Copyright © 2026 Nuno R.F.C.R. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by applicable copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), actual events, or real locales is entirely coincidental.
"Cartography Of Skin"
"I can't smell you on it anymore."
The sentence was simple.
The sentence was the most complex thing either of them had ever heard. The sentence contained, in its seven words, the complete and irreducible confession of a boy who had stolen a piece of a man and held it in the dark and breathed it in and slept against it and mapped its scent, obsessively, secretly, with the meticulous, desperate attention of a person cataloging a thing they know they're losing.
And the loss was the confession.
Not the stealing.
Elias didn't speak.
He turned.
He walked into the flat.
Rowan followed.
The flat received them.
Elias stood in the kitchen. He had stopped walking. He stood with his back to Rowan, still, facing the window, his chest bare, his arms at his sides. He didn't turn around. He waited.
Rowan stood near the door. Three feet inside it. The henley was still in his hands, gripped, clutched, the knuckles white around the folded fabric, the shirt held against his body the way a soldier holds a flag. The object between himself and the air. The last barrier.
He set it down.
The motion was slow. His hands opened, the grip loosening with the visible effort of a person letting go of something they've been holding for too long and whose hands have shaped themselves to the holding and must now be reshaped to the absence. He set the henley on the counter.
He walked toward Elias.
Not the way he'd walked on the beach. Not the gravitational convergence, the charged, unstoppable, mutual closing of distance. This was different. Slower. A pace of reverence, of awe, of the specific, terrified respect that a human being experiences in the presence of something they recognize as sacred and that the recognition makes more frightening, not less, because the sacred demands a quality of attention that the profane does not, and the attention is total, and the totality is vulnerability, and the vulnerability is the thing Rowan has spent nineteen years avoiding and is now, step by slow step, walking into.
He reached Elias.
Stood behind him.
Elias felt him there. Felt the heat of him arriving through the eighteen inches of air, registering on the bare skin of his back the way the sun registers on the surface of the water: not as contact but as presence, the warmth that precedes the touch, the announcement that the touch is coming.
Rowan moved to face him. Around the left side, a step, a quarter-rotation, until he was in front of Elias, between Elias and the window, between the man and the harbor light.
They stood face to face. Elias's hands were at his sides. Rowan's hands at his.
The distance was twelve inches.
Rowan's hand rose.
It was shaking.
The tremor was fine, visible, the kind of tremor that exists at the exact intersection of desire and terror, not a palsy, not a weakness, but the body's honest response to the magnitude of what it is about to do. The hand shook because it wasn't being asked to punch, shove, grab, or any of the things it knew. The hand was being asked to touch. To make contact with another person's body for no reason except the wanting of the contact, for no purpose except the feeling of the skin, with no armor and no alibi and no violence to hide inside.
The hand had never done this.
The hand had thrown rocks and thrown punches and gripped the collar of a man's jacket on a beach. The hand had stolen a shirt, hidden a shirt, and held a shirt to a face in the dark. The hand had done a thousand things. The hand had never done this.
Rowan raised it. Slowly. The arm extending through the twelve inches of air, fingers leading, wrist following, the motion conducted at the speed of a person disarming a bomb.
His fingertips made contact.
The chest. The center of it. The sternum, the flat, hard bone beneath the skin, the anatomical midline, the place where the ribs converge and the heart beats directly behind, separated from the surface by an inch of bone and muscle, and the thin, warm layer of skin that is, in this moment, the only thing between Rowan's fingertips and Elias's heart.
Three fingers.
The index, the middle, the ring. Resting on the sternum the way you'd rest your hand on the surface of water to test its temperature, barely there, the pressure negligible, the contact so light it was more suggestion than event.
Elias's heart beat against the fingertips. Rowan felt it. The rhythm, the push. The heartbeat was steady. The heartbeat was Elias, controlled, even, the cardiac equivalent of the stride and the voice and the hands that didn't shake when they hauled pots or tied knots or broke up bar fights. The heartbeat was the man's baseline. The heartbeat was the truth beneath all the other truths.
Rowan's fingers rested there.
Elias didn't move.
This touch, this trembling, terrified crossing of the final distance, this was Rowan's. The boy had walked across town. The boy had knocked on a door. The boy had confessed a theft and a need and had placed three fingers on the chest of the man he'd been orbiting since the day he arrived in town, and every step of the crossing had been his, and the last step, the touch, was his, and Elias would not take it from him.
So he stood still.
He breathed.
He let himself be touched.
Rowan's hand moved.
Slowly. From the sternum outward, the fingertips sliding across the skin, tracing it the way a hand traces a map of a country it's never visited but has dreamed about. Over the pectoral, the hard, curved surface of muscle that Elias's work had built. Along the ridge of the collarbone, the long, hard line of bone beneath skin, the structural beam that connected the shoulder to the center.
The touch was cartographic.
Each inch covered was an inch mapped, filed, recorded, and stored in the body's permanent archive alongside the scent of a stolen shirt.
His palm flattened. The full surface of the hand pressed against Elias's chest, over the heart.
His other hand rose. Found the other side. Both palms on the chest now, symmetrical, framing the sternum, the fingers spread, the hands encompassing as much of the surface as they could reach. Two hands on a man's bare chest. The simplest thing. The most complex thing.
Rowan stepped closer.
The distance collapsed. The twelve inches became six, the six became three, the three became a microclimate generated by two metabolisms and two sets of lungs, and the heat that rises from skin and meets its counterpart and produces, in the zone of convergence, a warmth that belongs to neither body and to both.
Rowan's face was near Elias's chest.
He breathed in.
The inhale was long. It was the longest breath Rowan had ever taken, a full-lung, diaphragm-deep, whole-body intake of air that was not air but him. Elias. The scent that had been on the shirt and had faded from the shirt and had driven Rowan across a town in the dark to stand in a kitchen and press his face toward the source.
Coffee. First.
Salt. Second.
Then the deeper thing.
The note beneath the notes. The warm, animal scent that was not a component but a presence, the smell of a living body at its most elemental, the biochemical signature that exists below the coffee and the salt, the irreducible him that the shirt had carried and that the shirt had lost and that was here, now, radiating from the skin of a man's chest at a distance of two inches. The distance was closing, and the scent was strengthening, and the strengthening was the answer to every question the shirt had been unable to answer, and that the source, the living, breathing, heart-beating source, was answering now.
Rowan's eyes closed, and his forehead came to rest against Elias's chest.
The contact was bone against muscle. The hardest part of the skull against the broad, warm plane of a man's sternum. The lightest, smallest, most devastating act of contact in the story, the weight of a head, resting, the full and entire weight of a nineteen-year-old boy's head placed against a man's chest with the complete, surrendered, bone-deep exhaustion of a person who has been holding themselves up for their entire life and who is, in this moment, setting the weight down.
Elias held.
And then, Elias's arms rose.
They hovered. Inches from Rowan's body, inches from the shoulders, the back, the curve of the spine. The arms traced the shape of him without touching, the hands describing the outline of a body, the way a frame describes the outline of a painting. A ghost embrace.
Rowan breathed against his skin.
"Hold me."
Two words.
Whispered.
Spoken into the skin. The vibration of the consonants traveling from Rowan's lips through the surface of Elias's chest and into the bone and through the bone and into the space behind the bone where the heart was.
'Hold me.' The two words that Rowan had never said. To anyone. In any context. Hold me. The request that requires trust.
'Hold me.'
Elias's arms closed.
The gentleness was immense.
His arms closed around Rowan's body. The motion was slow and complete, the full circumference of the embrace arriving in stages: the forearms first, then the biceps, then the hands, the progression of a hold that was building itself carefully, one layer at a time. His hands found Rowan's back. The shoulder blades, the twin prominences of bone beneath the hoodie's fabric, the wings that weren't wings, one hand on each blade, the fingers spread, the touch flat and firm and encompassing.
