Moored Heart (Catalina Dreams Book 1)

by I. M. Flippy

  Jason rubbed his buzzed head and cleared his throat. “All right, welcome to chez Winters. Such as it is.”

  Jason had not been kidding when he’d said his yacht was only technically a yacht. It was a nice model. Charlie knew enough about boats to know that. There were no leaks, and it wasn’t dirty. There were no invading eels. But the boat was obviously secondhand, if not third, and not the type of luxury set-up most people thought of when they thought of yachts. The upholstery was beaten up; the leather worn and faded. The wood paneling looked a little more 70s bachelor pad than luxury sugar daddy.

  Weirdest of all, the thing was named Morty as if Jason’s yacht was about to order knishes in a deli.

  Charlie decided he loved it.

  Jason gave him the five-minute tour, leading him inside and showing him the cockpit up top with an old-fashioned helm and two comfy chairs on swivels. The little cabin was all windows and Charlie imagined it must be fun to plow through the sea from the top of the boat with all that blue around you. Jason showed him the cozy stateroom down the short stairs behind the cockpit that felt like a patio with the screens open and then took him down a longer set of narrower stairs to the big stateroom with its orange couches built into the walls and the office shoved in a corner. There was a kitchenette and a small bedroom next to it. It was a nice enough boat, even if it was outdated.

  Charlie wanted to look at the details: the photographs carefully hooked to the walls of Jason, a blonde woman, and another older guy; Jason grinning with his arms around the shoulders of beat cops in uniform; Jason standing in front of a sports car and posing with (Charlie presumed) his mother and father; vintage police badges under glass; a couple of certificates that looked suspiciously like awards; more photos.

  Jason had a lot of friends and family. But he was out here alone on his boat. It made Charlie want to ask more questions, but he held his tongue for now.

  “Do you want a beer or anything?” Jason said. They stood in the kitchen and Jason leaned on the small fridge as Charlie stood across from him, trapping his hands behind him as he leaned on the sink. All the doors were open, and the chill breeze of evening came drifting in, making Charlie shiver as he kept his gaze trained on Jason.

  “I’m already pretty buzzed,” Charlie said, and his voice came out softer than he intended. His heart felt like a rock in his chest. He could swear it was digging into a lung somehow.

  He’s important, Charlie thought. Why does he seem so important?

  Everything between them was balanced on the head of a pin. Jason leaned forward a little and managed a shit-eating grin. “I swear I’m not tryin’ to get you drunk or anything.” He snapped his mouth shut. “I’m… I mean…”

  “Why would you?” Charlie said. “Although I’m kinda wondering why you invited me on your boat?”

  He clenched his fists behind him, bracing himself.

  “Because… To hang out, I guess.” Jason was a confident dude. He didn’t hunch like Charlie. But now he sounded small and uncertain.

  Charlie wanted to believe he knew why, and the thought made him break out in a sweat.

  He forced himself to be direct. “I gotta be honest, man.” His voice cracked a little, and he leaned forward, ducking his head. He got a whiff of Jason’s cologne. He was only wearing a bit, just enough to mix with the scent of sweat and tequila. It was a heady cocktail. “You’re giving me mixed signals here. I’m not sure why you want me here either. Are we hanging out? Are we doing more than hanging out?”

  Jason’s mouth made a little “o” as he breathed. He was holding himself still, not quite looking at Jason. “I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t know, then I should go.” Charlie made the move to leave and when he felt Jason’s hand on his arm, pulling him back, it felt like slow motion, the movement so momentous Charlie thought an orchestra should have been playing as Jason pulled Charlie to him.

  “This doesn’t have to be as big a deal as you think it is,” Charlie said.

  “Feels like a huge deal,” Jason said, his voice a deep rumble, and close enough that Charlie felt its vibration in his body, the sound going straight to his cock.

  Charlie licked his lips and moved closer, so close that if he leaned forward even a little, they would be kissing. But he let that moment breathe, smiling slightly at the thick tension between them as Jason’s hands slid up his arms experimentally. Anticipation made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  There was something so innocent about Jason. Charlie was used to a lack of inhibition in the bedroom. None of the guys he’d been with on Catalina or back on the mainland were shy at all, and nobody whose sexuality he’d ever wondered about.

