“Not gonna lie, I was way more into this when you were sucking my dick, but it’s okay.”
Deion watched as Carlos’s spine rippled, his tanned back twisting as he adjusted to the situation, every movement transmitted straight to Deion’s dick, making him light-headed and full of an urgent need to slam himself all the way home.
He wanted more than okay, though. Needed to see Carlos shuddering again like he needed his next breath. So he waited. Stroked the long muscular back stretched out before him. Ran his fingers through the tips of Carlos’s hair where sweat pasted it to his neck.
After a minute or two, Carlos inhaled deeply and relaxed. When Deion shifted, there was no hesitation as Carlos moved with him. Just in case, Deion drizzled a bunch of extra lube over the tight ring where their bodies met and thrust slowly until everything was as slick and slippery inside as out, and Carlos was pushing back into each slow invasion with his full strength.
“Fuck, this is so good,” Deion growled, digging his fingers into Carlos’s back and scraping them down his spine until Carlos shuddered and moaned at the sensations.
He pistoned his hips faster, pressure and pleasure building in his belly and his balls until his skin felt stretched tight with it, like he might explode at any moment, driving deep into Carlos’s tight, hot ass. He needed Carlos to catch up.
“Jerk yourself off,” he said, pushing at Carlos’s shoulder until he dropped to one elbow for balance, reaching under him with his other hand.
Deion felt it in his dick, the moment Carlos started stroking himself, the tight squeeze of Carlos’s ass at that first surge of pleasure.
“Fuck. Fuck. Don’t stop.” He was going to come. He yanked Carlos hard by the hips, slamming them against his own as he fucked so deep he lost himself in the heat. His head dropped back, the groan clawing its way out of his throat as he came, slick heat flooding the condom as he shuddered and pulsed, pleasure burning his entire body clean and empty. Underneath him, Carlos stiffened with a shout, his ass clamping down on Deion’s cock, squeezing one last burst of pleasure out of him.
Deion barely remembered to hang onto the condom when he pulled out, provoking a hiss from Carlos. He leaned over and found the mini wastebasket next to the bed and dropped the condom into the plastic liner, too tired to tie it off. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s good,” Carlos said, reaching behind himself to touch his asshole. “Shit. I’m gonna feel this all day.”
“Too much?” he asked. He should know, even if he was praying the answer was negative, because holy shit, he was going to need to do that again.
“No fucking way,” Carlos said with a sigh as he rolled over. “That was better than my fantasies. Jesus.”
Deion held up a weary hand for a high-five. Carlos snorted and smacked a palm against his.
“Dork.” Carlos grinned at him, an equally sweaty mess.
“Damn. I don’t want to do anything else on my vacation except fuck you.” At Carlos’s raised eyebrow, Deion corrected himself. “I mean, we can do whatever. You can . . . fuck, we can do anything you want. Jesus. Everything we’ve done is the most intense thing ever.”
“How many more days have we got?” Carlos asked with a grin.
Deion did the math. “Eight. Not counting the rest of today.”
Carlos rolled until he was on top of Deion, chest to chest. Cock to cock. His grin was wicked as he started grinding against him again. “I’ll make a list.”
9
On Monday, Josh insisted on showing off his and Benji’s growing business operation, with pride and excitement fairly radiating from his entire body. Deion was pretty sure this was the serious sales pitch for him to consider Miami as his next permanent home base, post-NFL—a topic Josh had very carefully avoided mentioning since picking up on Deion’s refusal to talk about his injury—but since neither of them explicitly acknowledged that, Deion told himself he didn’t have to shut that shit down.
The first thing Josh did was drag Deion to the clinic with him in the early morning hours, which was totally unfair, because Deion had been awake until something like three a.m. after he’d signed himself up for a membership at this gay porn website that seemed less skeevy than some of the others. At least most of the guys seemed to be having a genuinely good time when they fucked, and the level of kink was relatively low-key, which was great, because Deion was pretty sure he was about thirty seconds from giving himself a fucking heart attack the first time he watched a guy get his wrists taped together and then get jacked off by the camera dude who was filming the whole thing.
