HeartOn

by Amy Jo Cousins

  “Um, no?” He could barely remember what the question was.

  “We just left the World Erotic Art Museum.”

  Carlos laughed. He’d been there. Almost anyone who went to Miami’s gay bars ended up at the WEAM sooner or later on a night when the line to get into the nightclub Mansion snaked past the front door of the building housing one of the largest collections of erotic art in the country. It was just too easy to kill time there when the club had reached capacity and your idiot friends wouldn’t agree to go somewhere else, opting instead to swing through the museum and hope the line died down.

  “That place is a trip, huh?” Carlos was pretty sure it had been during a late-night, tipsy WEAM visit where he’d casually mentioned to Benji and some of their other friends that he could appreciate a nice-looking dick as much as the rest of them, on a purely aesthetic level, of course. When pressed, because college students didn’t know shit about boundaries so of course there was pressing, he’d denied being attracted to men. Which had been a total lie. But really, who hadn’t occasionally looked at a hot guy and thought, “Maybe?”

  Straight guys, probably.

  Occasional attractions didn’t mean he planned on doing anything about it, though. Not when there were so many girls around who were available and beautiful and really, really easy to explain to his parents.

  “Whole lotta dicks, man,” Deion said, shaking his head, still talking about the museum. His eyes were unfocused, as if his memories were too vivid to ignore. “Whole lotta dicks.”

  “And vajayjays,” Benji chimed in, which made them laugh, because the last person in the threesome you’d expect to have noticed pussy was the super sparkly, very, very gay Benji.

  “Yes. Yeah. Lots of vagina.” Deion looked flustered. “Just . . . genitalia everywhere.”

  “What was the best thing you saw?” Carlos asked him, getting fucking giddy with this whole conversation.

  I mean, if I were going to write the script for the first time I talked to Deion McCaskill for more than two seconds in passing, he would definitely remember me from before and we would absolutely be talking about dicks. So, you know, thank you, God.

  “Golden Boy,” Benji answered promptly, ignoring Josh and Deion’s groans. “Yes, the giant gold penis. I mean, you can sit on it. You can’t top that.”

  Benji licked his lips. Something in his eyes promised that his years of studying massage therapy had taught him all kinds of useful information about the body and he knew exactly how to use that knowledge for good, not evil.

  “Sometimes I think Josh must have hit the fucking jackpot when he met Benji,” Deion said under his breath.

  “I know, right?” Carlos had long thought the same.

  “Imagine having a boyfriend like that, who knew everything there was to know about anatomy and . . .” Deion shivered.

  Oh. Different kind of jackpot.

  A sex jackpot.

  “Yeah,” he muttered after thinking about it for two seconds. “That.”

  They glanced at each other, then looked away. Carlos reached down discretely and adjusted himself. Jesus. He changed his mind. Talking about dicks and fucking with Deion McCaskill in public was a terrible idea.

  He stopped picturing his friends having sex, or imagining Deion picturing their friends having sex, and forced his attention back to Benij’s ongoing rant about the joys of saddling up a giant dick and climbing on board.

  “I’m gonna need pics of that,” Carlos said, his face aching from smiling.

  Pouting was performed, as Benji described the sexual favors he’d promised Josh in a vain effort to persuade him to climb on the eight-foot-tall golden cock and balls that was the museum’s only touchable piece. To no avail, sadly, as both Deion and Josh had declined the selfie opportunity.

  “Loser,” Benji said to Josh, leaning against his side with an arm around his waist, smiling up at Josh like he’d won the lottery with his man.

  Josh bent down and kissed him. “I will take all the pictures of you riding giant dicks that your little heart desires, babe.”

  “How many times you think he’s had to say that since the first time they met?” Carlos murmured, and Deion busted out laughing. Startled, Carlos smiled at him, getting flushed all of a sudden when Deion met his eyes and held his gaze, smiling back. It was an old, tired joke, but his stomach fluttered anyway at the big man’s enthusiasm.

