The ex-con - Chapter 4 (Patreon)

Author’s note: All my characters are consenting adults (18+). All sexual acts depicted are consensual between the adult characters.

Chapter 4

The text came in while I was still on a job, kneeling on someone else’s kitchen tile with a bucket beside my knee.

Marcus: dinner. the mexican place on 4th. 8. you in or you married to the mop now

I almost said no.

Calum had been in the apartment four days. He could leave. That was the part I kept forgetting. No monitor. No property line. Parole wanted an address and a check-in, not a cage. The parole officer had come yesterday. Address on file. No cuff. Sleep here. That was the rule now. He could walk out a door. He just hadn’t.

He had legs and a city and a year of locked doors behind him. He stayed anyway. He stood too long in front of the fridge. He watched the door when I came home. He fucked me like the spare room was a decision he intended to keep.

I wiped my hands on my pants and typed.

Ash: I’ll come. can’t stay late

Marcus sent a string of beers. I put the phone away and finished the floor.

Calum was on the balcony when I got back. No cigarette this time. Just his forearms on the rail and the street underneath him like he was measuring how far he was allowed to want it. He turned when he heard the keys.

“You’re early.”

“Last house was small.”

He nodded. Came inside. Closed the slider. The white T-shirt clung to him the way it had since the station. Prison muscle. The preppy boy was a rumor now.

“I’m going out,” I said. “Dinner. Guys I used to see before you got here. I won’t be late.”

He didn’t move for a second.

“Alright.”

That was all. No come here. No fingers under my chin. Just the word, flat, like he’d practiced not being the man who asked me to stay after the nightmare.

I almost cancelled.

Instead I showered, put on a black shirt and jeans, and stopped in the hallway. He was on the edge of the spare bed, elbows on his knees, looking at the floor.

“You can come,” I said, and hated how it sounded. “If you want. It’s just tacos.”

He shook his head once.

“Go. You’ve been in this apartment with me since Thursday. Go be a person.”

“Calum—”

“I’m fine.” He looked up. The thing behind his eyes was not fine. “I’ll find a movie. I’ll eat whatever’s in the fridge. I won’t burn the place down.”

I left with my keys in a fist.

The restaurant was loud in the way cheap good places are loud. String lights. Plastic glasses. Marcus already halfway through a basket of chips. Two other guys from the old group — Nico and Jamal — waving like I hadn’t gone quiet for a year because a cleaning company doesn’t leave much room for nights like this.

I sat. I ordered. I drank slow.

They asked the usual. Work. If I was seeing anyone. If the friend crashing at my place was as built as the photo I’d sent to the chat by accident when I was showing them the van.

“That’s your roommate?” Nico said, grinning. “Brother. That’s a problem.”

“He’s not my roommate like that.” I lied

Jamal laughed. “You posted his arm. That’s a problem.”

I told them to shut up. I checked my phone. Nothing from Calum. I put it face-down and tried to taste the food.

Marcus leaned in.

“You look like you’re waiting for a text from your dad.”

“I’m waiting for nothing.”

“Sure.”

I lasted forty minutes. The table got louder. Someone ordered another round. Nico asked if the guy at my place was straight and I said I didn’t know, which was a lie so clean it almost felt polite. My phone stayed dark. I hated the dark.

Then the door opened and the noise dipped the way it dips when somebody walks in who doesn’t belong to the lighting.

Calum.

Black shirt I didn’t know he owned. The same jeans from the duffel. Hair still too long. Jaw still unshaven. He stood just inside the door and found me like he’d been given a seat number.

Marcus followed my face and whistled low.

“Is that—”

“Yeah.”

Calum crossed the room without hurrying. He didn’t smile for the table. He stopped behind the empty chair next to me and looked at the three of them first, then at me.

“You said you wouldn’t be late,” he said. Quiet. For me. “It’s been more than an hour.”

“I lost track.”

“I didn’t.”

Jamal’s eyebrows went up. Nico kicked me under the table. Marcus, to his credit, stood and put out a hand.