Elias held.
Rowan's body responded.
The response was not immediate. The response took time, the time it takes a body that has been braced for impact its entire life to recognize that the impact is not coming. The muscles of Rowan's back, beneath Elias's hands, were rigid. Locked.
Then, slowly, by degrees, the way ice melts in the hand that holds it, the rigidity softened. The full, pressed, total contact of two forms fitting together, with the precision of two things designed for each other, and now, at last, confirming the design.
Elias's nose found Rowan's hair.
He leaned down. Not far, the height difference was two inches, and the two inches were bridged by the boy's head tipping up and the man's head tipping down, the two motions meeting in the middle, in the dark curls, in the crown of Rowan's skull, where the hair was thickest, and the warmth was greatest, and the scent was concentrated.
Elias breathed in.
The scent of Rowan's hair was not a thing he had known he wanted. It was not a scent he had cataloged. It was a discovery. A revelation that arrived through the nostrils and traveled to the brain and detonated there with the force of a thing that has been unknown and is now known and can never be unknown again.
Clean. That was the base. But beneath the clean was the boy. The particular, specific, irreducible scent of Rowan's body, produced by his skin and his chemistry and the specific combination of cells and enzymes and microorganisms that made him him and no one else. Dark. Warm. Something that Elias had no word for and that did not require a word.
He breathed it in.
He held it.
Rowan's arms moved from the ribs, where they'd been resting, to the back. His fingers found the muscle. The ridges. The topography of a back that was now, beneath a boy's hands, still.
Then Rowan's head came up. Slowly. The chin first. Then the mouth, the lips. Then the nose. And then, the eyes. Blue. The full, unobstructed, undefended expanse of blue.
Rowan looked at Elias.
Elias looked at Rowan.
And finally, for the first time in his life, Elias let himself be seen.
He let Rowan see.
He let the control recede. He let his face yield, the full and terrifying act of a man who is strong enough to be gentle and who is now, in the final extension of that strength, allowing himself to be visible. The Elias beneath all the other. The one who held a rock on a nightstand and touched his lip where a boy had bitten it and stood on a boat in the dark and admitted to the sea that he was becoming a man who loved a boy.
That Elias.
Visible.
Seen.
The kiss didn't detonate.
It bloomed.
Their mouths met.
Slowly. The approach measured not in the frantic, desperate closing, but in a deliberate, eyes-open, fully conscious convergence.
Their lips touched. The contact was soft. Soft was a word that had not existed between these two men until this moment. Softness had been the absence, the thing neither of them knew. Soft was the frontier.
Then the softness caught fire.
Not all at once. Gradually. The slow build of a combustion that starts small, spreads, deepens, and accelerates until the acceleration becomes its own force and the force becomes everything.
Everything.
The kiss was everything.
Rowan's hands gripped. The hold on Elias's face shifting from tender to urgent, the fingers tightening in the hair, the palms pressing harder against the jaw, the kiss deepening and darkening and the mouths opening and the breath accelerating and the sound, the low, molten, chest-deep sound that left Elias and the high, breaking, lung-deep sound that left Rowan, the two meeting in the space between their mouths and harmonizing, the harmony not musical but chemical, the two notes combining into a compound that neither could produce alone.
Rowan jumped.
His legs left the floor. His thighs found Elias's hips, the hard, narrow architecture of a man's pelvis, the bones and the muscle providing the ledge that Rowan's body needed. His ankles crossed behind Elias's back. His arms circled Elias's neck. His body wrapped around Elias the way a vine wraps around a tree.
Elias held him.
His hands found the backs of Rowan's thighs. His arms supported the weight, and the weight was nothing. They kissed. Vertical. Rowan wrapped around Elias, Elias holding Rowan. The mouths working against each other with a hunger that was no longer desperate but directed, the hunger of the beach refined by the tenderness of the embrace, the violence alchemized into urgency, the urgency sustained by the knowledge that this was not a collision but a continuation, not an ending but a beginning, not the last thing but the first.
Elias walked.
He walked into the bedroom.
He lowered Rowan onto the bed. Rowan's back met the mattress. His legs unwound from Elias's hips. His arms stayed around Elias's neck, holding, pulling, refusing to relinquish the contact.
Elias followed him down. The dark curls on the white pillow. The blue eyes looking up at him, open, still open, the walls still down, the boy visible and present and here, in his bed, in his room. Elias's weight was on his forearms. Suspended.
Rowan's hands found Elias's shoulders.
Elias resisted. Not the pull, the moment. He held himself on his forearms for three more seconds, his eyes on Rowan's, the gaze so close and so direct that the looking was a physical thing, a pressure, a contact that preceded the contact of skin.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
His voice was low. Quiet. Not because he doubted the answer but because the asking was an act of care, a checkpoint.
Rowan nodded.
Not a quick nod, not the reflexive, thoughtless bob of a person confirming something trivial. A slow nod. The chin descending and rising with the full, weighted, conscious motion of a person who understands what they're agreeing to and is agreeing to it with their entire body.
The hoodie came off first.
Elias's hands found the hem. His fingers curled beneath the fabric at Rowan's waist. The cotton was warm. The body beneath it was warmer. His knuckles grazed the skin of Rowan's stomach as his hands moved upward, and the grazing produced a response, a contraction, a tightening of the abdominal muscles.
Elias stopped. His hands paused. The pause was a question. 'Is this okay?'
Rowan answered by raising his arms.
He lifted his arms above his head, extended them, the full length, the wrists past the pillow, the position of a body offering itself to be undressed. Elias lifted the hoodie. Up the torso, over the ribs, past the chest, over the head. Rowan's arms came through the sleeves, one, then the other, the fabric releasing him in stages. Elias dropped the hoodie off the side of the bed.
The t-shirt beneath. Gray. Thin. Elias's hands returned to the hem. This time, Rowan helped, his own hands finding the fabric and pulling it upward, the act collaborative now, two pairs of hands undressing one body. The shirt came off. Rowan's chest was narrow. Lean. The skin was pale. The winter white of a body that hadn't seen the sun in months, the pigment retreated, the surface almost luminous, the blue of the veins visible at the wrists and the inner arms, and the place where the neck met the collarbone.
And the scars.
Elias had seen them before.
He saw them now with different eyes.
The cigarette burns on the ribs. Three, no, four. Small, circular, the diameter of a cigarette's lit end, healed into pale, puckered discs of scar tissue that sat on the skin like coins pressed into wax. The scars were old. Years old. The skin around them had healed completely, the body having done its work of repair with the diligent, uncomplaining efficiency of an organism that has been damaged, has fixed itself, and has not asked whether the fixing was fair.
The belt marks. Two. On the left side, running diagonally from the lower ribs toward the hip, the scars linear, thin, the healed residue of a leather edge striking skin with force sufficient to break it.
Elias looked at the scars.
He looked at the body that held them.
Rowan watched Elias look.
"Your turn," he uttered. A near-whisper, the words spoken from the pillow, the blue eyes looking with an expression that was half demand and half offering.
Rowan's hands came to Elias's waist. The button of the jeans. His fingers found it, fumbled slightly, the fine motor control compromised by the tremor that was still in his hands and that might never fully leave. But the fumbling was brief. The button released. The zipper followed.
Elias stood. The bed released him, reluctantly and temporarily, the mattress rising as his weight left it. He stood beside the bed, and Rowan watched from the pillow, and the watching was itself an act so intimate that the air in the room adjusted to accommodate it.
Elias undressed.
The jeans first. Pushed down the hips, stepped out of, the motions economical. The jeans joined the hoodie on the floor. Then the last layer. The boxer briefs. He removed them. Stepped out. Stood.
