Nights Without Night (Fox Lake Book 2) Read online

  “Isa, there are services out there, the V.A.-” I start, but he shuts down immediately. I backtrack. Now, during the first time he’s opened up, is not the time to press. “Or I could help. We could have a, like, system. To pull you back, or something. Like…I say one, and you have to say two and I say three and you say four until ten and then…we can go through the consequences or something. Like, one, you get out of the car…” I start and then point at him. He looks at me for a moment.

  “Two, I beat the guy up for being an asshole,” he says. I fight the urge to roll my eyes.

  “Three, the guy is in a moving car. So am I. You open the door, I have to break, we collide, I get hurt-”

  “Okay, okay,” he says. I raise my eyebrows. “It was stupid, I get it. I just…”

  “I get it, but…let’s just try this next time, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” I repeat softly and press our foreheads together. I feel him sigh against me. I close my eyes.

  **********

  On Sunday, we take a walk through the Mallowston forest. The day is clear and cold. It smells like ice, even though it hasn’t snowed. Our breaths bloom white flowers in front of us. We follow a rocky dirt path through the pines and skeleton trees. The sun shines through, fragmented against our hair and skin and clothes. The light shines through Isadoro’s eyes, bright and untroubled.

  We reach a ridge and stop to look at the landscape. The forest seems to go on forever. Green, brown, blue. It’s all part of something.

  I feel Isadoro’s fingers against mine. Without looking, I take his hand.

  I breathe.

  **********

  The apartment is a warm haven from the cold. It’s late, and the alcohol in my veins is a low buzz inside me. I shut the front door behind me and take off my coat, hanging it carefully on its hook. I take off my shoes, resting them beside the door. When I walk towards the living room, my steps are almost silent, but Isadoro’s head is turned towards me. He’s sitting in the almost dark. In the phantom light of the TV, he looks like an apparition. These past years I’ve seen him more in dreams than in real life. Now, he seems to have appeared from the darkness of the night.

  I walk toward the couch and wrap myself around Isadoro from behind. I kiss his neck and feel his hand come to rest on one of my arms.

  He’s warm. The scent of him could take me back to childhood.

  “I want you to fuck me,” I say into his skin, biting there, a punctuation. He twists slightly to look at me and I kiss him, my tongue dragging across his lips. When I pull away, he wastes no time on untangling from me. I take a step back and he jumps over the back of the couch.

  “Oh, please,” I say, rolling my eyes at the demonstration, but heat burns inside.

  He pulls me toward him and kisses me again. I open my mouth, my arms, pressing closer. His hand cradles the back of my head, tilts it slightly and I go easily, following his pace.

  After a few moments, he pulls back and looks at me. I let him, feeling soft and malleable in his hands.

  “Bedroom,” I murmur. He nods but kisses me again until the darkness and the heat have melted us together.

  We go to my room. I lay on the bed and he stretches over me, reaching an arm out to turn on the bedside lamp. The glow lengthens the shadows of his eyelashes, of the dip below his bottom lip.

  He settles between my legs and I wind them around him, nudging him forward. He lets himself fall with his forearms bracketing my head. He runs his hand through my hair, looking at me, before leaning down. My hands slide across his neck, his shoulders, the moving muscles of his back. I hum into the kiss and I can feel his little smile against me.

  It goes into the night. He looks, and kisses, and looks at me. I want to ask him what he’s searching for, but I want to watch him too.

  He takes off my clothes and then his and slides down my body with his calloused hands. I’m already hard, have been for a while, and I squirm at the rake of his skin. He gives the tip of my dick a cursory lick and I choke on a fragmented ah, but then he’s gone again.

  The crinkle of the condom and click of the lube’s lid is like another of my sounds. I shift impatiently on the bed and then still as I feel slick fingers at my entrance.

  Like ever, he goes slow.

  As the first finger slides in, an errant thought courses through me. This is the first time since we were seventeen that he’s been inside me. Nearly a decade ago. We were children then, in all the ways that count.

