“I don’t have much faith in myself,” was all I managed to whisper in reply before, thank God, he did kiss me. And, Jesus, he tasted of beer and coffee and the smoke we’d made him stand at the window to indulge in, and gum. I’d kissed guys who were all about the tongue, but tonsil rockets did nothing for me. The way Steven took his time made me want it even more and when he finally did use the tip of his tongue to draw mine into his mouth, I could have come then and there.
“So.” He drew back just enough to draw breath—an ability for which I envied him; I sure as hell couldn’t—and licked his lips. That alone made the kiss seem even hotter in retrospect. “What did you mean by a ‘man like me’ anyway?”
I gave a short, quiet burst of nervous laughter. “Put it this way—I didn’t think you’d do any of this. It’s usually the way of things that I end up with guys who have been touched by the simple stick, or who lean a bit too heavy on the beer. You seem neither of those.”
“Fucking hell, Kit, don’t go overboard with the compliments. You’ll make my head spin.”
“I’m just saying, those are the kinds of guys I…” Damn it, Steven, why the hell do I keep losing my train of thought when you’re around? “That’s just the way of it.”
“I can understand that. If you’re saying you end up with alkies and morons, I’m just saying I get that. I understand it. A guy would have to be either off his face or clinically insane to think he stood a chance with you, wouldn’t he?”
If Steven Kenton’s presence messed with my head, Steven Kenton paying me such a compliment fried my brain from the inside out. “So.” Come on. Think, Blackman, think. “Which one are you?”
“I’ll leave you to figure that one out,” he murmured, before kissing me again.
My hands, up to that point, had been glued to the wall behind me, fingertips clawing at the air, and now somehow they found their way into Steven’s hair. When I tugged one of his dark curls to wrap it round my finger, he moaned, so I did it again. Breaking the kiss, he hissed in a breath.
“Was that sore?” His hair was still wrapped around my finger. As I was around his. I stared at him for a second and started to disentangle my hands from his hair.
“I didn’t say it hurt.”
And I stopped. “You like having your hair pulled?”
“Why do you think I let the curls grow?”
“Suits you.”
“And when your hands tightened against my scalp I think it was the first slightly-less-controlled-than-usual action I’ve ever seen from you.”
“You haven’t even lived here twenty-four hours yet. And I’ve been out most of the day anyway.”
“Convenient.” One eyebrow quirked in vague accusation.
“I was working.”
“Working at not helping me move in.”
“I’m here now.”
“So you are.” He nodded, a lazy smirk making him look so smug I couldn’t resist giving his hair another pull. He winced. “God.” But the vertical creases at the bridge of his nose, the almost-frown, didn’t tell me he was in pain. No more than he could cope with anyway. “I’ve waited too long for this.” His hand on me tightened again and it was my turn to stifle a moan.
“Too long? You—”
“Don’t give me that only lived here a few hours bullshit again, Kit. I meant…how long have you been in this room?”
“About five minutes.”
“Then that’s five minutes too long.” Both his hands went for my belt and the desperation in his fumbling silenced any half-hearted protests I might have given. “Honestly, Kit.” He eased my zip down too damn slowly for my liking. Now he’d made his move, I wanted him to just fucking touch me. “We’re both grown men. This doesn’t… I mean, we don’t…”
“Fuck.” One hand on my boxers meant he was one annoying sliver of fabric away from touching my bare skin and my balls ached for him to make me come.
“Look at me.”
I craned my neck, the voice in the back of my head desperately reciting, not that, anything but that. A strange angle to hold my head at, and stranger still was the absence of any pain, given the earlier threat of migraine. I let go of Steven’s messy black curls and slid my hands down his face, let them settle on his neck and felt him shake his head.
“Kit?”
“Don’t. Just…” Maybe if I lowered my head and looked at him before he made skin-on-skin contact, it’d be easier to take, easier to make him understand…
“Just what?” His fingers edged inside the waistband of my shorts. “Touch you?”
