Page 12 of Unlocked Dive
I’mhere. I’m trying. Maybe I can remember how to be Echo again too.
August is a long way off, I tell myself, settling back onto my stool.Focus on the dreamboat making you dinner.
It works. Before long, I’m having way too much fun watching him cook to give a shit about the eval. The quick, sure movements of his hands on the knife, the way he swipes a roguelock of hair out of his eyes with the back of his arm or sucks on a fingertip to taste the sauce—it all has me half-hard, helpless, andhungry.
“How’d you find circus?” he asks. Not the way everyone else does, curious and over-awed by its novelty, but like we’re sharing a secret, and he’s glad of the company.
“My brother. He—” A pan clatters against the stove, and Byrd yanks his hand back with a hiss. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. Fine. Handle was hot.” He rolls his shoulders without turning around. “Go on.”
“Gabe’s actually my half brother. He’s a lot older and generally an asshole, but he did silks for years. When I was about six, my dad took me to see one of his performances, and I fucking loved it. Not just Gabe, even though I was still young enough to think he was the shit back then, but all of it. The stage, the spectacle. Kids not that much older than me doing things I’d never imagined. It felt like—”Destiny.But I can’t say that out loud without feeling like an idiot.
“Recognition?” Byrd has turned around to look at me, leaning against the stove, his hands curled around the oven handle at his hips. His Henley is stretched tight across his chest and his eyes are sober, and if I don’t look away, my whole body will fall into his gravity.
Recognition.
“Yes.” I look away. “My mom was pissed. She always hated it when my dad gave Gabe attention. His mom was the college sweetheart, right? The first love. Mine was the midlife crisis trophy wife, and I was her favorite weapon.” I pause, suddenly guilty. “I mean, she loves me. She’s not a bad mom. She just…” My hands flex on the cool concrete island top, and I watch the skin stretch over my scars. “When Gabe flamed out, and then Igot accepted to NCC…I guess I feel sorry for Detta sometimes. Gabe’s mom.”
“But not for Gabe?”
“No.” I meet his gaze but don’t elaborate. That story leads to clouded places I’m not ready to go. Byrd doesn’t press me.
“I was married until recently,” he says instead, as if he needs to share some sordid piece of his own history after my confessions.
“Aren’t you a little young for a midlife crisis?” I ask, wanting to make him smile.
“The split was her idea.” The smile is bitter.
“Oh.”He had a wife. A wife who left him.“She sounds like an idiot.” This earns me a real smile.
“No. Just unhappy. She wanted things I couldn’t give her.”
“Like what?”
“More pieces of myself.” Now it’s his turn to look away. “She’s the reason I stopped touring and took the job at Cirque. Did you know I used to perform?”
I nod and shove away the images of his promo reel. The Byrd in front of me isreal, absurdly, unfairly forsaken, and the urge to touch him rages wretched in my chest.
“She wanted me close to home, not out on the road, surrounded by other performers. ‘The beautiful freaks,’ she called them. I knew she was jealous and threatened, but I understood—what kind of wife would want their husband gone for months at a time?”
There are a lot of ways I could answer that, but instead, I shake my head and say, “Wives aren’t really my specialty.”
He huffs a short laugh. “Or mine, apparently.”
“So she got what she wanted, but it wasn’t enough?” I know plenty of people like that. LA is full of them, infinite vacuums of insecure need. Gabe is one of them.
“No.” Byrd shoves away from the stove and busies himself draining the pasta. “It was never enough.”
7
Echo
Idrink two glasses of wine with dinner and pretend the glinting amusement in his eyes is interest.
Later, I jack off in the crisp white sheets of his downstairs guest room, imagining it’s his hand wrapped around my cock. The tan muscles of his forearm shifting with each stroke, his fingers in my mouth, salty and calloused. And when I slip one spit-slick digit behind my balls and press it into my own heat, I come hard enough to forget how terrified I am of tomorrow.
It doesn’t last.
