Soft, blunt fingers draw fire across my shoulder blades, tease the sides of my throat. “I have wanted the same thing for decades, Asher,” he says, and may God strike me dead if I have ever heard a voice more sorrowful than his. If we faced each other, I fear the darkness in his eyes would make me weep. “But I do not know if I can ever have it again.”
This is a precipice, but it is not the precipice. “We all carry desires that might never see the light of day,” I answer. He must know I want him. He must know I have not spent all of this time with him and put up with his habits solely out of some misguided sense of loyalty. When his fingers stroke forward, caress the dip of my collarbone and rise up the centre of my throat, I swallow against them. My breath catches.
He takes this as an invitation. His body, clothed and warm and strong, presses to me, hips framing mine, chest on my spine, breath hot on the nape of my neck. “Then stay with me in the night. I will leave you before day breaks.”
The moments before I speak are eternal. I am as close to him as I have been in decades. I am in a place where perhaps even God shields his eyes, for such blasphemies are scrawled upon these floors and lingering in the air. He is corporeal, solid, but the spirits crowding us are just as noticeable, whispering entities of cold, as though to encourage me to take shelter in his heat. I long to. I long to forget the man I have become, and let the boy who waits within have his stolen hours.
And that is why I step away — not to deny the man whose body and breath scream out for me, but rather to deny the part of myself wishing so desperately to echo his cries.
