by Peter Styles
I pulled the car over. When it was parked, I looked over at Luke. His face was relaxed, head on his jacket that was pooled against the window.
I got out of the car, the door slamming behind me. Luke startled awake at the sound.
The sun had gone down, the air chilly now. I crossed my arms, wrapping them around myself as I walked off from the car. My skin was tingling, something like panic bubbling in my stomach. It was the driving, the whiplash of emotions, Luke being angry at me when, hell, I was kind of angry at him. It was a lot of things—it was physical now.
My stomach churned. Luke’s car door opened, his feet against the gravel louder than the traffic on the side of us.
His hand clasped on my shoulder and spun me around. His eyes flickered across my face, his expression almost as angry as his voice. “What the hell are you doing?”
“What am I doing? Are you fucking kidding me?”
Luke’s mouth fell open. “You—we’re in Seattle, why did you stop driving?”
“Sorry that I needed a second.”
I turned my back to him. My heart beat fast in my chest, the thumping so loud I was sure that Luke could hear it, could hear how close it was to breaking.
Get ahold of yourself, I snapped silently.
Luke huffed in annoyance. The heartache was starting to shift to panic, to meld with the fear that I’d never be able to see him again.
I knew Luke—I knew that if I let him leave, if we stopped this trip with things like this, we’d never make it. Hell, we barely had a snowball’s chance of making it as it was. I wouldn’t be able to get him to talk to me, to try with me, once we went back to our regular lives.
The knowledge hurt.
“What are you doing?” he asked again.
I pushed the hurt down; anger came rearing up to take its place. I spun around and jabbed a finger at his chest. “What am I doing? You have the nerve to ask me that! You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.”
“What?”
“You’re living a lie, Luke! You’re a big, fat queer and you’re pretending like that doesn’t matter!”
Luke’s face fell and then hardened. “You have no right to say that to me.”
“Fuck, I have more of a right to ask you than you do me. You should be asking yourself what you’re doing.”
Luke knocked my arm away and glared at me. The look was vicious, cutting straight through me, like bright hot iron through skin. “You’ve been lying to me!”
“Oh, fuck off. You can be angry with me all you want. But you’re the one lying. You’re lying to yourself.”
I swallowed hard, trying to quell the burst of anger that was draining from me quickly. “This isn’t the time, though, and—”
“Fuck that,” Luke snapped. “Say what you want to say.”
My eyes burned and I blinked rapidly to keep anything from falling. I felt a bit on fire. “Do you even feel anything for me?”
Luke swallowed hard. He turned his glare to the ground. The moon was bright enough that I could see the way his bottom lip was trapped between his teeth, the way his hands were curled into fists by his side. The road was silent now, no passing cars to make Luke’s silence less harsh.
He didn’t say anything.
I closed the space between us and kissed him. It was rough, hard, and I felt the way his gasp flew into my mouth.
As soon as he started kissing me back, I pulled away. “Tell me that meant nothing to you.”
Luke said nothing. He glared at me, eyes hard as he searched my face for something. I don’t know if he found it, but then he had his hands fisted in my shirt and he was pressed against me, kissing me as hard as I had kissed him.
I knocked him away and shoved him against the car door.
“You’re a hypocrite,” I spat.
He glared at me and opened his mouth to argue. I cut him off with a kiss.
He bit my bottom lip; I shoved my tongue into his mouth.
I couldn’t tell if it was his hands or mine that undid our belts, but then our pants were pushed down and I had my hand curled around Luke’s growing erection. It was only at half-mast, but a few hard squeezes as we kissed and he was ready to go.
Luke had one hand tightly wound in my hair, his fingernails scraping angrily against my scalp, while the other was inside my boxers, teasing, soft movements that had me aching within moments.
We slid each other out of our boxers. The cold wind bit at my bare skin, but the fire beneath was more than enough to keep me warm. Luke’s hand wrapped around both of us; the harsh slide of rough skin against our wet, gliding dicks had us both canting our hips forward, fucking hard into his fist.
One of my hands clung to Luke’s shoulder, my fingernails digging into the material of his shirt, and the other one closed around the parts of our cocks that Luke’s hand couldn’t. It was rough, and too dry, and Luke kept biting my lip purposefully.
I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t care; I didn’t want to breathe. I just wanted to feel something besides this horrible, furious ache inside of my chest.
Luke’s thumb slid across the slit of my cock and I cursed loudly, yanking away from his kiss to mouth at his neck. He had the fading bruises of our time together just underneath his shirt collar. I bit hard on his upper neck and sucked a hard kiss on him as his hips started jutting forward with renewed purpose.
I littered his neck with purple and red marks, biting and licking, uncaring about what parts of him I claimed as mine. If this was all I was going to get—a harsh hand fuck against a car, when we were both so angry we could cry—then I was going to make it worth everything I could.
Luke’s head was thrown back against the car, slow, languid moans pulling out of his throat as his hips fought against his hand’s pace. I could feel my own hips circling, desperate, smearing precome against every bit of Luke’s skin I touched.
