Chico took his time and finished his sandwich a little later. He couldn’t tell if the silence was due to sticky peanut butter or a reluctance to break the mood. He didn’t feel like they’d been fighting, but he found his thoughts drifting to what Rafael might be like in a fight. If he lost his temper or sulked or got sarcastic.
“It’s strange being out here and not seeing light from that direction.” Water didn’t cut through the peanut butter as well as milk, but it allowed Chico to speak.
Rafael’s silhouette turned in the direction Chico gestured to, where his home was, currently dark. His house was the next nearest house, after Davi’s. The others were mere specks of light between the trees.
“Everything seems very far away like this.” Chico wasn’t sure exactly what he was trying to say. “A month ago I liked that. Now… I don’t know.”
“Are you missing city life?” Rafael’s throat must have still been thick with peanut butter.
Chico pushed his cup of water at him in case Rafael’s was empty. He shook his head. “No. Not really. Some things, yeah, like the good coffee places and the seafood. But I guess… I guess I could drive to the coast for that, if I wanted.”
“You could.” Rafael stayed where he was and didn’t touch the cup.
Chico turned toward him. “Are you really happy up here?”
“In most things, yes, I am.” He got the sense Rafael was peering at him in the near dark. “I’m with my family. I have a career I like and enough freedom in that career to basically do what I want. But I can see how a small town could be suffocating. It’s not for everyone. Even I need to get away sometimes. If you’re of a certain age and a certain persuasion, it can be lonely here.”
Unless Chico wanted to help him with his loneliness, or encourage him to talk about Jase or the bars, he had nothing to say to that.
He shifted back to look at the stars. “This really is my favorite thing about being up here… aside from time with Davi, of course.”
“Mine too.” Rafael exhaled, a tired, wrung-out sound, and leaned heavily into his chair. “My house was built more like a hunting cabin. It’s sort of… I guess you might say it’s sturdy looking. Nothing fanciful went into the design. But there’s a great balcony outside my bedroom. I like to sit outside when the weather is nice.”
“That sounds amazing.” Chico meant it, without allowing himself to dwell on that bedroom or Rafael’s house or if he’d mind company on his balcony someday. “Do you know, I thought my life before was okay, but I don’t ever think I would have said it was great?” Chico wasn’t even angry. He sighed at the heavens and wriggled into his borrowed sweatshirt. “Even then. How odd. I had—well, I thought I had—a decent boyfriend, a job that paid okay, a nice apartment where we lived together; and we watched the right movies and played the right music. It was good. Better than I ever expected. But it wasn’t great.”
Rafael’s chair creaked. “Why wouldn’t you expect something great for yourself?”
Chico waved a hand. “I don’t know. I’m gay? I’m not glamorous or super sexy? I’m smart but not a genius, and have no real talent. A settled life was all I really wanted. I didn’t think to ask for more than that.”
“Settled?” Rafael turned again. Chico somehow knew it without looking. “Were you happy?”
“I… thought I was?” Chico answered seriously but then realized he’d reached the point where talking about it was boring. Three years of his life with someone, and he was bored with talking about it after only a few months.
He considered that, then nodded. “I was like all my paired-up friends my age. I was doing well. But I was never relaxed like I am right now. There’s no pressure here. Or there’s
less
pressure here. I can work to get by and do whatever I want with my free time, and what I want is to sit at the studio and sew frilly tutus. Is that a strange thing to be proud of? Because I am proud of those tutus. I even like
saying
tutus.” God, he liked making Rafael laugh, even small, warm chuckles under his breath. Rafael shook his head, though, as if answering Chico’s question, so Chico nodded again. “Now I’m… not even sure what my status updates would be if I did all that online crap again. What is there in my life I can easily explain to others? Why do I even need to justify it to them if it makes
me
happy? Oh.” Chico drew out the word. “Talk about a late-night revelation.”
“How about the stars?” Rafael swept his hand across the sky. “You could share those. Your city friends don’t get that magnificent view. And no one will question why you love it.”
“That is so very true,” Chico agreed. “You’re very smart and reasonable, Mr. Raf.”
“I know.” Rafael’s tone was dry. “It’s one of the reasons my parents’ school breaks even. If it was up to them, it would be all ‘Dance, darlings! Follow your dreams!’ and no profits.”
