A Prodigal's Dilemma, chapter 22
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He comes around the corner still wearing my old clothes. Even though Matt just gave me permission, that doesn’t make my desires any more right. Or any less strong.
Seth stands before me, his knees against the box on which I sit. “You’ll get wet if you stay out here.” His voice is soft and his face full of questions. “You don’t want to go in?”
“I want…” but I can’t finish; I hang my head in shame. I want so many things right now, things that are impossible or forbidden or both.
He leans down over me and draws his perfect fingers along my jaw, raising my face to his. “It’s okay, you know,” his breath sweet on my skin. “You don’t have to be scared of me.”
His kiss is soft at first, but grows more urgent as he slip his fingers into the hair at the back of my neck and his knees onto the box between mine. He rests his other hand against the wall just above my shoulder. “I’ll never hurt you,” he whispers when we comes up for air. “I won’t let anyone else hurt you either.”
I wander through the fog of my lust-addled brain. But still, I can sense that there is something wrong with that statement. I’m not the one that needs protection.
“Seth.”
“Umm,” he purrs from behind my ear.
“Why do you want me?”
“Love.”
“What?”
“Love,” he says again, this time from the region of my collarbone. “You should have asked why I love you.”
“But,” I protest-well, as much as I can with this beautiful boy in my lap. “You can’t love me. You don’t even know me.”
“But I want to know you,” he says and pulls back far enough that I can see his face. “That counts for something, you know.”
“How much?”
“A lot.” His face grows serious. “My grandparents have been married for almost twenty years and they got married just days after they met.”
“How many days?”
“Well,” he says with a grin. “He won’t tell me, but he was only in Kyoto for a week. It was love at first sight, kind of like how I fell for you.”
I let that one pass.
“Is interest enough?” I ask, buying time. For what, I’m not sure. It’s not like I used the time between when Matt left and Seth appeared constructively. When Seth is out of my sight, all I do is think about him and when he touches me, I don’t think at all.
“Yes,” he states, reaching for the zipper on my jacket. I stop him with my hand. He lifts my fingers to his mouth and gently kisses each fingertip. “Since I love you… I want to… get to know you… better. Once I know you better… I’ll love you more.”
“You love me?”
“U-huh,” he says while sucking on my pinky. Sensations overwhelm me: the feel of my finger in his mouth, the look on his face, the way his body proclaims that he is enjoying himself.
“Why?”
He freezes on his way back to my ring finger. He drops my hand and turns away, sitting down on the empty side of the box, and leans against the wall beside me, close but not touching.
“I don’t know,” he says with a sigh. “You’re not the first to ask. Why you of all people? Why not someone I was closer to? Someone I’d met? Why someone quasi related to me?” He runs his fingers through his hair, his eyes closed. “It’s not like I had a choice.”
There is always a choice, isn’t there? We’re not animals. Can’t we say no to things we want? Even if it feel like it is killing us? The same way we eat things that are good for us and deny ourselves the bad. Or too much of the bad.
But he is not done. “They might as well ask why not a girl.”
“Never liked girls?” What kind of pressure has he lived with? From Matt’s monologue, he probably outed Seth, long before Seth would have done it himself.
“No,” he says, his arms covering his face. “I’ve never liked anyone but you.”
He looks so ashamed, so hurt. He is seventeen and different from those around him, even the people he loves the most. I remember that feeling. I knew I was different long before I realized how, but at least my parents didn’t spread it around while seeking advice.
I reach over and tug on his left arm; he doesn’t resist. I take his hand in mine and let them rest between us. He needs this touch, this gentle affection. Or perhaps I do. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Couldn’t be,” he says with certainty. “People are probably always whispering sweet nothing in your ear.”
I laugh; I can’t help myself. “No, but that’s probably why I enjoyed myself so much last night. You pampered me so well.”
“You deserved it.”
“Did I?”
“I wouldn’t have loved you for six years without ever laying eyes on you if I didn’t believe it.”
What can I say to that? I squeeze his hand gently and he responds in kind. Jays squawk from a place out of sight and the Christmas lights on a neighbor’s house blink off and on. I could stay here all day, holding the hand of the one I might just love-the one who claims to love me, but the pain of his stance is palatable.
“Was it hard?”
“You wouldn’t believe it.” Seth leans his head back and looks up into the gray clouds. “Everyone told me I was crazy. That I should face reality. That a guy like you would never want a boy like me.”
