Authors: Mimsy Hale
No sooner is the door to the RV closed behind them than Aiden’s mouth is back on his, his tongue tracing the line of Jake’s lips before plunging inside. They stumble sideways up the steps, the inside of the RV growing darker in the fading daylight. Aiden pushes Jake up against the bathroom door, links their fingers and presses their hands into the wood at either side of Jake’s head.
“This is finally happening,” he says, his voice holding a note of desire that Jake has never heard directed at him; it makes him shiver. “No going back?”
“No going back,” Jake says, pushing his hips forward into Aiden’s and whining in the back of his throat
.
“Fuck, okay,” Aiden whispers. He presses himself even more tightly against Jake, and both of them moan at the contact and friction. Then Aiden pulls Jake into the bedroom and flicks on the light.
Jake pushes Aiden onto the bed and looks at him, takes in the blush of sun on his skin and the front of his shirt, rumpled where Jake gripped it in his fist. The impatient fire dies but the heat remains, and with his eyes locked on Aiden’s, Jake slowly moves onto the bed, his knees at either side of Aiden’s hips. He leans forward, traces Aiden’s bottom lip with his index finger and bites back a groan when Aiden sucks it into his mouth—exactly what Jake had wanted him to do on that overtired, hazy night in Vermont.
Have we always been waiting for this?
Jake’s lips take the place of his finger, and he cups Aiden’s jaw to feel the shift and clench he’s been picturing since Atlanta. The kiss is slow, and the sounds Aiden makes in the back of his throat hit Jake like pinpricks. He kisses Aiden harder, savoring the taste of his mouth, while Aiden’s hands grip and squeeze his sides, moving up and underneath his shirt. Jake gasps into his mouth at the firm, strong touch.
“God, why haven’t we always been doing this,” he whines, rolling his hips down onto Aiden’s and pressing their foreheads together, mingling their breath. Aiden groans low in response. He tugs Jake’s shirt up over his head and tosses it, then lets his fingers drift over Jake’s nipples and down over his ribcage.
Jake shivers and surges forward to recapture Aiden’s lips. He’s never kissed
anyone
like this. He’s rushed with everyone he’s ever been with, even his first, and he feels as if he’s learning all over again. Sweet tremors chase one another up and down his spine and tingle all the way up into his lips as Aiden kisses a new life into him.
They undress one another in increments, trading until there is nothing left of them but skin and flesh and Jake’s hips working circles into Aiden’s. Aiden falls backward on the bed, taking Jake with him; his fingers grip the back of Jake’s neck like a lifeline, and every time his eyes open, they stare straight into Jake.
“Ade—shit,” Jake manages, the sensation beginning to build in his fingers and toes.
“Come on, Jake,” Aiden says, his pace quickening, his cock dragging against Jake’s, palms kneading into the flesh of Jake’s ass as his back arches off the covers.
“Are you—you close?”
“Fuck—yes, just don’t… Jesus, don’t stop, I’ve—I’ve wanted this…”
“Tell me,” Jake pants into the hollow of Aiden’s neck, sweat beading at his temples, and he spreads his knees wider, thrusts down harder, chasing and chasing and chasing.
“Couldn’t—ah—get Philly off my mind, you… the way you looked, fuck, I—
Jake…”
Aiden’s entire body tenses as he comes, a soundless cry in his slack mouth, and Jake bites down hard on his collarbone as he winds up and up, coiling tightly and then unspooling like thread.
The comedown is a calm Jake has never felt. Aiden’s hands find Jake’s face to pull him closer and their lazy lips fit together and slide apart. Jake climbs off Aiden carefully, collapses onto his side and pushes his face into the pillow, blood rushing through his head in a buzz that dulls everything else.
He looks at Aiden and finds him smiling.
“Tell me something,” Aiden pants, his chest—gloriously, gloriously bare and oh, is Jake going to take his time mapping out every last dip and contour—rapidly rising and falling as he tries to catch his breath. Jake gazes at him through heavy-lidded eyes, props himself up on his elbow and looks at Aiden expectantly. “This
is
just about the sex, right? There isn’t anything more to it, anything you wanna tell me?”
Of course there’s something more, you idiot,
Jake wants to say, but the three seconds he hesitates let that old fear back in, and it’s just enough to slot a couple of bricks back into place.