Rowan looked at him.
The looking lasted. The look was not a glance, not an appraisal, not an evaluative scan. The look was absorbed. Rowan's eyes moved across Elias's body with the slow, comprehensive, almost reverent attention of a person seeing something they've imagined and finding that the reality exceeds the imagination so thoroughly that the imagination now seems childish, inadequate, a sketch compared to the painting.
Elias's body was large. The word had been used before, but here, now, standing naked in a bedroom, the word found its literal meaning. The shoulders were broad, the chest wide, the torso tapering from the latissimus to the waist in a V-shape. The arms were thick, the muscles shaped by rope and net, and the daily, unrepeated demands of a body in service to the sea. The stomach was flat but not carved, the abdominals present but covered by the thin, normal layer. The hair on his chest, dark, concentrated at the sternum, spreading toward the collarbones, thinning at the sides, continued in a narrow line down the center of the abdomen, the trail bisecting the torso and drawing the eye downward. His legs were the legs of a man who'd spent two decades on moving surfaces, the quadriceps developed, the calves dense, the overall impression one of rootedness, a body that had learned to stand on things that moved and had built itself accordingly.
And the rest of him.
The full, unclothed, unconcealed totality of Elias.
A man whom nature had been kind to.
Because, between his legs, proudly stood a nine-inch, fully erect cock.
Rowan's lips parted. Not to speak, to breathe. The mouth opening slightly, the lower lip falling. Elias saw the parted lips. Saw the widened eyes. Saw, in the expression of the boy on the bed, something he had never seen directed at himself: awe. Not sexual assessment, not the transactional evaluation of a body for its utility or its capacity. Awe. The response of a person encountering something that exceeds their current framework and requires a new one to be built in real time.
Elias returned to the bed.
His hands found Rowan's jeans. The button. The zipper. The fabric pushed down the narrow hips, Rowan lifting, the motion instinctive, the pelvis rising from the mattress to allow the jeans to clear. The jeans came off. Then the last layer. Elias's hands, steady now, pulled the fabric down and away, and Rowan was bare. Completely. The full, unclothed, uncovered truth of a nineteen-year-old boy's body.
His body was beautiful.
The scars were part of the perfection. This was the thing that Elias understood as he looked, the burns and the marks and the evidence of a history that had been written on this skin were not flaws in the surface but features of it, the way a coastline's erosion is not a flaw but a characteristic, the way the sea shapes the things it touches and the shaping is what makes them beautiful.
He lay down beside Rowan. On his side. Facing him. The two of them, naked, parallel, close enough that the heat from one reached the other but not yet touching. The last inch. The last gap. The space that was about to be closed.
Elias's gaze travelled briefly down to Rowan's thighs, where the most beautiful, perfect, pink, seven-inch hard shaft lay, over his stomach.
Rowan almost smiled. The almost was enough, the corner of the mouth lifting, the ghost of the expression, the shadow of a thing his face knew how to do but rarely did. The almost-smile contained everything: the nervousness and the want and the absurdity and the reality, all of it held in the micro-movement of a lip.
Elias's hand found his hip. The palm settling on the bone, the iliac crest, the anatomical landmark that his hand covered completely, the fingers wrapping around the hip's curve.
Rowan moved closer.
The inch closed.
And in that inch, they began learning each other.
There was no other word for it, no word that captured the quality of what happened in that bed in the first minutes of full contact except learning, the active, real-time, body-to-body acquisition of a knowledge that had no prior framework. Neither of them had done this. The fact was present in every touch, not as clumsiness, not as incompetence, but as attention, the hyper-focused, almost electrical awareness of two people who are doing something for the first time and who are therefore present in the doing in a way that experience erodes.
Elias's mouth found Rowan's neck. Not the jaw, not the mouth, the neck. The long, pale, exposed column of it, the surface that Rowan had never offered and was now offering by the simple act of tipping his head back, the chin rising. Elias's lips found the pulse. He kissed it. A press. A placement. The lips resting on the beating point and holding there, feeling the rhythm against his mouth, the heart's pace transmitted through the skin at a distance of millimeters.
Rowan made a sound.
The sound was an invitation.
Elias's mouth traveled. Down the neck. The collarbone.
Rowan's hands were on Elias's back. Touching it now with the full, flat, greedy pressure of two palms, trying to feel everything at once. The ridges. The valleys. The taut landscape of the latissimus, the deep groove of the spine.
Elias moved lower. His mouth leaving the collarbone, descending the chest, kissing as it went, the lips and the tongue cataloging the surface, the sternum's flat plane and the ribs and the soft, sensitive stretch of skin over the lower ribs where the body narrows toward the waist.
Rowan's body responded. Autonomically. The stomach contracted when Elias's mouth reached it. The hips shifted when Elias's hand found the inner thigh. The fingers tightened on the back when the mouth went to a place the body hadn't known was connected to the sound, and that, it turned out, was connected to everything.
Elias learned the connections. He learned them the way he learned the sea, through direct observation, through repetition. He learned that Rowan's neck produced the low sound and that the hip produced a sharper one and that the inner thigh produced a silence that was louder than any sound, the held breath, the body going still. He learned that Rowan's hands communicated. That the grip on his back changed, tightened for 'yes', loosened for 'slow down', shifted for 'there', 'not there'.
The hands were a language.
The language was fluent.
Rowan's body opened. Not all at once. In stages. Like a door. Like a series of doors. Each one requiring a different key. Rowan's hands stopped being passengers and became pilots. The shift happened midwaw, the moment when the nervousness burned off, and the thing beneath it took over, the thing that had always been beneath it, the Rowan-frequency, the intensity, the all-or-nothing commitment.
Rowan put his mouth on Elias's shoulder and bit.
Elias's breath changed.
Rowan heard the breath change.
He bit again.
Different place. His teeth found it. Pressed. Held.
Elias's sound was lower this time. Deeper. From the chest, from the belly, from the place where the stoicism lived and the stoicism was, in this moment, losing a battle it had never been designed to fight. The sound was a concession. The sound was Elias's body admitting that the man who held, carried, and controlled was also a man who could be reached.
Rowan pushed. His hands on Elias's chest. Elias turned. Onto his back. The mattress received him, the broad body settling, the springs adjusting, the bed reconfiguring itself around a man who was, for the first time tonight, below.
Rowan above him.
The shift was not about control. It was about agency, the discovery that this was not something being done to him but something being done with him. He kissed Elias. The kiss was Rowan's, aggressive and urgent, the particular intensity of someone who approaches everything with full commitment. Elias received it. He let Rowan set the pace, the pressure, and the depth.
Then, Elias rolled them.
One motion. Fluid. The rotation of two bodies around a shared axis, Rowan's body lifted and turned by the simple, irresistible physics of a man who outweighed him by forty pounds and whose body knew, at the mechanical level, how to move weight. The roll was not aggressive. The roll was seamless, Rowan's back finding the mattress, Elias's body settling above, the transition so smooth it felt choreographed, though nothing in this bed was choreographed, everything in this bed was improvised, the first performance of a piece being composed in real time by two musicians who had never played together and who were discovering, note by note, that they were playing the same song.
Elias above.
Rowan below.
Elias's hand traveled. Down Rowan's body, slowly, the palm in full contact with the skin, the hand not skipping or hovering but touching, continuously, the unbroken line of contact from chest to stomach to hip.
His hand found the spot Rowan wanted.
The sound Rowan made, the long, shattered, involuntary sound of a body receiving a touch it has been building toward for hours and that arrives with the full, accumulated weight of every moment that preceded it, changed the room. Not the acoustics. The meaning. The room had been the site of a first touch and a first kiss and a first embrace and a first undressing, and now the room was the site of this, and this was different from everything that came before.
