by Avon Gale
“How do you want it?” Jared asked him, reaching down and finding the button on Lane’s jeans.
“I don’t care,” Lane moaned, his hips bucking up. “Just hurry, or I’m gonna—”
“Come in your jeans?” Jared grinned against his neck. He bit gently and rocked harder against him. It might be a terrible idea, but it was turning out to be fun as hell. “That’d be okay.”
“But I’d really... rather not. Can you push harder...? Oh, don’t stop.”
“You want me to push harder, or do you want me to take your pants off?” Jared teased. Lane was like a rocket underneath him. It was amazing.
“Jared.” Lane grabbed Jared’s shirt. “I don’t know. Okay? Just, whatever it is you’re going to do, do it already.”
“You’re really bossy,” Jared said, undoing Lane’s jeans completely. “I don’t know why, but I thought you’d be a lot more... I don’t know. Less bossy.”
“You thought about this...?”
Jared grinned and kissed him. He moved slightly so he could slide his hand into Lane’s jeans and watch Lane’s face while he did it. “I was at that bar for a reason too, idiot. Yeah. I thought about it. Do you like that?” His hand rubbed over Lane through his boxers, and Lane made a noise Jared had never heard in bed before, not with anyone, and immediately wanted to hear again. “I thought about you sucking me off.”
“Did thinking about it get you off?”
Jared bit him on the shoulder at a sudden wave of lust. Lane kept being very, very not shy at strange moments, and it was unexpected and also incredibly attractive. He finally got his hand around Lane’s cock and moved his hand slowly up and down, thumb rubbing over him, and said, “Yeah. I had a girl sucking me off, and I came thinking about you doing it instead.” Jared paused. “Okay. Maybe I thought about you two taking turns. Didn’t want to be rude, and she was really good at it.”
Lane’s entire body went tense and arched up off the bed as he came over Jared’s fist. As loud as he’d been the whole time, with the bossy demands and the moaning, he didn’t make a single sound until he fell back, gasping for breath.
Jared had to undo the buttons on his jeans because it was getting uncomfortable. He idly stroked a hand over himself while he watched Lane recover. Lane finally opened his eyes and grinned at Jared—bright and happy—and Jared almost closed his eyes because he didn’t want to see that at all. Instead, he leaned in and kissed him again, hot and slow.
“Think you could...?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Lane sat up, hair tousled, still smiling. His pants were undone, and his shirt was rucked up—Jared didn’t even remember doing that. He was messy but staring at Jared expectantly, like they were going to do drills and he was waiting for his turn.
Jared leaned back on his elbows. “Well?”
“Right. Sorry. I’m just—sorry.” Lane moved closer and put his hand on Jared’s cock. Jared’s hips bucked up, and he hissed, watching Lane through slitted eyes, breathing hard.
“Lane, seriously,” Jared snapped, covering his eyes before he strangled Lane to death.
“Sorry. Could you maybe show me how to do this? You’re really good at it,” he added, and Jared laughed helplessly and uncovered his eyes.
“Okay. Here.” He reached down, took Lane’s hand in his, and moved it over his cock, showing Lane how he liked it. And Lane paid attention like there would be a quiz later. Jared was going to make sure there was a quiz, an exam, and possibly a final. Lane watched the way Jared reacted, saying things, like “Oh you like it hard like that” and “What was that thing you did with your thumb?” He was killing Jared, he really was, right there on a crappy double bed in the Econo Lodge.
Eventually Lane told him “I got it now. Let me try it.” Jared had to think about horrible things to not come right then and there, because Lane was asking, and this was the hottest—and weirdest—hand job he’d ever gotten.
Lane wasn’t perfect, but he damn sure made up for it with enthusiasm, and when he looked at Jared and said, “Do you want me to put my mouth on you?” it was also the shortest hand job, because Jared came with a surprised moan, hips twisting, grabbing at Lane’s hand and making him tighten his grip, because that’s what he liked.
