the pain around his heart has lessened. He’d fallen asleep pressed against the other man with something like hope lodged in his chest. And maybe it makes him a bigger idiot to think someone like Alejandro can look at him and see forever, but he’s always been just a little bit foolish.
He stretches out, wriggling his toes against cool sheets. He stretches his arms until his palms press to the headboard. It feels good. It feels different, and he wants to curl his hands around it and hoard this moment for as long as he can. Unfortunately, his body has other ideas. His bladder is screaming, and he’s kind of hungry, and he’s going to need at least a twenty-minute shower to clean the last vestiges of Alejandro from his skin.
And he only feels okay thinking that because he knows there’s time for his sugar daddy to mess him up all over again. Then he thinks that the sugar daddy part might not be long-lived, but Alejandro has lodged himself in Avery’s heart, and he seems willing to stay. Or, at the very least, he seems willing to consider it.
As he stands, he gets a proper look around the room, realizing he hadn’t been allowed in before. It’s smaller than the guest bedroom and feels almost claustrophobic with his large bed and massive dresser taking up most of the floor space. He has a bookshelf in there too, with what looks like old paperbacks that have been read a hundred times. And on the shelves in between the spaces are little trinkets.
He almost doesn’t get a closer look, but then something catches his eye, and his heart is suddenly in his mouth. It’s the orca. And it’s not just the orca, it’s everything else. It’s the paperweight, and the stupid mittens hanging on a hook wedged into the side of the wood, and the little carving of a koala. It’s the stupid, pointless gifts that made him think of that infuriating man—every gift he thought was sitting at the bottom of a landfill, and they’re all right here as tangible proof that he was never nothing.
He traces his fingers over the orca’s tail, and he sees smudges on the sides like it’s been handled a lot. He kind of wants to cry, though he’s a little burned out from feeling so much. But he stands there a long time, until he can breathe again, and then he forces himself to face the day.
Padding to the bathroom, Avery turns on the shower then relieves himself before stepping into the hot spray. Alejandro’s shower has a control panel with too many buttons and absolutely zero knobs, and he wants to stay and fuck around with everything but it’s more pressing that he’s clean and ready to greet his lover—now that he’s finally his lover.
The thought makes him smile as he runs a sudsy hand over his stomach. The twelve long months of waiting were painful, but God, it was so worth it. He’s not sure that Hashem ever intended something like this to be seen as a Chanukah miracle, but he can’t help think about it anyway. He kind of wishes he could tell his mother, because if it didn’t involve a thorough debauching of her one and only child, she would have appreciated it. But he’s content to keep it to himself for now.
He rinses Alejandro’s soap away, basking in the scent it leaves behind, then dries off and finds his clothes still in his case in the guest room. Alejandro had packed for him, and Avery feels a sort of electric shock race through him when his hands brush over a pair of dark purple, silk panties. He bits his lip, trying not to think about Alejandro running his fingers over them—trying not to think about how it would feel for Alejandro to touch him while he’s wearing them. But he takes a risk and slides them up his hips, then pulls on a pair of tight jeans that leave nothing to the imagination.
By the time he’s got his hair brushed and pulled back and teeth brushed, he still hasn’t seen a hint of Alejandro. And while logic tells him to start panicking because the man is showing signs that he’s running, something in Avery tells him to be patient.
The kitchen is empty when he steps in, but there’s fresh breakfast laid out. Eggs, pastries, a fresh loaf of challah, and something he’s pretty sure is turkey bacon. It means