Citywide

by Santino Hassell

  Protectiveness reared up inside of me and battled with the shock that filled me. Never in a million years had I considered that he’d be afraid that he wouldn’t be enough for us.

  “My first response is to tell you that your concern is bullshit.” I tilted his head up, forcing him to look at me. “But I know you really mean what you’re saying, just like I really meant what I said about being afraid you’ll regret it, so I won’t. We’ll just have to be really fucking brave together and take the risk. Because Jace, we belong together. The three of us. I’ve never been so certain of anything in my life.”

  Jace clenched his hands right before he claimed my mouth in a savage kiss. Hard, teeth gnashing, and interrupted by shaky breaths and a darting tongue. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to reassure me or brand me, but I slid a hand through his hair and held him in place, anyway. One taste, and I couldn’t get enough of Jace with his tempting body that responded so beautifully to mine every single time.

  For the second time in two days, I was fucking his mouth with my tongue as he ground against me on top of a desk. But this time, we were doing it in front of the glass doors of an office building. Neither of us cared.

  Jace tilted his head back when I kissed down his throat to suck on his Adam’s apple. He moaned and jerked his hips forward, pressing his hard dick to mine. I’d had him twice in the past twenty-four hours, but my body responded like it was the first time all over again. As though I’d never had that hot questing tongue delving into my mouth while his restless hands slid down my shoulders to slide around and grip my back, fingernails digging into the skin. Like it was a total shock that we were so hungry for each other we paid no mind to the potential of an interruption as he used his toes to drag down my basketball shorts, then lifted his own hips so he could get his shorts down.

  He wrapped both his hands around our stiff lengths. “Is it bad that I am obsessed with your penis?”

  “Um.” I looked over his shoulder, but didn’t really see anything. Not when he was clumsily trying to stroke us both. “We should probably . . . stop.”

  “Why?” Jace arched an eyebrow, gazing at me challengingly, and found a rhythm so he could jerk us off. “Your dick is already dripping. I think it disagrees.”

  “It probably does,” I said, clearly delirious and giving my penis an entire personality. “But, like, someone’s gonna see.”

  Jace rolled his eyes dramatically. “Okay. Let me down.”

  “Huh?”

  He slid off the edge of the desk, and then dropped to his knees on the floor. I was graced with a single promising look before Jace knelt between my thighs and took me into his mouth. It was way more low-key than him jacking us on the desk, but the feel of that wet warmth surrounding me sent my eyes skittering around the lobby.

  Would anyone see us? Come downstairs? Was anyone looking in at us from the outside or were these windows reflective? Making out was one thing, but as soon as he deep-throated me, the way few people had before considering the size of my erection, I’d be a goner. I’d get loud and stupid.

  “Jace—”

  He slowly took me deeper, the agonizing slide enough for a tremor to start in my hands and my eyes to shut. Jace hummed appreciatively when he had me all the way in, so deep I was somewhat lodged in his throat. My mouth dropped open as he went to work, dragging his mouth up and down with his lips wrapped tightly around me. I wanted to fuck his mouth, but I held still even though my hips were restless and my balls tightening. When Jace cupped my balls, rolling them gently, I spread my thighs open wider.

  “Oh yeah,” I groaned. “Just like that, papi.”

  He hummed again, and I reached down to massage the back of his head as he took his time on me. It was driving me wild—the measured plunging of my dick in and out of his perfect mouth—but I could feel my orgasm starting to build. Or at least, it was until he pulled his mouth off with a wet popping sound to flick his tongue into my slit.

  “Jace,” I said, unashamed of how close it was to a whine.

  “All in good time, handsome,” he said, voice floating from beneath the desk.

  “Fu—”

  Footsteps rung out from the staircase, and I froze. Didn’t rush to pull up my shorts or drag Jace from out of the desk, just froze in place and stared at the stairway, waiting to see who would come out. Jace, on the other hand, went back to deep-throating me. There was no way he didn’t hear the voices now accompanying the footsteps, but since the desk was L-shaped and he was hidden from view, he probably didn’t care.

