Free Coda 03 -The Letter Z by Marie Sexton Page A

first time, I didn’t feel weird about what had just happened. Yes, it had been me fucking him, but what he had done had in no way been submissive. Somehow, that made a difference.
    I reached up and grabbed a handful of his hair, and he let me pull him down. I stopped just before his lips touched mine.

    “I love you,” I said.
    I loved to watch his face when I said those words too. He did the same thing every time: his eyes would close, and he would cock his head to the side and smile just a little. It was like he had a little box somewhere deep in his mind, where he kept all his favorite things. And each time I told him how I felt, he would close his eyes for just a second, while he tucked that moment away in that secret place.
    His eyes opened again and he smiled down at me. “I loved you first.” I had to laugh. “What does that have to do with anything?” He just smiled. “It means I win.”
“Okay,” I said as I kissed him. “You win.”
    He went in the bathroom and brought a towel back so I could wipe up the mess he’d left on my chest and stomach. I still had my shoes on and my pants around my ankles, and I had to laugh as I took them off.
    “You couldn’t let me get undressed first?”
“Are you complaining?” he asked jokingly as he got into bed. “Not a bit,” I said, and climbed in behind him.
“At least you were awake,” he teased.
“Are you complaining?”
I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was smiling. “Not a bit.”
    Once I had his hair tucked out of the way so it wasn’t tickling my nose, I used my finger to trace a line between the light freckles on his shoulder.
    “Are you gonna tell me?” he asked after a couple of minutes.
    I didn’t answer at first. Jared and I saw eye to eye on almost everything, but the one thing we definitely did not agree on was Zach and Angelo. I loved Angelo like a brother, but I also knew that he wasn’t exactly Jared’s favorite person. Ever since our New Year’s party, Jared had noticeably cooled toward him. I wasn’t sure what had happened, and when I asked Jared, he wouldn’t say a word. He was non-confrontational to a fault, and I knew he didn’t want to put me in a position of having to choose sides. We seemed to have an unspoken agreement to not talk about them at all. But now he was asking, and I had to answer.
    I chose my words carefully, to not imply blame on either side. “Angelo thinks he doesn’t deserve Zach.”

    “And you think Zach doesn’t deserve Angelo.”

    It wasn’t a question. “I think sometimes Zach doesn’t think about what Angelo needs.”
    What followed was a pregnant silence. I knew he disagreed, but he wasn’t saying anything because he didn’t want to argue. I poked him in the ribs. “Speak,” I said, and he sighed.
    “I don’t know how you can say Zach doesn’t think about Angelo. Angelo’s the only thing Zach does think about.” I knew what he meant, and I wondered how it was that we could both be right. “No matter what Zach does, it’s never enough. Do you think Angelo was thinking about Zach when he was out on that dance floor?”
    “Zach didn’t seem to mind.”

    “And you think it’s fair that he can behave like that but then fly off the handle when anybody pays attention to Zach?”
    “Jonathan isn’t exactly ‘anybody’, and he wasn’t just ‘paying attention’ to Zach. He’s Zach’s ex, and he kissed him. So yeah, I think Angelo had a right to be pissed.”
    “I think Zach did too.”
    What could I say? I couldn’t deny that I could never have sat back and watched another man touch Jared the way those men had touched Angelo. But Zach had barely blinked an eye. “They’re not like us,” I said to myself as much as to him.
    “Holy fucking understatement of the year, Batman.”
    He was getting annoyed now. I ran my hand down the not-quitesmooth skin of his arm, and kissed the patch of freckles on his shoulder. “You were right,” I said gently, trying to make him