Chico couldn’t stop a cackle from slipping out. “That is a dead-on impression of your mom. No offense.”
“Oh, I know.” Rafael turned toward him and bowed his head. “I perfected it at age nine.”
“Clever boy.” Chico wanted to bop him on the nose. Luckily, the fact that he would probably miss in the dark and end up hitting him in the face stopped him from doing anything too silly. He bopped Rafael on the shoulder instead.
Rafael caught his arm by the wrist and held it carefully, as if even with a layer of sweatshirt, Chico might break if he held on too strong.
His whisper took Chico equally by surprise. “If you don’t like it up here, you don’t have to stay. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. But you should know, I think you’re doing okay up here. You have Davi, and everyone at the studio, and… you have wherever else you’ve been volunteering.”
“Maybe my next status update can be a movie among the trees,” Chico whispered back, teasing.
“That’s all?” Everything seemed so quiet, as careful as Rafael’s soft voice.
“They’re looking for people to visit the seniors at the senior center. That’s the only thing on my dance card at the moment.” Chico lowered his head, although his warm face and any traces of his blush couldn’t be seen. “It will probably stay that way. I can’t imagine… I mean. It’s been
months
, and even before then, sex was this distant thing, and now I think about it, and I shudder. But you put your hands on me and—” He swallowed, stopped there. “I’m currently wound so tight I’d probably pop off in my jeans if you—if anyone touched me. Oh God.” He yanked his hand away from Rafael and put it over his mouth. “I thought I was done dumping my problems on you.”
He leaned away toward the edge of his chair and shook his head. “No more embarrassing truths, I promise. I’ll make more friends. Go out more. Something.”
He flapped his other hand toward the stars, as if that made any more sense than anything he was saying. “I can’t just…. Trust is. A thing. These days. For me.” He made himself take a breath. “To imagine someone thinking only of me again, to trust that they want me, the actual me, this whole messy shebang and not polite, perfect Chico, is hard. I’m working on it. I really am. I was never the insanely jealous type, or worried about a partner having fantasies about someone else. It’s only that he made me feel like I was less than. I wasn’t ever good enough somehow. Like I was there, but I wasn’t quite what he wanted; I wasn’t the someone he couldn’t keep his hands off of. And—” Chico let out a nervous laugh. “—I’m not going to pounce on you or anything. I don’t expect that from you.” He got anxiously to his feet. “I know you’re available and seeing…. I know you’re seeing other people.”
“Chico.” His name shut him up, which was something until Rafael stood up too. Chico didn’t want him to go, and he made a stupid, little, sad sound he would have regretted if Rafael hadn’t slid his hands around Chico’s waist to his back, if he hadn’t pulled Chico forward and kissed his shocked, open mouth.
Chico touched Rafael’s face, put his hands in Rafael’s hair, and shivered for the heat of it, the kiss in the dark that turned into two, and then three, without any pulling away or moments to breathe or stupid questions like
what was air
? Rafael kissed Chico’s bottom lip, and then the top, and then both of them together, with Chico on his toes for it, releasing soft, shaky moans that would have been words if he could think at all.
Rafael fitted his hands to Chico’s back and grabbed bunches of sweatshirt when Chico gasped and curled forward. He kissed Chico for that too, the fourth kiss, or maybe the fifth, slow and hot and dragging, and then pushed his hands down to Chico’s waist.
Then he stopped. Chico panted against his lips and inched forward to follow his mouth, but Rafael stopped.
His words were rough against Chico’s skin. “You’re driving me crazy.” He tightened his grip at Chico’s side and kissed him again, soft at his mouth, hungry and then gone. Chico was dazed and hard and so warm.
He put his palm along Rafael’s jaw. “I drive you crazy?” He thought he was close enough to Rafael to know him, but he wasn’t. The control on the surface had
this
underneath. “But you stopped flirting with me.”
Rafael shuddered when Chico touched him, and then he made a funny, angry noise. “What do you want from me?” he demanded, in a tone Chico had never heard from anyone before. It made him think of the music from the ballet, the dancer striving to save a life. “You were hurt, and I couldn’t have that.”
