Nervous

by SM Johnson

  “You have a twin!” I said.

  He laughed. “Yes.”

  “And a mother.”

  He laughed again, but I guess the significance escaped him, that I was a bit shook up about how little we knew about each other.

  But maybe not, because he asked, “Do you have siblings? Living parents?”

  “No siblings, but I have a mother and a step-father. They moved to Florida.”

  “Shall we stop at a coffee shop for some food and talk about our families? I haven’t seen this mood on you before. Quiet, but not because of nerves.”

  “Quiet because I’m thinking. It’s just… meeting them made me realize that I don’t know hardly anything about you.” I was a little freaked out at how much of a stranger he still was, and trying to reconcile this fact, the fact of being strangers, with how much I liked the way I felt when I was around him. But everything I didn’t know about him seemed so big, all of a sudden. And the secrets he referenced in that file. And how his sister, his twin sister, called him Mr. Secretive. Did all relationships start like this? With not knowing a person, with trusting the other person to be who they appear to be? Without knowing for sure? And there was still the problem of never knowing what the other person was thinking.

  “Jules. We are going to sit down and talk.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Not coffee. He steered me into a little café and ordered ice cream, for both of us. He did most of the talking, telling me about growing up with a twin, how they’d rarely argued with one another, how nice it was to always have someone to play with, and later, someone who always had your back. “We slept in the same bed for most of our lives, and it was strange to be apart in college. An adjustment period, to be grown-ups with separate lives.” He said they texted each other daily, even when they were busy. Sometimes it was a simple, “Boo, I’m thinking of you.”

  He asked about my parents. I explained how my mom was fake and judgmental, and pretended to be nice, although she was not very nice. That my step-father had never liked me. Avery asked about my biological father, and I explained about him being deported back to Mexico, but I left out the parts about him hitting me. Avery said something about how I must have my father’s eyes, whatever that meant.

  I told him my mother was concerned that I might tell all of New York that she made me anxious, and he laughed at that. “She knows you’re gay?” he asked.

  “I guess,” I said, thinking about when I’d called her from the hotel. “It’s probably just one more disappointment in a string of how I didn’t turn out like the son she wanted, but I don’t see that I can do much about it.”

  He sighed. “Been there. I’m lucky my mum’s pretty open-minded. She loves the arts and theatre and fashion, so she’s pretty okay with queers. She keeps hoping Olivia will have babies, so I don’t get the wistful lecture about that. For the most part, I think she’s happy that Phoenix & Phoenix has finally settled me down.”

  I wondered what that meant. Had he been someone who partied all the time? Who stumbled home drunk and puking in the small hours of the night? Was he one of those terrifyingly confident guys who had one shallow relationship after another, or a million one-night stands?

  I let the silence take over while I finished my ice cream, but realized it would keep bothering me to wonder, so I finally asked. “What did you settle down from?”

  He sighed, rubbed his hands over his face, then stared into his empty ice cream bowl.

  “A lot of things, Jules. I spent my twenties avoiding myself. Who I was on the outside compared to who I was on the inside. I had a lot of anger, and a lot of despair. All of my relationships imploded because of my anger.”

  He looked into my eyes. “One relationship, well, friendship, really, I thought would last forever. It didn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  He gave a grin that looked wry. “With the friendship?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s none of my business. What happened with you? To make you settle down.”

  “My father died, and my mother needed me to run Phoenix & Phoenix. She sent me to rehab because she was convinced I was an alcoholic. When that didn’t fix me, she made me find a therapist. She gave me the money I needed to get my head and my heart aligned. And then she put me in charge of the agency, keeping herself as CEO. She draws a salary, which is part me repaying the money she loaned me, and part a requirement of my father’s will. Doesn’t matter. Truth is, she saved my life.”

  I tried to imagine Avery being angry. He knew how to put a sharp tone in his voice, yeah, but he always seemed very much in control. He wasn’t afraid of my anger, in fact, he’d encouraged me to express it. I sheltered myself from bars and clubs because of my nerves around other people, but all the way back as far as I could remember, I was especially wary of people when they were drinking. I knew it changed people’s personalities sometimes. My Mexican father, for example, never had a temper until after a few beers.

  “Are you an alcoholic?” I asked, remembering the watered down drinks at the club.

  He shrugged. “I drank a lot back then, but more because I wanted to pass out to escape how trapped I felt. I rarely drink alcohol now, and I never get drunk. I made a promise to my sister to stop destroying myself, and a promise to a twin is practically a blood oath.”

  chapter fourteen

  pay attention to physical sensation

  We went back to Avery’s apartment in companionable silence. I was tired from so much social interaction, and mostly I wanted to hole up in my room and think about how much I’d learned about Avery in this one short evening, but it seemed rude, so I settled on the couch instead.

  “I liked the play, and your sister. Not sure about your mother yet. And hopefully I didn’t embarrass you, too much?”

  Avery laughed. “You didn’t embarrass me for a minute. Not even for a second. You handled yourself just fine. Whatever you might think, my mum liked you immediately.”

  “She did? How do you know?”

  “She remembered your name. She’s terrible with names, which means she made a point to remember yours. Trust me, it’s significant.”