  By the time the host escorted them to the private dining room, the group was complete. Josh, Benji, and Deion. Nancy, who Benji had met at massage therapy school, and her photographer husband, Brian, with their two adorable kids. Mila and Simone, Carlos’s favorite take-no-shit lesbian couple. And Tomás and Axel, who were in the off-again phase of their never-ending dating cycle. He thought.

  An orgy of ordering began as soon as they sat, Deion informing everyone they had an impossible task at hand.

  “There’s literally almost no way to meet the F-and-B minimum for this room unless we start doing shots of Louis XIII, which is a bit much for lunch. So, you know”—Deion waved his hands at the menu and their little group—“go wild.”

  Go wild they did.

  Plates started coming out of the kitchen a surprisingly short time later, cycling in via a constant stream of servers that was somehow only one guy and one girl but felt like legions. Stone crab and lobster salad and the amazing make-it-yourself apple cider coleslaw Joe’s did like no one else. Grilled broccolini and a carmelized mashed plantain dish that probably should have been served with dessert. Wine and Bloody Marys and sparkling juice concoctions almost as good as the stone crab.

  Almost.

  Throughout the entire meal, Carlos found himself devoting half his attention—at least—to whatever conversation Deion was involved in, to the degree that he almost missed it when Benji started to tell a story about the time in high school when he and Carlos had stayed out past curfew, gotten drunk at a party, and tried to sneak into Carlos’s family’s house where they were supposed to be having a sleepover.

  “I swear,” Benji said with relish, all conversation at the table paused to hear the end of the story. “I thought we were dead. But Carlos’s abuela flipped the lights on and took one look at us, stumbling through their big entryway, and only said one thing. In a voice that clearly threatened death, mind.”

  Carlos knew his role. He put on his abuela’s scowl in the face of the worst transgression she could imagine. “No shoes in the house!”

  “Shit,” Benji said, miming a duck and cover. “Whenever I hear those words, I always brace myself for your abeula to throw a chancleta at me.”

  Carlos laughed. “Dude. My abuela never threw her chanclas at you.”

  “She totally did!” Benji’s outrage was probably feigned, because he was grinning too broadly to be anything other than pleased as punch at the memory. “It was how I figured I was totally in with your family. Like, they’d adopted me as one of their own. An honorary Acosta-Kelly.”

  Benji always said Carlos’s middle and last names together, as if he needed to wallow in the blended family who’d accepted him underfoot with nothing but love since he was a kid.

  “You know they love you,” Carlos said and blew him a kiss. “Abuela would probably even let you wear shoes in the house.”

  “I would never,” Benji said, drawing back sharply with a dramatic hand pressed to his chest. “Maybe it was your mom who threw it some other time we were being stupid teenagers.”

  Carlos snorted. If his mom was going to throw a sandal at someone, it’d be an Oscar de la Renta or a Christian Laboutin and each individual strappy spike would cost half his rent. “As if my mom would throw one of her shoes.”

  “God, I know. I’d kill for her shoe closet,” Benji said dreamily.

  “Your mom’s big into fashion?” Deion asked Carlos from across the table.

  “Not, like, professionally. She’s an art dealer,” he explained. “But she loves fashion, and if she throws a sandal at you, catch it. You can probably sel
l it for five hundred on eBay. At least. And that’s just for the one shoe.”

  The look Deion gave him ran from the top of Carlos’s head to his shoes and back again. “So what happened? Does the fashion gene skip a generation in your family or something?”

  “Oh, fuck you!” Carlos said, laughing.

  “I’m kidding. You look sharp, man. Especially for someone who Benji told us growled at him for waking him up from a hangover.”

  “Hey!” Benji protested from his seat at the head of the white cloth-covered table, waving his hands frantically to deny, deny, deny. “I said some people had hangovers. I did not name names.”

  Deion just looked at him—still—and waited.

  Carlos gave up. “Yes. It was me.”

  No need to tell them he’d killed a six-pack sitting by himself on his balcony, smoking cigarettes one after the other until the pack was gone, a bad habit he hadn’t touched in years.