  In fact, he cared so little that he took me down deep enough for his nose to press into my pubic hair. A moan ripped out of me, but I muffled it by pressing my fist to my mouth. It came out sounding like a sob.

  Two women entered the lobby, looking hot and tired and still wearing business casual outfits they’d likely worn to work the day before. They glanced at me, and I tensed. Jace was sucking me more enthusiastically, and there was no fucking way these women didn’t hear the wet sloppy noises. Or notice how red-faced I likely was.

  “Any word when we’ll have power back?” one of the ladies, with long dark hair, asked. “It’s been forever.”

  Her friend, or coworker, pushed open the door and let the sounds of traffic and loud voices inside. Good thing, because Jace’s saliva was everywhere, and he seemed determined to make me come with an audience. My toes curled as he bobbed his head faster, and the wet squelching noise seemed deafening.

  The lady did not appear to notice.

  “Uh,” I said, not pulling my fist away from my mouth. “I don’t, uh, actually work . . . here.”

  She tilted her head and looked around. “Where’s Kevin?”

  “Sleeping. I’m—” A streak of pleasure went through me, rocking my world and my brain cells. My eyebrows crashed together as I stared at her, feeling guilty and overheated and so turned on I thought I would die. “—just covering for the dude,” I gritted out. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, no problem.” She started to back away, eyeballing me. “You okay?”

  “Yep.” My voice came out strangled. “Just hot.”

  “Sure as fuck is.” She smiled at me, winked, and turned to the door. “I’ll let you know if I find anything out.”

  Holy shit, I thought as the door closed behind her.

  Jace chose that moment to slide a finger against my clenching asshole, and I went off like a rocket, releasing spurt after spurt into his mouth. I bit my fist, eyes squeezing shut, but was drawing in frantic gasps of air by the time I unloaded entirely and sagged in the chair.

  “Holy shit.”

  Jace stood up, his lean body dragging against my torso, and beamed. “That was so hot.”

  I gaped at him, still panting. He laughed, eyes crinkling.

  “You’re so cute. That blush is everything!”

  I shook my head, trying to clear it, and pinched his side. He laughed harder.

  “Babe, that lady totally knew someone was beneath the table.”

  “I know,” Jace said, beaming. “And she was totally into it. I want to find her and be her friend.”

  He twisted around to peer through the glass, and I swatted his side.

  “You’re bad.”

  “I know.” He turned to me again. “That’s why you love me, though. Right?”

  I stared at him and his challenging smirk, and knew exactly what he was doing. Trying to make light of all the heaviness that had taken over what should have been a fun and easy campout in the office. Make a joke of his feelings and fears.

  “I love you for plenty of reasons. Both of you.”

  The happiness crossing Jace’s face was punctuated by a sudden flurry of sound—clicks and beeps and whirring—right before a rush of cold air blasted down into the lobby.

  The power was back on.

  “We should wait to work on the servers,” Caleb said. “The power could go out again for all we know.”

  “Gee, ya think?”

  Caleb glanced at Oli balefully, w
ho’d accompanied his lover to the QFindr office not even thirty minutes after the power had returned to Manhattan. I’d never spent much time around either of them beyond the occasional social function, but they were a handsome couple. Caleb with the silver streaks in his hair and poor attempt at casual clothing with his light-blue polo and blue cuffed slacks with pointy-toe shoes, and Oli dressed like James Dean in all black with his hair slicked back and damp from a shower.

  “You really didn’t need to run over here,” Aiden said from where he was leaning against the wall. He seemed grumpy about the arrival of his half-brother and business partner. “We weren’t going to rush into a server surgery after a full night of—”

  “Fucking?” Oli guessed, tossing a wink my way.

  Caleb glared harder. “Will you be appropriate?”

  “Why?” Oli looked from Aiden to me before meeting Jace’s eyes. He was stretched out on the floor with his Kindle. “Jace, was there fucking?”

