Neon Saturday Night (Low Country Lovers Book 2)

by Julia McBryant

  “Don’t wanna stay here all weekend,” Calhoun says. “Wanna play minigolf.”

  “Shhh,” Audie says. He lets his fingers play lower and stroke the short, wiry hair at the base of Calhoun’s cock — still soft yet. God, Audie loves to suck him hard. He pulls the covers down, flips around, and takes all of Calhoun in his mouth. It’s sloppy, without Calhoun stiff; Audie has to hold his base, but he can use his tongue to vary the pressure and move him in and out of his mouth fast. Calhoun groans with pleasure. Audie pops off and licks Calhoun’s balls. Ohgod, knowing he shaved them is different than feeling them smooth under his tongue. Audie begins hardening.

  `“Come kiss me,” Calhoun says. “Please Audie?”

  Whatever makes Calhoun happy. He turns around and meets his boyfriend’s lips, soft and pillowy against his own. Audie grabs the lube and slicks them both; they both harden some more, and more still when they twine around each other and grind, slipping on one another. They kiss gently this time, less desperately. Audie wants to give Calhoun time. But Calhoun is already begging, tilting his chin up, wrapping around Audie and thrusting his hips.

  “You’re already hard,” Audie teases, not that he has reason to; he’s just as stiff. He strokes Calhoun, earning pleased little sounds and nails in his back. “Do I get to fuck you again? Can you turn around and let me fuck you?”

  Audie likes this almost as much as having Calhoun up against the wall. So decadent, just to keep him here in this room and fuck him.

  Calhoun hums with pleasure and turns to be the little spoon. Audie uses lube more to slick him than to open him. “You want this?” he asks, smacking his cock deliciously against Calhoun’s tight entrance. Calhoun whines, straightens his lower leg more and raises his top one towards his chest. “Oh, you do want it?” Audie asks. He rubs himself on Calhoun, his cock sliding against him. When his boyfriend whines again, Audie holds Calhoun’s leg up, pitches his hips so he almost catches on his hole, then starts to slip inside him. He can never manage to tease Calhoun for long. That perfect slide into him, the circle tight on his cock, Calhoun gasping in his arms, already anticipating the pleasure of it. Audie knows Calhoun’ll have to jerk himself a good bit to get him off; he won’t hit that spot as well at this angle.

  But he does manage to graze it, and Calhoun sucks in a breath, then wiggles on him. He knows Calhoun’s playing with his cock and feels him sigh with pleasure.

  “I know you love this,” he says into Calhoun’s ear. “You know I could do this for hours, don’t you?” He thrusts a few times. “You feel so good against me. Don’t you do it fast. Don’t you make yourself go fast for me.”

  Calhoun makes some more pleased sounds, rocking back and forth between Audie’s hand and his own cock. Audie moves a little bit. This will take a while and he wants it that way. He closes his eyes and rests his lips on Calhoun. So good to be close like this. Audie will never take this for granted. This slow, gentle movement, wrapped around Calhoun, holding him close: this is why Audie will give Calhoun whatever he asks. He handed Calhoun everything and maybe one day he will regret it, but not today. Today Audie will hold him and tell him he loves him the best way he knows how. If love is a story we can tell with our bodies Audie wants to recite it again and again, chapter and verse.

  Audie continues to play with him, holding Calhoun tight, stroking his chest and belly, nudging in and out, in and out of him. Enough to feel that good sliding, that tight ring clenching up and down on him. He wants to thrust, to grab Calhoun and take him. But then Audie always does; he wars with his body’s natural impulse every time to fuck Calhoun hard rather than make love to him.

  “Feel good?” he whispers.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Calhoun says. He’s gone over into that dreamy state, an arm wrapped around the one Audie has stretched across his chest, the slowly jerking himself. His head bows. “So good, Audie. Don’t stop, love. Don’t stop. Just like this.”

  This is how it works, usually: once hard and fast. They seem to need it, after their time apart. One week at least, two weeks, sometimes three, depending on class schedules and papers due and exams. Three weeks of jacking it in the shower, three weeks of phone calls, three weeks of texting and messaging. Never the same as the smell of his neck, the press of his body. Audie dreams of it. When he sees Calhoun, he wants him hard and fast, wants to bite him, pin him, top him in every sense of the word. Calhoun comes to Audie all doe eyes and begging, the words Audie wants to hear: fuck me. I want your hard cock, please Audie please fuck me hard. But the second time — the second time is always different. They slow down and hold each other. It takes a long while.

