Who We Are (The Seafare Chronicles 2)

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re still fucking hot,” he says, and I can feel his half-hard length against my hip.

“Well, even if that’s true—which I highly doubt—all it takes is me opening my mouth and that whole illusion just dies right there. Literally, it’s like a black hole, even light can’t help but getting sucked down.” I stop for a moment and think about what I just said as Otter starts to grin. It looks evil and full of teeth. “You took that dirty, didn’t you?”

“Way dirty,” he assures me as he begins to grind his body into mine.

“Sex doesn’t solve problems,” I manage to get out as he rubs up and down my body with his, his mouth latching onto my neck.

“But it certainly makes things more fun,” he says as he licks his way up to my earlobe, breathing heavily into my ear as his teeth scrape along the shell. “Besides, the problems will still be there tomorrow. And so will I. I’m not going anywhere, Papa Bear. I told you that and I meant it. What do I need to do to prove that to you?” He reaches down between us and grabs my cock and gives it a rough pull. “You can’t possibly think you’re going to get away from me.” He reaches down my shorts and grips my dick, that big paw of his so familiar, so hot. He thumbs over my slit in the way that he knows drives me nuts. I squirm under him. “You even try, and I’ll hunt you down myself.” His voice is still rough, but not with sleep. He lifts up my shirt, his tongue swirling over one nipple and then the other. He allows my arms to go free and my hands go to his hair, holding him, pushing him further. I can’t speak yet, I have no words. I need to hear his voice.

“It doesn’t matter what goes on in that head of yours,” he breathes, trailing his tongue down my stomach, his hand starting to jerk me off, “or what you could possibly be thinking. Just as long as you know this is mine.”

He shakes my dick before swirling his tongue over the crown. “And this is mine,” he says as he rises up to kiss my chest, where my heart beats underneath. “And this is mine,” he says before kissing me deeply. I groan into his mouth, trying to go further, suddenly confused when he pulls away, putting his forehead against mine, breathing heavily. His breath is ragged in my face, and I breathe deeply, trying to take him in. The gold-green is flashing in the dark, but it’s almost angry. He’s no longer smiling. “Do you get me?” he asks, that warning tone of his in full force.

I nod, turning my head to the side, trying to avoid that gaze, those knowing eyes.

He grabs me by the chin and forces me to look back at him. Before our eyes can collide, I close mine. I get him. I do. I really do. But it’s times like these, times that his voice is sharp with control and hungry with desire, that I almost can’t take it. It’s too much. It’s too strong. And I know it’s exactly what I need. No one gets me like he does, not even the Kid. I don’t know how Otter got so smart or how he’s able to pierce me so, but he can and he does. I don’t know why he chose me, for the life of me, for all the trouble I’ve caused. How can he think this is worth it? I tell him I love him, I tell him how much he means to me, but does he know how much I need him?

That without him I would be nothing? I don’t know if he does, or at least not to the full extent in which I think it. And I don’t know if I can tell him that.

I’ve always been told you should never speak your wish aloud for it won’t come true, that it’ll go away.

Otter can’t go away. I won’t allow it.

“Bear,” he says from somewhere above me. “Look at me.”

I do. I do because he’s everything.

He watches me for a moment, letting go of my chin and reaching up to cup my face. “Do you get me?” he says harshly.

Ah God, I do. I do. I do. And he must see something there because that Otter grin pulls slowly at his lips, and I finally say, “Yes,” and my voice breaks, and he falls on top of me then, his hunger spilling over. His hands are everywhere, and my shirt is torn up over my head, and his mouth is on me in ways that only he knows how, in ways that only he can do. I arch my back as he again finds my dick and the wet heat that envelopes it is so hot so fast that I almost shoot right then. I gasp his name (“Otter,” I say, “Oh, my Otter”) as he swallows me whole, and I marvel at him, this man who seemed to give up everything, his life and job in a place so far away, just to be with me. I need to show him what he means to me, what he does to me. He has to know.

