ConvenientStrangers

by Cara McKenna

  “Oh, I’ve got plenty of spare toothbrushes,” Adam offered. “Wait. Did that make me sound like a slut?”

  Stephen nodded. “Very prepared and hospitable slut.”

  “I’ll take it. You’re welcome to crash for the night, if that wasn’t clear. But if you turn out to be a complete asshole, it’ll be on my incredibly uncomfortable but stylish couch.”

  “Cheers. Beats a motel, anyhow. Though given how friendly I was when you first approached, I won’t be insulted if you change your mind and kick me out.”

  Adam shrugged. If he had his way, they’d fuck around and hopefully get off, fall asleep and, at worst, suffer through an awkward cup of coffee in the morning before bidding one another a nice life.

  They strolled the rest of the way in easy enough silence, the noise and activity of downtown fading behind them as they reached Adam’s little complex.

  “Here I am,” he said, fishing out keys as they reached his unit.

  Stephen took in the row of tidy, bland duplexes. “Nice.”

  “It does the job.”

  Stephen’s gaze settled on the mailbox. “Adam Weir.”

  “That’s me.” He swung the door in and they both pushed off their shoes on the mat. “Sorry. Whole place is carpeted. In cream. What kind of masochist thinks this crap up?”

  “Probably one with an appreciable investment in a local rug-cleaning business.”

  Adam flipped on the lights and led him up the stairs.

  “Very nice,” Stephen repeated. “Oh good. No cheesy framed prints of naked men,” he added, looking around Adam’s den and adjoining dining room.

  “As much as I’d love to traumatize one of the God-fearing young mothers on the block who might pop in to try and fix me up with their single friends, no. Not my style.”

  “This the uncomfortable couch?” Stephen asked, and crossed the room to the black leather modular torture device. He sat and grimaced. “Bloody hell, what’s this stuffed with? Granite?”

  “I know. But it looks great, right?”

  “Sounds like some blokes I’ve dated.” Stephen stood and cast the couch a distrustful glance. “The things we’ll put up with if something looks great, eh?”

  Adam smiled at that. He was nervous, suddenly. Here they were in this familiar space, everything as it always was, except for the six-foot-something exception called Stephen with a P-H.

  Offer him a drink, dumbass.

  “Would you—” Adam cut himself off when he caught the look on Stephen’s face. Mean. Focused. Ever so slightly predatory. Adam swallowed.

  Stephen stepped closer. “Would I what?”

  “Oh, you know. Would you like…anything?”

  A curt nod and suddenly they were nose-to-nose. It was too bright in here, the blinds open and the windows cracked. Adam was thoroughly out, but he didn’t need to give the churchy neighbors across the street a free show, or indeed any new reasons to think gays lacked discretion.

  Stephen caught Adam’s gaze darting to the windows and left him to flip the blinds closed. “Better?” he asked, coming back over. He ran a hand lightly up Adam’s side.

  It felt sinful, this contact without explicit permission. David had been fussy about that kind of stuff, always needing to be asked if he felt like messing around before Adam made a move. Very protective of his personal space. Adam, on the other hand, couldn’t understand what mood or thought a man could be preoccupied with that couldn’t be trumped with an invitation to fuck around. As long as he wasn’t heading out the door to attend a funeral, Adam always felt like fucking around.

  He gasped—a quiet, laughable little noise as Stephen cupped his jaw. A rough thumb stroked his cheek as their lips touched. Adam angled his face as Stephen’s hot palm slid to the back of his head once more, the sexiest sensation he’d felt in months.

  It was messy and rough, hot as hell. Just like at the bar, they kissed as if there were a prize at stake, as if they were fighting. For minutes on end, the world was reduced to the slick, firm lap of this man’s tongue, the smell of his skin, the growl in his throat. Adam stroked Stephen’s arms. Hard and thick, just how he hoped other parts of his guest would prove. His pulse took off as Stephen fisted his tee shirt collar, blood flooding Adam’s cock. They were moving faster than he’d planned, but goddamn, he loved a mean man. He ran his hands down Stephen’s sides to hold his hips, stroking his belt, wrapping his fingers around the leather and tugging their bodies close, crotch grinding crotch.

