Bombora (35 page)

Like I said, I couldn’t keep this up much longer. The lies had to stop that day.

In one way or another, they did.

Right on time, Phel pulled up in front of the house driving the sleek Audi convertible I often liked to razz him about, though secretly I thought it was a pretty sexy car. Kind of like its owner. I could see the small smile he wore from the minute I opened the front door to him as he came up the walk, looking incredible even in old jeans and a thin gray sweater. He must have seen the longing on my face; the first thing Phel did when I closed the front door behind him was throw himself into my embrace and bury his face in my neck, muttering about how shitty he’d felt since our fight. Having his body there against mine felt so right that my knees almost buckled, and while I managed not to fall to the floor in a heap, I did have to collapse back against the wall as I held him and murmured my own apologies into his hair, breathing in the scent of him like I was a man deprived of oxygen. When he kissed me, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to let him go, and for once I didn’t stop to think about how the hell I’d turned into such a sap. Like everything else, it didn’t seem to matter if it meant hanging on to what was here in my arms.

“I shouldn’t have pushed you,” Phel told me, sounding frustrated and angry with himself. I wondered if he’d been beating himself up the whole time we weren’t talking to each other, the same way I’d been doing, albeit for completely opposite reasons. “I got this idea in my head about us living together,” he said miserably, “and didn’t stop to think about the reality. Liam is your priority; I can’t—and don’t—want to force you to disrupt your son’s life because I’m impatient and greedy.”

Unable to keep from smiling, I kissed his forehead. “I like that you’re impatient and greedy,” I told him. “Trust me, Phel, you’re not the one in the wrong here. I just didn’t know how to deal with what you were offering. Fuck, at first I didn’t even realize exactly
what
that was.”

Phel pulled back to look at me, eyes hilariously narrowed like he didn’t trust me to have correctly translated his vagueness. Oh, how little faith he had in my awesome powers of deduction. “And just what was I offering?” he asked.

With a shrug, I said, “Same thing I wanna offer you, baby: no more hiding, not from anyone. I’m so sick of only letting people see half of me or less because of what they might think. Fuck that. If anything, you make me way more respectable by association—there’s a reason they call you my ‘better half’, right?”

If I can be really corny here for a second, that’s honestly how I felt—feel—about Phel: he’s the better side of me. Like Plato talked about in that book about love, we’re two parts of a whole. Without him, I was hardly better than a dumb hick fuckup, and a pretty significant source of disappointment to myself and the people around me. That I’d found Phel at all was a miracle, and one for the fucking books, at that. You could give me a million years to try to catch up, and I’d never be the kind of person Phel was back then. But being around him… it made me feel like I could at least try, right? Now that I knew what I was reaching for, I had something to aspire to, and more importantly, someone who acted as if he didn’t care if I ever changed. The way Phel treated me, like he loved me just the way I was, made me want to be better for him.

Who the hell ever gets that lucky, huh? I was freaking
honored
, every day of my life, that Phel could let someone like me near him. And not just near him—inside him. I don’t mean that in a dirty way… but obviously that too (I can picture his eye roll now). For some reason, Phel actually loved me, and if that thought never ceased to amaze me, it’d be too fucking soon. More than that, he somehow seemed to understand everything about me without my ever having to say it out loud. I might have ruined Emilia’s life, which I was genuinely sorry for and still hoped to fix, but Phel was my chance to do it right. And I really,
really
wanted to do right by him. Maybe then I could start doing right by myself and everyone else too.

Lofty fucking ideas, I know, but that’s the kind of guy Phel was. He had a knack for getting me to let myself think big just by loving him. He had a knack for making me want to love myself while I was at it, impossible though it sometimes seemed.

I must have been silent a really long time, judging by the way Phel was staring at me. He looked confused, but there was something like amazement in his eyes that made me think the expression on my face wasn’t much different. I said, “What?”

Though he watched me a while longer, Phel eventually chuckled and shook his head. “I never know what to do when you look at me like that,” he said.

“Like what?”

His slow head tilt made me squeeze him tighter as he said, “Like you’re trying to figure something out, and can’t.” He hesitated, and I could feel tension creep into his posture. “It makes me wonder whether it’s
me
you’re unsure about.”

