by Sky McCoy
IT OCCURRED TO TAYLOR that this maybe was another one of Payton’s acts to get attention. But as the weeks went on, and he didn’t hear from him, and he never called around for him, not even at work, it became clear that this wasn’t a stunt, and whatever it was, Taylor couldn’t take the pressure Payton had obviously placed on him.
Taylor was at the point that he felt he needed some advice, and he thought better of calling Noah who always looked to him when he was in trouble with Jake because of his philandering ways, but then he was a desperate man, and a desperate man would cling to a straw in the middle of the ocean if he were drowning. And right now, Taylor was drowning.
It wasn’t but a few rings before Noah answered.
“Noah, what are you doing tonight?”
“Not a thing. Jake’s in California at a car auction, and I’m home with my little babies. They’re good for you. They will love you when no one else will,” Noah said sounding like he could use someone to talk to.
Taylor had to think twice whether he wanted to be around Noah. It wasn’t good if the both of them were crying in their drinks.
“Look, Noah, if you’re going to be such a downer then maybe I should call back when you’re feeling better,” Taylor said ready to hang up.
“Don’t you hang up,” Noah said, raising his voice sounding as if he had called someone before and they got the same feeling about talking to him as Taylor had. But Taylor listened anyway.
“Taylor, are you there? It’s just that since that thing with Sam, Jake doesn’t trust me, so he asked me to wear a cock’s cage, and I must be out of my mind to have agreed to that fucking contraption. It’s a bitch.”
“I called you, Noah, not to have you complain about your love life. I need some uplifting. Maybe we can go to a bar and dance. Nothing serious just get the fuck out so I can clear my head,” Taylor said.
“I heard from Max that Payton left you.”
How the fuck did he call Noah that fast?
“Max asked me to look out for you. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. I just need to unwind. I don’t like being in the house alone. Especially not tonight.”
“If Jake asks, I can say that I was helping you get over Payton.”
“Whatever, Noah. Do you know any clubs besides the BDSM ones where we all hang out? I’m tired of that crowd,” Taylor said.
“I’m glad you asked me, because there’s a new one that just opened uptown, one of my patients gave me a card he’s a part owner and can get us in there without us waiting in line.”
“I’m not going to go home and change. I’m wearing a suit,” Taylor said.
“Then lose the vest, tie, and coat, and those damn cufflinks you wear with your initials. Then you should be alright. Can you meet me there about ten? I have to feed my babies and make sure they’re ok.”
Taylor heard his two little dogs barking in the background. “That’s more than enough time,” Taylor said.
Chapter Twelve
ARRIVING ABOUT NINE thirty, Taylor drove slow near the club and saw the lines of men waiting to get in had made its way around the corner. As he passed the line to get closer to the entrance, he looked to see if he could spot Noah, but he’d been disappointed. He should have known Noah wouldn’t get there early. Noah was always on time, but never early. Therefore, Taylor concluded that it would be ten o’clock when he arrived.
“How the fuck is this going to work,” Taylor mumbled glaring out his car window at all those young men with their tight tees and tight jeans, and shorts hiked up to their ass cheeks showing off their tattoos.
Noah might appreciate that, Taylor thought, but he had left that scene behind two years ago when he married Payton.
If Payton were here, I wouldn’t be out tonight. We would be in our wonderful apartment listening to Lady Gaga, or Tony Bennet singing, “The Best Is Yet to Come,” as we sipped a glass of expensive wine while I’m giving Payton a blowjob.
I’ll probably be the oldest one in this crowd, and I’m thirty, Taylor thought.
Maybe he had made a mistake. He wasn’t looking for someone to fuck for the night. He was looking for dancing and conversation.
Studying the crowd of young men—dancing yes, conversation no, he thought. But maybe he would take a chance just to be away from that empty apartment with an empty bed. So he took a chance, and parked his car across the street at the parking lot, and walked over to the crowd waiting.
