Peter Cabot Gets Lost by Cat Sebastian
Day 4
Carthage, Missouri
When Caleb woke up, he couldn’t have said where he was, but he knew there wasn’t supposed to be a warm body pressed up against his side. Technically, he supposed it was the other way around—he was pressed against the other person’s side, his hand splayed over a bare stomach and his cheek resting on a shoulder. Slowly, the reality of his situation dawned on him.
Well, crap. His best bet was to extricate himself before Peter realized what Caleb had done. He thought he might be able to ease himself off without waking Peter up. Carefully, he shifted his weight to the arm that was currently underneath his pillow.
“Are you finally awake?” asked a rough voice.
“Oh, fuck,” Caleb said, freezing. “I was hoping you were still asleep. Why in hell didn’t you shove me off?”
“I did. Twice. You kept coming back. Like a limpet.”
“What the hell’s a limpet?”
“Not sure, honestly. Something that clings. Maybe something in the leech family? I read it in a book.”
“Well in that case,” Caleb said, moving to extract himself.
“Not so fast.” Peter’s arm tightened around Caleb’s shoulders. “Body warmth.”
Caleb registered that the room was cool, cold even. He was pretty sure that adult men did not normally huddle together under the covers unless they were about to die of exposure, but he was willing to play along. “Where did all these blankets come from?”
“The weather changed in the middle of the night, so I turned the fan off and took the blankets from both beds.”
Caleb yawned against the cotton of Peter’s undershirt and as he did so, he burrowed a little closer. When Peter had told Caleb to stay, he probably hadn’t meant for Caleb to stay pressed up against him like this. But he wasn’t making any move to put some distance between them, so Caleb let himself enjoy the warmth of Peter on one side and the blanket snug around them both.
This wasn’t cuddling, and even if it was, it didn’t mean anything. They were just two people who were reluctant to get out of a cozy bed. Peter shifted the arm that Caleb was mostly lying on, and brushed Caleb’s hip with his fingertips. It felt very deliberate. Holding his breath, Caleb took the hand that was already on Peter’s stomach and moved it up a little, just enough to answer whatever question Peter had silently asked. Beneath his palm, he felt the coarseness of Peter’s chest hair where his undershirt had ridden up, and the solidness of the muscle beneath.
All right, they were definitely cuddling. Caleb didn’t consider himself much of a cuddler, not even with anyone he had sex with. Especially not anyone he had sex with. It was strange being this close to someone and Caleb was sure he was doing it wrong. He was either being too still or not still enough. Every time he drew in a breath he was too conscious of how his ribcage moved against Peter’s, how close his mouth was to Peter’s skin, how if either of them moved their hands a few inches in any direction, what they were doing would become something else entirely. He scrambled to his feet, but before he could think better of it, he bent his head and pressed a quick kiss to Peter’s shoulder. He slipped into the bathroom to shower, not wanting to see Peter’s reaction.
By the time Caleb got out of the shower, Peter had mostly finished rounding up the array of objects that found their way out of his suitcase and all over the motel room. The same thing had happened all three nights—Peter Cabot, it turned out, was a bit of slob. Most of the things he left lying around were normal—his watch, his wallet, a comb—but some were like artifacts from another universe. He had a small travel alarm clock that folded up like a jewelry box, and which was made of the same soft blue leather as his suitcases. He had written a few postcards using a fountain pen with an honest-to-god gold nib, even though in his pocket he carried an ordinary, cheap ballpoint pen. His aftershave came in a pale green glass bottle with a French-sounding name and Caleb dearly wanted to unscrew the cap and see for himself if this was what made Peter smell so good.
Caleb realized that Peter had found time to bring back a couple cups of coffee from the office. He took his wristwatch off the nightstand and fastened it, noting that it was still only half past eight.
“You know, I would never have taken you for a morning person,” Caleb said after gulping down half his coffee.
“Always have been.”
Caleb frowned. “But I remember you coming in late almost every day to American History, and that class started at 9:00.”
“Sometimes crew practice ran late.”
“And so you just came late?” Caleb had dragged himself, half asleep, to every godforsaken 9:00 lecture.
“Cutting practice short would have been worse. The team needed me, but American History 101 didn’t. I told the professor at the beginning of the semester that I had a scheduling conflict, and he said it was fine.”
“Of course he did,” Caleb grumbled, shoving his dirty clothes into his suitcase.
Peter was silent for a moment. “You mean because of my name.”
“Well, yes.”
“That might have had something to do with it. But so did the fact that I had taken that professor’s course on the Industrial Revolution the previous semester and done pretty well, and he was also my thesis adviser and knew me.”
Caleb had the distinct feeling that “pretty well” was an understatement. “So, now I feel like an asshole.”
“For pointing out that I get special treatment? Hardly,” Peter said lightly. “There’s no getting around the fact that first and foremost I’m a Cabot.”
Caleb remembered the note of bleakness that had crept into Peter’s voice the previous night when they had talked about the future. That bleakness was there again on Peter’s last words, as if he wished he could imagine a future for himself as someone other than a Cabot. “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t—”
“I know. I don’t want to talk about it.” Peter shut his eyes and blew out a long breath. When he opened his eyes he smiled and it only looked a little fake. “Let’s check out. I want to get in the car, eat some pancakes, and drive through Kansas and Oklahoma with you.”
Caleb didn’t think it was his imagination that Peter had emphasized with you. He put as much cheer into his voice as he could, because if Peter wanted to pretend that everything was just fucking jolly, then Caleb could do that. “Well, what a coincidence. That’s exactly what I want, too.”
When they finished checking out and crossed the parking lot to Peter’s car, the sky to the north was dark with clouds.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” Caleb said. Back home, clouds like that meant they were in for an afternoon of thunderstorms, but he didn’t know if that held true this far west, where the land was disconcertingly flat in every direction.
“Me neither.” Peter tapped his fingers on the roof of his car. “I guess we could stay put for a little while.”
“Might as well get those pancakes while we see what happens.”
If Caleb had thought there might be awkwardness after spending the morning pretty much cuddling, and then having what might have been a quarrel, his worries were allayed by the time they pulled into the parking lot of the first roadside diner they encountered. Peter sometimes stammered and seemed uncomfortable, but he was awfully good at making sure nobody else felt awkward. Caleb didn’t know if it was because he had been raised in a family of politicians, and therefore was fluent in diplomacy, or if Peter was just good at putting people at ease.
Case in point: Peter ordered the largest possible tower of pancakes and Caleb ordered a more modest portion, but they both knew that the meal was going to end with Peter declaring that he couldn’t possibly finish his last pancake, and Caleb offering to take it off his hands. Peter managed to accomplish something like this at every meal without making Caleb feel like he was getting table scraps, somehow keeping the conversation flowing so Caleb didn’t even have an opportunity to get embarrassed.
