by Anne Tenino
“Never touched it last time,” Jock said, feeling stupid and momentarily insecure. Was he even doing it right? But he had his own, and he’d practiced plenty on it, so—
“You’re more than making up for it now,” Toby responded, and then he let go of Jock, lifting his hand to his mouth and licking his palm before grasping Jock’s shaft again, twisting and working his fingers right up under the head.
Jock swallowed. “That’s hot.” He let go of Toby’s dick and held his palm up to Toby’s mouth, watching as Toby slicked him up, too. Then Toby took Jock’s wrist and pulled it down to wrap around him again.
Jock’s self-consciousness dissolved, and he rolled them onto their sides to give them room to maneuver, maintaining his hold on the back of Toby’s neck, kissing him again, working his tongue and hand in the same rhythm. Toby followed his lead, stroking Jock with the same tempo, moaning.
When Toby came, the smell pushed Jock over into his own orgasm. Salty and primal. His body instinctively responded, the same way he reacted to the smell of blood in the hockey rink, his pulse leaping around and priming him for something major. Some game-changing event. The penalty box or the medics or spilling his cum all over Toby’s hand, shoving forward until his cock rested against Toby’s furry belly and his nuts wrung out a few more drops in reaction. “Fuck.”
Toby grinned, panting, his eyes closed and his head resting on Jock’s biceps. “You’re a curse-nutter.”
“Huh?” Man he’d really done some damage to Toby’s lips. They were slick and reddened and twice their normal size. “You’re smexy.”
“When you come, you curse. You did it the first time, too,” he explained, then opened his eyes and met Jock’s gaze, warm liquid brown. His pupils were huge and he looked half asleep and all happy. “Thank you.”
Jock kissed him. Softly, so he wouldn’t do more damage. He needed Toby to heal so he could do it all over again. “Thank you for what?”
Toby sighed, still smiling. “For thinking I’m smexy. For a good day.”
“We could go back to the gîte and make it better,” Jock suggested, and that’s when his butterflies kicked in, because that was the threshold. Repeat sex meant going from casual to being involved.
Toby’s smile slipped away and he met Jock’s gaze again. “Is that what you want?”
“Yeah, I do.” He kissed Toby again, harder this time, partly to distract himself from the way his stomach reacted to that. He’d been right, though. He’d never not be scared about this. But if he wanted more than just hookups, he had to get over the thing with the guys.
Suck it up.
Toby traced around Jock’s lips with his fingertips when Jock let up on his mouth. “Works for me.”
They used the blanket to clean up, then sat on it, avoiding the sticky spots. “I still want to eat before we leave,” Jock said, pulling the food toward them.
“You worked up an appetite?” Toby asked, smiling fully at him, bending his legs up under his chin and wrapping his arms around them. They were sheltered from most of the wind, but it still occasionally ruffled his hair. He looked good rumpled up, sitting in the shade but spotted here and there with sunlight. He’d taken his shoes off—afterward—and Jock knew for a fact that he hadn’t buttoned his jeans yet.
Yeah, he needed food and then they’d go back to the gîte.
Thank fuck, the picnic basket wasn’t full of sausage and cheese. There was bread—there was always bread, but at least it was Madame B’s homemade bread—and lots of little containers with various things to spread on it. And olives, of course. He’d never escape olives in Provence. Good thing he liked them. “Should we open the wine, too?”
“We may as well,” Toby said. “I’m sure Danny and Madame B worked hard on planning this little meal.”
Huh? “Why would Danny help her pack our lunch?”
Toby groaned and rested his forehead on his knees. “I probably shouldn’t tell you . . .”
He dug around until he found a corkscrew, then leaned over to kiss the back of Toby’s neck, right on a vertebral bump. “But you will because I’m your luh-vah.”
Toby laughed and leaned back on his elbows, straightening out his legs. His lips were still reddened, and reclined like he was, a small wedge of his skin peeked out at Jock, a few hairs curling toward him from Toby’s half-zipped jeans. I’m the man. Because he’d totally put that look on Toby’s face and loosened him up.