  But if he was going to do a deep dive into his sexuality and admit some hard truths about the direction his dick was recently pointing, then he was going to do it buzzed and riding a nicotine high that made the top of his head float off.

  Instead, he accepted the shit they dealt, Deion included, and reminded himself he had plenty of stories stored up after fifteen years of friendship and a good third of them involved some serious embarrassment for Benji.

  Revenge. Cold dish. Etc. etc. etc.

  One of Miami’s typical afternoon rain showers hit as soon as they rose from the table to leave, after a chorus of thank-yous from the group that Deion tried to wave away, unsuccessfully.

  “Hey.”

  He didn’t need to turn around to know it was Deion at his back. He’d been unable to stop himself from keeping track of the man at all times during their chaotic exit from the restaurant, their group stretching out and then bunching up again at the door as everyone hugged and kissed and called back and forth about plans for that night or later in the week. Through it all, Carlos was aware of Deion moving through the restaurant and the crowd.

  Which wasn’t exactly fucking rocket science. The man was massive, easily head and shoulders taller than most people in the room. Even at six feet tall himself, Carlos tilted his head back to look Deion in the eye.

  Ha. Sure. You know exactly where he is at all times, even when you turn your back on him, which you almost never do, because he’s tall. Uh-huh. Right.

  “Can you do me a favor, bro?”

  Carlos’s lips twitched, but he kept the smile off his face at the sports dude talk. “You just fed me the best meal I’ve ever had in my entire life, my man. You could ask for a kidney right now, and I’d say yes.”

  Deion took a step back then grinned. “It was pretty great, wasn’t it?”

  “It was fucking awesome. I’m not kidding. Best meal I’ve ever eaten in my life, and if someone tells my abuela I said that, I’ll deny it. What do you need?”

  “Josh and Benji won’t let me bring anything to the potluck tonight.”

  “Damn straight,” Carlos swore. “You don’t get to bring a fucking thing.”

  “Come on, don’t leave me hanging like that, man,” Deion said, moving closer and casting cautious glances at Josh and Benji, as if they might hear him and come storming over.

  Which they probably would. Because wtf, man. No more food can be provided by you after that ridiculous, amazing spread.

  But he didn’t say that out loud, mostly because his pulse was thundering in his chest and he was afraid his voice would wobble with it.

  “It’s not about the money. I’m not trying to drop bank or anything. If I pay for anything else on this trip, Josh’ll probably take it as a personal insult and stop talking to me for, like, a month.”

  Carlos lifted a brow. A month? Hell, when he got caught up in a new show, he could go a month without remembering to call his friends and not even notice. Clearly Josh and Deion had a totally different level of communication in play between the two of them.

  “I know. Bad news,” Deion said, nodding as if Carlos were agreeing with him. “So I’m not trying to throw my money around. But, man, it’s a potluck. I can’t just not bring anything. That’s, like, rude.”

  This was a fair point, Carlos had to admit.

  “I see what you mean,” he said slowly. Yeah, his mom would smack him if he ever showed up at potluck dinner without something to contribute. You didn’t do that. Like, ever.

  “I just need something, and they’re going to give me shit if I ask to stop at a store on the way home.”

  Before he could say anything, Deion sidled even closer to him. Looming. Intense. Smelling so rich and spicy Carlos’s mouth watered. And every cell in Carlos’s body fired with lust at the same moment, washing him with heat and desire.

  While he was standing there, dazed and rapidly getting hard while he started to sweat and tried not to picture Deion leaning over him in a bed, pressing into him with all that muscle and body mass, Deion shoved a giant hand into Carlos’s front pants pocket.

  Carlos jumped like he’d accidentally slipped a screwdriver into a live socket. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Dude. Chill out. Are you trying to draw everyone’s attention?” Deion muttered furiously.

  “Well, don’t put your hand in my fucking pocket without warning me first,” Carlos snapped, not actually angry, more like embarrassed, because if Deion did it again, he’d totally feel that Carlos’s dick was stiffening. “Fuck.”