Elias's hand moved. Slowly at first, jerking the sensitive skin, learning, again, the new territory, the specific geography of this part of this body, the responses it produced, the sounds it generated. His attention was total. His focus was vast, patient, encompassing.
Rowan was loud.
This was a discovery.
Rowan, who spoke in monosyllables and communicated in silences and who had, for nineteen years, kept his volume below the threshold of notice, was, in this bed, loud. Not screaming. But vocal, the sounds leaving him with the unmediated, uncensored, completely involuntary quality of a body that has been touched past the point where the mind can edit the response and that is now broadcasting, in real time, the raw signal of what the touching is doing, and the signal was loud, and the loudness was the most honest Rowan had ever been.
Elias listened. He listened for changes in pitch, for shifts in rhythm, for the specific variations that signaled a change in conditions. He listened, and he adjusted.
Rowan's hands found Elias. Reached down, found his shaft, slender finger gripping the thick mass, and Elias's breath broke, the sound leaving him suddenly, a sharp exhale.
They moved together.
The rhythm built. Slowly, then faster. The breathing accelerating, the sounds increasing, the bodies pressing closer and moving harder, the careful, measured attention of the early minutes giving way to something rawer, something less controlled.
Closer.
Harder.
Faster.
More.
Now.
Elias came first.
Rowan felt it building, felt it in the change of Elias's breathing, in the tightening of the arms, in the grip on his cock that went from firm to desperate in the space of three breaths, the hand no longer stroking but holding on.
"Fuck...fuck..." Elias groaned.
His face.
Rowan watched it. Watched the moment, the precise, identifiable, unrepeatable moment, when Elias Voss stopped being the man who controlled everything and became, instead, a body in the grip of a sensation that the body could not control. The stoicism broke. The jaw opened. The eyes lost their focus, the pupils dilating, the gaze going somewhere interior, somewhere deep.
He came with his face in Rowan's neck. The sound, low, broken, pulled from the deepest part of his chest, muffled by the skin, the vibration traveling through Rowan's neck and into his body and settling there, a frequency that would live in the tissue memory of that specific patch of skin for longer than either of them could measure.
The sound was a man letting go. For the duration of it, four seconds, five, an eternity compressed into the length of a breath, he was not carrying anything except the body in his arms, and the body in his arms was carrying him. Rowan held him through it. His arm around the broad back, his hand flat against the shoulder blades, his body receiving Elias's weight and Elias's sound and Elias's release, the thick streaks of fluid bursting forward, hitting his skin. Warm. Hot. Scorching.
Then Elias's hand found him again.
His hand resumed stroking.
Rowan was close. Had been close, had been on the edge, held there by the experience of watching Elias's face and feeling Elias's body and hearing the sound Elias made into his neck, all of it pushing him toward a threshold he was standing on and had not crossed.
Elias's mouth found his ear. Not a whisper, a breath.
"That's it..." Elias teased.
"Oh my...god...fuck..." Rowan muttered.
His body tightened. The progression visible from the outside, the muscles contracting, the back arching, the hands on Elias's shoulder blades gripping harder, the fingers pressing into the muscle.
He came with his eyes open.
This was the detail. The detail that distinguished this climax from every other physical release Rowan's body had ever experienced. His eyes were open. He was looking at Elias. Rowan came looking at Elias, and Elias looked back.
The sound Rowan made was different from every sound he'd made before.
Not the broken sound.
Not the need sound.
Not the pleasure sound.
A sound that contained all of them and exceeded all of them.
A sound that was, in its raw and involuntary totality, the sound of a person experiencing something that rewrites the definition of every experience that came before it, the sound of a body discovering, at the exact moment of its greatest exposure, that the exposure is not a danger but a home.
*
(Sometime Later)
They lay tangled. Rowan on his back. Elias half on top of him, the arm across the stomach, the arrangement less a position than a collapse, two bodies that had been exerting everything they had and were now exerting nothing.
They breathed.
"You're heavy," Rowan whispered in the dark.
A statement of fact delivered from beneath a hundred and ninety-five pounds of fisherman lying on him with the comprehensive, immovable weight of a man who has just had sex and whose body has entered the post-exertion state that is, in its essential character, indistinguishable from a large mammal deciding to nap.
"Like... I'm going to need a chiropractor heavy," Rowan said again.
Elias's chest vibrated. Not a laugh. The precursor to a laugh. The vibration traveled from his chest into Rowan's, the transfer of frequency between two bodies at zero distance.
"I can move," Elias said. Into the neck. Not moving.
"You're literally not moving."
"I said I can. I didn't say I wanted to."
Rowan's hand came up and found the back of Elias's head. The fingers in the hair. Resting. The weight of a hand in hair, which is one of the lighter weights in the world, and one of the heaviest.
"Move," Rowan muttered.
"No."
"You're crushing my lung."
"You have two."
"I need both of them."
"People function fine with one lung. I saw a documentary."
"You watched a documentary about lungs?"
"It was about a whale. The whale had one lung."
"Whales don't have one lung."
"This one did."
Rowan's mouth did something. The something was small, a movement at the corner, a shift in the architecture of the lip, the micro-muscular event that constitutes the beginning of a smile in a face that has not smiled fully in years. The almost-smile. The ghost.
"You're making this up."
Elias smiled.
"Get off me," Rowan repeated.
Elias rolled. Slowly, theatrically, with the exaggerated reluctance of a man making a point about the injustice of being asked to move. His body shifted to the side, the bed protesting, the mattress rearranging itself as weight was redistributed. He ended up on his back, beside Rowan, the two of them side by side, facing the ceiling, their shoulders touching.
"Better?" Elias said.
"My ribs are thanking you."
Silence.
Rowan turned his head. On the pillow. Looking at Elias in profile, the jaw, the nose, the brow. The looking was quiet. The looking was a luxury, the act of examining a face at close range without urgency, without fear. Just looking. At a man. In a bed. After.
"You stared at me," Rowan said.
"What?"
"The first day. At the dock. You were on the stairs."
"I wasn't staring."
"You stopped walking. On the stairs. And stared."
Elias was quiet for a moment. The moment was not denial. The moment was the small, private reckoning of a man who had been caught in an act he didn't know was observable.
"I was assessing the situation."
"You were staring. Your mouth was open."
"My mouth was not open."
"Like a fish. A big, confused fish."
"I was not a confused fish."
The vibration again. In Elias's chest. Closer to the surface this time, closer to the actual event, the actual laugh, the sound that his body was building toward.
"I didn't stare," Elias said. The lie was gentle. The lie was the kind of lie a person tells when the truth is too much, and the too-much is a good thing. "I just...looked."
"For how long?"
"A normal amount of time."
"What's a normal amount of time?"
"I don't have a metric."
"There's a word for it. The word is stare."
Elias turned his head. Now they were facing each other. The distance across the pillow was approximately fourteen inches, the distance across which people in beds have conversations they cannot have at any other distance.
"You rolled the window down," he said.
Rowan's eyes held his. The light was doing things to the blue that the color responded to, deepening, warming, the cold blue becoming something else.
"Yeah."
"You looked at me. Through the window. Before it rolled down."
A pause. Rowan's pause.
"Yeah," he said. "I looked at you."
"And?"
"And what?"
"What did you think?"
Rowan's mouth did the thing again. The corner. The ghost.
"I thought you were big."
"That's it?"
"And then I rolled the window down."
"And told me to go fuck myself."
"I told you to go the fuck away. There's a difference. Geographical."
Elias's mouth moved. The corner.
"You were rude," Elias said.
"I was...having a bad day."
"You were having a bad personality."
The sound that left Rowan was not a laugh. It was the closest thing to a laugh his body had produced in, how long? He didn't know. The sound was short, sharp, involuntary, a burst of air expelled from the lungs. The sound was brief. The sound changed the air in the room.
