by Roan Parrish
“Tell me,” he said. “Let me make you feel good. Anything you want. Anything.”
My breath caught at the desperation in his eyes. He wanted it like this sometimes—to be a tool of my pleasure, for me to command him to do everything I wanted. It filled me with a heady power that didn’t feel like unwelcome responsibility. It felt freeing to know I couldn’t make any mistakes—all I had to do was tell him what I wanted and it would be right.
I slicked his fingers and guided his hand to my ass. He traced my rim first, soft and slick, then slid inside. He curled his finger, stroking over my prostate, and I jumped, pleasure zinging through me.
“More, please, more.”
He rubbed over my prostate in slow circles, then pressed more firmly, a pattern that quickly had me seeing stars and digging my fingers into his shoulders.
“Dane, Dane, Dane,” I begged, but I no longer knew what I was asking for.
He added more lube and slid two fingers in, playing with my hole until I was whimpering.
“I need you, please, please,” I begged, squirming my hips backward, trying to impale myself on his erection without letting go of his shoulders because I knew I’d fall.
“Okay, hang on, I got you,” he said when I couldn’t coordinate our movements. His voice was rough with lust, pupils blown so wide only a thin ring of blue was visible around the black. He slicked himself with lube and then I felt the press of his massive cock at my entrance, blood-hot and straining.
He pressed his hips up as I slid down on him, slowly, slowly, and my eyes rolled back in my head as my body made space for him. We’d never done it this way before, and when I sank all the way down on his cock, he was so deep I couldn’t even breathe. I felt myself spasm around him painfully, then my muscles relaxed and I moaned as the extreme fullness recoded itself as pleasure.
I clenched experimentally and we both gasped. Dane’s jaw was set and he was breathing through his nose like he could hardly keep himself still. I pressed a trembling kiss to his lips and started to move, slowly at first as I got used to how deep he was in this position. Then, as I relaxed, I wanted more and more of him. Soon he was holding my hips as I rose and fell on him, the pleasure building and building.
I sank all the way down and ground my hips in a circle, breathless at the press of him. He helped hold me up as he let loose with a series of short, sharp thrusts that nailed my prostate and had me gasping. When I took him to the hilt again, I cried out, so overwhelmed by sensation that I couldn’t do anything but sit there, feeling him pulsing inside me.
“Oh, fuck, sweetheart, goddamn,” he groaned. “You okay?”
I whimpered, my muscles gone to jelly. Dane kissed my throat and sucked at my pulse.
“I can’t— I want…”
I bounced on him slightly, feeling the dark burn at the base of my spine and in my balls that said orgasm was close.
“I need—”
Dane took my hands and placed kisses on my palms, then he put my hands on his shoulders.
“Hold onto me,” he ground out. Then he grabbed my ass, spread me open, and began to pound into me, hips pistoning up off the couch in hard, glorious strokes that had me screaming. I couldn’t do anything but hold onto him as he took me apart. The friction was perfect, and I was on fire inside, the pleasure building and building until I thought I would pass out.
Then Dane pressed his thumb behind my balls as he thrust hard, and I was coming in huge, heaving pulses all over myself without him ever touching my dick. It went on and on until I was wrung dry. Dane gave me a few seconds to catch my breath, then he drove inside me in quick strokes that had him groaning and tightening every muscle.
I squeezed my ass, shuddering at the aftershocks of pleasure that sparked through me, and Dane groaned brokenly as his orgasm hit. He shot inside me, come making everything hot and wet as he moved. With one final thrust inside, Dane shivered and pressed me down hard on his cock, shaking against me.
“Jesus Christ,” he gasped, dropping his head back against the couch and stroking up and down my ribs.
I dropped my head to his shoulder and hugged him, too fucked out to do anything else. We stayed that way for a few minutes as he pulsed inside me. But instead of going soft, he stayed firm as we relaxed. After a few minutes I tightened around him, mostly to check how sore I was. Dane gasped and clamped his hands to my hips.
“Are you…?”
He shook his head.
“Just feel so good.”
He pressed soft kisses to my neck and my jaw, my shoulders, and finally my lips. When I leaned in to kiss him, I rocked my hips a little and then we were fucking again. Not the way we had been, but slow and liquid, just relishing the pleasure of being joined. I didn’t think either of us would come again, but it felt so good to move together as we kissed lazily.
After a few minutes, Dane took hold of my leg and leaned me back so he could turn me around in his lap. I felt the hot twist of him inside me as I moved, and then I was settled in his lap, my back to his front. He kissed the nape of my neck and leaned back against the couch. He played with my nipples, teasing and pinching them until my head lolled back and I spread my legs, his hard cock still inside me, nudging my pleasure to peak again.
He slid his hand down my stomach to my dick and began to work me. I didn’t think it was possible, but I started leaking again, my hips pulsing as he stroked me slowly. I felt like he was something made to bring me pleasure. Like I was sitting on him and in him, and he was around me and inside me. It was doing my head in, in the best way.