  Audie can hear the ocean, if he listens. He would rather hear Calhoun, his small pleasured noises. Audie can give him this. He knows he can’t give much, and so he gives whatever he can.

  “Please?” Calhoun finally asks, after an age, after time has warped, twisted to a beautiful shape in which nothing matters but their bodies warm against one another. “Please, Audie?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Audie says. “Yeah.”

  Calhoun jerks himself harder, faster, and Audie begins fucking Calhoun in earnest. “I love you,” he whispers. It’s easier now. “I love you, I love you, I love you.” He chants it like a mantra, like a prayer, like a desperate man’s last hope. “I love you.” He thrusts harder. “I love you.” Calhoun pumps his cock harder, passes over his head. Audie’s going to go. He’s going to go inside him and it’ll be so good, Calhoun’s warm slicked inside holding him tight, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” he chants as he tightens, as he stands on the edge of it, as he feels Calhoun jerks himself quick and hard. Audie lets go in him, a flood of come that leaves him shuddering hard and pumping again and again, back arched. Calhoun cries out and spills into hand. They come down together, thrusting less and less, then subsiding into slow dripping.

  Calhoun turns. “I love you,” he says.

  “I know you do,” Audie tells him. He kisses Calhoun. “I know you do, baby.”

  They wipe up and curl together into sleep. Audie holds Calhoun in his arms. He so seldom has the chance. He will give Calhoun whatever he asks. He loves him.

  They wake and order room service. Calhoun giggles while Audie feeds him strawberries. “I wanna go to the pool,” he says after.

  Audie rolls his eyes. “It’s a concrete hole in the ground with screaming children. I can keep you up here and make you feel good.” He nips Calhoun’s neck again.

  “No,” Calhoun says firmly. “You’re just afraid you’ll like the lazy river. Put on your damn rashguard so you don’t catch fire and get your fine ass in your suit.”

  Audie sighs. Calhoun always wins.

  This is how he finds himself, sunglassed, in a yellow tube. They float around in a serpentine with the inevitable splashing children. “This is it?” Audie asks.

  “This is it,” Calhoun says, lying back on the tube. “Isn’t it awesome?”

  “It’s something, all right,” Audie comments.

  “You’re afraid to like it. We’re in the sun. We have nothing to do but sit here and talk and enjoy ourselves.”

  “It’s called a lazy river and kids have probably peed in this water.”

  Calhoun looks at him over his sunglasses. “Since when have you hated kids? And anyway, there’s chlorine.”

  Audie sighs. “Do you know what my mother would say if she saw me doing this?”

  “Since when do you care about what your mother thinks? You hate your mother.”

  “It’s emblematic, Calhoun.”

  “You’re afraid to have fun and you’re ruining it so I demand you enjoy this.”

  Audie sighs. He lays back into his tube.

  Okay, it’s not that bad. But still. He is in the armpit of South Carolina in a yellow tube in a concrete hole floating in circles. God save him. Like Faulkner says: tell about the South. Tell about the South indeed.

  “Okay,” Calhoun announces at some point when he determines his tan will soon turn the corner to burn. “Lunch
then putt-putt. We need to go to Dirty Dick’s Crab Shack.”

  “No,” Audie says firmly. “That’s so trashy I can’t even begin.”

  “Then we’re going to Hooters.”

  “Fine,” Audie says, rolling his eyes. Like they care about tits.

  “The owl sign is boobs,” he complains as they pull up. “Calhoun. We can’t live with ourselves if we go in there. What if someone sees us?” What the fuck is he going to tell his friends about this weekend? We went to Hooters, two gay guys on a date. Christ on a tricycle.

  “Of course the sign is boobs!” Calhouns says gleefully. “And look, the waitresses wear the shortest shorts ever.”

  “Why do we care again?” Audie asks.

  “Because it’s fun, dork. C’mon.”