“Well, you were right about one thing,” Jared said, a few minutes later, sitting up to pull his shirt off. “You’re not a scared virgin at all. You’re just a bossy one who wants a detailed instruction manual.”
Lane ducked his head, blushing a little. “I just like to do things right, is all.”
“See. No. This is why I thought you were shy.” Jared reached over and took Lane’s shirt in his hands to yank it off. “You do the whole blushing thing—”
“I have really fair skin, all right?”
“—and you apologize a lot. And then you talk like you work for a gay phone-sex line. And you’re seriously strange. You know that, right?” He was also seriously hot, Jared noticed, with some impressive abs that made Jared want to come all over his stomach, just because.
“Do they have those?” Lane asked, watching Jared tug his jeans the rest of the way off.
Jared was still thinking about his little fantasy of coming all over Lane’s stomach. “Have what?”
“Gay phone-sex lines.” Lane watched him with that same expectant look from earlier.
“I—you know what the Internet is, don’t you?” Jared reached to take Lane’s jeans off, and his eyebrows raised as he saw Lane was getting hard again.
“I’m twenty,” Lane said, almost defensively. “Sorry?”
“Stop apologizing.” Jared pushed him down, pulled off his boxers, and then started kissing him again. They were both naked, and it felt good—different from the girl in the shower the night before. “I’m older than twenty, so you’re going to have to give me some time to catch up.”
“All right.” Lane made that sound like he was granting Jared a concession. “Tell me about the girl? I mean, if you want to.”
“I pretty much told you the whole thing.” Jared kissed him again, almost lazily, and he could feel Lane start to push up against him. It was going to be a long night, and he was definitely going to enjoy it, even if he ended up asleep for the rest of the week to make up for it.
“You could have done that with me. Last night.”
Jared’s breath hitched slightly. “Yeah. Believe it or not, I figured that.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Jared raised his head because Lane was pushing his hips up, but he was also lying with his hands at his sides, like he wasn’t allowed to touch Jared. “You can put your hands on me, you know. In fact, I’m going to be mad if you don’t.”
“I thought you said you needed time to catch up.”
Jared’s brow furrowed. “How is it you seem like you know what you’re doing sometimes, and then it’s like you just got dropped off on this planet?” He kissed him to make that sound less mean.
Lane didn’t seem to mind. “I’m very coordinated? I don’t know. Look, I’m not... I have no idea how to do this, but trust me, I think about it a lot. But you know, I usually get caught up in the part we just finished, not the other stuff. Like... touching you.”
Jared put his face in Lane’s neck, sighing and sucking gently at the skin there. “Stop thinking about it so much. Do you want to touch me?”
“Yeah,” Lane murmured, and then he sounded shy. This kid was giving Jared whiplash.
“Okay. Then do it. And you thought about it too, huh?”
“Mmmhmm.” Lane settled his warm hands tentatively on Jared’s back, until Jared rubbed Lane’s cock with his thigh. Then Lane dug his short nails in slightly, and that was much better.
“You can scratch me. I like that,” Jared told him. Lane immediately complied. He was very good at following directions, for someone who could also be really bossy. “Did you think about it last night?”
“I got myself off against the door.”
Jared lifted his head, trying to picture that. “Wait. Wha
t? How?”
“Hmm? Oh. The usual way. With my hand. What did you mean, though? Is there another way? Show me.”
That, right there. That was the thing that Jared couldn’t keep up with—and liked a whole lot more than he should. “I thought you meant you got off rubbing against the door.”
“No. I’ve never tried that. Should I? Can you get on top of me again? All the way on top of me, like you did at first.” Lane scratched his back, like Jared was a cat.
“Tell me what you did when you got home, and maybe I will.” He was totally going to, had been planning on it, in fact, but first he was going to make Lane ask him for it.
“I told you. I leaned against the door and got off thinking about you and the elevator.”
“Me and the elevator? Kinky. You’re weirder than I thought, Courtnall.”
Lane punched him on the shoulder. “You and me in the elevator.”