  He leaned into Jason’s space, avoiding the temptation of his mouth and instead whispered in his ear, “I want to blow you.”

  He felt Jason suck in a breath, and he nodded once.“Yes.”

  Charlie’s cock swelled in his bike shorts and he was sure it was obvious. But he ignored it, instead shutting his eyes and breathing in the heady scent of Jason, sliding his hands up his chest just like he’d imagined, feeling the hard density of his body. He pressed a kiss to Jason’s neck and tasted the faint spice of sweat and a bit of beard bristle. Jason pulled him closer, and he was dizzy with every sensation; Jason’s hands gripping his arms and slipping around to his back, holding him close, his breath coming in short brief gasps. The cool breeze still drifted in, and made goosebumps rise on his skin.

  Charlie leaned back and met Jason’s gaze, his hand sliding down to palm the cock already tenting his khaki shorts. Jason grunted, his eyes narrowing in something like surprise. He nodded, his head jerking comically. Charlie smiled at that, and all at once he dropped to his knees.

  “Oh fuck,” Jason said.

  Charlie’s mouth watered as he took his time to unbutton Jason’s shorts and take down the zipper. His erection wept when Jason’s fingers tangled in his hair tugging gently, but he was too embarrassed at this early stage to admit how much he wanted a little more of that treatment. Instead, he showed his appreciation, pulling down Jason’s boxer briefs and biting his lip as a huge pink cock came bouncing out.

  “I knew you’d be big,” Charlie murmured.

  It wasn’t rocket science. Jason was a big guy.

  Jason tugged on his hair again and Charlie moaned wantonly and buried his nose in the bushel of pubic hair before him while gently stroking Jason’s cock.

  “Oh... oh man…” Jason fell back against the fridge and Charlie smiled, feeling a sense of pride at being, presumably, Jason’s first man. Even if nothing else ever happened between them, he’d have both that and the pleased sounds Jason was making as Charlie finally took him in his mouth.

  Charlie paused for a moment, merely enjoying the sensation of Jason’s cock filling up his mouth and slowly he closed in until the head tapped the back of his throat and he relaxed into it, his own cock stretching the bounds of his bike shorts.

  Charlie loved sucking dick. He had discovered this at sixteen. He liked the feeling of it, the taste, the texture of a hard cock between his lips and against his tongue. He liked the sounds he could elicit from a man and he loved some hair pulling. It was as if Jason had been handed a checklist of his desire. He tugged a little harder on Charlie’s hair and Charlie moaned around him and began sucking in earnest. Jason grunted, groaned, whispered Charlie’s name. Any sense of self-consciousness disappeared.

  Charlie sucked and licked and finally he could take no more and reached into his bike shorts with one hand to palm himself, grinding against his hand as he quickened his pace. He could have let it go on, changing the pace expertly, letting Jason out of his mouth only to softly kiss and stroke him before sucking again. But he felt giddy and impatient to see him come.

  “Charlie…” His voice was a low rumble.

  Charlie sucked in his cheeks and shut his eyes, imagining that big dick sliding into him, filling him up as that low rumbly voice said sweet things in his ear, and just as the image fill
ed his head Jason yanked on Charlie’s hair and he yelped around Jason’s cock. He pulled Jason yet closer, encouraging him, his fingers digging into dense flesh. Jason fucked his mouth, and Charlie drooled around him, his eyes tearing up. But he held on, painfully aroused by the way Jason lost control. That seemed to do it for Jason, who said his name once more before filling his throat. He attempted to pull out, but Charlie held on, determined to take his cum.

  Charlie swallowed, saliva and cum dribbling down his chin. He let the still half hard cock fill his mouth, feeling pleasantly spacey as Jason stilled, muttering obscenities while he came down, and Charlie finally let him go with a soft smack.

  “Fuck,” Jason mumbled.

  Charlie cleared his throat, chuckling. He was still hard, but reality was swiftly rushing back in as he got to his feet. He snuck a look at Jason who was tucking himself back into his shorts with trembling hands.

