by Amy Lane
John unloaded on her, because Nana had always been the best listener, and she smoked a genteel cigarette like all Southern-born ladies of her era and nodded at the appropriate places.
When he was done, she sighed and patted his hand. “Honey, I’ve got nothing. You couldn’t stay—I know you couldn’t stay. I would have begged you to leave him one trip to rehab ago, but I know you. You’ve loved him since you were in high school—how do you give up on that?”
He didn’t tell her that his strange and tangled relationship with Vittorio Petrelli had begun even before high school, just like he didn’t tell her about the things they’d done, getting drunk in the local fields or cruising the highway for men. She didn’t need details, just like he didn’t need the little detail about Crosby giving Nana a good tongue-lashing, but that didn’t mean either of them hadn’t guessed.
But he sat on her porch, sad and hurt, and she told him, “Johnny, I can’t give you advice—if I knew a damned thing about love, I would have married for it instead of fucking rich husbands for money.” She spiked her lemonade again. He’d always loved that about Nana. “About the only thing I can give you is this house and some money when I’m gone.”
The thought chilled him to the bone. “Nana—man, you’re gonna live forever. You’re the only person on the planet who loves me!”
She kissed his temple hard and then wiped the lipstick off with her thumb. “Then you’re just going to have to find somebody besides Tory to love you,” she said. God love her, she was the soul of practicality. “Because otherwise, how am I going to piss off your mother? I’m terribly excited to think about you shooting gay orgies in my living room when that woman is dying for my property.” She smirked and then sobered. “But I’m leaving the bulk of the cash to Crosby, if you don’t mind? He’s on strict orders to move to the Caribbean and fill his bed with young women who have plump thighs and loose morals. Believe me, that man has earned it.”
John nodded, kept his internal shudder to himself, and told her truthfully that there were no hard feelings that Crosby was getting three-quarters of her inheritance. It was her money, she’d earned it honestly on her back, and he was just so damned grateful that someone in his family still loved him.
She’d passed away three years ago. Dex had come down to the funeral with him. They’d stayed in separate bedrooms, and Dex had talked to his girlfriend every night. Of course, during the days, he’d bitched about how much easier it was to sleep with guys than deal with girls, but that was before he was out, even to himself.
John had wondered then, if he’d just climbed into Dex’s bed and offered a blowjob, if Dex wouldn’t just cave. Apparently that had been the right course of action, because waiting for the guy seemed to have been a moral flaw.
Hell, John thought on the flight to Florida, it probably had been.
He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the plane window, wishing he could ask for a drink. He wasn’t great at flying, at least not by himself, and Dex had booked him nonstop. John actually liked layovers. They gave him a chance to run across an airline terminal and buy something bad for his damned delicate complexion and, if nothing else, stretch his legs, which ached when he sat in one place too long.
And layovers gave him a chance to stop thinking, and that was a blessing. He had a tablet and music and books and a laptop and a paperback—all things Dex had shoved in a messenger bag for him to occupy himself—and none of it was doing what it was supposed to do.
It was supposed to keep him from thinking too hard.
But he’d already visited Nana on memory road, and he really didn’t have too many other stops to take.
He was going to honor Tory’s last request, which meant he had to remember Tory and his first requests, and how the two of them had started being lovers before they even knew what the word meant.
THEY BONDED in grade school over science, N’Sync, and bubble gum.
By junior high, they’d confessed to beating off and started beating off together. The first touch of Tory’s hand on John’s cock had made John come instantaneously. Tory had stretched out his own orgasm a little, smiling, looking John in the eye, biting his lip. By the time the magic white liquid spurted over Tory’s fist, John was hard all over again. That time Tory used his mouth, and a tradition began.
Tory’s parents were Italian. His mother was a midsized woman with wide hips and dark hair and a habit of feeding everyone who came to her table. John’s mother hired a cook, and John liked Tory’s mother’s table better anyway. John and Tory’s jerk-off/suck-off sessions usually happened on sleepover Saturdays, when Tory lay down on the sleeping bag John brought and they explored each other’s bodies with absolute abandon. Tory slept in the upstairs bedroom, and his mom, in her words, was getting fatter every year. As long as neither of them made any noise, nobody was going to check on them. Why would they? Tory was the middle child, didn’t earn perfect grades like his older brother and sister, didn’t cause too much trouble like his younger sisters. He got average grades and had above-average looks.
The only one who’d ever thought he was special was John.
The only one who ever saw the marks on John’s pale skin from when his policeman father lost his temper was Tory.
They didn’t kiss—not at first. They were just private members of a very exclusive club that included John Alexander Carey and Vittorio Petrelli and no one else. Club dues were as many dirty magazines as they could find. Club activities were beating off and sucking off, and giggling about innocent things their peers said that made them think about beating off and sucking off. (Pretty much everything said by a teacher or a boy in seventh and eighth grade made them think about getting off. Both were proficient at laundry by then. Thinking back, John was pretty sure they supported the Kleenex industry in Florida.)
