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6 months together (June 30, Year 2)
“... can’t. Sounds like fun, but my girl’s gonna be in town for the long weekend.” Dodger jumped off the couch and ran for the hall when Chris came through the front door, talking, I assumed, on the phone. I was on the couch, my back propped against the arm and my legs stretched half the length of the cushions, reading a book. I scrambled to tuck the book between the cushion and the arm of the couch and sit up straight, folding my legs and tucking my feet under my thighs to wait for him, prim and proper and expectant and, I hoped, cute.
I heard him kick off his shoes, the soles thudding on the hardwood, and drop his keys onto the table in the front hall, “I don’t plan on being anywhere she’s not for those five days.” I felt myself blush a little, even sitting in the living room alone. He had that effect on me often. He got quiet to listen to whoever was on the other end of the line and I heard the jingle of Dodger’s collar as Chris greeted him. “Nah. I appreciate the offer, seriously, but we’re still staying pretty low-key for-” he stopped abruptly, waited silently, then responded to the interruption. “Oh yeah, no, 100 fucking percent.” His laugh rang out, seeming to fill all the space in the open, light-filled house, and Dodger came zooming back in to flop on his bed under the wide bay windows that overlooked the backyard and the Hollywood hills. “That’s not what I meant by low-key. I just mean I want to be careful about going out in public and shit, out here anyway.” I’d been listening to his voice and his padded footsteps as they got closer, but he stopped and his voice went gruff, “People are dicks, man.” And then he was coming closer again; he should see me on his couch any second. “And if she gets hurt because of some asshole trying to get a picture or something like that, I’ll lose my shit. It’s -,” he froze, his mouth agape and no sound coming out, when he reached the point where the front hall opened into the living room. For a second, the only sound was Dodger’s tail thumping against the floor.
I grinned back at him, my head tilted to the side and one foot twitching - anxious or excited or both - under me. “What the hell? I gotta, fuck, I gotta go.” When whoever was on the other end of the line spoke, it kickstarted him back into action and he crossed the room to stand directly in front of me in four long strides. “Yeah, I’m great, I just gotta go.” He grinned down at me and had almost hung up the phone before he even finished speaking. “I’ll uh, I’ll text you later.” He tossed the phone to the other end of the couch and leaned down, grabbing my face and kissing me, quick and almost too hard. “What,” he stopped to kiss me again, a little less hurried and frantic. “What are you,” another kiss, holding my face in his hands as he lowered himself to kneel in front of me, bringing us to nearly the same level, me just a little bit higher than him for once. “What are you doing here?” His hands trailed slowly from my cheeks down my neck and over my shoulders, then all the way down my arms until they passed over where my hands rested in my lap; finally his fingers wrapped around the outsides of my thighs. He lifted one hand, just for a second, to scratch Dodger between the ears without taking his eyes off my face when the dog came to lay on the floor next to his knee, then brought that hand right back to my leg.
“What?” I grinned so wide my face hurt, “Did you forget I was coming?”
His fingers dug into my legs, “Friday. You were coming Friday . It’s Wednesday. Fuck, it is Wednesday, right?” He held his left arm up to check his watch, which didn’t actually have a date or day of the week display on it. I giggled and nodded, laughing a little harder when he fell back onto his heels and sagged against the couch, dropping his head until his forehead landed on my shins where they crossed in front of me. “When …” his muffled voice trailed off. “Who …” he did it again, and I brought both hands to the sides of his head to scratch my nails lightly through his hair and across his scalp. “How …”
I decided to put him out of his misery rather than let him keep going. “Which one of those would you like me to answer?” I kept running my fingers through his hair, and his palms slid up my thighs until they curled around my hips.
“I don’t even fuckin’ know.” He shook his head, his forehead rocking against my legs.
“Your brother picked me up and let me in, a couple hours ago.”
That got him to sit back up. “That little shit.” He shook his head, again, and didn’t even really look up at me, staring off toward where he’d tossed his phone. “That's why he blew me off for dinner.” I just laughed and ran the tip of my index finger down the bridge of his nose, drawing his attention back so that he turned to look up at me, before unfolding my legs, careful not to kick him or step on Dodger, to rest my feet on the floor in front of his knees. I patted my lap in invitation and he moaned in relief, pleasure, something , as he pulled himself up onto the couch to drop his cheek onto my thigh and drape one arm across my knees, tucking the other hand under my legs.