In any case, he’d been, uh, distracted—mesmerized—by his new toy. And by new toy, he meant his dick on sex steroids from watching porn all night while texting Carlos about his favorite parts. Josh’s cheerful pounding on his bedroom door came way too early. If he hadn’t been offering homemade bacon, egg, and cheese English muffins, Deion might have blown him off and sank back into sleep again.
It was unfair how much power the smell of bacon could have over a man.
“Oh my God, I love your boyfriend,” he groaned around a mouth full of his third breakfast sandwich.
Josh grinned at him over his own inhalation of food. “He’s pretty great, right?”
“He’s awesome.”
“You ought to get some body work done by him,” Josh said, snagging another sandwich off the plate with relish, downing it in three bites, and then starting the cleanup. “He’s fucking brilliant, especially with chronic injury work.”
“I believe it,” Deion said, ignoring the hint. His injury wasn’t chronic. It wasn’t. And talking about it would only kill his buzz from how well things were going with the whole Carlos thing. He tried to cut off further conversation on the topic by jumping in to help, but Josh pulled the plate from his hands and waved him back to his seat. “It’s funny. I don’t remember you being big into cleaning back in college.”
“Hey, you and Gus were the ones who lived in that hellhole with the condoms on the floor.”
Deion grimaced. “That was one semester and if we’d known those dudes were gonna be so gross, we’d never have agreed to rent that house with them.”
“No shit.” Josh finished loading the dishwasher and started wiping down the counters.
“No, really, dude. It’s amazing to see you all . . . neat.”
Josh shrugged and kept on cleaning. “It was a real problem when we first moved in together, because I was super used to living in a mess, and Benji had such a tiny studio he’d become uber-organized and clean because that was the only way he could deal with having so little space.”
Shit. Deion glanced around the absolutely charming but way-too-small-for-his-daily-life apartment and tried to picture living in something even smaller. It had only been a few years since he’d started earning NFL money, and he hadn’t been extravagant at all with his real estate purchase, but he’d clearly gotten used to a whole new world, because he couldn’t picture it.
“So then we moved into this one bedroom, and I’m leaving my shit everywhere and Benji’s losing his mind because he’s the only one who puts shit in the dishwasher or takes out the trash or does laundry.” Josh grimaced, rinsing out the sponge and squeezing it dry before putting it down. “I was pretty much an asshole to live with. I had this attitude like, ‘If it doesn’t bother me, I’m not cleaning it. If it bothers you so much, then you clean it.’ Which is not how to get your boyfriend to give you blowjobs, let me tell you.”
Deion snorted. “I can imagine.”
He’d lived with a pretty wide range of roommates in college after moving off campus, and he was intimately familiar with how quickly friendships could suffer under the stress of housecleaning and the division of labor. “So, how’d you get your head out of your ass?”
“I tried to give him some bullshit about how he should just ask me to clean something if that was what he wanted. And he pointed out that made him the person in charge of organizing all the cleaning, in addition to doing half the work, w
hich was a whole additional job. And that he wasn’t my mother and I wasn’t a child, and I should get off my ass and participate in the running of our household like a grown-up.”
“Ouch.”
“So, yeah. That stung.” Josh shrugged, wiping down the faucet and the sink with an attention to detail that still amazed Deion. “But he was right. I was taking advantage of his need to keep things neater than I worried about, and it was a shitty thing to do. Plus, I was ignoring all the ways he does special stuff for me, and figuring, like, ‘Hey, I give him orgasms in return, so that’s fair.’ And let me tell you, orgasms ain’t enough when your man is also making all your favorite meals and remembering to grab the dry cleaning the night before your big interview at grad school and shit like that.