As he neared the front of the line, and got a closer look at the men, he shook his head and mumbled, “No fucking way.”
When Taylor rifled inside his pocket for his phone to walk back to where he parked his car at a lot nearby, he had his head down dialing Noah’s number to tell him to forget it, when he brushed shoulders with someone. He glanced up and stopped in his tracks.
His breath caught when he found himself staring eye to eye with Dylan. “I didn’t expect to see you here, Taylor. I thought you married guys had given up partying. Life has gotten too dull and you had to step out?” Dylan raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing like that. I was meeting a friend,” Taylor said glancing around. Where the fuck is Noah? he wondered. He didn’t want to be alone with Dylan. I’d been infatuated with him, and now I know the difference. That wasn’t love. I’d even held the notion that I wanted to marry him.
But then didn’t all men who had been virgins, and had sex for the first time? But this hadn’t been a first time having sex with a girl, but it was his first time having sex with a man, where he’d been fucked the way he had been doing the fucking.
And for some reason, he thought he was in love with this man and it was real love because it was raw, intense, and new, and different than anything he had experienced before.
“Do you still want to go inside? We can talk and then dance,” Dylan said aiming a flirty smile in Taylor’s direction. Taylor raised an eyebrow. “Just as friends of course.”
Since when had they ever been friends? The sex was hot whenever they got together, but talking about anything that mattered to Taylor—like when were they going to finally be together and think about making their relationship more than what it was—fuck buddies. That never happened.
Taylor remembered they only discussed one thing together, his photo shoots, and how some of the male models were such prima-donnas.
“You look like you could use a friend about now,” Dylan said touching Taylor’s arm. “Anytime you’re out here without your husband, there’s something wrong.”
“You were the cause of that,” Taylor said facing Dylan as Dylan propped one foot against the brick building, lit a cigarette, and handed him one. Taylor shook his head refusing it. Dylan took the extra and placed it in his pocket, and blew a cloud into the warm June air.
“Oh, I forgot you never liked this habit. I think you said it was a dirty habit.” And Dylan waggled his eyebrows.
“There are a lot of habit’s I don’t like,” Taylor said staring at Dylan as he shifted from one foot to the other showing Taylor his erection as if he could, or wanted to hide it inside his skin tight black jeans.
Dylan’s eye fucking Taylor, and his gesture of holding his cock was doing something to Taylor that he didn’t like. It reminded him of how hard and satisfying Dylan’s cock had been inside of him, but it also made him long for Payton.
“I can’t be the cause of anything if the marriage is strong, but then, how could it be after knowing someone for such a short time, and then you marry him? You have no foundation. Not like me and you.” Dylan pushed from the wall and dropped his half smoked cigarette and stepped on it, and then looked up at Taylor, cock sure of his effect on Taylor.
Dylan stood close where Taylor could feel the throb of Dylan’s erection pressing against his slacks. Taylor glanced down to see a wicked sexy smirk on Dylan’s face. The kind he had seen many times where he knew Taylor would give in to him sooner or later. But Taylor was a second from walking away from him.
Moving back from Dylan’s obvious needy
cock, Taylor turned and walked in the direction of the parking garage. Before he could cross the street Dylan caught him by the arm at the corner.
“Come on go in there with me. Let’s dance, and then if you don’t feel as if I want more than friendship, then I won’t push anything, and we’ll go our separate ways.” Dylan took Taylor by his hand and led him to the front of the line, and he nodded his head at the guy at the door, and they walked inside after Taylor scanned the crowd for Noah.
When he didn’t see Noah and Dylan gestured for him to come in, Taylor thought, Why not? He wasn’t that inexperienced youth anymore. He was a man and he intended to prove it and not let Dylan think that he could affect him in any way.
As they walked into the club with the flashing strobe lighting, and pulsating music, once again Noah couldn’t be counted on. But Taylor did give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he had an emergency call to meet a patient at the hospital had been Taylor’s first thought.