I didn't say anything; I was beyond happy to sit quietly with him for as long as he wanted. Nearly as soon as he'd settled himself, he reached with the arm thrown across my legs to lift my left hand off the arm of the couch and pull it down to my knee, where he played with my fingers - stretching them one by one and pressing his palm to mine, folding them down and closing his own over them, lacing our fingers together, over and over again, lazy and careless. I used my right hand to go back to running my fingertips through his hair and over his scalp. I combed his hair back off his forehead, I traced around his ear, I even trailed from his hairline down the back of his neck and dipped into the neck of his shirt to draw circles and figure eights on his spine between his shoulder blades. “God, baby. This is so nice." He made a sound deep in his throat, something between a hum and a moan, and pressed and nuzzled his cheek against my thigh, almost like he was trying to burrow into me. "I’ve had the worst fucking week.”
“I know.” I also knew that it had actually been longer than a week, but that he was trying not to be as negative as I thought he had every right to be. It hadn't even been two weeks since we'd last been together, when we'd departed on separate flights out of Orlando after celebrating our birthdays at Disney World - it had been 12 days, actually. But he'd gone back to work the next day, and shit had hit the fan right away.
First, he'd gotten a revised copy of the film’s script as soon as he'd gotten on set for fittings and the first full-cast table read, and he found that the revisions included the addition of multiple homophobic jokes by his character. He could have been okay with it, he'd explained - vented - to me, if his character was meant to be a bad guy within the world of the story or if it was meant to make a point within the film about the inappropriateness of such jokes. Unfortunately, though, the writer who'd added in the jokes truly just thought they were funny. There was no irony, no point being made. Chris had gone straight to the director, who’d been understanding about Chris’s unhappiness, but apparently there was a certain fear on the part of the producers and the studio around the idea of angering that particular writer. Chris had never performed any of his material before and therefore had no particular feelings about him one way or another before that incident, but he was making quite a name for himself through some of the work he’d created in the previous few years. It seemed that the producers were afraid of burning a bridge with him. The jokes had eventually been removed, but it had been a two-day ordeal that had included multiple conversations with assistant producers to get it done. Overall, the whole thing had left a bad taste in Chris’s mouth.
Then, just two days after getting that resolved, he'd found out through a conversation with a writers’ room assistant (whom he'd just kind of stumbled on, smoking and crying, behind his and a couple of the other actors' trailers) that one of the writers wasn’t treating the women in the room properly, in ways that varied from silencing the voices of female writers to speaking inappropriately to, and on a few occasions even touching, female assistants and script runners. Unsurprisingly, it was the same writer who had injected the offensive jokes. That had resulted in three days of Chris complaining, even raging, to everyone with any kind of power over the production of the movie. When it had made it so high up the ladder as to end up on the desk of the executive producer and it still seemed as if it was going to result in nothing more than a ‘talking to,’ Chris had threatened to walk, contract be damned. He could afford, he insisted, the financial burden of breaking his contract, but they couldn’t afford what would happen if he went public with the information of what had been allowed on their set. As it was, he’d already started spreading the word to every connection he had (and considering his history with Marvel, then Rian Johnson and the other huge names that had been attached to Knives Out , those connections ran very far and wide) that the writer in question was untrustworthy and a homophobic misogynist at best, a sexual abuser at worst. He was willing to give the producers the benefit of the doubt that they hadn’t known what kind of person they were hiring, provided they got rid of him immediately. They’d finally agreed to let the writer go, but it had taken far too long for Chris’s liking, and he’d been angry and rightfully sullen the whole time.
