Back Piece

by L. A. Witt

  Just wish I could see your face.

  Maybe . . .

  He pulled out and tapped Colin’s hip. “Turn onto your back.”

  Without the slightest bit of hesitation, Colin obeyed. He shifted around and spread his legs, and they both held their breath as Daniel guided himself in again. This position was different, and it was a little awkward to figure out how his legs should be and how to do this without crushing Colin’s balls, but he managed. Holding his breath, he pushed in again.

  “Fuck yeah . . .” Colin kept a hand over his cock and balls—Daniel had seen guys do that in porn, so he assumed it was just to protect himself—but didn’t seem the least bit worried. He squeezed his eyes shut and arched as Daniel picked up speed. “Ohhh . . .”

  More goose bumps sprang up all the way down Daniel’s back. Turning Colin on was easily the most incredible aphrodisiac imaginable. And the best part was knowing what Colin felt right then. What it was like to take a cock inside him, being stretched by the same dick that was sliding across his prostate.

  Daniel shivered. Which is better? Top or bottom?

  He looked down, watching himself moving in and out of Colin, watching the way Colin responded to being fucked. Hell, why pick? Fucking, being fucked—yes, please. All of it.

  As he picked up speed, he found enough breath to ask, “Like that?”

  “Uh-huh.” Colin moaned, rolling his hips in time with Daniel’s. “My God . . .”

  You don’t say. Daniel couldn’t help grinning. He’d never imagined the thrill that would come from making someone crazy like this. And combined with how turned on he was, with how fucking amazing it felt to be inside Colin, it was all mind-blowing. No wonder he’d gone off too soon the first time.

  Colin opened his eyes and looked up at Daniel. Their gazes locked, and they both grinned. Jesus, he was gorgeous. Especially like this.

  Colin lifted himself up on one elbow, grabbed the back of Daniel’s neck, and dragged him into a needy, breathless kiss. Daniel could barely remember how to thrust or kiss, but somehow his body knew, and his hips kept moving with Colin’s, and his lips and tongue did the same, and he didn’t know or care who was in control of anything as long as they didn’t stop.

  With a gasp, Colin broke the kiss. “Oh fuck. Fuck.” He dropped back to the mattress, eyes squeezed shut and his back lifting up. “Gonna . . . gonna come.”

  Instantly, Daniel was on the edge. Ready to come for the second time. He dug his teeth into his lip and concentrated on his rhythm, keeping his thrusts exactly the way Colin seemed to like them, and dear sweet Jesus, Colin was falling apart right there in front of him. Shaking, gasping, whispering “oh yeah, oh yeah, just like that, oh yeah” like a breathless mantra, and then he whimpered . . . tensed . . . clenched around Daniel’s dick . . .

  “Oh. God.” Daniel thrust into him as hard as he could, and he was . . . there. Done. Eyes rolling back, toes curling, back arching—tensing and relaxing all at the same time. Shudder after shudder rocked his entire body, until finally he had nothing left and couldn’t even hold himself up anymore.

  Exhaling, he sank down into Colin’s arms.

  “Just so you know,” Colin purred into his hair, “you can fuck me like that whenever you want.”

  Chapter 19

  It was that time again.

  Daniel’s tattoo had healed, and it was payday—time for the next dose of ink.

  As before, he straddled the seat at Colin’s workstation and leaned forward. He seemed to be getting used to everything. The prep work—foreplay, as they both jokingly called it—was becoming a normal routine. Clean off his skin. Shave. Stencil. Start.

  The first few lines were, as always, the most intense. Within five or ten minutes, though, he was able to relax into it.

  “Doing all right?” Colin asked.

  “Yeah.” Daniel exhaled slowly. “Still can’t figure out how you do this to yourself.”

  “Well, not my back.”

  Daniel laughed.

  They were quiet for a while. Colin concentrated on outlining the shield, Athena, the owl on her shoulder, and beside that, the raven flying from her toward Odin. Daniel just breathed.

