by Ariel Tachna
“But there is an issue,” Mathias said. “If there weren’t, you wouldn’t have been so strange the next morning or when we talked.”
Pascal huffed a bitter laugh. “There are too many issues to count. I don’t even know where to start. Don’t apologize again. All you did was bring things to a head faster. They would have been issues anyway.”
That didn’t sound promising. Mathias sank back into the chair, feeling the gulf between them growing with each passing second. “Do you want me to leave?”
“Do you want to leave?” Pascal countered.
Mathias shook his head, but Pascal continued to look at him expectantly, so he tried to put his thoughts in some semblance of order. “Meeting you was a stroke of luck I never believed I’d get.” He took a deep breath as he debated what to say next. “I work at a bank during the day where the chances of personal interaction are few. At night I work in a bar where I flirt with customers because that’s how I get tips. It’s business, nothing more. I figured I wouldn’t get a chance for more than that until the training period at the bank was over and I got enough of a raise to be able to quit working at the bar. Then I could go out and actually try to meet people I might be interested in. Then you came in, and all those plans went right out the window, except why would you be interested in me? I’m just a kid, and you’re….”
“I’m what?” Pascal asked.
“Fishing for compliments?” Mathias teased, but the joke fell flat. He sighed. “You’re everything I’m not. You’re put together. You know what you want in life. You have a career already. You have a great apartment. You don’t worry about whether you can achieve everything you set out to do because you’ve already achieved it.”
“Is that really how you see me?” Pascal asked.
“Of course it is. How else would I see you?”
Pascal snorted. “An old man desperate to reclaim his youth by hooking up with someone half his age? A waiter who never amounted to anything of worth in his life? A fool who’s afraid to get in too deep in a new relationship because the only one he’s had that ever mattered ended far too soon? There’s no shortage of other ways, and none of them are good.”
Mathias stared at Pascal as his brain raced to process the words that spewed from him. The pain beneath the surface scored him deeply. He wanted to do something, anything to take that look off Pascal’s face, but he didn’t know if he’d be welcome. “I don’t see you that way,” he said finally, because he had to say something.
“That’s something, I suppose, but it’s what you’ll hear about us. I’ll always be older than you. You’ll be this big-shot bank executive, and I’ll still be just a waiter. You may not see me that way now, but how long will that last?” Pascal asked bitterly.
“If I have ever said or done anything to make you think I feel that way or even that I care about things like that, I’m sorry,” Mathias said slowly. He couldn’t remember anything specific he might have said or done, but not realizing Pascal harbored those doubts, he hadn’t been careful to avoid the topics either. “I know I act without thinking sometimes, but I never meant to make you feel that way.”
“I was married once, or the closest thing to it,” Pascal said. Mathias blinked at the sudden change of topic, but he was willing to follow along. “We didn’t call it marriage then. It hadn’t been legalized in Québec yet, but we’d promised each other a lifetime together.”
“What happened?” Mathias asked, not entirely sure he wanted to know. Pascal obviously lived alone now, but that didn’t explain how he’d ended up that way.
“He died.”
Mathias flinched. Québec had legalized gay marriage in 2004. If they had been the same age, Pascal’s partner would have been in his early thirties when he died. Mathias had been a child, but he knew the history of the AIDS epidemic and how many thousands of men had died in the nineties before the current medical cocktails were discovered. Had Pascal’s partner been one of those deaths? Was that why he was so particular about sex? “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Robert had bone tumors. We tried everything the doctors could think of, but we found them too late,” Pascal said. “He was my world, and then he was gone. I never believed I’d get a second chance.”
Mathias couldn’t stand it. He pushed out of his seat and reached for Pascal. Pascal pulled back reflexively, but before Mathias could lower his arms and slink away, Pascal stepped into the embrace. Mathias rested his arms on Pascal’s hips and leaned against him. He didn’t know what comfort his presence would offer, but he would stand there as long as Pascal wanted. He wouldn’t pull away first.
