Page 37

Asher

Knowing Calisto needed time before facing his family, we returned to my friend’s flat rather than the house. I shoved his phone into his hands and told him to call his mother, though. The conversation was brief, but I knew Calisto felt better for making it.

Once he’d hung up, I substituted the phone for a burger and fries—Deliveroo having come good while he’d been on the phone. He raised an eyebrow as I devoured my own—chicken, not beef, but it was still a burger—but didn’t comment. Either he realized it might be a touchy subject, or he was just too damn tired.

It was funny how confronting your own mortality could make you reconsider the important things in life. I wouldn’t drop my healthy lifestyle altogether, but the occasional diversion from my strict diet probably wouldn’t make me drop dead before I was forty. Probably.

A shower came next. Calisto’s token protest that he wasn’t a child as I stripped him out of his clothing and pushed him under the warm water lasting only until I undressed and got in with him. He sagged under my touch as I turned him gently to face the wall and got to work on soaping up his back. Bathing together was a first for both of us. I only wished it had come under better circumstances.

“I killed her,” Calisto said after less than a minute.

My hands paused on his skin before I caught myself and resumed the slow movements meant to soothe as well as clean. “I know.”

Calisto hung his head, the water running in rivulets over his skin. “I’d decided not to. I had another option. But when she mentioned my family, I saw red. She would have stopped if she’d seen the girl move. She would have realized I’d done what she’d asked, and she would no longer have had a reason to send men after my family.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“What happened?” I asked gently. “Tell me everything.”

By the time he’d relayed the full story, we were out of the shower and in matching fluffy bathrobes. I’d found some hot chocolate at the back of a cupboard, Calisto’s hands wrapped around the mug as he sat cross-legged on the bed. “What would you have done?” he asked. “You wouldn’t have killed her, would you?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It’s easy to think that you’re not capable of something, but when it comes down to it…” When Calisto’s fallen expression said it wasn’t the answer he’d been looking for, I backtracked. “Let’s look at it another way. If you hadn’t done it, do we honestly think we’d be sitting here now?”

Calisto took a sip of his hot chocolate while he thought about it. “I guess we’ll never know.”

“You said it yourself,” I reminded him, “that her soul was black, that you knew she wouldn’t keep her word. Her threatening your family may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but you already knew how things were likely to end.”

I plucked the hot chocolate out of his grasp and placed the mug on the bedside cabinet so I could take hold of his hands. “I’m alive. Ben’s alive. You’re alive. That’s all that matters. Those three things prove you did the right thing.”

“I guess…”

“No guessing about it.” I pulled Calisto’s right hand to my lips and pressed a kiss to the back of it. “And I’ll start every day by telling you that, if I need to.”

A smile pulled at Calisto’s lips. “Before or after your Tai Chi session?”

“After. You’re never awake before.”

“I’m sometimes awake during. I like to watch. I might have to set my alarm in future.”

“I’ll video it for you, so you don’t have to.”

“Now there’s an offer!” Calisto’s flirtatious air faded as quickly as it had begun. “I haven’t told you everything.”

“No?”

He tugged his hands back, and I let him. “I did something stupid again.”

“What did you do?”

He took a deep breath. “Remember how I told you I could see everyone’s souls, both in that room and in the space between worlds?”

“Yeah.”

“One looked different,” he said. “And I instantly knew it must be Baxter’s.”

“Right…?”

He toyed with his fingers, his gaze fixed on them. “I don’t know if I was high on the power, or what it was, but all I could think was that I didn’t want Baxter dead, that he more than anyone deserved a second chance.” Calisto shook his head. “I told you I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“What did you do?”

“I grabbed his soul and pulled it over to this world. I thought he’d just appear in the room with us, but he didn’t.”

“And?” I prompted when Calisto fell silent.

“I haven’t seen him since. It was a stupid thing to do when he doesn’t have a body here. I don’t know what I did to him.”

“Maybe it just didn’t work.”

“He would have appeared. He’s just… gone.” There was so much sorrow in Calisto’s voice that there was nothing else to do but pull him into an embrace and hold him tight. “I never fucking learn. Edmund… Baxter…”

At least O’Reilly hadn’t been on that list. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. You do everything for the right reason, and that’s what matters.”

I’d assumed Calisto to be sleeping when I crept into the bedroom. As I eased myself into the bed with as little noise as possible, he proved me wrong by rolling over to face me. “Make me forget today,” he said.