When his hips started rocking too, I felt myself dissolve into an orgasm that was a wash of liquid pleasure instead of an explosion. He stroked me in time with the pulses of his hips and I came in a great clench and release that left me completely limp and shaking on top of him.
All I could do was moan and milk his dick with my ass to communicate that he should keep fucking me if he wanted to come again.
But he didn’t keep moving. He gentled me with soft kisses and fingers in my hair, a hand stroking down my thighs. I drifted, suspended in the beautiful afterglow.
Chapter 17
Huey
The day began like any other day. I woke when Felix got up for work and kissed away his sleepy complaints. I lifted weights. I showered. I ate oatmeal. I did payroll.
But something was buzzing beneath my skin. It wasn’t the itch that often propelled me out the door to run errands or distract myself working at the bar. It was anticipation. A promise.
As the day wore on, though, I realized what had been scratching at my mind all week, ever since we’d gotten back from Felix’s childhood home. Watching the Raineys—the way they talked and teased, confessed and forgave, irritated and adored—had shaken loose memories I’d buried years ago.
Memories of the years before my mother died, when my father was a smiling, speaking person. How we used to go for ice cream at Dairy Queen and my father would get coffee and my mom would get strawberry and he’d take a lick of hers and say it was too sweet and she’d take a lick of his and say it wasn’t sweet enough. How sometimes they’d danced in the living room.
Where had that man gone? Was he still in there somewhere? Could I have done more for him? Should I have tried harder?
My stomach churned as I picked up the phone, and the time between rings felt endless. I hadn’t planned what I would say, and at my father’s familiar voice, my throat tightened.
“Hey, Pops,” I said. My voice sounded choked and strangely high.
“Son. Been a while. How are you?”
“Good.”
It was the first time in a long time that I’d said it and meant it. I was good, and every day with Felix just made me feel better. Made me feel like I was actually living the life I’d worked so hard to save all those years ago.
“How’s work?”
“Fine,” he said.
And there was nothing else to say, unless…
I’d picked up the phone to call him with Felix’s words on my mind: Don’t you think it hurt him to not know his son? Now, hearing my father’s detached voice on the line, I knew the answer.
Yeah. It probably had hurt him. Just like it had hurt me not to know who my father might’ve been if my mother hadn’t died. But she did die, and he did crumble, and it did hurt me. Then I hurt myself even more.
If I were Felix, I’d tell my father everything. I’d give him the gift of my truth in the hopes it might be returned, might heal the wounds between us and lay a new road for us to walk together.
But I wasn’t Felix, and I’d stopped needed my father a long time ago. Telling him about my own troubles wouldn’t heal him, and I didn’t need our relationship to change. I didn’t want to take care of him, and I didn’t think he wanted it either.
I walked to the window and looked at Felix’s diorama, which was nearly done. I didn’t understand how he was able to work in such detail, but each figure, each object was perfectly rendered. Life in miniature—a story told in a box.
There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.
That’s what Frank Herbert said, and I’d always taken it to be about death. Now, though, looking at Felix’s bounded story and listening to the sound of my father breathing, I understood it differently.
Things were never truly over until you stopped engaging with them.
My relationship with my addiction persisted because I dwelled in it still, instead of shifting my attention to the ways things had changed.
My story with Felix was just beginning. And I wanted to give us endless blank paper to write it on.
My relationship with my father was still ongoing, so I could still change the story. But that wasn’t the relationship I felt guilty about. My father wasn’t the one I needed to make amends to.
“You take care, Pops,” I told my father, miles away in the Virginia house I’d grown up in, and hung up the phone.
Then, a miniature world in a box to my right and the teeming world of New York City out the window to my left, I dialed a number I hadn’t called in seven years.
* * *
—
Rachel had cut her long blond hair short and had a few more lines around her eyes, but other than that she looked the same, and when she walked into the coffee shop two eras of my life slammed together like meteorites.
I stood, and her eyes found me instantly. She made her way to the corner and hesitated a moment before she reached out and squeezed my shoulder in lieu of the hug or kiss she once would have given me.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
We sat down and she waved away my offer of a coffee.
“I was very, very surprised to hear from you, Huey.”
“Bad surprised,” I guessed.
She frowned.
“Jury’s out, I guess, depending on why you called.” Then she shook her head and said, “No, not bad surprised.”
She was always so damn kind to me.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m really good. But I don’t think you called because you wanted to know how I was doing. Did you?”
“Glad you’re doing well. But no, guess not.”
She nodded and sat there, ready to listen, just as she always had.
“I wanted to apologize. Because when I apologized to you…then, I apologized for the wrong things.”
Rachel nodded, her mouth pursed like she was trying not to show any emotion.