  Audie suddenly finds himself caring very much about tits. And ass. He might be gay but goddamn. These are some serious racks and you can’t help but stare. “See?” Calhoun says. “You just kind of want to — I don’t know. You can’t help it!” He laughs. They order hot wings and talk to the waitresses. Audie thinks they’re probably the only people who manage to maintain eye contact with the girls all day.

  “Okay,” says their waitress. “We have a bet going in the back. You two are gay, aren’t you?”

  Audie sighs. “How’d you know?”

  “You’re not leering enough. Plus you’re touching legs under the table.”

  They get free hot wings and all the waitresses want to take their pictures and think they’re adorable. Calhoun cracks up and kisses their cheeks.

  “My Gran would say that if you don’t stop, your eyes are gonna roll right outta your head, Audie,” Calhoun sings.

  Audie sighs.

  “That was so fun,” Calhoun says. “Okay. What kind of golf do you wanna play? There’s pirate golf and Jurassic Putt and ocean golf and jungle golf and every kind of golf ever.”

  Audie cracks a half smile, all he can manage in the Southern-state neon glare, still lit in the midday sun. A girl walks by in the shortest Daisy Dukes he’s ever seen, a straw hat, and a Confederate flag bikini top. He almost drops his head in his hands. “You wanna play pirate golf.”

  “I so wanna play pirate golf.”

  Audie sucks at pirate golf. He never once manages par and actually hits his ball into the blue water Calhoun swears is full of mosquito repellent. Audie cheats unmercifully so they can finish, which Calhoun pretends not to notice. When they finally finish the eighteenth hole, Audie sighs with relief.

  “We should get tattoos,” Calhoun says as they walk back to the Porsche.

  “No. Do you know what kind of people get tattoos?”

  “We should,” Calhoun says. “Matching ones. Like somewhere no one would ever see.”

  “What, like on our butts?”

  “No, upper thigh. Really high up. What would you get? Or maybe a piercing. I always wanted an industrial. You know, in one part of your ear and out the other.”

  “No.”

  “You could get a line of poetry,” Calhoun wheedles. “Like James Dickey or William Faulkner. I know what I would get. It’s from Pat Conroy’s Beach Music.”

  “What?” Audie asks suspiciously.

  “No story is a straight line.”

  Audie sighs. “Do you promise not to laugh? And I’ll never get it, so don’t even ask. It’s from James Dickey’s “Falling”: ‘there is still time to live on a breath made of nothing but the whole night.’”

  “Isn’t that the poem where the stewardess falls out the airplane?”

  “At least it isn’t the one where the kid fucks the sheep.”

  Calhoun laughs and links arms with him. “Do you know how much I’m in love with you?”

  “I know how much you’re in love with this tourist hellhole.”

  “Now we’re going back to the hotel and we’re getting our suits on and we’re going to the water park,” Calhoun announces. “And ordering a pizza because I’m starved.”

  So they snarf Dominos and change into their suits again, Audie very reluctantly. He’s never been to a water park, but he knows they’re filled with screaming children and probably bacteria of the most virulent kind. But whatever, it makes Calhoun happy and anything that makes Calhoun happy makes him happy. Love covers a multitude of sins.

  There’s more Confederate flag bikinis, mostly worn by girls with Yankee accents, and sweet baby Jesus in a manger this fuckery has to stop. “You know what that flag stands for, right?” he asks a girl.

  “It’s all about the South,” she tells him.

  “It’s all about slavery,” he informs her.

  “Whatever, it’s cute. Asshole.” She stomps off. Calhoun rolls his eyes.

  “Audie. Stop policing people’s clothing choices. And look. WATERSLIDE! I love waterslides!”

  “I’ve never been on a waterslide,” Audie says, eyeing the twisting monstrosity soaring above them.

  “You had the most weirdly deprived childhood. C’mon.” Calhoun grabs his hand and drags him up, up, up a metal staircase, way too high for Audie’s comfort. The attendant counts to ten and pushes Calhoun down a water-soaked dark tube. “See you at the bottom!” he yells to Audie.

  “Oh, fuck,” Audie mutters. He sits down. They count it off and push him, and he’s suddenly hurtling through the black, slipping and sliding down curves he can’t see, going up walls and down them, side to side, oh my god, what the blue fuck, he’s going to die, he can’t see anything and he wants to curl up in a ball but he’s going to fall into the water, and suddenly he lands with an enormous splash in a four-foot deep pool. Calhoun’s waiting on the far side, his hair slicked back.