One day they rode their bikes from their hometown of Florentine, a little coastal town not far from Daytona Beach, into Daytona Beach itself. The cool thing about Daytona Beach was that it had about sixty-dozen actual adult toy and video stores, and the ones in the shittier part of town didn’t give a damn if you were eighteen, seventeen, or barely fourteen and had ridden in on your bikes with your lawn-mowing money from your nana in your pocket so you could buy yourself some porn.
This particular day was scorchingly, heart-stoppingly hot. Florida in the summertime was no fucking joke, and they had to spend precious porn money on bottles of water as they rode their bikes into town. They wore their trunks, and although it had made dipping in the tepid ocean easier and rinsing off in the freezing pipe-water showers almost a joy, it also meant they were chafing and embarrassed by the time they got to the porn store, and Tory didn’t deal with discomfort well.
“Hey,” Tory hissed as they were looking through the magazines on the rack. “Stop looking at the ones with the girls in them—you’re not fooling anyone, okay?”
John grunted. Yeah, Tory said touching each other made them gay, and so the fuck what, but John was still a little afraid of what people would say.
Tory stepped on his toe and shoved the magazine he was looking at under John’s nose. One guy was lying on his back while another guy shoved his gigantic dick in the first guy’s ass. And another guy was sucking the first guy’s (also gigantic) dick. And the first guy—the one getting fucked and sucked—was kissing another guy.
John’s erection was instant and painful inside his swimsuit. He sucked in a breath and let it out on a moan and leaned his forehead against Tory’s shoulder.
“They’re kissing,” he said.
Tory, apparently comfortable in the anonymity of Daytona Beach, grabbed John’s chin, lowered that long Italian face to John’s scrunchy, freckled Scottish one, and touched John’s mouth with his own in their first kiss.
John moaned and ground up against Tory’s thigh again, because he was chafing and aching and it hurt to want things this bad when he couldn’t have them. Tory’s quick shucking of John’s shorts and the cool of the air around his bare skin w
ere such a relief that for a moment it didn’t register that he was naked in the back of a porn store, standing on a sticky floor.
Tory must have noticed the floor, because he shoved his shorts down and sank to a crouch in front of John and started doing what they’d been practicing in their bedroom for the past year.
Hot damn, but it felt good. In the many blowjobs John had received before and since, nothing rivaled the soothing moistness of Tory’s sweet mouth against John’s aching, heated skin. John squinted just enough to know Tory had a hand on his own body, and then he closed his eyes and propped himself up against the little door almost hidden by the magazine rack.
It didn’t take long.
He cried out softly as he came, and he was more than surprised when someone—someone not Tory—muffled his noises with a hard, deep kiss. John opened his eyes in shock and an older boy, maybe sixteen, was kissing him hard. It felt so good—had, in fact, been what John had wanted from the beginning, and John let him. Suddenly the stranger stiffened, and Tory’s moan beneath them was muffled. John kissed the guy harder, and when he shuddered, hips bucking as he came, John swallowed his groan.
The other boy pulled back from the kiss and grinned. He was okay-looking—had a department-store tan and a little extra weight around the chin but was generally not bad. He certainly didn’t look like a perv or a deviant, and the kiss had made John get hard again.
“God, that was hot,” the stranger said, pulling up his cargo shorts and underwear and tucking himself in.
“Hell yeah,” Tory said, standing up. He grinned at John and licked his hand. John, feeling a little shaken and a little cheap and used, extended his tongue so he could taste the comfort of Tory’s come.
The older boy nodded approvingly, and John fixed his shorts before grabbing Tory’s hand. We’re together, really. We just did that for fun, but mostly it’s the two of us. He didn’t say it, though. Tory was only his until he decided to be someone else’s.
“You guys are great,” the stranger said, and even though he was barely any older than they were and his teeth were straight and his hair was nicely cut and spiked on top, his smile was still filthy dirty. “You want to come with me? I know some guys who’ve got a party going on. Man, you can suck all the cock you want.”
John blushed. “Uhm, no thanks,” he muttered, squeezing Tory’s hand. In one of his rare moments of taking the lead, he looked furtively at Tory’s swim trunks until Tory, grinning unrepentantly, pulled his trunks up before licking that last drop off the back of his hand.
The guy shook his head, disappointed but not hostile. “Suit yourselves, baby meat. Man, we woulda had fun popping your cherries!”
With that he grabbed a couple of magazines from the gay section John and Tory had been looking at and turned around and walked out.
John turned and used the collar of Tory’s T-shirt to wipe Tory’s mouth—it was still glazed over with the stranger’s come. Tory grinned and darted in, stealing another kiss from John.
John melted. God, whether it was dirty or not, Tory had really loved it, and the taste of the stranger’s come in Tory’s mouth did nothing to change that defiant exuberance, that quirky joy.
“Why’d you say no?” Tory demanded when they came back for air. “That could have been fun!”
“Because,” John answered weakly. “Because, you know….” He cast a hunted look over his shoulder, but the proprietor was too busy nursing his own stiffie and reading his own porn—something featuring a girl with stupendous tits. “Because I wanted to kiss you some more,” he said, feeling stupid. “It’s brand-new.”