“Told you I was sorry for cancelling dinner or for not wanting to go out with your friends. Told you I was sorry I didn’t wanna talk. I said ‘sorry’ a million times. But I never apologized for the real thing.” I took a deep breath. “Rach. I…I used you. I used our relationship to prove to myself that I wasn’t a lost cause. Prove I could still…Prove maybe someone could still care for me.”
The rush of shame was even stronger than I’d imagined. I pressed my palm to my stomach to try and hold it in.
“And, fuck, I’m so damn sorry for that.”
I looked up and saw tears running down her cheeks, but her eyes were peaceful.
“I did care,” I assured her. “So much. I wanted everything for you. And I…I was nothing then. You needed things, wanted things that I couldn’t give. And I was so damn busy trying to prove all that to myself that I couldn’t be any of what you needed.”
Those last few weeks played in a loop in my head.
“I was a coward. Made you end it with me ’cuz I couldn’t bear to do it myself. ’M so damn sorry for that too.”
Emotion tightened my throat and I fell silent. Rachel reached out a hand and placed it over mine, which was fisted on the table.
“Thanks,” she said. And even though I could see her tears, she didn’t sound upset. “I really needed to hear that. And you really needed to know it.”
“I do. I see it now. I…I never gave you a chance to be there for me, not really. We never had a chance, and that was on me. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know,” she said, and it came out rough as her voice broke, but she was smiling.
She wiped her eyes and frowned at the black smears on her fingers.
“Ugh, damn it, Huey.” But she just wiped under her eyes with a napkin and turned back to me. “I had my own shit going on too. I wanted to believe that I could be the person you…you loved enough to let me in where you didn’t let anyone else.”
She cringed at herself.
“I wanted to feel special. But honestly? I was scared of what you were going through. I was scared I wouldn’t be enough. Or that you’d start using again and I’d have to deal with that. Our relationship wasn’t right for me either, even though I thought it was at the time.”
I could tell it had taken a lot for her to admit that to me after how much I’d hurt her. It made me realize she had forgiven me.
“Thanks.”
Rachel nodded, then her eyes narrowed. She peered at me with the perceptive look that always took me by surprise with its shrewdness.
“You met someone,” she said.
I blinked.
“Oh, man, you totally did.”
I nodded.
Rachel’s smile was wide and brilliant. She pounded on my fist with her palm.
“That’s wonderful. Really, Huey. I’m happy for you.”
I hesitated, then said, “ ’M scared I’ll fuck it up. Like I fucked us up.”
“You won’t fuck it up in the same way because you’re not the same. I can tell that just by talking to you. You might fuck it up in different ways…”
“Thanks a lot.”
She grinned.
“Felix is…” I stopped, and realized I didn’t have more to say. I’d just wanted to say his name. Just wanted to sit with someone who had loved me and say the name of the person I loved.
Rachel nodded when I fell silent. “I’m glad. I’m glad for us both.”
* * *
—
I walked around the block three times. To the rhythm of my footfalls, I said to myself, You’re not the same. You’re not the same. You’re not the same.
If I wasn’t the same, then things didn’t have to be the same. I didn’t have to make the same mistakes. Didn’t have to fall into the same patterns and habits.
I’d been good at football because I ran the plays I was given. I went where I was told. I practiced the drills and stuck to the formations and always protected my man—blocked out anything that could keep him from getting the ball and making his touchdown. I was strong and dependable and predictable.
B
ut the players who were great were the ones who saw the opening and took it despite the play. They were intuitive, adaptive, and knew that sometimes they had to take the game into their own hands because on the field things changed in an instant, and in ways no one calling the plays could’ve predicted. The great players trusted their instincts.
I wanted to change the way I played the game for good.
Hell, things were already changing.
I hadn’t thought I’d ever speak to Rachel again, but I’d just done it.
I hadn’t thought I’d ever pull back from working with sponsees, even as it sucked me dry, but I was.
I never thought I’d meet someone who would love me.
But…fuck. I had.
That stopped me in my tracks like a fist to the gut, and I leaned against the brick wall of a building.
Felix loved me.
He knew me, and he loved me.
I hadn’t given my father or Rachel that chance because I’d never let them truly know me. I’d never given anyone that chance.
But Felix did.
And I loved him in a way that shattered me and held me together all at once.
* * *
—
When I got home, Felix was waiting for me on the couch. I told him about the conversation with Rachel, and he ran his hands up and down my upper arms in an unconscious caress. I could see his joy for me, and his concern. I could read everything he felt on his face and I cherished that about him.
As I finished telling him, I saw something else: Felix was proud of me.
It was something I’d always wanted. I just hadn’t known who I wanted it from.
It took me several moments to understand that the burning feeling in my eyes was tears. I’d forgotten what it felt like.
Felix pulled me close and stroked my back. He murmured inconsequential soothing things and let me cry. I pressed my forehead to his shoulder and concentrated on taking deep, even breaths.
“Felix,” I said. “Felix.”