And most recently, he'd informed me through a long series of distraught texts throughout the morning and afternoon - which I’d responded to during layovers, blaming the delays on the education conference he thought I was at - that during the morning’s rehearsal for the first round of scenes they would be shooting, a young actor, a 17-year-old up-and-comer playing his nephew, had gotten injured. The way Chris had told the story - and he was his own worst critic, painting himself in a much harsher light than anyone else would have, I was sure - I couldn’t see how he could have been even the least bit at fault. That didn’t stop him from blaming himself though, agonizing over what he could have done differently and worrying himself to death over the young man. The last text I’d gotten from him though, about an hour before he’d gotten home (when he believed I was sitting on my own couch reading a book, not on his), told me that they’d just gotten word that the young man would be in a walking boot for a few weeks, but that nothing was broken. So the next challenge to be faced, first thing the next morning, would be adapting to a revised filming schedule that accounted for his young co-star’s lack of mobility. Luckily for us, and for everyone involved, really, considering how badly they all probably needed the break after everything that had been going on, the producer had already made big plans to go out of town with his family for the long weekend (Mexico, because apparently that’s how big-shot producers celebrate the nation’s birthday) and didn’t want the film going forward without him there to supervise, “all things considered.” So, we would still get our five-day weekend together (plus two days, after my ‘bonus days’ got added on), and hopefully when they all went back to work after the holiday, things would have settled down and they could hit the reset button for a fresh start.
“Is that why you did this? Because I’ve had a shitty week?”
I shrugged, even though he couldn’t see me, his cheek still pressed against my jeans and his eyes, I assumed, watching our hands as he continued to manipulate my fingers. “Didn’t hurt.” I didn’t add, because I didn’t want him to think I was making too big a deal out of something that really wasn’t, that the next day was the one-year anniversary of the day we’d met, which I remembered so acutely only because that had been when our movie became real for me and also because of its proximity to the Fourth of July. It certainly wasn’t something I’d hold him to remembering, or that I’d ever expect to celebrate or exchange gifts for, but getting to be with him on that day was a nice little bonus. “My conference for today and tomorrow got cancelled last week; I was gonna ask what you thought about me coming out a couple days early. But then every time we've talked you’ve seemed so stressed,” he squeezed my left hand and I realized that the middle finger of my right hand had started tracing hearts on the back of his neck, instead of just circles and random patterns, “so I just looked into it myself, to surprise you, and it was surprisingly easy to get my flight changed. I just wanted to do something nice for you. I mean," I rushed to add, "I hope you consider this something nice.”
He let go of my hand and pushed off my knee to flop over onto his back and stare up at me, eyes squinted, eyebrows furrowed, lips pursed. “Did you hear what I just said? Yeah, baby girl, it’s nice. Coming home and finding you on my couch was probably the only thing that could have turned this clusterfuck of a day around.” He reached up and curled his hand around the side of my neck, tracing the underside of my jaw with his thumb. “You know I still gotta work the next two days, though. Right?”
“I know.” I nodded and brought my left hand to his forehead, apparently unable to keep my hands out of his hair, combing it back over and over again as my other hand rested between his ribs. “I’ll just hang out here, mostly, if you don’t mind me being in your house when you’re not here. And I can take Dodger for a hike,” the dog’s head shot up at the sound of his name, but when he looked up to see us still lounging on the couch, he huffed and laid back down with his chin on his front paws, “your brother said he’d come get me if I wanted to get out of the house. That way I’m coming and going in his car, just in case.”
He scoffed and shook his head, his eyes falling closed and his lips curling into a small smile. “Of course I don’t mind. Walking into this house with you already here is ... I don’t even know. It’s awesome." He opened his eyes again, but instead of looking me in the eyes he was distracted, staring at my mouth. His eyes darted up to mine just for a second, then they fell back to my lips. I smirked at his single-mindedness. "You know I gotta kiss you again, right?" Before I'd even finished nodding he was using the hand on my neck to pull me down as he pushed himself up with the other one, meeting me halfway. It started soft, gentle - sweet pecks and presses against my lips - but it escalated quickly. He fitted our lips together so that his bottom one - that soft, plump, perfect bottom lip - nestled between mine, and I couldn’t help but part my own to trail my tongue across it. He opened for me, tilting his head a little farther to the side and sliding his tongue along mine when I pushed it past his lips and into his mouth. His hand tightened around my neck and he pulled a little, moaning quietly when I withdrew my tongue and bit down - not hard, but definitely firmly enough to be felt - on that same lovely lower lip and dragged my teeth across it as I pulled away, creating tension between my neck and his hand. Normally, that’s when he would have let me go, but that time, as soon as I’d pulled away he brought me back to him, then did the same thing to me that I’d just done to him, following it up by soothing the bite with his tongue then closing his lips around mine. My stomach flipped and I found myself squeezing my thighs together and tightening my hand into a fist around his tshirt over his stomach to prevent it from moving lower.
