“Shhh.” He wipes my tears with a gentle touch like always. Like always. He is always what I need him to be when I need it.
Isn’t that enough?
“It’s okay,” Trey says. “I never assumed it would be easy for you, my sweet,goodboy, but that you are trying means so much. Please never doubt that when you cry, all I want is to stem the flow.” He wipes beneath my eyes again and maintains a hold on my cheek. “When you hurt, all I want is to take the pain away or punish whoever caused it.” He draws my face toward him. “And when I make you feel good, I feel like all the world is brighterfor it, and I want nothing more than to make you feel good again and again. If that isn’t love, what is?”
Trey’s eyes sparkle in the dim light with the same demon-like glow as on our fourth date with the fairy lights twinkling in through the open door. Maybe not exactly the same as then, because tonight, it’s like the blackness of his eyes are lit up in technicolor, like a dark rainbow just for me.
And in that moment, what I want nothing more than to do right then is kiss Trey.
So I do.
Chapter seventeen
TREY
Ihave not technically said I love Walker, and yet in many ways I just did. I am feeling it, as much as I am capable of it, just as I have tried to explain to him.
No one has ever been what Walker is for me, and I never want anyone else to try.
The record fades into the next song, and Walker breaks from our kiss with a laugh he can barely keep muffled behind his hand. The reaction is warranted, considering we are listening to Foreigner and the song that just started is “I Want to Know What Love Is.”
I laugh too. I laugh so easily with Walker. It is what I imagine being a teenager must have been like for someone normal.Listening to music in a dim room with one’s parents asleep upstairs, trying to stifle any vocal moments of revelry—among other things. I never did any of that growing up, at least not here or with the unabashed foolhardiness of a child.
It makes my next decision easy, and I set aside our wine to grab Walker by the waist and pull him back out onto the porch for a dance. I have improved since our first debacle, maybe even a little since our fourth date sway, the leadup to finally undressing each other, touching each other, and claiming Walker as mine. Neither of us really lead, but I hold him close, with my arms wrapped up around his neck for once, one hand cradling the back of it and scratching gently at his hairline.
He wraps his arms around my waist and up my back, clinging to my somewhat slighter form. The tension he came home with earlier is a distant memory. It will return, when he thinks on that poor boy again who died too young, or when the next patient doesn’t make it. His care toward those he wants to save is part of what makes him so very special and precious to me. We are the same in a way, but while I operate from the shadows, Walker lives in the light.
As the next song begins, I reconnect our kiss. He feels so good in my arms, beneath my fingers, pliant in response to the movements of my tongue. Unaware of how planned my shifting of us is until his back is against the side of the house.
I keep his mouth against mine with that hand on the back of his neck, boxing him in with my legs spreading to frame his hips, and lean into him. I might not be able to dance much better than a rhythmic sway, but swaying is not too different from rocking, and I can do that in time to the music too.
Walker gasps, head turning from the seal of our lips, and moves his hands to grip my arms. “Trey…” he whispers in protest, but he isn’t exactly trying to push me away. I can feel theline of his thickening length in his jeans as I press mine into it. “Don’t start something you can’t finish.”
I take my hand from behind his head and tilt his chin back toward me. “And what gives you the impression I can’t finish?”
“I-I…” he trails off on an adorable, stuttering huff before collecting himself. “I don’t think I can havesexin your mother’s house.” He says the opportune word so inaudibly, it’s mostly just mouthed. “She’s right upstairs.”
True, and while Mother is far too sensible to come back down tonight, and I doubt Walker would be amenable to simply staying out on the porch to do it, I appreciate the decorum, much as I wish neither of us was being a gentleman right now. “She is upstairs now, but she’ll be gone all morning, remember?”
“Yeah…”
I hold Walker’s gaze with suggestive intent.
“Okay.” He chuckles. “Consider that a date,Daddy.”
I will never tire of hearing all the varied ways he says that. I kiss his cheek, right over his scar like a seal of my affections, and whisper, “That’s my good boy.”
Walker shudders, so very enticing and difficult to extract myself from, but I lure him from the wall and simply continue to hold him a while longer as we sway.
It’s early afternoon on Sunday when we arrive back at Walker’s apartment, giving him plenty of time to relax on his home turf, without quite as much of the baggage he had when we left.
Well, some of the baggage is on purpose. The matcha and owl plushies are too endearing for me to see them as anything but precious, just like Walker himself.
The rest of our time with Mother was wonderful. The early morning on Friday found us quite obviously in bed for an extra hour, and from there, the summer charms of smalltown comradery kept Walker in radiantly good spirits.
There was barbeque, drinks, and neighbors fussing over him—Mrs. Sheridan especially, of course—long before the concert began. Saturday repeated Friday to some extent, only this time with Mother at home in the morning to make us a big breakfast. Both concert nights were enjoyable, but I think Walker preferred Foreigner, especially when we walked down the street to the corner to get a better listen within view of the park and right that moment, they broke into their classic “Cold as Ice.”
Sunday started as lazy as it could until our flight.
