Engines & Lace: Chapter 8

Chapter 8 — What Could’ve Been — The story we never lived, but never stopped returning to.

We’d been at this for over a decade. Not steady, not anything you could map on a calendar, but long enough that each time felt like both a reunion and a continuation. By then, the dorms were years behind us. The firehouse too. He had married twice, divorced twice, gained kids along the way. I had moved into work trips, new cities, new men. Yet no matter how life shifted, he found his way back to me.

Sometimes it was me flying in for a conference, finding a spare night. Sometimes it was him detouring during one of his side gigs, picking me up outside a hotel with that smirk that meant he was already hard. We didn’t need much planning. Just the pull. Just the knowledge that even after years apart, our bodies would fall back into the same rhythm like no time had passed.

Those meetings often happened in places that didn’t belong to either of us: a roadside spot he knew, an anonymous hotel, the quiet stretch of my room after a work dinner. And no matter where, he always started the same—on his back, legs spread, dick heavy across his stomach. “Get me hard,” he’d mutter, voice low, and I’d drop to my knees like it was the first time all over again. His balls still swung big and full, always the same weight in my mouth, always the same groan when I sucked them just right.

But when the sex slowed, when the room quieted, he’d let pieces slip.

“Wish we’d been roommates,” he said once, sprawled across a cheap hotel bed, still buried inside me, cum leaking warm between us. His voice was almost casual, like it was just a thought, but I knew better.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“If we’d lived together back then…would’ve been different. Could’ve had you every night instead of sneaking around like kids.” His chest rose and fell, his hand dragging absently across my hip. “Wouldn’t have wasted all that time pretending.”

I didn’t answer right away. Because we both knew that wasn’t who he was then. Back in the dorms, he was still holding the line, still hiding behind girlfriends, still lacing up Timberlands like armor. Once I left town, he leaned harder into that straight life—marriages, kids, the version of himself that the world expected. He built it because he thought he had to. And maybe he still does.

But even through that, he kept coming back. To me. To what we had.

The sex never softened, even when the years piled up. He’d still feed me poppers, press the bottle to my nose while he slid himself deep inside, whispering things that only made sense in the dark. “Beg me for it.” “You want my babies.” “You’ll always be my boy.” And I’d take it all, stretched wide, moaning, hole sloppy from hours of being used. The mess was part of it—cum dripping out of me, sheets stained with lube, the raw proof that we had happened again.

But after, he lingered longer. Not just to fuck, but to remember. To remind me, maybe even himself, that this wasn’t just sex. That I wasn’t just another stop. His hand would rest on my thigh. His voice would drop. And every once in a while, he’d say it outright: “You’re my first boy. That don’t change.”

That mattered. More than the lace, the hotels, the years of sneaking. It mattered because I knew he meant it. I wasn’t just his first. I was the one he carried through all the other versions of his life. The one he kept circling back to, even when everything else looked different.

Now, looking back, I know we’ll never be what he imagined in those quiet confessions. I’ve always known that. We’ll never be roommates. We’ll never have the kind of life he hints at when the lights are low and the room smells like sweat and sex. He’ll keep moving through the world the way he always has—straight on the outside, complicated on the inside. And I’ll keep carrying these nights like proof.

What we had was never about permanence. It was about the charge, the claiming, the way he made me his even when he couldn’t say it out loud. It was about the first boy, and the only one he kept returning to.

And maybe that’s enough.

Because no matter how many times he walked out the door, no matter how many lives he built and tore down, he always came back. And when he did, he fucked me like he’d never left.

That’s what could’ve been. And that’s what was.