“Fuck,” he growled under his breath when he finally pulled away, punctuating the long, intense kiss with a quick one to the corner of my mouth and lingering there.
“Chris, I -,”
“Don’t do that.” He leaned to press his lips to my cheek, the gentleness of it a striking contrast to the power of the other kiss. “You know you don’t have to do that. I just really fuckin’ like kissing you.” His hand went from the back of my neck to the top of my head, smoothing back over my hair and stopping at the back of my head to pull me forward and down so he could press his lips to my forehead. He moved to lay back down, but first he reached for the throw pillow almost at the other end of the couch, and when he was on his back again, his head back on my lap, he held the pillow (nonchalantly, I’m pretty sure he believed) over his own waist and lap.
He tucked his free arm under his head and went on, looking up at me with a smirk through narrowed eyes. "I'm not sure I like the idea of you spending time with Scott unsupervised, though. There’s no telling what kind of shit he’ll tell you that you really don’t need to know.”
I just grinned. “You mean like the time you told him eating an earthworm would give him super powers?”
“Dammit,” he practically hissed.
“I can’t wait to spend time with my new best friend.” I laughed when he squeezed his eyes closed in an almost pained expression.
Dodger didn’t even really give Chris time to get comfortable again before he was up, whimpering and tap dancing between the living room and the kitchen. Chris groaned and rolled onto his side to push up off the couch. “Dinnertime,” he sighed. I tried to get him to let me feed the pup, but he just swatted at my hands and legs when I reached for his shoulder to pull him back down and started to stand. He sat in the middle of the couch for a second, watching Dodger’s dramatics, then reached to the other end where he’d tossed his phone, grabbing it and tossing it onto the coffee table without even looking at it. Dodger’s tail fanned in hyperdrive when Chris finally started moving toward the kitchen, pausing just for a second to kiss the top of my head.
He wasn’t gone long, just a minute or two, and I could hear him talking in soft tones, baby talk almost, to his ‘Bubba’ as he filled the food and water bowls. Dodger’s collar jingled, then within seconds I could see Chris out of my periphery coming back to join me. Instead of laying back down, though, he looked down at the couch, his expression conflicted.
“What’s wrong?” I tilted my head and looked up at him.
He held his right hand out, palm up, “I really wanna lay back down,” he flipped his other hand so it mirrored the first and looked down at it, “but I feel bad.” I didn’t say anything, just drew my eyebrows up and together in question. “You did this awesome thing for me, and you’ve travelled all day, and here I am using you as a pillow.”
“Oh my god,” I dropped my head back onto the cushion behind me and laughed a little. I grabbed the book I’d tucked into the couch and pulled it from the cushion, tossing it the few feet in front of me onto the coffee table with his phone. Then I turned and swung my legs up onto the couch, scooting down until the left side of my back pressed into the seat cushions and the right rested against the pillows lining the back, my legs continuing down toward the other end and my shoulders propped on the arm I’d just been resting my elbow on. I would be laying down fully if I scooted down just a little bit farther and let my head rest on the arm behind me. “Get down here you big goof,” I opened my arms, ready to hug him to me when he laid back down. Instead, he chewed at the corner of his bottom lip and planted his hands on his hips.
“Yeah? You definitely good with that?”
I jerked my head a little in a ‘come here’ gesture. “Yeah. Definitely.” He smiled softly then came down to join me, laying on his side to face me. His arms wound around my waist and he fidgeted, wiggling and scooting until he could rest his head half on my shoulder, half on my chest, without actually pressing his face into my boobs.
