The Glass House (11 page)

“We could… try it…,” Thomas said tentatively in a whispery voice.

“What?”

“We could…. I mean, if you want to tell me what you like, I would…. I don’t mind… as long as it didn’t go too far or anything…. I think I’ve heard that people use safe words and stuff so the other person knows when to stop.”

My eyes grew wide.

“I don’t want to tie you up or anything. All that usually happens is they get naked, and I wank them off….” My voice faded.

“I’m good with that.” He smiled hesitantly.

Fuck
, I thought weakly.

“T
ELL
ME
what to do,” he whispered, as if the words were a magic spell.

“Sit on the bed.”

Thomas kicked off his shoes and sat down next to me.

“Take your shirt off,” I commanded softly.

With shaky fingers Thomas obeyed. His breathing was quick and uneven, and I could see he felt self-conscious as he pulled his arms out of the sleeves, but he had no need to be. He went to take off the necklace I’d made for him, but I shook my head quickly. I liked to see him wearing it, the colorful glass resting against his naked skin. I raked my eyes up and down his broad chest, over the flat discs of his nipples, the fine feathering of hair around his belly button. Even though he wasn’t particularly toned, he looked strong and beautiful, and I liked what I saw very much. Though I was too scared to touch him yet. I got off the bed and knelt down in front of him. I wanted to see.

His erection jutted forward against the material of his trousers, the obviousness of it turning me on even more.

“Lay back and push your trousers and underwear down.”

I couldn’t believe I was doing this—
we
were doing this.

And I knew this scenario was lacking a little finesse, but I guess my fantasies were pretty perfunctory too, getting to the point, no playing around.

Thomas bit his lip and closed his eyes before lying back on the bed, lifting his hips, and doing as I asked.

At first I didn’t look. I couldn’t look directly at him. I could only see out of the corner of my eye at the way his sex rose up, proud and firm between his legs, nestled between his light pubic hair and the pale skin of his naked thighs.

It was pathetic. I’d asked him to do this. This was my fantasy, and I was shying away from it, running scared.

Willing myself to get a grip, I crawled closer to the bed and touched Thomas’s dick. God, his skin was soft there, softer and so much more delicate than that of his inner wrist. I stroked my finger from root to tip, watching as he fisted the sheet beneath his hands and tried to keep his eyes on me. I wanted to know what he liked, where he liked to be touched.

Trying not to be so clinical about everything, I cupped his balls one at a time, rubbed my thumb over the crinkly hair there. I hoped my hands were warm. I imagined being held and caressed by warm hands and thought that was probably something like bliss. Thomas was biting his lip, trying to keep from making a sound, but every other breath he took sounded like a gasp.

I pushed my hips into the bed frame so my dick was trapped against the metal. The pressure was really intense. Making a ring with my thumb and forefinger, I circled him gently. He was really curved and slender, his foreskin still covering the head a little. I pushed the skin down and traced the shape of him with my thumb before gently jacking him off, up and down, up and down, not really using much pressure, but fascinated by the way it made him lose control a little and pant, the strong muscles of his thighs taut.

I leaned over him and pressed my face into his stomach, the wet slickness of precome rubbed into my cheek as his dick pushed against my face. Suddenly Thomas made a strangled noise that seemed to come from deep inside him. I looked up and pulled back just in time to feel his hand cover mine around his dick, and he squeezed hard as he came.

The whole thing had taken less than five minutes, and I palmed myself through my trousers, knowing I wouldn’t last any longer. But as soon as his dick stopped pulsing, Thomas sucked his lip and covered his face with his left arm, looking unsure and uncomfortable.

Tentatively I stroked his arm, my fingers trailing lightly up to his armpit. He shivered and peeked at me from beneath his forearm.

“I’m sorry. I tried to hold off, but I couldn’t,” he said miserably.

“Fucking hell, Thomas, I don’t care about lasting. I hate taking ages to come. It’s fucking exhausting.”
And for once
, I thought,
this might be over in a few seconds.

“Do you want to come up here?” Thomas shifted to lie on his side and patted the bed beside him. “I won’t touch you unless you want me to.”

I lay down and pressed my face into his arm. Somehow I ended up pushing my face into his armpit, being tickled by his thick hair there and at the same time deeply aroused by the scent of him. His finger stroked through my hair, and he murmured and moaned wordlessly. My hand found the sticky mess covering his lower chest and stomach, and I rubbed my fingers through it. The heel of my other hand pressed down over the front of my jeans. After about ten seconds I came in a burst of burning fire, white hot.

For a moment I was undone. I exhaled a shaky gasp.

“
Fuck
, that was fast.”

It’s funny but, despite what everyone says, I’d always imagined the first time I was with someone wouldn’t have been so nerve-racking. But it was, and now it was over, I felt a hundred thousand times better. The ground was solid beneath me, and I knew where I stood. We liked one another. We turned one another on. Thomas had seen me come. I had seen Thomas come. We had been exposed, deeply.

“Okay?” Thomas whispered tenderly. The warmth of his breath shivered over my ear.

He still had his trousers pushed halfway down his thighs, his softened cock flopped against his stomach. He couldn’t have been comfortable.
I
wasn’t completely comfortable.

“You can pull them up if you want.”

Thomas dragged his brightly colored underwear up his thighs but kicked his trousers off and pulled the duvet around us.

“Is this okay?”

I pressed my face against his shoulder and nodded, enjoying the feel of his warm skin beneath my hands, his smooth chest beneath my cheek. We were lying in the dip of his bed, and that fact alone made me smile.

“Are you sleepy?” he asked.

“A bit,” I murmured.

I knew I should probably go and clean myself up, and Thomas’s stomach was all sticky against me too, but the moment felt too good to disrupt. I didn’t want to move from this bed.

“Thomas?”

