Chuckling, I say, “That doesn’t sound like you at all.”
“Yeah, no,” he retorts, meeting my gaze for the first time in a while. “I was a lot different back then. I’d already been rejected by my parents. I needed to cling to the attention and the, what I thought was, love he gave me.”
“Can relate there,” I say without meaning to. “So, what happened?”
I’m waiting for him to tell me to fuck off. It doesn’t come.
“Things became a lot really quickly.” I turn on my side, holding my hands under my cheek, watching him as he runs a hand down his cropped beard. “He wasn’t my first. I lost my virginity back before my parents even found out I was gay. But this was… different from what I was used to.”
Confusion clouds my mind for half a second before it clicks. “He topped you.”
I don’t phrase it as a question, but he answers it as one anyway. “Yeah.”
“And what? You didn’t like it?”
He huffs out a laugh, but there’s not an ounce of humor in it. “The first time he fucked me, I bled. Said we didn’t need to use lube, that spit would work just fine.”
“Shit, Mateo…”
“After that, I told him I didn’t think I liked it and asked if we could switch next time. He told me if I cared about him, I’d stop being such a bitch. He’d sometimes, like after a fight or something, tell me he’d let me top him soon. Soon never came.”
Mateo’s body is stiff. It’s clear remembering all of this is hard for him. I’ve never wanted to comfort him more than I do in this moment. Before I have a chance to, he continues.
“It wasn’t until we broke up, and I was away from him, that I realized just how badly he gaslit me into feeling like in order to prove how much I cared, I needed to do something I wasn’t comfortable with.”
Holy shit.
“Is that why you’re a strict top now?”
Mateo nods. “By the time we finally broke up, the thought of another person getting me in that way was enough to make my skin crawl. I couldn’t do it, so I didn’t.”
“Damn, that’s so fucked up.” My chest aches for him, having to go through something like that. “So, you’ve never had an enjoyable experience back there at all?”
He goes quiet for a moment, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “I have,” he states plainly. “By myself.”
Arousal stirs in my groin. That visual, especially right now, shouldn’t turn me on as much as it does. But I ignore it. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. And, uh, I’m sorry about your parents. Feeling unloved by your parent—or parents—is one of the worst feelings there is.”
Mateo finally turns to meet my gaze. “You got shitty folks too?”
“My dad,” I confirm quietly. “He left me, my mom, and my sister when I was little, and started a whole new family.”
“Damn, really?”
Nodding, I say, “Yup. I actually had no idea what happened to him until I was in high school, and saw him at a basketball game with his new family across the bleachers. Rival team. I thought he was dead.”
“Fuck,cariño. We’re quiet the fucked-up pair, aren’t we?” He laughs, which in turn makes me laugh.
“I guess so.”
31
MATEO
It’s barely eight in the morning, and I’ve already been up for an hour.
Travis, on the other hand, is sound asleep, mouth open, snoring, and drool spilling onto the pillow and everything. It’s annoyingly cute.
After we had a surprisingly intimate conversation about our fucked-up childhoods last night, we smoked another bowl and passed out. It was the first time we’ve slept together without actually sleeping together. It’s odd, but also… nice. Like, really fucking nice.