Luke’s hips froze. “Max—”
I cut him off and kissed him. It was nothing more than open mouths pressed together, hands tightening, and then it was over. We came over each other’s fists, both of our hips crashing into each other.
The high wore off in seconds.
I tore away from Luke and wiped my hand on my boxers, quickly putting myself away. I redid my belt with my back to Luke.
My chest felt hollow. For the briefest of moments, I wished I’d never met him.
Luke cleared his throat. I heard the car door open. I heard him climb in, slowly close it.
I took a deep breath and went around to the driver’s side.
Luke was staring out the windshield, his face hard. He spoke as I turned the key over in the ignition. “You don’t get to turn this around on me.”
I scoffed. Luke glared, but didn’t turn to me.
“You’re the one who lied. You tried to sabotage my career.” Luke tugged on his seatbelt, fingers closing around the strap hard enough that his knuckles turned white.
“I did not sabotage your career, you idiot.”
“You took every opportunity to call Harris,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. The anger from earlier was back full force, heady and heavy as it clouded my thoughts and vision. “Your only real purpose here was trying to impress the boss.”
“I don’t fucking need to impress the boss!”
“Oh, cause your work ethic is so spectacular!” Luke still wouldn’t look at me.
“Because he’s my fucking uncle!”
If Luke had been frozen before, this was something entirely new. His whole body locked; he didn’t even blink.
Regret finally cut through the anger. Jesus, out of everything I could have said, why had I said that? “Luke, that’s—”
“Fucking drive. Or I will.” He finally turned and looked at me.
He didn’t look angry at all.
My hand shook as I pulled us back onto the road. Luke’s quiet was deafening; I had ruined everything.
14
Luke
Max was Harris’s nephew.
&n
bsp; I couldn’t tell if this feeling, thick and slimy and crawling through my veins, was shock at the revelation, or the complete and utter despair of being unsurprised. Of course Max was related to the boss—showed up late, had a bad attitude, always somehow getting ahead.
I’d thought I was getting to know the real Max over this trip. I had only been falling for a lie.
This whole trip was nothing more than a joke. I had never stood a chance at promotion against the boss’s own family.
I was probably going to get fired or demoted. I’d been fucking with the boss’s nephew, and, fuck, did we even have policies in place at work for having a relationship with a coworker? I had never bothered looking into it before.
Max probably knew; he’d probably tell everyone that I had seduced him, the dumb gay idiot, and now I’d be fired, and everyone would know why.
I wanted to curl in onto myself. Wanted to be asleep in my own bed, weeks before this trip had ever happened. I wished I had never met Max Stephens.
We were nearing my neighborhood when he spoke. “I’m sorry,” Max said lowly. “I knew this would look bad. I know what it looks like, but—I didn’t get this job because Harris is my uncle, and it makes no difference, but I know what it looks like, and that’s why I never said anything.”
I glanced at him, then looked away without speaking.
Max slapped his hands on the steering wheel. I jumped, but kept my gaze focused on the blurry scenery outside of the window.
We were only ten minutes out. After forty hours in the car with Max in the past week, ten minutes should have felt like nothing.
Instead, it hurt.
I thought about waking up that last day in the motel, Max still asleep. We had been pressed together, legs intertwined, his breathing deep and heavy and relaxed.
A few times during this trip, I had thought that maybe this something between us—this maybe, this hopeful, this could be—would grow into something bigger.
I didn’t know how it would work, logically. I didn’t know if it could work, logically. But for a few times during the trip, I’d really, truly wanted it to work.
He had lied to me. He had lied to me again and again, and he had wasted my time, sabotaged my career. He had pulled me out of my shell, just to make sure that I’d be stepped on.
My throat felt itchy and full, my eyes burning. I hadn’t meant to, but I had trusted Max. And now—
He pulled the car up to my road. The apartment looked exactly the same as it had when I left. My old truck was parked across the street.
I swallowed heavily. Then I did it again when the first time really didn’t help.
I wanted to throw myself across the car and kiss Max. I could still taste him on my lips from earlier, could feel the bright ache of the bruises he’d sucked into my neck, could still feel the phantom pulse of his warm body wriggling against mine. I wanted to kiss him, wanted to forgive him. I wanted him to come to the hospital with me.
I looked away. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Luke—”
I slid from the car and got my bag out of the backseat. I hesitated before closing the door.
Max’s eyes were bloodshot. His beard was straggly now, in desperate need of a shave. He looked—sad.
He’d always looked like he was one step ahead, like he was telling a joke no one else knew. He didn’t look like that now.
I wanted to kiss him.
I looked away. “Goodnight.”
He called after me; I ignored him. I walked straight to my truck, digging in my bag for the keys. I drove away before Max had pulled his car from the curb.
The route to the hospital was unfamiliar, but that wasn’t the problem—the problem was every mile I drove was a mile I had put between Max and me, a mile that I had left him behind.
I had thought something could become real between us, but now I knew that that could never happen. It stung.
It wasn’t just that he’d lied; it wasn’t just that Harris was his uncle. The problem was that Max was right.
How could I ever commit to anyone, how could anything be real, when I wasn’t able to actually be me?
This whole thing had been a pipe dream.