“Marcus. You must be Calum. Ash talks about you like you’re a rumor.”

Calum shook it. His hand made Marcus’s look like a child’s.

“I needed air,” Calum said. “He told me where.”

He sat. The chair complained. The table got smaller. I could smell my perfume on him, which meant he’d used my bottle, which meant he’d been in my bathroom after I left, which meant the apartment hadn’t been enough.

Nico asked what he did.

“I got out last week,” Calum said. No garnish. “Ash picked me up at the station.”

The table did the math. Nobody said prison. Everybody heard it.

Jamal cleared his throat and asked about the food. Calum said he wasn’t hungry. He drank water. His knee found mine under the table and stayed there, heavy, not a question.

Marcus tried. “You lifting? You look like you live in a gym.”

“I lived in a box,” Calum said. “The gym was the only door that opened.”

Silence. Then Nico laughed too loud and I wanted to leave so badly my hands went cold.

“I should get him home,” I said.

“You just got here, he’s a big man, not a child..” Marcus said.

“I know.”

Calum was already standing. He didn’t say goodbye like a man who’d been invited. He said it like a man who’d come to collect. On the sidewalk the heat of the kitchen hit us and then the cooler dark. I started walking toward the lot where I’d left the van. Calum matched my pace without being asked.

“You didn’t have to come.”

“I know.”

“How did you even—”

“Bus. Two transfers. I asked the guy at the stop if 4th was this way. It was.” He looked at the street like it still surprised him that it went on without permission. “You left. I sat on the bed. I thought about those guys looking at you the way I look at you. Then I thought about the fact that I can walk out a door now. So I walked out a door.”

“Calum.”

“Did anyone touch you.”

Not a question that wanted comfort.

“No.”

“Look at you.”

“They’re friends.”

“I saw how they looked when I sat down. I know that look. I used to be the one wearing it on other people’s dates.” He stopped under a broken streetlight. “I don’t have a cuff on my ankle, Ash. I could have gone anywhere. I could have found a bar and a stranger and gotten this out of my system without dragging your night into it. I came here. That’s the part you need to hear.”

I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t I wanted you to.

The van smelled like lemon cleaner. He got in the passenger side and shut the door harder than he needed to. I drove. He didn’t touch the radio. His hand sat on his thigh like it was waiting for an order.

At a red light I said, “They’re going to text me.”

“Let them.”

“They’re going to ask if you’re my boyfriend or something.”

He turned his head. In the dash light his face looked older than twenty-five.

“What are you going to tell them.”

“I don’t know.”

“Then don’t answer tonight.”

The apartment was dark except for the lamp he left on in the kitchen. I dropped the keys. He locked the door behind us. That click did more than the restaurant had.

He didn’t tell me to come here. He walked past me into the living room, pulled his shirt off, and threw it on the couch. The body the year had made sat there in my cheap light — chest, stomach, the trail of hair, the arms that had shaken Marcus’s hand like it was nothing.

“Anyone look at you like I look at you,” he said again, closer now.

“I already said no.”

“Say it looking at me.”

I did. He nodded once, the same nod from the morning after the first time, the one that meant he’d decided.

“Good. Because I sat on a bus for forty minutes thinking about some guy’s hand on the back of your neck in a booth. Thinking about you laughing at a joke I didn’t get to hear. I don’t have an excuse anymore, Ash. I’m not locked in. I chose this apartment and I chose that restaurant and I am not spending the next six months being grateful and quiet while you go out and pretend I’m a guest.”

He kissed me.

It wasn’t the careful morning kiss. It was the restaurant still on his teeth, the bus, the year of loneliness. One hand in my hair, the other at my waist, walking me backward until my shoulders hit the wall by the kitchen. I opened for him. He made a sound into my mouth that didn’t belong in a place with neighbors.

“Bedroom,” he said against my lips. “Yours.”

I went. He followed and shut the door with his heel. I started on my shirt. He watched every button like it had insulted him. When I was down to nothing he shoved his jeans down and his cock was already hard, thick, the same weight that had been inside me yesterday and the day before. He stroked himself once, slow, looking at me.