  Trust me. I did trust him. I kind of had to, right? Because he was my boss and I moved into his apartment. And I let him have control over me, because he was good at it. He settled me down. Like Phoenix & Phoenix and a promise to his twin settled him.

  I think I had more than a crush on him, but I was afraid to think about that too much. Because… what then? What if it didn’t work out? What would I do? What if I liked him more than he liked me?

  “I caught you, you know,” Avery said.

  I looked up at him, startled.

  “Show me your hands.” He was giving orders again.

  I held out my hands. He took them one at a time, and traced one finger across my fingertips, pausing at the jagged one. “Here it is. We’ll have to fix it with clippers so you can keep your teeth away from it. And did I see you biting your lip while my mother spoke to you?”

  Did I? I didn’t remember it specifically, but it was possible. Probable.

  He took my head in his hands and looked at me. “Doe eyes. So pretty. I could punish you. I won’t, this time, because the theatre was a new experience. But you won’t get a skate next time, do you understand?”

  Calm. That calm came over me. Avery would be in charge, and I trusted Avery. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  He kissed me. The scent of him surrounded me like swirling snow, dizzying and all-consuming, the heat of his mouth thawing my reserve. The noise started low in my chest and rose up to my throat, a whimper, a purr, it was hard to tell. I never imagined kissing would be so sensual, would involve every nerve of my body. Except the ones that made me nervous.

  He pulled away from me, broke the kiss. “There are some things I want you to know, Jules. The first is that I like you the way you are. Whether you stumble over your words or choose to be silent.

  “The second is this is the real me. No matter wh
at you might ever hear about how I used to be, the me right here in front of you is the real Avery. Don’t ever doubt it. I am bossy. I am controlling. Getting to know me better is not going to change that. Getting less nervous around me isn’t going to change it, either. The last thing is important. Perhaps the most important. When you call me ‘sir’, it wakes up the beast and gets the game rolling. It’s you telling me in no uncertain terms that you want me to take control.”

  His lips touched mine again, but I spoke through the kiss. “Aren’t you tired of my inexperience by now? You never get off.”

  I could feel his grin against my mouth. “Let me worry about me, Jules. I happen to like the slow burn. I’m having fun. Are you?”

  Yes, yes, I was. All of this, everything, was so far outside my experience. I felt like a grand adventurer. Feeling things I’d never suspected were real, doing things I never thought I’d do. The mundane things – seeing a play in New York, and the absolutely crazy moment of meeting the mother of a man I really liked.

  My answer had to be everything, didn’t it? Not just words, but the right words. “Yes, sir. I am having fun.”

  I got stuck in my head, for a second, wondering how this could possibly be my life. But it was, it was. Avery was giving me these simple codes, keys to unlock my worries, freedom to let those worries go.

  When he murmured into my ear, “I want to tie you to my bed again,” I let him pull me from the couch and usher me down the hallway to his room.

  He switched the cold metal cuffs for soft red cloth ties, and I liked the way they looked against my skin. Gentle but dramatic.

  “I love when your eyes get so big, Jules.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t think I could.

  Once again, I was naked and Avery was clothed. Pretty sure it was the look in his eyes that was making mine huge. He looked feral, like he might devour me. Like he wanted to lose control.

  He kissed my forehead. And each eyelid. My nose and my cheeks. Sweet, chaste kisses, as though he was very fond of me. The actual touch of his lips on my skin felt like the opposite of what I saw in his eyes.

  He spent long enough kissing my lips that I couldn’t help but kiss back, wishing I could tangle my hands into his hair and keep his mouth joined with mine forever. Instead I had to content myself with our tangled tongues.

  “Keep making those noises, Jules, and I might do this until we starve to death.”

  I was making noises, little rushing breathless pants, a mewling in the back of my throat that sounded like begging without words. The sounds of desperate drowning, as I desperately drowned in him. His hands were on my skin, the fingers of one hand holding my chin in place as he continued to fuck my mouth with his tongue, his other hand at my shoulder for a second, before his fingers stroked down my side and slid beneath me until he held a handful of my ass. Then he moved so he was on top of me, his knees straddling my hips, his one hand still holding my chin, the other flat against my back, fingers flexed so his nails dug into my skin. I arched away from those tiny points of pain, hips thrusting until my cock brushed against his trousers.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” he said, shifting just enough that my cock strained into empty air. “This is a slow seduction, Jules. Patience, love.”

  Love. He called me that.

  His lips were on mine again, nibbling, shared breath hot between our mouths.

  To be kissed like this… I had never imagined it. Good thing, too, because I’m certain I would have imagined ‘wet’ and ‘slimy’ and ‘uncomfortable’, and this was none of those. This was… oh, my God, his tongue was inside of me, tracing the shape of my teeth, teasing my own tongue with firm strokes, making the rest of me want more of this, but in different places, obscene places, dirty places.

  I vaguely knew what I was longing for. I wanted to touch myself, to feel more of this, but without the shame I experienced with masturbation. How could that be? Was it somehow less shameful to get off with another person, a witness? Was masturbation shameful because it was done alone? Or because of the things I thought about, the things I imagined wanting? A demon who took away all choice and will, who hurt me in the most blissful ways, who made me squirm while insisting I feel so much… how could trapped make the anxiety go away? It made no sense. Trapped was something to be anxious about.

