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In case none of this is clear, I’ll speak plainly. I want you in all the ways I can have you. You have walls, and that’s okay. Walls, too, are part of a home. I’ll stand outside on devotional guard, so you don’t have to work so hard to protect them. Put me out of my misery. Go on a date with me?
P.P.S. Why are you so beautiful? You turn a sidelines chair into a throne. You do know you minding your business on a bench is how this started?
I follow his gaze to the overhead fresco. Meh. Mythical men immortalized in stone and ivory are no match for his sun-dipped, sinewy expanse and sculpted proportions.
More questions than answers, which might be the case with us until the end.
I haven’t yet explained his nickname to him. Blue. My dad used to say, “If you can’t find peace, wait for the blue hour before dawn, and free your wrestled fears to fate.” I’m not sure Blue has ever found that hour, but when I think of it, I think of him.
“Salem,” he moans, ruining my name for anyone else. It has to be a kind of delirium to want someone as badly as I want him. All of him.
“You run and still end up in my arms.” I thrust my hips. “Why do you think—Mm, fuck, you’re choking me. Why do you think that is? Hmm? Look at me.”
What I’d give to hear him cry out my name every day for the rest of my life. The thought aches.
In every future I imagine, I only see him. “Over five years,” I whisper against his lips, “I’ve dreamt of you.”
I want you. All of you. I will keep the ground from caving in for both of us if you let me.”
Baker Salem. Nah, that doesn’t sound right. Baker Bae is hands down the hottest guy I’ve ever seen.
He’s on my couch, looking more at home than I’ve ever felt here. There are moments so blinding in their arrival that they’ll take years to see. Finding him standing in front of my house earlier is one of them.
“I’ll sing for you anytime.” “Noo,” he groans, rolling to his back and pulling me on top of him. “I can’t fall any deeper in love with you. I have a career, responsibilities…I can’t be stuck on the couch like I’ve been, replaying your video over and over for hours.”
He’s part of the reason I can sit here and do this. You love him with every inch of your being. You love him so much it aches. You try really hard not to. And every time you run, you end up back with him. You’ll still feel like the floor is gonna cave in and you’ll lose him, but I can’t help you with that. I haven’t figured it out. But you don’t run anymore. You still retreat into the quiet corners of yourself. He knows you need it. But he’s there whenever you come out. With cake.