“Yeah?”

I shifted so I could cup his face in my hands. I glanced between his dark eyes and plump lips, and gently as I could, brushed my mouth against his. He closed his eyes and whimpered softly. So I did it again, letting my tongue trace his lower lip. A fierce jolt of desire passed through me as the tip of his tongue touched mine, and I pulled back. It was way too intense. I needed to go slow. I wasn’t ready to lose myself, to let go completely. I laid my head back down, on his chest this time, and slept to the gentle thump of Thomas’s heart.

T
HE
FOLLOWING
day Thomas invited me over again. I liked being at Thomas’s house. I was beginning to feel it was a safe space to be. All the quirky pieces of artwork made me smile—and I noticed some new piece of art or another of Thomas’s crazy vinyl creations every time I was there now. They weren’t all animals like I’d thought at first, and I’d decided the musical instruments were the coolest. Like the animals they weren’t detailed, but you could see what they were, what they evoked—the curved shell of a cello, the flared tube of a trumpet. Thomas didn’t do detail, even in his drawing—it was completely unnecessary for him. His magic was in knowing what was essential to bring something to life and what was not.

His gran cooked us tea—he’d told her to make anything but chips or pizza, so she made spaghetti bolognese (which tasted nicer than it looked, thankfully) and we sat and talked around the kitchen table.

There wasn’t really an opportunity for us to sneak off to Thomas’s bedroom. His gran kept looking between us and smiling as if she knew something of what was going on. And every small brush of skin we managed seemed to make us both react wildly. My heart went into rapid-fire every time Thomas simply brushed his foot over mine beneath the table.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t… be alone or anything,” Thomas said, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot as we stood on the doorstep to his house to say good-bye.

I shrugged. It was okay. I sucked my bottom lip into my mouth and wished I were brave enough to kiss him out here in the street. I really wanted to kiss him. Since yesterday I had begun longing for that intensity again. There was no one else around to see our secret weakness, but still, I couldn’t do it.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “Or maybe I’ll call you later….” He grinned. And I knew he would definitely call me later.

I held up my hand in good-bye and walked into the setting sun—the red glow staining the glass of the sky with colored light.

T
HE
NEXT
few days were impossible. Thomas was busy after school
every day
—though he was a little oblique about what he was doing. We wandered together at lunch and spoke on the phone every night until we were too tired to talk anymore, but it wasn’t enough. It was nowhere
near
enough. I was sure Thomas felt it too. This newfound intimacy longed to be explored. I felt pulled taut as piano wire in his presence. My body didn’t just call to his. It fucking yelled at the top of its voice. And my fantasies were becoming by turn more playful, adventurous, desperate.

We masturbated together on the phone after I told him a fantasy I kind of made up on the spot about wanting to trace the shape of his balls with my tongue as he knelt on the bed. Corinne was in her room and my door was locked, but it felt illicit and terrifying, and I was nearly sick at the thought of being found out. So much so that my orgasm kind of fizzled rather than exploded, and I wished Thomas’s arms were around me holding me through it.

T
HOMAS
WAS
waiting for me by the gates after school the next day. He kept shifting his schoolbag on his shoulder and fidgeting. It was a kind of guilty look.

“Hey.” He smiled, and the guilty look faded a little.

I smiled back, my fingers brushing against the smooth glass in my pocket—out of habit rather than need.

“Will your sister be home?” he asked shyly as a hundred boisterous kids jostled past us through the gates and onto the windswept playfield.

I shook my head. “Not ’til six.” I wanted to ask him what was wrong, but I also wanted to be with him. Badly.

The wind was whipping up the dust of the car park, and Thomas’s hair kept blowing into his eyes with every gust. He had to brush it back so he could see. A few days ago I’d asked him why he didn’t get it cut. He’d shrugged and said I’d told him I liked it long. And I did—it suited him. But it was the fact that he wanted to keep it like that for me I really liked. The fire flickered and flared deep in the pit of my stomach.

“Can I come home with you?” he asked hopefully, his voice deeper than normal, rough, his eyes locked on mine. I realized he’d been waiting for me to ask. God, I was fucking dense sometimes.

I had this fantasy where we were both naked, lying side by side on a bed, nothing touching—well, apart from our hands. And we had to stay like that until we couldn’t stand it any longer and one of us gave in. I kept thinking about it as we walked across the estate, brushing knuckles, then fingertips, every other step. I loved holding hands with him. As soon as we got inside the tower block, I pulled Thomas toward the relative privacy of the stairs and grabbed his hand and squeezed tightly. Thomas squeezed back, then let go and enfolded me in a tight hug. I closed my eyes, my nose pressed against the smooth skin of his neck, breathing him deep. My body had missed his so much. I felt it in every breath, in every heartbeat. I opened my eyes again and saw what I figured must be the same feeling written across his face.

Why did this have to feel so right? Why did nothing else match up?

I told him my fantasy as we walked slowly up the stairs.

“And that’s it?” Thomas asked in a husky voice. “You want us to get so turned on, we just about pass out? Because… I’m that turned on right now.”

My own desire swirled deep and low inside me. Yeah, I was that turned on too. How could something that ached so bad feel so fucking good?

“Well, we hold off and hold off, then maybe get off by just rubbing against one another.”

We paused for a bit on the stairs, neither of us looking at each other.

“I have a fantasy too,” Thomas said tentatively.

I wanted to say
oh God,
anything
, even though I wasn’t sure I could mean it. Sparkles of light were flicking up my spine at Thomas playing my game. I waited.

He ran the fingers of his free hand against the colored concrete wall and stared at the smooth steps.

“We’re not always completely undressed or anything, and we don’t always, you know,
go further
, but when I’m on my own, I can come from just thinking about it. So I guess it counts as a fantasy, yeah?”