“I’ve never seen you wear those before.”
“I don’t bring them to the bar, and we haven’t spent much time reading when you’ve been here,” Jake says, setting the book aside. He keeps the glasses on for another fewseconds, but then they end up on top of the book, and he beckons me closer. “What happens if I ask you how you’re doing and why you’re here?”
I shrug out of my jacket, pull my shirt over my head, and unfasten my jeans, which probably answers the latter half of his question just fine. But as I move toward him, my fingers trailing over his bare arm, I attempt the rest.
“I’ve always told you the truth, right? Even after you got back from Palm Springs, I—it just took me some time.”
“I don’t want this to be like it was then. I want to know what happened.”
Jake pushes at my jeans until I take over and finish undressing, leaving a pile on his floor. By the time I’m done, he’s added his own t-shirt to it, but I’m the one to tug the comforter away and reach for his pajama pants. Any morning wood has come and gone, and what I can feel growing thicker beneath my touch is all mine, but I’m impatient this morning and I want his dick inside me. I just need to give him what he wants first.
He lifts his hips so I can get him naked, and I smile as well as I can with too many things on my mind. “My father’s friends played the bar tonight, and he was with them. They were good. Great, actually.”
“You’re busy on Saturday nights,” Jake says, finally pulling me into bed with him. I straddle his lap without it being more than that, our cocks getting harder against each other while we wait. “Did he get in your way? Talk to you all night?”
“No. I think V scared him. He only said hello and left to sit near the stage.”
I kiss him then, slow and long and deep because the sun is just starting to rise, and Jake’s house is silent except for each shared breath we take. I’ve never seen him like this, still undone by the vulnerability that comes with sleep, and not yet put together again. The closest I came was the night of his accident, but that was a different undone, and it wasn’t the kind of thing I could enjoy except for the moments he and I fantasized about something like this.
His arms are wrapped around me now, so when I break away, I can’t go far.
“He didn’t bother you. And the music didn’t bother you,” he says, words warm against my neck. “So, what went wrong, what have you been up to the past few hours, and how do I get rid of that look in your eyes?” I won't ask what he sees—either I already know, or I don’t want to—but I bring a hand to his jaw and give him as much honesty as I can.
“I don’t think anything iswrong. But I feel like I’m scrambling to keep up with myself, and then keep falling further behind. I went to visit a friend for a while, and usually I go home after that, but I drove around instead, and then I—I wanted to see you.”
Jake’s teeth drag over my shoulder. “Because one friend wasn’t enough?”
I kiss him again because he has the wrong idea, and I don’t know how to correct it without getting into a couple of years of something I can’t explain. My friendship with a cute 20-year-old diner waitress makes little sense to anyone not in the booth with us. Maybe it’s true of whatever I have with Jaketoo—someone like him doesn’t need someone like me—but I cling to him while I can.
“Condom and lube.”
They’re within my reach too, but he’s the one who won’t fuck me until he’s heard enough. Apparently he has, though, or the constant tease of my dick moving against his has made him as impatient as I always am. Once he’s rolled the condom over his cock, I stroke him with the lube and wipe my hand on my thigh and rise on my knees just long enough to lower myself again.
When he’s buried inside me, it feels a lot like home.
But I don’t live here.