“So I decided I had to fucking change. I sat down and made a list of everything that needed to happen to keep things nice. And then I had Benji look at the list and he, like, doubled it. I didn’t even know people cleaned blinds, man. Never occurred to me. And then I decided it was my job to do more than my fair share of the cleaning. Because living in a nice space is important to my boyfriend. And I don’t know anything about cooking. Plus, that’s a thing he really likes doing, and he does it to take care of me too. So, cleaning is a thing I can do. Or could learn to do. And it would take care of him.”
“Wow.” Deion shook his head, marveling at the change a couple of years could make in a committed man. If anyone had told him back in college that Josh would someday be able to monologue on the power of cleaning house and maintaining a healthy relationship, he’d never have believed it. But now he understood why Josh and Benji together felt so rock solid, and why his own relationships with scores of women who lasted no longer than a few weeks had never felt anything but tenuous.
He’d never given a moment’s thought to putting as much work into his partner’s happiness as he had into his own professional goals.
Seemed pretty obvious when you looked at it that way.
“So you really put a lot of thought into this, huh?” he teased to lighten the mood.
Josh laughed, flustered, but owning it. “I did. Because this relationship is the most important thing in my life. Figured I ought to put at least as much work into it as I do into my career, you know. And I was putting in, like, no work.”
“Sounds like you’re doing a really good job to me,” Deion said, deliberately not thinking about Carlos and what it might be like to put that kind of effort into—
Stop it. You both agreed this was all for fun. On the down low. A chance to try stuff without making a big deal out of it in your life and then a no-drama end to everything when you leave town. Just because the sex is phenomenal and you can’t stop thinking about him doesn’t change the terms. It’s nothing more than a fun two weeks. Keep the fantasies focused on your dick, man. Anything else is not part of the deal.
“All right, we’re good here,” Josh said, grabbing his keys off the counter. “You ready?”
“Always.”
When they arrived at the clinic, Benji was nowhere in sight and the front desk was empty. Josh led him down the hall, pointing out a workout room, three treatment rooms—one of them currently in use by Benji, Deion assumed, since they had yet to see him—supply closet, an all-purpose staff room with a table big enough for group meetings, and the wall he and Benji wanted to bust through to take over the office next door when they had the money to expand. Everything was spotlessly clean and cheerfully painted in what Deion was coming to think of as Miami’s colors: ocean blues and greens, highlighted with sunset yellows and pinks.
“This is nice,” he said, real admiration in his voice. Josh looked at him like he wasn’t sure if Deion was giving him shit. “I’m serious. We’ve both been in more than our fair share of rehab facilities and this is, like, the most cheerful place I’ve ever seen.”
A big smile broke like sunrise over Josh’s face. “It is, right? We wanted it to be that way. Thanks.”
“You know, if I weren’t playing, I’d be really tempted to do something like what you’ve done. Maybe not go back to school for another degree, but I like the business you guys have set up here, and someday I’ll need to put my business degree to good use.”
He was just joking around, expecting a laugh or a grin, but Josh shot him a look. Opened his mouth. Then shut it without saying a word.
The hint of tension between them that Deion had felt since Josh had first picked him up at the airport built into an obvious silence that Deion eventually broke with irritation.
“What?” he asked, the word coming out sharper than he’d meant.
“Nothing.” Josh shook his head.
“I can tell you’ve been wanting to say something to me since the first minute I got here,” Deion snapped. He’d been counting on Josh not to do this. Not to bring up the topic he’d been hinting at in texts and phone calls for months now.
“You really wanna hear?”
Deion kept his mouth shut. He really, really didn’t. But maybe if Josh brought it up, Deion could shut this shit down once and for all.
They’d known each other long enough for Josh to read his silence as a go-ahead.
“All spring you’ve been talking about how hard you’re busting your ass so you’ll be ready for training camp in July.” Josh paused, as if giving Deion room to comment.
Nope. He had nothing to say.