  “Come on,” I say, and he pushes in another. I grind against his hand, but he doesn’t pick up the pace. He opens me up slowly. Two fingers, three. He watches them disappear inside me like he’s entranced. I get lost in the intensity of it, in the feel of the brushing pressure against my prostate, until I can’t take it anymore.

  “Come on. Come on, don’t you want to fuck me? Isa…” I move my hips, fucking myself harder on his thick fingers. I hear him grunt, letting me move before slipping out and grabbing my hips, slippery and desperate.

  I open my eyes. Look at the flush on his face, the sweat on his hairline from nothing more than fingering me. His eyes are orange, brown, black. He lifts me up with one hand and guides himself in with the other.

  The noise that comes out of me as he pushes in has been shredded by years of neglect. Fuck, he’s thick, filling me fully.

  When he starts moving, it’s with him all around me. My hips are hitched up to meet him on his knees, but he’s curved over me. Even when I close my eyes, I can feel him everywhere. He fucks me with deep, short thrusts that punch little noises out of me, and he picks them up from my lips, licking them from my tongue and my mouth.

  At this pace, the burning is such a gradual rise it almost surprises me when it scorches through. I can’t breathe for a moment as I feel my body clench and move without my permission, just feeling for a moment, all this pleasure and Isadoro at my core.

  “Iván, Iván…” Isadoro is saying as he continues fucking into me as I come, and I grasp at him, encouraging and overstimulated until he comes too. He hunches forward, a tighter shell around me as he moans into my neck. I close my eyes and breathe him in.

  Isadoro slumps to the side, slipping out of me. He gets up a moment to throw the condom in the trash as I wipe myself with the corner of the sheet and then fling it to the side.

  When he comes back he pulls me toward him, stroking his hands across my skin. I hold him back, letting myself drift.

  It’s quiet and peaceful here.

  I don’t know how much time has passed when I’m nudged from my doze by Isadoro untangling himself from me and getting up.

  “Where are you going?” I mumble, blinking sleepily.

  “Gonna watch some TV.” I can hear him shuffle around for his clothes.

  “It’s late,” I protest half-heartedly, knowing my argument is going to be of no use.

  “I’m not tired. Sleep,” he says, kissing me on the temple before moving away. I frown. I watch him leave until he disappears with a click of the door.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  One day we go to the biggest city park, heading for the lake.

  “I used to come here as often as I could when I was like…twenty? All my jobs were so shitty then, I came here to people watch and draw, just to feel like I was doing something I loved, you know?” I say, looking around.

  I haven’t been here for a while, but the landscape looks familiar. The expanse of grass, the ring of trees around us, cradling the large lake we’re heading towards. The lake is surrounded by a stone pathway, lifted so you have to look down at the dark water.

  “Yeah, I remember how tired you always looked when we Skyped. It worried me,” Isadoro admits. I almost laugh at the concept of Isadoro being worried about me for having one too many jobs while he was at war.

  “Remember how simple life seemed for adults when we were children? Like, even when we knew they had troubles it was like, ‘they make the rules, so they must have everything under control’. If someo
ne looked like an adult, they were an adult. I still feel like I’m sort of playing pretend. It’s not that I knew exactly what I was gonna be but, I don’t know…I wouldn’t have imagined this path to getting here. I guess it’s different for you, you always said you’d be a soldier,” I muse. Isadoro tilts his head to the side, considering, as we finally reach the stone pathway and start walking around the lake.

  “In a way…but I don’t think you can truly know what the military will really be like, you know? All the details, like…having to wash yourself with wipes or the smell when you burn the trash or the feeling of your helmet against your head when it’s boiling out. It’s one of those things theory can’t really prepare you for, and that’s life. I mean, you say I always wanted to be a soldier, but you’ve always been an artist. It’s just all the complicated parts of life that you can’t imagine as a kid.”

  “Yeah, I get you. But I don’t know if I would call me an artist.”

