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I rocked my hips in a slow circle. Beneath me, he pulled on my hips and sank his teeth into my shoulder. Another silent cue went unsaid.
More.

Searing heat pulsed through me. I dropped my hands on either side of his head with a strangled groan. The rhythm between us was sedate and steady, but it was about all I could take. Being so intimately connected to him was overwhelming, and I couldn’t look away. I watched the way he responded to every long, slow roll of my hips, the way he thrashed his head and rolled his eyes. He was so fucking beautiful. Once I knew he was past the hardest part, I could watch him forever. Nothing compared to being inside him, and suddenly, my whole body was on fire. I wanted to wrap my bones around him and never let go.

Ash brought his hand to the back of my neck and pulled me down, kissing me before he broke away with a breathless groan. “Fuck, fuck,
fuck
. You’re too damn good at this.”

I snapped my hips faster, harder, and beneath me, he began to unravel. I’d already brought him to the brink with my mouth, and as he arched his back away from the mattress, I knew he was close. “Look at me.” Our gazes locked and renewed heat spread through my belly. “I want to see you.”

He gripped my shoulders and sucked in a desperate breath. “Pete… I….”

There was an edge of panic in his voice, the way there always was when he lost control. With one hand, I pried his white-knuckled fingers from my skin. I clutched them tightly, fighting for what little control I had left and brought them up to my lips. It was the reassurance he needed, and with a final soft groan his release pulsed between us. The jolt of his body pushed me into my own climax as he shuddered and writhed beneath me. White-hot bursts of pleasure roared through me, spinning the room as it hit me full force.

Coherent thought abandoned me, but I fought hard to get it back. The euphoric wave buzzing through me was fucking amazing, but with Ash shaking in my arms, it quickly cleared. I held him tightly, keeping my heavy breaths away from his face, and pressed soft kisses to the tips of his fingers until I felt his breathing slow. Relieved, I lifted my weight off him and tried to pull out, but he protested and held me still another moment before he finally let go.

He was staring at the ceiling when I came back from chucking the condom and cleaning up, his eyes glazed and drowsy. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him close. “Do you want a bath?”

It had been a while since we’d had sex that way. However good it had felt, he was going to hurt in the morning.

He shook his head in a lazy motion, barely moving at all. “No, I wanna stay here.”

Ash was Texan by birth, but his southern roots only laced his speech when he was too tired to repress them… too tired to block out all the horrible shit that kept an invisible barrier between us.

He was just seventeen when his friend Ellie found him drawing on the streets of Philadelphia. He was homeless and drew comic book characters on the sidewalk for money. The way she told it, he was one of the best street artists in the city, but he said he just did it to survive. Ellie was in college at the time, and she spent the next three years trying to get him to go to a shelter. Eventually, she got her way, and when she moved back to Chicago a few months later, she asked him to come with her. It took him a year of procrastination and pulling his shit together, but after finishing his tattoo apprenticeship in Philly, he did just that.

Living together was a huge adjustment for both of us. Some days I thought we’d cracked it, but others….

I draped the comforter over us and tucked it around his shoulders. He settled against me with his arm stretched out across my torso. I ran my hand absently along his bicep and enjoyed the rare moment. Though he could be tactile when his mood was right, he rarely cuddled up to me so freely. Most times, he preferred our positions reversed—him on his back with his arms around me.

Curious, I pressed a kiss to the top of his sweat-dampened head. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I just missed you.”

I smiled into the darkness. “I missed you too.”

A light hum was his only answer, so I held him a bit tighter and made the most of having him curled against me. After a while, I felt him shift. I opened my eyes and quirked an eyebrow, too mellow to speak. He just stared at me, but his blazing eyes told me what I knew he found so hard to articulate.

I put my hand to his head and nudged it back down with a sad smile.

Love you too
.

Ash

October 2007

I loved my bedroom in daylight. It had a big window, a high ceiling, and pure-white walls that made the world feel clean. White walls were good for that, they just went on and on, and when the sun shone on them they lit up the whole room, and with it, my tired brain. But it was a different story at night. When darkness fell, the high ceiling dropped and the white walls were suffocating as they closed in around me.