“You aren’t going to believe it,” Toby said.
“He’s her luh-vah?” Jock handed Toby his wine.
“Okay, maybe you are going to believe it.”
“Barely.” Jock snorted. “I don’t get it at all, but the way they act around each other—crazy.”
While they ate, they speculated on what kind of future a twenty-something American frat boy and a fifty-something French widow might have. “Maybe it’s just a vacation fling,” Toby said eventually, but the frown on his face didn’t look sure.
“It’s gotta be more,” Jock agreed with Toby’s expression. “No guy as young as Danny goes for someone that much older than him unless it’s, like, true love.”
Toby glanced away, out over the non-blooming poppy field baking in the sun. “Maybe he’s got an oedipal complex? Who knows what attracts one person to another. Maybe it really is all destiny.”
Jock shrugged and spread some more of the artichoke stuff on a hunk of baguette. For some reason, Toby wasn’t that into the bread. He kept inspecting each piece carefully before eating it. Actually, he kinda seemed done eating altogether. “I dunno, some things seem pretty universal.”
“Like guys with torsos like GI Joe are going to pretty much get anybody revved up?”
“Wouldn’t it suck if I’d had the groin of a GI Joe doll?” He shuddered.
So did Toby. “That would’ve been a nasty surprise.”
“Bet I’d be hating it more than you.”
Toby rolled onto his side and rested his head on his arm, facing Jock. “It would have been a disservice to all mankind.”
Jock washed down his bite with the rest of his wine. “I don’t work for it, I mean, not that hard.”
“Your body? You work out every day. I see you guys. Doesn’t Danny have you all on some beer terrorist physical training program? He keeps talking about it.”
“Well, if training means we work out together, than yeah.” Jock let his head fall back, watching the sky through the leaves and trying to figure out how to explain what he wanted to. “I guess that doesn’t seem like much to me.”
“Does it make you uncomfortable when I say stuff about how you look?”
“Not . . . exactly.” He leaned back onto his elbows, reclining next to Toby. Parallel with him. “It’s more like I’m not that impressed with it. And I dunno, it was cool I guess, when I figured out that most guys saw me and wanted me, but . . .” He shrugged.
“I dated a body builder,” Toby began, and Jock stiffened up, because did he really want to hear about this? But Toby went on regardless. “But I only saw him a few times because he expected me to worship his muscles. He was boring as hell. You aren’t.” He pushed up from the blanket, brushing along Jock’s jaw with his lips.
“That’s good to know.” He turned onto his side so they were parallel and only a few inches apart. Except Jock was tall enough that his elbow was off the blanket and resting in the grass, plus he had more to say. The stuff he’d kind of been thinking lately, now that he had some distance. Maybe Toby sensed that, because he lay his head back down and listened. “Before I came out, I was so focused on hiding it, but also on trying to, like, get my needs met. But after we hooked up the first time? All the sudden it was like there were guys everywhere and they were checking me out and responding to me.” He couldn’t watch Toby’s face while he talked about this, so he inspected the grass at the edge of the blanket, brushing his palm across the top of it. “I had tons of offers after that picture went viral, but I couldn’t do it.” He shook his head and plucked a few b
lades of grass, throwing them up for the breeze to play with. “The fuckers who wanted to hook up with me after that were just . . .”
“They wanted to hook up because of the photo.”
“Yeah.” He shoved back up, sitting with his arms around his knees like Toby had been earlier, staring out over the fields and hills. Not too far away, Les Baux was visible, nearly white with the brightness of the day. “I don’t know how porn stars do it, man.”
“It’s different,” Toby said, sitting behind him and wrapping his arms around Jock’s waist. Then he rested his cheek on Jock’s back, and his voice vibrated in Jock’s chest. “You may have chosen that, sort of, but that doesn’t mean you wanted it.”
“I guess I’ll have to take your word on that, because I’ll never know.”
He could feel Toby’s smile on his back, though his shirt. “Do you miss playing?”
Jock nodded, swallowing. “A lot. It wasn’t a strategic move to eventually go pro, I just wanted to play hockey. I never thought it would be my career.”