A hawk flies overhead then disappears again from view.
“A guy like me?” I’m sure the term wasn’t meant to be complimentary.
“Yeah,” he whispers after a moment.
What is he thinking about? He is tense and his beautiful, smooth face wrinkles into a frown. I rub his palm with my thumb and ask, “Was that Jonathan?”
A flock of geese pass by out of sight, their honks echoing between the houses.
“How’d you guess?”
“Well,” I say, tracing his fingers with mine. “Some people think we will sleep with any man in the world. And he’s the only gay friend I’ve heard mentioned.”
“Are you jealous?”
“That he’s in love with you? Yes.”
“He wanted me to give him a chance.” Seth looks down at his knees, but he doesn’t pull his hand away. “I couldn’t. I can’t love him, just like I can’t stop loving you.”
He up looks at the sky. The hawk is back, but so are two much smaller birds, which following an instinct older than time, mob it from the area.
“Poor Jonathan, I empathize,” I say, pulling his hand against my chest. “Unrequited love is the pits even if you know you have no hope.”
“You’ve felt that way?”
“Many times,” I sigh. “I’m always the one that falls.”
He reaches up with his right hand and touches my cheek. “I love you.”
“And you say it so easily, so naturally, so believably.”
“You should believe me,” he says, “because it’s true. I’ve spent years defending my love for you. If I weren’t sure of my feelings, they would have dissipated like a cloud.”
“Did Matt give you trouble?”
“Well,” he says, rubbing his right hand against his forehead. “Most of Matt’s trouble was unintentional. My mom, much as I love her, thought the whole thing was funny and told all her friends, thinking they would get the joke. It wasn’t until some of them told her that I was broken and needed to be fixed, that she realized that she’d hurt me.
“She stopped saying ‘your Uncle Steven’ and let me drop the honorific as well. She said that as long as you were never anything less than an uncle, you could never be anything more.”
“Quite perceptive of her.”
“Yeah,” Seth says with a little laugh, “who’d have guessed?”
“Anyone else give you trouble?”
“It might be better to ask who didn’t,” he says, staring at the fence in front of us. He squeezes my fingers. “Grampa gave Matt the best advice. Pretty much butt out and let me live my life the way I want to.”
More geese fly over. This flock is only three strong, but is no less noisy. I wait for them to pass before I ask, “Did he really believe that, do you think?”
“He did by the time he said it.”
“Oh.”
“Gramma,” he hurries on, “just wants you to be happy. Preferably somewhere nearby so she can see your happiness with her own eyes.”
“That sounds like my mother,” I sigh and look over at him. His profile is breathtaking. “Anyone else?”
“Aunt Stacy made a huge deal over me being not quite eighteen.”
“Well,” I say, “in that I see her point. You are too young by a few weeks. But of course if we were in a different state you might be close to two years over the age of consent. If the laws haven’t changed.”
“So you’d have one less thing to feel guilty about if we were in New York or wherever?”
“True.”
He leans over and kisses me below my right ear. His warm breath caresses my neck. He takes his left hand from mine and wraps his arm behind my neck, pulling me close for a kiss on the lips. He doesn’t let my greater height get in his way. He doesn’t let anything get in the way. Maybe he is like this with everything he wants.
“You know,” I say, once he removes his tongue from my mouth, much too soon, I might add. “I can’t think when you do that.”
He laughs. “That’s the general idea.”
I remember my discussion with Stacy earlier. “That didn’t seem to be Stacy’s only problem. Your age, I mean.”
“It isn’t,” he acknowledges. “She is also upset that we’re quasi-related.”
“She doesn’t want the abused to become the abuser?”
“Something like that,” he says, leaning against me. “But I think her real problem is that we are both guys. She tries to be all cosmopolitan and everything, but she can’t wrap her mind around the idea that someone might be gay without being molested or have a domineering mother.”
“Oh.” She’s got the whole thing backward with me. “What does she think happened to you?”
“I’m not sure,” he says, removing his arm from behind my neck and pulling my arm around his shoulders. “But I think her biggest problem is that husband of hers. He’s really phobic, but he tries to pretend he isn’t.”
“He seems scared of everything,” I say. Sliding my arm down to his waist, I pull him closer to me. “Or was if just me?”
“It might just have been you,” he says, cuddling in. “Stacy talks about you all the time and he probably sees you as a rival, but it could be because you seem pretty unapologetic about your way of life.”
