Paint It Black

by Amy Lane

  “No?” he managed to say. Oh God, no ropes, no chains, and yet this kid had him naked and helpless and shaking.

  “No,” Cheever repeated. “It’s shit you did to survive. Who you are is a guy who’d make himself naked to help a fucked-up kid get through the worst week of his life. You think I’m going to let you go?”

  “I got no idea,” Blake moaned, stretched out and needy. Cheever spat in his crease a couple of times, raw and animal, so erotic Blake writhed at the thought of it.

  His finger at Blake’s entrance was no surprise, slender, teasing, and Blake arched his back, sweating.

  “Cheever, what are you—”

  “Seeing you naked,” Cheever said softly, thrusting in, pulling out. “Like I said, you’re beautiful.”

  Blake pulled one knee underneath him, fully intending to roll over and sit up so he could explain why this was a bedroom thing and not a life-together thing… and then Cheever added another finger.

  Blackness washed behind his eyes, and he gibbered into the pillow. “Oh my God…. Cheever—Cheever this isn’t… yes, more, bigger!”

  He was shaking with need, and unbidden, his other knee came up underneath him. There he was, as raw and vulnerable as he’d ever been, and Cheever kept thrusting, kissing the small of his back and tracing his spine with a wicked tongue.

  “I won’t leave you hanging,” Cheever whispered. “Stay there. Spread yourself if you have to.”

  The fingers disappeared and Blake did as he’d suggested, the part of his brain wondering where his self-preservation had disappeared to, completely submerged by the part of his brain crying out to have Cheever’s body in his.

  Cheever made quick work of his clothes and then came to the head of the bed, where he rooted under Blake’s pillow and came back with the lubricant. Blake stared at him with helpless eyes, and Cheever bent to take his mouth again.

  “There are so many ways I want to do this,” he whispered. “I want to have sex every way known to man twice, then again, then a hundred times more to see if it’s always this good.”

  No. No, it can’t possibly be. How could it always be this good when I feel like I’m going to explode when you touch me right now?

  But Cheever had moved away by then and drizzled the slick down Blake’s backside, rubbing it in with his thumb.

  Blake was trembling so hard, he couldn’t remember his own name.

  But he remembered who was about to fuck him, sure enough.

  “Cheever!”

  One long, slick thrust and Cheever was inside him again, where he belonged, and Blake emitted a long, low howl that was barely human.

  Cheever wasn’t gentle this time, wasn’t tentative. He pulled back fast and snapped forward hard, and all Blake could do was hide his face and scream.

  Again and again, not too fast, slow enough that every thrust hit home. Blake wound tighter and tighter, like a watch about to bust its spring. He thought he might rocket into blue balls, except Cheever started… touching him.

  Cheever gave him everything he didn’t know he needed. Slow caresses to his flanks, his ass, his thighs. Gentle words about his body—strong back, tight ass, muscles that popped in the moonlight. Soft kisses against his shoulders in between thrusts.

  Blake almost sobbed, he was so undone. And when Cheever said, “Okay, Blake, grab your cock and make yourself come,” Blake wondered who the kid thought he was fucking.

  But that’s all it took. One long, hard, painful squeeze and Blake was coming like a fire hose, locked around Cheever’s cock as Cheever groaned overhead and fell over his back, lost in his own orgasm, sweating with exertion and climax, and face it Blake, fucking triumph! Because the kid had won.

  Blake was his. Cheever’s course for their relationship was theirs. Blake had no recourse and no backbone—not in this.

  Blake’s knees went out from under him, and he was left flat on the bed in a puddle of his own come while Cheever finished stuttering inside him.

  “Blake?” Cheever said, running tender fingertips along his shoulders.

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to move in and let Briony have my room, as brilliant as it is. That way I don’t have to hide my paint supplies from the kids, and I can use the light in that empty room up here to paint in.”

  Blake wanted to laugh—as he was sure Cheever meant him to—but he could barely breathe because he was still rocked by orgasm and Cheever’s cock was still in his ass.

