by Daryl Banner
He had to feel the same way. There was no other reason why he kept doing what he was doing unless it was just a game to him. And even if that’s true, it’s a game I don’t mind playing over and over again, as long as I keep losing long enough to drive me crazy.
Lucas slipped out from under me, sauntering around the edge of the table. I looked up to find that he had hit another of his balls into the pockets, though I failed to notice which one; I hadn’t been paying attention.
“Looks like I just took the lead,” noted Lucas, strutting along the other side of the table like the cocky little shit he was. “Too bad we didn’t wager anything on this game. I might actually have a fighting chance against a pool expert.”
I felt a pinch of excitement at Lucas’s words, which dripped with sex, strength, and innuendo.
“How about this?” proposed Lucas as he came to a stop at the end of the table. “Winner gets a foot massage by the loser.”
Foot massage? I scrunched up my face. “You kidding me?”
“Does this pretty face look like it’s kidding?” He pointed at himself for good measure, then shot me one of his royally superior smirks. “You afraid to lose to a nineteen-year-old billiard noob?”
“Can you quit stressing your age?” I mumbled under my breath.
And of course he heard every word. “But doesn’t that make it more humiliating? To lose to a teenager?”
“You’re a legal adult.”
“With all your worldly knowledge and experience … c’mon. Are you not man enough to take me on, banker boy?”
“Banker boy?” I had to laugh at that one. Despite my laughter, exactly zero of the tension in my body was relieved. “Oh, I’m man enough. And I know I can win against you.”
“So what’s the worry?” He beat his chest. “Take me on, bitch.”
I narrowed my eyes. Why was the prospect of losing against him just as appealing as the prospect of winning? “You’re on.”
And so began the real game, though we were already both down a handful of balls with just a few more to go before one of us was declared the winner. I swear the term “handful of balls” didn’t have me chuckling like a teenager in my mind.
Especially since balls was what I needed to win this game.
Alarmingly, he sank two more balls before making a scratch. On my turn, I missed the eleven I was aiming for and succeeded in sinking the two ball on accident. Lucas found that to be the most hilarious thing—taking a point to thank me—before taking to the table and sinking yet another of his own.
No, Lucas never once let up his parallel game of aggressive cock-teasing the whole time. I had to endure him bending over the table much too far to be natural. Also, during my own shots, he would stand within view, posing suggestively with his cue stick between his legs as he innocently watched me. He knew what he was doing; that invisible halo over his head didn’t fool me.
It wasn’t long before we had reached the fateful final moment of the game. I had my thirteen ball still on the table. Lucas only needed to sink the eight ball to win.
“You gotta call the pocket,” I reminded him.
He shrugged, pointed at the corner pocket with his stick, then lowered himself to the table and took aim. And boy, did that cocky fucker keep his arm straight as an arrow, just as I only moments ago taught him.
The stick shot out.
His cue ball crashed into the eight ball like a lover going for one last desperate kiss.
Boom, straight into the corner pocket that eight ball went.
Lucas rose from the table at once with the biggest, cockiest, most victorious grin in the world and threw a fist into the air. “Fuck yeah! That’s how you do it!”
I set my stick on the table in defeat. “So the student becomes the master,” I mumbled.
His stick joined mine. “Don’t think I’m letting you out of the deal. The winner’s gotta collect his winnings.”
I quirked an eyebrow. “You were serious?”
“Fuck yeah, I was.” He strutted right over to the game room couch, plopped down onto it, then kicked his big feet up on the ottoman in front of him. “C’mon, banker boy. Get on it.”
I was equal parts taken aback and excited. This would be the first time that Lucas was actually inviting me to touch him. Granted, I might have preferred being invited to touch a different part of him, but I guessed his feet would have to do.
For now.
I strolled over to the couch. My heart was pounding. There was something else going on in the depths of my psyche I wasn’t willing to face, something to do with all my subconscious desires and the fantasies that manifested themselves in all my jerk-off sessions and dreams.
The cocky shit with the belt who loved to spank me and put me in my place.
The cocky shit who now bore Lucas’s gorgeous face.
The cocky shit who just propped his feet up for me to worship.
“Well?” Just that one stupid word was rich with that young, masculine pride of his. “You gonna keep the winner waiting?”
After a moment of reluctance, I knelt in front of the ottoman. In front of a young muscle god. In front of his big, socked feet. In front of Lucas, formerly known to me as Lucky.
And boy, do I feel fucking lucky right about now.
I brought my hands to his feet, then firmly began to press my thumbs into them. They felt exactly like I would have expected the feet of a young man as strong as him to feel: solid as stone, yet pliable, responsive, and warm as a fire.
“Really get your fingers up in there,” he taunted me from his totally comfortable seat on that couch—on my couch. “Firmer.”
“Oh, we’re barking orders now, are we?” I threw back.
To that, he closed his eyes and leaned back with his hands behind his head, which pushed his feet even more into my face. I hardly recoiled, keeping my hands hard at work on him. My gaze, however, remained glued to the rest of his perfect body, which lay there like a fucking feast for my eyes.
If this was what losing was, I wanted to lose. Every time. I was going to become a professional loser.
