Dear Kurl,
“So what was your problem tonight?” you asked me, after everyone had said good night. We’d stripped the coverlet off Zorah Otulah-Tierney’s bed and piled all the extra pillows in the corner of the bedroom so it would feel less perverse to fool around in there.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You were quiet.”
So you had noticed. I’d thought you were too busy having fun with the Otulah-Tierney clan. You’d held your own surprisingly well against the twins through several rounds of Overwatch on the PS3.
“At first I thought I was embarrassing you, showing off my scars like that. Then I thought maybe you were pissed that I never told you why I quit the team. That you didn’t like finding out about all that at the same time as the others.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I mean I’m sorry I never told you.”
“It wasn’t that,” I said.
“Then what?”
I couldn’t say it. Saying it, it seemed to me, would make it more possible.
“Your heart is beating so fast,” you said, and laid your ear against my chest.
I ran my palm over your shorn scalp. Your broad, strong skull.
“Come on, Hopkirk. Spill it.”
“If you don’t have secrets,” I began, and my voice cracked. I heaved a breath and swallowed a throatful of tears. “If you reveal everything, and free yourself altogether of shame, then what? What can I give you that you can’t get from anyone else?”
You lifted your head to peer at my face. Frowned.
Tears ran past my ears onto Zorah’s pillow. “That group hug in the hot tub? You attract people, Kurl. As many as you let in, they’ll come right in and adore you. There will be dozens. Hundreds. As many as you want.”
You made a scoffing noise in your throat and started to lick the tears off my cheeks. Swift little touches, like a cat lapping milk. After a minute you stopped and switched to kisses, kissing my jaw and my ears, and then my mouth, lightly. Then without warning you hooked your thumb between my teeth, tugged my mouth open and plunged your tongue as deep as it would go. You groaned, and the sound moved up from your chest all the way down my throat and straight into my groin.
You pulled back. “You felt that, right?”
I was breathless, full of heat. It was so fast! I could barely nod at you.
“That’s only you, Jo. That’s all you. Only you do that to me.”
“You did it.”
“Nope.”
I laughed. We were both wrong, of course: It was both of us at once, striking that humming, hungry chord together.
Yours,
Jo