The thing was, we still hadn’t slept together, literally or figuratively. Scott had looked at me like I was insane when he let me into the house and I asked him to show me to the guest room. At first he just raised one eyebrow, staring down at me like he was waiting for me to give in and tell him that, okay, fine, he should just take me straight to his brother’s room. When I didn’t, he finally just shook his head and scoffed, “I really thought he was full of shit.” It didn’t bother me that Scott apparently knew about our lack of a sex life, but it did surprise me a little. At the same time though, I didn’t really know what a functional sibling relationship looked like, since my own with my brother was far from it, so I certainly didn’t know what was or wasn’t considered ‘off-limits’ between two very close same-sex siblings.
I wanted to have sex with Chris, god did I want to. And I knew he would be good to me - kind, respectful, as gentle as I needed him to be (and I was confident he would also be just plain good , but that part wasn’t what was in question). I had never been worried about the act itself - the during - it was the after that scared me, the possibility that something in my (I believed) broken brain would snap and that I would destroy everything we’d created in the year we’d known each other, the six months of friendship and the following six months of so much more. But every time we got to actually spend time together, in person rather than through a phone or screen, it became a little harder to keep holding back.
My therapist, the one I’d gone from seeing once a month before my husband’s death to once a week since, reminded me weekly that it wasn’t her place to give me permission to have sex with my boyfriend. She also reminded me regularly, though, of how much I had grown, how far I had come from the truly broken girl whose husband had just died. My depression, which had always come in cycles and waves, hadn’t been an issue in several months. The anxiety, which had been part of who I was for as long as I could remember but that had been much worse in the previous few years, was under control - not erased, but manageable. And I hadn’t had a PTSD dream - cold-faced military officers showing up at my house to take away someone I loved - or panic attack - flashbacks accompanied by cold sweats, shaking, even hyperventilating - at the sight of a too-shiny, sleek black car, in months, since just after Chris and I had started dating, actually. She seemed to be telling me, without telling me, that she thought my brain and my emotions wouldn’t go haywire if I did sleep with him.
At the same time, she pointed out that there was a direct correlation between my anxiety and how in-control I felt, and that it would probably best if, when I did decide to take that step, whenever that may be, I felt that it was happening on my terms, the first time at least. Chris was amazing and he’d proven time and time again that he was never going to push me to do anything that I wasn’t absolutely comfortable with, always following my lead and looking for my cues before making a move. Still, having sex with him for the first time - on his couch or in his bed - during a semi-impromptu visit to California for July 4th weekend probably didn’t fully fit the definition of “on my terms.” The next time I’d see him after that trip would be when he came to stay with me, again for a long holiday weekend, in the beginning of September. I’d already started thinking that I didn’t see any possibility of that visit ending without us having slept together. Assuming, of course, that he wanted that as much as I did. Based on his reaction to our kiss, and to others in the past, I wasn’t really concerned about that being an issue.
That afternoon, there on his couch, was the first time we’d actually even lain together, both of us and not just one of us curled up (usually me) or stretched out (usually him), head resting on the other’s leg. I kept my arms open, barely even touching him, until he seemed fairly settled, then I let my right arm fall onto his left one, my forearm running the length of his upper arm and my hand tucking under his bicep. My left arm hooked up under his shoulder to his head until my fingers worked into his hair. I told myself it was because he’d seemed to enjoy it so much before, but honestly, there was something incredibly soothing to me in the repetitive motion of running my hand over his scalp, lightly massaging it, his soft hair sliding under and between my fingers.
“I’m sorry you’re having a rough week,” I told him once he’d been still for several seconds.
I smiled down at the top of his head when he shook it against me. “Nuh-uh. This is the best week ever, now.” He tightened his arms a little around my waist and scooted in a little closer, somehow.
“You wanna talk about it? Besides what you’ve already told me?”
“Nope. Just wanna lay here and hold you while you keep rubbing my head like that.”
“I can do that.” I let my head fall to the side until it landed on the back couch cushions and just looked down at him. I wasn’t entirely prepared for the way my chest tightened at the sight of him there, head on my chest, arms wrapped around me, legs curled up so he would fit on the couch, the bottom one wedged under mine and the top one thrown over them and twisted around my own top one until our feet tangled together. I honestly felt I could cry over how happy I was, how peaceful, content, how loved I felt in that moment.
