Page 25 of Regret Me Not
“You can do otters too,” Hal said with a wink. “But I really only want a bear.”
Pierce blushed and took a big bite of his bagel. “Mm’kay,” he said through a full mouth. “’M brrrr.”
Hal burst out laughing, and they finished breakfast in peace.
AN HOURlater, Pierce was stretching awkwardly, trying to attain the warrior’s pose, and Hal was grabbing his sweaty body everywhere at once to help him find the position.
“Ouch!” Pierce complained after a particularly hard crank to his knee.
“Oh shit—I’m sorry! Okay, you know what? You work so hard in the water, you had me fooled. I’m going to go back to very basic moves—like kids’ moves. They’ll be good for your coordination, and if we increase the speed, they’ll help you with cardio. You game?”
Pierce’s body hurt—a lot—and those warm fuzzy thoughts he’d had about Hal that morning had become sort of thin and meshy over the last fifteen minutes.
“Yeah,” he admitted, pulling his feet under him and putting his hand out to try to find balance. Hal caught his hand and pulled up behind his elbow. “This isn’t working.”
“Okay. I’m going to help you sit down, and I need you to spread your legs. Let’s start there.”
Pierce let himself be stretched and wondered again who had told this kid he couldn’t make a living doing what he was doing. Yeah, sure—he made mistakes. But no teacher started out perfect. And Hal had such a good heart, such a willingness to try what he needed in order to make his plan work.
How could you say no in the face of that raw enthusiasm?
Pierce obviously couldn’t.
But the thing was, when he said something funny and Hal turned those laughing brown eyes on Pierce’s face, Pierce didn’t ever want to try. He wanted to tell Hal yes to absolutely everything, anything, as long as he could make this young man that happy.
And as Hal squatted at his feet and pushed his toes toward his nose to help with his dorsiflex, Pierce was finding fewer and fewer reasons he shouldn’t do that.
Hal was honest about the workout being more intense than he’d anticipated—so he kept it to forty-five minutes and did lots of therapeutic breathing at the end. Pierce was grateful—and even more grateful that at the end he felt refreshed and not destroyed.
And then Hal helped Pierce stand up, and they were standing chest to chest, with only the memory of the hallucinogenic midnight blowjob between them.
“I’m negative,” Pierce blurted.
Hal raised his eyebrows and smirked. “Yeah, but we’re working on that.” He said it with a little shake of the head, and Pierce heard thePlease, please don’t talk about itin that movement and took a deep breath.
“Forewarned is forearmed,” he said, letting that have two meanings.
Hal’s eyes widened for a moment, as though the thought surprised him. “Very true. And I’ve now been warned of your negativity.”
He gestured grandly then, breaking the heat between them, and Pierce hobbled to the shower.
The rest of the day seemed to be spent in that dual state of awareness, though. On the one hand, they were the two guys who had spoken frankly and slyly for the last two weeks.
On the other hand, every time they touched, whether it was when Hal offered him a hand out of the car or bumped his shoulder as Pierce leaned his weight on the shopping cart, was like shaking a bottle full of lightning.
Sparks everywhere.
“Hm… throw pillows, what do you think?” Hal asked, looking at some brightly colored Christmas pillows with trees and holly berries on them.
“I think Derrick will be surprised,” Pierce said, and then, remembering that Derrick and Miranda were supposed to be there on New Year’s Day, said, “Throw them in, with some of the dark blue too. It’ll be like a thank-you gift.”
“That’s really nice!” Hal said, with that surprising excitement for “niceness.” “Also, it’s really convenient, since we can use them too!”
“Well, if Derrick didn’t like gifts that served double duty, he wouldn’t have gotten me a PS4 with three extra controllers last year,” Pierce told him dryly.
For a moment Hal looked blank, and then it hit him. “So he could play at your house,” he said, nodding in approval. “But why three extras?”
“For our wives.” Pierce shrugged. “Miranda liked to play but Cynthia didn’t, so Miranda, being a better person than any of the rest of us hosers, pretended not to want to play so Derrick and I could have the game room to ourselves and she and Cynthia could go buy decorating stuff at Target.”