  After another fifteen minutes or so, Daniel broke the silence. “Can I ask you something personal?”

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  Daniel took a swig of water. As he screwed on the cap, he said, “How did you get into porn?”

  Colin couldn’t help chuckling. That question had been inevitable, hadn’t it? He dipped the needle, then leaned in close to add some details to the shield. “It was kind of funny how it happened. I’d been modeling for a while, and right after I turned nineteen, I met a guy from the same agency. We started dating, and he was obsessed with the idea of becoming a porn star.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Because what better way to stroke a man’s ego than to pay him to have sex on camera?”

  Daniel turned his head so he was visible in profile. “Never thought about it that way.”

  “Yeah, neither did I, but he was determined to get noticed by the industry and become a big star.”

  “Doesn’t biology decide who becomes a ‘big’ star in that business?”

  Colin snorted. “Pretty much. Didn’t stop him from trying every supplement known to man to see if he could put on an inch or two.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No.” Colin snickered. “No, it did not.”

  Daniel laughed. “Ouch.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, he found out about this company that was doing amateur videos of real couples, but they were actually really well-done. Like the production quality was way better than most amateur stuff, and their sales and distribution were impressive.”

  “Let me guess—he wanted you to be in one with him.”

  Colin nodded. “And I mean, I was nineteen. On paper I was an adult, but let’s face it—we’re all still dumb kids at that age, or else they’d let us drink.”

  “Yeah, good point. And for some reason they let me enlist in the military and gave me a gun.”

  “Right?” Colin shook his head. “So, it sounded kind of fun, and at the time, he was one of the best I’d ever experienced in bed, so why not? And I mean, when you’re nineteen and someone offers you five hundred dollars to spend an hour or two in front of a camera doing what you do for free in bed anyway . . .”

  “Five hundred bucks is five hundred bucks.”

  “Seriously.” Colin put some more ink on the needle. “So we auditioned—”

  “Wait, how do you audition for a porno?”

  Colin laughed. “Exactly how you’d expect.”

  “You just walked in and fucked in front of the director?”

  “Basically.”

  “And they liked—Ow!” Daniel tensed, but stayed still.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Daniel ground out. “So they like what they saw?”

  “Mmhmm. We came back a couple of weeks later and filmed the real deal. They liked us so much, they asked us to come back and do another.” Colin furrowed his brow as he carefully traced the edge of Athena’s outstretched arm. “My boyfriend was thrilled. He’d made it. He was one hundred percent convinced his cell phone and e-mail were going to start blowing up with offers to be in more scenes.”

  “Did they?”

  “No. Mine did.”

  “Oh. Wow.” Daniel stretched his neck and shoulders a bit, then relaxed. “What did your boyfriend think of that?”

  Colin rolled his eyes and smirked. “He was not happy. Especially when I took them up on it.” He clicked his tongue as he continued tattooing. “Decided I was a shameless whore who obviously didn’t care about him if I wanted to have sex with other guys on camera.”

  “But . . . but . . .” Daniel sputtered. “Isn’t that what he wanted to do?”

  “I asked him that very same question, but he never answered me. He just packed up his crap and left.”

  “No shit?” Daniel turned, bringi
ng his face into profile. “He left because they wanted you instead of him?”

  “Yep.” Colin chuckled, pausing to dip the needle. “The funny thing is, I hadn’t planned to make anything out of working in porn. It was fun and it was good money, but I wasn’t going to make a career out of it. Then he left, and I suddenly had an apartment all to myself.” Carefully, he continued down the underside of Athena’s arm as he added, “Los Angeles is expensive as hell. Once he left that place in my lap, I didn’t have much choice but to start answering those calls.”

  “Oh damn. I didn’t realize you didn’t have a choice.”