  Avery was my demon. He trapped me, and I wasn’t anxious or nervous or any of the spectrum of negative emotions I expected to feel.

  I felt longing, and yearning, and wanting.

  His hands were moving now, touching and teasing all of my skin, it seemed. He brushed his fingers over my chest, and my stomach tightened. He did it again, only now his fingernails were involved, carving sensuous hot trails first around my nipples, then along each flank, and this made my calves tense and my toes curl. He looked into my eyes, and my cock still strained for something to rut against. He let out a soft laugh, as if he knew exactly what he was doing, as if he knew how he was effecting not only my body, but also the inside of my head.

  “Are you nervous, Jules?”

  I shook my head.

  I was in a headspace where nervous didn’t exist. The only thing on my radar was Avery.

  He let his hands rest just below my raised arms, thumbs on my chest, fingers curved firmly around the sides of my ribs, as if encasing me with flesh and bone. He moved both hands toward my waist, and a lighter pressure would have tickled, but it didn’t – it was a maddening slow exploration, every finger dragging over a rib, then settling into the space between, and then dragging over the next rib. A massage, almost, until his hands reached my waist, his thumbs digging hard into the creases between my thighs and my groin. And that was like a tickle, an unbearable leap of nerve endings. My torso heaved into the air as I arched. My knees came up to rest against his back. I grunted out a breath, all my muscles seizing at once, a climax of some sort, not an orgasm, but not unlike one, either. His thumbs dug harder into those spaces, and a spasm went through me, a feeling like I might gag or piss myself, or some combination of the two. My legs flailed in the air, straightening and then bending again, my knees bumping Avery’s back with more force than I intended.

  It made him smile. “That’s the spot,” he murmured, lifting his hands away and reaching for my face. He stroked my cheek with one gentle finger. “The place where touch alone might drive you mad.”

  He leaned forward and licked my collarbone and then the hollow of my throat. “I want to tie your ankles, too. Can I do that, Jules?”

  As if I wasn’t already helpless under his spell.

  I nodded, eyes wide open as I watched him pull lengths of red fabric from the nightstand drawer. He reached into the drawer again, and, I must have made a sound, a hissed in breath or something, when I saw the shining silver blades of a pair of heavy-duty shears.

  He set them on the top of the nightstand. “Safety, Jules. If you say ‘red’ I won’t attempt to untie you, I’ll just cut the bindings. If they feel too tight, that’s a yellow, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Words, please.”

  “Too tight is yellow. I understand, sir.”

  “The word to stop everything?”

  My gaze moved to the spill of red fabric he held in his hands. “Red, sir.”

  “There’s my good, beautiful boy.”

  A wave of pleasure roared through me when he said that, a feeling of warm contentment. This was a sex act, and I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t embarrassing myself. ‘Slow seduction’ he’d said, and I loved not just the sound of those words, but also how his saying them absolved me of the possibility of doing anything wrong.

  If I was supposed to do something, Avery would give me an order. He would take the guesswork out of the equation. All the social responsibility belonged to him.

  His hands traced the line of my leg, literally from my balls to my ankles. He found the place behind my knee that was ticklish enough for me to jerk my leg away, and this time he didn’t repeat the touch, just blew me a kiss and moved on to
ward my foot. He wrapped the center of the strip of fabric around my right ankle, once, twice, three times, tied a simple square knot, and stretched the ends to the bedpost. He did the same to my left leg, including the touch to the back of my knee and the blowing of a kiss.

  He undressed down to his boxer briefs, and a wave of heat went over and through me as I watched.

  He was, God, the sexiest human being I’d ever seen.

  Which, I know, I’ve thought this before. Maybe I was destined to think it every time he got undressed.

  “I want to know all of you, Jules. Touch you and taste you with my hands and tongue and teeth, and I want you to let me know what you like best.”

  I cringed a little, wondering what he meant by that. I imagined saying, “I like that,” every single second, because I suspected I would like anything he did. My forehead must have wrinkled while I worried this idea.

  “You can tell me with noise, love,” he said. “If you can’t find words.”

  Oh. A part of me thought that might be embarrassing, but I didn’t know how not to make noise, honestly. Even the embarrassing noises.

  He touched me everywhere, and every so often dug his thumbs into that space between my groin and my thigh. Something about having my ankles tied made me buck my hips and nearly howl when he did that. There was a nerve or something right there that reduced me to an animalistic state of trapped thrashing. Part of my brain sparked with the notion of unbearable, and yet my cock leaked and he stopped before I could even comprehend the word ‘red.’

  At some point he had that little jar between his hands, and then a finger slid into me, and my internal muscles flexed from the shock of having another person’s parts inside of me. Avery is touching the inside of my body. That thought had me moaning out loud.

  Avery’s voice then, a murmur, a soft growling purr. “You are the most beautiful boy of all.”

  His voice, his words, added another layer of sensation, a vibrating pleasure of spreading warmth from my ears to my mouth, and flooding into my chest.