Not that it mattered. It wasn’t like I wanted to sleep. Sleeping was dangerous. Shadows, nightmares, and—even worse—that sinking feeling when you woke up to find you were still the same bag of shit you were the day before. Fuck that. Waking up was a crappy way to start the day. It was better to stay awake, let the days blur into each other, and wait until they ceased to matter. These days, insomnia was all I had.

Life was different when I lived on the street. Half-asleep, half-awake, stoned on whatever I could get my hands on, everything was gray and blurred. Sometimes I couldn’t figure out if I was moving slower, or the world faster, and I didn’t much care. It was better that way; oblivion suited me better. These days, I saw too much. I
felt
too much.

Sighing, I slid off the windowsill, abandoned my bedroom, and padded through the empty apartment to the kitchen. I reached for some juice, ignoring my natural instinct to grab a beer. The mood I was in, if I started drinking, I’d never stop. Instead, I took my favorite glass—the one with the star engraved in its base—and went to the living room with my sketchbook to sit in the big chair by the window. I sat down and stared out at the city below. The neon twinkle of the street felt like an old friend, comforting me enough to put pencil to paper. There was no light in the apartment, so I couldn’t really see the page, but sometimes it was better that way. Getting lost in my work, the details were undefined and soothing. Occasionally, I even got a pleasant surprise when I examined the sketch in daylight. Such occasions were rare, though. I gave up in the end and shoved the pad under the couch.

Yeah, that’s right; sometimes I hid from my sketchbooks too.

I sat motionless for a while, but without my work to distract me, the eerie silence of the apartment got under my skin. I still wasn’t used to that. Though I’d been off the streets for more than a year, the places I’d lived before I came to Chicago were noisy: rowdy Philadelphia hostels full of drunks and attitude. The peace of my new home scared the hell out of me, and it didn’t take long for me to resort to my usual habit of turning the TV on low to keep me company. Nature shows were my favorite, especially the ones about the ocean. With all the lights off, the TV turned the whole room blue. I liked that, especially when the walls rippled.

I curled up on the couch and stared at deep-water fish. I’d been sitting there a while when the front door creaked open.

Pete
.

My roommate worked funny hours. Sometimes I hardly saw him at all, but that suited me. I spent enough time with people at work. By the end of the day I’d usually run out of energy to communicate. I only regretted being so antisocial when each night seemed to go on forever. Pete didn’t seem to mind my nocturnal ways. He was either resigned to me being a freak or he didn’t notice. I didn’t care either way. We’d only exchanged a few words since my friend Ellie had answered his advertisement for me a few weeks before. He wasn’t even here the day I moved in. Usually, when I heard him coming, I’d get up and slink away, but tonight, in the blue-tinged gloom of the room, I found I couldn’t be bothered to do even that. It was dark; with any luck he’d fail to see me.

“Hey.”

Or not. I looked up and there he was, standing in front of me, all olive-skinned, dark-haired six feet of him. A grin warmed his face. Even in the darkness I could see his brown eyes gleaming.

“Hey,” I returned awkwardly.

That was the other reason I avoided him. He was fucking
hot.
Talking wasn’t my thing at the best of times, and with him, it was hard to speak without tripping over my words or gawking like an idiot. Sometimes, he was lucky enough to get both.

“Can’t sleep?”

“Nah, not tired,” I lied. “What about you? Long night?”

“Fuck, yeah.” He stretched his arms over his head with a wide yawn. “Don’t think I could sleep, though. Tired but wired.”

I smiled in spite of myself. “I know that feeling.”

That earned me a smirk. “Yeah, looks like it. Are you working tomorrow?”

“No.” I shook my head absently. It already was tomorrow, and I hadn’t even thought about how I was going to spend my midweek day off.

Pete eyed me shrewdly, the way he had the first time I’d met him. I wanted to look away but didn’t, because something in his eyes held me still. It was weird—like the way my friend Ellie could hold my sketchy attention—but it wasn’t quite the same, and not quite as effective, either, since it seemed he’d asked me a question and I hadn’t even heard him. “Hmm?”

“Breakfast,” he repeated. “There’s no food in this place. Want to go to the diner?”

He said it like it was the most normal thing to do at four in the morning, but who was I to judge him? I was wide-awake, and it wasn’t like I had anything better to do.

