by May Archer
From inside the room came a shriek followed by a metallic clatter and a thud so loud I could almost feel the floor shake.
“Loafers?” Fuck. I kicked at the door. “Loafers! What’s going on? It better not be another gecko!”
But there was no answer except another slightly garbled scream.
“Shit. I’m coming in, asshole! You’d better be decent!” I tried the door, but it was locked, so I pulled up on the knob and shoved my hip into the hollow metal. It opened with a pop, as I’d known it would, and my eyes darted around the darkened room.
Nothing seemed out of place. The room was ruthlessly clean and citrus fresh. The king-sized bed was covered with a tidy, and apparently new, white coverlet. A distinctive pair of brown loafers were lined up beside the bed. The world’s saddest air conditioner chugged out an anemic stream of barely cool air. And from the closed bathroom came the sound of rushing water on tile along with a pained groan.
Shit.
Loafers was in the shower. And for all I knew, the cries I’d heard were not unhappy cries.
Thank God he hadn’t seen me.
I pivoted to retreat, tiptoeing as much as a person could while wearing sandals, but just before I cleared the doorway, a tidal wave of water poured from under the bathroom door, soaking the threadbare carpet. Loafers gave another gurgling yell.
I stood for a second, undecided. I mean, what were the chances he was getting off on nearly drowning, versus the chances that he was actually drowning?
Loafers, who’d seemed shocked at the idea of rope play, was probably not into some kind of water-based autoerotic asphyxiation.
“Fuck it,” I muttered. I pushed open the bathroom door and stepped into a fucking lake.
“Mo-ther-fuck-ing-fuck!” Loafers yelled, fortunately not at me but at the fire-hydrant-strength stream of water gushing out of a hole in the middle of the shower wall where the handle used to be.
Loafers was buck naked on his knees in the center of the tub, with his eyes screwed shut and his hands out in front of him, holding the broken shower handle like he was attempting to play a high-stakes game of pin the tail on the donkey with the plumbing. The drab gray shower curtain was halfway open like he’d debated escaping the shower before deciding to stand and fight. His hair was plastered to his head, and water sluiced down his surprisingly fit body in a way that was very, very…
Not the point, Reardon.
“Loafers!” I yelled. “Get out of there!”
He opened his eyes, and his head swung in my direction… and the stream of water smacked him in the side of the face, knocking him over. He floundered and it sounded like he hit his head against the bottom of the tub. Shit.
I waded through the puddled water, and nearly slipped and fell myself, until I ditched my flip-flops and surfed over to him.
“Loafers? Mason!” He was curled on his side, in the fetal position, covering his face. His fingers were still clenched around the stupid shower handle, and it sounded like he was saying, “It came off in my hands! It just… came off!” which meant he wasn’t dead or dying… probably.
So I waded back out into the bedroom, ran to the empty closet, threw open the access panel in the lower back corner, and turned the shut-off valve until the sound of rushing water faded to a steady, hollow drip-drip-drip.
I heaved a shaky breath, then let it out.
“Mason?”
No response.
“Mason?” I stood and picked my way across the squelching carpet back to the bathroom. “Are you okay?”
The only reply was a wet, snuffling noise, and from the bathroom doorway I could see his shoulders shaking, like he was crying. Or maybe in shock. What did shock look like?
Damn it. What was the good of having a doctor around when he was the one hurt?
“Is it your head?” I demanded, rushing toward the tub with zero regard for the stupid flip-flops I’d abandoned earlier. I tripped and caught air, grabbing at the first thing I could find to break my fall, which happened to be the ancient shower curtain.
I landed directly on top of Mason in the tub, with the curtain tangled around my waist and one arm, while his shoulder lodged firmly into my opposite armpit. A second later, the curtain rod landed on my head.
“Ow. Piece of shit!”
I reached up and pushed the rod onto the floor, then balanced my weight on my one free hand, so I wasn’t entirely suffocating the man beneath me, though I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to extricate myself without assistance.
“Mason! Are you okay?”