I sharply inhaled. “Jesus Christ, no,” I told him, pushing him back to arm’s length so I could look right at him, into those eyes that didn’t seem to know whether to look rueful or wary. “Listen to me,” I said and gripped his shoulders tight. “I love you, Phel, okay? More than I’ve ever loved anyone I’m not related to, and sometimes even more than my brother, which you’d understand if you knew him.” At that, his lips quirked and got me thinking that maybe it was time to think about introducing him to Hugh. “I don’t ever want you to doubt that, because I’m in this for the long haul. As long as you’ll have me.
That’s
the only thing I sometimes wonder about, that you’re gonna wake up one day and realize you’re too good for my shit. Losing you is just about the scariest thing I can think of, right up there with something happening to Liam or my kid brother.”

“You deserve good things, Nate,” Phel said, brow furrowed. His hands came up to touch my face, one tracing my cheekbone and the other crawling through my hair the way he knew I liked, as much as I liked having his hands anywhere on me. After two weeks apart, the touch made me shiver. From his smile, he noticed. “And you won’t lose me. I’m not going anywhere.”

Would Phelan still say that when he knew the whole truth? I didn’t know, but it was time to stop being a spineless asshole and start trusting him like I did with everything else. Unable to resist any longer, I leaned in and kissed him so hard it made my lips tingle, his mouth opening around a gasp while his whole body sagged against mine. Almost immediately, I felt his tongue flicker out and dart into my mouth, trying to deepen the kiss. But no—it had to be now.

“There’s some stuff I gotta talk to you about,” I murmured, breaking away slightly. “It’s important.”

“It can wait, goddamn it,” Phel growled, and then he was pressing me back into the wall, his hands going for my belt as if drawn there by magnetic traction. “Two fucking weeks, Nate,” he hissed, and my eyes rolled back at the first determined stroke of his fingers against my crotch. He gave this laugh that was low and dirty and made me feel a bit lightheaded. With the kind of expert touch that only comes from shitloads of sex with the same person, he started to massage my cock through my jeans. My eyes slitted open. He didn’t have to look so goddamned gleeful about it. “Whatever it is, it can wait until after I fuck you senseless.”

Christ, that voice. I shuddered again when he worked open my jeans and slid his hand inside. Meanwhile, his mouth slammed back against mine with a thousand times more force than a minute ago, and just like that, all thoughts of waiting to fuck until after I told him about Emilia flew out the window. So much for willpower. By then I was so hard, having barely touched myself for two weeks, that the lightest brush of fingers made me moan and clutch him to me, slide my hands down the back of his faded old jeans, the fabric so worn and soft it clung to his ass as if they were jogging pants. Phel let me grind us together just for a moment, tongue-fucking my mouth until we were both breathless, and then he pulled away.

“Bed,” he ordered. To say I all but fell over myself to usher us into the guest room is a severe fucking understatement.

After that, I think we were both too desperate and impatient to worry about gentleness or finesse or, hell, anything resembling foreplay or condoms or lube. We rolled around on that bed until our clothes were gone and I was panting and cursing at the slide of his skin against mine, the way he manhandled me just how he wanted, despite being the smaller guy. I loved it when Phel got all toppy and aggressive like that, bossy and demanding and fully aware I’d do anything he could ever want, up to and including letting him tie me down six ways from Sunday or take a crop to my ass. This wasn’t the time or place for the first, and he’d never expressed an interest in the latter, but let’s just say I’m lucky if two whole seconds passed between him rolling me on top of him and spitting into his hand, and me taking that hard, slicked-up dick of his and sticking it inside me so fast it gave me a head rush. It hurt a bit, no lie, because it’d been at least three weeks since I had anything up me bigger than a finger, but one look at Phel all slack-jawed and dumb with pleasure made my stomach flip and the familiar burn start to tingle in a way that was decidedly not painful.

That was my favorite moment of all, the point at which pain became pleasure—not just because of how it felt, but because Phel always seemed to know when the change happened, when he could pull me down to him for a sloppy kiss and start rocking into me like there was something he wanted to touch deep in my chest, hidden back behind my ribs. He made it so good, memorized angles more diligently than a champion pool player, aiming to brush against that place that made me arch my back and moan and moan and moan, voice rough and breaking and threading between the wet sounds of my ass slapping into his pelvis. Phel found my hip with his palm, guiding, and I felt the fingers of his other hand catching my hair as we fucked together and the room started to lurch like a Tilt-a-Whirl.

