by JA Huss
Contents
Play Dirty
Description
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
EPILOGUE
END OF BOOK SHIT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edited by RJ Locksley
Cover Design: JA Huss
Copyright © 2018 by J. A. Huss
All rights reserved.
ISBN-978-1-944475-55-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Description
From NYT Bestselling Author, JA Huss, comes the final sexy standalone in the Jordan's Game series. Can a threesome really work? Or does it always crash and burn at the end?
They were never meant to be just two. It was always three. But seven years ago Jordan Wells broke the trust he’d built with Alexander and Augustine and everything changed.
Everyone moved on and got over it. Put the past behind them where it belonged and started new lives.
But now Alexander and Augustine are back—looking for a new game and the final third to complete their threesome.
And they won’t take no for an answer.
Jordan Wells is about to play his final game.
Will he win? Or will he be too afraid to try?
CHAPTER ONE
How Alexander and I got to this moment really isn’t the point. It’s not. We’re here. He’s got his hand on my cock, squeezing it, only the fabric of my pants separating us.
His eyelids are heavy, but I know him. They always look like that. He could be watching the last innings of the final game of the World Series and his eyelids would still be heavy.
So the look on his face means nothing.
He could be turned on, or not.
He could be doing this for me.
Or her.
Or himself.
None of this is the point.
The only point is… I need him and he needs me, and either we find a way to get through this or we all lose. He will lose her, I will lose the Club, she will walk away and life will probably implode.
Dramatic, I know. I get it. But it feels honest.
“Should I kiss you?” Alexander asks.
I have so many things to say back to him right now, it’s ridiculous. But none of them are the point either, so I just reach up, grab his hair, and pull him in until our lips meet.
He’s not gay.
He’s a little bit bi, which is why he’s here with me. And I’m a lot bi. Which is why I’m here with him.
But this kiss isn’t anything spectacular.
It’s rather stiff, actually. His lips don’t meld with mine. There’s no tongue. There’s no moaning or anything like that.
Fingers thread through my hair.
Not his.
Hers.
Her nails are long and today they’re painted a deep, shiny red. She presses them against my scalp—lightly—as her lips join ours.
Alexander changes immediately. First, a sigh. Then he moves closer to me. His hand gripping my cock tighter. His mouth softer, his breath faster, his eyes closed.
We kiss like that for a long time, it seems. No one is undressed. No one makes a move to undress.
We just kiss.
Which is a little bit nice. I guess. Kinda high-school. Kinda innocent.
But I’m not really out for a little bit nice.
I want to take her over to the couch, lay her back against the cushions, and fuck her like a man in a threesome.
And hell, her husband is welcome. Like I said, I’m a lot bi. So I welcome that part.
He, however… well, let’s just say he doesn’t feel the same way.
“You used to like this,” Augustine says, kissing Alexander’s neck now.
He doesn’t open his eyes and I’m grateful. Because he kinda fascinates me and those heavy-lidded eyes come with an intense gaze when they’re open.
It gives me an opportunity to look at him.
“I only ever did it for you,” Alexander replies. “It was always you who liked this.”
I could make him change his mind. I could. I’m that good. But I’ve given up on the dream of a bonded threesome.
Those feelings have long since passed. I live in a reality of my own making. Which might not be a hundred percent real these days, but it’s a lot more realistic than Alexander ever getting used to the idea of me.
I grab his hand and remove it from my cock.
This is enough to make him open his eyes.
“What are you doing?” Augustine asks.
“Leaving,” I say.
And I do.
I go home. Which isn’t a home. I live in a seven-million-dollar, ten-thousand-square-foot historical mansion next door to the Denver Botanical Gardens. I bought it last fall in foreclosure with the hope of…
What?
What was I hoping?
I live here now because I’m liquidating. I have hopes and dreams too. I need things. It’s all I’ve got left and I don’t want it unless…
There are seven bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, two media rooms, two offices, two kitchens, a game room, a library, and a ballroom.
And I live here alone.
There’s nowhere to drop my keys as I come in the front door because the place is empty. A family lived here before their luck changed. And they left everything behind when they sold it. Even photographs. The happy couple on their wedding day. Pictures of their kids, and I can only assume they did that because they have digitals in Dropbox or some shit, because that part is pretty cold.
Pretty.
Fucking.
Cold.
(But who am I to judge?)
They left everything like it was a holiday home and whatever they kept there was just… extra. Like they went shopping and bought two of everything and so all this was just the spare set.
Except it wasn’t.