“Will you play again?”
He hung his head a second, watching the way Toby’s thumb stroked his abdomen. “I wanted to compete against guys who are at my level; it’s not any fun if you’re better than everyone else. Maybe I’ll find someplace else to play, eventually.”
Toby squeezed him tighter for a second, then they fell silent, until Toby said, “Tell me about the beer terrorist thing.”
“Uh, you know about the membership policy stuff?” That was probably the best place to start.
“About the alumni threatening to cut off the funding to the frat if you guys didn’t take out the stuff about accepting gays?”
“That.” Jock nodded. “They had this big meeting where Plant—he’s the treasurer—had to tell everyone that if the TAG alumni association cut off funds, we couldn’t afford to keep the keg fridge in beer.”
Toby whistled at that. “Way to grab a bunch of fratbros by the short and curlies.”
“It looked pretty bad,” Jock agreed. “But that was right after Ricky broke his leg when someone tried to burn down the frat—you know about that, right?”
“Uh-huh. I saw Collin that night, he told me.” Toby lifted his head from Jock’s back, pulling away slightly as he said it.
Somehow that told Jock everything he needed to know about Toby and Collin’s past. “I didn’t know you were that close to him.” The tension in his jaw transmitted to his voice.
“We’re friends.” Toby tightened his arms. “That’s all we ever were. And that night he told me he wasn’t interested in my benefits package any longer.”
“Because of his boyfriend?”
“They weren’t together yet, but they’d already met. I found that out the next night.” A smiled crept into his voice. “We went to the Slaughterhouse and Eric showed up looking for him. That was the last time I saw Collin for a while.”
“’Kay.” Jock knew he sounded totally defensive, but he didn’t care much. He just didn’t like thinking about Toby with other guys, even when it wasn’t anything serious.
“So what happened?” Toby asked.
“Huh?” Happened with who?
“Beer terrorists?”
“Oh, yeah.” Jock nodded and sat a little straighter, running his hand through his hair like it could help him rub some brain cells together. “So the guys were pretty much ready to vote to go back to the old policy—they’d just voted me in as a member, knowing up front I’m gay—and Tank couldn’t even threaten them into not changing the wording, but Ricky gets up there and starts going on about how he’d sacrificed his leg for this policy—”
“But he still has a leg.”
“That’s exactly what Collin said.” Forget about him. “Anyway, then Ricky starts calling the alumni beer terrorists and telling everyone that if we let them hold the keg hostage, they’d control everything from then on. He, like, whipped them into a revolutionary frenzy.” The memory of it made Jock smile, although at the time, just after he’d shown up at Calapooya, he’d been unable to. “Then everyone voted not to change the policy, and the guys are still stuck on fighting the beer terrorists.”
Toby snorted. “Thank God they aren’t allowed out in the real world. Theta Alpha Gamma might need to come up with a halfway house for when those guys graduate, so they can be introduced to society in small, manageable steps.”
“I’ll talk to Kyle about it when we get back.”
“Good idea.” Then came the unmistakable sound of Toby yawning.
“You wanna head back?” It was getting too hot, and Toby had started rubbing his chest, which reminded Jock they had business at the gîte. Like, bidness business. He trapped Toby’s hand where it was tracing the curve of his pec and squeezed.
“If you’re ready.” Toby sat up, breathing in like he was trying to wake himself from a trance.
“I’m ready.”
As Toby pulled in their driveway, around the main house to EuroTAG, he took one more look to see Jock’s head turned toward the side window, as silent and contemplative as he’d been since they’d started back. As soon as Toby halted the car, Jock got out, before Toby turned the engine off.
His heart wobbled. Not sank, exactly, but urged caution. He was pretty sure this was a go, but Jock could get scared again or change his mind . . . Oh, shut up. Toby stepped out, too, watching Jock stretch as if he’d woken from a nap.
“Man, European cars are small,” he said, coming around to Toby’s side of the car. “It’s not as bad as an airplane, but even twenty minutes and my knees are pissed off.”