That brings a smile to my lips. “Do I really?”
“Well, Gramma thinks so.”
“And what does Jenn think?”
“I’m not sure. She says I’m not really her nephew. How could I be if she was only seven when I was born? She also says she didn’t even know she was supposed to be my aunt until she was eighteen and I was introduced as her nephew at her wedding.
“It was totally funny the way she said it. Really self-deprecating, how she didn’t realize this kid who she only saw once a year was really Matt’s; he brought Josh and Tessa over all the time. That since I didn’t call them Mom and Dad, how was she to know. I don’t even have Matt’s name.
“She ended with if I wasn’t her nephew, then I wasn’t yours either.”
I touch his cheek; his eyes are bright with unshed tears. “She meant well. Most people do even when they are hurting you.”
“I know,” Seth says, pulling a green handkerchief from his pocket and wiping his face quickly. “My mom’s that way all the time.”
I take the hanky before he can put it away and do a more thorough job. He doesn’t tell me to stop treating like a child, showing just how mature he is. But I can see it in his eyes.
He takes the cloth from me as soon as I am done. “Jenn says she would be a hypocrite if my age bugged her. I take that to mean she didn’t wait for her wedding night.”
I smile with him, feeling a tug on my heart. It’s a good thing we don’t have to wait for ours. Ours. I wonder if Seth will ever want to get married. To me.
“And us?”
“She’s uncomfortable with the gay part; she doesn’t want to think about it. It’s all right for guys to love each other, and even have sex, just as long as she doesn’t have to watch them being ‘affectionate’.”
“Like she and Dave are?”
“Yeah,” Seth says, then sucks in a huge breath. “Dave’s a good influence on her; he’s so easygoing. You should have heard her when she first saw the pictures of you and Jake.”
I don’t want to start that discussion right now, so I pull him closer and ask, “Friends at school?”
“Most of them don’t know or don’t care,” Seth says and he relaxes against my shoulder, wrapping his arm around my waist. “My other grandparents are all right, too. The Ito’s don’t see us as related at all, and my dad has other kids; they’ll get great grandchildren. Mom has an uncle that’s gay, so I was nothing new over there.”
“Thank heaven for small favors.”
“You can say that again,” Seth says with a sigh.
“I’m worth all your effort?”
“What do you think?” he asks and I feel his fingers against the skin at my side. I grab his other hand as it reaches the front of my waistband.
But this is Seth. He climbs atop me, straddling my thighs, and takes both my hands in his, kissing each palm in turn. Then he stops, looking me in the eye, and says, “I won’t if you don’t want me to.”
He knows I want him to; he can feel it. But he still asks. To see if my head and heart agree? I hope so. “I never said I didn’t want to.”
He leans down to kiss me gently before straightening up. “But?”
“I’m not sure.” With him so close I can’t even think of a better way to put it.
“Are you fine with kisses?”
I actually like the answer to that question. “Yes,” I breathe, reaching my arms up to pull his head down to mine. He yields willingly and luckily for my brain, my beating heart, and other parts of me, he moves his lower body further down my legs.
I can’t think, but then I don’t really want to. My illicit lover is giving me my latest fix of my newest drug: himself. I can trust him, I’m sure, to stick with our agreement.
All too soon he pulls away. “I’m not going to let my second game be called on account of rain.”
“It’s raining?”
“I believe that’s what the drops on the back of my neck mean.”
I look around. The fence is covered with small, dark splotches and a drop hits my cheek. “Sorry,” I say. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Forgiven.” He gets up and pulls me after him. “I was kind of distracting you.”
“Kind of?” I laugh. “You are the most distraction creature I’ve ever met.”
“Creature, huh?” he says, grinning, and tugs me around the corner and under the eave, where he kisses me again. “What kind of creature am I?”
“A kitsune,” I say after some thought. “Or maybe Pan.”
“Creatures associated with sex?”
“Yes,” I say. “You’re a natural.”
He bushes deep pink and I lean down to kiss him. It is hard to say no to this beautiful boy, harder yet to want to. I feel seduced even when I’m the one being aggressive. But he gives as well as he gets and I am left breathless by his passion.
“I think we should go back.”
“Back?” I ask. I could stay here, with him in my arms, forever.
“Back to the hotel,” he says with a grin, stepping away from me. “Or maybe I should say to bed.”
