Page 8 of Redline Communion

“That’s not fair.”

“No.” His voice cracks just enough that I hear it before he does. “It’s not.”

We’re close enough now that I can hear the hitch in his breathing no matter how hard he tries to hide it. Something inside me pulls taut, wanting to shove him backward into the workbench and wanting, worse, to close the last of the distance instead.

“I’m not jealous of her,” I say.

“Liar.”

“I’m jealous of you. Of how easy you make it look.”

His face shifts, hurt first, then something like relief with grief underneath it.

“You think this has been easy for me? You think I don’t lie awake some nights wondering if she’d have picked me at all if you’d just let yourself want her out loud instead of building a rule so somebody else had to be dumb enough to break it?”

That’s the part I wasn’t braced for. He’s been carrying his own weight this whole time and never once made me watch him do it.

“Rafe.”

“Don’t.”

It’s closer to a plea than a warning, and that undoes me faster than the anger did.

Neither of us decides out loud who closes the distance. One second we’re staring at each other and the next his fist is in the front of my shirt, rough enough to drag me forward, all those years of not saying it finally too heavy to hide behind.

He kisses me with hunger and anger and everything we never said, hard enough to nearly knock me off balance. I walk him backward until he hits the wall, our tools rattling in the box beside us, and neither of us breaks for air until we have to.

It isn’t fair that he gets to live out loud with her and still somehow manages to be more honest about whatever this is between us than I’ve ever been. I’m jealous of him for it.

But right now isn’t about her.

It’s us.

I break the kiss first and catch his face between my hands, taking in lines I’ve spent years pretending I don’t already know before lifting the hem of his shirt. After that, clothes disappear faster than either of us can pretend we’re making careful decisions. Shirts first. Shoes somewhere near the workbench.

I look at him properly, which feels more dangerous than anything we’ve done so far.

I know this body already in all the ways a man is allowed to know his best friend’s body without admitting anything inconvenient about it: locker rooms, bruises, grease, blood. Years of looking everywhere except directly at the problem.

Apparently I’m done being subtle.

My fingers drag over the grease still marking his forearm before catching at his waistband. Of course that’s what my brain notices. Not the fact that he’s half naked in front of me.

The grease.

Very normal. Excellent priorities.

“Do it,” he says. “Strip me bare like you’ve been wanting to.”

That shuts me up, which is probably why he said it. His eyes are dark, steady, and way too sure of me.

I do as I’m told.

I lower myself to my knees before I can think long enough to turn obedience into another moral crisis, undo him slowly, then look up. He’s watching me with the expression of a man who has waited a long time to find out whether I’d actually follow through.

I hate how badly I want to prove him right.

I pull his pants and briefs down. He steps out of them and kicks them aside, and there it is, the thing I’ve been refusing to look directly at all this time.