  “I would. Iván, you dumbass, you’re amazing. Sometimes I look at one of your drawings or paintings or sculptures and it’s like…I don’t know. Something happens. I’m standing there but a part of me goes somewhere else. Somewhere you,” he says.

  I can feel the exact rhythm of my heart pumping in my chest. I’m speechless for a moment, Isadoro’s words digging under my skin. It’s not like he’s stingy with praise, but the compliment was so precise it knocks the breath out of me for a moment.

  “Well…thanks,” I say, changing the subject quickly to avoid the awkwardness inherent in accepting praise that means so much to you. “Well, as much fun as that illusion could be, I definitely wouldn’t go back to being a kid. There’s no way I’m going through the bullshit that is puberty again, even if it was nice when our biggest fear was quicksand.”

  Isadoro laughs. “Shit, everything was quicksand back then. And volcanoes. Instead of adult worries, the world was filled with danger.”

  “Why the hell was quicksand such a big thing back then? I swear, I haven’t even thought about quicksand since I was thirteen. I blame cartoons. Or maybe it was school.”

  “Maybe they were preparing us for growing up. Maybe quicksand was a metaphor for adulthood all along,” Isadoro says in a philosophizing voice.

  “Wow. That was deep,” I deadpan. Isadoro laughs. “Point is, I’m not going back to my painfully-awkward self.”

  “You weren’t that awkward,” Isadoro protests. I look at him.

  “Uh, yes I was. Remember thirteen-year-old-me? Not a good look,” I say. Isadoro laughs.

  “Okay, maybe I’m not gonna argue too hard on that point.”

  “How dare you?” I gasp. He snorts.

  “But you definitely grew into yourself by the time you were seventeen.”

  “Tell that to all the boys who weren’t in my yard.”

  “Man, you were so clueless. Remember Xander?” I nod. I’ve only ever known one guy with that name. “Total crush on you,” Isadoro says with complete confidence.

  “He did not!”

  “Oh my God. That you’re protesting the fact blows my mind. He had it so bad for you,” he says. I gape in silence as I try to process this fact.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me? He was hot as hell!” I burst out suddenly. I look at him, flapping my arms. He just looks straight ahead for a long moment as we walk.

  “It was so obvious I thought you were letting him down gently, I guess,” he says eventually. I huff.

  “Some friend you are. I could have been getting tail all that time.”

  “You were getting tail,” he reminds me and oh, yeah, that was when we had started fooling around

  “Well, more tail,” I say, and the words are barely out of my mouth when Isadoro grabs the front of my coat, pulling me toward him. Startled, I stumble into him.

  “You needed more tail?” he says. The teasing is soft, but it’s hiding a structure of iron.

  I blink at him and he leans down. Our cheeks and lips are cold, but the inside of his mouth is warm and wet.

  I don’t think we’ve ever kissed in public before.

  When we part, I’m a little dazed. He pulls me with him as we start walking again, his arm over my shoulder. I don’t push him off. He’s always been tactile with me.

  “You know,” he starts after we’ve walked almost half-around the lake, “I thought for sure you’d be hitched by the time I was out.” He says it softly like he’s sharing a secret. I snort.

  “First of all, that makes you sound like you’ve been in prison. Second of all, I’m only twenty-six, what the hell.”

  “Yeah, but…I don’t know.”

  “I’m such a catch you thought someone would have snatched me up by now?” I say with a teasing grin, but his expression remains serious.

  “Yeah,” he says simply. I narrow my eyes at him.

  “You’re being fucking weird today,” I tell him, but I wrap an arm around his middle. Isadoro laughs.

  “This is what I’m always like.”

  When we’ve walked around enough to tire ourselves into hunger, we go to a nearby hotdog stand and order two with everything. We have to take off our gloves to eat and by the time I've finished the tips of my fingers are aching.

  “I need to wash my hands,” I say, but Isadoro is busy buying some plain buns.

  “What’s that for?” I ask as we head to the toilets.

  “To feed the geese,” he explains. I wrinkle my nose.

