by Amy Lane
Dustin closed the gap between them, lips brushing Quinlan’s experimentally.
Harder.
His tongue teased the edges of Quinlan’s slightly parted lips, and he moved his hand from the back of Quinlan’s head to the side of his neck, which he cupped tenderly.
So tender.
Who would have thought this surly adolescent, this gruff working man, could touch Quin’s skin with such exquisite tenderness?
He gasped, and Dustin’s tongue swept in roughly. One hand stayed cupping Quinlan’s neck and the other shoved under his sweatshirt, blatant, forward, rough and possessive on Quinlan’s chest. A lifetime of reserve, of quiet, self-protective ice Quinlan had formed, layer by layer, around his heart, around his libido, went up in steam as Quinlan moaned and let Dustin pin him to the back of the car seat. With rough sweeps of his hand, a constant, hungry plundering of his mouth, Dustin threatened to consume every reservation, every inhibition Quinlan had ever possessed, with the wildfire of his hungry, shameless touch.
“Quinlan! Quin, is that you? Man, hurry—they’re taking roll!”
Oh God! The knocking on the window jolted him out of his haze, and Dustin pulled back reluctantly, leaning his forehead against Quinlan’s and panting. With fumbling movements, Dustin reached across him and lowered the window.
“Hey, Bobbie. He’ll be out in a minute—is that okay?”
“Yeah. Uh, sure.” Oh God. Quinlan didn’t even want to look at her, and then she made his mortification complete. “Oh my God, Dusty—is that you?”
“Yeah. It’s been a while. You should stop by. My mom wants to see the kids.”
“Sure. I’ll send John over while I’m on tour. I’m sure he’ll need the break. Uh… Quin?”
“Yeah,” he croaked, still not able to look at her.
“Three minutes. Dusty, if you pop the trunk, I’ll get his suitcase and his piece, okay?”
Dustin moved the lever and then turned back to Quinlan and smiled gently, rubbing Quinlan’s lower lip with his thumb. “That was a good kiss,” he said, full of pride.
Quinlan swallowed and nodded, because words were not a thing still.
“Don’t look so sad, Q.” Gentle. He was being gentle. “You have a couple months to wrap your head around that. To admit it was good. To admit you want it again.”
“It was good,” Quinlan said without thinking. His lips were still tingling. Hell, his cock was still tingling. “I just—”
Dustin kissed him again, short, hard, brutal—claiming.
He pulled back and mesmerized Quin with the conviction in his eyes. “You just have to go. Think of me, Q. I won’t forget to text.”
Quinlan nodded, because he had no choice, and Dustin reached across him again and unlatched the door. Quinlan was never sure after that how he got out of the car, grabbed his knapsack full of entertainment, and walked with wobbly knees to the idling bus.
Bobbie stood outside the doors, the last person besides Quinlan to get on board.
“So?” she asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he muttered, stalking down the aisle.
Bobbie burst into raucous laughter. “Chrissy’s holding the back for the three of us,” she directed. “And you’re hilarious. You should go on stage. That’s hysterical.”
“What?” He risked a glance over his shoulder. Bobbie’s complexion had cleared up since their first tour, and she’d learned how to cut and streak her hair so it highlighted the adorable points in her features. She no longer looked plain next to the darker, more exotic and buxom Chrissy, but it was the confidence she had now that made her sarcasm softer, that seemed to light her up from within.
Her husband, John, worked at the railroad in Roseville. A burly railroad man, he’d helped Bobbie change her flat tire on the side of the road one rainy night, and thought she walked on water ever since.
“What’s so funny?” he prompted.
She rolled her eyes. “Sit. Chrissy brought snacks because she’s awesome.”
“I am,” Chrissy said cheerfully. Quinlan had started to think of her as a grown-up Conroy. She was very smart but easily pleased. He liked that in a traveling companion. “What’s so funny?”
Alan, the lead instructor and orchestra conductor for the tour, stood up before he could answer. After he welcomed everybody and called a quick last-minute roll, Quinlan hoped Chrissy had forgotten the question.
No such luck.