  “Lots.”

  Oli grinned triumphantly at Caleb, and laughed when his lover gave a mournful headshake. For a minute, I was embarrassed. But then I noticed the way Aiden was pushing his shoulders back, all ready to defend himself, and I intercepted faster than a Russian number calling the White House.

  “Besides fucking, we found out your IT guy is a bigot Twitter troll. What’re y’all gonna do about that?”

  The grin was wiped from Oli’s face, Caleb’s mouth dropped open, and I spent the next few minutes rehashing what I’d found on Travis’s iPad. Even after regaling them with all the hate speech, they poured over it themselves until Oli reddened, his eyes narrowing, and Caleb had gone pale.

  “I should have listened to you,” he said miserably, after turning to Aiden. “You are such a better judge of character than me.”

  “Yeah, that’s why you’re with Oli,” Jace called from the floor.

  Oli flipped off Jace, who blew him a kiss.

  “He has to go,” Aiden said. “Like yesterday.”

  “Right. Of course.” There was an undertone of anger in Caleb’s voice that I’d never heard before. “We’ll tell him as soon as he returns from his trip. We’ll have his things all packed.” Caleb was looking around the room like he was ready to throw the dude’s shit out the window. “My God. I’m so embarrassed. How could we have been so oblivious?”

  “It’s more than embarrassing,” Oli said, holding up the iPad. “There are things about us on his social media. About the company.”

  Clearly, I hadn’t investigated that deeply before being interrupted, because all I’d seen was the usual troll viciousness. Now, I frowned. “Like what?”

  “He doesn’t name us on his time line, but he went off on a series of rants about a queer company raking in millions for doing nothing more than aggregating data to help other queers get laid. And that they pay their ‘normal’ employees like shit.”

  “Fuck his hetero tears,” Aiden growled. “Little bitch. His salary is commensurate with other salaries in the field.”

  I nodded in agreement, but something about Oli’s tone was off. There was tension in his shoulders that hadn’t been there before, and I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. Jace had sat up straight, as if his sense for danger was going off.

  “What else?” he pressed.

  Oli’s eyes flicked between us again, then forced a smile. “There’s some more detailed chatter in his DMs about the company, but it’s nothing. I’ll have Clive look at it on Monday.”

  “Lawsuit material?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  He clearly wasn’t going to go further into detail, so I backed off. If there was a potential lawsuit, he probably didn’t want to tell us everything, since he likely knew it could get repeated to our growing crew of friends. Jace crawled over to us on his hands and knees, quizzical but less alarmed, before coming to sit between where Aiden and I stood.

  “So, does my boo get the bigot’s job?”

  “Jace,” I hissed. “Cállate.”

  “What?” he asked innocently. “I’m just asking. We know you guys already wanted to hire him.”

  Aiden reached down to run his fingers through Jace’s hair, smiling fondly. “I was going to wait to ask until we get the servers and the firing sorted.”

  “Guys,” I muttered. “Chill.”

  “Why wait?” Jace got to his feet and draped himself all over me, smiling. “If you hire Chris as soon as possible, douche-canoe will be out the door and Chris in his spot to take care of the servers while on salary. I’m basically an HR genius.”

  I covered my face with my hands, but peeked through my fingers to see Oli smiling slightly, despite his obvious preoccupation with the iPad, and Caleb nodding seriously.

  “Chris, you were my original choice for this position. Would you be interested?”

  My eyebrows shot up. No interviews or résumés? Was this what happened when you had connections? “Seriously?”

  “Absolutely. I’m not very good at jokes. You’re highly skilled, have several years of experience, professional anytime I’ve worked with you whether it was about testing or the shoot—”

  “Dude,” I said, interrupting him. “I’m standing here in gym shorts, and I spent the night screwing your brother and his husband in your office. I’m not exactly professional.”