“You’ll never lose me,” Phel whispered in my ear, breath juddering. “You’re mine, Nate, and no one else’s. I love you.”

I’d heard him say those words so many times before, but it’s as though they reopened a splintering dam inside I couldn’t and didn’t want to stopper back up again.

“I love you, I love you,” I echoed, telling him the same thing over and over like I never wanted him to forget it. It didn’t matter if it was an easy thing to say during sex; I knew he knew how hard I meant it, how I could feel my love for him down to the marrow.

Then, next thing I knew, Emilia was screaming at us from the bedroom door and everything became a blur. I couldn’t say what happened after that if I tried, not even for a fucking police statement, except sometime between Emilia finding us and me and Phel separating at a speed that could have made my eyes cross, I know Phel’s heart broke and never really healed properly. In the confusion of Emilia’s shrieks and me crying and Phel looking so stony faced I wanted to vomit, he had his clothes back on and was out the door. He slipped through my fingers before I could beg him not to.

One thing I do remember is how relieved I felt. It swept over me like a wave, hard enough to steal the breath right out of my lungs. What quickly followed was the realization I was a lot more worried for Phel than myself or even Emilia. Either way, I was too late to stop him, and the rest is history.

Do I feel relief that Hugh walked in and discovered us pretty much the same way? Funny that Phel and I didn’t learn our lesson the first time around. But I don’t know. Maybe I do feel better, just from knowing I can put a stop to all the lies and betrayal and sneaking around. I’m sure even murderers must feel a certain sense of relief when they’re caught. Not that I’ve ever murdered anyone, or that lying to my brother about loving Phel is remotely on par. Bad analogy. Either way, I’ve wanted to be free of the bullshit ever since coming to Cardiff, and for one reason or another, it kept getting put off until the situation was barely any different than the one I’d left behind.

I know there’ll be plenty of explaining to do to Hugh when I manage to get him in the same room without him freaking out. In fact, for once my concern about what he’ll say—what he thinks—far exceeds my mortification that he saw my junk in action, not to mention more of Phel than my typical jealous male brain can allow without getting inappropriately possessive. Relieved or not, I know things are bad here. They were rocky when Hugh found out I’d been lying to him about my affair for a whole year, and then, after I went and promised him not to lie to his face again, he found out I never actually stopped. Maybe that wasn’t my intention, but given the speed with which Hugh hauled ass out of Phelan’s house, I’m guessing he’s not thinking too much about the what-ifs right now. I can only hope his first reaction wasn’t to hit up a liquor store or, God forbid, exchange a knowing look with the bartender down at the Shanty on Chesterfield Ave., who I’m pretty sure deals prescription meds—or worse—on the side. The thought is almost more than I can entertain right now.

The only good part is that Phel chose to stick around this time. After Hugh ran off, a few minutes went by where neither of us did anything, both too paralyzed with shock to move. Then I crawled to the edge of the mattress to sit there with my head in my hands. A little while after that, Phel joined me. He looks the same as I feel—disbelieving and mortified and ashamed—but it gives me a small measure of comfort that he hasn’t tried to leave or kick me out. Instead he sits slightly behind to me, body pressed along the length of my back, lips against my shoulder. He’s quiet for a real long time before a sigh bubbles up from deep within his chest.

“Fuck,” I say.

“Fuck,” he agrees. There doesn’t seem to be a better way to put it.

Truth is, I was surprised when Phel called me this morning, same way I was surprised when he turned up at the house yesterday in the middle of me telling Hugh I’m gay. Considering how Phel and I left things last time, I didn’t expect to hear from him again except for the rudimentary “fuck you” we all knew was coming. He was so mad at me for wanting to disrupt whatever arrangement we had going, I was barely hopeful I’d get even that. But instead, Phel, ever full of contradictions, turned out to be the guy who had my back, and stuck up for me in a remarkably unselfish way that made perfect sense at the time he was saying it, but flabbergasted the fuck out of me all the same. Weirder still, he stood there and let me hold his hand the whole time Hugh accused us of going behind his back, squeezing against my fingers every time he felt me starting to lose my nerve. He had to know how much harder I fell for him at that moment. Bad enough that he was already the love of my life, he had to go and be my hero too.