Tory nodded as though that was terribly reasonable, but he still looked a little disappointed. “Okay,” he said doubtfully. “But we’ll never be like that guy in the picture—you know, fucked, blown, everything—if we just do it between ourselves.”
“Well, let’s practice some more on each other,” John said, trying to hide his panic and sound practical too.
Tory nodded and they bought their porn. They tucked it carefully in their backpack so they could take it to Tory’s house and pore over it for hours that night, practicing everything they saw and were familiar with. They were particularly fascinated with the cocks being shoved in assholes, but they read enough and looked at enough pictures to realize they needed condoms and lube for that—and for sucking strangers off as well. (That was John’s one and only foray into unprotected sex, unless it was with Tory. After years in the sex industry, John would always count them lucky that it hadn’t ended really badly.)
They made excited plans to go back to that store searching for condoms and lube, and while John would remember that night later and laugh at the two of them because they could have gotten condoms and lubricant at the local drugstore, where nobody knew them and it wasn’t a ten-mile ride out of town in the sun, he would also die inside a little.
How different would his and Tory’s life together have been if he’d said the one thing he’d been thinking when Tory proposed they get “fucked, blown, everything”?
What would Tory have said if John had confessed that the thing he’d wanted most in that whole picture had been a simple kiss?
“SIR, CAN I offer you anything to drink?”
John jerked and fought the temptation to say rum and coke. Coke, get it? Yeah, that would be really fucking hilarious. “Diet soda,” he said, trying to fit the now and the then into place, like pieces from two different puzzles forced to interlock.
She poured him his drink with a professional smile, but he knew he was nothing to look at. Scrawny, with darkening red hair and freckles that were barely fading at thirty-five. He was well aware that he’d been even less beautiful as a kid. Tory, with his full lips and wicked eyes—he’d had a face sculpted like an angel’s, right down to a divot in his chin and sable hair. John had spent hours staring at him, taking pictures of him, even. By the time they were in high school, John had his own camera. He took pictures of alligators and sunsets and short palm trees thrusting aggressively from the sandy soil.
And he took pictures of Tory.
“NO,” JOHN muttered, looking through the viewfinder. His nana had given him the money, and this was one of the best digital cameras on the market, but it wasn’t the camera that framed the picture, it was John. “Lower your chin and look up at the camera there, like that. Hell. Your cock’s gone soft.”
Tory grinned at him from the blanket. They were actually taking naked pictures in Carpenter’s Park. Or, well, John was taking naked pictures of Tory. On an early Sunday morning, back in the further reaches of the park during a scorching, humid June before their senior year, the odds of getting caught were pretty much nil, which was good. Yeah, Tory and John got crap for being joined at the hip, but no one in their high school knew that they were very often joined at the cock and ass.
And they certainly didn’t know John usually topped in bed, and that Tory lay beneath him, body sweating, face naked in pleasure, grunting, pleading, and screaming for John to please fuck him harder, fuck him faster, fuck him more.
Always with Tory it was more.
The first time, Tory tried to top, but he’d been shaking and too close to getting off. After he’d forgotten the lube and driven in thoughtlessly, John had bled through a fissure for a month, and they’d both decided John had the clearer head for things, so he should be the one to stick it in.
Tory’s flesh around John’s cock was one of the purest things John had ever known. Dark, warm, pleasuring, Tory’s ass held him tight and safe and then squeezed just hard enough to make John’s vision blacken. But John learned his lesson from being hurt—he was gentle at first, and stroked long and carefully until Tory asked for more.
It was easy to give it to him.
The first time, Tory buried his face in John’s pillow, in John’s bed. John’s parents were on a trip, and since John was fifteen, the boys had the house to themselves, so Tory didn’t need to muffle the delicious sounds. On instinct John leaned forward and grabbed
his hair, pulling him back, making him cry out.
“Louder,” he begged, trying to keep from just banging senselessly inside him.
The moan that ripped from Tory’s gut was so deep it vibrated the head of John’s cock. “Tory, man….” John was hanging on by a thread, but they’d studied for this moment. “God, grab yourself so you come!”
The sound of Tory’s hand on his own cock sent shivers up John’s spine. This was sex—it was primal sweaty and glorious. So much of John’s life he’d spent cooped up, dressing like his mom needed him to, being good so his dad didn’t smack him because God forbid the cop’s kid get in trouble. But you weren’t pretty in sex, you just were: you were lightning and thunder and detonations and fireworks. And those things weren’t pretty, but they sure were worth being.
“That spot,” Tory breathed, and John hit it again. He could feel it, the size of a small rubber ball, just big enough to hit like a target in the dark when he was ramming himself inside Tory’s ass.
Tory screamed—an honest-to-God scream—and then shot come onto John’s clean Star Wars sheets. The feeling of him clenching around John’s cock was…
Indescribable.
John’s vision blacked, and his body did something that felt supernatural and explosive—sublime light, heavenly sound, hot and cold running blood, the works.
He collapsed onto Tory and pressed him into the mattress, where they lay, sweaty and replete, for a good ten minutes without talking.
I love you, Tory. This thing we did was amazing, and I did it just like that for you.