pulled Corbin in and hugged him, their embrace a bulky thing of coats and hats and scarves. “When will you know? It’s within a year, right, so when do we measure from? Is it from when I fell in love, or from when you did? Or the first day we both were? God, this is worse than figuring out an anniversary.”
Corbin pushed him away, smiling. “You’re ridiculous. You know it doesn’t work that way.”