Page 20 of State of Mind

Raphael’s grin softened, and he nodded. “I’ll bring the wine.”

CHAPTER 8

Wilder woke with an all-too familiar pressure in his ears—a rushing sound like water rising and rising until it fell with a roar like a waterfall. And the entire room went silent. He lifted his hand, rubbing his middle finger and thumb together by the shell of his ear, and he could hear something—faint and far off. Which meant he knew what was coming next.

Rolling onto his side, the world swam, but instead of correcting itself, the room began to rock like he was on a boat over stormy waters. Side to side, then around.

And around.

Logically, he knew it was his eyes dancing, shaking from side to side, which threw off his entire equilibrium. It meant more of the cochlea was dying, another bout of rushing white noise took with it a decibel of his hearing.

Another collection of sounds gone.

He remembered the day he lost the birds. He had already moved to Savannah, and it was a morning a lot like this one, with spinning rooms and shaking eyes, and eventually a bout of nausea that took forty-five minutes to clear up. His hearing returned in small bursts until he could hear the coffee brewing as he stood next to his percolator, and he could hear the sound of his bare feet tapping along the wood floors.

He didn’t think much of it, until he was outside with Jayden on the bench near the fountain in the park square—both of them drinking some of Adam’s intense Israeli coffee.

“God, do the birds really have to be this loud?”

And for a moment, Wilder thought he was joking, until he looked over at a group of finches fighting over what looked like an old pile of kettle corn someone had abandoned at the Market. They must have been loud—they must have been obnoxious, and Wilder had lost them. He waited a while—a few days, straining his ears every time he set foot outside, but there was nothing left of them except the movement in the trees, and the way they begged at his feet in the alley for cake crumbs.

He mourned those small losses—in his own private way. He’d never wanted to complain about it, never wanted to admit that there were things he didn’t want to give up. People already looked at him with pity, and admitting that there were things he wished he didn’t have to live without seemed validated every time a hearing person would tell him, ‘I love music so much that if I ever went deaf, I’d probably kill myself.’

He never did have a response to that. It was hard to decide what to say when a person said death was preferable to the way he existed. So, he’d smile, and he’d walk away, and he wouldn’t talk about how much he wished he could put on his old nineties playlist and let the lyrics of his angsting teenage soul remind him that things were better now.

Things had settled after the birds, but he couldn’t help wondering what he was going to lose next as he laid there, watching the ceiling spin alongside the fan. His stomach twisted, but he breathed through the nausea.

The vertigo eased a little as he threw his arm over his eyes and regulated his breathing—in through the nose, out through the mouth. It rarely lasted over an hour. He’d be late, but he’d still have time for Luca, though he honestly would be surprised if Luca hadn’t talked himself out of the excursion by now.

He knew Will’s little ranch wasn’t going to give that man anything. The animals didn’t hold the secrets to the universe. At best, Kevin the peacock was hiding a bit of sociopathic tendencies and a thirst for human blood—but even that was generally curbed by a handful of bird seed and a few pieces of dog kibble.

Luca was searching for something that didn’t exist in Savannah.

Wilder normally wouldn’t involve himself, but something in Luca’s face compelled him to help. Maybe it was just that he was the lost man once. He was the one who had wandered into Savannah without any fucking clue what to do with himself, and now he was this. He had integrated into something like a family—far better and kinder than his own had ever been. And the least he could do was pay it forward.

And he certainly didn’t mind looking while he did it.

Luca was a disaster, but a gorgeous one.

Taking another breath, Wilder peeled his arm away and saw that the room had mostly righted itself. His ears didn’t feel as full, and he could hear himself walk as he stood up from the bed and made his careful way into the bathroom. A hot shower usually got him the rest of the way there, and as he stood under the spray, he let the warmth ease him into a state of relaxation.

His cock stiffened a little, and he dragged the heel of his palm over his length, drawing it the rest of the way hard. It had been years—seven, to be exact—since anyone had touched him. He’d been twenty-two the night Scott had put his hands on Wilder for the last time, and before that, it had been so long since he felt any pleasure from anyone.

It hadn’t been that way at first, but by the time Scott was being carted off to jail, Wilder had lost all sense of what it was like for a partner to want him to feel good. He liked taking care of himself, though. He liked wrapping his hand around his cock and stroking because he knew himself. He spent years recovering from his wounds—physical and mental—and he refused to lose his own sexual awareness to the monster that Scott had become.

He was no stranger to toys now and no stranger to jerking off. He knew how hard to hold himself, how fast to move his hand. He pressed the side of his head to the wall, bracing himself on his shoulder, then used his other hand to gently cup his balls and roll them in his palm. His temperature rose, and his lips parted with a soft gasp he could feel but not hear.

The water drowned out most of what noise was left to him, but he didn’t care. It was warm, it was comfort. He liked the man he was, and that was erotic in itself. His hand moved faster, his eyes squeezed shut, and just before his orgasm lifted and crested, Luca’s image flashed behind his eyelids.

Just a quick moment of him there, cheeks pink from the sun, head bowed, long fingers peeling away at a cupcake wrapper.

Wilder came with a soft cry rippling along his throat as his come painted the walls, and he took a startled step back at what he’d done. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d come to the vision of anyone else. He had carefully trained himself to enjoy sensation—refusing to let his mind be occupied with another body, because that was where Scott had taken advantage. He’d become Wilder’s entire world, and Wilder had worked his ass off to make sure that never happened again. It meant cutting off sexual desire from other people, and it had worked.

Until now.

Until it hadn’t.

His fingers shook as he washed himself, then the wall, and he stepped out of the shower and wrapped in a towel like it could shield him from the sudden world-shaking thought. He might like Luca. Maybe not as a person—the man was a mess, and he didn’t know what was behind all of that chaos. But he was good looking enough that Wilder had been dragged out of his self-imposed sexual isolation long enough to notice.

---