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Authors: Amy Jo Cousins

Tags: #m/m;New Adult;contemporary;friends with benefits;love triangle;art;painting;geology;camping;New England;college

Love Me Like A Rock (7 page)

BOOK: Love Me Like A Rock
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Before Sean could say anything, Austin raised a hand.
Hold please.

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I think I don’t matter.” He flashed Sean a wicked grin and got a gentle smile in return. “I’m totally self-centered enough to think I’m the most important thing in the universe. But sometimes I think I only really matter when I’m right there, demanding someone’s attention.” He thought of Vinnie and their fucked-up friendship. “Sometimes not even then.”

Sean nodded. “I get it.”

“So when you do something like this, it’s kind of surreal. Because it upends the way I see the world, you know? It’s a level of attention I’m not used to feeling.” Austin bit his lip and ducked his head. Looked up at Sean through an overhang of curls and tried to focus on being sincere instead of flirty, which was fucking hard, because a part of him wanted to stop talking and push Sean down into the dirt and fuck him senseless. “Feels good. Really good. Thank you.”

When Sean frowned and pressed his lips together, Austin realized he’d just stomped all over the rules of their fuck-buddy relationship with his sappiness.

“Well, that was awkward.” He started to scramble to his feet.

Sean’s hand shot out and landed on his shoulder, holding Austin in place.

“So it’d be real easy for me to try to make this guy you’re hung up on look like a douchebag right about now. And make myself look pretty fucking good in comparison. But here’s what I think.” Sean picked up one of the stones he’d brought Austin, tumbling it between his fingers. “I don’t think we make decisions about who we want because there are rational, logical reasons why it would be better to be with one person than another. That’s not how it works. Sometimes we want people who are shitty for us.”

Austin’s face was hot, because it felt a little like judgment, even though it was kindly meant.

And also true. So just…sit there and listen.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping you’re gonna change your mind at some point about this casual thing.” Sean switched to sitting cross-legged, his knee pressing against Austin’s. “I like you, Austin. A lot. But I’m not trying to fuck with your head. I can wait. It’s worth it. The waiting.”

“Well.” Austin cleared his throat, staring out over the valley and willing his nose to stop stinging with sudden pressure. “That’s about the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. And after the magically produced art supplies too. Thank you.”

He snuck a glance at Sean sitting next to him.

Sean’s blush caught him off guard. “I know you probably have some seriously sophisticated art stuff you normally use, but I thought maybe it didn’t matter if the stuff you use isn’t fancy as long as it gets the job done.”

“It doesn’t,” Austin said absently, brain snagging on something Sean had just said that rang like a bell in his awareness, the lingering reverberation reawakening the buzz that had been sparked by their earlier conversation about Sean’s rock stuff.

“Well, the fancy stuff might work better—”

“The point isn’t how you do it,” Austin interrupted Sean, flashing him an
I’m sorry
look as he held up a hand, because he had to talk this out right now, or he’d lose it. “It’s what you do. Doesn’t matter if the tools are fancy or simple. What matters is the work you make and how it affects people. What kind of story they can read in it.”

Doesn’t matter if the tools are fancy.

Doesn’t matter.

After a moment more, he shook his head. Sean questioned him with a look.

“Nothing. Just another thought I couldn’t quite get ahold of.”

“Well, go ahead and do your thing, Picasso,” Sean said with a kiss on his cheek, before getting up and dusting dirt off his butt. “I’m going to stroll around some more. We’re not in any hurry.”

So Austin did, taking advantage the time Sean gave him to mess around with his “art supplies”, adding hints and smears of color to his sketches and generally playing like a child with a new and unfamiliar toy. Experiments in art were always interesting, and that this one came as a gift from Sean only made Austin all mushy while he enjoyed it.

When it was time to head back to camp, Austin bent down to scoop up his notebook. He thought briefly about bringing the smashed and battered substances he’d used to “paint” his pictures with him, but gave that up as a foolish idea.

It’s all in the woods. If I want more, my mountain man can just go hunt and gather for me.

That thought made him smile, which brought Sean in close just as Austin was wiping his palms on his jeans in a vain attempt to scrape some of the mess off his fingers.

“None of this stuff is poisonous, right?” A little late to be asking, probably, since he’d used his own spit to smear some of this stuff around.

“Yeah, Austin. I definitely would have told you that.” A fond shake of Sean’s head. Austin was used to people finding him amusing.

“Can’t hurt to make sure,” he said cheerfully, because Sean was also the guy who thought Austin was the fuckable one, and that made the amusing thing a lot easier to bear.