But it’s all gone now. I packed up the photographs in a box and gave them to Lawton. Did he ever return them? I have no idea because I never asked. Then I sold all the furniture in an estate sale last month and bought a desk and a couch from IKEA and had it placed in the fifteen-hundred-square-foot office on the main floor.
I’m pretty sure the IKEA delivery people thought I was crazy, but I don’t care. And anyway, it might be true.
I live in the office. I don’t even bother using the main kitchen because I don’t cook and the office has a wet bar—because all gentlemen who own ten-thousand-square-foot-homes have a wet bar in their office—and it even has a dishwasher to wash the cut-crystal glasses I drink bourbon out of every night before bed, so who cares about the industrial-sized chef’s kitchen on the other side of the house?
On the desk there’s a laptop and on the wall there’s a fifty-five-inch TV, except I don’t have cable, or Netflix, or Hulu, or even Prime, so why I bought the TV, I couldn’t tell you.
If anyone saw me these days I’d get a label.
If I was lucky that label would be… eccentric. But more likely than not, they’d call me… sad.
And that would be accurate.
I am sad. I’m just not a hundred percent sure why.
Maybe for all the thing
s I lost. For all the ways I’ve tried to make up to the people who matter. For all the things I’ll never have—things that have nothing to do with the size of a TV or the number of bathrooms in a house I don’t even really live in, or a wet bar in the oversized home office.
I feel sorry for that family who lost this house. I really do. Because at least they treated it like a home. At least it was loved.
I don’t love it.
I kick off my shoes as I enter the office and pour myself four fingers of bourbon. I sit on the couch, facing the window that faces the front yard—visible because of the fancy landscape lighting—and think about the game that just ended.
Sometimes people ask me why I do this. Why I make up these games. Why I fuck with so many lives. And I say, Why not?
I take a sip of my drink, still staring out the window, and ask myself that question now.
I don’t reply.
Days pass and there’s no more communication with Augustine. But Alexander shows up at my office—dutifully—every day at lunch to give it another try.
I drop the blinds on the windows that face the hallway and I kiss him. We try to get used to it, to each other, but…
“I don’t think this is gonna work.”
That’s what he says now.
“Me either,” I say, placing my hand on his cheek and slipping my tongue into his mouth.
He’s getting better at kissing at least. For her pleasure, not mine.
He gets me hard every day. Every time we do this, he gets me hard. Because even though I’m not gay, I do enjoy men. Not typically alone, without a woman, but the reach for me isn’t as far as it is for him.
“We should tell her,” he says, still kissing me back.
“So tell her,” I say, placing my hand on his. He squeezes my cock a little harder. His breath quickens. I have a moment of hope that maybe… just maybe he’s coming around to the idea.
But he’s not. Because he backs away, shaking his head. “I can’t. Not like this.”
“Not like… what?”
“Just… fuck, I don’t know what we’re even doing.”
“Well…” I laugh. But then I decide. I’m tired of it too. So I shrug. I knew it would never work. And say, “Fine.”
“That’s it? Just fine?”
“What should I say? I can’t fucking make you enjoy me. She can’t make you either. This whole fucking deal is stupid.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
“You know why. I want that building, Alexander. All you gotta do is let me buy it from you and I’ll go away. I swear on my fucking father’s life, I’ll disappear. I’ll never talk to her again. Hell, I don’t want this any more than you do.”
“But you’d take her,” he says. Not a question.
“Sure.” I shrug. “I still love her. But she’s married to you, so… that’s the end of that.”
“She’s going to divorce me,” he says. “There’s no way we make it past this… bullshit. So this…” He pans his hands wide. “This arrangement is the only way I keep her.”
“Dude, what do you want me to say? I’m not gonna steal her from you. I’m not that guy anymore.”
“But you’ll take her after I’m gone, won’t you?”
“I don’t—”
“Fuck you,” Alexander says. “Fuck you. Don’t lie.”
“She doesn’t want me either. She wants us both. I can’t give her you. You can’t give her me. So just sell me the fucking building and make it all go away.”
He inhales. Exhales. “It’s not in my name or I would’ve.”
Figures.
I walk over to the credenza in front of my office window, pour myself a drink—I do not offer one to Alexander—and say, “So… see you tomorrow?”
He pauses. Takes a moment to think about tomorrow. I sip my drink and wait him out.
None of this is the point.
He leaves without answering.
Dreams are unreliable things.
That’s how I got here.
I had a dream.
It involves a building with a revolving door. Which I have always thought clever and ironic because you had to walk through a dose of reality to enter the dream inside the club.
