For Real (Spires, #3)

by Alexis Hall

I hope he doesn’t regret me—this stupid kid he took home one night—but I’m going to remember him forever.

God. What would it be like to have someone trust you and want you that much? To put aside fear and pride and shame and inhibition. All the stuff that’s supposed to be so important. Parts of ourselves we’re supposed to protect and care about.

I couldn’t tell if it was a sort of irony that my life had been not once but twice bisected. First into Robert and After Robert. And then into Before Toby and After Toby. It seemed a rather harsh fate, to live always in aftermath. That Robert, who had shared my life for over a decade, should have affected me seemed right. Even fair. But Toby Finch, who had burned like a comet for half a night and half a day? That was simply maddeningly cruel.

What could I do with a boy who had brought me to my knees twice, yet still held my hand in the dark? What could I give in return for such kindness? Such faith?

But that’s sort of what love is, I guess. A perpetual state of semideranged partiality.

I know I’ve only been with him twice. That I hardly know the guy. But I also don’t know how you fall in love, except by wanting to. So maybe that’ll do. For now, anyway.

I don’t need to tell him what I want. His mouth is on me, his tongue in me. Filling me with these soft shocks of renewed pleasure. Not enough to get me hard again. Although this is going to be wank bait forever: Laurie lapping his own come from my freshly—and indeed thoroughly—fucked arse. Just like he’d drunk mine from my skin.

Of course I’m going back. And if sex is what we have—if sex is all I’m good for—I’m going to make sure I am good.

“I want to give him everything, and the things I can’t give, I want him to take.”

“That poor kid.” Grace let out a long, slow breath, almost a sigh. “In love with someone so emotionally unavailable and sexually overavailable.”

I want other stuff too. That’s what I came here to say. I’m sorry if this sounds all blackmaily or something, but it honestly kind of hurts when you use something that’s special to put me in a box.”

“I never want to hurt you, darling.” “Then trust me. Not just with your body.”

“He wasn’t my boyfriend.” “You’ve got a serious bee in your bonnet about that word.” “It’s facile. I mean, he was my friend, but he was my lover and my partner, the man I would have chosen to live my life with.”

“Nobody’s perfect, Toby.” “Well, okay, if you ever felt like actually believing in me. In us. That’d be nice. And, like, someday you could maybe make it easy, instead of making me fight for every scrap of you like you’re the fucking Somme.”

“You can occasionally and voluntarily say something nice to me, you know. I won’t expect you to marry me after.”

Laurie takes my hand. Voluntarily. And it turns out that’s all I need to be stupidly happy.

Maybe it’s messed up, but I’m so fucking proud right now that my heart is spinning round the top of some spire somewhere. I think he’s exaggerating in the madness of being jealous and not knowing how to deal with it, and obviously I genuinely don’t want to upset him, but I like how much he wants me. How much he can’t deny it right now.

We must look fucking amazing. Framed in filthy tableaux in the moon-drenched cloisters. I love doing this: imagining us together while we’re together, all the ways we’re different and the same, all the ways our bodies fit together and all the ways mine can make his yield.

“Oh . . . I can’t. I can’t dance.” “What, not at all? Not even when you hear ABBA?” “I do my very best not to hear ABBA.”

“Or he might simply have decided to stop coming. I did nothing to keep him, really, except quietly fall in love with him while telling everyone—including him—I wasn’t and wouldn’t.”

“Don’t you get it, Laurie? I wanted you to be with me, but here I am as usual, sitting on your doorstep, waiting for the corner of your life I’m allowed.”

“If you say you’re sorry, I’ll scream.” He looked at me, his eyes all shadow and shiny with unshed tears. “My granddad’s dead, Laurie. The person I love most in the whole world. And I spent his funeral thinking about you. How fucked is that?”

“You . . . you—” his eyes widened “—took holiday? For me?” I couldn’t lie. “Um, technically, I took holiday to get over you because I thought you weren’t coming back.” “It’s about me. Still counts.” He nipped at my shoulder, possessive and playful at the same time. “I’m counting it.”

My ridiculous, beautiful boy. I would have found a way to give him the moon if he’d wanted it.

“When you said you wanted a lemon meringue pie and filthy sex, I didn’t think you meant together.” “That’s what you get for underestimating me.”

I want to be his equal. But I can’t be. Because I’m not. How the fuck am I supposed to be his prince when I’m just a pauper?

I’d treated his choices as if they were mistakes, and his fears as if they were nothing.

The truth was, the years between us mattered. Not—as I had thought—because of how other people would judge, but because while some of the bridges between us were instinctive and effortless, love and sex and faith, others had to be carefully built. And I’d failed not just to build them, but to notice they were needed.

“This isn’t submission.” “Isn’t it?” “No.” He looks up at me, tired as well, but he’s never looked more beautiful to me than in this moment, strong and open and unafraid like when he surrenders his body. “It’s love.”

I’m starting to think you should always push your luck. No, you can deal with. Don’t know is the most frightening thing of all.

He’s sleek with happiness, somehow, like the man I fell in love with lives on the surface now, not hidden deep inside, and it blows my mind to think that’s for me and because of me.

Point is . . . let’s worry about it when it happens.” He smiles up at me, squinting through the sun dapple. “I can’t imagine any of those days.” “Neither can I, so let’s just be in love today.”