For the first time since all this had started happening, since I’d heard that Grandpa was in the hospital, since Max had kissed me, I felt myself give in to the overwhelming feelings pressing at my every limb.
I made it to the hospital fifteen minutes later with shaking hands and a red, puffy face.
There was too much to do, too many things to fix, to live in some fantasy world. I was here now. I needed to focus on what really mattered, and pipe dreams, and boys with pretty faces, weren’t what mattered.
At least not for me.
15
Max
As insane as the road trip had been, it stopped mattering within moments.
One second, everything was high intensity, and Luke’s warm hands on my body, and cold shoulder when we weren’t touching, and then—he was driving away with only a terse goodnight between us.
It had been four days since that night, and I hadn’t heard a thing from Luke.
He hadn’t even come in to work.
Luke never missed work; he had perfect attendance, which was why he was so pissed when he thought that I’d reported him for being late. It wasn’t like the company put five-minute tardies into our files but, fuck, Luke normally acted like it.
But then Monday passed, and no one had even heard from him; he hadn’t even bothered calling.
Tuesday passed, and this time, at least, Tina said that Luke had called and said he wasn’t coming in because of a family emergency.
I asked if it was his grandfather. Tina had frowned and shrugged; she hadn’t bothered asking.
By Wednesday, I was seconds away from pulling my hair out by the roots. I hadn’t shaved, hadn’t eaten, or slept, or done a bit of work since we came back. I couldn’t—every time I tried to do something normal, it felt wrong.
I was wrong.
Luke had ruined me, and now he didn’t even have the decency to show up to work for me to be mad at.
Thursday after work, I still hadn’t heard heard from him. He hadn’t come into work or replied to my texts. I had only sent two—
Is everyone okay?
And: Can we talk?
He had read both. Normally, leaving me on read would have me making a pithy joke about him being a basic Scorpio bitch, but now—with how we'd left things—
I felt sick to my stomach every time I thought about it.
He owed it to me to tell me that everyone was at least alive, didn’t he? Fuck him; he knew I cared. Could have cared. Did care.
It was semantics—I was worried. I wanted to tell him that I cared. He wouldn’t pick up the phone.
I thought about asking Harris to call him in, so I could just have a second. But then I remembered his face when he'd found out that I hadn’t overnighted the package, when he’d thought I was manipulating him, and forced the idea away. Good intentions and whatnot.
And I owed it to him to promise that nothing bad would happen. I knew he didn’t believe that my relationship to Harris didn’t affect my job here, but he had honestly thought I was sabotaging him. I had to make sure he knew that when he came back to work, there would be a job waiting for him.
I waited until work ended on Thursday before driving over to his apartment. The ugly blue truck was parked there, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
I made it all the way to the door before I realized I had no fucking idea which apartment was his.
“Please be a giant fucking nerd,” I prayed, reading through the list of tenants with buzzers.
And, like the insane rule-follower that Luke was, there was a Wilson, L listed on the box. I quickly tapped the buzzer a few times.
At first, no one answered. I did it again and again until he finally did.
“Fuck yeah,” I muttered under my breath. I looked at the apartment number again—5B—and then went i
nside.
I took the stairs two at a time.
When I made it to 5B, I knocked hard and then started to panic.
What the fuck was I doing? Luke didn’t want to talk to me. And I was here to—what? Say hi? How was he even going to take me saying that his job was fine? The guy was a paranoid nutcase; he would probably take that as a threat.
This was a horrible idea.
I turned to leave.
The apartment door opened. I froze.
“Uh, hey?”
I turned around slowly. It wasn’t Luke. Relief filled me. “Oh, sorry. Wrong apartment.”
“No worries—” The guy stopped, narrowing his eyes. “You look familiar.”
“I’m not,” I said quickly.
He cocked his eyes. “No, yeah, I definitely know you.”
I shook my head quickly and started back toward the stairs. “Nope! Stranger. Wrong door.”
“You’re—holy shit! You’re Max, right? From college? Luke’s Max?”
My whole body thrummed like I had been electrocuted. Slowly, I repeated, “Luke’s Max?”
The guy laughed, snapping his fingers. “Yeah, that’s you. Arch nemesis life ruiner, right?”
There was a pang of hurt, but I brushed it off. “That’s me.”
“Ah, awesome.” The guy was still grinning. “I’m Nick, Luke’s roommate.”
“Um. Hey?”
“Hey.” The guy looked around the hallway and asked, “You looking for Luke?”
I wondered if it would be too weird to say no. I shrugged indifferently.
He nodded, as if that made sense. “He’s at the hospital. The one on the corner of Brand and King? If you need to see him.”
I swallowed hard. I didn’t need to see him. It wasn’t important. And it was a bad idea.
I thanked him and practically ran away. I made it back to my car with my heart slamming in my chest.
Then I drove to the hospital.
This was crazy. I was going all the way to the hospital, where he was with his ailing grandparents, and going to do what? Ask him when he’s coming back to work?
I groaned. I got out of the car anyway, and went to the front of the hospital. I paced by the benches, trying to work up the courage to make a fucking decision.