“No, seriously, Quin—look at you. You’re all flushed, you’ve got….” Suddenly she started to laugh, low and dirty, her full red mouth pulling into a good-natured leer. “You’ve got razor burn on your cheeks! C’mon, Quin! What’s so funny?”
Bobbie laughed too. Evil. They were both horrible people, and he couldn’t imagine why he’d been friends with them for so long.
“What’s funny is that he thinks he’s not going to tell us when he started making out with Dusty.”
“Dusty!” Chrissy clapped her hand over her mouth, only sparkling brown eyes showing. “When did that happen?”
“I don’t want to talk about it?”
Both girls collapsed into gales of laughter.
“Oh my God! Quin! Say it again!” Bobbie begged.
“What?” he snapped.
“Say we’re going to be trapped on this bus for the next fourteen hours with nothing to do but gossip and knit, and you’re not going to tell us about making out with the kid you’ve known since he was fourteen while we’re all on the bus.”
Oh God. Quinlan covered his eyes with his hand. “Oh man,” he mumbled. Because they were so right.
“Dusty?” Chrissy said again. “Damn. He’s hot.”
“Oh my God, Chrissy!” Quinlan looked at her in horror. “He’s—”
“Older than most of the kids on this bus,” she told him with a shrug. “Hey, I’m not married. I go to a club and see a guy who looks like Dusty with a legit ID? Yeah, I’d hit that if the time was right.”
“But I used to babysit him!” Quinlan wailed, expecting them to judge him. Hoping, actually—because it would hold in place the one legitimate barrier that would keep Dustin out. Away from Quinlan’s inner sanctum, the self-containment of his heart.
“Look, Quin,” Bobbie said patiently. “It’s like those kids on Harry Potter. Like, we started going to the movies, and they were all, you know. Little kids. And then, about the fifth movie, we all went ‘Oh, that Radcliffe kid, he’s gonna be pretty hot in a few years.’ And then the eighth movie comes out, and we’re like, ‘Neville Longbottom, be still my heart!’”
“And then he did that spread in his underwear?” Chrissy interjected.
“Right?” Bobbie nodded furiously. “That was amazing.”
“I saw,” Quinlan muttered. “I’m pretty sure that was Dusty’s spank bank in his junior year in high school.” Oh God. He buried his face in his hands. “I’m going to hell!”
“But see?” Bobbie said, patting his back. “Thing is, that could be your spank bank and it wouldn’t make you any pervier than anybody else spanking. You understand?”
“It’s like Jensen Ackles,” Chrissy said pragmatically.
Quinlan stared at her. “Dean?”
“Yeah. My mom had the biggest crush on that guy. Still does. Anyway, she started crushing on him in 2005, when the show first came out. But she was like, ‘He’s a very good-looking boy.’ But by 2011, when he turned thirty, she was like, ‘Yeah, I could date him now if I wasn’t married to your father, ’cause I’m only forty, and it’s not that big a difference anymore.’ Except it’s not ten years for you, Quin. It’s, like, six. And how old is John?”
“Thirty-five,” Chrissy answered promptly. “Seven years older. See?”
Quinlan grunted, suddenly exhausted. “Sure.”
“You’re done, aren’t you?” Bobbie asked perceptively.
“So done.”
“And you’ve got all tour to think about it, don’t you?”
He sighed and grabbed his knapsack
to tuck under his head. “Yup.”
“Wait,” she told him. “Before you go beddy-bye, what books did you bring? We need to plan the book swap.”
A bus tradition. So normal—like the world hadn’t just rolled under his feet with the taste of Dustin’s breath.
“Sure,” he said, unzipping his backpack. “Let the swap begin.”
THAT night they reached the first hotel, outside of Oregon, and after going to find food, he and Bobbie adjourned to their room and got ready for bed.
Bobbie put on a detective show—they both adored them—and he lay on his side and texted the family.
Got to first hotel. Tell me about your day.
The kids started from Nica and Jacob’s phone, and then Belinda and Melly and Dustin each sent him a picture. In return he sent one he’d taken of Bobbie and Chrissy on the walk home after dinner, with the ocean behind them.