He was still covering his face with his hands, clutching the stupid shower handle to his forehead, so I wriggled my trapped arm out of its plastic prison, grabbed the handle, and threw it on the floor next to the curtain rod where it landed with a splash.
Mason’s shoulders shook harder than ever, and he made a sound like he was suppressing a sob.
My stomach twisted. I sucked at this comforting shit.
I pushed myself up further so he could maybe breathe better, and tried to pry his fingers away from his face, but I ended up slipping and falling on him more fully, because somehow this day kept getting worse.
“Christ, I’m sorry. Mason? Fuck. Please calm down. It’s gonna be okay. Okay? It’s gonna be… you know… fine.”
I shook his shoulder, but the sobbing continued, so I ran a hand over his wet hair instead. I was leagues out of my depth and sinking fast.
“I know you’ve had a lot happen today. And it’s gotta seem overwhelming. But… just… don’t cry. Did you concuss yourself?” I pulled at his fingers again. “Did you… Wait! Motherfucker. Are you laughing?”
Mason nodded, his eyes still squeezed shut. His whole body trembled as he sucked in a breath. “Oh, God! This day. I’m not a passionate person,” he moaned. He let his forearm fall back over his face and shifted so he was lying on his back in the inch or so of water that remained in the tub. “Figures I want something that’s mine, and it turns out what’s mine is a situation that’s fucked-up beyond all recognition.”
“Are you… are you having a mental break right now?” I demanded as I tried to process his collection of unrelated sentences.
“All I wanted was respect and independence. Is this better or worse than being recruited by the mob, do you think?”
Shit. “How hard did you hit your head?” I pulled at his arm again. “Look at me, Mason. Can you focus? How many eyes do I have?”
He sniffed loudly and moved his arm just enough to look up at me.
“You have one,” he said promptly. “At least, one that I can see, because the other is nearly swollen shut.” He lifted a hand to my face, but I flinched away, and he shook his head disapprovingly. “You should’ve kept the ice on it,” he chided softly.
“Yeah, well. I was a little busy playing chauffeur.”
“And intimidating innocent doctors.”
“Did not.”
But he lifted an eyebrow, and all of a sudden, I remembered with a wince. Rafe’s office. My shirt.
Right.
“You’re not innocent. But I, ah… I definitely do owe you an apology for that scene earlier.” I took a deep breath. “I’m truly sorry that I tried to intimidate you. I’m sorry I made things weird. I’m not that guy, I swear. Okay?”
Mason nodded slowly and wiped his eyes. “Okay.”
“Just like that?” I mean, I wanted him to believe me. I just… didn’t get why he would, after the day we’d had.
Mason smiled. “You’re a jerk and possibly a serial killer, but I don’t get the impression that you’re a liar, and dealing with your uncle would make a saint commit a felony. Plus, I’m not sure if you noticed, but my own behavior today wasn’t exactly impeccable. So, yeah. Okay.”
“Okay,” I repeated, weirdly relieved. “So, I brought up your suitcases. And I bought you dinner.” I hooked a thumb out the bathroom door, to where the room door was still hanging wide open and the darkening pink sky was just visible over the water. “
Chicken stew and fried yucca. As a peace offering. And I, um… brought you an old plug-in night-light I found kicking around.” Kicking around at Pickles’ grocery store in the home goods section, to be precise. “Just in case the room got—” Jesus, I sounded like an idiot. “—dark.”
“Wow.” He smiled and turned my words from earlier back on me. “Well, as apologies go, I’ve had worse.”
My throat went tight.
Mason’s hair was a mass of damp, brown waves that made him look about twelve years old, all pushed back as they were. But right at the front, two or three silver threads glinted, and I couldn’t help but stare. It was another chink in Mason Bloom’s veneer of perfection—not that there was much of that left, to be honest, given where we were and why. A little crack that let the truth of him shine through.
My gaze tracked lower, and when our eyes met I saw that his were wide and watchful, a luminous green against his pale skin, and it might have just been my wishful thinking or whatever, but I’d have sworn he was waiting for something.
