Chapter 20: The Back Porch at Dusk
The silence after the shower stretched into the afternoon, then into the evening.It wasn’t a peaceful silence. It was a thick, charged thing, heavy with everything they hadn’t said. Nathan had retreated into a focused, mechanical tidiness, wiping down the studio console until it gleamed, aligning pencils on the desk with a precision that bordered on violent. Michael floated through the house like a ghost, touching objects—a bookshelf, a curtain—as if to confirm their solidity. The easy communion of creation had fissured, replaced by the stark awareness of what they’d done, what they were doing. The world outside, with its cameras and accusations, felt like a gathering storm just beyond the walls.
By dusk, the air inside was suffocating. Michael slipped out the back screen door, its creak a loud protest in the quiet.The porch was old, its wood weathered to a soft gray. The forest beyond was a deepening well of shadows, the first fireflies winking like tiny, erratic pulses of a hidden heartbeat. He leaned on the railing, feeling the rough grain bite into his forearms. The air smelled of impending rain and decaying leaves.He didn’t hear Nathan approach. He only felt the shift in the atmosphere, a solid presence materializing behind him.He didn’t turn.
“You’ve been avoiding me all day,” Nathan said. His voice was low, stripped of its usual gravel, just clean and cold.
“You’ve been cleaning,” Michael replied softly, staring into the gathering dark. “You only clean like that when your head’s a warzone.”
Nathan’s hand slapped down on the railing next to Michael’s, caging him.“Maybe it is. You’re in my house.In my head.In my fucking bed. You’re a black hole, Michael. A beautiful, tragic black hole, and I’m letting you pull me apart.”
Michael finally turned.Nathan’s face was pale in the twilight, his eyes dark pools. The guarded expression was gone, replaced by a raw, unvarnished fear. “Then let me go,” Michael whispered, the words tearing at his throat.“No.” The denial was absolute. Nathan’s other hand came up, gripping Michael’s jaw.“That’s the problem. I can’t.”
The kiss wasn’t gentle. It was a collision, a punctuation mark to the day’s tension. Nathan’s mouth was demanding, punishing, as if he could fuse them together through sheer force. Michael responded in kind, his own frustration and fear meeting Nathan’s head-on.Their teeth clicked. Nathan spun him around, shoving him back against the wooden railing.It groaned under the impact.
Nathan’s hands went to the button of Michael’s jeans, fumbling in the low light. The rasp of the zipper was obscenely loud.He shoved the denim down over Michael’s hips, the rough material scraping skin.
“Nathan, wait—”
Nathan spat into his own palm, a crude, deliberate gesture. “No more waiting.” He didn’t prepare, didn’t ask. He pushed two fingers inside Michael in one sharp, twisting motion.
Michael’s back arched, a choked scream ripping from his lungs as the dry, brutal intrusion breached him.The pain was white-hot, a searing line of fire. He clawed at Nathan’s shoulders, his nails digging through the fabric of his hoodie.
Nathan covered his mouth with his own, swallowing his cries. The kiss was a mockery of comfort, all hard pressure and shared, frantic breath.“You feel that?” Nathan growled against his lips. “You feel how fucking empty you were? I can feel you clenching around me, trying to spit me out. You won’t.”
He scissored his fingers, the stretch agonizing, a violation that was also a claiming. Tears welled in Michael’s eyes, blurring the forest into a smear of dark green and bruised purple.He was pinned, a specimen. The rough wood of the railing ground into the small of his back with every brutal movement of Nathan’s hand.
Then the fingers were gone, leaving a throbbing, hollow ache. Nathan freed his own cock, hard and angry in the cool air. He positioned himself, the blunt head pressing against the violated, unresisting entrance.“Look at me,” Nathan commanded, his voice shaking now.
Michael forced his eyes open, meeting Nathan’s gaze. In the dying light, he saw it all: the rage, the fear, the desperate, terrifying love.Nathan thrust.
It was a single, shearing stroke, a taking.Michael’s vision whited out. The railing dug deeper, a counterpoint to the splitting fullness.He couldn’t breathe.Nathan didn’t pause. He set a brutal, piston-driven rhythm, each drive knocking the air from Michael’s lungs in a sharp gasp.The porch creaked in time, a lewd accompaniment.
“This,” Nathan grunted, his hips slamming home, “this is real. Not the fairy dust and the fucking moonwalks.This sweat.This pain.This is you. And it’s mine.”
His words were worse than the fucking.They were true. Michael’s legs buckled, but Nathan caught him, an arm like an iron band around his chest, holding him up to be impaled. The pace intensified, becoming savage, unchained. Nathan’s balls slapped against him with a wet, rhythmic smack. The world narrowed to the pain-pleasure radiating from his core, to the smell of Nathan’s sweat and the damp forest, to the animal sounds ripped from their throats.
Nathan’s hand slid down Michael’s stomach, slick with sweat, and gripped his cock. He was hard, had been since the first shove against the railing. Nathan jerked him in time with his thrusts, a cruel, perfect synchronization.
“Come for me,” Nathan snarled in his ear, his voice raw.“Come on the fucking porch like an animal. Show me you’re here.”
The coil snapped. Michael’s orgasm tore through him without grace or beauty, a violent, shuddering seizure. He cried out, a broken sound lost in the trees, as his seed spilled over Nathan’s fist and onto the weathered wood below.
The convulsions of Michael’s body triggered Nathan’s own end. With a final, deep plunge, he buried himself to the hilt and held, a guttural moan tearing from his chest as he pulsed inside him.They sagged together against the railing, a single heaving mass of spent energy. Nathan’s forehead fell to Michael’s shoulder, his breath hot and ragged. Michael’s face was wet with tears and sweat, pressed against Nathan’s hoodie.
For a long time, the only sounds were their slowing breaths and the first tentative drops of rain pattering on the porch roof. Nathan carefully, so carefully, withdrew. He gently tugged Michael’s jeans back up over his trembling limbs, doing the button with fumbling fingers.
He turned Michael around and pulled him into an embrace, not sexual, but foundational.Michael shuddered, burying his face in Nathan’s neck.
“I’m so fucked up,” Nathan whispered into his hair, the anger gone, leaving only a hollow exhaustion.“Me too,” Michael breathed. “That’s why we fit.”
The rain began in earnest, a steady drumming on the leaves. They stood there on the porch, in the dark, held together by their broken pieces, as the storm finally broke around them.