  He slid his hand under Stephen’s shirt, skimmed his palm over the flattest, hardest set of abs he’d ever felt.

  “Jesus, you’re sexy.” Way too eager, he traced the edge of Stephen’s belt buckle. A strong hand clasped his, gently moving it away.

  “Not that I don’t appreciate being invited here,” Stephen said, then cleared his throat. “But I don’t fuck on the first date.”

  Adam adjusted his angry erection, telling it to quit getting its hopes up. Still, he wasn’t the one who’d started all this by the pool table, or indeed suggested they leave. Talk about mixed signals.

  He smiled dryly, annoyed. “That’s too bad. I usually prefer to get bent over a barstool and fisted while I’m waiting for the second round to show up.”

  It gave the guy pause and he straightened, nostrils flaring with a long breath. He shrugged the way a man did when he wasn’t disposed to actually apologizing. Close enough.

  Adam stepped back then crossed to the dining area to pull out a chair at the table for his moody guest. “Sorry if I was too forward.”

  Stephen strolled over, gaze not quite meeting Adam’s. “Yeah, well. Sorry if I was a presumptuous arsehole just then. I’m not having the best day ever.”

  Adam smirked then offered a kinder, dopier, commiserating grin. “Your ex really did a number on you, huh?”

  Stephen sighed as he took a seat, looking suddenly more exhausted than angry. “Probably. Fucking closet cases.”

  “Ah, I see.” Adam’s body cooled, and he went to a cabinet and gathered a bottle of good scotch and a pair of rocks glasses. “So all this… It’s not just that you’ve gone more than two years only kissing the same guy. More than two years since you’ve been able to be out with a guy, publicly? Like, out with a guy?”

  He nodded. “My fault though, really. I let it go on way too long, telling myself he was going to change. Should’ve ripped the plaster off ages ago.”

  “You must have been serious to have survived all that time, long-distance,” Adam said, sitting. He’d rather escape into the sex, but maybe this was good, that they’d met this way, that they were having this conversation. Free therapy. He poured two modest shots and slid one across the wood.

  “Cheers. Funny thing was, we weren’t that serious. Sort of casual for a year, in London, then he moved back here and we somehow ended up being official during that time apart. The distance made it feel more…fraught, maybe. More dramatic.” Stephen took a sip. “Then I moved here to see where we were going, and now it’s ten months later and he’s no closer to coming out than when I met him. Wrecked my little star-crossed melodrama, you could say. Upending my life to hold some coward’s hand wasn’t the deal I signed up for. And I mean that handholding a bit metaphorically, since he’d never go for that. Not with witnesses.”

  “That sucks. We’ve all dated one of those.”

  “We don’t all bloody emigrate for one though.”

  Adam smiled, spinning his glass around on the tabletop. “No, we don’t.”

  Stephen cracked his neck, too manly to be allowed. “You ever been the first guy to bring a closeted guy out? Not all the way out. But you know—been a guy’s first? The first one to get him to even admit to himself that he’s gay?”

  “Yeah, I have. When I was in college. Kind of scary, like you’re all they’ve got.”

  Stephen smiled, a tight little guilty gesture. “Not to me, it wasn’t.”

  “No?”

  “That had me so fucking hot, knowing I was the only man t
his bloke was willing to do shit with.” He shook his head, as if the mere thought of it overwhelmed him.

  “Ah. I could see how that might have an appeal.” Especially to a dominant, controlling type, Adam’s own kryptonite, for better or worse. Maybe the guy could use a whipping boy, to hate-fuck all his anger out on. What a terrible, ingenious notion.

  “It let me put up with him being closeted for ages, because at first there was something about that, knowing I had him wanting things he was scared of, you know?”

  Adam nodded.

  “Felt good, to me anyhow, knowing he felt filthy about the whole thing. Taboo and all that. Dirty. Then you start caring about somebody, properly caring…”

  “Yeah, I know. Then you start feeling filthy. Like what’s wrong with you, that this person’s so ashamed to admit who you really are to them, to the people whose opinions they seem to care more about than yours. Coworkers and neighbors.”