Just to be at the feet of Lucas, a slave to his strength, beneath him at all hours of the day, existing only to serve him.
Then I stopped and listened to my thoughts. Serve him? Be beneath him? A slave to his strength?
What the fuck has gotten into me?
“Your hands stopped,” he complained from the couch.
“Sorry.” I made them move again, kneading his feet like the most stubborn dough I’d ever had the pleasure of working.
After some time, my fingers moved up to massage his ankles and heels. Strangely, the more I worked his feet, the more relaxed I seemed to feel, as if I was vicariously absorbing the pleasure he was receiving from my efforts. That, or it just brought me relief to know he was enjoying my hard work.
And it was hard work; I had hardly been massaging his feet for five minutes and my fingers and forearms were already killing me.
“I guess I go both ways.”
I glanced up, startled by his sudden statement. “You what?”
“I go both ways.” His eyes were still closed, and he shrugged. “I never really gave it much thought, to be honest.”
He had taken us back to that conversation—the straight-as-a-cue-stick back-and-forth taunting we had earlier. “Oh, okay.”
“I mean, I had a girlfriend my freshman year of high school. I never dated guys. But …” He shrugged again. “The prospect never turned me off. I’ve fantasized about them before.”
My mouth went dry, and I clenched up with excitement. He certainly had my curiosity piqued. Literally, I stopped blinking as I listened to his every word, ears perked. “Fantasized …?”
“Yeah. I kinda always liked to … uh …” He shifted slightly, his feet wiggling in my face for a second before he settled in place and shook his head. “Nah, never mind.”
“What? Go ahead,” I encouraged him, desperate to hear more. “I won’t judge you. You can
tell me.”
“I know. It’s just …” He curled his bottom lip into his mouth and bit it, his eyes still closed.
Fuck, I want to be the one biting that perfect, plush lip of his.
I needed him to keep going. “Yeah?”
He let go of his lip and said, “I guess I have a sort of power-trip fantasy or something.”
My eyes glazed over. “Power-trip fantasy?”
“Yeah. I kinda get off on power.”
His eyes opened just then, and I was assaulted with the beauty of his strength as he stared down upon me from between his legs, sitting on that couch like a king with his hands behind his head, his pits exposed, and his feet in my face. Literally, I couldn’t even dream of a more dominant position for him to be in and a more submissive one for myself.
If this wasn’t the perfectly fateful beginning of my living out my lifelong sexual fantasies, I had no idea what was.
But I totally kept my cool. I played it all off like my dream wasn’t actually coming true before my eyes. “So, uh ... what are you saying, Lucas? You saying you like what I’m doing right now? You’re enjoying having this power over me?”
The tiniest smile curled his lips. “You could say that.”
Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.
“Cool,” I muttered, totally casual, easy as a slice of apple pie.
He didn’t say anything after that, letting me work on his big beautiful feet, except now he was watching me intently. To avoid a staring contest, I kept my attention on his socked soles, rubbing with mounting firmness despite the ache building up in my arms.
Then a nerve in my elbow, untimely as ever, pinched.
I winced and let go of his feet, grabbing my elbow instead. “Damn it,” I hissed, annoyed at the bad timing.
He was off his couch-throne and at my side in an instant. He took my arm into his own soft hands. “Is it hurting?”
I glanced up, surprised by his one-eighty. “It … It was just a pinch. Of a nerve, I think. Or something. No big deal.”
He shook his head. “We need to bandage it up again, dude.”
How could Lucas go from being a dominant winner to a sweet and caring nurse in the space of a second? “It’s fine,” I insisted. “Lie back. I’ll keep massaging your—”
“Nah. We gotta wrap this up.” He lifted me to my feet. “Don’t you got a first aid in your bathroom or something? Take me to it. We gotta keep pressure on that arm.”
I was beside myself with bafflement. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed that my moment with his feet ended, or touched beyond words at the way he was instantly caring for me.
A minute later found me sitting on the edge of my bed while Lucas gently wrapped my elbow in an ACE bandage, making a tight and careful cocoon of my wound.
“I don’t get it,” I mumbled as he worked. “It isn’t even bruised on the outside anymore, yet the inside is all—”
“Achy,” Lucas finished for me. “Painful. Hurt. Yeah, I know. The worst wounds are the ones we can’t see.”
He kept wrapping my arm, and I had the feeling that Lucas was talking about something else entirely. Indeed, I might have agreed, had I the balls to pull his attention to his own wounds that were, without question, gaping and wide open, as I learned after we watched that dark, sad movie back in the hotel room. And I hope someday, I can tend to your inner emotional wounds the way you’re so generously tending to mine.
“All good,” he announced as he finished, then met my eyes. “Feel better?”
I could have stared into his eyes the rest of the evening. As it was, I couldn’t manage to speak. I was hypnotized at once, tickled by heavy emotions that sat in my chest and begged me to lean forward and kiss those perfect lips of his, those lips I had been longing for ever since I first saw him across that hotel lobby.
“Much better,” I finally managed to answer.
Then, in typical Lucas fashion, he grinned and added, “Don’t for a second think this gets you off the hook for the rest of my foot massage after dinner, bitch.”
