by Neve Wilder
I squinted at the page, then cut a look over at him that lingered longer than I intended. “This is about us?” I meant it as a statement, but it came out almost as a question.
Les did that side-to-side head-tilt thing again and scratched casually at his jaw. “Sorta.”
“Dancing around your hard edges…” I read off the page, my gaze flickering up to find him watching me pensively. “That’s what I’m like to you?”
“You’re a lot of things, Porter.” He shrugged and picked up his coffee, taking a long swallow.
I ran through the notes again, trying to expand on what he’d given me, and finally collapsed backward in a huff, giving up. Lately, it felt like I was the one stuck while Les churned along easily.
He read my frustration and reached for his guitar, dragging it from my lap. I thought he was going to pick up where I’d left off, but instead he laid it on the floor beside him, then crawled onto the couch, insinuating himself behind me. “I want to try something. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you never touch anyone.”
I hadn’t really, but he wasn’t wrong. Les was always touching people, throwing his arms around shoulders, showing affection or interest with a touch to someone’s forearm or hand. I was careful of personal space, and I didn’t like anyone I didn’t know in my own, which had made working as a bartender an exercise in frustration.
When his hands landed on my shoulders, I flinched. Instead of taking it as a brush-off and retreating, though, he tightened his grip, digging his thumbs into muscle, pressing into the knots and rolling against them. I was about to shrug him off, but he pushed the heels of his palms into my shoulder blades and fuck did it feel good. I let my head drop forward a little and felt him sink more heavily into the cushion behind me.
“Good?”
I gave a tiny nod as he firmly prodded the top of my spine. “Yeah.” It felt better than good, and if he kept going I couldn’t decide whether I was more likely to fall asleep or pop wood.
“Remember when we played Gap Fest and there was a masseuse backstage?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you sleep with her?”
Les laughed close to my ear. “No. I mean, I don’t want to ruin your very flattering image of me, but I was about to say you should do this more often. I get that you have your routines and stuff, but you don’t let yourself deviate and you never relax, and even if you’re not going to relax about ninety-nine percent of your waking life—a masseuse kind of forces you into it for a while.”
“What are you getting at here?”
He let out an exasperated huff. “That you should fucking relax for five minutes and let me do this. Your shoulders feel like rebar.” His touch tripped up to the side of my neck, fingertips working the tendons. The warmth of his skin and the way he rolled his knuckles across my neck was almost orgasmic. I tilted my head to one side, then the other, directed by the pressure of his touch. When he moved on and closed his hands around my biceps, his torso pressed against me and I could feel him, hard and thick against me.
“Pretty sure masseuses aren’t supposed to be sporting wood when they massage someone.”
“That’s why I’m not a professional. Sorry. It’s an occupational hazard with me, I guess. I have a hair trigger, you know that. Do you want me to stop?” He paused, his hands still curled around my upper arms, but his grip loosening ever so slightly.
“No. Keep going.” I tried not to think about how good it felt, because he wasn’t the only one with a hard-on. Which answered my previous question; I was not at all drowsy at the moment.
He released one of my arms and put both hands on the other, initiating long, deep strokes from my bicep to my wrist, pushing at muscle, kneading tendons until my arm went rag doll floppy and loose. Then he did the other arm. Afterward, I felt him shift around, rising up on his knees behind me to tackle my shoulders again. His dick brushed against my back as he dug into me, and I wasn’t unaware that his breathing had quickened. Mine had too and now I was so damn hard my pants were little more than a straightjacket on my cock.
When he reached for the hem of my T-shirt and tugged it up toward my chin and then over my head, I didn’t resist, just lifted my arms, having slipped into some kind of trancelike autopilot mode that I’d blame on the insane eroticism of his touch. Air rushed cool across my skin, and his warm hands pressed flat against my ribs, dragging down to my lower back and then back up again with a friction that almost burned.