  “Geese are evil and don’t deserve hotdog buns,” I say. Isadoro looks at me with judgey eyes.

  “Are you serious?”

  “…No,” I say, even though I totally was.

  “I thought you liked animals?”

  “I love animals! But geese aren’t animals. They’re demons. Everybody knows this Isadoro, wake up!”

  “Oh my God.”

  After going to the bathroom, we head to another lake, this one with a natural shore where a gaggle of geese are bunched together, squawking at each other and being a general nuisance.

  I accept one of the hot dog buns and start throwing pieces at the birds reluctantly. Meanwhile, Isadoro is tossing pieces at them carefully, making sure everybody gets some even though they’re fighting over the scraps like the vicious animals they are.

  Isadoro catches me looking at him and my expression must be a little more than mocking because he raises his eyebrows at me.

  “What!” I say, throwing my last piece of bread. It hits one of the birds on the head and I giggle a little. Isadoro shakes his head.

  “It was an accident! And it’s freaking hotdog bread, come on,” I say. Isadoro smiles. I do not like the look in his eyes at all.

  He turns toward me and starts throwing the bread right at my feet.

  “What are you doing?” I say, backpedalling, but he keeps going. “Stop!” I say, but the geese are already charging. I scream as one of them starts flapping its massive wings right in front of me, running away. When I turn back to look at Isadoro, he’s doubled over, laughing.

  “Fucking asshole!” I shout at him, even though I’m kind of laughing too. I run over and shove him hard. He topples over easily, already unbalanced by his moronic laughing.

  He’s been startled into silence, and as he gets up I see that the side he landed on is covered in geese shit. Now, I’m the one who starts laughing, wrapping my arm around my middle and tilting my head back.

  When I look back at him, however, he’s almost all the way up. I recognize the glint in his eyes. I immediately stop laughing.

  “Do not come near me. Do. Not. Come. Near. Me.” I squeal the last words as Isadoro charges me and I sprint away. It takes him an embarrassingly short amount of time to catch me, however. As soon as he does, he starts rubbing his side against me, getting the shit on my jacket too.

  “No!” I howl.

  “Payback is geese shit,” he grins.

  We return home cold, dirty, but grinning.

  “Dibs on the shower!” I say as soon as we get home.

&nbs
p; “You are a child,” he laughs. I stick my tongue out at him.

  “Suck it, poophead.”

  I lounge on his bed after I take my shower, back against the mattress with my feet on the floor. I’ve just put some sweatpants on and flip through my phone nonchalantly as I wait. I hear the bathroom door open and put the phone down, propping myself up on my elbows.

  Isadoro pauses as soon as he steps into the room. His eyes go straight to me, looking down my mostly-prone body and then up again. I smirk, widening my knees a little. His eyes go dark and he looks so good my mouth waters. There’s just a white towel around his waist, and the expanse of muscle and skin on display has me honest-to-god hardening in my sweatpants. Isadoro must notice because it’s his turn to smirk.

  “Jerk,” I say, for looking so fucking delicious and being so many steps away. I cup myself through the soft cloth, tilting my head back and moaning, drawing the noise out.

  It works. Isadoro flings the towel to the side and prowls toward me. His dick hangs heavy and thick between his legs.

  “Yeah,” I grunt. As soon as Isadoro reaches me, he grabs hold of my sweatpants and yanks them down and off in almost one movement.

  “Jesus!” I say, heart thundering, but then Isadoro is on me, kissing any further words right from my mouth.

  I wrap my legs around him, pushing him against me. There’s something wild and insatiable inside me, something I’m having trouble containing. I bite at his lips and drag my nails across his back, rubbing my dick against his abs. For once, he’s the one struggling to keep up.

  “I want,” I say against his lips before pushing him away. He grunts in surprise and I squirm from under him, leaving him confused and on his front. I straddle the small of his back and push his head against the bed, cheek-side down. He groans low in his throat and, God, that sound. It cuts right through me.