I pull him off my dick and roll him over, st

raddling his chest, my legs under his arms as his hands stroke my thighs. I reach behind me and shove his shorts down past his knees, feeling his dick spring up and slap against my hand. I stroke it gently while I reach over with my left hand and grab the lube from the nightstand. As I pull my hand back, he captures it in his and kisses each finger gently. Even I notice when he hesitates over the ring finger. But the kiss there lasts the longest. I don’t know what that means.

You sure?

He takes the lube from my hand (“I like getting you ready,” he told me once, a low blush on his face. “You look hot with my fingers in you”) and he sits up, holding me in his lap, his lips on my neck as he pours the lube onto his fingers and begins to stretch me. I rock my head back as I wrap my arms around his neck, my hands at the back of his head, cradling him against me as he works me open. There’s a brief moment when he leaves my body that I whimper at the loss, but then he enters me again in a swift thrust of his hips, and I cry out softly, his body rolling underneath me, like I’m sitting on top of an incoming tide.

There’s a moment, somewhere deeper into the night, when he’s above me, rocking into me with slow movements, that he sighs, “Bear,” and my name on his lips is like the greatest thing I’ve heard. It’s a single syllable stretched, drawn out like it’s air and he’s breathing it out. His shoulders begin to shudder, and I feel a burst of heat rush through me, and I hear his voice in my head, telling me that he has fought for me, that the fight was all he knew, and I shake beneath him, the earthquake around my heart exploding as I come between us, my hands like claws on his back, my eyes rolling back into my head.

I can’t lose this, I think wildly. I can’t lose him. I won’t survive. I’ll be nothing.

As he collapses on top of me, that weight so comforting, I know that problems have not been solved. I know that there are still issues there, and that they are mostly my own. But there is a moment that none of that matters, that all I care about is his heart against mine, his breath against my neck, his mouth leaving trails of slow kisses around my throat. All that matters is the look in his eyes when he props himself up on his elbow to look down at me, that grin flashing as the weak dawn light starts to glow through the window. He tells me he’s not leaving ever again. He tells me I’m all he’s ever wanted. He tells me he loves me. But I can see something behind his eyes that’s almost like fear, that knowing look that he’s not so successful in covering up, that he believes every single thing he’s said, that while he does not doubt me, he might just doubt himself. Like he thinks he might not be good enough for me.

And that terrifies me.

I stroke his hair, and I tell myself to believe him, if just to ease his mind.

It almost works.

ANNA is waiting for me in the quad of Oceanside Community College, a small smile on her face as she watches me drag my feet toward her like I’m on some kind of death march. Which is really what it feels like, having to go back to school after three years. I have a backpack, for Christ’s sake, filled with notebooks and pencils and textbooks that cost way more than they should have (seriously, you should have seen the look on my face when four books rang up at over four hundred dollars. Otter told me later that you would have thought they were asking me to set a baby seal on fire with a flamethrower. Try to get that image out of your head. I dare you. Ty sure couldn’t, let me tell you). The Kid wanted me to buy a backpack with Anderson Cooper’s face on it. I told him they didn’t make backpacks like that, but I could get one with Transformers on it, a little Optimus Prime action going on. He asked me to remind him again of my age. I advised him that I was twenty-one. He asked if I thought one day I would act like it. I responded that everyone likes Transformers. He told me that Anderson Cooper was more of an American institution than Transformers were. I told him nobody cared about Anderson Cooper except his mother and his secret pseudo boyfriend. The Kid told me God would strike me down for my blasphemy.

We then went online to see if they did make Anderson Cooper backpacks, because the Kid didn’t believe me, stating that a man revered like Anderson Cooper had to have his face on a backpack. Unsurprisingly, such a thing did not exist, at least that we were able to find, and that was by the time we had clicked on the two hundredth Google search page (that was three hours I’m never getting back). The Kid lamented on such an untapped market and immediately set out to write up a business plan for a line of Anderson Cooper products (coasters, coffee mugs, golf balls, ride-on lawn mowers—trust me, it only got weirder from there. Does anyone actually need an Anderson Cooper Crock-Pot?). I told him that was slightly stalkerish and that he should dial it back a little. He told me it was only stalkerish if he went over to his house and went through his sock drawer.