  “Sure,” he managed to say. September. He’d leave in September, and Cheever would move out and he’d be alone. “Sounds great.”

  Cheever pulled out and shoved at Blake’s shoulder. Blake rolled to his side and Cheever stretched out next to him, putting his head on Blake’s shoulder and kissing his cheek.

  “I knew you’d see it my way.”

  SURE. SURE Blake would see it his way.

  He had no choice.

  The next day, while he was practicing the new album with the guys, Cheever and Trav moved his dresser upstairs, and his paint stuff too. The dresser went in Blake’s room. His paint stuff went in the suite with the most light.

  The day after, the guys woke them up in the morning with Cheever’s bed, which they put in one of the other suites, laughing even as they set it up, because they didn’t see it getting a lot of use.

  The day after that, Cheever spent the day setting up his studio, with drawers for his supplies and a computer desk and an easel. Blake watched him, frowning, thinking he’d have to move it all back, but he didn’t say anything. It was June. He could have the happiest three months of his life if he just let Cheever do what he wanted. September was a lifetime away.

  By the end of the week, Cheever Sanders had been in Blake’s bed every night, laughing, pushy, and voracious, and Blake was starting to sense that this wasn’t going away.

  He yearned for it to not go away.

  At the end of two weeks, Mackey was out of bed and on crutches, slowly but surely regaining some of his mobility and independence. He sat in on the practice sessions, listening, making suggestions, talking promotion with Trav. And while Blake knew he was writing his own stuff and practicing his own instruments in a limited capacity—including the piano, which was new to him—he seemed determined to let Blake fly with this project on his own.

  Blake found himself settling more and more into the role of leader, much like Mackey had been. Unlike the first album, in which he’d pretty much taken the studio musician’s vision and ran with it, he found he was taking the control the band had given him and making the album his own. For ten years, he’d made himself “useful,” and he was proud of that. Kell, Mackey, the twins, even Briony and Shelia and the children, they’d all gotten very good at depending on him. For someone who had grown up only being able to look out for number one, he thought that being there for other people was as good as Blake Manning got.

  But as they worked on this album, with Cheever in his bed, being bossy, being charming, telling him he was special, he found that telling the guys what to do—as well as some of the studio musicians he’d needed to hire to make his vision true—became easier as he went. He wasn’t just the guy who was dependable anymore. He was the guy who helped make the music, helped make the sound that could make the spirit soar. And the sound that was coming out of the studio….

  Oh, it pleased him. It made him happy and sad; it hooked him in the stomach and made him want to sing. It did all the things to him that good music had always done, and it was his music.

  Cheever sat in through the recording sessions sometimes, sketching the guys when they were happy or pissed or thoughtful.

  But it was more than that. Blake could tell, just by the way his eyes would move as Stevie would snark or Jefferson would make peace or Kell would problem solve with one or two pithy sentences, that Cheever was learning his brothers from the beginning again, figuring out how the boys who’d raised him had grown up as men. All of them had grown up in Mackey’s shadow, but Cheever—and Blake, looking through
Cheever’s eyes—could see that they had grown strong enough to face the sun all on their own.

  Blake would find himself just staring at Cheever sometimes, charmed and fascinated by this young man who seemed so completely himself, so completely at ease, after Blake had seen him at his worst.

  It actually gave him hope.

  People could learn. They could grow. They could transform. They could take their experiences, good and bad, and use them to become a better, stronger, kinder person.

  Seeing Cheever in the process of doing it made Blake proud—proud of Cheever and proud of himself.

  He’d done that too. He’d gone from being a coke whore to a rock star to an actual human being. Maybe Blake wasn’t all of the bad things he’d once been. Cheever certainly wasn’t.

  Blake stopped questioning Cheever’s presence in his bed, in his life, and, little by little, started to accept it.

