One More Time

by Caitlin Ricci

  “Sure you don’t want to get naked and take care of each other?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

  But my question took him out of his lighter mood and brought a frown to his face. “I do like you, Trent, but I can’t have sex with you after just a week. That’s not how I am.”

  I nodded and struggled up to my feet. “I know. So where’s your bathroom?”

  “Are you seriously going to come in my bathroom?” Caleb asked, as if he couldn’t believe my nerve.

  I leveled a glare at him. “Unless you’re planning to suck me, then yeah, I do want to get this taken care of. I might have been able to walk around and hang out with you when I was almost hard but not fully. That’s not the case anymore, and I’m hurting. So either fix this or tell me where your bathroom is.”

  He rolled his eyes but lifted his hand anyway. “Little hall by the stairs. Second door on your left. Don’t make a mess!” he called after me as I walked away. I waved to him over my shoulder to let him know I’d heard him before I found the bathroom, pulled down my pants, and took my hard cock into my hand. “Fucking Caleb,” I groaned as I started stroking myself. His thighs had felt good under my fingertips and having him grip me on my shirt was just what I’d needed too. I guess we’d turned each other on, but I tried to be good because he told me no. He, on the other hand, had intentionally left me frustrated as a way of paying me back, it seemed, for what I’d done to him. And now here I was, in his bathroom, jerking off while thinking about being buried in his ass so deep that I could grip his hips and grind against him as I came inside him.

  In my fantasy he panted my name and begged for more. That was the part that did me in, where I pictured his face flushed the way it had been the first time I’d seen him, as he begged me not to stop, to keep going, to come in him.

  “Fuuck,” I growled as large streams of my come shot into his toilet. I was the one left flushed and panting as I cleaned up and put myself away. I ran cold water over my face before coming out to see him again, only to find myself in an empty living room.

  I could have hung around and waited for him, and maybe I should have. But instead I went looking for Caleb, and once I found him I was glad I had. He was on his back on a big bed. He hadn’t even bothered to fully close the door so I came inside and left it a little open, just as he had. His jeans were pushed down his hips and his shirt was pulled up over his stomach. He didn’t have a lot of definition to his abs, but he had enough that I was licking my lips as I waited to taste them.

  But as soon as Caleb saw me, he stopped touching his hard cock and quickly tried to cover himself with the dark green sheet near his hip. “Shit,” he cursed.

  I didn’t care that I’d caught him jerking off since I’d just finished downstairs myself. I wished we could have done it together, but whatever. I planned to get another chance to do that. I crossed my hands behind my back and leaned against the wall across from him. Maybe I was trying to show him I wasn’t going to touch him or try to convince him to have sex with me. Maybe I was just trying to get comfortable since there was no way in hell I was leaving that room until I got to watch him come.

  Either way, I lifted my eyebrows and waited for him to continue.

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Why should I?”

  He didn’t tell me to go, and I didn’t leave on my own. Instead he pulled the sheet aside, giving me a good view of his thick cock and swollen head, then stroked himself again. “If I had known you were coming up here, we could have done this together,” I said conversationally.

  He gave me a look as if he couldn’t believe I was still standing there, just watching him. I didn’t mind, but it sucked that I couldn’t touch him. I could have tried, but I was pretty sure that if I went up to touch him, he would stop what he was doing, fix his clothes, and that would be the end of it. I knew he wasn’t into casual sex, and I wasn’t getting laid by him tonight, but I still desperately wanted to run my fingers down the little trail of hair that wound over his stomach to end in a blond patch of curls just a few shades darker than the hair on his head.

  “I thought about you while I came in your bathroom,” I told him, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “Oh yeah? What about?” If he was trying to play it off as being cool, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it because I could hear the hitch in his breath each time the long strokes of his hand got up to the head of his cock. I preferred shorter strokes. It was surprising, for me at least, that he went from the base of his cock, right on top of his balls, all the way back up to his head each time.

  I smiled at him and brought one of my hands from behind my back to rub the front of my pants. I wasn’t hard, but I could be soon enough if he would just give in. Since that wasn’t going to happen, I touched myself only long enough to see his face flush an even darker shade of red before he lifted his gaze from my crotch back to my face.

  “Having you bent over in front of me, my cock buried so deep in your ass that I could grind my hips against you as I dug my fingers into your hips.” He wasn’t even pretending not to be affected by me anymore as he groaned and rolled his head to the side.

  I came away from the wall and went to the foot of his bed. I still didn’t touch him, but I was close enough to touch his foot if I thought I could get away with it. Unfortunately his foot was not the part of him I most wanted to touch right then.

  “When I made myself come, I thought about coming in you and filling your ass,” I continued. My voice dropped on its own without me even trying, and I smiled as I saw his hips buck off the bed. “You wanted me to go harder, faster. And you begged me for more. That’s what did me in. I imagined the sound of you begging when I fucked your tight ass as hard as I could.”

