Most of my guys were downstairs in the lounge, sitting around, chatting, playing pool and table soccer, but I moved past them to the upper floor and my and Shane’s bedroom. I told Shane I would shower and didn’t wait for a reply.
The bathroom was amazing, and I turned on all of the showerheads at once as soon as I had stripped off my clothes. Water poured from above and sprayed me from three sides, heating up the bathroom and filling it with a cloud of steam. My head remained as foggy as it had been at the bar, my vision narrow and mind scattered.
It was only when I dried myself and put on my underwear and an old pair of shorts and stepped into the bedroom that all the fog cleared. The moment made me think that simplicity was a literal, tangible thing, like an object you placed in your space that filtered out all your doubts and insecurities.
Shane sat in the bed, wearing a T-shirt, his legs covered by the thick duvet, a book open in his lap, and locks of messy hair falling over his glasses to obscure his vision. He was bathed in the soft glow of the reading lamp on top of his nightstand, and I pressed my hand against the frame of the bathroom door as if to steady myself once the weight lifted off my chest. The lightness of standing here, of simplybeing, made my knees click.
All the diverging paths fell off. The spur of jealousy that had made me drag him away from someone who’d finally paid him a shred of attention, the relentless attempts to distance myself from him, the fear that I would take him, dismantle him, and never find a way to put him back together, it all dropped away. Only one way forward remained, and it coiled itself around mywaist, my chest, my throat, and my wrists. It tugged me forward, but I resisted even now, so it tightened around me until it felt like it would suffocate me.
I didn’t know how much this changed things. I didn’t know if I dared to do anything. But there were some facts I couldn’t ignore. No, I wasn’t straight. And yes, I wanted Shane. Just knowing as much defined me, grounded me in reality rather than letting me float away into the endless, worrisome possibilities.
Shane lifted his gaze off the pages of his book, looking right into my eyes, and I knew I was seen. Not in the way I’d been dying for all this time, to be seen at my best, my greatest, my handsomest, my strongest, and my most talented. Not like that at all. He saw the core of me, the very soul which I often doubted existed.
His book lay in his lap, abandoned, and he folded his lips shortly before parting them a little.
I took a step toward the bed, but sleep was a long-forgotten dream. “Shane, I’m sorry,” I said.
His eyebrows lifted hopefully. His entire face lit up. “What for?”
I swallowed the clump of guilt choking me. “I shouldn’t have dragged you away. Ian could have been your first, and I ruined it. It was a stupid mistake.”
For the rest of the night, I wondered what I’d said to wipe away every hint of glimmering hope from his face. His eyes went out like a campfire’s last embers at the crack of dawn. His warmth was extinguished. “That’s okay. He was probably just interested in one thing.”
Shane picked up the book again, and I could see the walls rising around him. He was lost to me.
ELEVEN
SHANE
Sleepingnext to Patrick that night was easier than I could have hoped. He’d exhibited the same lack of interest and the same friendly distance as ever, which meant I didn’t need to fret.
He crossed the room and slipped under the cover. His shorts were terribly short, and I couldn’t stop myself from glancing at his defined quads in the moment before he hid them from sight. His torso, as stunning as Michelangelo’sDavid, was only an anatomical thing. Yeah, I could appreciate the aesthetic, but I knew just how closed those doors were to me. What did it matter that I slept next to a semi-naked Greek god when he didn’t want me? And Patrick made it a point to put across.
Even so, drifting asleep had an overwhelming power of grasping the last threads of reality and braiding them with dreams. Still awake, I conjured the image of Patrick exactly as he was, lying behind my back, into an eager and passionate lover. The snapshot was so powerful that I felt it entering me, my body desperate to coil, fingers itching to sink into something soft, toes curling until my foot was about to cramp.
I woke up to a ray of sunshine screaming into my pupils, burning away whatever dreams had left me breathless, and grew suddenly aware of the boiling warmth behind my back. Thesearing spot was my lower back, where I could feel my T-shirt had lifted in my sleep. That heat was not a branding rod or a pile of coals but flesh. His flesh. His body pressed against mine like someone had stacked us together with a purpose.
I couldn’t decide whether I had woken up painfully hard from some lost dream or if the heat of his barely covered body pressed against my back did the trick, but I knew I wasn’t getting up soon. The coiling arm tossed over my middle wasn’t helping, either.
My breath grew shallow, and my throat was too tight to let me inhale any better. Even in his sleep, he found a way to torment me. Yet instead of slipping from under his arm and disappearing into the bathroom until this terrible erection went away, I sank deeper into the mattress and Patrick’s arm.
He exhaled, his warm breath caressing my bare neck, a tiny little snore escaping him, and I squeezed my eyes shut in hopes of sliding back into my dreams.
I failed.
My heart was beating too fast, and my body was running too hot to let me sleep. I matched my breathing to Patrick’s and took effort to remember what it felt like to be spooned from the back. I doubted I’d get to feel this anytime soon. I simply didn’t have what it took to move from wanting to having these things. The gap between my desire and my ability to demand its fulfillment could fit an ocean.
It was Patrick who came to his senses first. If I had nurtured some silly little idea that he would wake up and let his hand drift down the length of my torso, denying me my indecision and taking the reins, it didn’t happen.
“Fuck, you should get a part-time job as a body pillow,” Patrick crackled as he turned onto his back. “Sorry about that.”
It wasn’t until I said, “Uh, it’s fine,” that I realized just how dry my throat was.
Patrick had no problem getting up and strolling into the bathroom. My gaze drifted down, but he was already facing away from me, and if there was anything to see, I missed it. Instead, I gazed at his back, shoulders swinging, waist narrow, ass hugged by the shorts that seemed even tighter this morning.
When he reemerged, my crisis was averted, but only for a moment. His blue eyes glimmered with droplets of water still clinging to his ridiculously long eyelashes, as if he’d splashed his face and decided not to bother with the towel. He strutted around the room as I hopped out of bed and rushed into the bathroom to brush my teeth.
My head was spinning. There was another night ahead of us, and I just didn’t think I could hold myself together. I was splitting by the seams.