Decent, Dustin texted—not on the group chat, he noticed. I want a selfie.
You know what I look like.
As a response, Dustin sent him a picture of himself on his back in his bedroom. Quinlan could see his face and his bare collarbone and realized he must be shirtless.
You know what I look like too.
I’m not sexting you! Oh God. If Jacob and Nica ever saw pictures like that, Quinlan would have to commit seppuku.
Not sexting, Q. Just a selfie. Trust me.
Quinlan took a picture of himself—in a T-shirt, thank God!—and sent it back.
Good. Tomorrow, maybe look at the camera.
I feel stupid.
Don’t. I love your smile.
Quinlan’s phone blew up right then with Melly telling him about the fight she’d just gotten into with her friend, and he didn’t answer.
But later, before he fell asleep, he felt bad.
I love yours too.
THE tour commenced. Quinlan loved performing. He loved playing with Chrissy and Bobbie. He’d hoped maybe Sammy would come with them again someday, but by the time Sammy recovered, he had firm roots with Cooper and his family, and two months in the summer had seemed like too much time away.
As much as he loved performing, Quinlan was starting to see how that could be so.
Like before, he texted the family when he could. Not every night—performance and rehearsal took a lot of time and energy, and so did riding herd on the thirty or so lowerclassmen who’d been accepted into the fellowship for the first or second time this year.
Bobbie remarked more than once—and often within students’ hearing—that they would not be held responsible if half the undergrads turned up pregnant.
But once every two, three days, as the bus rumbled through the Pacific Northwest and back through the Badlands, then back down through Colorado again, Quinlan sat and caught up with all the news.
Dustin sent him a selfie every night.
Bobbie caught him, three weeks into the tour, taking one of his own as they got out at the top of Hwy 34 and looked around, shivering in the cold.
“Here,” said Bobbie, putting her arm around him as he took a shot with nothing but blue sky in the background. “Now send me a copy so I can show my men. Who’s this for?”
“Family,” Quinlan muttered.
Bobbie looked at him sharply. “And by family, you mean….”
Quinlan let out a breath and showed her his phone.
“Aw…,” she murmured. “I didn’t know he had a cat!”
“It’s technically his sister’s cat,” Quinlan told her, embarrassed. “But Pikachu sits on Dustin more, so Belinda told him he’s liable for the vet bills.”
Bobbie burst out laughing. “It’s a good family,” she said after a moment. “And seriously—sending you a selfie every night?”
Quinlan had to close his eyes against the aching sweetness of it.
“Yeah.”
“One of the most romantic things I’ve ever seen,” she agreed. “You know. Maybe you could….”
“I’ll think about it,” he promised.
She broke into laughter again and then had to pant for breath because they were two miles up. “Funny thing is,” she gasped, holding up a finger.
He nodded. They didn’t have to say it. He was that transparent—it was obvious he’d thought about nothing else all tour.
NEW Mexico was a furnace, Texas was a barbecue, and Arizona was a cauldron of fire.
They hit Oklahoma during a heat wave, and everybody swore they lost ten pounds just walking outside.
Quinlan’s selfie had an awful lot of frizzing curly hair that no amount of product could tame.
Looking tired, Q. Gonna make it the next two weeks?
Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas—I’ve done it before.
He walked onto the stage in Lexington grateful that the South did air-conditioning right. After he, Bobbie, Chrissie, and Alan finished the instructor’s set, he got down to the bottom of the stage, took a right into the gentlemen’s room, and lost every meal he’d ever had.
By the time he was done, there was a line three deep.
Two days later, most of the orchestra had recovered from whatever they’d eaten—or breathed—that had turned their little group into a vomitorium, but not Quinlan.
Two more days of getting fluids in the hotel room, Bobbie at his side while the rest of the group moved on, and they were both done. She’d recovered in the first wave, so she gave him the first available flight home. He’d texted her as the plane taxied in and saw that she was supposed to land six hours after he did, and until he’d walked in on Dustin, that was his last clear memory and his last lucid thought.