No, it wasn’t diplomacy, and it wasn’t just putting people at ease. There was nothing smooth or practiced about what Peter did, only an earnest effort to do right, to be kind. Peter Cabot was good. He was a good man, but that didn’t stop him from trying to be an even better one, and Caleb didn’t know what to do with that information. It wasn’t just that Caleb’s preconceived notions were being turned on their head—he had gotten over that the previous day. But now there was something else, something worse. Peter was good, and he liked to make Caleb happy—no, he liked to take care of Caleb. And it had been so long since anyone had taken care of Caleb. It was such a relief to have somebody give him that last pancake or to pick up a newspaper without being asked, and he hated that such small things meant so much. But he had been swimming upstream for what felt like his whole life and it was so nice to be able to take it easy for a little bit.
At the same time, it made him feel so vulnerable—he had to be in a pretty sorry state if getting a leftover pancake meant that much. He felt like Peter—rich and connected and never wanting for anything—could see how pathetic Caleb really was. He didn’t want Peter, of all people, to see all that, and he didn’t want to think of himself in those terms.
It made Peter so transparently happy to do these little favors for Caleb, though. When he slid that last pancake onto Caleb’s plate, he was almost pink with happiness, so obviously pleased with himself that Caleb couldn’t help but smile.
“Thank you,” Caleb said, and Peter looked at him, faintly startled. Caleb realized that might have been the first time he properly, ungrudgingly, thanked Peter.
“It’s just a pancake,” Peter said, voice gruff, eyes averted.
“I know,” Caleb said, and under the table nudged Peter’s foot with his own.
* * *Riverton, Kansas
They shouldn’t have gotten back in the car, that much was obvious as soon as the first clouds rolled overhead. Whatever this storm was, Peter would rather have waited it out in the diner than in a car that suddenly seemed all too small and flimsy. In the span of minutes, it was so dark that Peter had to put on his headlights. A few minutes after that, fat raindrops began pelting the windshield.
“I’m going to pull over,” Peter said when the rain was so heavy that he could no longer see more than a few yards ahead.
“There’s a gas station up there on the right,” Caleb said. “At least I think that’s what I see over there.”
Peter couldn’t see much of anything, but he pulled off the road and into a paved lot, figuring that whatever this place was, it was better than getting rear ended by another car on the shoulder of the road.
Caleb had been right that it was a service station—or rather that’s what it must have been at some point. Even in the growing dark, Peter could see that its roof sagged in the middle and its windows were boarded up.
“I don’t think we can go in there,” Peter observed.
“Just pull up against the building so that if there’s hail, we’ll be sheltered.”
Peter did as he was told, his heart hammering in his chest and his fingers tight on the steering wheel. “I don’t like this,” he admitted.
He half expected Caleb to tell him that it was just a rainstorm, as if he didn’t already know that.
“It’s the wide-open space. I mean, for me it is.”
“Huh?”
“We’re in a car in the middle of this enormous wide-open expanse. The storm seems like it takes up the entire sky, from horizon to horizon. It’s like being a sprinkle on top of a sheet cake.”
“Yeah,” Peter said, laughing a little at the image and relieved to have his worries put into words. Well, at least part of his worries. There was something about being here, in a rainstorm, with nothing in sight but an abandoned gas station, that made the full reality of what he had done hit him. He had spent his entire life knowing that to be a Cabot was to put the family first, and in one impulsive move he had broken that cardinal rule. If he cut himself free from his family, then he wasn’t only free—he was adrift, alone in a world that suddenly seemed much too large.
“Once my sister and I were out trying to round up the chickens,” Caleb said, apparently oblivious to Peter’s crisis. “A fox had gotten into the coop and the hens scattered, so we were doing our best to catch as many as we could, and I guess we didn’t notice how far from the house we had gone. When a storm like this rolled in, we didn’t have time to get back home.”
Peter turned his head, resting his cheek against the back of the seat and regarding Caleb in the half light. “What did you do?”
“We sat under a pine tree. Me and Judy and three very angry chickens. My mother was beside herself.” He smiled faintly, and Peter remembered what Caleb had said about being homesick for a place that might not ever be real for him again. “The point is, we were fine.”
“Yeah,” Peter said. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to think of what his own sister and brother would say when they found out what he had done. But that wasn’t quite right—they already knew and might be discussing it among themselves this very minute. Would they be shocked, or would they chalk this up to another one of Peter’s disappointing failures? A cool hand came to rest on top of where his own hand clutched the steering wheel.
“You might feel better if you let go,” Caleb said, peeling Peter’s fingers off the wheel, one by one. “You’ll ruin the leather.”
Peter let Caleb pry his hand from the wheel, but instead of letting go, Caleb held Peter’s hand in his own. There was nothing suggestive about the touch, except for the fact that they were touching in the first place. None of Peter’s friends would have held his hand to comfort him, but then again Peter probably wouldn’t have let himself fall apart in front of any of his friends. The fact that Caleb’s hand was touching his was proof that Peter was in an unfamiliar place.
“It was like this, actually,” Caleb said. “Under the pine tree, it was like Judy and I were the only people in the world, like that little space under the boughs was the only place that really existed.”
“Yeah?” Peter said, mainly to prompt Caleb to keep talking. It hardly mattered what Caleb said, so long as he kept talking, kept reminding him that whatever he had done, he wasn’t lost, wasn’t alone.
“It was dark, just like now. But cozy, right?”
Peter wouldn’t have described the car as cozy. Between the darkness and the rain coming down in sheets, he couldn’t see out the windows. But that also meant that nobody could see them. They were sheltered from the storm, but also from the rest of the world. “If you say so,” Peter said.
“Much drier than under a tree,” Caleb said. “And fewer angry chickens.”
Peter felt himself smile.
“See, I can be soothing and put people at their ease too,” Caleb said, grinning crookedly.
“Is that what you’re doing?” Peter asked, his eyes straying to where their hands were still joined. “I mean”—Peter’s mouth went dry, but he had done one reckless thing this week and he could do another. “Is that all you’re doing?”
Caleb looked at him for a long minute, as if searching for something in Peter’s eyes. Whatever he was looking for, Peter really hoped he found it. “No,” Caleb finally said. “Not really.”
“Good.” Peter swallowed. He knew he ought to say something more, or do something, but he couldn’t even imagine what any of that would be. His hand was growing clammy, so he pulled it away from Caleb’s. “I hate not knowing what I’m doing.”
“It can’t happen often,” Caleb said, his pale eyes sparkling with amusement. “You do everything competently. Even now, you’re slightly hysterical but you’re doing it in style. No crying, no hyperventilating. And in a Cadillac.”
