Page 41 of Catcher's Lock

At the end of May, I drive him to San Francisco on a foggy Wednesday night, and he checks us into an overpriced airport hotel with an early morning shuttle.

He’s been hyper and overly chatty all day, running through our best memories like he can make up for nine months of slow, preoccupied withdrawal. I don’t even try to keep up. Everything I want to say has been carefully buried, the graves covered with flowers. My youthful daydreams have become a garden of denial I’ve spent years cultivating in a doomed attempt to protect myself from my desire.

He emerges dripping from the shower, towel clad and scrubbing at his hair, and I allow myself one last covetous glance before I flee into the vacated bathroom, willing him to be asleep before I return.

It’s a futile hope—and a lie.

The bedside lamp casts a small halo of light, and he’s sprawled in his bed with the quilt shoved to the side and only the white sheet covering his naked body.Barely. He looks up from his phone with a grin and rolls to face me as I scramble under my own covers.

I plug in my phone and set the alarm with absurdly clumsy hands, conscious of his eyes on me. We’ve shared a room a hundred times. Why is it suddenly different now?

Because it might be the last one.

“Are you gonna miss me?” he asks when I finally settle.

“You know I am.” Denying it would be farcical. Cocooned in the welcome shadows and the soft rush of the air conditioner, I slowly start to unwind. We stare at each other across the circle of amber light.

“I think you’ll survive. I think someone else will come alongonce I’m out of the way and sweep you off your feet.” His tone is soft and musing, but it’s the first time he’s voiced the lopsided longing between us, and faint alarm bells echo in my chest.

I don’t want someone else.I’ll wait forever if you let me.

“Maybe I’ll finally get to find out what it feels like to handle someone else’s dick,” I say, scrambling to lighten the sudden weight in the room. His gaze sharpens.

“Does it scare you?” he asks. “The idea of a hard cock that’s not yours? Do you think you’d know what to do with it?”

“I handle my own just fine.”What is happening right now?My attempted laugh comes out a croak, then dries up entirely at the next words out of his mouth.

“Want me to show you?” His hand trails down his bare chest and teases the top of the sheet draped over his hips. “It could be a going-away present.”

“I’m—” I lick my lips. “I’m not going away. I don’t need a present.” There’s no way he’s serious, and I am about to come undone at how foolishly I want this.

Ignoring my inane babbling, he arches a brow in challenge. I can barely parse the unspoken question, let alone formulate a coherent answer. My blood is a cacophony in my ears, and my brain is lost in the typhoon.

Please.

Don’t…

He slides his hand under the sheet.

…stop.

With a shift of his hips, he sheds the flimsy fabric barrier, and…

I. Can’t. Breathe.

He’s always been careless with his body. I’ve seen him naked a hundred times—at the river and the Sweetwater baths, peeling himself in and out of his wetsuit, in the locker room at school.

But never like this. Never sculpted and simmering and gildedin the lamplight like an offering from a pagan god.

I’ve never seen himhard.

He’s hard.

My own dick lurches to attention as he wraps his long fingers around his erection, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away if the world were ending around me.

Which maybe it is.

With a languid, honeyed grip, he starts to stroke himself, and everything locks up inside me like I’ve been hit with an electric current. I’m captivated by the flexing muscles in his forearms and the play of his fingers as they sweep up and over his crown, lost in cruel fantasy. His aerialist abs ripple and flex, candescent with sweat, and his ass clenches as his heels drag against the bed.