Up Close and Personal
JACOB showed up from work to help Dustin get Quinlan out of the bathtub and into the bed.
“God—he looks like shit. Here—get his medical card out of his wallet. I think we can get EMTs here to give him fluids.”
That was Dad. No questions about “Hey, what were you doing here on your day off? I thought you were going hiking.” No “He didn’t tell you he was sick?”
Just showing up and helping out and giving good advice.
Dustin was grateful, because he was full of all sorts of good shit to tell himself. Classy move, Dusty—jerking off in the guy’s bed when he shows up looking like death.
Augh!
But it had been damned hard. Dustin had missed the hell out of Quinlan when he’d been gone.
Of course, Dustin had missed the hell out of him during all the other years, but this one had been special.
Selfie after selfie, Dustin had kept up his relentless campaign of Let’s remind Q that I’m not a kid anymore! and it had seemed to be working. The pictures Quinlan sent back had gone from super shy, to a little bit coy, to occasionally flirtatious. Not only had it given Dustin hope, but oh my God, had it turned him on!
When Quinlan dropped off Dustin’s radar four days ago, Dustin hadn’t been that worried, really. It happened—he’d seen the tour get intense, and Quin wasn’t answering anybody’s texts, so Dustin figured he was just busy.
But Dustin had missed even the selfie to remind him that yes! He’d done it! He’d kissed Quinlan, and it had been fantastic.
When he and Belinda had relocated—Belinda to her boyfriend’s apartment and Dustin to Quinlan’s, so their own place could be recarpeted—the first thing Dustin had thought about was what it would feel like to sleep in Quinlan’s bed.
Sliding his hands along his overheated, swollen flesh hadn’t occurred to him until he had a day off and it was too damned hot outside to go hiking.
Having Quinlan startle him like that had been a blow to his confidence. Damn. One glimpse of little Dusty naked, and Dustin had turned into the snarling asshole who’d made Quinlan’s life miserable at the very beginning.
Dustin wasn’t proud of that.
But bitch’s remorse would have to wait until after Quinlan could even walk by himself.
Dustin found the insurance card, and Dad called the number on the back and asked for a concierge
visit.
He frowned at the response. “Yeah, I don’t care if he needed fluids in frickin’ Lexington three days ago. He’s here now, and he looks like shit, and I’m not dragging him back out in the heat to get him hydrated. Yeah, I’ll fucking pay for it myself. Jesus, you people suck!”
He hit End Call with unnecessary force and scowled. “Asshole.”
“Guy on the helpline?” Dustin asked, trying to deal with his father’s unhappy face. The kids didn’t see it often.
“No, Quinlan. Goddammit, Dusty—he’s been sick for four days. He didn’t tell you?”
Dustin grunted, suddenly pissed off too. “No, because if I’d known he was sick in Kentucky, I would be in Kentucky, and he wouldn’t have dragged himself back here.”
Jacob’s smile flirted with the corners of his mouth. “That’s my boy. Okay. Well, they’ll be here in twenty minutes. Go give him some more Gatorade now and give him hell later.”
“Sure.”
“Son.” Dad stopped him with a gentle hand on his arm. “Just let him know… I don’t know. Let him know I missed him like I’d miss you.”
Dustin was going to say, “Thanks a lot, Dad!” but he understood. Quinlan liked to think he was an outsider here. An outsider everywhere. Dustin’s job was to convince him he was only an outsider in his own heart.
“Sure.”
With that he turned back toward the bedroom, where Quinlan lay naked under his own covers and relatively clean burgundy-colored sheets. They might not have been clean if he’d gotten home ten minutes later—Dusty would own that.
He sat down slowly on the side of the bed and stroked Quinlan’s hair back from his forehead and then kissed the pale skin there gently.
“How you doing there, Q?”
“Feeling stupid,” Quinlan rasped. He sounded like he’d been throwing up for weeks. “I should have stayed one more day.”
“Why didn’t you call us?” And Dustin was proud of himself—no recrimination in his voice. Nothing in his voice but worry.
“I didn’t want you to see me in a hotel room in Kentucky,” Quinlan whined. “I just wanted to come home.”