“And sucking me off? Or was I sucking you off? You need to use more words, here.” Jared grinned against Lane’s shoulder. This part was fun. There were some advantages to being older and needing recovery time.
“I didn’t get that far. It didn’t really take me that long.”
“You really were hard up,” Jared said, kissing down Lane’s chest.
“You have no idea,” Lane said, and his fingers dug into Jared’s shoulders again. This time, when Jared put his mouth on him, Lane scratched him like he meant it. He also thrashed around and moaned a lot, and he talked more than almost anyone Jared had ever been to bed with, which was at odds with the kid’s normal personality.
He sucked Lane until Lane was saying pretty things like “Please,” and “Can I come? Is that okay?” And then, when Jared told him no, just to see what he’d do, Lane said, “But why not? I really want to. Do you know how good your mouth feels?” Because there was no way to say no to that, Lane followed Jared’s nod of assent with, “Thank God.”
By that time, Jared was pretty much all caught up and ready to go again. And he had a brief, insanely hot moment where he thought about fucking Lane, because he was pretty sure Lane would be into it. But something told him it wasn’t the time. Instead, he stretched out naked on top of Lane again and rubbed against him, then straddled him and jacked himself off so he came on Lane’s stomach. It was just as good as he’d thought it would be, and the way Lane watched him do it was hot as hell.
Later he got to see Lane’s pretty mouth on his cock in the shower, just like he’d imagined the night before. And his insistence on doing it right would have been really annoying if it weren’t for the whole blowjob part.
Jared slept like the dead, until his phone alarm went off at six-thirty with a bus-departure time of seven fifteen looming and Lane taking up most of the bed and absolutely all of the covers.
Part of him wished he hadn’t heard his alarm. He had two days off, and Savannah wasn’t that far away from Jacksonville. It was the fact that he was actually considering going back to sleep that got Jared up and out of bed.
He scribbled a note to Lane on the little hotel notepad and left it next to him on the bed. That was fun, thanks—Jared. It seemed dumb, but he did have to go, and when he tried to wake Lane up and tell him, Lane tried to kiss him. That kid was insatiable. Jesus Christ.
At the last second, Jared turned around and went back to the bed, grabbed the pen again, and scribbled his number on the note. What the hell. It’s not like he expected anything to come of it. He never did. Jared had learned his lesson the hard way on that one.
But when he was on the bus, half-asleep in his seat and thinking about Lane being bossy and messy and “Can I come, is that okay?” a little voice told him maybe he hadn’t learned that lesson quite as well as he’d thought.
Chapter 4
Living with Ryan was both better and worse than living in the Econo Lodge. If pressed, Lane wasn’t sure which one he’d say he preferred.
Ryan was messy, which was fine, because Lane had his own room, and he wasn’t exactly the neatest person in the whole world either. But Ryan also ate pizza for just about every meal, and they had so many boxes that they could probably construct an entire new apartment with them.
Ryan was also very, very popular with the ladies. Ryan had a lot of girls stay over, and Lane gave him credit for being enthusiastic and, if the moans he heard were any indication, pretty good at it.
It was fine until he came home one night with two girls, Becca and Mandy, and one was for him. Lane knew he either needed to tell his roommate he was gay or else learn how to be bisexual really quickly, because he could only make so many excuses. And he was going to have to pay Zoe rent if he kept sleeping on her couch. Her couch was in her living room, which was tiny, but it faced the ocean. Lane was too concerned about sea creatures to go in the ocean, but he liked looking at it. Like girls, maybe. That was probably a bad analogy.
The thing was, Lane probably wouldn’t mind watching Ryan with a girl. It was the part where he would have to do things with one that made him wary of the whole thing.
Sometimes he would open his sock drawer and find the note Jared left him with his phone number on it. Lane finally had a smart phone, and he kept thinking about calling, just so Jared would have his number. But he didn’t.
Calling Jared to ask how to learn to like sleeping with girls was a bad idea. Lane knew that because he’d asked Zoe and she’d told him so.