Sean snagged his hand and began swiping at the smears with a wet wipe he’d also pulled out of his pack o’ wonders.

“You really do make a mess, don’t you?” Sean asked, tucking the corner of his mouth back like he was trying not to smile.

“Pretty much always,” Austin admitted, shading his eyes with his free hand as he looked up. The sun shining through the edges of Sean’s beard lit it on golden fire.

“Good thing I’m not afraid of a little mess.”

And Austin wasn’t sure they were talking anymore about the stuff he’d managed to smear halfway up his arms while working, because the softness of Sean’s mouth was making Austin’s chest feel funny.

Feeling funny in his chest made him think about Vinnie, and when Austin realized this was the first time he’d thought of Vinnie since leaving campus, that made him so uncomfortable he popped up like a Jack-in-the-box, smacked a sexless kiss on Sean’s mouth, and shouted, “Last one down the mountain digs the poop trench!” while clutching his sketchbook and pencils, skittering down the trail until the thought that he might really break something slowed him down to a safer pace.

Don’t be an idiot. Remember how long Denny was in rehab for his shoulder.

But thinking of Denny’s dislocated shoulder—acquired on another big hill because this wilderness shit was dangerous—made him think of how they’d had to rearrange their boat crew while Denny was out all last spring. How Vinnie had moved up to the stroke seat behind Rafi, who was way more chill about crew now that he didn’t fear losing his scholarship if their boat didn’t sweep the season. They’d reverted to their old seating this semester with Denny attempting to return, but the sports doc keeping an eye on Denny had warned him his shoulder was getting worse again and it looked like Denny might have to quit rowing for good.

At the beginning of the semester, Austin would have said he and his friends were locked into their roles on the team, locked and loaded and ready to win. But now it looked like they’d be making a permanent change none of them had anticipated, finding a new normal with Denny taking on a coaching internship with the team instead of manning a seat in the boat.

Maybe all kinds of things were changing.

Maybe Austin was one of the things that was turning out different than he’d imagined.

Chapter Seven

He carried the mountain in him on the walk back to the campsite. That bedrock-deep stability and the calm of a clear view stuck with him through preparations for dinner and hauling dead wood out of the brush for that night’s campfire.

Sean’s cooking skills were enough to earn him water duty and a seat at the fire while Chris, the Lion Man, manned the fire and the pots of bubbling stew squeezed out of silver foil packets.

“Can’t cook, but he can make paints from shit he finds in the woods. Where on earth do you come from, Sean?” Austin teased as Chris waved off another offer of help from the two of them.

“Wisconsin,” Sean said dryly.

Austin threw an elbow, and then laughed and rolled onto his side to escape when Sean dug fingers into his ribs in revenge.

“Uncle!”

Sean hauled him upright until they were leaning against each other again, shoulders pressed together and their backs to the log that edged nearest to the campfire. Austin was definitely the group’s delicate bunny as far as who got chilly fastest, so they’d ceded the closest seat to the fire to him.

“Seriously. Tell me.”

“It’s not very interesting, you know. I don’t have any Secretaries or Ministers of anything in my family tree.”

After a year of living with Rafi, Austin had finally clued in to the fact that it sometimes sounded like he was name-dropping when he talked about his family, which had made him shut up for most of a month until Rafi dragged it out of him, why he was acting so weird. But Sean had been genuinely curious when Austin had tried to keep his family descriptions low-key, so some of the more esoteric details had leaked out, although he had managed not to talk about his immediate family yet.

“I’m just a regular guy, Austin. My mom’s in real estate. My dad’s a teacher.” Sean wrapped an arm around Austin’s shoulder and Austin snuggled in close. Sean was better than the campfire for warmth. “I’ve got a baby sister who’s nine years younger than me, which means I haven’t seen her for more than holidays since she was nine.”

“You must miss her.” He didn’t need to ask, really. Sean was the kind of decent that meant of course he missed his sister.

“Yeah. But I have to go where the PhD programs with TA jobs are, and Carlisle was my best offer for these two years.”

The jolt that pushed all of Austin’s senses into his skin was like being zapped by a wet nine-volt battery. “Two years? Are you not going to be here next year?”

Crazy to think that bothered him, but Austin couldn’t push down the niggling thought that he would miss Sean more than he ought to if Sean weren’t there to strip down for life drawing class, or to interrupt every walk with random lectures about the rocks poking up out of the ground, or to get naked with in a sleeping bag.