He knew the hug didn’t solve anything, but it felt good. He hoped it felt the same to Pascal, tangible proof that Mathias was still there and intended to still be there if Pascal would have him.
Chapter 15
PASCAL LEANED into Mathias’s arms. When was the last time he’d let someone comfort him? He’d had to be the strong one when Robert was sick. He’d been the strong one each time they lost a friend. He’d been the rock everyone else leaned on, even when he was shattering inside. To have Mathias see through that façade was unexpected but not unwelcome. Not unwelcome at all.
He breathed in the scent of Mathias’s aftershave and let it soothe his frayed nerves. He’d known the conversation would be tense, although he hadn’t seen Mathias’s primary concern coming. At least he could resolve one thing between them, even if the rest was still a tangled mess of issues and emotions. As good as it felt to stand there, they wouldn’t solve anything with a hug.
He lifted his head and summoned a smile for Mathias. It felt brittle on his face, but it was an improvement over frowning. “Are you hungry? I promised you lunch.”
Mathias looked surprised at the comment. Pascal squeezed his waist. “We can talk more after we eat, but I think we both need a break.”
Mathias still looked like he wanted to barge on with the conversation, but he followed Pascal into the tiny kitchen and helped him carry bowls and a tureen of soup out to the table. “I didn’t know people still had things like that,” he said, pointing to the soup container.
“It was my grandmother’s,” Pascal said. “She gave her good china to my sister, but Sylvie never used it. She gave it to me a couple of years after Mamie died. I don’t have a lot of call for good china, but I think she’d like it that I use it, even if it’s not for fancy parties.”
Pascal ladled up the squash potage into the bowls and put the lid back on the tureen.
Mathias took a taste of the soup and smiled broadly. “This is really good.”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” Pascal teased, striving for normalcy. “I know how to cook.”
Mathias laughed. “Then you’re better off than I am. I don’t go hungry, but it never tastes this good.”
Pascal almost offered to teach him, but that assumed a future together, and he wasn’t sure that was still on the table. Mathias hadn’t gone running when Pascal let loose the vitriol that had been building up inside him, but that hardly meant he was willing to stay around long-term. He took a spoonful of the soup and tried to think of something to pass the time while they ate. They’d have to talk more after they were done, but he wanted the meal to be an oasis of peace before they started again.
“When’s your next training at the bank?” Interest in Mathias’s career was a safe topic.
“Next month,” Mathias replied. “Then I’m done with training weekends for a while. I’ll have some more to do next year sometime, I think. I don’t have the whole two-year program memorized.”
“That’s good,” Pascal said. “You need a break. If nothing else, you’ll be able to sleep in on Saturdays and Sundays now.”
“Or spend them with you,” Mathias said.
Pascal looked down at his suddenly fascinating soup. Maybe talking about Mathias’s future wasn’t such a good way to avoid talking about their future.
“If that’s something you still want to do.” Mathias’s voice sounded
so small that Pascal looked back up sharply.
“I still have to spend some Sundays with my parents.” Pascal felt like a complete bastard when Mathias’s face fell even more. “Finish your lunch. We’ll figure things out.”
Mathias nodded and went back to his soup, but Pascal could feel the gulf growing between them with each passing moment spent in silence. Mathias finished the bowl and looked expectantly at Pascal, who hadn’t managed more than two or three mouthfuls. With a stifled sigh, he carried the tureen back into the kitchen and returned to where Mathias waited.
He sat this time, though he didn’t know how long he’d stay seated. Mathias took the spot on the couch next to him. Pascal took a deep breath and faced Mathias. “What do you want out of this?” He gestured between them.
“Whatever you’re willing to give me,” Mathias replied.
Pascal shook his head. “That’s not actually helpful, and it’s not what I asked. What do you want?”
“Everything you’ll let me have,” Mathias said, “and before you tell me that’s not helpful either, think about it from my perspective. If I tell you I want forever and you’re looking for a fling, where does that leave me?”
