Grey's Awakening

by Cameron Dane

  Sirus removed his boots and the last of his clothes and then slipped back into the warmth of bed, snuggling in behind a dozing Grey.

  “Holy shit!” Grey yelped and bounced about a foot off the mattress, spinning to face Sirus as he did. “Your skin is freezing.”

  “Damn it.” Sirus reached out to touch Grey, but quickly pulled back his hand before he made contact again. “Sorry about that. I didn’t even think that I would still be cold when I crawled in behind you.”

  Grey slapped his cheeks in that cute way of his, studying Sirus as he blinked himself fully awake. “Yeah, well, I’m not going to make it a federal case or anything.” Pushing himself up against the headboard, Grey grabbed Sirus’s hands between his and put his mouth to them, blowing wonderful warm breath over Sirus’s tingling fingers. “Where did you go? I didn’t even feel you get up.”

  Sirus shivered as his extremities slowly heated under Grey’s care. Rolling his shoulder and head, he found Grey’s gaze. “I woke up around nine thirty and remembered I hadn’t shut or locked the door to the shed when we came inside. I’m not so much worried about people, but I didn’t want an animal to get in there and tear up the place.”

  Grey winced, looking truly pained. “Is everything okay? I shouldn’t have attacked you like I did in there.” He let go of Sirus’s hands and dug his fingers into his hair, making an even bigger, sexier mess of the brown stuff. “I’ll replace anything that was damaged, by animal or weather. At least the stuff that I can. Obviously, your work is irreplaceable. Shit.”

  “Hey.” Sirus crawled over Grey, straddled his lap, and pulled the man’s hands down to his sides before he could give himself a bald spot. “I like that you attacked me in there.” He rubbed the backs of Grey’s hands with the pads of his thumbs, creating little swirling designs over his warm skin. “It was a damn good frontal attack.” He quirked a brow. “I’ll take one of those kinds of interruptions any day of the week.”

  A trace of a smile curled the edges of Grey’s lips, and twin lines of pink stole over the slash of his cheeks. “What came after wasn’t bad either.”

  “It wasn’t, huh?” Sirus sat on Grey’s thighs and just savored being with him. “You weren’t expecting the butt plug, were you?”

  The pink suffusing Grey’s cheeks burned full red and crept down to his neck. “Can’t say that I was, no.”

  Sirus’s heart twisted at Grey’s obvious discomfort. “You’ve never used a plug, or dildo, or any kind of toy with a partner before?” He didn’t really need Grey to answer that. “And clearly no one has used one on you.”

  Grey scratched his chest and broke eye contact, putting his focus on the wall. As Sirus watched an internal struggle play itself out on Grey’s sharply angled face, a frisson of uncertainty chilled him.

  Sirus’s throat grew tight, and he cleared it before he spoke. “I apologize if I crossed a line and did something that made you uncomfortable.”

  Grey’s focus jumped back to Sirus, pinpointing right on him. “No, please don’t think that. I loved what you did to me.” He touched Sirus’s cheek, and the hardness slid away from his face. “It’s just,” Grey bit off a low curse, “I always viewed stuff like that as a very personal thing, and I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of you. I’m pretty damn sure I did.”

  “Oh, baby.” Sirus leaned in, kissed Grey, and melted into a goddamned puddle of longing all over the man. “You got me harder and hotter than I’ve ever been, with every single response you gave me. You could never look foolish in my eyes. If you want,”

  Sirus sat back and brushed his fingers through Grey’s hair, taming it just a little bit, “next time you can use whatever thing or toy you want on me, and watch me lose it too. That way we’re even. Okay?”

  Grey opened his mouth, but his stomach grumbled loudly first, beating out whatever he intended to say.

  Sirus tapped his finger against Grey’s abdomen, chuckling. “That rumble is familiar.

  Okay, so I can take a hint. You want me to feed you first.” He reluctantly crawled off Grey’s lap, and once again pulled Grey to his feet, tugging until they stood flush against one another. “Will sandwiches work?” Sirus reached between them and ran his hand down the length of Grey’s long cock, getting an immediate stir out of him. “Or do you need something heartier in order to regain your stamina for round two?”