  “Um…” Jason rubbed his head, his eyes heavy-lidded. “That was...fuck…”

  Charlie had the distinct impression Jason was about to say this was a one-time thing never to be repeated; a bucket list item now checked off. If he had to hear that speech, he thought his heart might shatter. He needed to prepare himself first.

  Racked with nerves, he uttered a hoarse laugh and leaned forward, pressing a kiss to Jason’s cheek. “I should go.” Just saying it made his erection wilt.

  Jason blinked at him. “Oh… Uh, I have to take you in the dinghy.”

  “Right.” Charlie considered the more palatable option of swimming for it, but it was dark out now and they were prohibitively far from the shore. “Shit.”

  “It’s fine,” Jason said, suddenly in motion and sounding too normal for Charlie’s comfort. “I’ll take you.”

  They didn’t speak the whole ride back and Jason only smiled tightly when he left Charlie alone at the dock.

  9

  Jason

  Jason considered himself a mature person. He was a retired homicide detective with enough accomplishments to have scored a book deal about his time on the force. He had survived a good marriage before things ended on a peaceful agreement between both parties.

  But the moment his dick left Charlie’s mouth, he felt as bereft of emotional intelligence as he had at fifteen.

  The ride in the dinghy was painfully awkward. The only thing that redeemed it from being excruciating was the darkness on the water so that Jason couldn’t quite make out Charlie’s expression. But there were plenty of safety lamps on the dock to spotlight his lonely, lanky figure standing there watching Jason speed away back to his yacht.

  He’d tied his dinghy up and collapsed on his bed, clapping his hands to his eyes and feeling like he’d just screwed up immeasurably before he finally dropped off to sleep.

  In the morning he glared at himself in the bathroom mirror, brushing his teeth.

  “You dumbass,” he said under his breath. He went through the motions: shower, dress, make bed, tidy things up… He went to the kitchen to make coffee and stopped short, staring at the very spot where Charlie had knelt there on the floor.

  Jason leaned in the doorway, his head humming with a thousand riotous thoughts. He made coffee, trying and failing not to think about Charlie’s mouth on him, the glimmer in his eyes, and the way he moaned so wantonly when Jason forgot to be careful and pulled his hair. His hand shook so hard thinking about it that coffee slopped on the floor. He took a long swallow to steady himself and crossed the stateroom to his desk, ostensibly to work.

  Jason somehow managed three paragraphs and then the image of Charlie going down on him came to mind again and he watched himself—as if from outside of his body—looking up that porn of the Charlie doppelganger.

  This time he wasn’t paying attention to the girl at all. He watched “Charlie” snap his hips and moan. The shoulders were broad like Charlie’s, although he didn’t have that same smirk that was somehow still kind as if everything was a joke right up until it wasn’t.

  “Fuck, Charlie,” Jason murmured, spilling over his fingers.

  Briefly, he imagined Cal’s face if he found out about this, or Alyssa’s for that matter. They’d think he’d lost his mind.

  “But I am... straight,” Jason muttered. “I’m confused is what I am. Fuck this.”

  So, he let a man blow him.

  This was not an apocalypse.

  No one knew him on Catalina. He didn’t have to tell anyone, and he didn’t have to decide anything. That much, at least, was a comfort.

  Out of determination, Jason forced himself to compartmentalize and write for the next several hours. Every time he stopped writing, he thought of Charlie. That gave him a powerful motivation to keep writing, to run from those troublesome thoughts and the memory of Charlie’s dark eyes as he’d sucked Jason off, and the way he’d watched the dinghy speeding away from the lonely dock in the night.

  “I’m an asshole,” Jason said to himself, when he finally stopped to make himself a sandwich. He spoke to himself with his mouth full, scarfing down his lunch on the deck and looking forlornly at the shore. He could see Porpoise Pot from his boat.

  He was making too big a deal out of the entire thing. He was just some old guy to Charlie. Charlie was attracted enough to fool around with him. He’d given Jason a wild night he could think about in his old age and to make it any more than that was foolish.

  That night, Jason jerked off thinking of Charlie again and nearly texted him five times before he stopped and told himself he was a pathetic old man who had been alone on a boat too long already.