On to the end
He comes around the corner still wearing my old clothes. Even though Matt just gave me permission, that doesn’t make my desires any more right. Or any less strong.
Seth stands before me, his knees against the box on which I sit. “You’ll get wet if you stay out here.” His voice is soft and his face full of questions. “You don’t want to go in?”
“I want…” but I can’t finish; I hang my head in shame. I want so many things right now, things that are impossible or forbidden or both.
He leans down over me and draws his perfect fingers along my jaw, raising my face to his. “It’s okay, you know,” his breath sweet on my skin. “You don’t have to be scared of me.”
His kiss is soft at first, but grows more urgent as he slip his fingers into the hair at the back of my neck and his knees onto the box between mine. He rests his other hand against the wall just above my shoulder. “I’ll never hurt you,” he whispers when we comes up for air. “I won’t let anyone else hurt you either.”
I wander through the fog of my lust-addled brain. But still, I can sense that there is something wrong with that statement. I’m not the one that needs protection.
“Seth.”
“Umm,” he purrs from behind my ear.
“Why do you want me?”
“Love.”
“What?”
“Love,” he says again, this time from the region of my collarbone. “You should have asked why I love you.”
“But,” I protest-well, as much as I can with this beautiful boy in my lap. “You can’t love me. You don’t even know me.”
“But I want to know you,” he says and pulls back far enough that I can see his face. “That counts for something, you know.”
“How much?”
“A lot.” His face grows serious. “My grandparents have been married for almost twenty years and they got married just days after they met.”
“How many days?”
“Well,” he says with a grin. “He won’t tell me, but he was only in Kyoto for a week. It was love at first sight, kind of like how I fell for you.”
I let that one pass.
“Is interest enough?” I ask, buying time. For what, I’m not sure. It’s not like I used the time between when Matt left and Seth appeared constructively. When Seth is out of my sight, all I do is think about him and when he touches me, I don’t think at all.
“Yes,” he states, reaching for the zipper on my jacket. I stop him with my hand. He lifts my fingers to his mouth and gently kisses each fingertip. “Since I love you… I want to… get to know you… better. Once I know you better… I’ll love you more.”
“You love me?”
“U-huh,” he says while sucking on my pinky. Sensations overwhelm me: the feel of my finger in his mouth, the look on his face, the way his body proclaims that he is enjoying himself.
“Why?”
He freezes on his way back to my ring finger. He drops my hand and turns away, sitting down on the empty side of the box, and leans against the wall beside me, close but not touching.
“I don’t know,” he says with a sigh. “You’re not the first to ask. Why you of all people? Why not someone I was closer to? Someone I’d met? Why someone quasi related to me?” He runs his fingers through his hair, his eyes closed. “It’s not like I had a choice.”
There is always a choice, isn’t there? We’re not animals. Can’t we say no to things we want? Even if it feel like it is killing us? The same way we eat things that are good for us and deny ourselves the bad. Or too much of the bad.
But he is not done. “They might as well ask why not a girl.”
“Never liked girls?” What kind of pressure has he lived with? From Matt’s monologue, he probably outed Seth, long before Seth would have done it himself.
“No,” he says, his arms covering his face. “I’ve never liked anyone but you.”
He looks so ashamed, so hurt. He is seventeen and different from those around him, even the people he loves the most. I remember that feeling. I knew I was different long before I realized how, but at least my parents didn’t spread it around while seeking advice.
I reach over and tug on his left arm; he doesn’t resist. I take his hand in mine and let them rest between us. He needs this touch, this gentle affection. Or perhaps I do. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Couldn’t be,” he says with certainty. “People are probably always whispering sweet nothing in your ear.”
I laugh; I can’t help myself. “No, but that’s probably why I enjoyed myself so much last night. You pampered me so well.”
“You deserved it.”
“Did I?”
“I wouldn’t have loved you for six years without ever laying eyes on you if I didn’t believe it.”
What can I say to that? I squeeze his hand gently and he responds in kind. Jays squawk from a place out of sight and the Christmas lights on a neighbor’s house blink off and on. I could stay here all day, holding the hand of the one I might just love-the one who claims to love me, but the pain of his stance is palatable.
“Was it hard?”
“You wouldn’t believe it.” Seth leans his head back and looks up into the gray clouds. “Everyone told me I was crazy. That I should face reality. That a guy like you would never want a boy like me.”
