Except now.
For the first time since we tumbled into bed yesterday afternoon, there’s been something weighing me down. And Oliver knows it.
“You okay?” he asks.
I sniff, stretch my arm across the hot tub, toying with the string at his swim trunks.
Deviously tight and short, they’re an obnoxious highlighter yellow, covered in silk-screen-print bananas. I squint. “It’s like looking into the sun.”
Oliver barks a laugh as he brings his hands to his waistband. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to take them off.”
My hand lands on top of his, stopping him. “Not yet. I have…something I want to say first.”
“Okay.” He turns his hand, lacing our fingers together. “What’s up?”
I jerk my head, beckoning him into the tub, which has felt incredible on my back.
Oliver swings his legs around and sinks down beside me, sliding one hand along my thigh under the water, threading his fingers through my hair with the other. “All ears,” he tells me.
I stare up at the sky, those stars shining infinitely brighter since we’re miles from the nearest city. I smile, remembering that night in LA, the last time I studied the stars with Oliver by my side—the shower, our meal outside, his weird, lovely story about the Big and Little Dippers, telling me in his anecdotal way that I wasn’t alone, that there was something salvageable in what felt like the absolute wreckage of my life.
I wrap my arm around his neck and tug him close, pressing a kiss to his temple, breathing him in. “I love you,” I tell him.
Gently, he rubs my thigh. “I know.”
“I want to watch Rogers and Hammerstein musicals made into movies and fold your garishly bright clothes and kiss you everywhere and do dishes with you and tell you when I’m hurt and trust you not to think I’m a worthless piece of shit without a ball at my feet.”
His hand freezes. “Gavin, I would never think that.”
Tearing my gaze from the stars, I meet his eyes and turn my hand until it’s clutching his beneath the water, our fingers interlaced. “I know. But…it’s hard for me. To really know it, deep inside myself.”
“Why?” He searches my eyes. “Why do you think of yourself like that? I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t. Because you grew up learning that you were lovable whether or not you were worth millions of dollars or if you’d scored the most goals. I didn’t. Thank God you don’t understand that.”
Oliver slides his fingertips along my palm, head bent as he studies our hands touching. “You’re right, I grew up being affirmed and protected. But, I want you to know, I still have insecurities. I’m the youngest boy of five, the sixth kid of seven. I’ve battled feelings of inadequacy plenty. My anxiety, it messes with my head, makes me worry about things I shouldn’t, beat myself up, overanalyze moments in the past that I can’t change but that my brain insists on obsessing over anyway.”
“You’re perfect,” I tell him fiercely. “I’ll crush anything that makes you feel otherwise.”
Peering up, he meets my eyes and smiles wryly. “I’m not perfect. And I didn’t say this to make it about me or diminish what you went through, I just…want you to know I might understand a little, what it’s like to know something up here”—he points to his head—“but not down here.” He sets his hand on my chest, over my heart.
I clasp his hand in mine and press a kiss to his palm, then hold it tight, tracing its lines.
He presses a kiss to my shoulder, then sets his head there. “You have more you need to tell me, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I hate talking about it. Thinking about it. Remembering it. But my fucking therapist said it’s an important exercise in vulnerability to trust you with my past. Or some shit like that.”
He smiles up at me and it sets my heart afire, glowing. “You’re in therapy,” he says. “I’m proud of you.”
“It’s fucking horse shit, is what it is.”
“It’s hard.”
“Hard.” I snort. “My dick gets hard. My abs are hard. Therapy is a Herculean fucking labor. God, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But apparently Pauline knows what she’s talking about. She fucking better, for how much I’m paying her. And she says this is where I start, so…here goes.”
Clearing my throat, I clutch his hand, feel him, remind myself he’s here, holding me. Still wanting me.
“There’s no one from my past that I miss, no one I ever let close,” I tell him. “Except one person. Fred.”
Oliver smiles. “Fred’s a good name.”
I nod. “When I met Fred, I was not in a great place. In fact, I was beating the shit out of someone who’d thought that being older than me was a good reason to try to beat the shit out of me. We were brawling in the park across from his convenience store. Fred came out, dragged me by the collar out of the fray. I was filthy and hungry and very, very angry.”
Oliver holds my hand tight, watches me, waits.
“He brought me inside his store. Gave me a granola bar and a juice and told me to sit my ass down and cool off. Then he went in back and brought out a soccer ball, set it in my hands, and said, ‘Next time you want to kick the crap out of something, you put that ball in front of your feet and kick it instead.’ He took me by the shoulder, pointed up to the television anchored to the wall, to some Prem game replaying on the TV. ‘See that?’ he said, ‘That’s a game of control.’ Then he tapped my chest. ‘That’s what you’re gonna do. Control that anger inside you and do something with it.’
“Then he walked me through his store, out to the back. It was this dead-end alley, the sun pouring down on it. It felt like walking into church, or what I imagined church was supposed to be: somewhere safe, somewhere you felt peace. Sanctuary.
“He pointed to a small net at the end of the alley, said, ‘You come here any time, shoot, dribble, get your anger out.’ I was skeptical. I’d already dealt with my fair share of men trying to take advantage of me, a neglected, unsupervised boy. I said something to that effect, all piss and malice. He got very quiet, searching my eyes, putting the pieces together.
“Then he said, ‘This place was my grandson’s. He’s gone now, and I just…haven’t had the heart to put it away. He told me not to, said someone else would need it.’ And then he just looked at me…like no one ever had before. Like he didn’t see a dirty, hungry kid too big for his clothes, too angry for his own good, and he said, ‘Now I know he was right.’”
I blink so the wetness pooling in my eyes won’t spill into tears. Oliver dabs the corners of his eyes.
“I barely ever went ‘home.’ My aunt and uncle were my legal guardians, but they…they were not good people.” I shudder, pushing away terrible memories, memories I’m not yet ready to talk about or deal with in therapy, though, one day, I know I will. “I wasn’t safe there.”
“Your parents?” he asks quietly.
“Never knew them. My dad was never in the picture, far as I know. My mom passed when I was a baby. I don’t even know what of. My aunt just reminded me she resented it.”