Chapter 6: The Middle of the Night
The first thing Ethan became aware of was warmth. A solid, comfortable heat along his right side, and a heavier warmth across his chest. He was on his back, one arm flung out, the other trapped. His head wasn't on his pillow. It was pillowed on something that rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm.
Leo’s chest.
The memory of the night crashed over him, not in a wave, but in a slow, seep of vivid details. The dark. The whispered confessions. The feeling of Leo’s hands mapping his skin like he was discovering new territory. The absolute silence afterward, broken only by their breathing syncing up.
He kept his eyes closed, savoring the private truth of the morning. Sunlight, thin and pale, painted the backs of his eyelids. The room was quiet. Downstairs, a distant cabinet shut. Mom making coffee.
Leo was still asleep. Ethan could tell by the deep, even breaths. But Leo’s hand wasn’t still. It rested low on Ethan’s stomach, just above the waistband of his boxers. And it was moving. Not in a sexual way, but in a slow, almost unconscious exploration. His fingertips traced the defined ridges of Ethan’s lower abs, following the trail of hair that disappeared under the fabric.
Ethan held his breath, pretending sleep, a thrilling complicity in being studied.
Leo’s hand glided up, over the plain of his chest, comparing. It brushed a nipple, and Ethan had to fight not to twitch. The calloused pads of Leo’s fingers—hockey hands, scarred from pucks and sticks—were surprisingly gentle as they skimmed up to his collarbone, then his throat. They traced his jaw, the stubble there, then carded slowly into his tousled dark hair. It was a touch of pure, unguarded curiosity.
Then the hand retreated, slipping back down his body, under the elastic of his boxers.
Ethan’s heart hammered against his ribs. He stayed limp, eyes shut, every nerve ending on fire.
Leo took him in hand, soft and pliant from sleep. His grip was careful, measuring. Ethan felt Leo’s whole body tense slightly behind him, a hitched inhale against the top of his head. He knew what Leo was realizing. The sheer, ridiculous size of him, even at rest. A fact Ethan had always been privately aware of but had never had compared to anything but porn, which didn’t count.
But that wasn’t the strangest part.
The strangest part was the feeling of Leo’s hand itself. The width of the palm, the length of the fingers, the way the thumb settled. It felt… familiar. It felt, in a way that made his brain short-circuit, exactly like his own hand.
Leo shifted. His feet, which had been tangled with Ethan’s, pressed down. A comparison of their own. Ethan wore a size twelve. Leo’s size-thirteen foot engulfed his, heel to toe. Another point of shocking symmetry.
Leo’s toes curled, a small, tense motion against Ethan’s instep.
The memory Leo was chasing arrived for Ethan, too. That first shower. The frantic, steam-blinded collision. Their bodies slick and desperate, hard lengths brushing, sliding. They’d been too lost in the panic and the need to look, to really see. But they’d felt it. A resonance.
Now, in the quiet morning, the evidence was in Leo’s hand.
Leo let go, his hand withdrawing as if from a live wire. He didn’t pull away, though. He settled closer, his nose burying into Ethan’s hair, his arm wrapping more possessively around his waist. Ethan could feel the hard line of Leo’s own morning erection pressed against his hip.
“I know you’re awake,” Leo murmured, his voice gravelly with sleep.
“How?”
“Your breathing changed like two minutes ago. You’re terrible at this.”
A slow smile spread across Ethan’s face. He opened his eyes, looking at the cracked plaster of his ceiling. “You’re a creep.”
“You let me.” Leo nuzzled the spot behind his ear. “So what does that make you?”
“Curious.”
Leo was silent for a long moment. “Yeah,” he finally said, the word full of a weight that had nothing to do with sleep. “Me too.” He exhaled, a warm rush against Ethan’s skin. “It’s weird, right? Not just the… the obvious. Everything. It’s like someone copied the template and just tweaked a few settings.”
Ethan knew exactly what he meant. The similar build, the hair, the eyes strangers commented on. It had been a coincidence, a funny quirk for their parents to gush over. Now it felt like a secret language written on their bones. “It’s weird,” Ethan agreed.
They lay there, listening to the house wake up. The groan of the pipes as someone used the shower down the hall. The muffled sound of the morning news from the living room TV.
“We have to get up,” Ethan said, making no move to do so.
“Why?” Leo’s hand splayed on his stomach. “Got a big plan?”
“Class. Practice. The whole ‘pretending yesterday didn’t completely nuke our lives’ thing.”
Leo laughed softly. “Right. That.” He pressed a kiss to Ethan’s shoulder. “My brain is just blue-screening every time I try to think about it. All I can actually process is this. Right here.”
Ethan turned his head, and their eyes met. Leo’s hazel eyes were still soft, flecked with green in the morning light. Ethan saw his own confusion, his own wonder, reflected back at him. It was the most terrifying and comforting thing he’d ever seen.
“Last night,” Ethan began, his voice low. “You said doors were slamming shut.”
“They did.”
“Are we… locked in?”
Leo searched his face. “Do you feel locked in?”
Ethan thought about it. The walls of his room, the house, the expectations outside. Then he felt the solid certainty of Leo’s body against his, the anchor of that arm. The world outside seemed flimsy in comparison. “No,” he said, the truth of it surprising him. “I feel like I finally found the key.”
A real smile, bright and unreserved, broke across Leo’s face. It was a smile Ethan realized he’d only seen fragments of before. “Okay,” Leo said, like it was that simple. Maybe it was.
The moment shattered with a sharp knock on the door. “Boys? You up? Pancakes are on!” Derek’s cheerful voice boomed through the wood.
They froze. A panicked, mutual silence. Then they erupted into a silent, frantic disentanglement. Leo rolled to his own side of the bed, yanking the sheets up. Ethan scrambled for a shirt on the floor, pulling it on inside out.
“Yeah! Yeah, we’re up!” Leo called back, his voice impressively normal. “Be down in a sec!”
They heard Derek’s footsteps retreat down the hall.
They looked at each other across the rumpled bed, the charged space between them now crackling with a new, giddy anxiety. Leo’s hair was a wild mess. Ethan’s shirt was on backwards. They were a crime scene of a perfect morning.
Leo grinned, that mischievous spark back in his eyes. “So. Pancakes with the parents.” He swung his legs out of bed, the sheets pooling around his waist. “You good?”
Ethan looked at him—this sudden, complicated, breathtaking fact in his life—standing in a beam of dusty sunlight. The world was waiting, full of questions they didn’t have answers to. But for the first time, he wasn’t facing it alone. He had an accomplice.
“Yeah,” Ethan said, getting to his feet. He snagged his jeans from the floor. “I’m good.”
As Leo headed for the door, he paused, his hand on the knob. He didn’t look back, but his voice was clear. “For the record, Ethan? The tweaks they made to my settings? All upgrades.”
He slipped out before Ethan could reply, leaving him standing alone in the middle of the room, his face heating with a flush that had nothing to do with panic and everything to do with the stupid, brilliant hope now blooming, unchecked, in his chest.