Page 200 of Catch Me
“What are they for?”
Dragging me down to sit beside him, he perched his chin on my shoulder and kissed my neck. “I was going to make a drawing from each of the games. They weren’t supposed to be of you, but...Anyway, I wanted to make a sort of collage to frame them in so that it’d commemorate your first World Series.”
“That’s an incredible idea.”
“The last one will be the best.”
“Why?”
“Because it’ll be your face just before you win the World Series.”
“Fuck, I . . . Can I have a collage too?”
He pulled back and frowned. “It was always going to be for you, dumbass. You think I want your face on my wall?”
“Maybe. You’re obsessed.”
“Hm.”
He grabbed his tablet and started scrolling through drawings. I wanted to see every single one. The image he passed to me made my mouth drop open.
“You actually drew this?”
“Not until last night,” he admitted. “I couldn’t bring myself to.”
As I studied it, I felt overwhelmed. The angle didn’t show much of his face, but it showed mine. He’d studied me the entire time we had sex. The way he’d captured it here was incredible. And it was explicit.
I bit my lip, looking at my cock halfway inside of his ass while my fingers dug into his skin. One of his hands was on my shoulder and the other was in my hair. In the dim lighting, what stood out were my eyes, which were locked onto his face. Somehow, despite all the other aspects of the drawing, he’d made them feel like the centerpiece.
“Did you finally get my eyes right?”
He sighed. “No, but I gave them the recognition they deserve.”
Cupping his face, I kissed him softly. “Will you tell me now?”
“I’ll never be able to get it down on paper because, like you said, art can’t fully capture life.”
“You see life in them?” I clarified.
“No. Nobody else can see what I do. It can’t be replicated because it’s not physically there. It exists deep inside of me, in a place I never understood and wasn’t capable of feeling until I found who I was and where I belonged. They say home isn’t a place. It’s a feeling or...a person. Three weeks, ten months, it doesn’t matter. It was there then and it’s still there.”
My nostrils flared as he stared at me more intently than he ever had.
“I see home in your eyes, Travis McKinney. I’ve seen it since the moment I met you.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Annoying the hell out of me with your text messages.”
He scoffed and shoved my chest. “I annoyed you?”
“Yeah, you’d check me out, then get all doe-eyed before you acted like a dick.”
The look on his face made me laugh. I threaded my fingers through his hair and tipped his head back. With my lips on his neck and his hand on my chest, I closed my eyes.
Home. Maybe he was onto something.