“On the bed. Hands and knees.”

I climbed up. The mattress dipped. His hands found my hips, thumbs stroking once, almost kind, before he spat into his palm and slicked himself.

The head of him pressed against me.

“You remember who you were thinking about when they asked if you were seeing anyone.”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“You.”

He pushed in.

The stretch pulled a broken sound out of me. He sank in one long thrust until his hips were flush against my ass and then he stayed there, breathing hard, one hand sliding up my spine to the back of my neck.

“You go out,” he said, voice rough. “You sit under string lights. You let them ask. That’s fine. This is mine. You understand?”

“Yes.”

He started moving.

Deep. Deliberate. Each stroke dragged the full length of him in and out while his grip on my neck kept me where he wanted. The wet sound of it filled the room. I dropped my head and pushed back. He met me harder.

“I could have gone to a bar,” he muttered. “I could have found somebody who didn’t know my name. I came to the restaurant because your phone was dark and I don’t do dark anymore. You don’t get to go quiet on me in a restaurant, Ash. You don’t get to sit there and let them call me a rumor.”

“It wasn’t a date.”

He fucked me harder for the sentence.

“I know it wasn’t. That’s why I’m angry. If it was a date I’d understand the look on your face. It was tacos and I still wanted to put my mouth on you in front of them.”

The bed started to talk. One hand on my neck, the other on my hip. Every thrust forced air out of me. He reached around and wrapped his fist around my cock, rough, in time with his hips.

“This is the only one you’re taking,” he said. “You feel that? That’s not gratitude. That’s me being able to walk out a door and walking toward you anyway.”

I clenched around him. He cursed and drove deeper. His balls slapped against me. The room smelled like sex and the perfume from my bottle and the heat he’d carried from his jealousy.

“Tell me.”

“I’m yours.”

“Again.”

“I’m yours— fuck—”

He tightened the hand on my neck just enough. The dual pull wrecked me. I came hard onto the sheets with a sound I didn’t recognize. The way I locked around him pulled him over. He buried himself to the hilt, groaned like something had been torn out of him, and came in thick pulses deep inside me. I felt every one. He kept thrusting through it, short, messy, until there was nothing left.

We stayed locked together. Heartbeats. His forehead against my shoulder. When he finally eased out I felt him start to leak down my thigh. He looked at it for a second, then pulled me down onto my side and locked an arm around my waist, chest to my back.

His mouth found the back of my neck.

“Next time you go out,” he said, still wrecked, “you text when you get there. You text when you’re coming home. I don’t care if it’s Marcus. I don’t care if it’s a client. I spent a year not knowing what door opened next. I am not doing that in this apartment.”

“Okay.”

“Say it.”

“I’ll text.”

He kissed the skin under my ear and held tighter.

“I don’t have a chain on my leg, Ash. That means I can follow you. That means I will. Don’t make me sit on another bus wondering which one of them made you laugh.”

I nodded into the pillow.

Outside, a car went by. Inside, the sheets were wrecked and the black shirt he’d worn to 4th was still on my living room floor like evidence.

He was quiet for a long time. Then, against my hair, almost unwilling:

“Those guys are going to text you.”

“I know.”

“You tell them I’m the friend who got out. That’s all they get. The rest is ours.”

“Okay.”

He breathed out. The arm around me didn’t loosen.

“I’m going to look for work,” he said. “Legal. Day labor. Whatever takes a record. I’m not living in your spare room like a guest who fucks you at night and eats your food. I came to that restaurant because I could. I’m staying in this apartment because I want to be with you. I want to fix my life. Those are different sentences. Don’t mix them up.”

I turned enough to see his face in the dark.

“I’m not mixing them up.”

Something in his expression eased. Not soft. Just less ready to fight the door.

“Good. Sleep. In the morning I want breakfast and I want you to tell me the truth about whether you liked that I showed up.”

I already knew the truth.

I liked it in the way that meant six months was not going to be a favor.

It was going to be a man who could leave, and didn’t, and would get on a bus to follow me next time I hang out with other guys…