Lane’s parents were coming to visit for their next home game stint. That was a momentary distraction. Lane cleaned up the apartment as much as he could, ignored the stares of his fellow tenants as he hauled three weeks of pizza boxes to the dumpster, and made sure his laundry was mostly under control. He shoved a lot of stuff under his bed and reminded himself that his parents were only stopping by the apartment. They were staying in a hotel.
Other than the impending disaster of what would happen if his sexual preferences were made public, things were going well for Lane. The Sea Storm were winning. Lane wasn’t cocky enough to think it was all because of him, but there was no question they played better when they actually played as a team. They were at the top of their division in the standings, in a constantly rotating battle for first place with the Renegades.
Who they would be playing the next week, in Savannah. Zoe kept telling him to text Jared and see if he wanted to meet up, reminding Lane that he left his phone number, didn’t he?
Still, it was a week away, and Lane had to concentrate on their upcoming games and on seeing his parents. He got them tickets, of course, and when they came in to town on Thursday night, he took them to Cruisers. It was basically the only restaurant he ever went to. When Zoe was working, she gave him milkshakes and french fries for free. That was not something he shared with his parents, though. Their little trip was going to shatter enough of their illusions about life in professional minor league hockey. He should leave a few in place if he could.
It wasn’t the money that restricted him as much as his lack of a car, but he’d started saving up for one. Maybe their next trip down, he could take them to dinner somewhere on the beach. He should also really try to explore the city, because it was actually pretty nice. And the weather was fantastic. There was no denying that.
Cruisers was busy, and they had to wait ten minutes for a table, even with Lane’s stellar connections and recent professional-hockey-player paycheck in his pocket. Or what was left of it, after taking out the rent and utilities and some gas money for Zoe, which left him enough to pay for dinner for him and his parents and split a few pizzas with Ryan.
Lane had been waiting a long time to buy his parents dinner with money earned by actually playing professional hockey. And sure, it was only a couple of burgers and a few beers, but it meant a lot to Lane to be able to do it.
He wanted to thank his parents for the years of driving him to practice, cheering at the games, and believing in him enough to trust that this day would come. For the sacrifices he knew they’d made for him, for teaching him the game he loved, and for le
tting him follow his dream.
Instead, he said, “You should get a milkshake. They’re really good.” Zoe wasn’t their waitress, but she came over beaming and waving at Lane from her section of the restaurant. “Sure is busy in here,” she said, leaning on the back of Lane’s chair. “Hi. Y’all must be Lane’s parents. Welcome. Lane, you should’ve told them to sit you in my section. Are y’all going to the game tomorrow?”
His parents were staring at Zoe like she was a strange, foreign creature—and with that accent, her bright, ruby red hair, and the full-sleeve tattoos, maybe she was. Not that they didn’t have girls like Zoe in Canada. They just didn’t usually hang around with Lane. His parents nodded, like they weren’t sure what to say.
“Of course y’all are. Duh. Silly me. Hey, Lane, I’ve got a four top that’s taking forever to finish up, but I’ll come over if y’all are still here when they’re gone. Try a chocolate milkshake. That’s Lane’s favorite, ain’t it.” She ruffled Lane’s hair, which was a thing she did.
Zoe was Lane’s best friend—the first one he’d ever had. Unless he counted Derek Bishop, but Derek never talked to him again after his mom walked in on them kissing. When he saw his parents looking at each other, Lane was happy to finally have a friend to introduce to them.
“And how did you meet her?” his mom asked, her eyes practically shining.
“Oh, umm. Here? The guys and I came here after the game with our rivals, the one that I scored the game winner for. Remember?” They nodded because they were hockey parents, and it didn’t matter that Lane played his games thousands of miles away from home. When their son scored a game winner, they knew about it. “She was our waitress. My roommate is kind of... uh... sometimes he’s not very polite,” Lane said gravely, which made his parents look concerned, like Lane had told them Ryan was a drug dealer. “Anyway we ended up talking, and she gave me a ride back to my hotel.”
Lane remembered what happened after Zoe dropped him off, and it made him blush hotly to think about that night while sitting with his parents.