  Stephen thumped a fist softly on the table. “Nail on the head. I don’t need the guy I’m seeing to be out marching in every parade that passes by. If he doesn’t want his coworkers knowing, I can accept that. Some divisions are valid, like some people don’t need to know who you fuck when you clock out at the end of the day. But something. Some sign you’re okay with who you are. I mean, if you resent yourself because you’re fucking me, I can’t help but think you must resent me.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Like, I fuck the shit out of you, wake up with you every morning, move my bloody life across the ocean for you. But you care more about what your elderly aunties think, and when do you see them? Once a year, tops? Fucking coward.”

  “We all get to deal with it in our own ways. In our own time.”

  “Well, his time wasn’t fast enough for me. ‘Never’ wasn’t soon enough to stick around waiting for.”

  “No, of course not. And who knows—maybe your leaving will be his wake-up call. He lost a good thing, staying in the closet. Maybe that’s what it’ll take for him.”

  Stephen sipped his whiskey. “Not holding my breath.”

  Fine by Adam. He’d be lying if he told himself he was above being somebody’s rebound. Just what he needed, in fact, to launch himself back into the wonderful world of casual sex, post-romantic implosion. Though Stephen was right to hit the brakes—they didn’t need to screw tonight. In fact, they really shouldn’t. But get Adam’s sheets nice and messed up, give him some good memories to jerk off to, to make bedtime feel less lonely. Cleanse his palate.

  “It’s odd,” Stephen said slowly, “how you can be with a bloke for months, for years, then the second you break up with them, properly break up with them… It’s like, what pills did somebody slip me, that I ever thought that was what I wanted?”

  Adam nodded. “The rose-tinted glasses are off.”

  “Must be the fucking sex that does it—tints them in the first place.”

  “True.”

  “The glasses have been off for a while, but I turned my life so inside out, I couldn’t just give up on trying to make things work. Which is mad, because I was never one of those people who think a relationship should be work, you know? Like, if it feels like work, you probably picked the wrong bloke.”

  Adam nodded. “I think there’s something to be said for both schools of thought. But right now, I’m firmly in your camp.”

  Stephen downed the last of his shot and sighed, rolling his head back. He dropped his chin and looked Adam square in the face. His eyes were blue—dark blue, not clear and bright. A storm, not a summer’s day. “Sorry. You were nice enough to invite me back here to screw around, and I’m dumping all this on you like you’re my bloody analyst.”

  “It’s my therapy, too. I’m still on the rebound from my ex, for better or worse. Probably worse, since it’s been most of a month, not…” He checked his watch. “Seven hours, like some people.”

  Stephen smiled, gaze slipping to the empty glass cupped in his big hands.

  “What do you do, anyway?” Adam asked, thinking they could use a change of topic.

  “Builder. Sorry—construction,” he translated.

  “Damn. You out to your coworkers?”

  “Most of ‘em know by now, I’m sure. A couple of them definitely know, since it’s cropped up in conversation.”

  “Awkward conversation,” Adam teased.

  “Awkward for them, maybe. ‘Hey, check out the tits on her,’” he said, in an amusingly heavy Southern accent. “Oh sorry, mate. Not really a breast man. Prefer cock, actually, since you bring it up.”

  Adam laughed.

  “And you know how fucking obsessed straight blokes are with cataloguing the benders walking among them. I’m sure the scandal’s spread through the ranks by now.”

  “How’d it go, in that environment? Were they cool about it?”

  “What choice have they got? I’m their fucking foreman, and I’ve been scrapping with guys over this shit since I was a teenager. I’m not coy about it. If they have an issue with me and they want to sort it out, I’ll help them sort it out.”

  “I guess that’s probably the simplest language for guys like that to get the message in.”

  Stephen nodded. “But nobody’s made a thing of it yet, not to my face. Generally, Americans are a little less punchy about it. Which surprised me. I thought I was asking for it when I decided to move to the South, but the North of England’s still in the dark ages about gay equality, far as I’ve seen. I get more flak here for being an immigrant and stealing some hardworking local’s job. Hardly anybody’s hassled me here for being a cocksucker.”