“No. Yes. I mean don’t—”
“Told you. Stuff of legend. Haven’t even laid my palm against your cock yet and I’ve already rendered you incoherent.”
“Steven.”
Something in my voice must have got through to him because his hand stopped its advance.
I lowered my gaze, tried to concentrate on the way my hands looked against his neck. “I don’t like being looked at.”
“What? Why the hell not? You’re—”
“I don’t. Like it.”
Steven’s confusion hung in the air between us—what little there was anyway—for the longest moment I’d ever lived through, then he shrugged and pushed himself closer. “All right, then.” His breath warmed my face and I wondered when he was going to kiss me again. “So I won’t look at you.” Pause, then he slid his hand down the underside of my cock and I growled from the back of my throat, quietly enough to be discreet, loud enough to let him know how good it felt. “I still need to listen to you, though.”
I hauled in a laboured breath, almost wheezing, and Steven laughed against my ear.
“God, that’s hot.”
“Fuck. Steven. You—” I pushed my hips against him when he curved his hand around my cock. “Shit—”
“Still want me to stop?”
“No. Oh God.” Somehow I managed to twist my head round, pull his hair so I could kiss him this time. No, I didn’t want him looking at me, but his scrutiny only burned when he pulled back, looked at me from a distance greater than an inch. This way I didn’t have his intense stare on me and I could again taste the sharp tang of smoke on his tongue, the mint he’d eaten to mask it which had mixed with the smoke rather than hiding it.
He broke the kiss and touched his forehead to mine, rasping inhalations a reply to whatever noises I made. Mostly close-lipped grunts, each one less controlled than the last.
“I knew you’d feel good,” he whispered.
“Isn’t that supposed to be my line?”
“Did you know it? Did you think about this before I even touched you?” His hand slowed in anticipation of my answer.
“Don’t.” Say it, Kit, say it. It’s not a fucking weakness to let another man know you want him.
“Don’t stop.”
“Tell me if you did, then,” Steven whispered, and I fought to still my body, quiet my breathing, so I could hear him clearly. His hand on my cock quickened, I whimpered, and his free hand pushed off the wall and came to rest on the curve of my waist. “Did you?”
“I—”
“I know I did. Especially since that first time I came round here.”
Watching the down-up of his shoulder had me undone. As if a bare shoulder wasn’t bad—good—enough, it was inked, and it moved because he was minutes away from making me come.
“When you came to your bedroom door.”
“I caught you looking.”
“Likewise.” Steven’s lips curved into a smile I felt against my neck, and breath huffed out of him in a discreet laugh, making me shiver. “Wondered if you were gay. Or open-minded at least.”
“Oh.” I nodded, screwed my eyes shut, wanting to come and not wanting to come.
“Definitely. Gay. Oh God, I’m gonna…don’t…”
He flicked his wrist in a way that made my breath catch and trailed the tip of his tongue up the side of my neck, along my jaw, to my mouth. “Fuck, you look—”
“D
on’t.” I clutched the hair at the nape of his neck, pulled him towards me, dipped my head, anything to stop him.
“Kit—”
“Don’t. Don’t look at me. Don’t. Don’t stop—” I grabbed his arm with my other hand, tried to force it to move faster, but realised I was only letting him guide me. I couldn’t force his hand; his arm was only there to give me something to hold on to. And I gritted my teeth to stop myself biting his neck. When I got this close…
“Is there something wrong with me wanting to see what you look like when you come?”
“Don’t—”
“You say that word a lot,” he taunted. “Let me hear it, then. Let me hear you come.”
“No. Not here. Can’t.”
“Can’t let yourself go?” Steven’s palm fit perfectly against the underside of my cock, then with a flick of his wrist, over the head, spreading the pre-cum over me with every stroke. “Yes you can. I know you want to come.” The gentleness, the quietude, of his voice goaded me. “I know you need to.”
“He might—we could…”
“Kit.”