Peter couldn’t imagine where Caleb had gotten hold of the idea that Peter was competent at anything, and he’d tell him exactly how wrong he was if he weren’t worried about scaring the man off. “I don’t mean that. I mean about this. About you. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
Something shuttered in Caleb’s expression. “Supposed to?”
Peter knew he was getting this all wrong. “Usually if I’m not sure what to do, I do either what’s expected of me or the thing that’s least likely to get me noticed, and that’s enough. But I want—shit—I want to—” He filled his lungs and slowly let out his breath, trying to remind himself that even if he had radically misread this situation, Caleb still wasn’t going to be horrible about it. “I want to touch you and I think you want that too, but I’ve never—” He stopped, not sure how to finish that sentence. “I’ve never, okay?”
Caleb was silent for long enough that Peter might have thought he had gotten everything wrong, except for how Caleb never looked away. “Want me to make this easy for us?” Caleb asked, voice low and soft.
“Please,” Peter said. “Please.”
Caleb slid along the bench seat, one hand coming up to touch Peter’s jaw. His fingers were cool and sure as he leaned in. “I really hope that by touching you meant kissing,” he said, so close Peter could feel his breath on his own cheek.
“Yeah,” Peter managed, and Caleb closed the last few inches between them, brushing their lips together.
Peter had kissed other people. Well, he had kissed women. Sometimes at the end of a date he’d give a girl a quick kiss if it seemed like that was what she wanted. He was good at that, he thought—a kiss that was warm enough to make a girl feel appreciated but not heated enough to make her feel like he had any expectations. He had figured out the right duration, the right pressure, where to keep his hands, and the whole routine was no more intimate than dancing with someone. A few times he had done a little more, mainly because he was starting to worry there was something wrong with him for not wanting more and thought that maybe he was just missing the point because he was bad at it. But all those kisses and touches were only his pitiful attempts to be the person he thought he was supposed to be; he didn’t want them any more than he wanted to shave every day or wear his brown shoes with his brown belt. He was just following the rules.
He had never kissed anyone like this. He had never kissed anyone he had actually wanted to kiss, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone the way he wanted to kiss Caleb. This kiss was made of want. It was made of all the things Peter wasn’t supposed to be but was anyway.
But really, it was Caleb kissing him—Caleb brushing his lips over Peter’s, Caleb tangling his fingers in Peter’s hair. He had offered to make this easy, and that was what he was doing.
Experimentally, Peter parted his lips. Caleb responded with a low noise, as if he had been waiting for Peter to do just that, and licked Peter’s lower lip.
Peter gasped. He hadn’t expected a touch so small to electrify his whole body like that. Caleb hesitated, and Peter took advantage of the pause to press closer, getting one hand on the back of Caleb’s neck and letting the other settle on his waist in a way that somehow felt as important as the kiss. Peter licked into Caleb’s mouth, tasting maple syrup and coffee and knowing that he probably tasted the same.
Caleb’s hand was firm on his shoulder, an invitation. Peter let himself be pulled down, bracing one hand on the seat beside Caleb’s head while the other stayed at Caleb’s waist. Caleb’s hands strayed, one at the back of Peter’s neck and the other roaming up and down his side, then toying with the part of his shirt that had come untucked. The mere idea of Caleb’s hand inside his clothing made Peter groan, and then Caleb was arching up beneath him in a way that made it impossible for Peter to ignore his own throbbing erection. Peter ground down against Caleb, driven by instinct and want and the need to give Caleb whatever he was looking for.
“Wait,” Caleb breathed. “Stop.”
Peter lifted himself off Caleb, putting some distance between them. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—” He didn’t know how to finish that sentence. He wasn’t sure what he had done wrong, just that he didn’t want to do it again, whatever it was.
“No, I just was afraid I’d…um. We have to drive for a while, yet, and I don’t like being messy.”
It took Peter a moment to understand that Caleb was pretty much saying that he was worried about coming in his pants. Which, when Peter stopped to think about it, was a valid concern for him too. He might have been embarrassed about it, if not for how Caleb was apparently in the same state. And that meant Caleb wanted him.
The fact of that want—given and received, shared, equal—settled over Peter until he felt almost blanketed in it, wrapped up in it. “Later,” he said, and he didn’t know whether it was a question or an answer.
“Later,” Caleb said, lifting himself up to press a last, relatively chaste, kiss to the corner of Peter’s mouth.
* * *Commerce, Oklahoma
When the rain let up to a mere trickle and the sun emerged weakly from behind still-angry clouds, Caleb changed places with Peter and steered the car back onto the highway.
“It’s only three o’clock,” Caleb said, “but I think we should stop for the day. I don’t know if that’s the end of the storm. Also, I’m worried that everybody else is going to run for the first motel and that if we leave it too long, we won’t find a room.”
“Good idea.”
“Honestly, I’m just relieved it wasn’t a tornado.”
He heard Peter’s sharp intake of breath. “Shit. I didn’t think of that. Is that how tornadoes start? With a thunderstorm?”
“Beats me. The fact that there are tornadoes in Kansas is literally the only weather trivia I know, and it’s possible that The Wizard of Oz isn’t an accurate source, so don’t ask me.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
Caleb didn’t need to turn his head to know that a little line had appeared on Peter’s forehead the way it did whenever he was hard on himself. “Now that I know you can’t predict the weather, I don’t like you anymore,” he said. “Sorry.”
Peter snorted. “I was a Boy Scout. I should know these things.”
“Of course you were a Boy Scout.”
“I think I see a motel sign ahead. Want to get into the right lane?” Caleb switched lanes and waited. A moment later, Peter spoke again. “The turn is in about thirty seconds.” Without Caleb having to say anything, Peter had figured out that while Caleb was a decent driver, he needed a lot of help with navigation, so he had started to talk Caleb through any piece of road that wasn’t a straight line. Somehow, he managed to accomplish this without sounding at all condescending. He even used a ballpoint pen to outline their route on the map, so that Caleb could get a sense of where they were heading.
When Caleb pulled into the parking lot, he could tell right away that this was a cut above the other motels they had stayed at. There was a neon sign proclaiming the existence of a cocktail lounge on the premises and the fact that the rooms all had televisions. He had to make the money in his wallet last him all the way to Los Angeles and then get him through the weeks before his first paycheck. He had already resigned himself to spending the first month sleeping on the couch of a former classmate. Logically, he knew that spending an extra dollar on tonight’s room wouldn’t matter much in the long term, but the idea of spending a penny more than he needed to made his stomach twist uncomfortably.
Those thoughts all blew away like so much dust when they stepped out of the car. Over the roof of the car, Peter grinned at him, a smile warm and guileless and just for Caleb.