Elias heard it. His eyes changed, warming, the look on his face shifting from the teasing to something else, something that watched the almost-laugh the way a person watches a rare bird: with the careful, held-breath attention of someone who knows that the thing they're seeing is unusual and that the seeing is a privilege and that the privilege might not come again.
"There it is," Elias said. Quietly.
The silence that followed was warm. A different kind of intimacy than the sex, than the exchange of fluids, not deeper but wider.
"You wanted to fuck me the second you saw me."
Rowan said it into the dark. Matter-of-fact. The profanity deployed with the clinical precision that was his particular gift, the word not vulgar but exact, the most accurate available term for the thing he was describing.
Elias's head turned on the pillow.
"That's not..."
"It is. I saw it."
Elias was quiet for a beat. The beat was the space between a joke that was a deflection and a truth that was not.
"I wanted you to fuck me. I still do..."
Elias rolled onto his side. Facing Rowan. The motion brought them closer, the faces approaching the distance at which features become landscapes and the landscape's details are visible: the specific shade of blue in each iris, the exact curl pattern at the temple, the faint, fading remnant of a bruise above the left eye that was now yellow-green, the last trace of a bar fight that felt like it had happened in another century.
"It wasn't that," Elias said. "I don't know what it was. I just...felt something move that hadn't moved before."
"Like a splinter," Rowan said.
Elias blinked. "What?"
"A splinter. Under your skin."
Elias looked at him, stunned. The word was his, and Rowan had said it. The boy had reached down and plucked it from where Elias had kept it: hidden in the private, interior space where the things that matter are stored.
"Yeah," Elias said. Quietly. "Like a splinter."
"Is it still there?"
"No. It's...it became something else."
"What?"
"Bigger."
"Bigger than a splinter?"
"Bigger than a lot of things."
Rowan held this. He held it, and the holding was visible, and the visibility was trust. Then his mouth did the ghost-thing. The corner. The lift.
"So you admit it," he said.
"Admit what?"
"That you wanted to fuck me."
"I didn't..."
"Big confused fish on the stairs. Mouth open. Wanting to f..."
Elias moved. Fast, the speed of a man who has been provoked past the point of dignity and whose response is not anger but something else, something that exists in the space between retaliation and play. His arm went around Rowan's waist. The other hand found the boy's wrist, not pinning, not restraining, but controlling, the effortless redirection of a body that was talking too much into a body that was going to stop talking.
Rowan yelped.
They wrestled.
Rowan fought. Of course, he fought, fighting was his native mode, his first language, the thing his body defaulted to when another body engaged it. But the fighting had a new quality, a lightness, an energy that was not rage but joy. He squirmed. He twisted. He attempted to pin Elias's arm behind his back, but failed because Elias's arm was the diameter of Rowan's thigh, and the pinning was structurally impossible, like trying to pin a pylon.
Elias held him. "Take it back," he said. Over Rowan, one arm across the narrow chest, the other hand holding the wrist, loosely, gently.
"No."
"Take it back."
"You were the most confused fish in the sea."
"I'm going to..."
"What? Throw me overboard again? We're in a bed."
"The floor. The floor is available."
"You would not throw me on the floor."
"Try me."
Rowan stopped fighting. Not because he lost, because the fighting had accomplished what the fighting was for, which was not victory but contact.
He lay beneath Elias. On his back. Pinned. His breath was fast. His face was flushed. His hair was wrecked, the curls in every direction. His eyes were bright.
Not bright with tears. Not bright with the shine of crying or the gloss of pain. But the thing that brightness means when it is produced not by grief but by its opposite. The thing that the eyes do when the person behind them is experiencing something that approximates, in its tentative and astonishing way, happiness.
Elias saw it. He stopped. The wrestling stopped. The playing stopped. The room stopped.
"What?" Rowan whispered.
"Nothing," Elias said. His thumb on the cheekbone. "Just looking."
"You're staring again."
"Yeah."
"Confused fish."
"Yeah."
The kiss that followed was not the kiss of the beach, not the kiss of the kitchen, and not the kiss that had preceded the jerk session. The kiss was new. It was the kind of kiss that exists on the other side of the first time, the kiss that knows what the body knows, that carries the knowledge of the body's sounds and responses and the body's particular, unrepeatable geography in its pressure, angle, and depth. The kiss was informed. The kiss was the first kiss of their lives that was not about discovery but about return, the mouth arriving at a place it's been before and finding it, impossibly, better the second time.
Rowan's hands went to Elias's chest. Not pushing this time. Pulling. The fingers spreading on the pectorals, the palms pressing in, the grip of a person who is drawing a body toward their own and who is doing the drawing without urgency because the urgency is no longer necessary, because the body is coming, and the coming is certain, and the certainty is the new thing, and the new thing is better than the urgency ever was.
The playfulness was still in the room. The laughter's residue, the wrestling's echo, the smell of two people who had been ridiculous together and who were now, in the transition from ridiculous to serious, carrying the ridiculousness with them, a lightness in the touching, a warmth in the mouths, the particular quality that sex has when it follows laughter.
Unmistakably, irreducibly, beautifully human.
The tenderness surfaced.
Rowan's leg moved. The knee rising, the thigh shifting, the body opening.
Elias settled between his legs.
The original configuration, the elemental arrangement, two bodies aligned in the way that produces the maximum contact, the maximum vulnerability, and the maximum heat. Elias's hips between Rowan's thighs. Rowan's legs around Elias's waist. The architecture built, the scaffolding familiar now, the blueprint understood.
Rowan couldn't pinpoint the exact moment it happened. Or the way it unfolded. All that remained were fragmented memories, like fleeting shadows.
He remembered Elias taking his hand, bringing it to his mouth, spitting into it. The heat of Elias's fingers gliding between his thighs was seared into his mind. A jolt of electricity surged through him as those fingers brushed against the threshold of his entrance.
It didn't matter how much time slipped away, whether it was mere minutes, endless hours, or the expanse of years. Rowan knew one thing for certain: the feeling of that moment would be etched into his soul forever.
The feeling of the first time Elias entered him.
The sound Rowan made was a single, unbroken syllable, low, from the diaphragm, the sound of a body receiving another body.
Elias's forehead found Rowan's. The contact, bone against bone, the head-to-head pressure. His eyes were open. Rowan's eyes were open. They looked at each other from an inch away while their bodies began to move.
"Slow..." Rowan moaned.
The word applied to everything, to the mouths, to the hands, to the rhythm that was building between them with the tidal patience of a thing that knows where it's going and is in no rush to arrive. The first time had been fast, accelerated by the sheer, accumulated pressure of weeks of wanting and the detonation of that wanting into contact. The first time had been a wave cresting. This was the swell beneath it. This was the deep water.
Elias moved inside Rowan with a new deliberateness. Each motion was a sentence, complete, purposeful, the full extension and return conducted at the speed of attention rather than the speed of need. The need was there. The need was the engine. But the engine was being governed now, not by restraint, which implies resistance, but by intention, which implies the opposite: the full, conscious deployment of the body's capabilities toward a specific end, and the end was not the climax but the journey, and the journey was the body beneath him, and the body was a territory he intended to know completely.
"...there," Rowan said.
One word. Not a command but a coordinate, a navigational marker dropped in the dark, the verbal equivalent of a pin on a map, the single syllable communicating a location and a sensation and a request.
Elias heard it. Adjusted. The motion shifting, fractionally, the angle changing by degrees, the body making the micro-correction that the word requested, the adjustment so precise it was almost mechanical, the mechanics of a man who listens to the sea and hears what it's saying and responds.