My fingers tightened in his hair, my other hand digging so deeply into his arm I’d leave bruises. Not that I cared.
“Kit.”
That got my attention but even though I was so far gone, I still couldn’t look him in the eye. I lifted my face away from the curve of Steven’s neck to show I was listening, but there was nothing to hear. He merely nudged me until his mouth was against mine again and his tongue ran along the underside of mine at the exact moment I came, choking off any sounds I might have made above a grunt of shock and relief.
A combination of coming that hard and lack of oxygen had just begun to make my head spin when he broke off the kiss and gasped. “Oh yes. “ His voice was so thick with arousal I’d have thought he was the one who’d just had an almost-complete-stranger wank him off up against the wall. “Fuck. I needed that.”
“You…?” I croaked. “Steven, you…” My chest heaved as I forced oxygen back into my lungs.
“Are you kidding me?” Again, our foreheads touched and his was misted with perspiration. Or maybe that was mine. “Ever since I saw you with your shirt off I needed to know what it felt like when you came.” And he hadn’t yet lifted his hand off my cock. Every so often he stroked it again as if willing it back to life. Ordinarily there was no way I’d get hard again after mere minutes, but with Steven Kenton, who knew what could happen? Even the sensation of my dick going soft and his spunk-covered hand spreading the love sent a faint tingle of arousal to the base of my spine.
“Oh. Oh God. Shit, sorry, I…”
“You’re apologising for coming all over my hand?” His hand slowed to a stop but still he didn’t let go. “Where else was it gonna go?”
“You really want an answer to that?”
“I could think of a few places. Plenty of other chances anyway.” Steven paused, inclined his head, dropped his gaze to my mouth, which wasn’t so bad. It was being looked in the eyes I couldn’t handle. “Will you be all right if I let you go?”
“Yeah, of course I—” But my knees shook as he stood back, laughing.
“Sure? Right, I had a box of tissues here somewhere.”
“You too?” I muttered, tucking myself in and reaching for my zip.
“What?” But he didn’t look over his shoulder at me, busying himself with wiping my jizz off his hand and arm with a handful of paper tissues.
“Nothing.” Again I craned my neck, looked up, and couldn’t stop my knees trembling.
Yeah. Nothing like a Kenton hand-job, is there, Blackman? It’d look comedic, I knew, but I let myself slide down the wall to a crouch before sitting on the floor.
Steven tossed the tissues into a bag used as a bin and turned to face me again, laughing at the sight of me. “That bad?”
I tried to smile but had to look away.
“Or that good, I’d prefer to think. How’s the head?”
“Which one?”
“I meant the migraine, Kit.”
“Oh. That. Yeah.” I waved a hand before resting my elbow on a bent knee and cupping my head. “It’s fine.”
“A Kenton hand-job. The stuff of legend and the kind of migraine cure your GP would never prescribe.”
“I don’t think I could stand it if he did, especially with the number of migraines I get.”
“And now you see why I never fall for the ‘not tonight, dear, I’ve got a headache’
excuse.”
“Yeah. Your hand is living, breathing Migraleve.”
“One does one’s best.” He grinned and let himself fall back on the bed, one arm thrown over his face as if he was the exhausted one. Well, he had moved house that day, been shifting boxes and bags. Giving me a monumental hand-job was probably just something to pass the time. Absolutely nothing to him.
Just like it meant nothing to me.
Maybe if I said that often enough I’d start to believe it.
Chapter Five
“Well.” Steven parted the blinds with the tips of his fingers and peered out as if expecting to see something interesting across the street. He exhaled sharply, let the blinds fall back into place and turned around again, to face the living room.
I, slouched on the settee only half paying attention to the DVD I wasn’t watching, shoved another handful of jelly beans into my mouth. The bowl, balanced on my lap, was nearly empty. God knew what I’d done with them all. Eaten them, probably. I’d gone into that DVD-and-junk-food fugue again, only woken up by Steven’s movements and single word.