  A month after Cheever Sanders had simply asserted his way into Blake’s bed, Mackey got his wrist cast taken off and got a brace in its place. And his leg cast was replaced with a waterproof walking cast. His back still hurt—anybody could see it, but pretty much every room in both houses had a special orthopedic chair meant especially for Mackey to take the strain off, and he spent about ten minutes every hour doing strengthening and stretching exercises to help the rest of his muscles pick up the slack.

  Blake and Cheever had remarked privately that Mackey’s stomach muscles were becoming insanely ripped—people were going to think he’d gone to get swole instead of gone to heal his injuries.

  But that, along with so many other things between them, remained private.

  Private.

  Like the little moan Cheever made when Blake ran his lips from Cheever’s earlobe down the side of his neck.

  Private.

  Like the way Cheever possessed Blake easily, like he’d been born to top, like Blake was smaller, more delicate, precious.

  Private.

  Like the way Blake stayed up nights, perfecting each song on his roster, worrying, fretting, teasing, until he was sure it was worthy of the Outbreak Monkey brand, since his brothers were pouring their hearts into what should have been his own risk.

  Like the time Blake went upstairs unexpectedly and heard a competent if not spectacular guitar player working the chords from one of Outbreak Monkey’s biggest hits again and again and again until it was smooth as silk. He’d found Cheever sitting in his art studio, playing until his fingers blistered, trying so damned hard to be like his brothers without anybody seeing him fail.

  Like the way Blake had cried while bandaging those blisters, because Cheever was perfect and beautiful, and he couldn’t figure out the right words to tell him he was perfect and beautiful and make him believe it.

  That sort of private.

  So private that Blake was reluctant to ask Cheever to come up with Trav, Mackey, Kell, and Heather to take Katy to her grandparents’ place to visit when they could put it off no longer.

  “You’re going without me?” Cheever asked as Blake packed his bag the night before.

  “You can come!” Blake told him, trying to smile about it. “It’s just… you know.”

  “But I love that kid!” Once Mackey had gotten back on his feet, Cheever had spent his morning hours helping Shelia and Briony and Marcia—Blake didn’t doubt he loved Katy. If three days at Disneyland didn’t bond you with a pack of children, nothing would.

  “I know it!” Blake tried a winning smile. “Baby boy, this is just… I mean, Grant’s parents are awful. And it’s hard leaving her there. The only reason we can do it this year is that her mom’s gonna be there. Otherwise, I honestly think Trav would be fighting it in court. It’s hard. It sucks. And Mackey and Kell are gonna be tore up. They are every year. Jefferson and Stevie are probably having their own little pity party with her right now, since they’re not going. It’s no fun for anybody, you know? I just thought I’d spare you, that’s all.”

  “You called me ‘baby boy,’” Cheever said softly. “That’s sweet. I like it when you do that, because you think just saying it makes you the grown-up, and we both know that’s not what’s going on here.”

  Blake grimaced, because, well, truth. “Your point is?”

  Cheever blinked those green eyes at him with a little extra sass. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I can’t handle this because I’m your baby boy.”

  As. If. The way Cheever took Blake apart in bed almost nightly? Not even a chance.

  “That’s not what this is,” Blake said, trying to be the fucking grown-up for once.

  “Then explain,” Cheever asked, all steel and reason. “Explain so I don’t feel like you don’t think I can handle this, or like this isn’t any of my business because I was too young to get in your club on the ground floor.”

  Blake threw a pair of socks into his duffel as if he was trying to pitch them through a window. “I just don’t want you to have to hurt! Is that so goddamned bad?” Great. His throat was thick and his eyes burned, but Cheever was looking at him with profound understanding, which usually meant Blake had lost before he even opened his mouth.

  Cheever stood up from the bed and walked behind him, setting his hands on Blake’s hips and kissing his neck at the shoulder joint.

  “Feel better?” he asked silkily.

  “No.” Blake scowled.

  “Want to beat up some more socks? I got a nice pair of boxer-briefs you can really go to town on.”

  “Go away.”

  “No.” Cheever wrapped his arms tight around him and Blake’s unyielding body relaxed just a smidge. “Why are you so mad?”

