Page 38 of Stripped
"Can't wait. Illustrations?"
"Just photos of my ass. For the art crowd."
"You've got a niche."
"I've got an ass."
The banter sits between us. Easy. Almost comfortable. The kind of exchange that would be unremarkable between any two people who've known each other more than a week, except we're not any two people, we're TrevorHollander and Cole Marek, and comfortable is so far outside our parameters it might as well be a country neither of us has a visa for.
It trails off. The silence that replaces it is different from our usual loaded ones. No fight in it. None of the tension of two men circling something they both want and neither will admit to. Just quiet. The fan turning. The cicadas. The occasional creak of the house settling as the temperature drops another degree toward something almost bearable.
My eyes drift. They do that. Unsupervised. They find Trevor's left shoulder — the scar tissue, a puckered ridge that runs from just below the collarbone to the outer edge of the deltoid. Pale against his tan. Raised. The kind of scar that tells you exactly what happened without the story: something went in, something came out, and the body did its best to close the hole but couldn't make it pretty. I've looked at it before. Dozens of times. In the garage. In his room. In the hospital hallway while Eileen slept and neither of us watched the clock, because watching the clock meant admitting why we were there. I've looked and looked away, because looking too long felt like staring at something I had no right to see.
Tonight I don't look away.
"That the one?" Flat. Direct. No preamble, no softening, just the question dropped between us like something I've carried and finally decided to put down.
Trevor goes still. Full-body. The stillness that comes from below conscious control, the muscles locking because the brain hasn't finished processing the input. One beat. Two. His eyes find mine across the room, and whatever he seesclears some threshold, because his jaw works once and the word comes out quiet.
"Yeah."
I set my beer on the coffee table. The bottle clinks, too loud for the quiet. I stand. Cross to him. Drop onto the arm of the chair — not beside him, not quite, just perched on the armrest where the wood's worn smooth from twenty years of bodies doing exactly what I'm doing now. Close enough that he has to decide whether to shift away. His thigh is a few inches from mine. The heat off his skin reaches me through the charged air, and charged air has been the defining feature of us since we were teenagers sharing a bed and pretending not to notice.
He doesn't shift away.
I reach out. My thumb finds the scar. Runs along it, slow, the pad of my finger tracing the raised edge from one end to the other. The tissue is different under my skin — warmer somehow, or maybe that's the contrast with the rest of him, which runs hot, because Trevor Hollander is a furnace in human form and always has been. The ridge catches against my thumbprint. Bumpy. Irregular. A topographical map of damage and repair, and my thumb reads it the way you'd read braille, learning the story through touch because the words have never been adequate.
His shoulders go rigid. A sharp inhale through the nose, controlled, the breath you take when something hurts and you're deciding whether to admit it. His chest doesn't move. His jaw is set so tight the muscle jumps, and from this angle I can see the tension in his neck that means he's holding something back by sheer will.
He doesn't pull back.
My thumb stills at the center of the scar. Holds there. Pressed against the thickest part of the ridge, where the tissue is raised highest, where whatever went in did the most damage on its way through. My throat does something complicated. Swallowing doesn't fix it. Nothing fixes it. The words are right there, stacked behind my teeth like freight cars waiting for a track that never clears:
I know why you left. I know it was because of me — because of what was crackling between us in this house, in that bed, in the inches of charged air we've carried since we were old enough to know what the charge meant and young enough to be terrified by it. I know that when the word came back you'd been shot, I put a bottle in my hand and didn't put it down for months. I know Mick found me sleeping it off behind a dumpster and dragged me to his garage and handed me a wrench and a reason to show up, and the reason was the closest thing to absolution I've ever gotten, and it still wasn't enough. I know I was the reason you left, and the reason you ended up on a rooftop overseas when the round came through, because if I'd treated you like a person instead of a threat — if I'd looked at you the way I'm looking at you now instead of the way I looked at you then, all antagonism and forced disdain and the cruelty of a teenager in love with his stepbrother who can't handle it — you might have stayed, and if you'd stayed you wouldn't have a scar there, or the blankness that shows up in your eyes sometimes when you think nobody's looking.