Rowan's breath confirmed the adjustment. The exhale that left him was longer than the one before, deeper, the respiratory evidence of a body that has been found, the specific, irreplaceable sensation of being touched in the exact place and the exact way that the body was asking to be touched, the request and the response meeting at the intersection and producing, at the intersection, a sound that was neither pain nor pleasure but the compound of both, the alloy that is produced when a body that has known pain is introduced to pleasure by hands that are careful and a rhythm that is patient and a man who is paying attention.
"Oh fuck..." Rowan said. "Right there."
Elias's mouth was at Rowan's ear. Close, the distance of a whisper, the distance of a breath. "Tell me," he said.
"What?"
"What it feels like."
Rowan's eyes were closed. His head was turned on the pillow, the neck exposed, the jaw tilted. "I don't..." The sentence fractured. Not from pain. From the difficulty of translating a physical experience into words while the experience is still happening. "Pressure. But not...fuck...not the bad kind. The kind where..."
Elias moved. The sentence interrupted by a sensation that bypassed the speech centers and went directly to the body's response system, the result visible in the arch of Rowan's back, the spine curving, the shoulder blades pressing into the mattress, the full, involuntary, beautiful mechanics of a body receiving a stimulus it cannot narrate and can only show.
"That," Rowan said. When he could speak again. "Like that."
Elias cataloged. The angle. The depth. The specific combination of pressure and pace that produced the arch, the sound, the interruption of speech. He filed it the way he filed tidal data, precisely, permanently, in the body's archive where the important things are kept. He would remember this. He would remember the angle that made Rowan's spine curve, the pace that made Rowan's words dissolve, and the depth that made Rowan's hands grip the sheets with white-knuckled intensity.
"You feel..." Elias started. His voice was different now, lower, rougher. "You feel like..."
"What?"
"I don't...have the word."
"Try."
Elias's forehead dropped to Rowan's shoulder. The contact was a bracing, an anchoring.
"Home," he said. The word muffled by skin. The word nonetheless audible, nonetheless received, nonetheless traveling from his mouth through the surface of Rowan's body and into the space where words become facts.
Rowan's hand came to the back of his head. The fingers in the hair. The grip tightening.
Elias turned him over. The motion was seamless. His hands on Rowan's hips. Rowan's body rotated, from back to side to stomach, the turn guided by Elias's hands, the motion collaborative, Rowan's muscles assisting the rotation the way a dancer assists a partner's lead, the body trusting the hands that were directing it because the hands had earned the trust.
Rowan lay on his stomach. Face turned to the side on the pillow, one cheek pressed against the cotton, the jaw, the eye, the dark curl that had fallen across the forehead. His back was exposed. The full, uninterrupted expanse of it, the spine, the shoulder blades, the lean musculature that shifted beneath the pale skin with each breath.
Elias's hands were on the small of Rowan's back. Resting. Not moving. The hands that had been directing now still, paused at the junction of the lower back and the hips, the transition point between the scars above and the skin below.
"Is this okay?" Elias said.
The question was the question. The simplest question. The question that contained all the other questions.
Rowan's body answered. The answer was in the muscles, the tension releasing, the back softening, the spine settling into the mattress with the incremental, deliberate relaxation of a system that has run the query and received the result.
"Don't..." Rowan said into the pillow. "Don't pull out," he pleaded. "Put it back in. Please."
Elias's mouth found the back of his neck. The place where the hair ended, and the skin began, the nape, the vulnerable junction, the place where the body's defenses are thinnest because the body never evolved to expect a kiss there. He kissed it. Slowly. The lips pressing into the warm skin, the breath moving the fine hairs, the contact so light it was barely contact and so intense it was felt in every nerve of Rowan's body simultaneously.
Elias obeyed. Inch by inch. Slowly.
Rowan's hands gripped the pillow.
The cotton bunching in his fists.
Rowan's face, turned on the pillow, did something that Elias couldn't see but that the pillow absorbed: a contraction, a tightening, a body being touched in a place where the body remembers damage and is now receiving, instead of damage, the opposite of damage, and the opposite is so foreign and so overwhelming that the face cannot hold its shape and must, briefly, collapse and reform.
He didn't cry. The tears were close, ready to flow. He held them back as Elias entered him, their skin finally touching. Then, slowly, the motions began, organic and flawless. The pain transformed into pleasure, and in that moment, Rowan surrendered completely to the joy.
The unmitigated joy of being fucked by a man.
They changed positions the way the sea changes, fluidly, without announcement, the movement organic, each configuration leading to the next through the natural mechanics of two bodies that were learning to navigate each other.
On their sides. Facing the window. Elias behind Rowan, the larger body curved around the smaller, the chest against the back, the hips aligned, spooning in the vocabulary of ordinary intimacy, and that was, for these two men in this bed, something more specific: the position of shelter. Elias's body a wall between Rowan and the room. Elias's arms around Rowan's chest. Elias's mouth at Rowan's ear, the breath and the voice and the sound all delivered at the range of zero, directly into the nerve center, the intimacy of the position so total that the boundary between the two bodies was no longer anatomical but theoretical.
"I've got you," Elias said. Into the ear. The words not a declaration but a fact, a navigational reading.
Rowan's hand found Elias's arm. The forearm that was crossed over his chest, the thick, rope-scarred, salt-cured forearm. Rowan's fingers wrapped around it. Holding the arm the way you hold a railing on a boat, the anchor point that keeps you steady when the surface beneath you is moving. The thing keeping you stable while every cell in your body is being gifted with the most glorious, unrelenting thrusting.
The pace of the spooned position produced a different quality of sensation than the face-to-face. The angle changed, the depth changed, the experience of being entered from behind carrying, for Rowan, a weight that was both physical and emotional, the position that required the trust he had granted and that Elias was honoring with every careful, measured, attentive motion.
"Harder," Rowan directed.
The word was quiet. Spoken into the space between the pillow and the window, where the harbor was visible, and the boats rocked. The word was a request and a permission, the permission for Elias to stop being careful, or rather to be careful differently, the care applied not to restraint but to precision, the difference between a man holding back and a man holding true.
Elias adjusted. The motion changed, the force increased, the depth deepened, the rhythm heightened from the surface into something more structural, the impact felt not just in the nerve endings but in the bones, in the muscles.
Rowan's grip on the forearm tightened. His head tipped back, against Elias's shoulder, the dark curls pressing into the deltoid, the neck exposed, the throat offered, the body arching into the sensation with the full, committed, single-system engagement of a person who has stopped dividing attention between the feeling and the monitoring of the feeling and is now, at last, simply feeling.
"Like that," Rowan wailed. "Oh my God... don't stop."
Elias didn't stop.
He found the angle that produced the arch. He found the pace that produced the grip. He found the combination, the specific, unreplicable, this-body-with-this-body formula, that produced the sound, the sound that Rowan made when the touching reached the place where pleasure and surrender and the obliteration of every defense converged, and the convergence was visible from the outside as a full-body event: the spine curving, the hands gripping, the head falling back, the mouth opening, the sound rising from somewhere so deep it might have been the diaphragm or the belly or the center of the earth.
Elias cataloged the sound. Filed it alongside the first sound and the second and the third, the growing archive of Rowan pleasure, each entry distinct, each frequency specific, the angle that made the boy in his arms sound like something breaking open in the best possible way.
They turned again. Face to face. Elias on his back, Rowan above him, the position that had given Rowan the vantage, the looking-down, the agency. But everything was different now. Rowan moved above Elias with a rhythm that was his own. Not the pace Elias set, his own pace, his own angle, the motion dictated by his own body's knowledge of what it needed and where the need lived. The aggression was there, it was always there, it would always be there, the Rowan-frequency running beneath every act like a bass line, but the aggression was alloyed now, combined with something softer, something that had no name until tonight, and that was being named, in real time, by the body rather than the mouth.