“Maybe. Hopefully. I have to do extended fieldwork for my dissertation. I’ve applied to work on a project in Massachusetts, but there are other possibilities too.” Sean shrugged, which was no kind of fucking answer.

But maybe Austin wasn’t entitled to an answer like that until he figured out what the hell he was doing with his personal life.

“Your family has always lived in Wisconsin?” he asked, changing the subject.

“Yeah. We almost moved once, but we managed to find a way to stay put.”

“What happened?”

“The recession hit my parents pretty hard. We’d been really comfortable. I mean, not Keating-family comfortable, which I imagine involves trips to Paris for the spring fashion shows or shit like that—”

“Not quite,” Austin lied. His sister and his mom had done just that in eighth grade to celebrate her graduation.

“Yeah, I can see by the look on your face what a crazy idea that is.” Sean snorted, and Austin tugged on his chin scruff until he yelped.

“It was hard?” Austin prompted when it seemed like Sean had forgotten.

“Pretty bad, yeah. You know, the real estate market just crashed. Nobody was buying, and if they were, houses were selling for a fraction of their previous value. Not much commission to split on a thirty-thousand-dollar house. Not enough, for sure.”

“Sounds rough.”

Sean’s cheek curved, the pull of old memories tugging a smile out of him as he stared into the fire, light dancing on his face. “It was…pretty great actually. I mean, I wasn’t a hundred percent clued in on the family finances, so I’m sure it was stressful for my mom and dad. But we sold our house, at a loss, and moved into a smaller rental house. My sister was only five years old and we had to share a room, because the house only had two bedrooms.”

Austin snorted. You couldn’t pay him to share a room with any of his relatives.

“Just what a high-school kid wants, right? A roommate in kindergarten. But Ava used to have bad dreams, and I’d let her crawl into bed with me. It was…sweet. And even though we didn’t have much money, somehow it still felt really secure. Like, we were a team, as a family. All of us in it together. I don’t know. I’m not describing it right, but it was a strangely good time, despite all the bad stuff.”

“No, you described it just right,” Austin said, picking at the seam that edged the zipper of Sean’s blue fleece jacket.

Sean’s arm tightened on his shoulders. “What about you? Let me guess. Only child, parents dote on you, the best of everything for their happy boy.”

Austin snorted. “The best of everything, yes.”

“You have brothers and sisters?”

“Just sisters actually, but there are five of them.”

“Holy shit. That’s a lot of sisters.” Sean gave a small shudder that jostled Austin’s cheek on his chest. “I mean, I love my sister.”

“But.” Austin smiled.

“Yeah, but.” Sean didn’t say anything for a moment, as if imagining that. “Are you guys close?”

“I don’t know. I guess? I mean, I like them. But I mostly got lost in the shuffle. My parents aren’t awful or anything. They love us. Love me.” The words came out automatically, because of course his parents loved him. That was what parents did, right? But after Sean’s description of his family, Austin’s words felt thin as tissue paper. He had no memories of times when his family felt like a team, like they were all in it together. “They travel a lot though, for my mom’s job, and my sisters and I pretty much do our own thing. Everyone’s nice.”

Everyone’s nice. Talk about damning with faint praise.

“What does your mom do?” Sean asked, stepping away from the eggshell fragility of Austin’s assertion that he was loved by his family.

“She’s one of the US representatives from Massachusetts.”

Silence.

Sean leaned away from Austin, forcing him to sit up while Sean stared at him.

“As in, she’s in Congress?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, Washington DC, big white Capitol building, votes on Social Security and whether or not to go to war.”

Austin nodded. That was his mom. And she was a power broker too. A dealmaker who worked across the aisle and built coalitions to get shit done.

“Whoa. That’s…impressive.”

“She’s pretty great. Politically, I mean. I’d totally vote for her, even if she wasn’t my mom. She voted against DOMA even before I told her I was gay. I mean, I was just a kid. But she always does the right thing.”

And because he’d been raised by a mom who was a politician, his kneejerk instinct was to qualify his statement.

“The right thing for people who agree with us. I mean, obviously if you’re a Republican, you totally don’t think that was the right thing.” On that thought, a spasm of anxiety ripped through him. “Jesus. You’re not, like, some kind of Log Cabin Republican, are you?”

Sean laughed. “I don’t know what that means. I really loved my Lincoln Logs when I was little, though.”

“The Log Cabin Republicans are gay conservatives.”

“I’d think that would be a contradiction in terms.”