  “It’s only a twenty.”

  “What?”

  “You’re bringing something, right? Well, when you go to the store—shit, you didn’t buy something already, did you?”

  No, because I was supposed to be going to the store right now, before getting a haircut and spending way too much time obsessing about what I’m going to wear, because I am apparently a high schooler again.

  “Nope,” was all he said.

  “Cool. When you go to the store, just, please, grab me something.”

  “Like?”

  “Anything. Seriously. Bottle of wine. Loaf of nice bread. Some frigging flowers. Whatever’s easy and cheap.”

  “Okay. Got it.” Carlos’s hands were shaky with some kind of weird reaction to this whole conversation, like he had too much adrenaline in his system or something, so he shoved them in his pants pockets. “Will do.”

  “Thanks, man. You’re the best.” Deion yanked him close for one of those bro hugs Carlos didn’t run into a lot in his theater circles, where people were more likely to drape themselves on you at any opportunity than avoid full-body contact. “Let me give you my number, just in case.”

  The hand thumping his back was massive, shaking his entire torso with two sharp taps. Even after he’d said his goodbyes and walked off down the sidewalk in the heat, the remnants of the afternoon shower puddling in the cracks, he could feel the echoes of those thumps competing with his heartbeat.

  4

  Carlos spent a stupid amount of time at the wine shop picking out Deion’s bottle.

  Who knew he could find so many ways to mindfuck the choice of a relatively inexpensive bottle of white wine to death? But somehow it was impossible to make a decision. Because as much as Deion had insisted he didn’t want to make a big deal out of this, Carlos could not buy a fifteen-dollar chard and call it a day.

  The man was a millionaire, for fuck’s sake. Deion shouldn’t give his friends cheap wine, not even via an intermediary.

  Carlos had meant to hop online and do some googles, but between his post-lunch food coma and reading the play an acquaintance had sent him, along with a one-off gig contract he’d have to consider if his dream job pursuit fell through this month, he’d had no time.

  When his phone rang and he saw it was his mom, he answered in a hurry.

  “Perfect timing. I need a wine recommendation,” he said instead of hello.

  “And I need you to call Graciela Suarez before she stabs me with a shrimp fork,” she replied tartly. “She’s still waiting for you to
agree to take her commission.”

  He winced. That’s right. He forgot he’d been avoiding his mom’s calls for a reason, claiming a heavy work schedule. And now he’d busted himself by asking about wine, which she would easily read as meaning he had time to go to a party but not to call his mother. Mierda. “Sorry. I’ll call her today. I promise.”

  “I sang your praises last week when they were over for dinner and she saw the armoire in the guest room. She’s got her checkbook out and she’s ready to write you a major deposit today,” his mom said with relish. She adored making a big sale almost as much as she loved convincing old money to take a risk with new and emerging artists. “You could name your price.”

  No doubt he could. But making furniture, no matter how fine and fancy and profitable, just wasn’t his passion. His mother had leaned on him gently—and not so gently—over the years, trying to convince him to turn his skills toward more and more artistic displays. She had a long spiel about functional art and elitism she rolled out for bedazzled art investors, and her not-so-secret hope had been to lure Carlos into her world via the polishing of his crafts skills. She’d been disappointed when his determination to slap together two by fours and paint backstage had proven to have staying power. He knew she’d never understood why he refused to launch himself into the world of high-end custom design work, but he didn’t want to spend his energy creating pieces that would hold pride of place, even multigenerationally, in one family’s home.

  What he wanted was to create worlds. Detail work was fine. Important, even. But Carlos hottest turn-on was the big-picture vision that drove the visual impact of a play on its audience. He got hard for ways to make the experience dazzling or austere, immersive or abstract, depending on the text and the director’s wishes. To bring another era to life, or an imaginary land. Playing God was his passion. He dug working with a creative team too, bouncing concepts and ideas off each other, wrangling differences of opinion into a creative synergy that produced a dramatic experience greater than any of them could have envisioned on their own.