The tenderness was in his hands. The hands on Elias's chest, the palms flat against it, the fingers spread, the hands using the chest as a platform and a connection point.
The tenderness was in his eyes. Open. Looking down at the man beneath him, the man who held and carried and governed and who was now, on his back, in his own bed, not governing anything, not holding anything. At the mercy of the body riding him.
"You..." Rowan started. Moving. The sentence competing with the body's rhythm for the mouth's resources, the words forming, dissolving, and reforming. "You feel so good inside me..."
"Yeah?"
Rowan moaned, head nodding slowly.
"Jesus Christ, you're fucking beautiful..." Elias groaned, his hands clasping the smooth skin on Rowan's moving hips.
"Elias..."
The rhythm shifted. Rowan's hips finding an angle that produced a response in both of them, a dual sound, simultaneous, a tandem exhale. The sound derailed the sentence. The sentence didn't matter. The bodies were saying it better.
Elias's hands gripped Rowan's hips harder. Not directing, steadying. The palms on the iliac crests, the fingers wrapping around the bone, the hold that said 'the rhythm is yours and I'm following'. The following was not passive. The following was trust. The reciprocity completing itself. The circuit closing. Two men, each giving the other the thing that cost them most.
Rowan giving trust.
Elias giving control.
The rhythm built. The sounds built. The breathing built, faster, shorter, the lungs working harder, the bodies working harder, the effort visible in the sweat and the flushed skin and the grip of hands and the arch of backs and the specific, unmistakable set of physiological indicators that signal approach, that signal the wave gathering, that signal the swell building toward the crest.
"I'm..." Rowan announced. The word was all he could manage. The single pronoun, spoken from above, his body still moving, his hands still on Elias's chest, the sentence that every body in the history of bodies has produced at this moment, the announcement, the warning, the report from the front lines of a sensation that is no longer building but arriving.
"I know," Elias replied. Below him. His hands on the hips. His eyes on the face. "I know. I'm..."
Rowan's hands pressed into Elias's chest. The fingers curling, the nails finding the skin, the grip that was desire's punctuation, the body's final, involuntary act of contact before the contact became too much and the too-much became the thing itself. His head fell forward. His eyes closed. His mouth opened. The face broke, the features disassembling, the composure irrelevant, becoming what faces become when the body overrides them: raw, animal, unperformed.
Elias watched it. With total attention, with the full, devoted, unwavering focus of a man who understands that what he is witnessing is rare and that the witnessing is a responsibility and a gift. He watched the face, and he held the hips, and he felt the body above him reach the point, the specific, identifiable, irreversible point, and he let it reach him.
Rowan came with Elias's name on his mouth.
Not spoken. Not shouted. Formed, the lips and the tongue shaping the syllables in the moment of maximum sensation, the name produced not as communication but as involuntary prayer, the mouth making the only sound that mattered at the only moment when the mattering was total.
Two syllables.
E-li-as.
Three, technically. But the body compressed them, the climax condensing the name into a single, elongated, molten syllable that was both the name and the sound and the need and the release and everything that Rowan had been carrying since a car window and a dock and a man on a staircase who had looked at him and whose looking had rearranged the world.
Elias heard his name.
The hearing tipped him.
Not immediately, but soon, the gap between Rowan's arrival and his own measured in seconds, the proximity close enough that the two events were less sequential than concurrent, two waves from the same storm reaching shore at slightly different moments but belonging to the same system, the same disturbance, the same force.
Elias came inside Rowan.
The sound he made was lower than the first time. More sustained. The sound of a body that had already climaxed once tonight and that was now, in the second arriving, reaching a different depth, not the shock of the new but the resonance of the known.
He held Rowan through it. His arms going around the boy's back, pulling him down, pulling him in, the bodies collapsing together, the vertical becoming horizontal, Rowan's weight settling onto Elias's chest, covered in Rowan's cum, with the full, boneless, post-climax surrender of a body that has finished and whose muscles have received the signal to release and have released completely, the boy on the man, the man holding the boy, the two of them a single, tangled, breathing, devastated, radiant pile of limb and skin and the after.
*
(Hours Later)
They lay in the between.
Rowan on his side.
Elias on his side.
Facing each other.
Their bodies were spent. Their bodies had been used. Their bodies had used each other. The walls had been dismantled so thoroughly by the night's progressive campaign of touch and sound and honesty and sex that the place where they'd stood showed no foundation, no rubble, no evidence that they'd ever existed.
What remained was raw material.
Two people.
"Can I stay?" Rowan asked. The question arrived without preamble. No lead-in, no setup, no conversational runway. He exhaled. The exhale was frustration, not at Elias but at language, at the fundamental inadequacy of words to describe a sensation that the body understood perfectly and the mouth could not translate. "Please," he beseeched.
"Rowan..."
"What?"
"You need to go back to Camille's."
Rowan's hand immediately stiffened on Elias's chest. The fingers that had been loosely resting tightened, a contraction.
"You need to go back. Before morning. Before she..."
"Before she what? Notices I'm gone?"
"Rowan."
"Don't."
"We...need to be careful about this."
"I don't want to be careful."
"I know..."
"I want to keep fucking you until the bed breaks."
"This bed is older than both of us. It might actually break."
"Then I want to be here when it does."
Elias sat up. The motion was slow, the body rising from the pillow, the torso vertical, the broad back against the headboard. The sitting-up was not a retreat. The sitting-up was a man changing his physical position because the conversation required a different posture, the way a captain adjusts his stance when the sea changes, and the adjustment is not a reaction to the change but a preparation for what the change means.
"Camille doesn't know," Elias said.
"So?"
"So she's your mother."
"She gave birth to me and left."
"She's trying. She's been trying since you got here."
"This isn't about her."
"It is, though. It is about her, because you live in her house and she's my..." He stopped. The word he was going to say, 'friend', sat in his throat. Camille was his friend. Camille was the woman he had broken three days ago in his office. Camille was the woman whose heart he had gently, irrevocably closed a door on, and the irrevocability was connected to the boy in this bed in ways Camille didn't know, and that Elias wasn't ready to reveal. "She's part of this. Whether we want her to be or not."
Rowan's jaw set.
"I could talk to her," Rowan said.
Elias blinked. "What?"
"I could talk to her. Tell her..."
"Tell her what?"
"That I'm...that you and I..."
"You want to tell your mother that you're fucking her ex-boyfriend."
Rowan sat up. The motion fast, the body rising from the pillow with the sudden, kinetic energy of someone whose stillness has been converted to motion by frustration.
This was no longer pillow-talk.
This was a negotiation.
"I could work at the dock," Rowan said.
"What?"
"Get a job. I overheard Marcus talking about you guys being short-handed. I could..."
"You want to work at my dock?"
"I'm not afraid of work. I could be on the boats, I could..."
"Rowan, you threw up in my cargo hold."
"I was nervous, okay? It was my first time on a boat."
"You were green for four hours."
"So I'll do dock work. I don't have to be on the boats. I could do maintenance, I could..."
Elias was looking at him. The looking was not the stoic look, not the captain look, not the careful, controlled regard of the man the dock knew. The look had warmth in it, the specific warmth of watching a boy plan a future that the boy has never planned before, a boy whose life until this moment has been a series of reactions and evasions and the daily act of surviving, and who is now, in a bed, at four in the morning, planning. Making schemes. Building scaffolding around a thing he wants to keep. The planning was new. The planning was Rowan saying, in the language of logistics and employment, the thing he couldn't say in the language of words.
Elias laughed.
In the span of three minutes, Rowan proposed coming out to his estranged mother, getting a job on a dock he'd never worked on, and restructuring his entire existence around a man he'd known for a month, and he was dead serious. It was unbearable and beautiful and impossible and real.