“Tell me about you.”
Coughing back the last of the jelly beans, I frowned. “Me?”
He shrugged, palms visible, the picture of innocent curiosity. “Yeah. You.”
“There’s not much to tell.” I hoped this wasn’t going to be the way of it every time Gary and Gemma had a night out. Steven probing me, but not in the way I’d like him to. He may have wanked me off on his first night here a week or two back, but getting into my pants didn’t mean he had to attempt to get into my head. “You know what Gary says about me. I’m a computer geek. I have no social life. Hell, I’m anti- social, and…” I shrugged as best I could in my near-recumbent position. “That’s about it.”
“Kit.”
“My name’s Christopher Blackman. I’m twenty-seven years old—” I began, echoing his reluctant confession in the bedroom on his first night here.
“You’re gay and you don’t have your hand on my cock?” Steven concluded, proving he remembered at least some of what had occurred in detail.
Me? I remembered all of it. Every last second. Every word. Every stroke.
I shifted on the settee, wishing the now-empty bowl was a pillow. A folded coat.
Anything that stood a chance of hiding how well I remembered the other evening. “Well, no.” I cleared my throat, straightened and sat the bowl on the table, hoping my posture prevented Steven seeing the effect such a reminder of the other night—as if I needed one—had on me. Not that he’d be looking there of course.
“I was only joking.” His close-lipped smile, almost a smirk, made it clear he’d got the better of me and knew it. Casually insert the memory of that hand-job into Kit’s head again and carry on like I never said a word. He paced slowly from the window to the other side of the room. Turned, set a course for the window again. “Not asking for your life story. Just small talk. You kept remarking on the fact we don’t really know each other, after all. You know, before I—”
“Yes, “ I put in. “I know that. Thank you. I wasn’t…” It hadn’t been my way of trying to get to know him. I’d been trying to tell him how crazy it was, how we shouldn’t have…he shouldn’t have… But he did. He’d touched me but that didn’t mean we had to be all intimate about it. “And I don’t have that much to say about myself.” Parents still alive. I was out to them and everyone else. A younger brother. One or two exes I did my best to avoid and that was it. Not much to show for t
wenty-seven years.
“There must be something interesting about you.”
“Nope. I’m entirely boring.”
Steven stopped in his pacing back and forth, looked down at me and huffed out a breath. Half acknowledgement of my words, half amusement, I suspected. And he continued pacing. “You an only child?”
“Nope.”
“Well?”
“Well what?” I met his gaze and sighed heavily. “A brother. James. He lives with his girlfriend, Sarah, and their little boy, Sam.”
“Oh my God—you’re an uncle? “
Even from this distance, which was admittedly only a few feet, I noticed how brightly his eyes sparkled. “Yes. I’m an uncle.”
“That is—”
“Don’t you dare say cute.”
“I wasn’t gonna. Tiff calls everything ‘totes adorbz’; maybe that—”
“If you ever call me ‘totes adorbz’, I will rip your face off, Kenton.”
“I wouldn’t dare.” Steven held up his hands in a parody of surrender as he wandered over to the living room bookcase, but the grin spoilt the effect of subdued contrition he’d no doubt been aiming for. We used the bookcase for DVDs and CDs as well as books. Anything that migrated to another room without having the decency to be labelled or have its ownership clearly marked ended up there. It was the lost property office of Casa Blackman, Lacey and Kenton. He was probably pretending to be absorbed in the paperbacks’ spines.
After a few seconds of acting, he looked over his shoulder.
“What? What? Oh, is this where I’m expected to ask about your family?”
“One would assume it was the polite thing to do.”
“Fine. “ I drew out the monosyllabic word for as long as possible, making it an agonised breath. “Tell me about your family.” I focused on the television, or tried to. Just so I didn’t have to look at him.
“…just Tiff. Our dad’s not around anymore but we still see Mum regular—Kit, are you—”
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