Page 34 of Diamond Ring
Alex kisses like he does everything else, a mixture of roughness and caution that makes Jake want to kiss him again, so he does. Alex’s stubble scrapes his mouth. His lips part in question. He draws back, fractionally, then whispers, “Yeah?” like Jake could possibly say anything else.
Jake nods, wanting to hold him so that he can’t go back to Rhode Island, to Florida for spring training, to anywhere where Jake can’t immediately follow. Of course his arm protests at the cold, the movement, but Alex leans in anyway, hand a soothing weight on the back of his neck, fingers playing with his necklace chain.
His mouth tastes like champagne when he sweeps his tongue, like bubbles, a pleasant kind of dizziness, and Jake wonders what it would have been like to kiss him in triumph, to hoist a trophy together and proclaim themselves champions of the entire world.
Eventually Alex draws back. “I didn’t think you were queer. You never said.”
“I missed you.” Which feels impossibly facile for all the things Jake wants to articulate.
Alex laughs, loud in the stillness of the backyard, something joyful, unconstrained. “I missed you too.”
Jake’s neighbor, either from a sense of poetry or just one too many beers, starts shooting off fireworks. They dazzle up into the clouded sky.
“Those are pretty good,” Alex says. “I figured they’d be Roman candles or whatever.”
“Nah, we go all out in the suburbs.” And Jake leans in for another kiss as blossoms of light bloom over the houses around them.
They end up in Jake’s bed, Alex careful of his arm, arranging pillows, fussing with the blanket until Jake says, “I’m good, I’m good, kiss me again,” and Alex obliges.
They only drank half the bottle between them, but Jake feels the shimmering warmth of a champagne drunk, when Alex unbuttons his shirt slowly, fingers gentle at his chest, then follows with his mouth.
He curls a hand around Jake’s biceps, just above at the embroidery of Jake’s stitches protected by the plastic of his brace. “I’m sorry. I should have known.” Like it’s his responsibility to care for Jake’s body.
He does, though, stripped, careful, a hand on Jake when Jake confesses it’s been days—aneternity. And Jake doesn’t think about how he’ll have to leave, how they’ll spend a season apart, how everything in the world seems subtly wrong, off-kilter and misarranged, except for the way Alex looks at him, and the darkness of his eyelashes and the grit of his stubble on Jake’s chest.
Jake’s close, not at the tipping point but nearly there, when he gasps, “I can’t um, my right hand doesn’t work great. If you wanted me to...”
Alex pauses, before levering himself over, arching to make up for the difference in height, taking them both in his impossible grip.
They move together, easy, Alex pausing his rhythm to kiss him. “I’m close,” Jake breathes, and he’s rewarded with another cycle of Alex’s fist, with Alex’s weight pressing him into the mattress. And they come like that, simply, effusively, with champagne on their commingled breath.
When Jake wakes up the next morning, Alex is leaning on the headboard, scrolling through his phone. “Your mom came up earlier,” he says. “She knocked but didn’t wait before coming in. That gonna be an issue?”
“I think she was surprised you were sleeping on the sofa bed in the first place.”
“We were supposed to go to brunch.” Alex wrinkles his nose in slight disgust.
“You don’t have brunch in Rhode Island?”
“We do. I don’t like it there either.”
“We don’t have to go.”
“They already left. She said she’d bring back pancakes.”
“So what you’re saying is we have nothing to do but lie around here?”
Alex smiles and strokes a hand up Jake’s shoulder, and they spend the morning like that: dozing, making out, Alex eventually crowding him into the shower and kissing him under the spray.
“You look good like this,” Alex says.
“Hungover?” Though Jake isn’t, really.
Alex shakes his head, runs his fingers through the wet ends of Jake’s hair. “You know what you look like.”
“I thought about this at the ballpark.”
A smirk from Alex, a stroke of his hand at Jake’s hip. “You thought about it there or about us doing this there?”