I don't say any of it. The words live in my throat and die there. So instead of speaking, I let my whole hand rest flat against his shoulder. Palm against skin. Warm. Still. The weight of my hand on his body, and the weight ofeverything that hand means, and the impossibility of getting any of it across through touch when touch is the only language I've got that doesn't come out broken.
Trevor doesn't speak either. He looks straight ahead, jaw set, one hand gripping the armrest hard enough that the knuckles have gone white. His breathing has slowed to something measured — the rhythm of a man feeling too much who's decided the feeling stays where it is, behind the wall, because the wall is the only thing keeping him upright.
I let my hand sit there. One beat. Two. The fan turns. The cicadas scream. Outside, a car passes on Cembrook and its headlights sweep the living room wall in a slow arc that touches neither of us and moves on.
Then I shift. My hand moves down his arm, finds his hand on the armrest, takes it. His fingers are warm. Calloused. The roughness of hands that have done real work, the kind that leaves marks and doesn't apologize. He doesn't pull away. Doesn't lace his fingers through mine either — just lets his hand sit in my grip, passive, waiting, the surrender of a man who's decided whatever happens next is outside his control and he's okay with that.
I stand. Pull gently. Trevor follows. Not right away — there's a beat where he stays seated, his weight in the chair, his eyes on mine with that focused attention that makes my chest do something I refuse to name — and then he's up, and we're moving toward the hall, and the stairs creak under our weight because they've always creaked, and the sound is so familiar it almost hurts.
His room. The narrow twin bed against the wall, the water-stained ceiling, the smell of Trevor's skin on thesheets. The bed is made. Military corners. Of course. Trevor Hollander could make a hospital bed in a hurricane and the corners would still cut paper. I lead him to the edge of it. Make him sit. The mattress gives under his weight, the frame creaks, and the sound is so domestic, so ordinary, that something in my chest tightens in a way I didn't expect.
I kneel. Boots on the hardwood, knees on the floor, my face level with his chest. His skin is warm — I can feel the heat coming off him before I touch him, that furnace quality that belongs to Trevor alone. I lean in. My mouth finds the scar.
I kiss it. Once. Slow. My lips against the raised tissue, smoother somehow than the skin around it, which is rough with a day's stubble and salt from dried sweat. I kiss the length of it. From the collarbone down, following the ridge with my mouth the way my thumb followed it before, learning the geography through a different sense. His breath catches — I feel it against my hair, a sharp pull through his nose — and his hand finds the back of my neck. Not pushing. Not holding. Just resting there, his fingers in my short hair, his palm warm against my scalp.
I keep going. Down his chest. The planes of muscle there, defined and hard, the architecture of a body rebuilt after damage and come back stronger. My mouth on his sternum. His ribs. The flat of his stomach, where the muscle tightens under my lips and his breathing goes shallow. I can taste him — salt, soap, something underneath that's Trevor alone. I work his belt one-handed. The buckle gives. The button pops. I drag the zipper down slow, the sound obscene in the quiet room, and then his jeans areopen and his cock is there, hard against his stomach, flushed dark and thick, and Christ, the sight of it does something to my stomach that borders on religious.
I take him in my mouth. Slow. No preamble, no teasing, just my lips around him, taking him deep, the heat and weight of him against my tongue. He twitches. Once. Hard. A full-body response that travels from his hips to his throat as a sound — low, choked, barely there — and it goes straight to my own dick, so hard it hurts, trapped against my jeans with nowhere to go and too much want to carry.
I set a rhythm. Not fast. Not rough. The opposite of the garage, the opposite of the bedroom wall. This is slow. Deliberate. My mouth on him, my hand on his thigh, my thumb tracing circles on the inside of his knee where the skin is softer. I can taste every inch of him. The salt at the base. The musk in the crease of his thigh. The precome bitter and sweet at once on my tongue, and I swallow around him and feel him pulse against the back of my throat, and the power of it — Trevor Hollander coming apart in my mouth, because of my mouth, because of me — is almost too much to hold.
His hand is in my hair. Gripping. Not controlling, not directing, just holding on, his fingers tight against my scalp, his knuckles white. His hips roll up in short, desperate thrusts I match with my mouth, and the rhythm we find is filthy and tender at once, the kind of fucking that comes from a place deeper than anger and lasts longer than rage.