  He groaned and jerked when he came. I stepped forward and ran my hand up the inside of his leg, starting at his ankle and moving up his calf until I cupped his thigh right below his open fly. Caleb was watching me as I bent and slid my mouth over his stiff cock. He hissed out a moan, and I was pretty sure he didn’t know what he should do in that moment because I had finished cleaning off his head with long swipes of my tongue before he put his clean hand on my shoulder. He could have pushed my head down; I wouldn’t have minded. But it was nice to feel his fingers curl into the material of my uniform, just as they had when we were on the couch.

  I took my time cleaning him up because it let me enjoy his taste. I knew what I wanted from him, but there were no guarantees with him. And if this was the only time I would ever get to put my mouth on his cock, I was sure as hell going to enjoy the feeling of having him in my mouth and the taste of his come on my tongue. His heavy panting had turned into soft sighs by the time I was done with him.

  I was half-hard again, and if he would have let me fuck him right then, I would have easily been able to get it up the rest of the way. But I could tell from looking at his face that what we’d done was as far as he was going to let things go that night. Which, fine, I could handle that. I didn’t want to stop there, but I certainly wasn’t going to be an asshole about it either.

  “There’s a master bath through that door with some mouthwash on the sink if you need it,” he said as I straightened back up.

  I shook my head. “I don’t mind your taste.”

  He blushed again, though he hadn’t actually stopped blushing since I came into his bedroom, and slowly got off the bed. He zipped himself up, then went into the bathroom to clean up the rest of the way. He left the door open so I got to see him take a wet washcloth and run it over his stomach where I hadn’t licked him clean.

  “I don’t know how being friends with you is going to work,” he said as he came back out and tossed the washcloth into his hamper.

  “Meaning what?” I asked.

  Caleb shrugged and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I’ve never been friends with someone I wanted to have sex with so much.”

  There was an easy answer for that,
but I figured he probably already knew what I was going to say. And I didn’t want to drive him away by repeating myself. “Want to try again tomorrow? One more time? I’ll bring over a movie we can actually watch.” I was trying to be good, and I hoped he saw that, because the alternative was me having him bent over the dresser he was standing next to and fucking him from behind until he cried out and came all over it.

  Caleb gave me a quick nod. “I’d like that. Do you think it could even work, though?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not really friends with many people,” I admitted.

  “That you don’t have sex with?” he asked.

  I laughed and shook my head. “No. In college, yes. But recently not so much. Guys at the precinct, people at the diner that have known me since I was a baby, but not really guys like you. So I’m trying not to fuck this up with you.”

  Smiling, Caleb came forward and gave me a hug. It was strange hugging a guy I wanted, since I didn’t do that with the guys I had sex with, but I had to admit that it felt good to have him in my arms.

  “I appreciate you trying,” Caleb said.

  I nodded. “I know you don’t want casual sex.”

  He stepped away, and I didn’t try to stop him. “Yeah, I really can’t do that. I know it works for you, and I’m sure it’s frustrating, just like it is for me. But I would want to date you, to have a relationship with you. Go to movies and share milkshakes at the diner.”

  That all sounded nice, but that wasn’t something I could give him. Someone could, and I wouldn’t try to get in the way of him finding someone else if he wanted to, but I couldn’t be that kind of guy for him.

  “Tomorrow, then?” I asked. I could tell he was disappointed that I didn’t say I could do all of those things with him. I’d be his friend, absolutely, but I couldn’t be anything more serious than that with him. And I wasn’t ready to tell him why either.

  Caleb nodded. “Yeah. See you tomorrow.”

  I could have stayed around; we might have been able to watch the movie from the beginning. But I could tell he was done for the night, and I was too. A week of knowing Caleb had turned what I wanted in a guy completely around, but I couldn’t do anything about that right then.

  Chapter Seven

  Caleb

  HALFWAY THROUGH a phone meeting with one of my regular clients the next morning, I was distracted enough to visit the Green Acres Equine Sanctuary’s website. I instantly knew I needed to update it for them because whoever had designed it had no idea what they were doing. Large portions of the text were unreadable and many of the images had to be scrolled over to be viewed fully, despite how large my monitor was. I shook my head and went through their recent rescue pictures, looking for any good ones of Trent.

  “What’s that color between purple and blue that I like?” Mr. Riti asked.

  “Violet?” I answered blandly. He wanted a family website with each of his twelve grandchildren getting their own page with their own color scheme. It was good money, but I was pretty sure the finished product would look awful. “Are you sure you don’t want to go with one color scheme for the site as a whole? It would make it look more uniform.”

  “My grandchildren aren’t uniform!” He sounded as if I’d somehow offended him. I filed that away as something to remember when working with him again, because he always wanted something new every few months it seemed.

  “Of course not. Violet for your oldest, then?” I said in an effort to calm him down. I had a good reputation and enough clients and repeat work that I could afford to say no to some of them, especially the ones with a bad history of not paying me on time, but Mr. Riti wasn’t like that. He was a bit extreme sometimes, but he paid me on time and always came back for more work. Two of his kids had even requested work from me too.

