The Muse's Undoing

38

MATTHEW

The laundry gets done, and Fischer helps me fold it. We go out to eat at my favorite Thai restaurant and it feels like a proper date. Candlelight and everything. He looks amazing in candlelight. Inspiration for days.

Because of that, though, my defenses are failing. My excuses to maintain some mental distance from him are getting flimsy as hell. And I can’t stop kissing him.

It’s late, and we’re back on my bed, clean sheets all tucked in. We’re fully dressed and all over each other. Mouths engaged, cocks grinding, hands roaming, hair pulling. It’s like we’re doing everything possible not to have sex and yet, somehow, we’re still fucking.

He started it with a smile, and I tackled him.

“Why do you turn me on so much?” That’s me. Wondering aloud.

“I have no fucking clue.”

“I wanna do the craziest shit to you.”

He lets out a short laugh, his mouth right up against mine, “Like what?”

My mouth wants to kiss him more than it wants to talk. He moans, softening in my arms, his head tipping back from the force of my kiss, his body yielding to mine, totally making my point because I feel like a predator—completely set on having this man and only this man. I want him to be my toy. I want to use the fuck out of him. I want to destroy him for anyone or anything else.

This isn’t normal. And it’s definitely not the norm for me. But he’s letting me.

I plant my hands on the mattress and shove myself away from him, but seeing the strand of saliva still connecting us makes my cock thud against my fly. “Whoa,” I whisper. “Sorry.”

Fischer frowns, crossing his arms behind his head to regard me all casually. Like he’s not just as hard as I am. “Have I overstayed my welcome?”

I shake my head, keeping my eyes on his.

“I’m okay,” he says. “You don’t have to apologize for anything.”

His face is totally unreadable. I feel like I usually have a better idea what he might be thinking, but maybe my own thoughts are racing too fast. “Maybe we should hit pause for a second,” I blurt out, not so subtly begging him to save me from myself.

“Okay.”

I push myself off to one side and sit up. Slowly he does, too. We’re still facing each other, but he looks past me to the door, and I shift my gaze to the window. “Can I be honest with you?” I ask.

“Yeah, that’d be great,” he says, his voice low and sort of dejected. I hate it.

“I’ve been having sex with guys since I was eighteen. And I always pictured myself ending up with a man. But then I started picturing myself with you—and you were straight. At least, as far as I knew.”

Fischer puts his head in his hands, and I see him rubbing his eyes with the heels of them.

I go on. “I had a lot of strong feelings for you, and I think I started to think, maybe…anyway, you went back to work, and honestly that kind of fucked me up.”

Fischer lifts his head, eyes bleary. “I get that this doesn’t matter, and words are cheap, but I was fucked up by you and me too.”

“Because you felt ashamed.”

“No… It wasn’t just that.”

“We got close, though,” I say. “You admit that, right? Like maybe too close, and it maybe could have given me the wrong idea?”

“Yes, Matthew. We were close. It was getting…intimate.”

“Right, and I was all good with that, like zero guilt whatsoever, but when you left and came home to marry a woman, I kinda figured you did have some guilt about it. Which made us wrong, which made me wrong, and it made a lot of things about me wrong.”

“If I had it to do over, I would change a lot,” he says. “But not because I felt like we were wrong.”