  The blood rushed to Caleb’s face, but he bravely continued. “Right, well, that is certainly unorthodox but given the situation . . .” He gestured vaguely, maybe reaching for an explanation. “Well, it wasn’t as though it was a work day.”

  Jace snickered. “You’re so cute, Caycay.”

  He was, but I was hung up on . . . everything. My mind was going at a hundred miles an hour because as soon as the words had left Caleb’s mouth, I’d realized that I really did want the job. The glass cube with the sleek furniture in the fancy purple office with the shower and workout equipment. The queer-friendly environment where I’d get to see people I genuinely liked every day. Where I’d get to collaborate with them on something innovative and cool. Replacing a racist-ass fuckboy was the icing on the cake.

  “I want the job,” I said quickly. “But I need to give my current job notice. I can’t just walk out after all this time.”

  “See?” Caleb beamed. “Professional.”

  I held up my hands to thwart him from going off further. “There’s more.” Looking over at Jace’s thrilled expression, then Aiden’s quietly proud smile, my heart thrummed in my chest. I thought about what Jace had said in the lobby, what Aiden had said earlier this morning, and Raymond’s drawl in my ear. “What if—” I stammered. “What if . . . I’m with . . . one of my bosses? How does that work?”

  Aiden straightened.

  “What do you mean?” Caleb asked, cocking his head. “‘With’?”

  Oli looked at his lover with exasperation. “Darling. Really? Really?”

  Caleb blushed again. “Oh. I get it.”

  I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing. I kept laughing when Jace pulled me into a lamprey hug, and when Aiden hovered by my side as Oli dragged Caleb away from us.

  “Let’s give them a minute,” Oli said, walking farther down the hall. “And we’ll work something out,” he called back to me. “After all, I’m fucking the founder.”

  Caleb said something chastising to him, but by then I was burying my face against Jace’s neck as Aiden put a hand on both our shoulders.

  “Christopher, are you sure?” he asked, low and serious. There was almost a warning in his tone. “Or are you talking about the casual—”

  “We were never casual,” I said sharply. “Not for a few months, anyway. So quit saying that shit.”

  “Agreed.” Jace looked up at us. “But can we take this time to nail down what with entails while all three of us are here?”

  My heart had been slamming into my rib cage as soon as I’d blurted it out to Caleb and Oli, but as my two men looked at me with hope and trepidation written all over their lovely faces, calm washed over me. They
were nervous because of me. They were waiting for me. I wasn’t the only one who was desperate for this to work.

  “For me, it means . . . no more random booty calls or sexy weekends. It means we’re together. For real. Sleeping together, eating together, spending time together for more than just fucking . . .” Aiden was squeezing my shoulder so hard I thought he would crush the bone. I took a deep breath. “But . . . I can’t do it if y’all are fucking other people. I know it’s what you’ve always done, but I don’t have your history. I haven’t been through more than half a lifetime being confident that you two love me like you have with each other.”

  Jace jerked me against him, hugging me so tight it was hard to breathe.

  “You already know what I think. I want us to do this.”

  Aiden, who’d not been prepped on that part of our lobby hookup, moved his hand from me to clamp both on Jace’s shoulders. The hope that filled his face matched what I’d felt as soon as Jace had said the words downstairs.

  “God,” he breathed, closing his eyes for a minute. “You have no idea how this feels.”

  “How what feels?” I asked, looking into Aiden’s eyes over Jace’s shoulder.

  “The relief.” He shook his head slowly. “Are you both sure? I want this so bad, I’m fuckin’ afraid that it’s a dream.”

  “It’s real,” Jace said. “He’s ours. We’re doing this.”

  The word ours lit me up like the sky on the Fourth of July. I smiled, big and dorky, and for the first time, I felt no doubts. No fears.

  A smile spread over my face. “Can we celebrate with booze and food and sex and UFC? It’s fight night.”

  Aiden pulled me and Jace to him, grinning his rakish grin. “We can do anything you want. But you may have to slow me down because I’m ready to cab it to South Jamaica, pack your shit, and bring you home.”