I didn’t need to ask what method he expected me to use, immediately knowing what he wanted. Mainly because I wanted it too. Whatever else had happened today, we’d acknowledged a bond between us that would never be broken. One that deserved a celebration. It didn’t matter that he’d been slower to realize it. I would have waited however long it took. I would have been his friend. Or anything he needed me to be.

This was better, though. This was way better.

I rolled on top of him, pressing him into the bed with my weight, my mouth hot and hungry on his. I’d always held back to a certain extent with Calisto, keenly aware that if I proved too much, that if I broadcasted the true depth of my feelings, it might send him running in the opposite direction, and not willing to risk it when crumbs were better than nothing.

I wasn’t holding back anymore.

He opened to my tongue, hands fastening on my biceps like he needed an anchor. I would be that for him. In bed. Out of bed. Personally. Professionally. Whatever he needed.

“Jesus!” he said when we stopped for a breather.

“Asher,” I corrected with a smile.

He laughed as I knew he would, tipping his head back to find my gaze. “Are you naked again?” Rather than waiting for an answer, he skimmed his hands down my back until he had twin handfuls of naked arse and I arched into his touch.

I nuzzled into his neck, his skin sweet with a slight tang of salt. “You’re overdressed.” Overdressed was a single pair of briefs, Calisto keeping his underwear on when he’d tumbled into bed, but my point still stood.

Calisto wriggled beneath me, every slide of his skin against mine sending electric thrills of sensation through me as he maneuvered the briefs off. He combined discarding them over the edge of the bed with switching the lamp on. “I want to see you. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of looking at you.”

“Tell me that in thirty years’ time when I have a paunch and I’m going bald.”

“I will,” he said with such certainty that it made my heart sing. “Because I already know you’ll be one of those men who’ll age like fine wine.”

“Better keep Margarita away then, or there’ll be nothing left of me.”

I had a moment of concern I might have gone too far by bringing his family into it, before Calisto laughed. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

He moved slightly, a gasp escaping my lips as our cocks rubbed together, the smile on his face saying it had been deliberate. I kissed him again, tasting the smugness on his lips and loving it.

“Did you mean it,” he asked, “when you said you were versatile? Or were you just saying it because you thought that’s what I wanted to hear?”

“I meant it. I don’t lie, remember?” Which had been proved not quite true in recent times. Luckily, Calisto didn’t pick me up on it.

“So why did we never switch things up?”

“You never seemed like you wanted to.”

Calisto gave that statement some thought as his fingers moved in lazy circles over my abdomen, the move promising to touch my cock without ever getting round to it. “I wanted to,” he finally said.

“So why didn’t you?”

Calisto’s fingers finally found their way lower, his grip sure as he teased me to full hardness. “I don’t know. Probably a hundred different reasons. All of which now seem pathetic.” He rolled me onto my back, shoving the covers back to leave me on full display. “Please tell me there’s lube here.”

“Bedside cabinet,” I said. “There're condoms as well.”

Calisto found both items, wasting no time in covering his palm with lube and getting back to the important job of stroking me. “I’m going to fuck you,” he said, his lips curving into a smile.

“Okay.” The mere thought of it had pre-cum oozing from my cock. Calisto swooped on it like a starving man who had no other sustenance, bringing it to his lips and making quite the show of sucking it off his finger in an act more arousing than any porn I’d ever seen.

Things moved quickly after that until Calisto was braced over me, all bulging biceps and a look on his face that said he was the luckiest man in the world. If it hadn’t been the wrong time, I would have argued that. That label belonged to me.

A pillow under my arse left me at the perfect angle as he penetrated me, constantly checking my expression for any sign of discomfort. “Fuck me,” I said when he was too slow, too careful, and I felt like I might explode with desire. “Make me yours.”

That did it, Calisto’s hips snapping forward to bury himself deep. “Yes!” I said, already grasping at him to pull him deeper still. “Fuck me.”

There was no slow and careful after that. Just two men working together to achieve the same aim. I stroked my cock in time with Calisto’s thrusts, stopping when there was a danger of me coming before him. Sometimes we kissed. Sometimes he rested his forehead against mine, his breathing coming in ragged pants. Sometimes, we stared into each other’s eyes. At one point, Calisto muttered something about “fire, not ice.” I didn’t ask for an explanation, too lost in a world of ecstasy with the promise of more still to come.

Despite my careful edging, I came first, my orgasm triggering Calisto’s as he thrust deep for one last time before shuddering on top of me. “I love you,” he said, his face buried in my neck, and what felt like the slight dampness of tears.

I stroked his back and reconsidered everything I’d always believed about what it meant to be happy. “I love you, too.”