raw-nerved excitement, I’m like a bottle of champagne the split-second it’s first opened. Like a firework someone has just applied the match to. Making it all the way to the back might not even be possible, he might look over his shoulder and find a pile of ashes where I used to be. That’s how hot I’m burning right now.
I can’t stop looking. Every step he takes, I can see the muscles move in his lower back, and I want to put my mouth on his skin, I want to feel each movement with my lips. This is crazy. It’s the definition of insanity.
The tray of drinks has become an unnecessary burden, and he hands them to another loinclothed man, who looks a question at him. Again that flick of the head, indicating me.
An entire conversation passes between them, and this other waiter nods and leaves my vision completely.
Where is he leading me, this strange boy? What is he going to do to me?
It’s not fair to feel like this. It’s not fair that the first thing I’ve felt in months, the first real emotion to strike me, is this utter need. It’s desperate and wrong.
It’s the wrongness of it that appeals to me most. Knowing how bad I’m going to feel after this, it’s like a drug. This is going to prove every bad thing I believe about myself, and I love it. I deserve it.
The hall is dark—every hallway in this building seems calculated to be dark and foreboding, and there are a series of rooms to either side. God, is Daniel behind one of these doors? Is Hawk? I can’t think about that. I’ve lost all respect for them…yet here I am, in the same hall.
He knocks at one door, a quick knock, tap-tap, leaning in and listening before trying the doorknob. He ushers me inside.
I am not sure what I expected.
This is, after all, a rich boy’s club. Why would this room be small and dank and sad? In my mind, the split-second before I step in, that’s how I’m picturing it, a bare mattress on a metal frame, something like a prison cell, but no. It’s bright. It’s big. There is something of the corporate hotel in it, a sameness, but to me it sizzles with possibility.
He closes the door and presses a small button that I think is a light switch, but must mean something else; no further lights come on. Maybe it’s just something to say the room is taken.
“Look, I’m sorry, I don’t usually do this, but—”
“I’m a waiter.”
“No, I know, I get that—”
“I’m not…I’m not one of them,” he says, and his voice is a small whisper, and there’s something about the smallness of it that makes me need to kiss his mouth. In the light I can see him better, every detail of his plump lips, every small line and highlight. I can see the indentation where he has pressed his teeth into his lip, a small crescent.
“I don’t want them,” I say.
“They want you. I can tell. They kept coming up to you.”
“Why are we whispering?”
He stands chest to chest with me, and I think for a moment that he is going to be the aggressor here, not that I would mind that, but it’s unexpected. I’m not one of these guys who can only go one way. Whatever he wants is fine with me, I’m hard and I’m ready.
But he asks me a question. He looks up at me, and I can see miles deep into his eyes. “Are you… Are you kind?”
It catches me so off-guard that I’m honest.
“No,” shaking my head sadly. “No. I wish I were. No, there are things about me…”
I can’t tell if this was the wrong answer or the right one. It’s something I may never get to know, because he’s so close to me, I can feel his breath on my lips, the warmth of it, and there is only a millimeter of distance between us, a gulf that he crosses, all by himself, to come to me, to touch his lips to mine, and they are so soft, I cannot help but touch them with my teeth, not to bite, but to test their softness, and he’s so close I can feel him tremble. Is it fear?
I would never hurt someone like you. I can’t say it, it would sound ridiculous in words, but it’s true, and I want him to know it.
He must know it. That’s why the kiss