“You’d think. But no.” Austin shook his head. Politics. Not his favorite thing. “They support all the other planks in the party platform, and say they don’t have to agree with all the anti-gay shit to want small government and low taxes, or whatever.”

“Yeah, no, that’s not me. I’m a Democrat, I guess. Although I was on a two-week field survey during the last election, so I didn’t actually vote.”

“Aw, Jesus. Don’t ever tell my mom that, unless you want to get lectured about your civic duty for an hour.” Austin knew better than to miss even a primary election or a local council vote. The one communication he could count on from his parents was an email or text on Election Day:
Did you vote yet?

“So I guess if she’s from Massachusetts, it’s not a problem for her to have a gay son, huh?” Sean asked with a raised eyebrow.

Austin snorted. “Hardly. It gets her votes, for sure.”

“Do you have to go to rallies and stuff?”

“During an election year, sometimes. But she’s pretty hardcore about keeping us out of it. And because she inherited her seat from her dad and, like, eighty percent of her district votes for her, she doesn’t have to make us do that stuff. She can pretty much just show up on Election Day and wave to her voters and they send her back to DC.”

“I guess that’s pretty good, then.”

“I got sucked into some stuff once, when this super PAC tried to whip up support for blocking a continuing resolution. They made the NEA budget their battle flag.”

“It’s like you’re talking a foreign language. I don’t even know what this stuff means,” Sean said, laughing.

It was kind of nice, actually, that all of this was just words and the big picture to Sean. Austin got the same kind of
I don’t get your background
vibe from Rafi, but that came with a whole mountain of awkwardness because Rafi’s pride was always on the line when he found himself in a conversation where he didn’t understand something and the reason came down to how he’d grown up. How different his background was. And Vinnie and Denny understood too well maybe, because they knew the kind of pressure that came with the money and the influence, so it was harder to forget all that baggage and just be a normal guy when he was with friends like that.

But Sean fell somewhere in between, perfectly in between those two different reactions to learning Austin was the son of one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress.

It didn’t mean much to him, because he was only a casual participant in American politics, like so many people with lives full of challenges and passions that meant more to them than arguing over the next appropriations bill.

But Austin didn’t think it ever occurred to Sean to be intimidated by him either. Or to feel that Sean’s own background made him less than.

Which it doesn’t, so that’s great.

Not that Austin thought Rafi felt less than him. Rafi had enough self-esteem to bulldoze his way through the world if that’s what he needed to do.

No, where Rafi’s vulnerability shone through was in his worry about what other people thought of him. Not what he thought of himself. And Sean simply didn’t have that worry built into his make-up.

After spending most of his waking hours with a bunch of friends who, Bob aside, made worry a second major, sitting at a campfire eating brown stew out of a collapsible metal cup with the press of Sean’s leg against his own, was a strange kind of magic.

* * * * *

Their breaths fogged in the cold, dark night when they arrived back on campus, Sean delivering a sleepy Austin to his dorm’s front doorstep and grabbing him for one last kiss before shoving him out of the car and sending him to bed.

Must be after midnight. Practice is gonna come way too soon.

The mountain was still with him, along with swirling thoughts about layers that didn’t make sense but told a story, and new vs. old techniques and materials not mattering as much as the end result. Austin’s dreams were a hot mess of vivid images that melted and broke into each other, leaving random parts and pieces behind that didn’t match their backgrounds.

And yes, his alarm blaring in the pre-dawn hours was as painful as he’d imagined it would be. Crawling out of a warm bed into a chilly room was easier when there wasn’t a cozy body next to him under the covers.

He waved off Vinnie’s questions about his weekend foray to the woods, letting the bleariness of his lack of sleep do the talking for him.

On the river, the wind was kicking up a chop that had Coach scowling. Austin crossed his fingers and shot up a Hail Mary prayer she’d let them on the water. Days when conditions were too dangerous were miserable in the boathouse. Coach inevitably burned the rowers even harder in erg drills than she did on the river, and bruising their way through 2k after 2k sprint was way less fun than digging into the water with their oars.

And Austin had less than nothing to do during erg drills, which was his least favorite position ever. He could sit through a fair number of sprints himself, pulling and sliding until his shoulders and legs and core burned with the lactic acid buildup—way more than most physically fit people could—but he had nowhere near the stamina of the rowers, a fact which they were only too happy to rub in.

But sticking with his team was one of the core commitments of Austin’s life, so even when Coach announced they were stuck on the ergs for the day, he rowed and cheerleaded their way through drills until everyone was exhausted, and the ache of sore muscles distracted everyone from asking about his weekend away.

For now, at least.

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