Page 66 of Missed Steps
He rolls up my trouser leg and wraps the cooling blanket around my residual limb. He sets his warm hands against my thigh and kneads the muscles. I sink back, sighing. “Feels good,” I murmur.
“Don’t fall asleep,” Chris warns from the kitchen. “Food will be ready in five minutes.”
I gaze at Mark through half-lidded eyes. His weight rests on his knees, and he focuses on my leg as he massages me. “Do you want to take a shower?” I ask. “Not that you need to. You didn’t break a sweat.”
“I’m good,” Mark says.
“Were you bored?” I ask next. “I know it was way too easy for you.”
“I wasn’t bored,” Mark confirms. “Especially once you were on my back and I had your arms wrapped around me.” He finds a tight muscle in my thigh and works his fingers into it. “We should check out other clubs together. I only did sports ones and didn’t try out any of the other ones.”
“Same here.”
His weight shifts to the side, and he moves his massage to my other leg.
My eyes drift shut. A second later, Mark strokes my cheek. “Food’s done,” he says. He puts a pillow onto my lap and Chris hands me a bowl of stir fry. Someone put the TV on and a drama plays out on the screen as I eat. The entire bowl of food is devoured in seconds. I place the bowl onto the coffee table and scoot so I can lie out, and rest my head on Mark’s lap.
He sets his bowl down next to mine and arranges the throw blanket from the back of the couch over me. “Comfortable?” he checks.
I hum.
I doze off, half-aware as I listen to Mark and Chris talking. Mark strokes my hair with one hand and has the other resting on my shoulder.
“Kyle mentioned that his brothers would tease him whenever he liked anyone,” Mark says.
“He told you about it?” Chris asks, a grim note in his voice.
Mark pauses. “I asked. I thought it was shyness at first, but he has such a hard time just talking to me in front of other people sometimes, and he can get so aggressive about rejecting me, I knew there had to be more going on.”
Chris sighs. “I hope you don’t give him a hard time about it. It’s not something he can help.”
“I don’t.”
“It wasn’t teasing,” Chris says. “I came home from a long trip to find out he’d missed most of the school semester because he was too scared to attend with them. He wouldn’t even leave his room until they were out of the house. My brother, the one that had graduated school already, would talk to him through the bedroom door. Taunt him. I’m not even sure half of what he said. Kyle doesn’t ever talk about it.” There’s a pause. “He was only twelve. The brothers he was in school with were both sixteen, and the one that stayed at the house with him was twenty-one.”
Tension creeps into Mark’s thighs. “What about your parents?”
“Useless,” Chris says, his disapproval and distaste clear. “It took weeks to get him comfortable enough to leave his room again, and months before I could convince him to return to school. I ended up enrolling him in a private school six hours away that had a dormitory. I rented a house nearby. He lived with me and stayed in the dormitory when I needed to go away for work. I’ve never let any of them near him again; not even for our parents’ funeral.”
There’s a long pause of silence. I keep my eyes shut, my breathing level, and don’t let my mind wake up enough to grow uncomfortable or tense up.
“He said he was getting the bus home at the start of summer when he got into his accident. You were on your climb. Surely he wasn’t going to see any of his other siblings?”
“He was talking about the town where he went to the private school. I keep the house rented out year-round, so he has a place away from here to go if he likes. Last summer, he went home for a few weeks to spend time with his old school friend, so he was probably going to do that this summer, too,” Chris explains. He snorts. “I’m more surprised by you than his injury. Ten years of him not so much as hinting about liking someone, and suddenly he’s got a boyfriend? And one with your temperament?”
“Apologies for my temperament,” Mark says. And I can hearthe grin in his voice. He’s not sorry at all.
Chris grunts.
As the conversation lulls, I drift back to sleep.
I’m woken by Mark gently shaking my shoulder. I roll over and blink up at him, bleary-eyed. “Is your leg dead?” I mumble.
“Dinner’s ready,” he says.
“We just ate.”
“Hours ago, pretty boy,” Mark says, amused.