  “Wasn’t that awesome?” he demands.

  “It was … something,” Audie says. He’s shaking a little.

  “Let’s do it again,” Calhoun says, and drags him to the top.

  The second time isn’t as bad.

  The third time is better.

  The fourth time Audie rides out the turns, slaloms like an Olympic skeleton player, then does his best to cannonball.

  They ride all the waterslides. Audie pretends to hate them because he feels like he’s supposed to hate them. Audie does not like waterslides.

  Except he sort of does.

  On the way back to the hotel, Calhoun grins. “Play me your secret favorite song,” he says, as they idle on the strip. “The most embarrassing favorite song. And sing it.”

  “No,” Audie says, mortified. No way will he admit that to anyone.

  “Do it.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll do it if you do it.”

  Audie sighs. Calhoun can keep at things like a dog gnawing an old bone, and there’s nothing to do but give into him. So Audie flips to his super-secret playlist. And out of the speakers blares Weezer’s cover of Toto’s “Africa.” Calhoun cracks up. “You have to sing,” he orders.

  That’s how they end up doing a loud duet to Weezer driving down the Myrtle Beach strip while passers-by sing along. Audie thinks he’d want to sink down in his seat and die. But it’s actually kind of awesome. Clearly, it makes Calhoun happy. And it’s so freeing, just belting it out, letting everything go, refusing to care. He’s never refused to care in his entire life. Audie’s always worried about what people will think, that they’re looking. But under the neon and the Confederate flag bikinis and the shouting drunks it doesn’t matter anymore. They’re just one more spectacle.

  “You wanna hear mine?” Calhoun grins. “But you have to sing.”

  “Um, okay?” Audie says.

  He fiddles with Audie’s phone.

  “I stay out …” he starts along with Taylor Swift. Hideously off-key. And suddenly they’re singing “Shake It Off” as loud as they can, in a red 911 Porsche Carrerra, which may be the gayest thing that’s ever happened in Myrtle Beach or anywhere else in the great state of South Carolina. Girls stop and dance, sing drunkenly. Calhoun actually leans out the window and makes eye contact. Audie laughs at him. They play the most ridiculous
songs they can think of. Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.” Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time.” The Backstreet Boys’ “Backstreet’s Back.” R.E.M.’s “It’s The End of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” which both of them, weirdly enough, know every word to, earning an ovation from passersby. A duet of “Bohemian Rhapsody” carries them into the hotel.

  “See?” Calhoun says. “See?”

  Audie is starting to see.

  “Time for the minigolf experience of your life,” Calhoun says. “I read about it in a brochure and it’s supposed to be amazing.”

  Audie groans.

  “No, this is better than pirate golf. This is better than Jurassic Putt. This is transcendental.”

  “Do we have to?” Audie asks.

  “Yes we have to and don’t lie, you liked the water park and you will like this. So stop it.”

  Audie loves Calhoun. So they dry off and change. Audie follows Calhoun’s directions off the strip onto Route 17, where Calhoun directs him to the minigolf place that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Ewok huts in Jedi. “You’re fucking with me,” Audie says.

  “Atlantia,” Calhoun announces. “The premier minigolf experience in Myrtle Beach, and we are going there. So get your ass in there and pick out a putter.”

  Audie heaves a mighty sigh, parks the Porsche, and follows his boyfriend into a fake mermaid-treasure trove full of water fountains. Far more impressive than the usual minigolf experience, Audie has to admit. He picks the pink ball. Calhoun selects the purple one.

  “We’re being especially gay today,” Calhoun points out.

  Audie snorts.

  Then they go into the course. It’s indoors. Gloriously, ridiculously, and insanely indoors.

  Someone appears to have paid a very stoned, very starving art student to decorate the walls of an old warehouse with the story of the gifted Atlanticans, who bestowed their wonders upon the world before that ancient cataclysm (much hinted at, never detailed) that destroyed their wondrous civilization.

  “What. The. Fuck,” Audie says, gazing around in wonder. The place also looks blacklight sensitive.