A touch of sadness flashed through Jamie’s blue-green eyes before he nodded and sagged against Ryan’s chest again. “You’re still hoping I’ll fall out of love with you, aren’t you?”
The question gave him pause. Ryan frowned. “No,” he said slowly. “I guess I’ve accepted it.”
Jamie just hummed, his pale fingers playing with the hem of Ryan’s shirt.
Minutes ticked away in silence, and now that he had nothing else to focus on, Ryan became acutely aware that Jamie was in his lap. While the two of them were no strangers to snuggling and cuddling, this was new. This was the way he would sit with a girlfriend. It hadn’t been a big deal with Hannah; with Jamie it felt…different. Jamie might be slighter and shorter than him, but he was a guy, and not a small one.
“Can I ask you something?” Ryan murmured, deciding against telling Jamie to get off his lap. Jamie seemed comfortable. And it wasn’t exactly hardship, anyway.
“Yeah?”
“When did it start?”
Jamie didn’t need to ask what he meant. “Pretty much when I figured out what my dick was for,” he said with a soft chuckle. “But I’ve been half in denial for years. Until…”
“Until what?”
Jamie lifted his head to look at Ryan. “Until I accidentally saw you have sex with Erica.”
“Erica?”
Jamie rolled his eyes. “We were sixteen. I don’t expect you to remember her. You were a total man-slut back then.”
“I was sixteen,” Ryan said, not bothering to deny the slut part. He had been.
Jamie snorted, his fingers playing with the bottom button of Ryan’s shirt. “Anyway, I saw you have sex with her.”
Ryan smiled, amused despite himself. “You don’t have sex at sixteen, Jamie—you fuck, hoping you’re doing it right. It’s quick, horny, and awkward as hell. I was probably better at it than your average sixteen-year-old, but I was still pretty mediocre.”
“To my virgin eyes, your technique was fine,” Jamie muttered, dropping his gaze to Ryan’s shirt. “It was…”
Ryan stayed silent, watching him curiously.
“Up until that moment I had been half in denial,” Jamie said at last. “I had been hoping it was just a phase, something that would pass. But—but it was hard to remain in denial when I realized I wanted to take the girl’s place.” Jamie lifted his eyes, the familiar shameless expression back in them. “I wanted to be the one under you, the one you were fucking.”
Ryan stared at Jamie, the room so quiet that he could hear the sound of the fridge in the kitchen.
“I had a bit of an identity crisis after that,” Jamie said, wetting his lips with his tongue. “I hated my body, hated that I wanted things my body couldn’t have and shouldn’t want.” Jamie blushed. “Sometimes…sometimes I hated being a boy and wished I were born as a girl, so that I could know what it felt like to have you—have you that way. I wanted it so badly. It had become something of an obsession—to get you inside me.”
Ryan wasn’t sure how to react to a confession like that. His mouth was dry. What Jamie was saying was more than a little messed up for various reasons. But there was something about it—the part about Jamie needing him, wanting to have him inside him—that appealed to the twisted part of him that wanted to own Jamie in every possible way, even though his rational part cringed and thought that it was wrong.
“Pretty fucked up, yeah?” Jamie said with a rueful smile. “But that was before I did some research and found out that men could be like that together, too. That was when I discovered dildos.”
Ryan didn’t know what Jamie was trying to achieve. If his aim was to make Ryan uncomfortable as hell, he was succeeding. “Jamie—”
“I loved using them,” Jamie murmured, his face red but his jaw set stubbornly, a look of determination in his eyes. “I loved it. I got kinda addicted to it.” He laughed a little. “The problem was, I always imagined that it was you, so when I actually had sex with my boyfriends, I fucked them but couldn’t let them fuck me—it seemed wrong.” Jamie’s gaze held Ryan’s, his expression oddly vulnerable and daring at the same time. “So yeah, I’ve wanted you to fuck me since I was sixteen.”
“Are you trying to shock me?” Ryan said with a short laugh.
Jamie shrugged. “Maybe. Is it working?” Jamie cocked his head, studying him with an unreadable look in his eyes. “Are you disgusted?”
“No,” Ryan said. He felt many things, but disgust wasn’t one of them.
Jamie licked his lips. “I want to suck your cock.”
Ryan stared. Even after everything that had happened in the past few weeks, hearing that was still so damn surreal. But then again, Jamie seemed to be in a strange state of mind this evening. Ryan knew he had only himself to blame for this situation. He should have stayed away while Jamie was emotionally compromised instead of having Jamie in his fucking lap.