by Cameron Dane
Eventually Alex had nothing left to give. One final shiver rolled through him. With one more scrape of their lips, he drew back just a hair. “I’m sorry.” As he withdrew from Hunter’s body, he brushed another kiss to Hunter’s cheek. “I couldn’t hold it back.” He climbed off Hunter but ran a hand down his spine, dipped into his crease, and then kept going to fondle Hunter’s heavy sac. “Roll over and I’ll take care of you.”
Hunter hissed. He took a second to press into Alex’s teasing contact, but his cock -- his entire being -- screamed for a different kind of release. While tangling his hand into the bedding, searching for the tube he wanted, Hunter shifted to his back. He looked up at Alex and hid nothing in his stare. “Ride me.” His throat thickened with his request. “I want you to feel me come in you too.”
“Shit, baby.” Alex jolted, and his pupils flared. “I think you just made me a little bit hard again.” He grabbed the lubricant out of Hunter’s hand and scrambled to straddle his stomach. On his knees, Alex squeezed a dollop of the clear substance onto his fingers. As he reached back and worked the stuff into his body, he winced, but the heated flush in his skin and the light in his eyes didn’t diminish one bit. “I’m still getting used to how much I want to open my ass for you.”
Hunter’s chest tightened with the memory of his old sexual identity. “I think there will always be a part of my personality now that craves being there,” he confessed. “I don’t think I can go back to that man I was who always wanted to bottom.”
Alex rubbed his palm over Hunter’s heart. “You don’t have to.” He then shuffled back and lined up his hole right at the tip of Hunter’s iron-hard dick. “Not with me.” With that, Alex held his hand against Hunter’s shaft, keeping it in alignment with his pucker. Alex pushed down, down, down. Hunter watched Alex grit his teeth every time his hole didn’t open to accept Hunter’s cock. Alex kept rocking, though, and didn’t stop until his pucker collapsed and he slowly worked every inch of Hunter’s thick cock into his ass. Both men gasped and jerked, and they instantly locked stares.
Hunter had never been bare inside a person before, and he fought the nearly unbearable need to pound Alex’s passage with rough, jarring upward thrusts. The millions of nerve endings in his penis shrieked for fast, hard, drilling friction, but Hunter willed himself to allow Alex the time to adjust to Hunter’s penetration and begin to move when he could handle it.
It didn’t take long for that initial tension to release in Alex. After a moment, he gave Hunter one of his special wicked grins, braced himself on Hunter’s chest, and lifted himself almost all the way off Hunter’s dick, leaving just the fat head tucked inside, to then reverse and sit all the way down on Hunter’s cock again. Smothering heat surrounded Hunter’s shaft, and the intense pleasure of it snaked tentacles of wonderful humming into his belly and even tugged on his heart.
With a moan, Alex found a rocking rhythm that surely had Hunter’s cockhead rubbing over his sweet spot with every roll of his hips. Alex’s gaze changed to something downright dreamy, and he clutched at Hunter’s chest with a punishing grip that only made Hunter harder.
Just when Hunter didn’t believe he would be able to stuff down his shout of need a second longer, Alex grinned wickedly again and picked up the pace, giving Hunter the faster ride he craved.
A rough chuckle mixed itself with Hunter’s groan. “You teasing bastard.” He couldn’t believe the humor mixed with the lust in Alex’s eyes, nor the lightness in his own heart. Baring his teeth, trying to play fierce back, Hunter knifed up with his hips and slammed his cock deep into Alex’s quivering chute. “If you’re not careful, I’ll blister your ass with a belt again.” Alex came down on Hunter with driving force right then and made them both cry out with acute pleasure.
As Alex sent his asshole straight onto Hunter’s dick for another rough piercing, he admitted in a low, gruff tone, “If you’re not careful, next time I’ll come with just the sting of the leather.” He bit his lip through another tough drilling in his ass, but he never once blinked or looked away. “I loved everything you did to me at the site.” Alex took Hunter’s hand and rubbed it over his hip and around to the curve of his buttocks, as if giving Hunter tactile evidence that no permanent damage had been done to his body as a result of Hunter’s anger that day. “I loved it because it was you, Hunt.” Alex put Hunter’s damaged hand on him too, covering them both with his, holding Hunter to him in another way. “Only because it was you.”