I shrugged and got to my feet. “Sure.”

He seemed slightly surprised that I’d accepted his invitation, but he waited patiently while I got my shit together. I followed him outside, and the moment I set foot on the street, I felt better. The cold air stung my scratchy eyes and felt good against my skin. I lit a cigarette and fell into step beside him, enjoying the sensation of being in the one environment where I truly felt I belonged.

Pete was silent for a while, and I let him be. Though he’d said he felt wired, he seemed half-asleep. After a block or two, he turned to me. “So you’re an artist?”

I snorted and rolled my eyes. “I wouldn’t call it that. I do tattoos at Finnegan’s on Fort Street.”

Pete shrugged. “That’s still art, isn’t it? I knew it was tats. Your friend told me when you came to look at the room, remember?”

I shook my head slightly. I was in a world of my own the day Ellie dragged me off her couch to view the room in Pete’s apartment. Until then, I’d been content enough to observe Chicago through her high-rise apartment windows.

I’d heard it said all big cities were the same, but Chicago didn’t feel like Philadelphia, and it certainly didn’t feel like the asshole of Texas, where I grew up.

Some days I wondered what Ellie would make of Texas. She’d been all over the world with her wealthy folks, but always the big cities and those coastal places you saw on postcards, the ones with the white beaches and
really
blue oceans. Perhaps she’d like it, but who knew? I could hardly remember it myself. By the time she found me sleeping on the streets of Philadelphia, I’d been away from the South for more than two years.

Now I’d left Philly behind too, and I wondered how long it would take me to forget it.

I turned my gaze back on Pete, picturing the day we’d first met, but it was no good. I remembered nothing from that day but how amazing his dark skin looked against the smooth white walls. “What do you do?”

“I’m a paramedic,” he said. “That’s why I’m not around sometimes. I pretty much just work and sleep when I’m on rotation.”

Paramedic.
Damn it, I knew that already. Ellie told me before I’d even met him. What the fuck was up with my brain tonight? I’d even seen him in his uniform, and that wasn’t a sight I’d forget in a hurry.

I’d also noticed that he slept a lot when he was at home. One afternoon, I’d discovered his habit of sleeping with his bedroom door wide open. I hated that. Open doors bothered me, especially when I was asleep. Odd, because for a long time, my life didn’t contain any damn doors. That night, to avoid disturbing him, I’d stayed out and picked up a chick in a bar. It was morning by the time I came home to an empty apartment.

Pete led me to a booth in the deserted diner and slid into the seat opposite me. “You want coffee?”

“Um, sure.”

The server poured coffee, took our orders, and left. Pete eyed the sugar I dumped in my coffee when she was gone. “Sweet tooth, huh?”

“Yep,” I admitted with a reluctant smile. Ellie had said the same thing a few weeks after meeting me too. “Don’t leave any cookies lying around.”

“I’ll remember that next time my mom sends me a care package.”

He laughed. The rich sound made me look up from the swirling coffee in my mug. I didn’t really like coffee, but it was habit to drink anything warm I could find when the weather got cold. “You get those, too? I thought it was just Ellie’s mom who did stuff like that.”

“Nah, moms are all the same.” Pete took a quick sip of his own scarily black coffee. “My mom lives up in Edgewater. Whenever I get up there, she gives me a big box of home-cooked food. She’s Italian, so she always cooks too much.”

Italian
. Suddenly his dark hair and deep-brown eyes made sense.
Shit, why am I looking at his eyes so much?

“What about your mom?” Pete asked when I didn’t say anything. “Does she live in Philadelphia? That’s where you lived before, right?”

“For a while,” I said absently. “My mom lived in Texas, but she died when I was a kid.”

Pete was silent as he sized me up in that subtle way of his. “My dad died when I was fourteen,” he said eventually. “He worked on an oil rig, and the drillship he was on capsized and sank.”

His eyes flashed with an emotion I vaguely recognized. It was gone before I could name it, but I figured it wasn’t anything good. My own father was a mystery to me—I didn’t even know his name. My mom died of a drug overdose, and it was possible he’d shared her fate, but I didn’t grieve for either of them. You couldn’t miss something you’d never had.