His heart hammering in his chest, he meets Aiden’s eyes squarely and forces out the words, “No. What happens on the road trip stays on the road trip.”
3,408 miles
Day Thirty-Three: Alabama
Aiden’s first time was a mistake.
The guy’s name was Tyler Pace, and he was one of Aiden’s roommates in London, an intern in the same program. He wore a sort of uniform, T-shirts in muted colors under a boxy black blazer and ratty jeans that would have appalled Jake. He had small black gauges in his ears and his bright red hair was shot through with blond, shaved at the sides and styled on top in a messy approximation of a James Dean pompadour. A pair of thick, oversized black hipster glasses with red arms obscured his hazel eyes, and there was always a pair of Skullcandy headphones around his neck blaring Irish folk rock.
Tyler appeared, at first, to be a patchwork of personalities all clamoring for dominion over one body; an enigma who kept mostly to himself, and only ever spoke when spoken to or when he had something particularly important to say. All of Aiden’s questions went unasked, and he contented himself with being mostly in the dark, even though Tyler’s eyes sometimes lingered on him as if waiting for him to speak.
Aiden scoffed every time Lucy told him that Tyler had a crush on him.
The night they slept together, a few days before Christmas break, Tyler knocked on Aiden’s bedroom door mere moments after Aiden disconnected from a blazing Skype fight with Jake. The walls in the flat were old and thin, and everyone probably heard Aiden’s placatory tone escalate into angry yelling, louder and louder, until he told Jake that he was glad he wasn’t coming home for the holidays before hanging up and dropping his head into his hands.
“Everything all right there?” Tyler asked in his lilting Irish accent when Aiden opened the door. Perhaps it was the concern in his voice, perhaps it was the way his eyes kept dropping to Aiden’s mouth, or perhaps it was the fact that he was Jake’s polar opposite—whatever the reason, Aiden stepped forward and kissed him.
One thing led to another, and even though Tyler was sweet about it afterward, something changed irrevocably between them. Aiden suddenly began to notice the absence of Tyler’s lingering looks. Tyler started talking to him more and more, but never about anything real, and Aiden realized that the mystery surrounding Tyler had been nothing more than the unresolved tension between them.
The second time it happened, Aiden was drunk and in pieces over the news of his grandfather’s death. On Tyler’s part, it was probably no more than a pity fuck. That was what it felt like: quick, messy, a race to the finish.
With Jake, it lasts for hours. They trade a litany of deep kisses, get lost in one another over and over until they are both spent and Aiden falls asleep with Jake’s face buried in the hollow of his neck.
When Jake finally pulls up to the campground’s dump station in Ozark the next evening, the sun has long since set. They’ve been on the road from Key West all day, driving in two shifts and stopping for only an hour in Gainesville. They’re both exhausted, not only from the miles they’ve covered, but also from lack of sleep.
Silence envelops them as Jake switches off the engine, stretches his arms up over his head and rolls his wrists, and Aiden has to remind himself that he actually has permission to look now. So he does, taking in the lean lines of Jake’s body and picturing the miles of lightly freckled pale skin that he knows lie beneath Jake’s shirt and jeans.
If it weren’t for his exhaustion, Aiden might feel compelled to do a victory dance or something equally embarrassing.
“What are you looking at?” Jake asks around a yawn that he stifles behind his hand. Everything about him screams tiredness, and Aiden reaches over to let the backs of his fingers drift over Jake’s cheek.
“You, sleepyhead,” he says, smiling fondly when Jake leans into the touch. “Do you think you’ll stay awake long enough to watch our movie?”
“I’ll be fine once I’ve had coffee and stretched. God, I
ache,”
Jake says, turning sideways in his seat and dropping his cheek onto the headrest.
“Go stretch. It’s my turn to empty the tanks. Don’t be too jealous.” Jake wrinkles his nose and Aiden asks, “Aren’t you jealous at
all?
Hoses, gauges,
and
disposable gloves? I’d be jealous.”
“If I had the energy, I would be side-eyeing you so hard right now,” Jake murmurs, his eyes drifting closed.
“Hey, come on. Up,” Aiden says, taking Jake’s hands and pulling him to his feet. Jake sways then finds his equilibrium and offers Aiden a weak but grateful smile. Quite unable to resist the impulse, Aiden rocks forward and catches Jake’s sleepy, slackening mouth in a fleeting kiss that is both a request for and promise of more. He knows he’s playing a dangerous game, particularly in light of what Jake said last night, but he can’t yet find it within himself to care. What lies between them has a time limit on it, now—an expiration dated the day they arrive back in Maine—and until then Aiden is going to take whatever he’s given.