Fucking Christ almighty. Hunter choked on his swelling of emotions. Every loving and sexual and tender and aggressive feeling Hunter had in him for this man coalesced into a giant fireball and surged right through him with incredible, awful, wonderful pain. Hunter arched off the bed in a bow, taking Alex with him. Alex’s name ripped through Hunter from his soul, annihilated his throat on the way out, and filled the bedroom in an animalistic cry. Hunter held Alex to him, with every inch of his cock claiming ownership of the man’s ass, as pleasure so intense it cut through his bones consumed him and then had no choice but to exit his body or kill him. Hunter’s seed, his very essence, his love shot out of him and into Alex’s being, the only place it belonged. Hunter filled Alex with cum -- with himself -- and he did it so completely, Alex jerked on top of him. The man’s passage clamped in a series of tight contractions around Hunter’s cock, and Hunter would have sworn Alex rode another orgasm as well.
It took forever, and Hunter had never felt more wrung out in his life, but the tension thrumming through him eventually waned, and his body dropped back to the bed. Alex fell on top of him, a sweet burden of hot, sweaty, out-of-breath man.
This moment, this day, this evening fulfilled every secret, buried dream inside Hunter for this man. For Alex. For the person he loved. Hunter wanted to simply savor Alex’s weight pressing him into the bed and replay the intense beauty of what had just occurred between them. He wanted to continue running his fingers in little circles over Alex’s back, as he did now, for the rest of the night, and not worry about anything else. But Hunter had learned to accept that his brain did not work that way. His mind immediately started running scenarios of tomorrow, a week, six months, a year ahead, and before his heart had a chance to settle, it revved up again with new adrenaline. Shit. Hunter cursed the tickles of old demons fighting to stir him into a debilitating state of fear. Dr. Royan said this might be a part of me forever.
The urge to run to the bathroom for a razor blade pushed at Hunter’s brain, sped up his heartbeat, and made his hands repeatedly clench. New perspiration beaded on his neck before the sweat from sex had a chance to disappear.
Hunter nudged at the man on top of him, keeping his touch gentle when the increasing buzz in his blood pushed at him to shove Alex away. “Can I get up?” he asked. Unable to ignore the urges that wanted him to cut himself in order to get away from the powerful emotions, Hunter turned to rules and actions he and Dr. Royan had devised to help him cope. “I have to move.”
Alex immediately got off Hunter, breaking the connection of their bodies. “I felt you get tight on me,” Alex said as Hunter jumped off the bed. “What is it?”
Pacing, Hunter literally walked his way through the buzzing and the punching trying to gain hold of him. He saw himself pushing through a swirling storm, with his shoulders down against the winds, and reminded himself a funnel cloud wouldn’t sweep down and steal his life. He’d learned through experience that he just had to keep walking and he would be all right.
“I need a few minutes,” Hunter shared, mindful of Alex in the room with him. “I started getting those feelings that make me want to do harmful things, and I have to get them clear in my head and sort them out.” Hunter grabbed his sweats off the foot of the bed and shoved them on. He swiped up a HAWKINS RANCH T-shirt from the laundry basket by the door and pulled that on too. He felt unbearably naked in a way clothing wouldn’t cover but still needed some sort of protection.
Sitting at the foot of the bed now, Alex slipped into his pants and shir
t too but left both unbuttoned. His gaze, so bright and clear with concern and love, ripped at Hunter’s heart.
“Would it be ignorant or cruel of me to ask if I could hear what is going on in your head?” Alex asked, even as he sat on his hands, so obviously forcing himself not to move.
“No, it wouldn’t.” Hunter flashed back to the time in Dr. Royan’s office where panic had gripped him so completely he’d hyperventilated almost to the point of passing out. Nervousness sliced through him now, again, but he forced himself to remember all the successes he’d had since that first day of unconventional therapy with Hercules, and reminded himself to focus on those better days. Hell, Hunter’s heart pumped faster than it should in this moment, but the fact that he could now actually fight through his demons in front of not just any person, but in front of Alex, the man he wanted to love and respect him more than anyone, gave Hunter hope for the future as much as the coping skills he now possessed.
