Read My Lips(22)

Thoughts of her bring me to the couch where I collapse and kick my sore feet up, my eyelids growing heavier by the second. I mash a throw pillow behind my head and let sleep have her way with me, assuming she wants me at all. I’ve had trouble sleeping lately. That same stupid nightmare keeps creeping into my dreams, the one where I wake up in a house filled with water. My bed’s floating, my roommates are gone, and no one’s there to help me. Since I’ve had the nightmare so many times, I always know none of the doors will open no matter how hard I push, and somehow, I can’t smash the window. Because I already know I can’t get free, I’m more terrified each time I have the nightmare. The room keeps filling up, and for a moment, I always think I see someone outside. I scream for them, begging for help, pounding my fist against the glass, and for once, it’s the rest of the world who can’t seem to hear a thing. No one comes to save my life.

I hate feeling helpless.

But that’s not the dream that finds me on the couch tonight. Instead, it’s her on that tiny stage all by herself, and the entire room at the Throng has emptied itself of all those others who don’t matter. It’s just her on the stage, and me in front of her.

And all that cold, silent space between us.

I study her. Like a zoomed-in camera, my eyes draw up the length of her smooth legs, over her supple hips, and arriving at her perky, perfect breasts.

My cock’s so hard, a moan vibrates my chest.

My eyes arrive at her lips, and suddenly I’m at the edge of the stage looking up at her. The whole room feels ice cold against my skin. Her breath is the only warmth I know, and it touches me in little jagged spurts and I haven’t even touched her yet. She wants me so bad. She wants me to do things to her. “Clayton,” I can imagine her saying.

Yes, I can imagine her voice. I think on what it might sound like. I feel it, smooth and seductive as her finger tracing my tattoos. Her pink lips dance, singing to me. What else can she do with them?

My cock is so hard. “Clayton …” It pushes against the inside of my jeans. I want to pull it out while her breath keeps touching my face.

I want to look up into her eyes and bury my mouth in her breasts.

I want to know what she smells like so bad. I want to taste her. I want to tear off her clothes and watch her gasp with surprise as the beast within me is unleashed on her.

I reach down for my cock, ready to release him.

Then I feel the subtle shake of a door closing and remove my hand, the dream destroyed. Fucking hell. I catch my breath and lift my head, only to find Brant standing over the couch holding a six-pack with a smug grin of victory stretched across his face.

Brant is the tall, slender type with the messy brown hair and blue eyes that all the girls go ape shit for, and he knows it too. He works out a third as much as I do, yet keeps a body that’s ripped and lean, no matter how much pizza he packs a day. I don’t know how the fucker does it. Brant’s come a long way since we were kids, that’s for sure. We’ve been the best of buddies since the day we fought and made up over bloody noses in an elementary school playground.

He wiggles the six-pack and gives me a lift of his eyebrows, offering one. I type, then lift my phone with a scowl:



WTF with the dishes?

Im not ur mom



Brant smirks, leans over the back of the couch and says it’s all Dmitri’s leftover mess from some friends he brought over last night. Then he adds something about how if I listened more carefully, I would’ve heard their ruckus and kicked them out.

I throw a punch into his arm for that remark, inspiring a laugh from him that I can almost hear with my mind. I’ve known Brant since long before I lost my hearing and we’ve cracked so many stupid jokes together that I know his laugh as intimately as my own. He’s the only person in the world who can get away with giving me shit for being deaf. Maybe it’s the only way we both can cope with it … even if he’s still shit at sign language and doesn’t seem able to retain a damn thing beyond the signs for “fart”, “poop”, “penis”, and “Cherry Coke”.

Brant comes around the couch and plops down by my legs, nearly sitting on them, and asks me if I’m still planning on coming to his thing. What I was planning to do was jerk off, you fucker. Truth is, I’m not even sure that’s what he asked; the sleepier I get, the harder it is to read lips. I have to think for a moment before realizing what he means: he’s got a bowling tournament next Saturday that he’s invited Dmitri and I to come watch. It’s an unofficial sort of local thing with the prize being free drinks for a week, but it means a lot to Brant. Also, he happens to be some weird kind of bowling ball whisperer.