  His hazel eyes heating to green flecked with amber, Grey snaked his hand around Sirus neck and pulled him down, stealing an openmouthed, hot kiss. He thrust his tongue past Sirus’s lips, sweeping deeply as he grabbed onto Sirus’s hips and sank his fingers into Sirus’s flesh with exquisite strength, weakening Sirus at the knees. Grey kissed Sirus thoroughly enough to turn him into a puddle, and then pulled away. “That ought to hold me.” He flashed a wolfish smile. “For now.” Grey smacked Sirus’s flank and headed out of the bedroom, his bare ass the most enticing invitation Sirus had ever been offered in his life.

  Already out of sight, down the hall, Grey’s voice drifted back to Sirus. “You coming?”

  “Very likely I will,” Sirus muttered to himself. There was no talking his cock down around Greyson Cole. “More than once.”

  Shaking his head, Sirus chased after Grey, totally besotted.

  “You must have your father’s eyes,” Grey said, breaking Sirus out of their silence.

  They both leaned against Sirus’s kitchen counter, munching on turkey sandwiches, chips, and sharing a beer. Naked. Eating. And completely comfortable with occasional spurts of conversation or companionable silence.

  “Your mom’s eyes are dark,” Grey added, when Sirus looked at him, “so that leaves your father. His must be the same intriguing slate color as yours are.”

  Sharp pain pierced Sirus’s chest, taking him back to his conversation with his mother today. The hurt made him feel twice as heavy and incredibly alone. His food turned to the taste of cardboard in his mouth, killing his appetite. Sirus put the half eaten sandwich down and took a fast swig of beer, clearing the blockage in his throat.

  “I’m sorry.” Grey banged his fist into the counter and muttered a foul word. “That was so stupid of me.” Regret filled his eyes. “After this morning… I shouldn’t have mentioned your parents.”

  “No, it’s all right.” Sirus turned and leaned his hip against the counter, facing Grey.

  “It’s kind of nice that you noticed. Yes. I have my dad’s eyes and build, and my mother’s coloring.”

  Grey’s gaze traveled up the length of Sirus’s naked body, ending at his face. “It’s a nice combination.”

  Sirus’s skin heated from top to bottom, and he couldn’t take his eyes off Grey.

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s just the truth.” Grey wiped his mouth with a paper towel, put it down, then picked it up again and twisted it with his fingers. “Can I… I don’t know… Just tell me if I’m imposing, and I’ll shut up. You won’t hurt my feelings. It’s just…” Grey pursed his lips, then blurted out, “You were obviously upset earlier. Is it okay for me to ask what happened with your mom?”

  Caution butted up against hope inside Sirus; Grey had set the rules for their brief affair, but now he seemed to be changing them. “You really want to know?”

  Grey chewed the corner of his lip, and nodded. “If you want to tell me, I do.”

  Oh God, he really seems to want to listen. Sirus trembled, the knowledge heady.

  Scary too.

  “All right.” Sirus’s hand shook as he picked up the beer and took another sip. If Grey noticed, he very sweetly didn’t acknowledge the reaction. “After you left…” Sirus proceeded to give Grey a blow by blow account of his conversation with his mother, only leaving out the part where he mentioned that he might have someone serious in his life very soon. While Sirus had been picturing Grey when he spoke those words, he knew they were only his most secret hopes, not a comment upon anything real Grey had given him about their future.

  About what would happen to them when Grey’
s vacation came to an end and he went home.

  By the time Sirus finished sharing what had taken place with his mother, he and Grey had finished their beer and moved back to bed. Grey leaned against the foot of the bed, and Sirus sat against the headboard.

  “So that’s it.” Sirus picked at the rumpled bedding, unable to keep completely still.

  After sharing, his throat felt rubbed raw all over again, almost as bad as when having the original conversation with his mother. “It’s up to her now. I can’t do anything more.”

  “I’m sorry it went down that way,” Grey said. Softness in his voice and openness in his eyes backed up his words. “It’s interesting, though, and unusual, that your dad openly accepts you while your mom cannot. Most times you hear it’s the other way, if either parent is willing to accept at all.”