A hawk flies overhead then disappears again from view.
“A guy like me?” I’m sure the term wasn’t meant to be complimentary.
“Yeah,” he whispers after a moment.
What is he thinking about? He is tense and his beautiful, smooth face wrinkles into a frown. I rub his palm with my thumb and ask, “Was that Jonathan?”
A flock of geese pass by out of sight, their honks echoing between the houses.
“How’d you guess?”
“Well,” I say, tracing his fingers with mine. “Some people think we will sleep with any man in the world. And he’s the only gay friend I’ve heard mentioned.”
“Are you jealous?”
“That he’s in love with you? Yes.”
“He wanted me to give him a chance.” Seth looks down at his knees, but he doesn’t pull his hand away. “I couldn’t. I can’t love him, just like I can’t stop loving you.”
He up looks at the sky. The hawk is back, but so are two much smaller birds, which following an instinct older than time, mob it from the area.
“Poor Jonathan, I empathize,” I say, pulling his hand against my chest. “Unrequited love is the pits even if you know you have no hope.”
“You’ve felt that way?”
“Many times,” I sigh. “I’m always the one that falls.”
He reaches up with his right hand and touches my cheek. “I love you.”
“And you say it so easily, so naturally, so believably.”
“You should believe me,” he says, “because it’s true. I’ve spent years defending my love for you. If I weren’t sure of my feelings, they would have dissipated like a cloud.”
“Did Matt give you trouble?”
“Well,” he says, rubbing his right hand against his forehead. “Most of Matt’s trouble was unintentional. My mom, much as I love her, thought the whole thing was funny and told all her friends, thinking they would get the joke. It wasn’t until some of them told her that I was broken and needed to be fixed, that she realized that she’d hurt me.
“She stopped saying ‘your Uncle Steven’ and let me drop the honorific as well. She said that as long as you were never anything less than an uncle, you could never be anything more.”
“Quite perceptive of her.”
“Yeah,” Seth says with a little laugh, “who’d have guessed?”
“Anyone else give you trouble?”
“It might be better to ask who didn’t,” he says, staring at the fence in front of us. He squeezes my fingers. “Grampa gave Matt the best advice. Pretty much butt out and let me live my life the way I want to.”
More geese fly over. This flock is only three strong, but is no less noisy. I wait for them to pass before I ask, “Did he really believe that, do you think?”
“He did by the time he said it.”
“Oh.”
“Gramma,” he hurries on, “just wants you to be happy. Preferably somewhere nearby so she can see your happiness with her own eyes.”
“That sounds like my mother,” I sigh and look over at him. His profile is breathtaking. “Anyone else?”
“Aunt Stacy made a huge deal over me being not quite eighteen.”
“Well,” I say, “in that I see her point. You are too young by a few weeks. But of course if we were in a different state you might be close to two years over the age of consent. If the laws haven’t changed.”
“So you’d have one less thing to feel guilty about if we were in New York or wherever?”
“True.”
He leans over and kisses me below my right ear. His warm breath caresses my neck. He takes his left hand from mine and wraps his arm behind my neck, pulling me close for a kiss on the lips. He doesn’t let my greater height get in his way. He doesn’t let anything get in the way. Maybe he is like this with everything he wants.
“You know,” I say, once he removes his tongue from my mouth, much too soon, I might add. “I can’t think when you do that.”
He laughs. “That’s the general idea.”
I remember my discussion with Stacy earlier. “That didn’t seem to be Stacy’s only problem. Your age, I mean.”
“It isn’t,” he acknowledges. “She is also upset that we’re quasi-related.”
“She doesn’t want the abused to become the abuser?”
“Something like that,” he says, leaning against me. “But I think her real problem is that we are both guys. She tries to be all cosmopolitan and everything, but she can’t wrap her mind around the idea that someone might be gay without being molested or have a domineering mother.”
“Oh.” She’s got the whole thing backward with me. “What does she think happened to you?”
“I’m not sure,” he says, removing his arm from behind my neck and pulling my arm around his shoulders. “But I think her biggest problem is that husband of hers. He’s really phobic, but he tries to pretend he isn’t.”
“He seems scared of everything,” I say. Sliding my arm down to his waist, I pull him closer to me. “Or was if just me?”
“It might just have been you,” he says, cuddling in. “Stacy talks about you all the time and he probably sees you as a rival, but it could be because you seem pretty unapologetic about your way of life.”
