Melting - Sean Ashcroft Page 0,62
both of them kind of urgently—and the couch pulled out, in case someone needed a place to crash for the night. It was ugly, it wasn’t all that comfortable, but it did the job.
“Are you serious?” I asked, flicking my TV on.
“Yes,” Wes said on the other end. “We’re syncing up our movies, eating the same pizza order, and pretending like we’re together.”
“How did you come up with this?” I asked, flipping the box open and inhaling the smell of real food with a happy sigh. Man could not live on cake, ice cream, and toast alone. Pizza wasn’t exactly a health food, but it did at least cover a little more of whatever the current oversimplified nutritional diagram was.
“Will you laugh at me if I say I was looking up long distance date ideas on the internet?”
I did laugh, but I wasn’t laughing at Wes. I was laughing because I couldn’t believe how thoughtful he was.
We decided on a movie after a few minutes of discussion, picking out the safe and familiar Raiders of the Lost Ark that both of our dads had made us watch when we were definitely too young for it.
“This is why I’m gay,” I said as Harrison Ford walked across the screen, sweaty and with his shirt open almost to his navel.
Wes laughed between bites of pizza, and for a second I was so absorbed in the fantasy that I looked over to the other side of the couch, fully expecting him to be there.
My heart sank at the empty space where he should have been.
“You’re still coming next week, right?” I asked. I hated that I’d had to put him off, and I hated that I was going to be so exhausted when he got here.
I was scared, too—scared that when Wes saw me under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t like me anymore.
“Nothing could stop me,” Wes said. “I miss you.”
“I miss you like you wouldn’t believe,” I said.
“Oh, I’d believe. I haven’t had sex in over two weeks,” Wes said, laughing. “Remember when I couldn’t manage one?”
“I remember,” I said, chewing on my lip. I’d never been worried that Wes might cheat on me—I knew he wouldn’t. But I was worried that he’d get tired of being so far apart all the time.
“Don’t worry, I think about you when I jerk off,” Wes teased.
“Which you do a lot,” I said, licking my fingers clean after my last slice of pizza and sitting back.
For the first time since I’d gotten in Wes’s truck to go to the airport, I felt like I could relax. He was here. Even if he wasn’t physically next to me, he was here.
“It’s like you know me.” Wes laughed. “But for the record? I still miss you after.”
“You miss not knowing whether or not I’m gonna bite your head off?” I asked.
“I thought we decided it was only the girl praying mantises who did that?”
“I wasn’t sure we’d even decided I was a real praying mantis,” I said.
“I’ll check again when I get there,” Wes promised. “A few times, just to be sure.”
“I’d like that. I haven’t even had time to see myself naked in a while, anything could’ve happened.”
Wes chuckled as the credits rolled on my screen, and I couldn’t help yawning in response.
“Tired?” Wes asked, the faintest hint of disappointment in his voice.
I was tired. I was exhausted down to my bones.
But hearing Wes’s voice felt so good I didn’t want to give it up. Not yet. I couldn’t handle hanging up just yet.
“Not so tired I can’t listen to you tell me about your day,” I said, hopeful.
“I can do that,” Wes agreed. “But I was thinking, y’know, this is a wi-fi call. If you plug your phone in, and I plug mine in… you could… this is stupid, but we could just leave the call going while we slept. I miss… I miss, umm…”
Wes trailed off, but I could hear how close he’d gotten to tears.
I could feel a lump forming in my own throat at the thought of lying down next to him. Such a simple thing, something we’d taken for granted when we got together.
Now I would’ve done anything for the power to just appear in his room and crawl under the blankets with him. To hold his goddamn hand, just for a little while.
“I like this plan,” I said. “Let’s go with it.”
Wes breathed a sigh of relief on the other end of the line.
“Good. Okay, good. You’ve got me until you