Q*pid

by Xavier Mayne

  Fox felt the heat of Drew’s touch spread through his arm, scorching him, mocking him. “What the fuck,” he grunted, grabbing Drew’s hand and throwing it off him. “What the fucking fuck?”

  Drew’s expression was one of utter devastation, but Fox didn’t give a shit about that. “Fox, I thought we—”

  “You thought what?” Fox roared. “You thought this was a fucking romantic weekend? You thought a candlelight dinner would get me ready for you to make a move?”

  “Listen to me,” Drew said, making the worst mistake of the night. He put his hand back on Fox’s arm.

  “Get the fuck away from me!” Fox shouted, shoving Drew back with both hands—and kicking him away for good measure.

  With a thump, Drew fell to the floor. Fox leapt up from the bed—he had ignored the internal warning signs, and he would ignore them no longer. He would never get back into that bed.

  Drew got up from the floor and stood unsteadily. The two men stared at each other for a long moment, as if neither wanted to make the first move.

  “What the fuck, man? I’m not a fucking faggot,” Fox finally said, bringing an end to the silence. It did not, however, bring an end to their conflict.

  Without warning, Drew launched himself over the bed, closing the gap between them in less than a second. He crashed into Fox, head down and fists up, knocking him back against the wall with a mighty thud. Fox saw stars as he fought to push Drew off him. He brought a knee up between them and kicked hard, and with a grunt Drew rolled away from him. Fox jumped after him, wrapping his arm around Drew’s neck and holding him in place. “Stop it,” he demanded, growling directly into Drew’s ear.

  “No fucking way,” Drew grunted back, and with a vicious twist he freed himself from Fox’s grip. He landed a powerful shove squarely in the middle of Fox’s chest, knocking him backward into the nightstand and dropping the lamp onto the floor. Drew got to his feet, perhaps thinking that the crash of a shattering glass lampshade would bring an end to their fight.

  Fox proved him wrong with a running tackle that hit Drew in the lower back and sent him sprawling across the bed. Fox landed atop him and again secured him in a wrestling hold that was more comprehensive. Drew, however, seemed to be driven in his fury to feats of strength and leverage far beyond Fox’s expectation. He thrashed free of the hold, then with superhuman dexterity, flipped Fox around and put him in a similar, but far more aggressive, hold.

  “Get. The fuck. Off me.” Fox’s voice was low and murderous.

  “Like hell I will,” Drew growled in reply. “There’s some shit here we need to deal with.”

  “There’s nothing we need to ‘deal with.’ What we need to do is get the fuck out of here.”

  “No.” Drew’s voice carried a finality that struck Fox as surely as his punches had.

  “We knew this was a mistake going in,” Fox said, his breathing made shallow by the compression of Drew’s wrestling hold. “It was a computer mistake that we made even bigger by trying to be friends.”

  “This is not a mistake,” Drew grunted, squeezing even harder.

  “Let me go, fucker,” Fox said, his voice sounding high and weak.

  “No,” Drew repeated. “Not until we talk about this. Not until you can tell me you don’t feel it too.” His voice softened a little, and his grip slackened enough for Fox to draw his first deep breath in far too long.

  “Feel what?” Fox asked. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about what made you ignore your dating queue and come here with me this weekend.” Drew’s voice rushed hot into his ear. “I’m talking about the way you looked at me when the waiters came here to set up dinner. I’m talking about how you hugged me after the marimba concert.”

  “So what?”

  “So I know you feel what I feel. I see it. I can tell it’s there for you just like it’s there for me. I want us to figure out together what we do about it.”

  “We don’t do anything about it,” Fox replied. “Why do we have to do anything about it?”

  “Because I cannot go on like this,” Drew said softly. “I cannot go on pretending to myself and pretending to you that what we’re doing here is only friendship. What it is… is love.”

  “No,” Fox said, but the thickness of his voice and the hot tears that surged into his eyes betrayed him. “That’s not what…,” he managed to get out before his throat closed around the lie he was about to tell. He could go no further, wanted to go no further in his denials against the truth Drew spoke.

  “That’s exactly what,” Drew said, releasing his hold. He knew Fox had broken. Somehow he knew it.

  Fox struggled to free himself from Drew’s entwining grasp, but though Drew had relaxed his considerable musculature, he still had his arms—and apparently a leg—wrapped around him. Frustrated, Fox turned over and faced him.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t want you to say anything. I want to know you will let yourself feel this.”

  “What am I supposed to be feeling?” Fox asked. He knew what Drew meant, but he could not bear to show it.

  “This,” Drew said. He took Fox’s hand in his own and pulled it to him until it rested flat against his chest, against his pounding heart. “This is what I feel when we’re together. When you’re near me, I….” His voice faltered. “I become a better person. I know it—I feel it here. Right here.”

  “Your heart is pounding because you went ninja on me, man,” Fox protested.

  “After you shoved me. And then you used the F-word.” Drew looked scoldingly at him.

  “I use the F-word all the time. So do you.”

  “Not fuck. You said faggot. That shit’s not going to fly with me.”