Noah did have an excuse once Jake forced him into private practice because he was known to have a wandering cock, and that was the only way to save their marriage, and by the toys Jake had him wearing like the cock’s cage, where Jake held the key there wasn’t much Noah could do, so Taylor concluded that it had been an emergency.
Once Taylor was inside the club, the music pulsed and hummed and Dylan was swaying his hips to the music as they walked to the bar and ordered drinks. Taylor downed his tequila shot and ordered another as Dylan watched him. Taylor felt his mind clearing of all his thoughts of Payton and his inhibitions. He began swaying to the music.
“You were really in a bad way. I’ve never known you to drink two shots of tequila back to back.”
“You’ve never known me at all. Let’s dance.” And Taylor took the lead, heading through a crowd of dancers who were dancing slow and grinding on each other while the music strummed.
Taylor’s hips moved behind Dylan, but when Dylan turned to face him, Taylor twirled him around, and danced against his ass. Taylor waited for something to happen. This had been a man he had missed sleepless nights over waiting for him to fly in from Europe, but ended up being disappointed more times than he cared to think about.
“This is the first time I’m seeing you like this. Forceful. I think I like it,” Dylan said placing his top teeth over his bottom lip in a flirty gesture as he gyrated his hips to the beat of the music.
“That’s because I’m no longer eighteen and a promise can’t make me happy.”
“So I would assume your husband is the bottom the way you were to me.”
Taylor raised an eyebrow and he thought at that moment that he had made a serious mistake entering that bar with Dylan, but he’d felt lonely, and he’d needed to be around others even if it was Dylan. But where the fuck was Noah?
“I don’t think I want to discuss my private life with you of all people, Dylan.”
“Who else would you talk to? Like I said, we have a history together, and I know you better than any man will, or ever could.”
Taylor stopped dancing and walked to the bar and got another shot of tequila and tossed it back. Then he looked at Dylan and took his hand and led him in the direction of a sofa. Now Taylor had had too much to drink and he stood gazing at Dylan. When Dylan moved in to take a kiss, Taylor still had enough sobriety to slap his hand down away from his face.
“You don’t get to do that anymore, Dylan. You don’t get to be the dominant with me. Save that for one of your butt boys. I’m not that boy anymore.”
“Let’s talk. We can discuss whatever you want,” Dylan said to Taylor. “We can leave here if you want and go to my place. Remember it used to be our place.”
“I need a drink,” Taylor said. He needed someone to listen to him, but he didn’t want Dylan because of their history together, and Dylan was never a man you could confide in.
Dylan was selfish and self-centered and too much of a narcissist. He was a handsome man who knew his ability to manipulate, and control young men with sex. He probably made it an art form because Taylor had been one of his willing victims.
Taylor had thought Dylan was the most beautiful man he had ever seen, but that was back in the day when he was a teenager of eighteen and nineteen. When he graduated from college and law school everything changed. His mind had changed the moment he saw a picture of Payton.
Back then Taylor had thought he was in love with Dylan, and then at eighteen and being fucked by a man twenty something, and given what he needed as an eighteen year old boy with his hormones raging, he couldn’t see the real Dylan.
Dylan was a social climber. Everything he got and owned was because he fucked someone important in New York, or he latched onto a rich young man, and back then his rich young man was Taylor Knox. It was Taylor’s apartment that Dylan referred to that they go back to and talk.
Dylan raised his hand for the waiter to bring Taylor another drink. And the drinks kept coming and the only one not drinking was Dylan.
TAYLOR WOKE FEELING like shit. His head thumped and thrummed like someone had been banging a drum inside it all night long. What the fuck has happened to me, Taylor wondered as he glanced around the room. This place looked familiar, he thought, as he fought through the haze to make sense of his surroundings. He thought he would be okay if the bed stopped spinning.
The bed and paintings, the antique dresser, and lamps, all this was familiar, but it wasn’t his expensive apartment he shared with Payton, at least it wasn’t the one he remembered. Everything was off. The bed he slept in with Payton was a king bed, but this one was a regular size bed. This bedroom much smaller than his.