“You really have a thing about knees, don’t you?” Toby asked, leaning against the side of the vehicle.
Jock smiled at that. “I guess.”
Just ask. “Are you coming to my place?”
“Yeah.” Jock rested his hand on the roof of the car, just behind Toby’s shoulder, standing close enough that their feet touched. “If that’s okay?”
“Definitely okay.” Toby reached for Jock’s shirt, pulling him closer. Jock didn’t fight it, kissing Toby slowly at first, unlike before, but getting demanding within seconds, pressing Toby against the car with his body. Then suddenly he broke it off, pulling away and swiping at his mouth, turning toward the rosemary hedge that fronted the EuroTAG patio.
The suspiciously shaking, whispering hedge. “Shhh!” a very Danny-sounding plant hissed.
“I think the children are watching,” Toby murmured to Jock.
“Uh, yeah.” Jock kicked at the ground, not meeting his eyes.
“Spying on us to see if their picnic scheme worked, or training in stealth anti–beer terrorist maneuvers?”
“I’d say both, but they aren’t good at multitasking from what I’ve seen.” Jock shook his head, folding his arms over his chest.
“Hey!” a bush protested with Julian’s voice. “I can totally multitask.” He ended the mystery of the muttering shrubbery by popping up from behind it, holding a shoe in one hand and a very dirty cloth in the other. “I polished all my shoes while we waited for you guys to get back.” He’d decorated his hair with rosemary branches, sort of like antlers.
“You’re a freak, dude.” Ricky stood, eyeing Julian sideways. He had similar herbal antlers, but more of them.
Jock sighed, turning back to Toby. “So, after dinner?”
Behind him, Danny bounced up, staring at them, cocking his head. Maybe he was wondering Why not right now? also.
“Yes.” Toby nodded, suppressing the urge to lean forward and kiss Jock, even a quick one. He pretty clearly wasn’t down with the public displays yet.
At least Jock gave Toby one of their communicative, reassuring eye-locks as he backed up a few steps, flashing his dimple quickly before turning and heading into the house.
“So . . .” Danny said after Jock had walked through the door. “It was a good day?”
Toby snorted. “I’m not telling you.”
Danny trailed behind him as Toby started toward his caban
on. “C’mon dude, I told you shit about, you know, my love life.”
“Yes, you did,” Toby agreed, refusing to turn back. “And that was your choice. My choice is to not share.”
“Well, you know where to find me if you change your mind, or, like, need to talk about anything.”
Toby rolled his eyes to himself and hardened his heart to the wounded tone of Danny’s voice. “Yep, I do.”
His first order of business was to take a shower. Not the kind he’d been taking, but the more purposeful kind. Getting clean for Jock’s visit later, because he knew exactly what he wanted, and he was pretty sure that was exactly what Jock wanted. And so what if Jock had taken a little break before getting it? He’d said he was coming over, hadn’t he? Maybe the fratbro welcoming party had made him jittery. Or he simply wanted an opportunity to brush his teeth first. Lots of explanations that had nothing to do with avoiding Toby. This level of insecurity is so unlike me. Or it used to be, but since the advent of that boy, Toby had discovered new facets to his personality.
The bathroom was so small he kept catching glances of himself in the mirror. His body was nothing like Jock’s, but he’d never been unattractive, he didn’t think. He was pretty average, although definitely carrying less weight than a lot of Americans. And even less since coming to France, he could feel as he lathered his overly hairy abdomen. Jock liked all that hair. He seemed to like other stuff, too.
An hour later he was dressed again and stepping out the door to kill some time on his patio before dinner when he found someone sitting in one of the chairs in front. Someone whose hair was a little too light and whose shoulders weren’t quite wide enough. Noah. And judging by the way his face was buried in his hands, Toby was about to be knee-deep in more bro-angst.
“What is it?” he asked, coming to sit next to the kid.
Noah lifted his head, pressing his steepled hands against his lips, knuckles white. “I need to talk to someone.”
“Well Jock—”
“God,” Noah groaned. “I can’t tell him about this. He’ll tell me how fucking stupid I am.”