It occurred to Caleb that his bank account wasn’t the only thing that was going to get damaged this trip. Caleb didn’t have any business kissing the likes of Peter Cabot. In the ordinary course of things, they wouldn’t even share a casual conversation, let alone a week together, and certainly not a kiss. This trip had created an entirely spurious intimacy, and that normally wouldn’t have bothered Caleb, at least not too much. He had, after all, spent his entire college career brushing shoulders with people who wouldn’t have had anything to do with him if he hadn’t happened to be at the same school. This was no different.
Or it wouldn’t have been, if they hadn’t kissed. Caleb’s previous encounters had been casual. Transactional. Very pleasant while they were happening but not particularly memorable. They ran together into a blur of smoky bars and hastily unzipped trousers, hands that might belong to anyone, rushed but certain pleasure. That suited him. He thought that maybe at some point he wouldn’t mind meeting someone about whom he could feel something more, but this was a project for the distant future, when he was settled and had stopped needing to count every penny. In the meantime he had other things to do—a name to make, a career to establish—and casual encounters would continue to do just fine.
He had a sinking feeling that if he spent the next three or four days or however long it took to get to California messing around with Peter, he wouldn’t be able to keep things casual. He liked Peter, liked him a lot, far more than he had thought possible.
Caleb might not be sure exactly how a man went about getting his heart broken, but he thought that a few days of fooling around with someone he was uncomfortably fond of but who ordinarily wouldn’t give him the time of day was a damned good start.
He sighed and moved to the back of the car to get his bag.
* * *Caleb was acting prickly again—not overtly hostile in the way he had the first day, but more like he expected Peter to do something awful and was primed to defend himself.
The kiss had, obviously, been a bad idea. They had gotten carried away by the storm and slight air of danger. Now Caleb regretted having kissed a man who was inexperienced and clumsy and didn’t know what he was doing, and who he didn’t even like that much. Caleb was probably horrified at the prospect of spending the next few days obligated to tolerate Peter’s fumbling efforts.
There was no doubt in Peter’s mind that Caleb would indeed consider himself obligated, and at that realization Peter was horrified with himself. Caleb had made it clear that he thought he was supposed to go along with Peter’s suggestions, whether it was watching a baseball game or stopping for an early lunch, and Peter had been an idiot for forgetting that.
He watched as Caleb unpacked his suitcase. He never took everything out—that wouldn’t make sense for a stay of only one night—but he made a habit of arranging the items he’d need on the dresser in a neat row. Now he took out his shaving kit, a pair of pajamas, a toothbrush, and a comb. Remaining in the suitcase was only a single shirt, and Peter realized Caleb would soon need clean clothes. He thought he had spotted a sign for a coin-operated laundry in the lobby and made a mental note to find out.
“So,” Peter said, trying hard not to sound lecherous, and staying clear on the other side of the room, “there’s a little restaurant across the street where we could get an early dinner.”
“Whatever you like,” Caleb said, not turning around.
“It matters what you think,” Peter said. “I don’t want to just drag you around.”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” Caleb answered.
Peter understood that he wasn’t going to make any progress, so he grabbed a bottle of shampoo from his suitcase and proceeded to take a shower.
When he came out, Caleb was seated stiffly on the edge of the bed, reading the newspaper they had bought that morning in Missouri.
“Do you ever read anything else?” Peter asked, towel drying his hair.
Caleb made a disapproving sound. “Of course I—” His words fell away as he looked up.
Peter had a towel wrapped securely around his hips. This wasn’t the first time he had come out of the bathroom only clad in a towel, and Caleb had done the same thing himself. Usually, as far as Peter could tell, they both averted their eyes from one another’s bodies in those moments, perhaps even more than Peter’s teammates or roommates did in similar circumstances.
But now, Caleb stared at Peter’s chest.
It probably only lasted two seconds, but during that time they both were utterly still. Peter thought he could hear his own pulse, Caleb’s breathing, the distant traffic, the muffled tick of the alarm clock buried in his suitcase. Peter didn’t think he had ever been looked at like that, with undiluted lust, with a flash of hunger in gray eyes.
Then Caleb recovered himself. “Of course I do.”
“What?” Peter asked, unable to remember what they had been talking about.
“Books.” Caleb met his eyes as if nothing had happened. “I read books. Fiction and non-fiction, in case you were wondering.”
When Caleb disappeared into the bathroom, Peter got dressed, then went in search of the coin-operated laundry so he could avoid being in the room when Caleb got out of the shower.
As Caleb had predicted, the motel was full. On the way to the office, he saw families on vacation, sunburned children and harried-looking parents, and more suitcases than seemed possible. There was a handful of solitary men, likely on business trips. At the vending machine was a couple only a year or two older than Peter. She had on a yellow sun dress with her hair in a ponytail, and he wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. They stood so close, his hand on the small of her back, her body fitted against his side. Even after they got their bottles of soda and walked away, their bodies brushed at every possible point of contact. Peter supposed they were on their honeymoon, or near enough to it, and the thought made him feel the way he had during the storm.
How had Caleb put it? Like a sprinkle on a sheet cake. That spring, Peter—along with everyone else in the country—had seen a picture of the earth taken by the satellite Tiros 1. It was a segment of a vast cloud-covered sphere and the infinity of space beyond, and it had left Peter feeling almost seasick. He had known, intellectually, that all of humanity played out their lives on a ball that hurtled through space, but something about seeing it on television and in the papers made it real.
To say that it made him feel insignificant wasn’t quite right—Peter already knew he was insignificant. But it made him feel like a helium balloon whose string was held by a distracted child. He had always been able to count on his family to tether him firmly to earth: he was a Cabot, a member of a family that was an institution as much as it was a collection of relatives. They looked out for one another; they made sacrifices for the greater good of Cabots in general.
But that belonging came at a price, and for Peter that price was frequent reminders that he wasn’t enough. And that was without anyone in his family knowing who he really was.
A year ago, his uncle had quietly taken Peter’s father and a few other family members aside and explained that he was getting divorced because he preferred men. Almost instantly, he had been fired from Peter’s father’s senate office and disinvited from Sunday dinner. And Uncle Tommy had been perfect: charming, talented, handsome, and loyal. If the Cabots had been willing to toss Uncle Tommy aside, Peter was under no illusions about what they’d do to him.
During the year since then, Peter had felt almost doomed. He had looked forward to his graduation like a man awaiting his execution. At least in college, he was good at some things. He had friends; his grades were always fine, and in classes that were mostly reading and writing, they were better than fine. After graduation, he wouldn’t even have that. He’d have to hide who he was in order to please people who would never be pleased by him.