Waiting for me.
My eyes darted down to his lips, which were parted slightly, and I noticed the moment when his breathing hitched from something that was definitely not laughter. My gaze shifted back to his, but Mason didn’t move, so neither did I, and the moment spun out. It lasted two seconds—then ten, then twenty—and for every second, there was an alternate universe in which one of us moved forward or back, committed or retreated, but in this one we were frozen. Staring. Daring each other with our eyes.
No misunderstandings. No place else to be. We might have stayed there forever.
But then a gust of salty air blew through the room, sending the bathroom door crashing into the wall and kicking up little goose bumps on every part of my skin that was damp—which was basically all the parts. I shivered back to reality and straight into an Adam-and-Steve-type moment of awareness, where I suddenly realized that—Hey, now!—Mason Bloom was all the way naked.
And lying under me.
In a pink bathtub.
Soaking wet.
With his body separated from my body by only a cheap plastic shower curtain and my damp, damp cargo shorts.
My dick went hard almost instantly.
I’ll take Awkward Porn Scenarios for $2000, Alex?
But the weirdest part? Mason wasn’t pushing me off him. He had to notice I was hard, the way my cock was pressed against his hip, but didn’t say a word about it. In fact, he seemed pretty darn content to just stay there all night. A little smile played around his mouth, like he was… relaxed?
Just a couple of dudes, doing what dudes do on a Friday night. In a tub.
Mason even shifted his hips the tiniest bit like he was getting comfortable, adjusting his position so the lower half of his body could better cradle mine.
You know, just one bro helping another, if the first bro was naked and the other was on top of him, fully erect and all wet. No homo.
The moment he shifted, though, we both noticed that wasn’t the only issue at hand. Mason was hard, too. Undeniably, unequivocally, rock-fucking-hard.
I say we both noticed because yeah, Mason looked nearly as shocked as I was. I hadn’t thought a guy could get that hard without noticing, but maybe the knock to the head had shaken him up or something.
His green eyes flared wide, and I could almost see him connecting the dots between “Oh, gee, I’m hard” and “Oh, shit, I’m hard and naked with Fenn.”
I held my breath and waited for the fallout. For the freak-out. For the empty laugh that didn’t cover the outraged anger. For the denial. For the blame that was 100 percent certainly gonna fall in my lap.
Instead, Mason blinked like a little owl, sank his teeth into his bottom lip, looking like all thirty-one flavors of fuckable in one annoying package. Then he shifted again so his erection rubbed against mine, and he sucked in a breath like it felt pretty damn good.
I was out of that tub in a nanosecond, on my knees on the floor in the cold water, struggling to remove the kraken-like shower curtain from around my ankles.
I didn’t fuck around with straight guys, and I definitely didn’t fuck around with guys who claimed to be straight but were willing to be corrupted.
“Listen, that thing in Rafe’s office earlier?” I said, getting to my feet. “Me, getting in your space? That was my fault. A hundred percent. And I already apologized for it. But I’m not taking responsibility for… for… this.” I waved a hand in the direction of his crotch. “You get me? This was not my fault, it was yours.”
Mason’s cheeks flamed red and he sat up, bunching the curtain over his groin like he was suddenly embarrassed—three minutes too late, in my opinion, ’cause I’d been feeling that hard length pressed against me until a second ago.
“Of course it wasn’t your fault! It’s not… it’s not anyone’s fault. It’s not a fault thing. Stimulus is stimulus.” He paused, like he was trying to digest his own bullshit.
“Really? You get stimulated around guys a lot?” I grabbed my sandals off the floor and jammed them on my feet. “’Cause there’s a word for those of us who experience this regularly, and it’s not straight.”
“N-no, I never have. But we…” He waved his hand at the shower. “And you…” He waved a hand at the curtain on the floor. “And… it just happened. I don’t know why.” He sounded confused.
From a distant corner of my brain came a snippet of a conversation, playing like a picture-in-picture.