It involves a bar called the Black Room and a restaurant called the White Room and a grand lobby that hides the elevators to the basement behind the stairs to the second-floor landing. And up there is another elevator that takes you up into another world. And off to the side of that landing, there is another, smaller, even more private bar that looks out onto the grand lobby and bar down below.
I want to own this place. This dream world. This haven from the stress and expectations of the outside world. I want to go back there, but you know what they say.
You can’t ever go home again.
What does that mean, anyway? Like… yeah. You can. Unless the fucking apocalypse happened and your home was blown up or taken over by zombies, you can definitely go back there. It might not be the same place it was when you left, but it’s still home.
I could make it work.
I could get all the members back together.
There could be parties down in the basement again. There could be drinks in the bar again. There could be rooms upstairs again.
I could be happy.
If Augustine would just sell me the building I could get all this back.
I could.
Two weeks ago. That’s when I found out she and Alexander owned the building the club used to be in. Two weeks ago I was ready to fuck her over. Ready to do anything, everything, to get what I wanted.
So I called Alexander. Not her, him. And not because I’m sexist and I think the man is in charge of shit like this, either. I just didn’t want to talk to her.
And I asked him stuff. Like… “Hey, what’s going on with the building? What are you gonna turn it into? Ever think about selling it?”
And he said, “I’ll have Augustine call you.”
So she did.
And that conversation was something I’d imagined in the past and was not what I wanted to hear now, in the present.
It went like this.
“I hear you’re interested in purchasing the Turning Point building.”
“Yes. Sell it to me. You’re not doing anything with it. It’s been sitting empty for over a year now. Let me have it. I’ll pay you. Cash. Fair market value.”
“I don’t need money. Alexander is wealthy, we have more money than we need.”
Right then I knew. Because people who don’t need money want things you don’t typically want to give up.
“Then what’s the price?” I asked.
“You.”
Because of course it is.
“The life I’ve built—we’ve built—” which is a dig at me, because that we means him, “=--is dying, Jordan,” she said. “It’s dead, actually.”
“So?”
“I’d like to revive it. We had something good once. Better than good, ya know?”
“I mean, what do you want me to say? It’s not me. I’m not the problem here. You two are the problem. Just sell me the building and you can have what you want.”
“But… it’s not what I want. Well, I do want this. OK? I do. But not like this. Not like this. I need you, Jordan.”
“I think that defeats the purpose of being married, Augustine.”
“No, you misunderstand,” she said. “It’s just so complicated now. It didn’t used to be like that, remember? I don’t just need him. Or you. I need you both.”
And there it was. The price I’d have to pay.
CHAPTER TWO
Two weeks ago that same day, I first called Alexander and have my first sit down with them.
“So what do you think about all this?”
This is my first question to Alexander.
And it’s funny, ya know. When I first found out they owned the building I was ready to play dirty with these two to get what I want, but this… it isn’t the kind of
dirty I’ve been imagining.
Alexander is sitting across from me. Actually, both of them are sitting across from me. It’s a small, round table on the Tea Room patio. They are facing the street and I am facing my building. Because Turning Point is right next door.
My friend Chella owns the Tea Room. She’s not here. Still on maternity leave after having her first child with Smith Baldwin, who, along with Elias Bricman and Quin Foster, was one of the former Turning Point owners.
I should’ve bought it back then. Why the fuck didn’t I buy it back then?
Alexander looks at his wife. Smiles. It’s a small smile. And says, “I’ll do anything for her.”
I want to roll my eyes. The thing no one ever understood about what happened between us almost eight years ago now was that Augustine was just as guilty as anyone. Yeah, I was the asshole. I’ll take that responsibility. But she wanted all of it. She wanted everything I was doing. And this meeting right now just proves it.
“So…” I start. But what do you say when a married couple comes to you with something like this?
“So I want us to try, Jordan,” Augustine says. “Just… give it a try. Like the old days.”
“It didn’t work.” I laugh. “We did try. And it didn’t work.”
“We’re different now,” Augustine says. “More mature. We’ve tried things, learned things about ourselves, and…” She falters for words. Almost sighs with resignation. “And we love each other.”
I raise one eyebrow at Alexander. “He doesn’t love me.”
“He could,” Augustine insists.
“I don’t love him,” I say. “I’m not sure I even like him.”
Augustine purses her lips. “Since when do you need to like someone to fuck them?”
“OK,” I say. “So this is a temporary fantasy? You want a game? Is that what I’m hearing? You want me to arrange a game for you, only I’m one of the players?”
“Not a game,” she corrects, eyes darting quickly over to Alexander, then just as quickly back at me. Like she didn’t want me to see that. “I want us to try to make something real. Something that might last.”