By the end of the fall semester, he was only leaving his room to go to class and to practice with his team. By Easter, he was starting to fantasize about getting hit by a bus or coming down with various debilitating illnesses, and that couldn’t possibly be a good sign.
These past few days, he hadn’t felt doomed. Part of it was simply the thrill of escaping a future that he had accepted as inevitable. Years of enduring his family’s disappointment had eaten away like acid at Peter’s own sense of self, and now he finally had hope that he could make it stop. He was starting to imagine a future in which he was enough, just the way he was.
Peter fished a dime out of his pocket and fed it to the vending machine, then watched his Coke tumble down. He popped the cap and took a drink, leaning against the brick wall outside the office. It was hot and he hadn’t realized how thirsty he was. In front of him, a steady stream of cars traveled down the highway, everybody headed somewhere.
“There you are,” Caleb said, coming up beside him. “I thought you might have gotten lost.” He was washed and dressed, his damp hair curling around the collar of his worn white oxford. He was probably overdue for a haircut, Peter realized. He probably hadn’t bothered getting it cut in Cambridge, thinking to save the money and visit a barber right before starting his new job. His sleeves were rolled up, exposing fine-boned wrists.
“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” Peter said turning his attention away from Caleb and back to the road. He clenched the room key in his hand, the metal teeth digging into his palm. “I’m sorry.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“I shouldn’t have kissed you,” Peter said, quiet enough that nobody could overhear, “or walked around half naked.”
Caleb had leaned in to hear Peter but now stood up straight and took a step away. “All right. We’ll pretend it never happened.” He walked past Peter in the direction of the sidewalk. “Are you coming to dinner or not?”
Peter followed, certain he had gotten something wrong but unable to figure out what.
* * *Annoyingly, dinner was very good, good enough to coax Caleb out of his surly mood. Peter had steak, Caleb had a hamburger, and on the table in front of them was a basket of steaming hot biscuits and a little dish of soft butter.
“These biscuits,” Caleb said after the first bite, forgetting all the very good reasons he was annoyed with Peter, “are better than my mother’s. They are better than my grandmother’s, God forgive me.” He took another bite. “I didn’t know they had biscuits this far west.” They certainly didn’t have them in Massachusetts. He had gone four years in the wilderness and now he had a biscuit melting in his mouth and across the table he had a ridiculously handsome man looking at him as if Caleb’s biscuit enjoyment was the best news he had heard all week.
Peter took a bite of steak. “That good?”
Caleb made an incoherent murmur of pleasure and watched with interest as Peter’s cheeks went pink.
“Here,” Peter said, taking another biscuit from the basket and slathering it with butter the way Caleb had done, “have another.” He handed the biscuit to Caleb, watching him expectantly.
There was no reason why Caleb couldn’t have buttered his own biscuit. There was no reason why Peter having done such a basic task for him should make something horrible and happy flutter around in the vicinity of Caleb’s heart, and also somewhat lower.
There was also no reason why Peter should look so eager for Caleb to take it.
But when Caleb did take it with a murmured thanks, their fingers brushed and something electric passed between them. Caleb took a bite and would have sworn on a bible that it tasted better than the one he had buttered himself.
He was losing his mind and, by the looks of it, so was Peter, whose eyes went round like saucers while he watched Caleb eat.
Caleb was aware that at some point he had thought Peter was a lackluster copy of his more charismatic family members, but now that notion seemed laughably wrong, obsolete, a relic of some embarrassing old way of thinking, like believing in a flat earth. He was going to spend the rest of his life seeing pictures of various Cabots and knowing that they were just poor imitations of Peter. Everything about Peter, from that one piece of hair that swooped onto his forehead, to the way he rolled up his shirt sleeves, to the faint shadow that appeared on his jaw every day at dinner time, was almost more than Caleb could take.
Caleb dabbed at his mouth with the napkin, considered changing the topic to something suitably mood-killing, like the election, but then gave in to the impulse to pick at a mental scab. “Peter, why did you apologize earlier?” he asked, barely above a whisper.
Peter paused with a forkful of steak halfway to his mouth. “Because I’m trying to do the right thing.”
Caleb had not been expecting that. He had assumed that Peter would say something about not making things awkward during the remainder of their trip, and Caleb would understand that to be code for not wanting to fuck commoners, and that would be that. Even quieter, Caleb said, “Is kissing men wrong?”
“What? No. Of course not. I mean, I’m past that, thank God.”
Caleb felt a sigh of relief whoosh from his lungs, but quickly recovered himself. “Then what about what we did was wrong?”
“I shouldn’t take advantage.”
“What,” Caleb said flatly.
“You don’t even feel comfortable saying no to me about where we eat dinner. I don’t want to put you in a position of not being able to say no about—” he swallowed “—other things.”
Caleb put his fork down and took a long drink of water. “You are an idiot. A preposterous fool. Bless your heart. I don’t know what I see in you,” he hissed. “The reason I don’t fuss about dinner is that I don’t care. There are a lot of things I don’t care about. One thing I do care about, you poor sweet idiot, is who I—” he broke off, realizing his voice had raised above a whisper. “You get the picture.”
“Right,” Peter said in a strangled sounding voice.
“So, if you think I’m going to fuck you out of gratitude,” Caleb whispered, “or to pay my way, or whatever is going through that pretty head of yours, just forget it. I kissed you. I made the first move. Me.”
“I remember,” Peter said, seeming to recover some of his usual easy affability. “I was there.”
“So while your concern is admirable and this conversation, however much I hate to admit it, was probably a good idea, your worries are unfounded, and you are very dumb.”
They sat in silence for a moment as Caleb stared at the pieces of cauliflower that lingered on his plate and realized what he had done: he had just declared in no uncertain terms that he was game for whatever Peter wanted. Caleb vaguely recalled that in the distant past of yesterday he had distinctly not wanted to go to bed with Peter. He didn’t want to be anybody’s sexual awakening or big queer experiment or anything else. He didn’t want to run a four-day cross country boot camp in gay sex for Peter Cabot.
Although, when he put it to himself in those terms, a four-day cross country gay sex boot camp with Peter Cabot seemed like a superb plan. Sure, he’d regret it when it was over but that wouldn’t happen until they reached Los Angeles. That was hundreds of miles away, comfortably remote, separated from the here and now by a nonsensical swirl of lines on a gas station map.
It was warm in the restaurant, and Peter had undone the top button of his shirt and rolled up his sleeves. He had his forearms on the table and was leaning toward Caleb just a little.
“You should try a bite of this steak,” Peter said, cutting a piece and spearing it on his fork.
For a moment Caleb thought Peter was going to feed him the steak and was simultaneously horrified that this was happening in public, and thrilled that it was happening at all, but then Peter slid the morsel onto Caleb’s plate.