  “I think that’s more down to you than Nashville itself,” Adam admitted. “But we’re getting there. Slowly.” He smiled, finding it odd to catch himself thinking of it as “we”, when he’d spent so many years dreaming of nothing except escaping this twangy-ass hick town. Funny how your home imprinted on you, in ways you didn’t understand until you tried to leave…only to discover you wanted to stay.

  Stephen sighed. “So, you’ve heard all about my romantic woes. What about yours? How long ago did you say you split? A month?”

  “Three weeks.” Three weeks and two days. “We were only together eight months, but… I dunno. It was the most grown-up relationship I’ve had, sad as that may be. For the first six months I thought, wow, I’ve finally got it together.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-three. You?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  Adam nodded, trying to ignore how perfectly sexy an age that was. “Anyway, he dumped me. And looking back now, I can’t believe how surprised I was. Because it made complete sense. Except, we made complete sense, which is why I stayed with him so long…”

  Stephen’s wry smile cut Adam off. “You’ve lost me a bit.”

  Adam laughed. “You’re not alone. But before David, I always stumbled into these really intense, really hot relationships. Or maybe more like extended one-night stands. One-month stands.”

  That earned him a low, curt, goddamn sexy chuckle.

  “But David was the first guy I dated where we really communicated, talked like grown-ups, fucking talked about the future, you know?”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “But the passion wasn’t there. All the logic you want, but not the filth. The good kind of filth.”

  Stephen poured himself a fresh half-shot and raised it in salute.

  “We made sense, but we weren’t hot together. Not in the spontaneous, effortless way I wanted. And to be totally honest, part of the reason his dumping me stung so bad was that in the back of my head…”

  “You always imagined you’d be stuck dumping him?”

  Adam huffed a tiny laugh through his nose. “Exactly. It sounds petty, but yeah.”

  “We’ve all had one of those. One of those ones where you want to shout, ‘I was going to dump you, you know! You just beat me to it.’ But thankfully most of us don’t actually say that. Much as we want to.”

  “Sort of wish
I had. Well, no, I don’t. Would’ve wrecked the best thing about that relationship, all that grown-up-ish-ness. And I put off ending things because this was supposed to be my smart, successful relationship. I was worried I was sabotaging things, throwing it all away because we weren’t perfectly compatible, sex-wise, because maybe deep down, I was just afraid of committing. Anyway.” Adam poured himself a swallow of scotch, wincing as it went down.

  “So now that you’re eight months—plus three weeks—older and wiser,” Stephen said, eyes on the liquor swirling in the glass he held, “what have you learned? You still fancy yourself a rational bloke? Or you going back to the bad decisions you’d hoped he’d rescue you from?”

  Adam shrugged. “Is it naïve of me to think I might find both?”

  “For the sake of all mankind, I hope not.”

  “Me neither. But I’m not in a rush to settle down. I’m in rebound mode, so shallow as it is, I’m only really preoccupied with the hot factor. Not for revenge or anything. I’m just all OD’d on good decisions for the foreseeable future. Um, no offense.”

  “None taken. Rather fancy the idea of being someone’s bad decision.”

  “Oh good. I think.”

  Stephen’s eyes narrowed. “What do you do, anyhow?”

  The liquor spurred Adam’s reply, turning what could’ve been a simple, neutral answer into a shameless flirtation. “Guess.”

  Stephen took the bait, leaning back in his seat and giving Adam an over-the-top, thorough study. “You’re clever.”

  “Thank you, thank you.”

  “But you look pretty fit.”

  “Thank you even further.”

  “But I bet that’s the gym, yeah?”

  Adam smirked. “Guilty, Mr. Foreman. Sorry.”

  “No, no. I’m not bothered. So you’re clever and you can afford a gym membership and a terrible leather couch. You an academic?”

  He shook his head.

  “Something utterly dull under the vague, catchall banner of ‘business’, then?”

  “No, thankfully not. I’m a physical therapist.”

  “Ah, right. Like sports injuries? All these college football players crippling themselves for a chance at going pro?”