Page 34 of Omega’s Fold

Through the fog of the glass, his eyes find mine.

He stands in the shower with the water running over him and he looks at me through the steam and he waits.

I cannot say it.

I try. My mouth opens. Nothing comes out. I am shaking I am so nervous, and I can’t say a word.

He reaches out slowly. His hand finds the faucet. He turns the water down — not off, down, so it is a thinner sound behind him.

I close my eyes. I nod. Once. Hard.

“Come here,” he says.

I open my eyes.

He has opened the shower door. He is standing inside with the water at his back and his hand held out to me, palm open, and he is waiting.

I cross the bathroom floor.

The tiles are warm under my feet, then, I’m at the shower door and he is taking my wrist, and then my other wrist, and he is drawing me in under the spray with him. The water runs hot over the back of my neck and down my spine.

“You’re sure?” he says.

I manage the word. “Yes.”

He kisses me.

His mouth is warm. His hand is at the back of my neck. The water is running over both of us. My hands are on his chest and I can feel his heart going hard under them, which is not what I expected, I did not expect him to be as gone as I am, and the knowing, that he is, unlocks something in me and I make a sound into his mouth that I did not know I was going to make.

His hand slides up from my hip, over my ribs, around to the small of my back. He slides his other hand up into my hair and he kisses me again.

After that I lose the order of things.

There is his mouth on my throat. There is his hand between us. There is the tile cool on my back and his body hot against my front. There is the sound of the water and the sound of my own breathing and somewhere, a long way off, a sound that I realize, later, was me. I am held up. Whatever I cannot do, he is doing. Whatever I don’t know, he is not asking me to know. His hands are where they need to be. His mouth is where it needs to be.

At some point my legs go.

He takes my weight. He has been taking most of it already. He lowers us down until I’m sitting on the tiled bench at the back of the shower and he is kneeling between my knees with his forearms on my thighs. His forehead is against my sternum, and the water flows over his shoulders and runs down my legs.

“Easy, easy,” he says, breathing hard, into my chest. “All right.”

Neither of us moves for another minute. Then he lifts his head and he looks at me. His hair is stuck to his forehead. His gray eyes are almost black.

He reaches up and turns the water off.

He gets me out of the shower. He wraps the towel around my shoulders, not his, mine first, and he is drying my hair with the end of it and I am letting him. I would let him do anything in this minute.

“Your room,” he says.

I nod.

We go out into the hall. He has not bothered with a towel for himself, he is holding mine around me with one arm and holding my hand with the other, and the hall is cold and I am still shaking and we go down to my room.

At the door I stop.

He stops with me. He does not push. He waits.

“Julian.”