“You already know I don’t want a fling,” Pascal pointed out.
“But I don’t really know what you do want,” Mathias said. “You haven’t given me anything to go on. I know you look at me and see a kid, and next to you, I am a kid. I get that. But don’t dismiss me just because I’m young. I worked damn hard to get where I am, and I’m working even harder to stay here. I’m not some rich kid playing at having a job. I’m from rural Québec. My parents barely speak English. My dad works in the paper mills, and my mother never worked. I grew up poor, the oldest kid, expected to work as soon as I was old enough. And maybe that makes me beneath you, just like waiting tables in a bar does, but that’s not all I am or all I’ll ever be.”
“I know that,” Pascal hurried to answer. “I don’t know anyone who works harder than you.”
“But you don’t believe I’ll work that hard at making things work between us.”
Pascal wanted to refute that, but he wouldn’t lie to Mathias. He’d fallen into exactly that trap. “It’s not that so much as I’m having a hard time believing you’ll want to put that much work into me. I look at you and see someone with so much potential, someone who’s going somewhere. You don’t want to be bogged down with me.”
“How about you do us both a favor and stop assuming what I want or don’t want?” Mathias suggested. “Because I don’t see you the way you clearly see yourself, so I’m not thinking that way. You can’t possibly think I don’t want you after Tuesday night.”
“You were horny and I was available.”
“You’re half-right, anyway,” Mathias said. “I was horny. You have that effect on me. But you make it sound like you were the easiest or only option. You weren’t. Even as dead as the bar was on Tuesday, I could have found someone to go home with if I’d wanted. Or I could have gone cruising in another bar. I didn’t. I came here because you were here, and I didn’t want a random fuck. I wanted you. That was a bit presumptuous on my part, since you’d made your position clear on the matter, but that didn’t change how I felt about you.”
Pascal couldn’t stop the thrill that went through him at Mathias’s words, because he knew how easily Mathias could have found someone else. “We should probably talk about that presumption bit.”
Mathias sighed. “I’m sorry. I said it already, but I’ll say it again, as often as you need me to.”
“It’s not the sex, per se, that bothers me,” Pascal replied. “It’s that you knew where I stood and you barged ahead anyway. It makes it hard to feel like my opinion on things matters to you.”
Mathias slumped against the back of the couch. “I didn’t think things through. I’m sorry. You should have stopped me.”
“I should have,” Pascal agreed, “but what’s done is done. Sex changes things in a relationship, and I wasn’t ready for that because I wasn’t sure it meant as much to you as it does to me.”
“Are you saying we can have sex now?” Mathias asked.
Pascal laughed. “Maybe not right this minute, but it’s pointless to close the barn door after the horse has already escaped. We can’t undo what we did. We can only decide how to move forward. If you really meant it when you said you were serious about making this work, then I have to take you at your word. And if I do that, then my reasons for waiting to have sex are no longer valid. But, Mathias….” He waited for Mathias to look up at him. “If I make my stance on something clear again, take that seriously. If I can’t trust you, the rest doesn’t matter.”
Mathias looked so miserable that Pascal nearly regretted his words, but this was important. They had to be able to trust one another, and Mathias’s actions had been a direct violation of that.
“You can trust me,” Mathias said finally. “It won’t happen again.”
Pascal smiled even as he hoped Mathias was right. He reached across the space between them and closed his fingers around Mathias’s. Mathias turned his hand so he could twine their fingers together. “Can we call in sick tonight and just stay right here instead?” Mathias asked.
Pascal chuckled. “I’m sure we could, but I’m not sure either of our budgets would appreciate it.” Pascal could have afforded a night off, but Mathias couldn’t, and he didn’t want to rub that in.
“Don’t remind me. Six more months. I can handle six more months of this.”
“What happens in six months?” Pascal asked.
“I get a pay increase,” Mathias said. “Not a large one, but enough that I can probably cut back to just working weekends at Le Salon.”