Caleb ate the steak. It was insanely delicious. He did not understand how a tiny roadside restaurant in—if he read the map correctly—Oklahoma could have the best food he had eaten in his life, and decided he was not going to look too closely into what role his dinner partner played in that assessment.
* * *They had eaten early, so Peter didn’t know why he was surprised to find that it was still broad daylight when they left the restaurant. He felt like it ought to be night, so that whatever was about to happen would have the dignity of shadows and half-light. Instead he was blushing and knew it was completely obvious.
Caleb had the door unlocked and open before Peter even found the key in his pocket, and when they entered the room Caleb gave Peter a long look. He opened his mouth to say something, but whatever he saw in Peter’s face must have made him change his mind, and he turned away, toeing off his shoes.
Peter did the same, his heart pounding in his chest and his fingers fumbling on the knot of his shoelaces. He sat on the edge of the bed, trying to make sense of the tangle in front of him and trying even harder not to be paralyzed by awareness of Caleb, a few feet away, taking off his watch.
“Shit,” he said, as one of his shoelaces snapped. He held the broken length in one hand that he was mortified to realize was shaking.
“I have a spare,” Caleb said. “Jesus, what was it, an heirloom shoelace? Are you all right?” He sat beside Peter, putting a hand on Peter’s knee.
Peter laughed, or at least he tried to. It came out more like a whimper. He knew his face was red. Because he needed something to do with the hand that wasn’t holding a stupid broken shoelace, and because he thought he might die if he didn’t touch Caleb, he put his hand over Caleb’s. “Nervous,” he managed, his voice strangled. “I told you, I hate not knowing what I’m doing.”
Caleb turned his hand over and laced their fingers together. Caleb’s skin was lighter, his wrist and hand finer, but their fingers fit together. “I was going to put the television on, not immediately jump on you,” he said. “In the car, you said you hadn’t been with a man, so I wasn’t going to stage a full-fledged seduction or whatever it is that has you looking cornered.”
“Maybe I want a full-fledged seduction,” Peter said, feeling awfully bold, and then immediately wanted to hide under the scratchy motel bedspread. He swallowed. “Also, what you said isn’t right. It’s not just that I haven’t been with a man. It’s, um, anyone.” He forced himself to turn and look at Caleb, so he saw the other man’s eyes widen. Peter knew he was putting a burden on Caleb, making him all kinds of firsts, and was sorry for it.
“Ah,” Caleb said, sounding surprised but not bothered.
“Is that going to be a problem?”
Caleb shook his head. “Of course not.” They were close, thigh to thigh, hand in hand. “Do you want me to turn on the TV?”
“No,” Peter said. His heart was pounding and his hand was sweaty and he had no idea how he was going to take the next step, whatever it was. But then one of Caleb’s hands was on Peter’s jaw, feather light. His lips met the corner of Peter’s mouth and he kissed him there.
Peter waited—not hesitating, just letting himself get kissed, letting himself feel the progress of Caleb’s lips over his own, soft and sure and just a little bit careful. He slid an arm around Caleb’s waist, running his hand over the other man’s narrow ribs and the knobs of his spine and then up into the hair at the back of his head. When Caleb let out a soft sound of contentment, somewhere between a moan and a sigh, Peter felt it against his own mouth, and opened.
He remembered the feel of Caleb underneath him in the car, but that wasn’t quite what he wanted, so he leaned back a little, more a suggestion than anything else. Caleb took the hint, following Peter down to the mattress, angling his body over Peter’s, nudging one of Peter’s legs aside to make room.
“Oh God,” Peter groaned when Caleb slotted one of his legs between Peter’s.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.” Peter tentatively moved his hips and felt Caleb’s answering hardness against him.
Their kisses became loose and uncoordinated as they started to grind against one another, and Peter couldn’t think about anything other than the places where their bodies touched—Caleb’s slight frame surprisingly solid as it pressed him down, Caleb’s tongue and lips against his own, Caleb’s hands grasping Peter’s hips and tugging him even closer.
Peter buried his head in Caleb’s neck, seeking out softness and warmth and the rasp of stubble against his cheek. He pressed his lips over Caleb’s pulse and gently sucked, then ran his tongue over the place where his lips had been. Caleb made a noise that went straight to Peter’s dick, so Peter did it again.
“Help me get rid of this,” Caleb said, and Peter saw Caleb’s fingers nimbly unbuttoning his shirt. Peter shoved Caleb’s undershirt up, and meant to pull it over Caleb’s head, but got distracted by the warm skin beneath his hands, the pale hair on his chest, the pounding of Caleb’s heart. He sat up and pressed a kiss to the top of Caleb’s stomach, then higher, on his sternum. He shoved the shirt higher still and moved his mouth over one of Caleb’s flat, pink nipples.
“Oh, Jesus,” Caleb said. “Shit. That feels good.”
“Yeah?” Bracing himself on one hand, Peter replaced his mouth with his thumb, and began kissing the other nipple.
Now Caleb was almost writhing and Peter had never been so hard. He wondered if it was possible to come just like this, almost totally dressed.
“Peter,” Caleb breathed. “I can’t—I need—”
“I want to make you come,” Peter said, because at that moment it was the only thing he wanted.
Peter pulled back to give Caleb enough space to unfasten his trousers, watching as he pushed them down over his hips, followed by his underwear, and his cock sprang free.
“Can I?” Peter asked, his hand hovering stupidly, but Caleb grabbed it and pressed it to his cock.
“Yes yes yes,” Caleb said, the words landing in Peter’s mouth as they collided into a kiss. “But—you.” He insinuated a hand between him, then slid the palm of his hand over Peter’s clothed erection. “I want you to come too.”
Peter couldn’t manage to undo his button, but Caleb did it with one hand, and just the pressure of his zipper against his oversensitive skin was enough to make him groan. Then Caleb’s hand was wrapped around him, and this wasn’t going to last very long at all, especially after Peter figured out how to touch Caleb in a way that made him cry out. He loved it—the sounds Caleb made, the knowledge that all he had to do was move his thumb over the wet head of Caleb’s cock and Caleb would start swearing, the way Caleb’s own hand became uncoordinated as he got more worked up.
They rolled a little so Peter was on top. He was going to make Caleb come, he was going to watch it happen, was going to feel it and hear it and know it was his doing. He kissed Caleb’s nipple again as he stroked the silky hardness of his cock, and then Caleb muttered something that sounded like a warning and he was coming, all over Peter’s hand and his own stomach, his eyes squeezed shut and one hand twisted in the bedspread. Peter put his own hand over Caleb’s fist, stroking himself, and then he was coming too.
“Oh God,” Caleb breathed, his voice shaky. “Peter.”
“Was that okay?”