  “I don’t know what it is with my mom.” A swelling need to share bubbled up in Sirus, one he could not ignore. Fuck, it felt so good to talk to someone who might understand him. “I think her inability to acknowledge me as a gay man is all tangled up in my grandfather and the disappointment he still shows over the fact that my mom fell in love and married my dad.”

  Grey drew his legs up and rested his elbows on his knees, his focus purely on Sirus.

  “What the hell is so wrong with your dad?”

  Sirus smiled, his heart lightening just picturing his father. “My father is this giant of a man from the Deep South, and is a strange combination of a redneck liberal who loves the opera and country music. He grew up dirt poor, what people call white trash.” A swirl of darkness moved over Sirus’s gaze. “He fucking hated that phrase, and so do I.

  Anyway, my father got himself through college, and he’s a professor with a mechanical engineering degree now. He teaches at a college in DC. He loves to talk politics, and loves a good argument about ideas even more. Oh,” Sirus made a face, “and, obviously, he’s not Greek.”

  “Ah.” Grey nodded knowingly. “Is the non-Greek thing the biggest strike against your dad with your grandfather?”

  Scrunching his face, Sirus shrugged. “It’s just one of many. My grandfather is one of the most conservative people I know, so I’d say he pretty much disliked everything about my father, on sight. But my mother does passionately love my father, all of us kids could always see that as clear as day. She married my dad—his name is Whit—and moved away from New York in the face of what she knew was my grandfather’s great disappointment.” Sirus paused, the pull to understand his mom still locked firmly in his heart. “I think it hurt my mother deeply that my grandfather couldn’t be happy for her.

  My dad says she was really afraid of losing her father when she chose to get married and ignore his wishes.”

  Sirus stopped again, memories of visits to his mother’s family still vivid in his mind.

  His voice dropped as he spoke, the thick tension in some of those moments as alive today as when he had been there in person. “My grandfather is one of those people that to this day, forty years later, still makes those under the breath comments that let everyone in the room know how he really feels, without out and out saying something hostile to your face. My mother knows my grandfather hasn’t fully forgiven her for defying him, and I think in a lot of ways she’s still trying to get back that love he openly gives to his other daughters.”

  “I would think that would make her even more sympathetic to openly accepting you, not less.” Tucking his legs against his chest, Grey laid his chin to rest on his folded arms.

  “Don’t you?”

  “You would think, but I can’t get her to talk to me about why she won’t acknowledge that I’m gay, which is so frustrating, because I can only guess at where’s she’s coming from.” So many excuses and reasons for his mother’s behavior had come and gone from Sirus’s mind over the years. One came back to him time and again, but he had never talked about it with his father or any of his siblings out of fear of creating a tear between his mother and another member of the family. “I think in my mother’s mind, if she acknowledges and accepts that I’m gay, then she’ll feel like she has to tell my grandfather that his grandson is gay. Right now, my grandfather doesn’t know about me, and for a lot of reasons it’s just a good idea that we never tell him. There are others who don’t know either, and I’m okay with that. I don’t see my grandfather that often, and we’re not very close. He always kind of scared me when I was little, and that never fully went away.”

  Sirus looked to Grey and found a man quietly focused, listening intently to every word Sirus shared. The intensity caused a flip-flopping in Sirus’s stomach and tied up his tongue. Grey was so attractive, smart, successful and decisive in his choices that Sirus had to wonder if his worries and fears seemed small and silly to this man. He began to sweat a little as he considered whether in his wildest dreams, even if he somehow got Grey, that he’d be an exciting enough person to hold his attention for long.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself, Wilder. Not this time. You got to fuck him once, and he has asked about your family. Neither thing amounts to a marriage proposal. Not even close.

  “Do you want to stop?” Grey asked, making Sirus realize he must have been silent for longer than he had thought. “Did you decide you don’t want to talk, after all?”

