You’re on your knees in front of our neighbor from across the way (but never for him, no; that’s not for him). You’re on your knees and have been for five minutes or more, his cock in your mouth, his hands in your hair, and I’ve been watching the rhythm of the swell, the bulge of his cockhead pressing into the soft inner wall of your cheek, distending it as you tongue him, moving back and forth as you suck. I’m watching the swell of flesh and so I almost miss it, the tightening of his fingers in your hair, a spasm of pulling closer and pushing off at once. I smile and wait for you to swallow, to sit back on your heels and lick the escaped trace of come from the corner of your mouth before it slides so far down your skin that your tongue can’t catch it.
I wait, but you are still kneeling before him, his cock is still in your mouth, his hands are still in your hair, your flesh is still moving in rhythm, yours and his. I wait and watch, and a few minutes later, maybe not so many as five but an eternity nonetheless; I wait, and an eternity later, his fingers tighten in your hair and then you are swallowing, sitting back on your heels, licking the escaped trace of come from the corner of your mouth.
You remain kneeling as he zips himself up. I can’t hear his words as well as I could hear his moans, but I know he is thanking and praising you. Then he says clearly, “I should go, before Cas catches us.” Bow slung over his shoulder once more, he dazzles one last smile at you before turning on heel and strolling off to his beloved archery range,
idiotic and endearing at the same time.
Once he’s gone, you rise to your feet and turn to the grandfather clock. I know you can’t actually see me, but somehow our eyes seem to meet anyhow. “You can come out now.” You grin at me.
The crack that only I can see widens as I push the door open and unfold myself back into normal space. As I cross the floor, I rub my back where the stilled pendulum had dug in; by the time I get to you, you have already sprawled on the sofa. I lean over and fingercomb your hair back the other way, feeling the strands fall into their natural
flop. “Much better,” I say. “Now you look like you instead of me.”
We grin at each other and you shift so there is room for me as I climb over the back of the sofa to join you. “I always look like me!” you say. “I can’t help it if neither he nor the rest of the world seems able to tell.”
We laugh, and then I go quiet. “The only thing is, he might figure it out now,” I say. “He’s never done that with me before. Even someone as stupid as he is will surely notice such things.”
You wait for more. You aren’t sure what I’m talking about because you have heard and seen him come for me as many times as I have seen him come for you. You say my name, the name he has just used to thank you: “Pol.”
It’s hard to keep looking at you right now, so I look at my hands, slack and helpless in my lap. “Never done that with me,” I repeat. “He’s never pulled me like that. In the middle like that.”
I’m not sure you understand me, but I don’t know how to explain because I have never had to explain anything to you, ever. The thing of it is this: It is not jealousy. It is not that I want him to pull me in the middle too. It is that you did something different. You found something I haven’t found, something I don’t know. This something is between us now. Not between us, shared in the way that all the everything between us binds us together; this is something that separates us. Divides us, one from the other.
I am afraid of trying to explain this to you, because if I have to put it into words, it means you really don’t know; it will mean I know something you don’t, and you know something I don’t, and then the gap between us will widen even more.
So I just look at you and you’re just looking at me, and it’s like a mirror. And we have always been able to see the warps that make us reflect differently, even if no one else can see them; we can see them, but we have always looked only at the unwarped reflections when we look at each other. Until now. Now, I see the bends and refractions, the twists in the surface that make light bounce differently.
But then you say, “Here,” and you reach for my fingers, you take my hand and bring it up to your mouth, and we are no longer mirroring each other in body–we are stretched, stretching across the gap. “Let me show you.” Your breath brushes your words over my fingers on the way to me. “Will you let me show you?”
I nod wordlessly and you open your mouth to admit me. Your tongue is warm and soft and wet and strong as it curls around my fingertips, flicking and licking and tricking and sucking. I close my eyes to learn your touch, to memorize your tricks with my sense of touch.
Then air, not your warm breath but the cool air of the room washes over my fingers and I open my eyes. You hold out your hand to me: “Try to do to me what I’m doing to you.” So I take you in and lick my memorizations onto your skin; and when you take me back in, tendrils from the curl of your tongue sink under my skin, shoot through my blood, spiral up to my tongue to tell it how to wrap around you in turn, how to flick and lick and trick and suck.
After minutes, maybe more than five, maybe less, almost an eternity but not quite, I take your hand from my mouth. “Cas.” When you take mine from yours, when we are mirroring each other in body and reflecting each other in gaze, I say, somehow without breath, “I think it would be easier to understand with the real thing.”
We look at each other. We meet in our mutual, mutually reflecting gaze. We have always been physically close; we shared a bed well out of our childhood years, and sometimes still do. But as close as we are, this is a line we have never crossed.
You undress me as I undress you, and when we are naked we lie down again, on the floor this time, facing each other, though not eye to eye. Mouth to cock; cock to mouth. We take each other in; we hold each other, we curl, warm and soft and wet and strong, around each other. We memorize with touch; we spiral into each other, we swallow each
other down.
We have crossed the line. We have crossed the line, and bridged the gap. We cannot go back.
We look at each other, eye to eye, reflected, reflecting.
We smile: we would not go back, even if we could.