Talker Read Free Page A

hurt, so many times. His body was literally twitching
    with the need to be loved, but his heart… his heart couldn’t take
    one more wormwood-flavored grind through the mood-processor.
    “C ome on, Brian,” Tate said, crouching down next to him. He
    put an easy hand on Brian’s shoulder because he thought Brian
    was straight, Brian was no threat to him, Brian couldn’t possibly
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    hurt him that way, and Brian met that dark-eyed, clenched-jaw look
    of trust with a throat so tight he could hardly breathe.
    “I mean,” Tate said softly, “it’s not like you can do this for me,
    you know? You’re the best friend a guy could have, but… I… I
    real y want someone.” He stood up and danced away to the
    industrial-techno-popping rhythm of his heart. “I’m just so lonely,”
    he said nakedly, and Brian was final y able to get the words out.
    “But I love you,” he rasped, and Tate bent down and patted
    him on the head like a child or a cat or something.
    “Wel , yeah, but we both know it’s not the way I need.” His
    voice choked at that, and before Brian could contradict him, explain
    the trope that Tate had locked him into as surely as a girl in a
    manga book, he said, “Here. I’ve got to go… I’l just go alone…
    I’ll… I’ll shower at work… bye….”
    Brian tried hard to scramble after him, but he put al his weight
    on his bad shoulder and when his vision cleared from the mask of
    black spots in front of it, Tate was long gone. Brian had been a
    decathlete. Tate had been a distance sprinter, and they had more
    than half a dozen different trails to choose from between the city
    streets and the riverfront bike trail. The odds of actual y catching up
    to him when he was in this mood were as thin as the scar tissue on
    Tate’s healing heart.
    Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit….
    Brian found himself on his ass again as scalding tears slid in
    the salty dust coating his knees.
    “But it is the way you need,” he whispered. It is, Tate. It’s just
    exactly what you need. But Tate wouldn’t listen to him—not now.
    Not after all Brian had seen, or the way Tate had laid his heart bare
    because he thought Brian was “safe.” O h G od—now that Tate
    really needed Brian-the-lover, how could Brian get him to trust
    Brian-the-friend?

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    P a rt III
    O ld Lovers

    BRIAN had a date with Virginia the first night Tate had tried to have
    sex. He remembered that—the date.
    He’d been having sex pretty steadily since his senior year in
    homeschooling. He was a pretty kid—he knew that in a detached
    way. Wheat-colored hair, blue eyes, all-American-boy freckles, and
    a wide, smiling mouth—between that and the body, which was
    honed because he liked the exercise and not because he liked the
    muscles—well, girls had been following him into bed with impunity,
    and he hadn’t minded. He liked girls, liked pleasing them, so he
    was pretty good in bed (when they could find one—often, he was
    pretty good in his car), but the whole affair seemed… curiously
    passionless to him. There had been no pounding or sweating or
    dedication to the act. The whole gimme gimme gimme gotta have it
    ba-bee thing seemed to be missing, and it hadn’t been until he’d
    lived with Tate that he’d begun to figure out why.
    Since moving in with Tate, he’d become obsessed with the
    crease of Tate’s thigh, the one leading from his hip to his groin.
    Maybe it was because Tate’s private parts were always casually
    hidden when he came out of the shower or was dressing, but that
    particular place just… captured Brian’s attention in the oddest way.
    Was Tate’s cock long? Thick? Did it hang heavy when he got
    out of the shower? Were there scars? (Poor baby, let there not be
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    scars!) Were there piercings? Was the hair the same dark, inky
    color as the hair on his head?
    And that wasn’t the only part of Tate’s body that seemed to
    have