That brings a smile to my lips. “Do I really?”
“Well, Gramma thinks so.”
“And what does Jenn think?”
“I’m not sure. She says I’m not really her nephew. How could I be if she was only seven when I was born? She also says she didn’t even know she was supposed to be my aunt until she was eighteen and I was introduced as her nephew at her wedding.
“It was totally funny the way she said it. Really self-deprecating, how she didn’t realize this kid who she only saw once a year was really Matt’s; he brought Josh and Tessa over all the time. That since I didn’t call them Mom and Dad, how was she to know. I don’t even have Matt’s name.
“She ended with if I wasn’t her nephew, then I wasn’t yours either.”
I touch his cheek; his eyes are bright with unshed tears. “She meant well. Most people do even when they are hurting you.”
“I know,” Seth says, pulling a green handkerchief from his pocket and wiping his face quickly. “My mom’s that way all the time.”
I take the hanky before he can put it away and do a more thorough job. He doesn’t tell me to stop treating like a child, showing just how mature he is. But I can see it in his eyes.
He takes the cloth from me as soon as I am done. “Jenn says she would be a hypocrite if my age bugged her. I take that to mean she didn’t wait for her wedding night.”
I smile with him, feeling a tug on my heart. It’s a good thing we don’t have to wait for ours. Ours. I wonder if Seth will ever want to get married. To me.
“And us?”
“She’s uncomfortable with the gay part; she doesn’t want to think about it. It’s all right for guys to love each other, and even have sex, just as long as she doesn’t have to watch them being ‘affectionate’.”
“Like she and Dave are?”
“Yeah,” Seth says, then sucks in a huge breath. “Dave’s a good influence on her; he’s so easygoing. You should have heard her when she first saw the pictures of you and Jake.”
I don’t want to start that discussion right now, so I pull him closer and ask, “Friends at school?”
“Most of them don’t know or don’t care,” Seth says and he relaxes against my shoulder, wrapping his arm around my waist. “My other grandparents are all right, too. The Ito’s don’t see us as related at all, and my dad has other kids; they’ll get great grandchildren. Mom has an uncle that’s gay, so I was nothing new over there.”
“Thank heaven for small favors.”
“You can say that again,” Seth says with a sigh.
“I’m worth all your effort?”
“What do you think?” he asks and I feel his fingers against the skin at my side. I grab his other hand as it reaches the front of my waistband.
But this is Seth. He climbs atop me, straddling my thighs, and takes both my hands in his, kissing each palm in turn. Then he stops, looking me in the eye, and says, “I won’t if you don’t want me to.”
He knows I want him to; he can feel it. But he still asks. To see if my head and heart agree? I hope so. “I never said I didn’t want to.”
He leans down to kiss me gently before straightening up. “But?”
“I’m not sure.” With him so close I can’t even think of a better way to put it.
“Are you fine with kisses?”
I actually like the answer to that question. “Yes,” I breathe, reaching my arms up to pull his head down to mine. He yields willingly and luckily for my brain, my beating heart, and other parts of me, he moves his lower body further down my legs.
I can’t think, but then I don’t really want to. My illicit lover is giving me my latest fix of my newest drug: himself. I can trust him, I’m sure, to stick with our agreement.
All too soon he pulls away. “I’m not going to let my second game be called on account of rain.”
“It’s raining?”
“I believe that’s what the drops on the back of my neck mean.”
I look around. The fence is covered with small, dark splotches and a drop hits my cheek. “Sorry,” I say. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Forgiven.” He gets up and pulls me after him. “I was kind of distracting you.”
“Kind of?” I laugh. “You are the most distraction creature I’ve ever met.”
“Creature, huh?” he says, grinning, and tugs me around the corner and under the eave, where he kisses me again. “What kind of creature am I?”
“A kitsune,” I say after some thought. “Or maybe Pan.”
“Creatures associated with sex?”
“Yes,” I say. “You’re a natural.”
He bushes deep pink and I lean down to kiss him. It is hard to say no to this beautiful boy, harder yet to want to. I feel seduced even when I’m the one being aggressive. But he gives as well as he gets and I am left breathless by his passion.
“I think we should go back.”
“Back?” I ask. I could stay here, with him in my arms, forever.
“Back to the hotel,” he says with a grin, stepping away from me. “Or maybe I should say to bed.”
On to the end