I broke the peace and quiet between us, because, though it makes no sense whatsoever, it was too intense for me. “Hey, who were you talking to when you came in?” I went on quickly, “If it’s okay for me to ask. I don’t - normally I wouldn’t be so nosy, but I feel bad if you’re cancelling plans because of me.”
“Nah,” he shrugged, “I didn’t cancel anything. It was Mackie. Him and Sebastian and some of the others from their show are going to play paintball, of all things,” he scoffed a little. “They've been saying they wanted to hang out since I got back into town, and they’ve got a long weekend too. Everybody’s got their own plans for the Fourth, but they’re hanging out together on Monday.”
“Okay,” I scratched the top of his head teasingly, “first of all, don’t act like you wouldn’t love playing paintball with those guys.”
He chuckled. “Okay, fair.”
“And second of all, you can go if you want. I don’t want me coming out here to disrupt your life. I go to school stuff sometimes when you’re with me.”
He shook his head then turned to prop his chin on my chest and look up at me. “Trust me, going to paintball with them would be a lot, lot more than the couple hours here and there you spend at school events. Paintball turns into dinner, which turns into drinks, and before you know it we've lost all of Monday.” He loosened his grip on my waist and used his feet against the arm at the other end of the couch to push himself up to kiss my cheek, “I’ve got seven days with you and I have to work the first two. When I’m not at work, I’m not doing anything that means I gotta let you more than arm’s length away.” His arm worked its way up from where it had been wedged under the small of my back to curl around my shoulders and before I realized exactly what he was doing, he’d shuffled us so that he was the one propped on the arm of the couch, laying on his back, and I was folded into him, my head on his shoulder, tucked under his jaw.
“Can I at least go to the bathroom?” I asked, smirking, into his chest as I shifted my arms so that one was tucked under me and the other draped across his waist. I rolled forward a little so that my hip pressed against his and I threw my top leg over his.
“I guess,” he sighed, “But keep the door cracked. And don't drink so much water.”
I pinched his side and made him jump. “Eww. You’re a mess.”
“But I’m your mess,” he turned to kiss the top of my head then stayed there so that his lips moved across my hair, “and you love me.”
“For some reason,” I teased, and he blew a puff of air against the top of my head. I giggled for a second, then went on with my follow-up question. “Can I be nosy again? Just one more time?”
“Shoot.”
“It’s about your conversation with Mackie, so if you don’t want to answer, it’s okay. I know I’m sticking my nose where -”
He cut me off. “Baby. I was talking about you. It was pretty clear I was talking about you. You’re allowed to ask about it”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath, blowing it out of my mouth. “What didn’t you mean by ‘low-key?’” He didn’t answer right away, and I felt his head turn, so even though I didn’t look up to be sure, I guessed he was looking down at me, confused. “You said we were keeping things low-key, then you said ‘That’s not what I meant by low-key.’ What didn’t you mean?”
“Oh,” he cleared his throat and I craned my neck to look up at him. He was blushing. I couldn’t see much, just his neck, really, and a little bit of his cheek, but there was no mistaking the pink flush on his skin. “He said I could bring you along, that it’d be cool to meet you, and I told him we were trying to stay low-key for now.” He tilted his head down toward me then and brought his hand up from where he was holding me to him by my shoulder to run it over my hair. “He said it seemed less low-key and more like I was completely in love with you.” I blushed, then, and turned to press my face into his chest, kissing him through his t-shirt. “He, uh,” he twisted a strand of my hair around his fingers then unwound it, “he asked a while back when I was coming back out this way because he said it seemed like I was spending more time in Boston than I usually do between jobs. I told him about you then. And I may have talked about you a few times since.”
When he had been quiet for a couple seconds, I looked back up and he was looking down at me, almost as if for approval of having told his friend about me, about us. “Yeah, well, I’m 100 fucking percent completely in love with you, too.”
He grinned and lowered his hand back to my hip then brought the other one up from his other side and used it to tilt my chin up so he could lean down to kiss me. “I’m starting to get that impression.” I smiled back against his lips then pecked them quickly before settling back down against him. Before long there would be dinner and whatever else his nightly routine consisted of, but until then, I was jet-lagged from the long travel day and the three-hour time difference, and I was craving a short nap in my new favorite place - draped across him, his arms holding my body tight to his.