Glancing at Alex, a little breathless still, Hunter added, “I just need some time to get myself through this initial bad place, and then I think I’ll be able to talk.”
“All right.” Alex nodded and kept himself glued to the bed.
Nodding back, Hunter whispered, “Thank you.”
As much as Hunter had deliberately aided in creating a damaged, imperfect body for himself, he’d learned through talking with Dr. Royan and going back over the course of his adult life and teen years that a perfectionist lived inside him. He was someone whose best ability and instincts naturally kicked in and allowed him to function well in high-intensity situations; living in a constant war zone had drilled such skills into Hunter’s psyche as the correct way to function. Conversely, returning home to a normal pace of living, with copious amounts of time to project into the future, Hunter tended toward overthinking. He wanted to make everything perfect, and knowing he couldn’t pushed at his emotions to such a degree he turned to violence, directed at himself or others, in order to stop the emotions filling his heart and the thoughts ballooning in his head. Hell. That was just part of the bullshit in Hunter’s brain all the time. He knew he still had a whole host of other fucked-up crap messing with his head too, but right now Hunter recognized what having Alex in his bed and lying on top of him in such a wonderful heap of male perfection a moment ago had done to his brain -- where it had sent his thoughts. Hunter zeroed in on the perfectionist already envisioning ten-year anniversaries that could never be.
Even if it can’t happen -- in his head, Hunter kept pushing through the black cloud and raging winds -- it will crush the hell out of me, but I won’t die. Nor will Alex, or anyone else I love. Hunter hadn’t checked the clock, but he probably paced and talked himself into believing the truth of his rational thoughts for a good ten minutes before his heart rate completely calmed.
Hunter exhaled. Feeling a bit lighter, he dropped to his knees in front of Alex. “I apologize if I scared you.” He rubbed at the brackets pulling Alex’s mouth into a tight frown. “It’s okay now. My fingers aren’t itching to find a knife anymore.”
Alex clutched Hunter’s hand and held it in his lap. “Was it something I did in bed that upset you?”
“No, no. You were perfect.” Hunter dipped down and pressed kisses to Alex’s hands. “I just started overthinking and projecting and not liking what I saw. I still have this part of me that wants to shut down or hurt myself so I don’t have to feel anything too big, whether it be good or bad. One of the things I’ve learned to do is move and talk to myself. I have to convince myself I can ride through whatever is trying to push me to distraction with hurting myself, and that in the end I’ll be all right.”
“What brought on the panic?” Worry still coated Alex’s careful tone. “Can you tell me what you were thinking that triggered it?”
Shit. Walking through the initial destructive wave didn’t take away what had erupted this newest volcano inside Hunter. He pushed up straighter and worked like the devil not to well up in front of Alex. “I was thinking this was amazing tonight, and I think you’re about the most incredible, patient man I’ve ever met, and I love you.” Hunter’s heart practically exploded, and he couldn’t stop squeezing Alex’s hands. “I can let myself say that to you now, and I can hear you say it back without freaking out. But even if I know all that, and if I can let myself believe I deserve you, I can’t be with you forever.” Hunter pushed in between Alex’s legs and put them almost forehead to forehead. “I can’t move to Boston with you” -- his voice caught, but Hunter pushed on -- “and you’ve been away from your life far too long already. At some point you’re going to leave, and I cannot move away from Quinten. It’s finally starting to feel like home again, and I could never do that to my sister. Sarah suffered enough while I was serving active duty, and I owe her time to let us get to know each other and be a tight family again.” Hunter’s heart cracked. He touched Alex’s cheeks, forehead, nose, and mouth with the tips of his fingers, aching to get in as much contact as possible, starting now. “It feels like it’s going to kill me, and I know we don’t yet know when it’s going to happen, but I have to stay here when you eventually return to your life in Boston.”
