Page 65 of Mr. Frosty Pants
“Can I give you a massage?” Casey asked when Bruno finally conceded that Joel was all right and moved to lay on the floor at his feet. “Feeling good doesn’t just have to be about sex.”
“But I like sex,” Joel said, his crooked lips tweaking up. “At least, I like it so far. With you.”
Casey grinned, the heaviness that had pressed on his heart since Joel had bolted for the shower lifting. “You do?”
“Yeah. Rimming is better than it looks in porn, and that’s saying something. Because it looks pretty great in porn.”
Casey laughed outright and hooked his arm around Joel’s shoulders to drag him in close again. “Oh yeah? What else looks good in porn?”
“Fucking. Especially getting fucked.”
“Yeah? You like the idea of a guy fucking your ass?”
“Don’t you?”
Casey shrugged. “Sometimes. I like to be the one doing the fucking usually.”
Joel’s throat clicked. “Did you bring condoms?”
Casey shook his head. “We’re not doing that yet. We’ve got plenty of time. We don’t need to rush into it.” Especially not after Joel’s emotional reaction to rimming. Casey wasn’t ready to push limits when Joel was still so fragile. “Fucking isn’t second-date material,” he joked, though he’d fucked plenty of guys he’d never even gone on a first date with. But Joel didn’t need to know that.
Joel scoffed. “We don’t have a lot of time, Casey. You’re going back to New York after Christmas. Which, for the record, is the day after tomorrow, and, if I like getting fucked, I’d like to do it more than once.” He was wide-eyed and earnest, his expression of resigned determination burrowing into Casey’s flesh.
“I’m staying through New Year’s Day,” Casey murmured, his brain circling around the words Joel had spit out so sincerely. “But, are you saying… Do you want it to be over when I go back to New York? It doesn’t have to be.”
Joel shook his head. “Just stop.” He cleared his throat. “It doesn’t matter what I want, Casey, because we’ve got no future. So, let’s just have this time and be happy we got it.” He rubbed his face. “Fuck, I need a cigarette.”
“You know, when we were kids, you used to boss me around and most of the time I took what you said as the God’s honest truth.”
“Ha. Could have fooled me. You did whatever you wanted when it came to me.”
“If that was true, I’d have kissed you back then and made love to you a million times in the years since.”
Joel closed his eyes.
“But I’m telling you right now, this doesn’t have to be over when I go back to school. Maybe that sounds safer to you. Something with a beginning and an end that you can see from the start. But that’s not what either one of us really wants.”
“You think you know what I want?” Joel gritted out.
“I know that you trust me more than you trust anyone else in the world.”
“Oh yeah? What makes you think that?”
“Because you let me lick your ass, man.” Casey grinned. “And you haven’t kicked me out yet. And you’re sitting here looking at me like you hope like hell that what I’m saying is true.”
“So what?” Joel ran a hand into his hair. “It doesn’t make it true.”
“What’s your big fear? That we make a go of this and…what? What’s so scary about the idea of us carrying on when I go back to school?”
“We can’t work out. What you want, who you are? It’s not what my life is going to be.”
“Who am I, Joel? If you know the answer to that, tell me now. Because I’m just figuring that out for myself. I started seeing a therapist to get to the heart of what I wanted and who I am, but I haven’t felt more me in my entire life than I have when I’m holding you, making you feel good, letting you be you too. Fuck, why would I want to let that go? Why do you?”
Joel vibrated beside him on the sofa, arms around his knees and his eyes focused on the top of the starless Christmas tree. “You’ll leave me. In the end, you’ll leave me.”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