  Fox felt a stab of shame. “I don’t know why I said that. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’m sorry.”

  Drew shook his head. “You know as well as I do why you said it. You found yourself in bed with another man who had just confessed that he’s starting to fall in love with you. I kind of dropped that on you all at once—that had to be a bit of a shock.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  Drew’s eyes widened, as if he was as shocked to hear Fox say this as Fox was himself. But say it he had.

  “It wasn’t?” Drew asked, shaking his head.

  “No. I mean, it was, but it’s not like it shouldn’t have occurred to me that you would say that. It’s what I’ve spent the last week trying not to allow myself to even think. Because you’re right—about my queue not being empty, about me not even considering going on any dates, about how I must have looked at you when you arranged that amazing dinner tonight. I was scared and ashamed and confused, and to hear you say out loud what I’ve been trying not to even allow into my head completely fucked me up. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “There’s nothing you could do that would hurt me, except leave.” Drew looked searchingly into Fox’s eyes. “I could take anything but that.”

  “Which explains why you just about crushed me when I said we should go. You pretty much owned me, man.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “So you settled on pummeling me into submission?”

  “Not proud of that. I’m normally a ‘use your words’ kind of person.”

  “You can fucking hold your own in a fight, I’ll give you that. I had no idea you were so strong.”

  “When I’m afraid I’m going to lose something I care about, I guess I can be.”

  Fox felt a pang in his chest. “You don’t mean… me?”

  Drew smiled. “I do.”

  Fox stared at him for a moment, dizzy from the twists and turns their conversation—hell, their whole friendship—had taken this evening. “What do we do now?”

  “I vote for pulling the covers over us and getting some sleep,” Drew said. “We can pick up the pieces in the morning.”

  “You make it sound like grim work.”

  “I meant the pieces of th
e lamp, not of us. We’re going to be fine.”

  Fox urgently wished he shared Drew’s confidence. But he had to admit that Drew seemed to know far better than he how to handle whatever their friendship was turning into, so he decided to simply trust him. “Okay,” he said.

  Drew beamed. He reached down and pulled the covers up, and though he no longer held Fox in his arms, he stayed close.

  IT TOOK a long while for Fox’s breathing to slow and become regular. The shock and anger and pain that had wracked him, that had made him say terrible things and lash out physically, were finally in abeyance. Drew watched him for more than an hour as peace came over him and his body relaxed.

  Drew felt keenly responsible for the sudden transformation Fox had undergone. It was his touch that did it, that made Fox confront all at once the reality that had been slowly forming in Drew’s mind over the last few days. He didn’t have the answers that Fox asked for—he had no idea what they were supposed to do now—but he knew there was no place he’d rather be than beside this man, this friend who had come from nowhere and was suddenly part of the fabric of his life.

  In the pale moonlight, Fox’s face was porcelain, his normally sharp and handsome features placid and refined in sleep. Now, in the absolute privacy of this remote hideaway, Drew allowed himself the luxury of really looking at him. It was not something a guy would normally do.

  Drew was starting to feel less like the guy he’d thought himself to be.

  He had never been this close to another man—emotionally or physically. From the moment he read Fox’s dating profile, he had started to feel like there might be a connection to this man unlike any friendship he’d had before. Objectively, they shared very little in terms of their jobs, their upbringing, their lifestyle. But once he’d spent a few minutes in Fox’s company, he knew. He just knew they would be close.

  Well, maybe not as close as they were now.

  When he had first pulled the covers up, the heat from their bodies was ovenlike, but now as Fox slept, they were simply snug, wrapped up together in a high-thread-count-and-fluffy-down cocoon. The hair on Fox’s legs tickled against his own, and Fox’s arm—the one he had touched, which had lit the fuse of their explosion—lay pressed up against his ribs. There was an innocence and a purity to this, whatever this was, that they shared.

  Fox heaved a deeper breath and shifted slightly, causing his bare hip to bump up against Drew’s. The brief contact sent a chill up his spine.

  So it was true. Drew knew well that one simply cannot argue with empirical evidence, and the evidence of Fox’s effect on him, his vital, bodily effect, was overwhelming. Being here, next to Fox, naked next to Fox, was thrilling to him in a way he’d never imagined. He now knew something about himself that he hadn’t only yesterday.

  He was falling in love with a man. With this man, the one stretched out naked next to him. He expected the vertiginous reality of this discovery to stop his heart and make him clutch his temples in agonized existential panic, but it did nothing of the sort. Instead, he was filled with a contented warmth, a sudden peace, that felt like a glow had been kindled in him that was certain and inextinguishable.

  He was happy.

  Chapter FOURTEEN

  FOX JOLTED awake in the dark, precisely as he done the day before. He was about to reach for his phone to check the time when he realized he couldn’t.

  Because Drew’s arm was wrapped around him.

  Fox turned his head to the side and looked at Drew, who was lying on his stomach and whose face was mere inches away. They were, in fact, on the same pillow.

  He tried to rationally analyze how he felt about this.

  On the one hand, they were two straight men. Friends.