Every bit of tension visibly slid out of Alex, and the sweetest smile suddenly lit his face. “Did you not understand what I meant when I told you I wasn’t going anywhere, you sweet man?” Almost mirroring, Alex brushed his thumbs over Hunter’s slashing cheekbones and jaw. “I didn’t mean I was only staying here for a couple of months. I didn’t mean for however many years it takes to oversee my building project. I meant I’m not leaving Quinten. Or you.” He scraped the softest, fleeting kiss across Hunter’s lips and whispered, “Ever.”
Sighing, Hunter dropped back to rest his weight on his heels. “But you have to. I know enough about your finances and career to know you have a multimillion-dollar business that is very entrenched in Boston. It’s not going to run itself with supporting players forever.” He put his hand over Alex’s parted lips before the man slipped one word out. “And I know you love what you do too much to give it up. I would never let you.”
Alex pried Hunter’s hand off his mouth. “Baby, I own that business. It is a private cooperation. I can do whatever the hell I want with it.” Something of that charming arrogance Hunter remembered from when they’d first crossed paths glinted the green in Alex’s eyes now. “If I want, I can pick it up and move it to Quinten.”
“That wouldn’t be financially wise.” Hunter pushed to his feet, pointing at Alex as he started to pace again. “And I know you wouldn’t do that to your people, so don’t try to tell me -- or yourself -- you would.”
“You’re right,” Alex replied. “I wouldn’t. We have a reputation back east, people know where we are, and I wouldn’t uproot us. But I can put someone else I trust implicitly in charge of the day-to-day operations back in Boston” -- Hunter swung to face Alex, and Alex raised his brows -- “which, yes, is exactly what I did today.”
“But you would die out here without a business to master and real estate to conquer and rebuild.” Shaking his head, Hunter backed up until his spine hit the wall. “I don’t want to be a part of smothering your soul.”
Alex got up and stalked Hunter to the wall. “I can and plan to open an office here, baby.” He nodded as Hunter again shook his head. “There are all kinds of opportunities in middle America that Quick Holdings has not even begun to tackle. I’m already looking into acquiring a beaten-down ski resort in a little town north of here. It’s an ideal location, and I think I can get it for an excellent price and turn it into something incredible that would rival its beachy counterpoint Quick Holdings owns in Hawaii.”
Hope got Hunter’s heart skittering in the best, fluttery kind of way. “Really?”
“Yes, really.” Alex took Hunter’s hands and guided him to sit at the foot of the bed. This time he knelt at Hunter’s feet. “I am ambitious as hell, but also creative and able to adapt to an ever-evolving environment. Changing my zip code won’t alter that.
I want you, Hunt, and I have known from the beginning that part of having you meant being in Quinten. I’ve been thinking about what might happen from almost the start.” His small smile, so full of tenderness, softened the shark-like passion for his work he’d exhibited just a moment ago. “It’s not all-or-nothing. I’m guessing part of your therapy has included your doctor telling you that.”
“You’re right. It has.” Hunter suddenly narrowed his stare. “And you’re not guessing. You’ve done research on me.”
Alex looked as if Hunter had shot him. “Not specifically on you.” He twisted his hands in Hunter’s shirt, his touch imploring. “I would never violate any confidential relationships you have with professionals or family. But I did read everything I could get my hands on about PTSD, self-harming, and survivor’s guilt.” As Alex’s cheeks pinked, he shrugged. “I love you. Part of that is trying to understand what makes you tick, and to be here to listen with some knowledge should you ever feel comfortable confiding in me.”
Hunter brushed his fingers through Alex’s messy blond hair. The man kept himself so put together, Hunter rarely found opportunities to straighten him. “I’ve told you a lot more than I’ve told any other human being.” Hunter’s voice thickened with every word. “I’ve never told anybody, except Dr. Royan now, about holding Will as he died.”
Alex blinked a film of wetness from his eyes. “You honor me.” After pushing up from the floor, Alex took a seat next to Hunter at the foot of the bed. “And I’ve never told anyone half the things I told you about Mack.” He took Hunter’s damaged hand and twined the fingers they could. “Or even about my mother,” he added in a softer tone.