Page 36 of Forever Not Yours

“What’s with the gloves?”

“To protect my hands. Also gives a nice smack against bare skin, and well. Leather.”

He said nothing, and that was good enough for me. I could have added that I loved the smell of them, and that people usually found them hot. I knew I did.

“Hot,” he said softly. I hugged him, held him closer, dropped another kiss on his hairline.

“Wanker,” I retaliated with a smile.

“I like when you hug me.” Surprising.

“I always wanted to hug you, you know, at uni. Never dared to. We hugged hello and goodbye when we went on breaks. But other than that…” It seemed I couldn’t stop telling him all my secrets, years and years of hopes and dreams I’d never aired. Not to anyone. Never to him. At all. What a waste that had been.

“You used to lie on my lap, watching TV,” he said. “I would play with your hair. We did that.”

“True.”

“Wasn’t into blokes. Otherwise, I would have hit on you. Promise. I wasn’t taking the piss or anything. I just didn’t…you know.”

“I know.” I did.

“And yet here we are, years later, and I just came from you spanking my arse.”

Trust him to actually say it out loud.

“Did it help?”

“With feeling better about all this?”

He was looking straight at me. I still found that frightening, the honesty. The actual feelings he stirred up in my chest. The fact that he was right here, and I was holding him, and that he was still naked under that blanket.

“Yes,” I said weakly.

“I don’t know. I love that feeling, though, what you just did. When I kind of… It’s hard to explain. When I just go under, and I feel like I’m floating. Like nothing matters anymore. I could live or die or just float forever. Some things turn me on to the point that I get like that, but it’s…like…it has to be something…like what we just did.”

“You took it well.”

“I’ve…you know. Tried it before. But I’ve never come from it like…that.”

I loved that he was telling me these things, that we were slowly getting there. There was so much to learn, things to understand about him that I’d never realised until now. What he was. How it felt to experience these things with him.

“I’m so happy you let me,” I said. My body was doing that thing it did whenever I felt we were on the right track. Happy vibes. A weird sense of pride.

“You’re good at it,” he added.

What did you say to that?Thank you? I’m a good spanker?I kept smiling. He did that to me.

We lay there in silence for a while, me losing the gloves so I could stroke his hair and him drifting off, dozing. I remembered this. We’d been here before. Two boys on a musty old student dorm sofa, relaxing in the summer heat. Nothing more than that.

This was so much more, and I wondered if I’d ever be the same again, or if this had changed me and irrevocably altered the course of my life.

We couldn’t always have the things we wanted, or so I’d heard, but I was starting to doubt that, along with my entire life.

Hours later, I woke him and made him show me his backside, smothered his fragile skin with calming lotions, kissed his shoulder. I smoothed down his back because I could, made him dress himself to keep warm and reminded him to dose up his pump. Then I served the elaborate meal I’d cooked, on plates with proper cutlery, a glass of sparkling water each.

“Wanker,” he muttered with that smile back on his face. “You know how to wow me, don’t you?”

I did. I’d made his favourite, a simple pasta with mushrooms and vegetables, a comforting, easy-to-eat dish that he wolfed down, shoving forkfuls into that pretty mouth of his, until he suddenly stopped and looked at me.

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