  “Yes, violet for her. And then royal blue for the next one. That’s a pretty color, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “It is.” I still didn’t know if he wanted the text, the background, or some heading to be these colors but that was something I’d figure out when I actually got started on his project and got more of the specifics from him. This was just the talking stage, which really could have been done by e-mail and would have let me search for pictures of Trent a lot more easily. But Mr. Riti was one of my clients who actually liked to talk things through, no matter how little I did. He’d booked me for an hour, though, and was paying me for my time as well, so I saved one quick picture of an exhausted-looking, very dirty, Trent where he was smiling as he closed up a horse trailer before I clicked out of the website and focused completely on Mr. Riti and his latest website project.

  The entire project, including calendars he decided to spring on me just as I was about to hang up the phone, would take me a couple of weeks to manage. The great thing about working from home was that I didn’t have to waste an hour each way driving in traffic to get to an office to do things I could have just as easily done at home, and done them better and faster there too. The office in LA had always been distracting to me with people talking nonstop and doors closing excessively hard since they were the heavy kind that no one really used anymore. Except for Paul.

  Great. That was one person I hadn’t meant to think about. He’d been respecting my space, for the most part, which was nice. But I was still getting random naked texts. I deleted them instantly, but I wasn’t sure how to make it any clearer that I did not want to have anything more to do with him. He was a liar and he slept around. I felt guilty for thinking that, though, since Trent slept with a lot of guys too, but at least he didn’t lie to me about it. In fact, I was sure that if I actually texted him and wanted to know if he’d been with anyone in the last few days, he would tell me. And I was also pretty sure I would know the answer to that question already without even having to ask. I shouldn’t have been comparing them at all, except I didn’t have a lot else to go on between them. I’d thought I loved Paul. Wasn’t it natural to want to examine my ex against the feelings I was starting to have for someone else?

  I sighed and ran my hands through my hair in frustration. I wanted him, but I couldn’t be something on the side. Not again. The worst part of it was that I kept getting the feeling that he was holding back from me, that sex was all Trent could give me. I wanted him so much and sometimes I thought I could handle that. People had sex with their friends all the time; there were even really bad movies about it. But I wasn’t like that. I’d been with three guys, and even though I hadn’t had sex with him, I counted Trent in that number now, which brought me up to a whole four people, just because he’d put his mouth on my cock.

  I was starting to get hard just thinking about him slowly cleaning me off. He didn’t suck me, didn’t even put much pressure on me, but that had been more than enough to last me for a few fantasies.

  Going back to the horse sanctuary page to keep looking for more pictures of him was an easy decision. I had work I could have been doing, and even if I didn’t, there was always laundry to do or I could have decided to eat something more than cookies, chips, and the remainder of the beef jerky I’d brought over from California. I had some boxed macaroni and cheese I could have made for lunch, since it was nearly eleven, but I was a bit too lazy for that, and besides, there were pictures of Trent in front of me.

  He looked happy with the horses, and I kind of wished I could get one to see him that happy in person. Which was a horrible idea and would never actually happen, but I was going through their fostering requirements anyway. I didn’t want to adopt a horse, since I couldn’t guarantee I’d be able to take care of it if something happened to me, but if I could foster one while Dean, Natalie, and Sam were visiting, then that could be good for the kid. As far as I knew, Sam had never really been around horses. I didn’t count pony rides at carnivals as actually riding, so I was pretty sure he hadn’t. There wasn’t much to it though, I remembered, aside from vet visits, farriers, tack, feed, and everything else that added up to a very expensive pet.

  But according to the website
, they covered all that. Before I could change my mind, I filled out the foster volunteer form on their website. If they weren’t coming out, then I wouldn’t foster, but I was pretty sure Natalie was ready to get her kid out of LA for a while. It made me really mad that some kids hurt him for being gay, and I was proud of him for coming out and being that brave. I hadn’t been at his age, but Sam had always been the kind of kid who was pretty sure of who he was and what he wanted. I admired that about him.

  It was nearly noon when I looked away from my laptop again and cheap pasta and fake cheese didn’t really sound all that appealing. Normally I loved macaroni and cheese, but the boxed stuff just wasn’t going to do it for me right then. I got off the stool, rubbed my sore back—I’d spent far too much time leaning over the island—then left the house to go to Rosie’s for lunch. I figured I’d stop by the store and get some more essentials afterward, and maybe I’d even see Trent there with the other cops.

  I was right. He was there, and he was surrounded by other people. Still, when I came in, he raised his hand and waved to me. I waved back, shot him a smile, and then followed a waitress over to a booth. Pulled pork, sweet potato fries, and sweet tea sounded like a good lunch, though not particularly healthy. It was a good thing I wasn’t trying to be healthy, then, I supposed….

  Halfway through my lunch, Trent pulled himself away from the guys at his table to come join me. He stole two of my fries, which I guessed was fair since I remembered taking a few of his before, but when he reached for my pulled pork I nearly stabbed him with my fork in defense of my lunch.

  Laughing, he shook his head, then finished up with a grin at me. I was the center of his attention for that moment, and it was nice to have all of him focused solely on me. “How’s work going?” I asked.

  Trent shrugged and rested his arms on the table. “Decent, I guess. I spent most of the morning answering e-mails so I can’t complain. How’s designing going? Anything fun?”