  “Because if I don’t stay mad, you are going to win, and it’s a… a… Roman general victory, that’s what it is!” And goddamn his online degree anyway, because he couldn’t remember the actual fucking word.

  “Pyrrhic,” Cheever supplied, rubbing his lips along the shell of Blake’s ear.

  “That. You’ll win, but you’ll have to go back to Tyson, and you’ll get to see all of those shitty things that made it such a fucking death trap in the first place, and you’ll feel like ass. So you won’t really win—you’ll just get to watch the rest of us fall apart. Mackey and I don’t even get to down fucking beer, you get that? There’s no boozy happy ‘we’re so glad we survived’ or, ‘no, no, no, my hometown is shittier!’ or any of that coping crap. We are just pissed off and mad and fucking mean. Kell and I got into a fistfight the first time we did this, and then, when we looked like hamburger, we like hung on each other and cried.”

  “Wow.” Cheever sounded surprised, but he wasn’t stopping that gentle seduction, which meant that Blake’s words weren’t sinking in.

  “It’s better now,” Blake admitted. “’Cause for the first couple years, we were leaving her there until we got back for Christmas, and that always sucked. She smelled like cigarettes and wouldn’t eat for the first three days. This is six weeks—and Sam is there most of the time, so Katy’ll be happy. But we’re still leaving our baby someplace that almost killed the bunch of us, and dammit, I didn’t want you to see.”

  Augh! He needed to run, or to work the sandbag, or to lift a lot of weight all at the same time.

  But Cheever kept his arms around Blake’s waist and his lips moving gently on his ear, and his groin thrusting repeatedly at Blake’s backside.

  “This isn’t about me,” Cheever said softly.

  “It is too.”

  “No, it isn’t. If it was, you would have asked me.”

  Well, hell. “Do you want to come with us?” he asked, done.

  “Yes. But that’s not the point.”

  “What is?” And still, that gentle assault at his irritation, his defenses, all of the self-protective measures Blake had taken to not be a raw, exposed nerve that needed a bump of coke to get his sorry ass out of bed.

  “You don’t want me to see you ugly,” Cheever murmured. “You don’t want me to see you hurt.”

  “I don’t want you to get
hurt,” Blake repeated stubbornly.

  “I might,” Cheever admitted. “I didn’t say your reasoning wasn’t sound. But you can either trust me to deal with it or you can’t.”

  Blake pushed his finger between his eyebrows and rubbed, trying to loosen the knot of tension that wouldn’t stop building right there, and Cheever kept kissing the back of his neck.

  “You suck,” he muttered. “You really, really suck. This trip is going to suck. Your brothers are going to suck. Trav’s gonna suck. I’m gonna suck. And your mom’s gonna beat us all to death with a tire iron before this is done. Mark my words here, Cheever, this is not going to be pretty.”

  “So if you’re right and I’m wrong,” Cheever murmured, sliding his hands under Blake’s shirt, “what’s your prize? How long do you get to say ‘I told you so’? I just want to mark it on the calendar, you know, to make sure you’re done before you take off on tour in September.”

  Oh God. Tour. Blake was going to have to leave Cheever here, probably back in the big house to help with the kids so he wouldn’t be alone—but still. Cheever planned to make up that class that had set him over the edge, which cheered Blake no end, because it meant all sorts of things—things about follow-through, about taking responsibility, about doing what was right and fixing what you broke.

  But it meant Blake would leave, and Cheever would rediscover his life—the one with the rich friends and the bright future and the hot guys in pretty cars who didn’t have Blake’s baggage. Cheever would have a do-over, and it was all Blake had wanted for the boy from that first moment he’d seen him in that squalid hotel room. Blake’s feelings shouldn’t enter into it, not even a little bit, not even at all.

  “No ‘I told you so,’” Blake said gruffly, relaxing and leaning his head back so Cheever could take his mouth. “Just you and me, square like we are.”

  Cheever didn’t disappoint him, and after they knocked his duffel bag off the bed and had energetic, strangely tender sex, they repacked it again.

  For two.