Out of Nowhere (Middle of Somewhere 2)

Rafe freezes.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with whether you’re male or female,” he says, and he sounds pissed. “You think men can’t be hurt? Can’t be raped?” His voice is shaking. “Do you know how many men I saw get—” He cuts himself off with a shake of his head and pushes off me, dropping onto his back on the bed and putting one arm over his face. “And the fact that you don’t see it—that you don’t see what he did to you….” He shakes his head. “If you don’t feel like it was rape, then… then, I’m glad, I guess, but…. Colin, he coerced you. He threatened to tell your father and your brothers that you were gay if you didn’t let him have sex with you when you didn’t want it. That’s… that’s—well, whatever you want to call it, it’s fucking wrong. And I hate that it happened to you.”

I run a tentative finger down his arm. He’s vibrating with anger. Coerced. Yeah, that’s the word I was trying to find earlier to tell Daniel what I thought might have happened the day I found him and Buddy in the alley. But it wasn’t that. Not for him. And I’m glad. Glad the ugliness didn’t touch him.

“And I fucking hate that you didn’t tell me about it before,” Rafe says, turning to me, his face fierce and his hand on my hair gentle.

I shake my head, trying to find the words to explain that I wanted things to be different with him. I wanted to start that side of things over, as if shit with Buddy had never happened. That I didn’t want to think of what I did with Rafe as even being in the same category as things with Buddy.

But I don’t come up with any words at all. I just reach for Rafe, wanting the warmth of his skin, his scent, the weight of him. Wanting to be connected with him. It’s not even exactly sex that I need. Just something to let me feel close to him.

“Please,” I hear myself say softly. Rafe lowers his mouth to mine and kisses me, sweet and slow. “Please.”

“Colin.” He moves on top of me, stroking my face and neck.

“Please.”

“Are you sure?”

“You think it’s fucked up?” I say around a lump in my throat.

He shakes his head. “I think it’s fucked up that I want you right now.”

“Why?”

“Because I”—his voice drops to a whisper—“I don’t want to be like them. The men. The ones who hurt people.”

“You’re not.”

“Sometimes I’m not sure,” he says.

“No way.”

“Don’t you get it?” he says finally. “I want to tear the fucking world apart to find the people who hurt you. I want to pull them apart with my bare hands and watch them whimper while I tell them what they’re being punished for.” He’s squeezing my shoulders too tightly and his eyes are focused inward, like he’s not even looking at me.

“’S not the same,” I tell him. But he shakes his head.

I reach up and run my fingers through his hair, untangling every snag I encounter, as he calms down. Gradually, my hands find their way from his hair to his neck, then down the corded muscles of his back to rest on his ass, drawing him against me.

We kiss for a while, moving together slowly. When Rafe leans back to pull his shirt off, he’s looking at me strangely.

I want him to obliterate the past and blot out the future. I want to be so completely full-up with only Rafe that everything else falls away. I want to become the person I feel like when he’s touching me. And I also want to show him that he isn’t those men—the ones who hurt people.

“I want—I…. Listen. I trust you,” I say. Rafe runs his knuckles down my jaw, eyes half closing. “I want you to touch me however you want.” I can see the arousal shoot through Rafe in the tightening of his muscles and it makes my heart beat faster. “I want you to… do whatever you want.”

Rafe bites his lip and frowns but the way he’s looking at me leaves no question that he wants this. His pupils are huge in the warm brown of his eyes and his forehead is damp. “Yeah?”

I nod. He kisses me, and when I reach a hand up to his nipple, he presses my wrist into the pillow above my head. When I reach my other hand down to where his erection is sticking out of the band of his underwear, he presses that wrist to the bed too.

He pauses just before kissing me, lips an inch from mine. “Is that okay?”

I nod, gasping for breath.

“Mmmm. You can trust me.” I nod. There’s something almost desperate in his voice. “I won’t hurt you.”