It was like he wasn’t speaking English. Chico had to repeat everything he said, softer, in wonder. “You couldn’t?”
Rafael shook his head and put his mouth to Chico’s cheekbone. “If you can’t stay, then you can’t. If being with me scares you, just tell me. But don’t think for a second that I don’t want to touch you. All of you. The real you, whoever that is. You aren’t like anyone else, Chico.”
Chico shivered for Rafael’s breath over the short, buzzed hair of his undercut, and the expanse of his hands at his waist. Everything else was so foreign he couldn’t process it. “You don’t scare me.” It seemed very important for him to say that much, if nothing else.
“But you don’t really believe me,” Rafael finished for him, “or you won’t. You like it when I tease you, but you won’t ask me for more than flirting. Because you don’t trust me or because of the town or something else?”
All of those things. None of them. Chico shook his head. “I don’t know. But I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m like this. You shouldn’t have to wait for me to figure myself out.”
Rafael laughed and for the first time, Chico didn’t like the sound. “The strangest thing is… I would. I’ve
been
waiting, and I don’t even really mind. At least not in those moments when I can tell you’re thinking about it, about me.” Rafael lowered his voice, but it was still rough. “If you asked, I could keep waiting. As long as you said what you wanted, I could go slow. I’m not used to slow anymore. Tourists come and go. But I can relearn, if you think we will work. There’s something about the way you look at me….”
Chico didn’t say anything, and maybe Rafael took his silence for denial and not a stunned loss of voice. “Chico, from the second you first spoke to me, I liked you. You were apologizing too much and insisting you were bothering me, and you didn’t even notice I would have walked you to Davi’s house and carried all your stuff for you if I had to.” He shook his head at Chico’s startled jump. “You still don’t see it. If you don’t want me, that’s one thing. But if you even hinted that all you needed was time, I would wait to see what we might be like. Because I think we’d be great.”
Chico had wandered into some grand story, which had to be a mistake. Nobody said things like this, and if they did, it wasn’t to him. This was not a fairy tale. He put his hand to Rafael’s face again and yanked it away when he couldn’t feel a smile. “But I’m just Chico.”
“And that’s the real issue, isn’t it?” Rafael stepped away.
Chico wasn’t prepared for it. He leaned after him, missing kisses and now his hands. He wanted Rafael’s smile back. “Great?” he echoed, and wet his lips. His cock was throbbing but that was a less immediate problem than the cold anxiety pooling in his stomach. “How do you know?” he demanded. “How do you know you wouldn’t get tired of me?”
“How do I know you wouldn’t get tired of me?” Rafael returned sharply, with another hint of real anger, but then sighed heavily. “Speaking of what a reasonable man I am, it’s been a long day. I should go home.” The kind, patient tone had returned.
Chico frowned and wrapped his arms around his chest. “What is it I don’t see?”
“Tomorrow’s going to be another long day,” Rafael went on, irritatingly stubborn all of the sudden.
Tomorrow was Friday. Saturday night Rafael would be out with the others. Maybe not to sleep with anyone, but he could. Either way, it wasn’t Chico’s business.
Unless Chico said something. If he asked Rafael to wait, to do this slowly, then Chico could make it his business.
He put his head down. His eyes began to sting because he was an idiot. “I don’t inspire feelings like that,” he said at last, voice choked. “I’m not like you.”
“I’m not sure what, exactly, you think I am that’s so different from you, but someday I’d like to know about those feelings I inspire in you. Maybe we could compare them.” Rafael stood there for another moment, then slid open the doors. “I hope you enjoy your weekend home, Chico,” he said and went inside. He was down the stairs a few moments later and then gone into the dark.
Chico watched him go for as long as he could make out his shape in the shadows, but Rafael never turned his flashlight on, guiding himself with the moonlight and the light from Davi’s house.
When Chico finally went inside, he had a single text on his phone—from Davi.
Idiot
was all it said.
But when Chico took a picture of the view from his balcony around 4:00 a.m. and posted it with the caption, “This is my view,” Davi was the first one to like it.
HIS PARENTS
liked it too. They commented on it almost the first moment he pulled into the driveway. He got tons of questions about the area and how he was doing, peppered with concern about Davi, who hadn’t been down to see everyone very much.