  “No. Sorry.” Sirus scrubbed his face and wiped away the worry. “It wasn’t that.” He rolled the conversation back in his mind and found the place where he’d left off. “I think acknowledging my homosexuality is twisted up in my mom’s head with knowing that if she does, and is proud of me in every way, and brags about me or a partner, then she’ll have to tell her father that I’m gay. That will sever any tie they still share, for good.” It killed Sirus just thinking about cutting off communication with his mother, so his heart bled for her position, even though it affected him too. “In my grandfather’s eyes, not only will my mother have gone against his wishes and married beneath her, but then she went and had a son who turned out to be a fag… Nope, that would do it for my grandfather.

  Not only would I not be welcome in his home, but I’m pretty sure he’d fully disown my mother too.” Sirus grimaced. The idea of tearing apart two families, even as he knew he couldn’t change who he was in order to keep them together, weighed heavy on his soul.

  “I think my mother is hiding in this in-between place, pretending what I am doesn’t really exist. If she did, she would have to deal with it on a lot of fronts, not just with me. She’s clearly not ready to do that. I suppose I can even understand it, on some level.” Suddenly, Sirus shook his head, cleared the heaviness of family history, and put his attention back on Grey. “Of course, that’s all just a theory. If she’ll never even talk to me about it, that’s all it will ever be. I’ll never know for sure.”

  Grey nodded, his cheek rubbing against his forearm as he did it. He stared at Sirus, quiet for a long moment, his eyes looking as if they tracked back through the conversation like words on a page. Eventually, the internal mapping seemed to stop, and Grey settled his focus on Sirus again, his eyes full of sympathy. “I would guess the fact that your mother so obviously loves you must make it tougher on you. I think it might be easier to deal with just being tossed out on your ass; at least you know where you stand with someone like that.” Grey’s face hardened, but in a flash the hint of emotion disappeared. “Your mother is clearly not homophobic, at least not in the sense that she’s afraid to touch you or be near you, a gay man. Her hug and happiness to see you looked very real to me, and I’m not half bad at reading people. There was never even the slightest cringe toward you. She just wouldn’t see me.”

  “Yeah, but I’m old enough now and clear enough about what I want in my life that accepting me also means accepting a man as my partner. I need that now.” Visions of some of Sirus’s siblings and their spouses filled his head. The love and acceptance he constantly witnessed in their marriages twisted a ball of envy and wanting in his gut. “I don’t have the patience or energy anymore for bullshit and games. Le
ast of all from a member of my own family.”

  “Families are complicated and messy.” Grey closed his eyes, blocking Sirus’s one constant avenue to reading this man. A shudder jerked through Grey, leaving Sirus cold.

  When Grey opened his eyes again, the bleakness living there ripped right through Sirus’s heart. “I broke mine up when I was nine years old,” Grey said, his voice agonizingly soft.

  “Tore Kelsie right out of the arms of my mom and dad, and we never saw them again.”

  Oh God. He’s giving me something personal. Sirus held his breath and tried not to make the slightest movement, noise, or anything that would alert Grey to the fact that he was once again sharing something intimate, and as a result possibly shut him down.

  “My parents were not exactly what you would call capable or functioning members of society. Even less so as caretakers of two children.” Grey looked at a place beyond Sirus, but Sirus could see his eyes clear as day. The unforgiving glint in the hazel depths did war with a film of moisture battling not to fall. “Not everything can be turned into a fun wilderness adventure, you know? Kids need a specific amount of calories in their everyday diet and certain nutrients for their bodies to grow properly. They need hot, running water to keep clean, and heat when the weather turns cold. You willfully don’t even try to give your kids those things, and they should be taken away from you.” Grey’s voice grew rougher with each statement, and, with each sentence, he successfully blinked the threat of tears away. Finally, he looked at Sirus, back in control, and said, “Even if one of their own kids is the one that makes it happen.”

  “You mentioned a grandmother,” Sirus said, treading gently, “and Kelsie has in passing too. She’s the one who came and took you from your parents?”

  “Yeah.” Grey lifted his head, his hands trembling just the slightest bit as he ran them through his hair. “But I found her number and I’m the one who called her. She was my mother’s mother, but they were estranged. I deliberately made that call and alerted her to the squalor Kelsie and I were living in. I told her she needed to come see it for herself and then make a decision about whether she wanted to do something about it before I took Kelsie and ran away.”