“Fuck, you’ve got a killer body. I’ve always been so jealous of that.” Just the lust-heavy sound of his voice made me groan in reply, and I thought for the millionth time about how he’d kissed me the other night. When his boner brushed against me this time, I pushed back against him without even thinking twice.
He dug into my shoulders, finding a rhythm, pushing and pulling against me, his breath coming steadily but in heavy drafts. I was so fucking turned on I couldn’t take it; I reached behind me, grabbed the back of his thigh, and yanked him hard up against me.
“Shit,” he hissed out. “You fucker.” He shifted again, tilting himself somehow so I couldn’t feel his dick anymore. “I’m not trying to perv on you, I’m trying to relax you.”
“It’s kinda hard to ignore your dick.”
“I get that a lot.” He chuckled shamelessly. “Just think of it like… one of those massage wands in the SkyMall magazine.”
“Those vibrate, though, don’t they?”
“Keep arching your back against me like that and my wand will definitely be vibrating.”
“There’s something wrong with you.” More mumble than words as I let my head droop forward again and my eyes fall shut to better focus on the pleasure radiating through me.
He walked the pressure of his knuckles up and down my back, his laughter low and sonorous when my spine swayed back and forth trying to anticipate his next move. My erection throbbed and was well on its way to full-blown ache. What was it with my cock and Les? For that matter, what was it with me and Les? Why was the worst option in the world the only one both my dick and I seemed to agree on?
“Want me to keep going?” He paused, his hands low around my waist, thumbs sweeping into the dimples at my lower back.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, like ‘eh, this is okay’ or ‘yes definitely’?”
I twisted around to try and catch a glimpse of his face, because it struck me as such an unusual question coming from him. I thought he just wanted to hear some kind of verbal confirmation of what he was visibly doing to me. Because there was no fucking way he couldn’t know or couldn’t see the evidence trying to leap out of my pants. His eyes were glassy, cheeks tinged with color, and his tongue darted out to swipe his lower lip as his brows winged up, silently prodding me.
“Yes, definitely.” I kept my voice as even as I could.
He nodded and lifted up on his knees again, tackling my shoulders with the downward force of his body through his arms. When I let my head droop forward, I noticed a tiny wet spot on my sweats where my cock was plastered to the fabric, and I wondered if that was the cause of the curse that slipped from his mouth next.
The whole ambience transformed in an instant.
I lifted my hips at the same time Les’s hands landed on the waistband of my sweats. He shoved them down below my knees, then pulled me back against him, between his thighs. Resting his chin on my shoulder, he ran a hand down over my chest, then my stomach, stopping before he reached my cock. His breath tickled the side of my neck as he spoke, but there was no mistaking the desire in the velvety roll of his voice. “You want me to touch you?”
I figured the fact that my dick was twitching was answer enough, but apparently that didn’t cut it. He wrapped his hand around me and gave my shaft a single, excruciatingly tight stroke that almost had me coming off the couch for more before he released me suddenly. My dick protested the brush-off with another hard twitch, a thick bead of precum squeezing from my slit.
“You want me to jack that fat cock, then you
fucking say it.”
I gritted my teeth and reached for his hand, but he swatted me away. “Goddammit, quit fucking around and jack me before common sense catches up with my dick.”
He rumbled, a sound that was caught between laughter and purr. “Not gonna happen this time, sweetheart; I’m one step ahead. I’m about to get you off so fucking hard you’ll be Jell-O.”
“You always such a cocky fuck when it comes to sex?”
“Besides music, it’s the only thing I know I do well.”
It’d be funny if it wasn’t so true, because when he gripped me again, his fist gliding along my length and twisting deftly at the top, it was fucking perfect. The pressure, the friction, everything. He pushed his thumb against my lower lip, and I opened to him automatically, taking it into my mouth and sucking while he growled against my throat. He dragged his wet thumb down my chin and then rubbed it over my head a few times, making me writhe.
“Spit.” He cupped his palm under my chin, and when I hesitated, he said. “Don’t think about it, just do it.”
So I did. Then his hand was back on my cock, slick and hot and driving me mad.