Caleb looked at him like he was crazy. “Come here.” He grabbed Peter’s collar—Peter, somehow, was still entirely dressed—and reeled him in for a kiss that was sloppy and happy and soft.
Peter tried to keep his hand, the one they had both come all over, away from Caleb.
“What are you doing?” Caleb asked.
“You said you don’t like being messy.”
Caleb let out a shocked little noise and pulled his undershirt the rest of the way off, then used it to carefully wipe off Peter’s hand and his own stomach. “I don’t mind getting messy. I just don’t like staying messy. For, um, future reference.”
“Good to know,” Peter said, his stupid dick already hardening again at Caleb’s words. He lay down on his back next to Caleb, their arms brushing. He wasn’t sure about the etiquette of this situation. What he wanted was to drag Caleb close and just feel him there, but that might be too much, so instead he stared at the ceiling. “There’s a washing machine behind the office. I got some change, and one of these little envelopes of detergent, so we could wash our clothes later.” He swallowed, not knowing why laundry was making him nervous. “If you like.”
“I’m familiar with how laundry works, thank you,” Caleb said, and Peter’s heart clenched with happiness at the knowledge that Caleb could be prickly and strange not a minute after coming. “Ah, but you aren’t, of course. You have your wash sent out, I bet.”
“You’d win that bet,” Peter admitted.
Caleb propped himself up on an elbow and looked down at Peter. “I will educate you about coin-operated laundry tonight.” Somehow he managed to make it sound filthy.
“I already know. I’m a self-educated man. I bought the detergent and read the sign.” He had needed to read it twice and compare it with the instructions on the back of the detergent packet, but Caleb didn’t need to know that.
“Well, in that case.” Caleb pulled him in for another kiss.
* * *Caleb was going to associate the smell of laundry detergent and the sound of washing machines with frustrated horniness for the rest of his life. They dressed, gathered up their clothes, made their way to the laundry room while doing a credible impression of people who were not about to fuck, and shoved the wash into the machines.
“We have about forty-five minutes,” Caleb pointed out, only a little breathless. “We have options. One, you could stand there and keep watching the clothes go around. Two, we don’t do that.”
Peter turned away from the washing machines. He had a look on his face that Caleb didn’t trust one bit. “Forty-five minutes?” He shook his head. “I think we should get some ice cream cones.” The gleam in his eye was positively malevolent, and it suited him far more than Caleb wanted to admit.
“Ice cream,” Caleb repeated flatly.
Peter stepped closer. He braced a hand on the clothes dryer behind Caleb. “I want to take my time with you.”
Nobody had ever said anything like that to Caleb. There usually wasn’t much time. There usually wasn’t much talking, come to that.
Caleb swallowed and managed to stammer out something that at least included the word “okay” and then they walked down the road to the Dairy Queen. Peter got plain vanilla with sprinkles and Caleb got strawberry, and they took their ice creams outside and sat in rickety folding lawn chairs. It was a strange place for lawn chairs. There was nothing to look at except the cars driving past and some deflated-looking clouds in the darkening sky. The town was more than a little run down, and Caleb knew from towns that had seen their prime.
It made him want to call his mother, of all things. He wanted to ask her if she knew that a huge chunk of this country was flat—either flat and green, or flat and dusty. He wanted to ask Judy about her cast and he even wanted to have a stilted and very manly conversation with his stepdad.
He’d wait until he got to California, though. First, because his mother would think he had lost his mind and gotten too big for his britches if he wasted money on a long-distance call for no reason. Second, because those conversations always ended with him feeling spent and sorry and more than a little teary. And he didn’t want any of that right now. He didn’t want to spend any more time on that knife’s edge between homesickness and never wanting to go back there again, not when instead he could be looking forward. Turning his head, he watched Peter use his plastic spoon to scrape the last drops of ice cream out of his cup.
Peter got to his feet and dropped the paper cup into the waste bin. “I’ll go switch the laundry,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“No!” Caleb said, jumping to his feet. Peter turned around, plainly startled. “It’s just—” He nearly made up an excuse, maybe something about not wanting to get eaten alive by mosquitoes or not trusting Peter to handle the laundry without supervision. But all those ugly thoughts were too close to the surface for him to pretend they weren’t. “I never feel safe on my own in places like this.”
Peter was silent until they crossed the street. “Don’t you come from a place like this?”
“Exactly.” And then, because he could almost feel the concern wafting off of Peter, “It’s just that small towns are no fun for kids who are different.”
“Did people know that you were—”
“God, no. I’m sure some suspected, but being a little—bookish, I believe, is the euphemism people used when they didn’t want to come right out and say effeminate—and more than a little poor were enough, believe me.” Ugh, he hated saying those things out loud. He hated even thinking about it. This was why he shouldn’t even let himself think of home. This was why he was taking a job clear on the other side of the country. “Nobody ever hurt me too badly. It was just a couple of punches, that sort of thing,” he said, all in a rush, because he didn’t want Peter to get the wrong idea.
Peter made a noise that might have been a growl, and good lord that did something to Caleb. Usually, saying things out loud made him feel helpless and weak. But it felt unexpectedly nice to know that someone was angry on his behalf, even though Caleb had long since put his own anger behind him and replaced it with ambition.
Together, they put the laundry in the dryer and fed the machine some nickels, and then they walked over to what the neon sign called the cocktail lounge but was really just a corner of the lobby with a liquor license. They got a couple of beers and carried them back to the laundry room, where they leaned against the row of washing machines and had a meandering conversation that Caleb didn’t think he’d be able to recall the least part of, not even five minutes later. But he was pretty sure he’d always remember the scent of cheap laundry powder, the rhythmic thumping of their clothes in the dryer, the way Peter’s forearm sometimes brushed his own. More than anything, he thought he’d remember how the air seemed thick with shared anticipation, and how whenever he caught Peter’s eye, he lost his train of thought entirely.
When the clothes were finally dry, they carried them back to the room in two haphazard armfuls, and then Peter nearly dropped his half onto the floor while he fumbled in his pocket for the key. But they somehow got the clothes onto one of the beds, right before Caleb all but pushed Peter onto the other.
“Jesus,” he said, and swung a leg over Peter’s lap. Peter leaned up and caught his mouth in a kiss, and he tasted like ice cream and beer.
Caleb peeled off Peter’s clothes, taking his time with it, looking his fill at every inch of skin he exposed and sometimes following up with a kiss.
Peter Cabot naked was, somehow, better looking than Peter Cabot dressed, and Peter Cabot dressed was no mean thing. He was broad shouldered but lean, in a way that made Caleb think he hadn’t quite finished filling out. His chest hair was nearly black, and Caleb couldn’t resist playing with it when, finally unclothed, they lay side by side.