To that, I had to laugh. It’ll be my total pleasure.
Chapter 12
LUCKY
The rest of that first night was low-key, which is exactly what I needed after a hurricane of a weekend.
After getting his arm all wrapped up nice and tight, James and I spent the rest of the afternoon watching TV while my clothes tumbled around in the laundry room. When evening took out the sun, his house lit itself up like a torch in the wilderness, practically glowing. I seriously didn’t notice during the day how many lights he had in his house, from the chandeliers to the wall sconces, floor lamps, hidden backsplash lights in the kitchen, and a light that glowed behind the flatscreen in the living room.
I was so used to just streetlamps and the dim glow of casinos. All of the light in James’s house made me feel safe.
Yeah, I scored the rest of my foot rub when James assured me that his arm felt fine. While massaging my feet on the floor in front of the living room couch, he flippantly shared stories of his best and worst clients at the bank while we waited for dinner to be delivered from a local place he liked. I listened, intrigued, as he kept working his thumbs vigorously into my soles and ranted on and on. I opened up about some crazy ass experiences I’d had with perverts who wanted a piece of me to assholes who only saw me as garbage to step over.
I’d never seen James’s face get so red with anger when I talked about the pervs. You’d think he was already planning ways to put his fist through their skulls.
I kinda liked that side of James.
After my foot massage and dinner—and another hour or so in front of that huge TV with a million channels—James admitted he needed to get to bed. “Bank hours suck,” he griped. “But feel free to stay up all night if you want. Chill. Relax. There’s a computer in the game room if you want to, like … I don’t know.”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“There’s some games on there. Or you can … I don’t know. Do whatever you like.” He leaned against the doorframe and smiled. We were standing in the hall between our rooms. “Do you need anything else? Need me to get you anything?”
He had already done so much for me. I was starting to feel like his charity case. “Nah, I’m fine. You just do your thing. Go to work tomorrow, don’t mess up your routine or whatever. I’ll fend for myself here. You’ve shown me where everything is, anyway.”
“I could take a couple days off, maybe. We could—”
“Nah, seriously,” I insisted. “Don’t. I don’t need anything.”
“Lucas …”
“I’ve gotten by on the streets for more than a year. You’ve given me a roof and a bed. Hell, I’ve got my own damned shower now. I think you’ve done your part. Now, just …” I took a breath. “Just let me do my part, alright? How about I’ll look after your house while you’re at work. Clean it. Straighten stuff up.”
“There’s a woman who does that already. Every Wednesday.”
“So I’ll cut your grass, then. It’s a jungle out there. Then your mother can get off your back about it.”
He smirked. “Lucas, you don’t have to—”
“Yeah, I do.” I folded my arms. “You got a cleaning lady on Wednesdays, fine, but no one for the lawn. Just tell me where you keep the lawnmower and my ass will take care of the rest.”
James bit his lip, frustrated. Then, after a moment of hesitant deliberation, he finally gave in. “Alright. There’s a …” He sighed. “There’s a toolshed behind the garage. The riding lawnmower might even still be back there. Weed-eater. Edger. Spade. Should be anything you need, really. I haven’t even been in it for … I don’t know how long.”
I nodded. “I’ll figure it out.”
“You really could just rest here if—”
“James,” I warned.
“Just don’t fault me for wanting to take care of you, alright?” There was a flicker of emotion in his eyes. “Please just let me. It makes me fe
el good, to be able to … provide for someone. I’ve been here all on my own for so damned long, y’know?”
I didn’t respond back, my arms still folded tightly across my chest as I watched his face.
James let out a short sigh, then nodded at me. “Well, anyway, goodnight,” he murmured, then disappeared into his room. I then heard his bathroom door close and water begin to run.
I stood there for a while, unmoving, as his words sat on me. Let me take care of you, he’d begged. I’ve been here all on my own …
Part of me knew the feeling. Living in a house with someone else was going to take some adjusting, I guessed.
On both of our parts.
I decided to do just the same as he did, slipping into my room, shutting the door, and running a shower. I noticed a set of PJ pants and a plain white tee folded up neatly on the counter, which James must have left there for me. Something about that small gesture made me smile despite myself. It might be nice, being genuinely taken care of for a change. After peeling off all my clothes, I stepped inside and let the hot water run over my face. In no time at all, the room filled with steam, and I was lost to my thoughts.
By the time I got out, James was already in bed. The house was quiet. Too quiet. Even the hotel room had the noise of footsteps when people passed by the door, or the soft murmur of the TV, or distant street chatter and car engines.
Out in the middle of the country at James’s house, there was nothing. Not even crickets.
Just silence.
I slipped on a clean pair of underwear—black boxer briefs—then lay on top of my bed. The PJ pants and tee he gave me, I set in the drawer, which only contained my few clothes. I couldn’t bring myself to unpack everything from my backpack. At least not yet. I kept it on the bed with me for some reason. It wasn’t even about trust anymore or whether some stalker in the night was going to rob me. I was just used to having the big clunky thing by my side.
Only a person who’d lived out of a backpack could understand separation anxiety with an inanimate object.