“Fuck, I’m gonna come just getting you off,” he whispered, and nipped at my earlobe.
I shuddered out a breath as his hand twisted over me, my hips chasing every stroke, his breath hot against my neck and his dick pulsing against my back. He stroked me slow, then fast, hard then soft until I was half-crazed at the variation, my orgasm constantly yanked to the foreground, then shoved to the background until there was nowhere left for it to go, and no matter how he touched me, I was about to explode.
I panted, letting my head fall back to his shoulder, and he braced his legs around my hips. His teeth sank into my shoulder, my collarbone, my neck, and I arched every time into his hand, nearly whimpering with the need for release. I was never fucking like this, had never been like this with anyone else—almost feral with how turned on I was, how much I ached over what he was doing to me, how perfectly he read my body.
“God,” I grated out. I sounded desperate and whiny and so unlike myself. “Fuck, I’m gonna come.” And then I couldn’t stop talking, telling him harder, faster on harsh, guttering breaths. Les was right there with me, breath coming heavy and fast in my ear as he whispered filthy encouragements—how hard I was, how good I felt in his fist. And when he gripped my balls in his other hand and told me to give him the load I was holding back, I fucking lost it. My thighs quaked with the full-body shudder that coursed through me, and I blew hot in his hand to a string of curses he whispered against my throat. I felt the hard press of him against my back as my orgasm rolled through me, and then a bloom of wet heat as he came with muffled groan.
His legs sprawled on either side of me as we both went limp and collapsed backward into the sofa, the harsh rise and fall of his chest lifting me up and down.
After a few minutes, I rolled off to one side, hiking my pants back up over my ass and tossing my T-shirt to him so he could mop himself off.
“Shit.”
“What?” I glanced at him in alarm.
“You came all over Bowie’s face.”
I looked down at the records scattered over the floor and there, streaked across Bowie’s softly focused expression on the record sleeve of Young Americans, was a streamer of cum. My eyes went wide, and Les rolled off the couch, racked with laughter.
“Oh hell.” I reached down and swiped at the record sleeve. “Fitting tribute?”
“Absolutely.”
An hour passed. Two. We’d cleaned up and worked on some songs, blithely glossing over what had happened earlier. Patches of uncomfortable silence were interspersed with comfortable conversation. All of it felt inherently unsteady, like the way Les’s coffee mug was sitting at the very edge of the table, one clumsy movement from tipping over. That was more or less what the past six months had felt like, too. So when Les blew out a long breath, shoved his guitar aside, and sprawled on his side on the floor near me, saying, “We have to talk about this,” I was relieved this time instead of angry. Maybe I’d needed that orgasm more than I thought, because I was definitely calmer now. I’d also spent the last half hour reliving the feeling of him getting me off and wondering how and if I could make it happen again.
“Have you always been into guys?”
That wasn’t what I expected, though, so it took me a minute to reframe my mindset. All the while, he studied me passively. Not hurrying me, just patient interest.
“I’m not ‘into’ guys.” He snorted and I held up my hand so he’d let me finish. “I’m not ‘into’ people in general that often, okay? You already know that.”
“Have you been with a guy before?”
I schooled my expression, steeling myself. Of course he had to ask the fucking question. “Yes.”
His jaw dropped as he sat up straight and stared me down like I’d brutalized a puppy or something. “Why haven’t you ever told me?”
“Because it’s none of your business really. How often do I talk about anyone I date anyway?”
He tipped his head to the side. “All right. Point. Still, it seems like something that would’ve come up somewhere along the way. I dunno, maybe one of the many times you walked in on me. Some solidarity or a thumbs-up and a ‘hey, your oral technique looks great.’”
“You’re usually on the receiving end of said technique,” I pointed out.
“Okay, point again. But why?” Then he squinted one eye and pursed his lips, like he was seeing right through me. “Wait. Who was it? Did he break your clockwork heart?”