Leaving Jake and his soft smile, Aiden grabs his phone from the dashboard and heads outside. A loop of Coldplay’s “Clocks” soundtracks his work, reminding him of tenth grade, when he learned the piano riff by heart and played it so often that, one Sunday morning after a sleepover, Jake told him he’d been drumming it in his sleep.
He makes quick work of emptying the tanks: first the black water, then the gray, running water rinses in between. He finishes the job by dumping a liberal amount of treatment into each tank, then rests his palm on the side of the RV for a second and thinks of his grandfather.
“You were so proud of this RV,” he says quietly. “Hope I’m taking good enough care of her, Grandpa.”
A chill in the air sends him back inside. He leans in the doorway to the bedroom, watching Jake sprawl on the bed. Jake says, “If there was even the slightest spill, you’re sleeping on the couch.”
Aiden grins and sets his phone down by the bed. The song still plays softly. Jake is stretched out on his stomach, still in his clothes. Half of his face is pushed into the pillow and he regards Aiden through one bleary eye.
“Coffee?” Aiden asks.
“Mm… no. Too comfy.”
“Massage?”
“Oh my god.
Please.
”
Chuckling, Aiden climbs onto the bed and straddles Jake’s thighs. He blinks and swallows as he gently tugs Jake’s shirt from the waistband of his jeans; skin, miles of it, and he’s allowed to look and touch and savor every inch.
He rubs his hands together to warm them and starts with Jake’s shoulders. Jake melts beneath his ministrations almost immediately and lets out a positively obscene groan of pleasure.
“That feels
amazing,”
he says. Aiden gently begins to work out a knot at the top of Jake’s shoulder blade. “If I’d known you were so good with your hands, I might not have taken so long.”
“Why
did
you take so long?” Aiden asks, careful to keep his tone light and conversational.
Jake pauses, and then simply says, “It was totally weird. And then it wasn’t.”
“Obviously I just became too hard to resist,” Aiden says. He pushes Jake’s arms up so that he will wrap them around his pillow, and then drags the heel of his own hand up the length of Jake’s spine, leaving a light flush of red in its wake.
“Well, you—oh,
right there—
you took your time as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“WaterFire? The Brooklyn Bridge? Come on, Dan.”
The nickname falls from Jake’s lips so easily, as if it hasn’t been years since he last used it—seven years, in fact; Jake’s father had latched onto the nickname as well, and Jake stopped using it after his passing—and Aiden feels a rush of fondness in his chest. He eases off on the pressure for a moment and lets his fingers drift back and forth across the breadth of Jake’s shoulders.
“And what about Delaware?” he asks carefully, knowing that he probably isn’t going to get any answers, not with this wall already here between them. It’s translucent—almost invisible, really—but tangible and daubed with the words,
Boundary line, please do not cross.
“Can we just… forget Delaware?”
“Sure,” Aiden says, though it will take a long time for him to forget that fear he’d seen in Jake’s eyes. Changing tack, he leans forward and presses an open-mouthed kiss to Jake’s shoulder. Against Jake’s skin, he murmurs, “Something else I’m curious about, though.”
“Oh?”
“What number am I?”
A beat, a shift, and then, “Thirteen.”
“Lucky thirteen,” Aiden says with a chuckle. He sits back and presses his thumbs into the base of Jake’s neck. “It was what, four before I left? Wow. I really
was
cramping your style.”
“No, you—mmm, that’s good… it wasn’t ever like that, not really,” Jake says. “You were enough.”
Aiden breathes in slowly, leans his weight onto his thumbs and works out the knots in Jake’s muscles. Jake shudders underneath him when the tension finally dissipates, and this time when Aiden leans forward, Jake hooks his arm around Aiden’s neck, dragging him down to lie next to him.
“Better?” Aiden asks. Jake turns onto his side, looking remarkably livelier than before, and nods. “Good.”
“Was last night a one-time thing?” Jake asks suddenly, and Aiden blinks dumbly at him.
Carefully, he asks, “Do you want it to be?”
“No,” Jake says. “Do you?”
“Not when you were the least terrifying you’ve ever looked, this morning. No fire, pitchforks
or
death.”