Page 123 of String Boys

He cried then, helplessly, like he did sometimes when they were in bed and Kelly had to leave, or like Kelly did, usually their first day alone for a long week. His body had to purge, the loneliness, the anger, the things it held back when the other half of his heart was far away, connected by the fragile string of love.

SOMETHING ABOUTtheir trip to Mendocino was different.

Maybe it was the hotel room—small and close, with the roar of the sea right outside. They ran on the beach together in the morning, did something in the nearby town in the afternoon, and then….

There was nothing but them and the king-sized bed.

All Seth knew was that the evening they arrived—Kelly driving, of course, because it was something he’d still never had time to learn—they had checked in and set the bags on the ground, and Kelly had suddenly been… hot.

His skin had been heated from the car, of course, but Seth couldn’t look at him without his heart hammering in his chest and his breath catching. He’d dropped his suitcase in the middle of the floor and stared.

“What?” Kelly rubbed irritably at his nose. “Cliffhanger?”

Seth squinted at him. “No.”

“What?”

Seth’s skin prickled—everywhere. His scalp, his neck, his shoulders, his buttocks… hiscock.

He opened his mouth and closed it, and finally managed to croak, “I want.”

“You want what?” But Kelly was smirking, his eyes lighting up from within, and he removed the baseball hat he’d worn to shade his face.

“I want.” Seth licked his lips, and his palms broke into a sweat. He could hardly breathe.

They’d gone out for dinner after his graduation, and then everybody had gone home, leaving Seth in his dorm room again.

Alone.

He’d shown up for Kelly’s graduation from junior college and slid in through the crowd, ignoring anybody who looked like they knew him. They didn’t know him, even if he’d had classes with them in high school, in junior high, in grade school.

The only people who knew him were sitting in the middle, saving a seat for him.

He took it, and Chloe clambered over Lily and Lulu’s laps to come coo on his. It was just that easy. Every damned time.

After the morning graduation, they’d gone out to eat again, mostly, Seth suspected, so he could talk to the girls and hold Chloe. Lily and Lulu were finishing up their first year of high school, and they wanted Seth to know that they were tied for third in their class, right behind Sheila Thompson and Alex Crawford, and that theywouldovertake their foes on the field of academic battle if they had to leave blood on the ground.

Agnes had rolled her eyes and whispered, “I get to be inplaysnext year. Eighth grade is gonnarock.”

And Chloe—Chloe had clung to him, humming her favorite lullaby, saying his name occasionally and showing him the new stuffie he’d sent her the week before.

They’d had to pry her out of his arms when he’d gotten into Kelly’s Toyota to leave.

And that had been it. So familiar. Seth comes, Seth throws everybody into an uproar, Seth leaves. He’d chatted with Kelly, catching up as human beings, listening to him destress about finals, filling in with details about Italy they hadn’t discussed yet, and it had all been very… normal.

Very… everyday. Happy, but with that undercurrent of not enough that had tempered every heartbeat of his life for the last five years.

Until this moment here, when Seth couldn’t fucking breathe, and his cock felt like it was going to split at the seams, and Kelly was all he could see.

“You want?” Kelly asked, his voice suddenly gruff, low.

A man’s voice.

Seth’s mouth was so dry. “I want.”

He took two strides across the room. Kelly met him halfway, and they were on each other, devouring, voracious. Seth couldn’t taste him enough, couldn’t touch his skin enough. Their clothes fell where they stood, Kelly’s capable hands splitting Seth’s old T-shirt from the neck down where it fluttered to his feet.

“Lube,” Kelly muttered, shoving Seth’s pants down around his ankles while Seth kicked off his shoes. “Now. Not joking. Fucking now.”