Page 2 of Love Is…

“Poor baby,” Luke says, chuckling. He grips Hal’s ass and pulls him even closer, grinding up against him. He slips his hands beneath the waistbands of Hal’s sweats and boxers and touches warm skin, firm muscle. “Sorry for making it sohardfor you.” He snorts, delighted, even as he slides his hands around his boyfriend’s hips and curls his fingers around his hard cock.

“Yeah, really sorry,” Hal says with a breathless laugh. “Oh shit.” He hisses and bucks, and thrusts into Luke’s hand. “That’s good. Just…yeah…like that.” He lifts his head and presses a desperate, hungry kiss to Luke’s lips. “You’re so good at that.Yes.”

He shoves Luke’s shirt up just in time to come in hot, messy stripes all over his stomach. He makes the sweetest sound in his throat, halfway between a moan and a prayer.

Luke loves it. Loveshim. His heart is full, and his body is buzzing, and he never,neverwants this to end.

Hal sags against him, lets him support some of his considerable weight. His chest heaves as he gulps air, hard nipples teasing at Luke through their shirts.

“Baby,” he murmurs. “Oh.”

Luke loves himso much. “Better morning?” he teases.

“Yeah…oh. Oh! Baby, here.” Hal shoves his hand down the front of Luke’s pajama pants and grips him in the way Luke has shown him he likes best.

For all that he loves poetry, Luke has never been willing to use poetic terms to describe sex. Not in the past. But now, now with Hal, the touch of a hand becomes something more, all-encompassing; something tender, and loving, and perfect.

He makes hungry sounds as he comes, slicking Hal’s hand, his own pants, Hal’s clothes.

They rest with their foreheads touching, breathing the same air.

“Have I ever told you,” Hal says, the shape of a smile pressed to Luke’s lips, “that I love you?”

“All the time.”

Hal has to change clothes, but it’s a good morning.

~*~

The cold took our breath, Luke writes.A cold incomprehensible to two Virginia boys.

From his own chair, the cold is a pleasant sort of catalyst for finding one’s way indoors. Pedestrians hustle past on the sidewalks, purses and shopping bags clutched tight, smiles on their faces as they survey the red and pink and white decorations set up in shop windows. Luke sits at his favorite front-corner table in Georgetown Grind, killing his word count goals and nursing a latte, occasionally glancing through the fogged-up window when he needs to grope for a particular word. Writing is one part typing, nine parts staring into space, after all.

Some days he stays home, shuffling around the apartment in sweats, glasses smudged, hair a wreck from tugging on it. Hal usually finds him stretched out on the couch, having an existential crisis about his addiction to semicolons, and tries not to laugh at him too hard. But other days Luke dresses and takes his laptop to the coffee shop for a change of pace…and to fulfill all those writerly stereotypes.

Out on the sidewalk, a little girl in a pink ski cap with a pom-pom on top waves at him, grin flashing an array of missing baby teeth. He waves back and returns to his manuscript. Today is a good day; one of the this-is-kinda-pretty-good days. A day when he believes he can make it as an author.

“Hey,” a breathless female voice says, and he looks up to see Tara sliding into the chair across from him.

She’s come from school, so she’s toting her backpack with all its buttons, and a huge pink gym duffel that bears the Victoria’s Secret logo that Luke knows holds all her dance gear. She’s dressed in skinny jeans, boots, and a black sweater cut to look like a motorcycle jacket. She flicks her dyed-black hair out of her eyes and says, “So it’s a productive day, then.”

“Very,” he agrees. “Waist-deep in Korean snow.”

She snorts. “I’m gonna order. You want a refill?”

“Please.”

With the exception of Hal, Luke isn’t the sort of person to maintain friendships. Not close ones, anyway. But living in DC, he’s got friends now. A few of them, the most prominent of which is Tara. And the funny thing – the unexpected thing – is that he’s enjoying it. He likes her company. Likes her sarcastic eye rolls, her abrasive sense of humor. She reminds him of himself, a little, except her company is more entertaining than his own.

He’s especially glad to see her today, because though she’s younger than him by almost a decade, and though she has a lot to learn about the nature of life, she has a keen eye when it comes to his romantic worries and misunderstandings. Sometimes he finds that annoying as hell, but today he needs a little insight.

He closes his laptop when she returns to the table and says, “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” She slides a fresh latte to him and pops the lid off her own. “This sound serious.”

“It is. Kind of.”

She stares at him, steam from her coffee twining around the tip of her nose.

---