  On the other, they were entwined, naked, in a romantic oceanside cottage. Drew had said he was falling in love with him. They had fought—again, naked, which Fox was not ready to think about—and then they had settled into bed again, as if what they’d been through was completely normal.

  Yeah, rationality’s not going to be much help here.

  He looked at Drew’s peaceful face and felt a deep pang of envy that he was apparently so easily reconciled to this strange new turn their friendship had taken. “We’re going to be fine,” he’d said.

  Fox very much wished to believe this. He very much doubted it was true.

  “AH, THERE he is,” Drew said softly as Fox’s eyes fluttered open. “Good morning.”

  Fox blinked several times. “Morning.” He sounded wary.

  “Sleep okay?”

  “I guess so.” Fox sat up a bit, propped himself on his elbows. “It’s already light out.”

  “Yeah, imagine that. Sleeping past dawn on a Sunday. How lazy can we get?”

  “There’s still time to get out and do the standup paddleboards,” Fox said. He moved to pull the covers off.

  “Hey, hold up there,” Drew said. “You just woke up. Are you sure you want to jump out of bed right this minute?”

  “Why not? We don’t want to lose the day.”

  “Because you just woke up, and you might want to wait for something that’s… up… to go down, if you know what I mean.”

  Fox’s eyes widened, and he glanced downward for a fraction of a second. “You’re probably right. I’ll wait a bit.”

  “How about we stay in bed for a while, and let the paddleboards take care of themselves?” Drew said. “Let’s be lazy for a change.”

  “What are we going to do in bed?” Fox asked.

  Drew laughed. “I’m going to pretend that’s not a classic porno line, and order room service breakfast. How’s that?”

  Fox smiled, though he also rolled his eyes. “Fine. We’ll be lazy.”

  “There’s a good man,” Drew cheered. He picked up the phone and placed an order for far too much food for breakfast. “It’ll be here in a half hour.”

  “Great,” Fox said. “Now I’m going to get up and go to the bathroom. You may wish to avert your eyes.”

  “Your morning wood won’t bother me a bit,” Drew said with a grin. “Got a pretty bad case of it myself.”

  “Feel free to keep it to yourself,” Fox said drily. He slipped out of the bed, keeping his body turned away as he did so. He did not, Drew noted, grab his bathrobe.

  Fox emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later, and on his way back to bed he bent down to pick up the pieces of the lamp that they had knocked over the night before. “I feel kind of rock-and-roll,” he said. “I’ve never trashed a hotel room before.”

  “How about we try not to make it a habit?” Drew suggested.

  “Deal.” Fox finished picking up the pieces, then seemed to reach out for his bathrobe and stop halfway. He turned to Drew. “I have to ask. Are we really going to have breakfast in bed, naked?”

  “Do you want to?” Drew asked. He smiled and cocked an eyebrow to let Fox know he was safe to answer in the affirmative.

  “Honest to God, Drew, I don’t know,” Fox said with a frustrated sigh. “What are we doing here?”

  “We are having breakfast in bed, naked. Friends do that.”

  “They do not.”

  “We do. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Fine.” Fox plopped back down on the bed and pulled the covers over himself. “This is weird, and I don’t know why we’re doing it, but fine.”

  “We’re doing it because we did it.”

  “That makes no sense at all.”

  “It makes perfect sense. We collapsed into bed drunk and naked on the first night because being drunk makes it impossible to do anything but what you absolutely have to in order to survive. Like when you’re completely shit-faced but can still talk on the phone when your boss calls. So clearly wearing something to bed was lower on the priority list than getting into bed. Then last night it would have been weird to wear pajamas when we’d been naked the night before, like we were ashamed of it or something, so we went naked again. Perfectly normal.”

  “Then I freaked out, and we
whaled on each other, and then—and this is where I once again have no idea why we’re doing this—we got back into bed naked again. And here we are.”

  “Exactly. Here we are. Now we can either take this chance the universe has given us and see what happens, or we can run screaming away from it and never find out. Could you really live knowing that you didn’t give this a chance?”

  “Didn’t give what a chance?”

  “This,” Drew said, pointing to the two of them.

  Fox shook his head in confusion.

  “Look, I don’t know any more than you do what we’re doing here,” Drew said. “But I do know that last night, after we stopped beating each other up, we lay down next to each other. I watched you fall asleep, and I saw the calm come over you, and I felt your body relax, and it was… amazing. I could feel the peacefulness coming off of you. You freaked out, and we fought it out, and we came out the other side in a better place. Having you next to me… well, it felt right. I’m man enough to admit that.”

  “But what does that mean? It may have felt right to you, but what happens now?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we’re friends who like to sleep next to each other. Maybe we’re at the beginning of something new. I don’t know. But I do know I’m not going to let the chance to find out slip away. I’ve never met anyone like you, Fox, and I never would have thought that someone like you could be friends with someone like me. But the computer knew, and now I know it too. Don’t you want to find out what happens next?”

  “What happens next is that we drive back to the city, and life starts again. This weekend has been intense in all kinds of ways, but we have lives back there that we need to get back to.”

  “But we don’t have to be the same people we were when we left,” Drew said. “We can be more, and better, together.”