Josh grabbed the back of his neck and rubbed it, then dropped his hands to his hips and squared off, facing Deion head on. “You know your odds of playing again are slim, right? I mean, all optimism and positive thinking aside, there’s a good chance you’re going to get waived once you pass your physical. And your chances of getting picked up by another team are . . .”
“Labrum tears aren’t career enders.” The shoulder injury usually benched a player for the rest of a season, yes, but not for good. Josh knew how intensely Deion focused on his rehab, and his training in general. If it could be done by sheer willpower and hard work alone, success was in the bag. To hear his friend insist that Deion might not get the results he wanted was a kick in the teeth.
“Not the first one,” Josh said grimly.
Deion didn’t look at him. His previous labrum tear had been years earlier and his recovery had been laborious but complete. This most recent injury was a totally separate thing, and if he put his head down and gutted it out, he could achieve the same result this time too. That’s what he kept telling himself.
That’s what he had to keep telling himself. He wasn’t ready for this to be the end, and Josh forcing him to take a good, hard look at alternate scenarios was just going to piss him off.
“I’m just saying. You’ve got a place to land if you want one. You know that, right?”
He didn’t need a place to land. He knew right where he was going to be next week, next month, next year. Playing for Kansas City or, worst case scenario, traded to another team, where he’d have to build his cred back up, yes. As . . . nice as it was for Josh and Benji to worry about him and his career off the field, Deion didn’t need their help. He had everything handled.
Someday, yes. Sure. Years down the line, Deion would need to figure out what he wanted to do next. No other scenario was worth thinking about until he absolutely had to. He’d had plenty of experience over the years with not thinking about things that couldn’t be helped. Or would only make things worse if acknowledged.
So he was able to look Josh straight in the eye and say, “I’m gonna play again. I know I am. You said your piece. I heard you. And I appreciate the offer, but we gotta put all that on hold.”
Josh held his gaze until Deion got uncomfortable and looked away. “Okay. I will keep thinking good thoughts for you, buddy. But you just remember: I’m here for the shit stuff too, okay? Always. Because I know how bad it gets.”
Which was the kind of thing that required a bro hug, although Deion hung on to Josh longer than a bro hug probably allowed. “Thanks.”
By the time they made i
t back to the entrance, a Latina girl with dark-blue short hair and a ring in her nose was speaking on the phone in Spanish at the desk, and she flagged Josh down before he could finish what Deion could tell was a practiced speech. Josh shot him a look of apology and walked over to listen intently.
He was back a moment later. “Hey, they need me for a minute. You good here?”
“Yeah. Go.” Deion waved him off. “I’m gonna check out your workout room.”
Josh grimaced. “It’s underwhelming. We made a deal with the gym down the street and I usually meet clients there. Expansion is on the agenda and a serious workout room is priority number one, but not for another two years. Can’t wait to get a decent setup. This is killing me.”
“Josh!” Benji’s voice, from down the hall.
“Back in a sec,” Josh said and jogged off, calling out to Benji. “I’m coming, babe. Keep your pants on.”
As soon as he set foot in the workout room, Deion understood what Josh meant. Even in college, they’d had access to top-of-the-line fitness facilities as members of the football team at a school where their sport brought in the big bucks. The clinic’s workout room, on the other hand, was bare bones. A couple of benches for free weights, one flat and one incline, were the only semi-permanent pieces of equipment. Exercise balls, the half-spheres of BOSU balls, and racks of dumbbells lined one wall, with exercise bands and Velcro straps hanging off pegs on another wall. The other two walls were mirrored, so patients would be able to see themselves and correct their form based on feedback.
The setup was basic, but professional. Competent. And if Josh had an arrangement with a nearby gym, then Deion could see how he’d be able to handle a wide range of clients with ease here.
The door to the hall opened with a creak. A tall, good-looking white guy with dark red hair and some heavy scruff walked in, his left arm bent across his stomach as if held in an invisible sling and his left foot dragging just enough to be noticeable.
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