I fought to ignore the jab. My heart was far from clockwork. It was a bastard. Fleeting images surfaced—a red skim of hair, a soft mouth, warm brown eyes. My best friend in high school. Until he moved away senior year and our friendship unraveled suddenly, painfully, like it’d never even been there at all. I told Les the first part, but he seemed unsatisfied by the answer. “What’d you do with him?”
“Mostly hand jobs, a few blowjobs. It was… high school.” It had always been hurried and hushed. Like there was something intrinsically wrong with what we were doing. That was mostly on his part, though. I didn’t have enough of a social profile back then to give a shit what other people thought; I was already invisible.
“Did you love him?”
Relentlessly, painfully. But I was confused, too. So much of high school was nothing but confusion to me. The social politics, the general obsession with body parts and who was sticking what in where and for how long. Music was easier. A place I could dissolve into. A place where I created the rules, the structure, the tone.
“He contacted me once. Sent me an email right after our first album hit it big.”
Les’s eyes widened. “Did you reply?” He lowered his voice as if we were in a crowd rather than in an empty room, and it was clear that he’d mistaken my reluctance to talk about it as embarrassment rather than hurt. “Did you see him again?”
“Nah. When I’m done, I’m done.”
And then he sussed it out. “So he did break your heart. And that’s why you haven’t been with another guy since?”
I didn’t say anything. Maybe it was easier to let him think a broken heart was to blame than to tell him the deeper truth. Because that truth was far more complex than some implication of self-imposed restraint after a soured relationship. The truth was I hadn’t been attracted to another guy until Les. And if I was brutally honest, I’d never been attracted to anyone the way I was Les. And yeah, I’d only come to that conclusion recently after a shit ton of internal turmoil, but the force of it hit like an avalanche primarily because it was so rare for me to be truly into anyone. “Maybe.”
“You’re being really obtuse right now.”
I felt the corners of my mouth turn up, and Les threw his arm across the couch cushion, leaning closer to look up at me, the green intensity of his gaze brightening like a flash fire. “I won’t hurt you, you know.”
“I know. Because this isn’t real an
yway.” It was both true and untrue, but it was the best kind of answer for the ridiculous promise Les was making. How could anyone predict whether they’d hurt someone else? If someone had asked me about Luke in high school, I never would’ve thought it possible that we wouldn’t somehow be connected for life, and what I felt for Les now was so damn complicated I was hesitant to label it. Les got me and I got him, but it was on this subdermal, subvocal level that didn’t make logical sense to me. It was like trying to break down a song. If you went too far, it would lose all its magic, but it was also a necessity if you wanted to truly understand the structure and why the song worked in the first place.
Maybe I needed to try not questioning us. With music, my trust in Les’s instinct and ability was absolute. But where I was concerned personally? Not so much. Yet, I couldn’t deny that I wanted more of this. Whatever it was. Because the sad truth was, sex rarely felt as good as what had just happened, and I was jealous. Jealous of people like Les, who seemed to find pleasure easily, in any random hand or mouth or body, while apparently it took an act of God for me to even want it. That load I’d blown in his hand felt like it’d been building up in me for a decade. So yeah, I wanted more. A lot more. But that meant I’d have to make a concerted effort to keep it casual the way Les apparently could.
Les frowned and scraped his teeth over his lower lip but nodded after a moment. “Doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun with it. Like we just did, yeah?”
I licked my lips, and somehow when I said, “Sure, yeah. I’m down,” it felt as if I’d passed through some door that slammed shut and disappeared behind me.
Chapter 25
I was cartwheeling inside the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. Evan might’ve been second-guessing himself over this morning, but clearly his body was into me. If I could just prove to him that there was no need for him to get all mired in overthinking, maybe this whole fake relationship could become… Fuck, was I really considering that? Yeah, I’d been lusting after him forever, but it was always accompanied by the ice-water shock of reality reminding me that that was pure fantasy because Evan was never going to be into me in a romantic way. Not to mention my track record with relationships was pretty shitty. Regardless, I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Or maybe gift dick was more appropriate.