“Look at you,” Caleb said, and watched as Peter flushed, from his perfect cheekbones right down to his chest. He blushed all the time, and Caleb couldn’t get enough of it.
“Look at you,” Peter answered, and it would have been absurd if he didn’t look like he meant it, holding himself up on one elbow to look Caleb over. It wasn’t that Caleb thought he was bad looking—he knew he was serviceably attractive, if you liked that sort of thing, but he couldn’t really get over the idea that Peter did seem to like that sort of thing.
It was almost embarrassing how hungrily Peter looked at him, so there was nothing to do about it but to roll on top of him and kiss him until he stopped. When they were both hard again, Caleb rolled off. “What else do you like?”
Peter blushed again, because of course he did. “I don’t know. I told you I haven’t done anything.”
“Yes, but you must have thought about it.”
Peter’s brow furrowed, as if this were a particularly hard question. Caleb leaned in and kissed him again until the wrinkle between his eyes faded away.
“What I meant,” Caleb said, “was how would you like me to touch you, and how would you like to touch me?”
“Why don’t you tell me what you like,” Peter said, his gaze fixed on the ceiling.
“I like what we did earlier. I like hands and mouths. I don’t like being fucked,” he said, because in his experience it was better to get that much clear upfront. “At all. Yes, I’ve tried. Yes, everybody thinks their magic dick will make me see the error of my ways. No, it won’t.” Peter had gone pale, and was no longer staring at the ceiling, but directly at Caleb. A wave of anxiety passed through Caleb, and he swallowed. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“God, no. I won’t—I don’t want to do anything you don’t. I just hadn’t thought of that.”
Christ, he hadn’t been thinking of that, and here Caleb was talking about all the men who had fucked him and how much he hadn’t liked it. Lovely. High quality pillow talk, Caleb. He turned his face into the pillow and only barely resisted screaming.
“Well, what had you thought of, then?” Caleb asked, barely recovering himself. “When you’re jerking off,” he clarified, because he was apparently teaching a course in remedial horniness. “You must think of something.” Peter’s face had reverted to bright red, which Caleb decided had to be an improvement. “You don’t have to tell me. I really am fine doing what we did earlier, or nothing at all. I’m not trying to embarrass you. I’m trying to figure out how to—how we can make one another feel good, but I’m clearly traumatizing you, so I’m going to go die of mortification now, bye.” He took one of the spare pillows and put it over his face.
Peter removed the pillow and looked down at him with a faintly amused expression. “You’re pretty cute when you get embarrassed.”
Caleb snatched the pillow back and hit him with it. “Take it back.”
Peter laughed and threw the pillow onto the other bed, where it sent some of the clean laundry toppling onto the floor. “All right, so hands and mouths are fine. You don’t want to be fucked. Anything else I should know?” Any trace of awkwardness had dissipated, and Peter was back to being his usual capable, agreeable self. Caleb was impressed. He was also hard again.
“What about you?” Caleb asked. He expected Peter to say that his limits were the same as Caleb’s. That was one of the reasons Caleb had mentioned it, to give Peter an easy out.
“There’s nothing I’m definitely not interested in,” Peter said easily. “Let’s play it by ear.”
Caleb nodded, trying to look like his brain wasn’t exploding, and rolled on top of Peter.
“Are negotiations over?” Peter murmured.
“Oh, to hell with you,” Caleb said into Peter’s collarbone. “See if I do anything with this.” He brushed the back of his hand over Peter’s cock. Peter shivered, and Caleb proceeded to kiss his way down Peter’s chest, then lower, glancing up to make sure it was okay. He arranged himself between Peter’s legs, kissing his hip, then the place where his thigh met his torso, soft open-mouthed kisses with the tiniest suggestion of teeth. When he kissed his way over to Peter’s straining erection, he paused, just holding it, letting it rest against his cheek while he looked up at Peter.
“Jesus,” Peter said, and held himself up on his elbow. “I want to watch you. Can I watch you?”
“Yeah,” Caleb said, and took the head between his lips. He was good at this. He knew he was good at this, having been told so and also having received enough lackluster blow jobs to know the difference. He swirled his tongue and heard Peter’s sharp intake of air, then pulled off to mouth his way down the shaft.
“God,” Peter said, because blasphemy seemed to be his preferred mode of communication during sex, and it really shouldn’t work for Caleb half this well. “Look at you.” His voice was soft, quiet, as if he didn’t even mean for Caleb to hear. He brushed some hair off Caleb’s forehead and held his hand there. “You’re beautiful.”
Now that was just unfair. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair that Peter thought he could say that sort of thing and look at him like that, with his eyes all soft and shocked. Those words and those looks were going to twist their way into Caleb’s ribcage whether Caleb let them or not.
When Caleb shoved Peter’s legs further apart and wetly kissed the inside of his thigh, Peter only bent his knee further to give him room to work. When Caleb trailed his mouth lower, taking Peter’s sac into his mouth, first one side, then the other, thinking that if he made this properly filthy then Peter might stop looking at him like he was performing a miracle, Peter only sighed and murmured horrible things and combed his fingers through Caleb’s hair—not even pulling, just being impossibly gentle. When Caleb gave that up as a bad job and just swallowed down the whole shaft, hoping that would at least shut both of them up, he made the stupid mistake of glancing up at Peter and saw that the man was fucking overcome.
It was terrible. Caleb had set out to give a world class blow job and now he was distracted by eye contact, and one of his thumbs was tracing a circle on Peter’s hip in a way that could only be described as tender, and this was not going to be a very good blow job at all. Instead it felt like the two of them were fucking communing or something, and Peter’s cock just happened to be halfway down Caleb’s throat.
It didn’t last very long at all, because Caleb didn’t have the presence of mind to draw it out. Peter came, and Caleb swallowed, and then Caleb helplessly rested his burning hot cheek on Peter’s thigh and tried to collect himself.
“C’mere,” Peter said after a minute. “Come back up here.”
Caleb went, because he couldn’t come up with a reason not to, and also because he desperately wanted to. Peter tugged him up, a strong arm hauling him close, and kissed him hard and wet and messy.
“Let me,” Peter said. “Let me do it to you.”
“What,” Caleb said, half panicked.
“You said mouths were okay.”
“Uh,” Caleb said, because mouths were very much okay, but also the thought of Peter’s mouth wrapped around him, the idea of being the first person to be sucked off by Peter Cabot, was too much. “We should fold the laundry before it wrinkles.” Caleb should have been embarrassed by such an obvious lie, and probably he would have been if he didn’t have so many other things to be embarrassed about.
“Okay,” Peter said, too kind and good to call Caleb out on his idiocy, and pressed a horrifying little kiss to the top of Caleb’s head.