  The next day, he went to the beach.

  It was a sweltering day on the island. Jason wore a shorter pair of shorts than usual, and one of the Hawaiian shirts Cal had bought him as a gag. He felt uncomfortably like Magnum P.I. and briefly wondered if he should grow a mustache as he sped out to shore on the dinghy.

  The beach was teeming, even more than usual. Jason put out his towel, slipped on his shades, and sat back. He opened his paperback and skimmed, finding his place. He was a big reader, and it had pained him to give away most of his library, keeping only what fit on the boat. So far, he’d avoided the island’s bookstore, but he knew he’d end up splurging eventually.

  For now, he got comfortable on his towel, with a bottle of iced tea, and plunged into the book. He only became distracted thinking of Charlie five or six times, sighing as he reread the same paragraph yet again.

  He just happened to look up from his book at an opportune time. Some distant part of him wondered if the fates were fucking with him. How had he known to look up at exactly the moment Charlie came walking out of the water right in front of him?

  Jason was frozen as Charlie walked up the sand. He wore a tiny pair of green trunks. The wet fabric clung to Charlie’s thighs, that bulge Jason was already acquainted with once again on display. The trunks rode low enough to put the glorious V of his hips front and center. It was truly insane, to Jason’s mind, that Charlie could convincingly wear geeky T-shirts and cardigans while hiding a better body than Jason had even suspected. He had defined abs and a dark dusting of hair decorating his lean chest. Those broad shoulders that Jason so admired led to biceps T-shirts only hinted at.

  Charlie walked up the beach.

  He didn’t see Jason at first as he looked up the shore. Everyone else sure saw him, and he didn’t seem to notice the stares as he pushed his wet hair back and sniffed.

  None of this made any sense to Jason.

  Catalina Island seemed to be teeming with men who liked other men. How had nobody snapped up this Adonis?

  Jason crossed his ankles and he braced himself on his elbows. He was going to get hard on this beach and then what?

  Definitely not totally straight, he thought.

  This moment seemed to prove it to him more than the blowjob or the porn, which was odd and sort of romantic.

  Jason had taken off his sunglasses to read, so there was nothing to disguise his blatant staring as his mouth hung open.

&n
bsp; Charlie finally seemed to notice him. Astoundingly, he still did not notice all the other beachgoers—both men and women—who gawked at him.

  “Jason,” Charlie said, stopping short in front of him. He had no particular tone.

  Jason forced himself to his feet, stumbling forward a little so that Charlie reached out to steady him and Jason’s gaze wandered down the expanse of his chest.

  “Hey,” Jason said. His voice sounded like it was coming from far away to his ears. “Uh, hey. Day off?”

  “Yeah…” Charlie shrugged, attempting a smile that was not convincing, but somehow made Jason feel better. He played with tendrils of dark, wet hair, sending water droplets everywhere, his abdominals flexing. “It was supposed to be yesterday, but I felt like working…”

  Jason felt like his mouth was full of cotton when he said, “I feel like things got weird and I didn’t mean for that to happen.” He thought he would choke on the sentence. It was so stilted coming out of him. “I don’t mean what we did. I mean...how it ended?”

  “Oh.” Charlie’s shoulders dropped and he looked away, kicking the sand. “No, yeah. Me too. I don’t want it to be weird. Honestly. Like this island is really small. It forces you to work things out with people if you can.”

  “Right…”

  “I’m glad you said that.”

  Charlie was standing too close, and he was squinting in the sun and smiling so charmingly.

  I have to fix this, he thought, feeling stupid.

  What he said was, “Do you want to come back to my boat for a bit?”

  Charlie’s eyelashes fluttered, and he took one step that brought him so close to Jason, he thought there might be a kiss coming. “Yeah,” Charlie said. “Let’s go.”

  Somewhere, dimly, Jason heard a voice insisting that things were not about to get any less weird.

  He ignored it.

  His cock was doing all the thinking now, and it had ninety-nine thoughts, all of them lascivious as Charlie jogged over to his own spot in the sand and grabbed a towel. He slipped on his flip-flops before following Jason to the dock.