Another six months at least of juggling nights off and crazy weekend schedules. He was too old for this, but if Mathias was willing to meet him halfway, Pascal wouldn’t back out now. He switched Mathias’s hand to his other one so he could stretch his arm around Mathias’s shoulders. Mathias scooted closer and rested his head against Pascal. “When I was so afraid I’d screwed things up beyond repair, this is what I realized I’d miss the most,” Mathias said in a soft voice.
“What?”
“Being with you like this. No demands, no pressure, no masks to wear for work or for play. Just being together. As amazing as the sex was—did I tell you it was really amazing?” Pascal nodded. It had been damn good sex. “Anyway, as amazing as the sex was, that wasn’t what I would’ve missed the most.”
Pascal pressed a kiss to the top of Mathias’s head, the only part he could reach easily. Mathias tipped his head up to meet Pascal’s lips with his own. Pascal kissed him again and shifted a little to get more comfortable.
“That doesn’t mean I’d turn down a repeat of the sex either,” Mathias added. “If you meant what you said about it being okay now.”
Pascal glanced at the clock. They had time before he had to work, but he didn’t want to rush the next time they had sex. He wanted to make love to Mathias properly. “I meant it, but not today. Some evening when we have time to relax and enjoy it instead of worrying that we’ll have to hurry so we can get ready for work.”
“You have an overinflated opinion of my stamina,” Mathias said.
“Or you have an underinflated opinion of mine,” Pascal purred in reply. Mathias shivered in his arms, much to Pascal’s delight. Something good would come of his age. He nuzzled Mathias’s cheek as he shifted on the couch again so Mathias rested against the back of the couch with Pascal leaning over him. Mathias lifted his chin, asking for a kiss, but Pascal avoided his mouth, preferring to draw this out. They had rushed the foreplay on Tuesday. Pascal intended to show Mathias the rewards of patience now. Mathias’s skin felt like satin beneath his lips, soft and smooth with the hint of shaving cream to entice Pascal’s nose. He brushed his lips over one high cheekbone while caressing Mathias’s palm with his thumb.
Mathias caught his lower lip between his teeth, drawing Pascal’s attention to his full, p
outing mouth. He traced the abused flesh with one finger, holding Mathias’s gaze with his own as he did. Mathias’s face projected only innocent enthusiasm, but the way he sucked Pascal’s finger into his mouth was anything but innocent. Pascal inhaled sharply, transfixed by Mathias’s expression as he teased him. He didn’t know what he’d done to be so lucky, but the very idea that this young, vibrant, gorgeous man wanted to be with him knocked the breath he’d managed to draw in from his lungs and left him dizzy with delight and need. He lowered his head to nuzzle at Mathias’s jaw. Mathias tipped his head back, offering Pascal unrestricted access to his neck. Then he nipped at the tip of Pascal’s finger.
“Brat,” Pascal muttered against Mathias’s skin. Mathias just did it again.
In retaliation, Pascal nipped at Mathias’s pulse point.
“Yes,” Mathias said through a hiss of breath. “Leave a mark. Let everyone who sees me at the bar tonight know I’m taken.”
“And if it’s still there on Monday when you have to go to the bank?” Pascal asked.
Mathias shrugged. “Then they’ll know I’m taken too.”
He shouldn’t do it. Adrien wouldn’t care at Le Salon, but if Mathias went to the bank on Monday with his neck covered in hickeys, his boss there could very well say something about his unprofessional appearance. He shouldn’t do it, but even as he told himself that, he sank his teeth into the tender skin and sucked hard. Mathias’s breath stuttered, and a soft groan escaped. Pascal started to lift his head to check Mathias’s reaction, but Mathias held him in place. “More.”
That answered that question. Pascal tipped Mathias backward on the couch and latched on again, a little lower this time, closer to the collar of his T-shirt, where it would be covered by the dress shirt he would wear to the bank. He bit down again, not hard enough to break skin, but more than enough to draw another gasp and moan from Mathias.