“Oh fuck me.” This was his first apartment. It was the one he’d shared with Dylan years ago and made it a present to him. Taylor tried to sit up and his head felt as if it had hit a large tree going a hundred miles an hour.
But then he would be dead. Didn’t he feel like he was dead?
“Yes,” Taylor moaned and held on to his head and rubbed his temples trying to steady himself because the room whirled around and made him dizzy, and he couldn’t stop it.
Maybe he had done what he had feared would happen—fucking Dylan because he was drunk out of his mind, and then having Payton find out about it. And if he had fucked Dylan, Dylan would certainly tell Payton.
He threw back the covers with what little energy he had and tried to get to his feet. “What the fuck happened to me,” he murmured. “I have to get out of here.”
Lying in Dylan’s bed naked wasn’t what he had wanted. It made things worse. How could he explain this to Payton? He just went to a club and Dylan picked him up, and took him to their old apartment because he was too wasted to drive. “Holy shit. Where is my car?”
As he leaned over to place his feet on the floor, he saw his pants lying over a chair. He had to will himself to get to his pants. When he reached his pants, he pulled out his iPhone and called Noah.
“Noah.”
“Who the fuck is calling me this early in the morning?”
“It’s me, Taylor. And I hope that’s your private phone because you don’t sound like a respected doctor.”
“I’m only respected by my colleagues. My so called friends are not respectable if they hang out all night at gay bars, and think someone will be there to hold their hands when they fuck up.”
“Look here, Noah, don’t play that shit with me. I’m the one who saved your cheating ass. You know that Jake would have dropped your prissy ass if it wasn’t for me pleading your case, now be glad that you have a friend, and one that’s an attorney.”
“I have to feed my babies. Make it fast, Taylor, why are you calling me this early and what do you want?”
“I waited for you all night and you didn’t show,” Taylor said.
“I got a call last night to report to the hospital for an emergency, and I tried calling you to tell you that I couldn’t make it, but you didn’t answer, so I left you a text. Check your messages.”
“I need you to come get
me.”
“Where the fuck are you?”
“I think I’m at my old apartment. And I need you to pick me up.”
“What? You don’t know? For Christ’s sake Taylor I just walked in. I need some new friends.” Taylor heard Noah grumbling and walking around and the dogs barking.
“There’s no one here, Noah. The last thing I remember was being in the club with Dylan.”
“He couldn’t have given you one of those date rape drugs could he? You know it has the same effect. You don’t know what happened, Taylor, and you wake up and you’ve been molested.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Noah. I think I would remember if I had been molested. Or anything close to that. I was drunk and thinking about Payton and I cried on, well, I literally cried on Dylan’s shoulder. He must have brought me here and put me to bed. I don’t want to think that he planned this shit. He couldn’t have. I need you to pick me up because I can’t drive home. You remember where my old apartment is. The one off Fifth Avenue and Madison.”
“I think I can find you,” Noah said sucking his teeth so loud Taylor heard it on his iPhone. “I’m not parking because you know how fucked up parking is around there. I’ll probably have to double park, and I want you outside when I get there,” Noah barked.
“I’m getting dressed now.”
“You’re naked?”
“It’s a long story. Be there and bring me something for a hangover, will you?”
Chapter Thirteen
AS TAYLOR PULLED UP his pants and glanced over to find his shirt, he felt like shit. Straitening up, he breathed hard and ambled into the restroom. The place was neater than he remembered. Maybe it was because Dylan was the neat freak in their relationship. He complained that Taylor was so messy because Taylor had been used to having maids and deep down looking back, Taylor realized that Dylan was jealous of the fact that he was independently rich.
With his grandparents leaving him money and his mother and father having money, that seemed to irk Dylan, and he would tell Taylor to pay for everything. “I can’t afford it like you,” he would say to Taylor.