"You're out of your fucking mind," Elias said through the laugh.
Rowan's face changed.
The change was instant.
He got up.
The motion was abrupt. The body leaving the bed the way a body leaves a place it's been told it doesn't belong, fast, committed, the full rejection of a surface that has just, in Rowan's recalibration, become hostile.
"Rowan..."
"Fuck you," he muttered, already reaching for his clothes. The jeans on the floor. The underwear. The motions fast, hands working with the speed that the departure requires when the departure is motivated not by satisfaction but by the specific, acute, unbearable hurt of having offered something and having it laughed at. "You know what? Fine. You're right."
"Stop."
"It's not like I expected you to understand..."
"Stop."
Elias was behind him.
The crossing of the room had been fast, faster than Rowan expected, faster than the bed's release and the floor's cold, and the three steps between the mattress and the place where Rowan was standing should have allowed.
His arms went around Rowan from behind.
Rowan went rigid. The rigidity was automatic, the old wiring, the old response, the body's archived protocol for contact-from-behind firing before the new data could override it. His muscles locked. His breath stopped. His hands, holding the jeans he'd been about to step into, gripped the denim with the force of a body that is deciding, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, whether the thing behind it is threat or home.
"I'm not laughing at you," Elias said. Into his hair. Into the curls. The voice low, stripped, at its most honest frequency. "I'm..."
"Let me go."
"No."
"Elias..."
"Turn around."
A beat. Two. Then, Rowan turned. The turn brought them face to face. Close, the closest, the zero-distance, the distance at which the eyes can't focus on the whole face and must choose a feature.
Rowan's eyes chose Elias's.
The collision, and it was a collision, the word accurate, the impact of two gazes meeting at the range of inches with the full, accumulated weight of everything behind them, the collision produced, in both of them, the same recognition. The same knowing. The thing that doesn't need words because the thing is the word, and the word is in the eyes, and the eyes are saying it, and the saying is mutual.
And the mutuality is: they couldn't live another second away from each other.
The knowledge arrived in both bodies at the same instant. Not as a thought, as a fact, a physical, cellular, bone-level certainty that the time apart was no longer a thing either of them could tolerate. The tolerance had been spent. The reserves were empty. The mechanism that had allowed Elias to watch Rowan run from a beach and the mechanism that had allowed Rowan to lie in a bed with a fading shirt, those mechanisms were broken, overridden, burned out by a night that had taken every defense both of them possessed and had disassembled them.
They couldn't be apart. The 'couldn't' wasn't dramatic. The 'couldn't' wasn't the hyperbole of new lovers or the desperation of the young.
The 'couldn't' was the sea.
The 'couldn't' was the tide.
The force that moves water across the surface of the earth, and does not stop, negotiate, or care what the coast thinks about its arrival.
The kiss came next, and it was fire.
Rowan's hands went to Elias's face. Rough. His fingers in Elias's hair, his palms on the jaw, his mouth on Elias's mouth with the force and the fury and the desperate, annihilating need of a person who was, thirty seconds ago, putting on his jeans to leave and who is now putting his tongue in a man's mouth because leaving is not possible and the not-possible is the realest thing he's ever felt.
Elias's hands were on Rowan's waist. The grip tightened. The raw, physical, unmitigated force of a man whose body had been restraining itself all night and whose restraint had just been overridden by a kiss and a pair of eyes and the cellular knowledge that the boy in his arms was the only thing in the world that mattered and the mattering was a fire, and the fire was in his hands.
He walked Rowan backward.
Through the bedroom. Into the hallway. Four steps.
The kitchen counter.
Elias lifted Rowan onto it. One motion. Rowan's legs opened. The motion instinctive, the thighs parting, the knees rising, the body creating the space that Elias's body needed. Elias stepped into the space. Between the legs.
Elias held out his hand.
Rowan spit into it.
Elias layered himself with the spit.
Rowan smirked.
Elias entered him.
Not slowly this time. This was direct. The pace that exists when the patience has served its purpose, and the purpose is now different.
The sound Rowan made was loud. The loudest of the night, a sound that left his mouth and hit the kitchen walls and bounced and returned and filled the room with the vocal evidence of a body being entered with a force that was not gentle and was not rough but was honest, the force of a man's actual wanting applied to the body of the person he wanted, the pretense of patience stripped away, the real pace revealed.
"Fuck!"
The word was Rowan's. Expelled. Not directed, released, the way a valve releases pressure, the word serving no communicative purpose except intensity, the single syllable carrying the full payload of sensation.
Elias's hands were on Rowan's hips. Gripping. Holding the hips steady, holding the body in place, the hands serving as anchors while the rest of him moved, no longer the careful, attentive, every-nerve-cataloged pace of the previous waves. This rhythm was primal. This rhythm existed below the learning, the mapping, and the careful observation. This rhythm was the instinct that predates instruction, the force that the gentleness had been, all night, governing, and that was now, at four in the morning on a kitchen counter, ungoverned.
Rowan's legs tightened around him. The ankles locking behind Elias's muscular back, the thighs gripping his hips, the body wrapped around Elias. His arms circled Elias's neck. His mouth found Elias's ear.
"Harder," Rowan whispered.
The words entered Elias's ear and traveled the short, incendiary distance from the auditory nerve to the base of the brain where the primitive responses live, and the primitive responses responded, the body accelerating, the rhythm deepening, the force increasing.
"I want to feel you inside me when I walk," Rowan said into his ear. The voice of a boy who has discovered that his mouth is not just for kissing and biting and confessing but for this, for the delivery of sentences that are gasoline, that are accelerant, that are the verbal equivalent of oxygen applied to a fire that is already burning and that becomes, with the addition, an inferno. "I want to sit in her kitchen and feel you and know that you're on the dock and that you're..."
The sentence dissolved.
Elias's mouth found Rowan's neck. The place. The same place. The hollow below the ear where the jaw meets the neck, and the pulse runs close. His mouth opened against the skin. His breath hit the pulse point, and his pulse raced, and the two pulses were indistinguishable.
"I want..." Rowan tried again. The words broken. Fragmented. The sentences arriving in pieces, each piece a splinter of the full truth, each splinter incendiary. "I want you to...when you're on the boat...I want you to think about...this...about me on this counter...with your dick inside me..."
The rhythm was relentless now. The counter bearing the weight of both of them, the surface protesting. The sounds leaving Rowan were the sounds of a body that has been freed from the obligation to be quiet and that is reveling in the freedom, each sound larger than the last, the vocal expression of a person who has spent nineteen years being silent and who has discovered, in this kitchen, in this man's arms, that the silence was a prison and the sound is the escape.
"Don't stop," Rowan said. "Don't...I can't...Elias..."
The name again. Produced in extremis. The syllables molten, the pronunciation distorted by the breath and the body, and the thing the body was doing.
Elias didn't stop.
He held the hips.
He held the rhythm.
The climax built.
In both of them.
Simultaneously.
Rowan came first. The orgasm was vocal and physical and visible, the back arching, the head falling back, the legs tightening, the arms pulling Elias closer with a force that was strength and surrender in the same motion, the body breaking open with the sound that had become, over the course of this night, the most important sound in Elias's life.
Elias followed. Seconds later. He came with his face to Rowan's neck. Always the neck. The place where honesty lives. The place where the sounds go. The place that was, as of tonight, the geography of his undoing.
"Don't worry," he whispered into it. "I'll figure something out."
The sentence landed in Rowan's ear and traveled inward, past the eardrum, past the nerve, into the place where promises are stored, the place where a boy who has never been promised anything by anyone keeps the things that are promised to him.
And the place was empty.
And the place had always been empty.
And the sentence entered the empty place and filled it.
Along with Elias's load.
(To be continued...)
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