“It just happened, Fenn. I felt you wanting me from the minute you walked into my office, and I couldn’t help it. You made me want you back.”
“Why you gotta be so sexy, Fenn? I was doin’ so good today, then you walk in here like a cool drink of water and I can’t think right. Lock the door and get on your knees for me. Now.”
“Come on, Fenn, me ’n’ Misty have practically been engaged since the cradle. It don’t mean a single thing to either of us. She’s never made me feel the way you make me feel. Just one more kiss, Fenn. One more… that’s it. God, Fenn, yes!”
“We need to make sure Dad never finds out. He wouldn’t understand I’m still straight as I ever was. He wouldn’t understand you made me weak for you.”
I sucked in a deep breath and tried to focus on the shivering man in the bathtub.
“Yeah, well. My dick’s usually a little more selective than yours seems to be. Stimulus is stimulus? Please.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means…” I stared down at him, trying to figure out what to say.
It meant… I knew a guy like you, once.
It meant… Just about every gay man has known a hundred guys like you.
It meant… I am done with guys who are straight as an arrow, straight as a line while the lights are on but can’t wait to get their dicks in my mouth the second we’re alone.
It meant… I am over guys who let me fuck them, then end up fucking me over.
“It means… nothing,” I finally concluded, squeezing my eyes shut and turning around. “Not a damn thing. Enjoy your dinner in heterosexual tranquility.”
“Wait, what?” Mason sputtered. “Don’t be like that, Fenn! I’m sorry, okay? It was an accident. I couldn’t help it!” His face got redder and redder. “I thought we were okay with each other now.”
“God. Is there a script you people follow?”
“Us people?”
If he’d face-planted into the tub again, Mason couldn’t have looked more bewildered, and on some level I knew I was being unfair. Mason wasn’t Thad Chambers. Mason was Mason.
But also? I had One Life Rule for a reason.
“Never mind. Just…” I clenched my hands into fists. “Call Rafe. Tell him to get a plumber out here. Tell him to pay the guy a decent rate and not offer him a hunk of moon rock for the job.”
“Okay, but—”
“And have him move you to another room. Immediately.”
“Yeah, obviously. But—”
“And
tell him he can take your ass to work in the morning.”
“I can take my own ass!” he returned. “I’ll call a cab.”
I gave him a withering glance that I hoped conveyed his chances of finding a cab that would come all the way to Whispering Key and take him a mile down the road to work.
“And watch out, because there’s a storm coming, and the door locks are shit,” I warned. Turned out Beale and his motherfucking portents had been right, damn it all.
“Fenn!” I could hear the rustle of plastic as he shifted. “Can we please talk about—”
I shook my head. The last thing I wanted to do was talk. If I stayed one more minute, I was going to kiss him. I was going to do anything he’d let me do.
And then I’d hate myself even more than I already did.
“Have a good night, Loafers. Call me when you’re ready to go back to the airport.”
Chapter Six
Mason
Micah: Hey. You settling in?
Micah: It’s been four days. Were you gonna answer my calls, ever?
Micah: Look, I’m sorry I wasn’t as supportive as I could have been the other day.
Micah: I was surprised.
Micah: And I’ll miss you. We all will.
Micah: But I believe in you, Mase. Always have. You know what you’re doing.
I gritted my teeth and forced myself to type.
Me: Hey! Not angry, promise. Settling in, but super busy. Love you lots. Love to Con, too. Call you next weekend!
I shoved my phone facedown into the comforter and groaned up at the ceiling.
That was some bitter fucking irony right there. Micah thought I knew what I was doing? Ha. In my entire life—and I mean, even including the teenaged parts, when I did almost every harebrained thing my idiot friends ever dared me to do, complete with all the broken bones and community service that earned me—I had never, ever felt less like I knew what I was doing.
Taking control of my one goddamn life had ended up with me stranding myself on an island with spotty cell service, rotting plumbing, and the most insane collection of humans I’d ever seen assembled in one place.