All the Way Happy by Kit Coltrane

Author:Kit Coltrane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carina Press
Published: 2022-10-17T13:48:07+00:00

* * *

When his alarm went off, Jack burrowed his head farther into the down pillows and groaned. Why was he waking up this early?

He rolled over and stretched, lazy, down to his toes. Tired or not, he felt unusually fantastic. His whole body was relaxed like a spiral of honey off the comb, the bed so soft, his muscles slack. He had never felt like this.

Eyes still closed, he recalled flashes of abstract details from last night—the club, the courthouse, the grit of the stone behind him, and Theo’s hand. Theo’s mouth as it bit him and as his whole body released, as if he had been waiting his whole life for that sharp pain.

His eyes snapped open. Shame came in the wake of remembered pleasure.

He had really done that. After four years of struggling and hating and wanting, hungering, more than anything, and telling himself that it wasn’t true, it couldn’t be, and he had—

He thought about home, Dare and Quinn and, oh God, Meg—what would they think if they knew that the most pleasurable moment of his eighteen years was clutching at Theo in the dark, giving in? He and Meg, they weren’t—they were together, but not together, no real commitments, not sure where the next year would lead them, but—

What would they all think if they knew he—

A part of him that he had thought he had amputated wondered, what would his mother say?

He tried to think back to kissing Meg, winding his fingers through her dark red hair. He felt an echo of his lingering childhood love, like a sepia-toned photograph. Something precious but aged, like a snapshot in a family scrapbook.

But Theo—

Theo was that moment in The Wizard of Oz, you know, when she steps out into a new world of too-saturated pigments, the miasma of flowers and red glitter and golden bricks. When Jack had watched a wibbly copy of that film on their fuzzy television, he’d almost been sick from the transition—black-and-white was so much closer to his life, the way it had always been, and little Jack had wondered in that moment if he would ever truly see in color.

And now he had.

And it was five in the morning, and he’d only gotten four hours of sleep, and he was full of disgust at this fully realized truth, and even so he was going to get two cups of coffee and meet Theo in the silvery light of sunrise.

And it felt so good. Dangerously good.

He pulled on a pair of jeans, a fresh shirt, a hooded jacket, and stopped by the café he’d seen on his first morning here. He wandered up the hill to the University College Cork campus, smelling the river, watching blackbirds take flight.

In his whole life he had taken so few moments to notice beauty. His childhood was bereft of beauty. Everything here was still, crystallized in the hour before waking. The grass of the quad was perfectly manicured, soft and trimmed and so green. He watched

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