  “Well.” Colin shrugged. “It’s not like I was forced into it. I could have made ends meet on my own, or pulled in some roommates. I figured if nothing else, a scene or two would tide me over until I got my shit together. Then I realized it was damn good money and a lot of fun, so . . . why not?” He paused to carefully trace where Athena’s fingers wrapped around her spear. “I mean, don’t get me wrong—it was a lot of work. But I enjoyed it, and the money was just obscene. I could spend a day on set and make more than I made in a month at the fast-food joint where I was working. So, I dropped out of college, quit working at the restaurant, and followed the money. And as it turned out, the real money wasn’t in amateur, which is why I started doing the pro stuff.”

  “Was it different? Besides the money?”

  “Oh yeah.” Colin wiped away some excess ink. He sat back a bit to scrutinize the work he’d done and check it against the sketch. Satisfied it was coming out the way he wanted it to, he put some more ink on the needle and kept working. “The amateur scenes are one thing. There’s some performance anxiety because you’ve got cameras all around you, and you have to keep going for at least an hour. And you have to, you know, perform. But the pro stuff?” He whistled, his muscles aching at the memory. “That was exhausting. Like I said before, you’d be on set for hours. I mean . . . hours. And I honestly couldn’t tell you if it was tougher to be a top or a bottom. The top has to stay hard for insane amounts of time, and if you go soft, you have to be able to get hard quick.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned that. But . . . how did you do it?”

  “Drugs.”

  Daniel turned his head again. “You’re joking.”

  Colin shrugged as he continued working. “Hey, when you’re getting three grand to fuck a guy, a Cialis or two is what it is.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Mmhmm.” Colin wiped some ink away along with some blood that had started welling up. “And if I was bottoming for a scene, I won’t deny smoking a joint beforehand or doing poppers whenever the camera wasn’t looking.”

  “Poppers?”

  “Yeah, they’re these little nitrate things you huff to help you relax.” Colin rolled some stiffness out of his shoulders and stretched his neck. “Amyl nitrate or something, I think. Anyway, a lot of guys take them when they’re hooking up. Or, you know, doing porn.”

  Daniel said nothing for about a minute. Maybe he was thinking, maybe he was just breathing through a particularly painful spot. Eventually, though, he said, “Wait, so if you were stoned on-set, or you were high, was it still . . .”

  “Consensual?”

  Daniel nodded.

  “Oh yeah. It’s not like alcohol, at least not for me. The poppers didn’t do much for me besides relax me, and when I smoked weed, I was perfectly coherent. My brain didn’t work quite as fast, and my body was relaxed as fuck. I could still think, though. I still knew where I was and what I was doing.”

  “Even on weed?”

  “Yeah. Why not?”

  “But I thought it made you a total zombie.”

  Colin eyed the back of Daniel’s head, but then remembered who he was talking to. “Let me guess—they also told you that one joint will have you addicted for life, and the next thing you know, you’ll be trying heroin and cocaine?”

  Daniel turned his head slightly. “Let me guess—you’re going to tell me that’s not true?”

  “Not even a little. Most people I know who have drug problems started with booze, not weed.” Colin dropped his ink-stained paper towel in the trash and pulled a clean one off the stack beside his ink cups. “And I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve met who have a problem with weed. Everyone else can take it or leave it.”

  “Do you still smoke it?”

  “Eh. Once in a blue moon. It’s not as easy to get it and get away with it in Virginia. California, they didn’t care. But if I get a hankering for it, I’ve got people.”

  “Sometimes I wish I could try it.” Daniel gave a quiet, sheepish laugh. “But the Navy would frown on that.”

  “I’ve heard that. But hey, when you retire . . .”

  “Something to look forward to, right?”

  “Exactly.” Colin wiped away some excess ink and a little blood, and dipped the needle. “So anyway, I was throwing back Cialis and whatever else I could get my hands on, and even that didn’t always help because sometimes the mind is willing but the body is done. And if you’re on the bottom . . . well, you’re probably taking a very large dick in your ass for a lot longer than you normally would. I avoided poppers for a long time, but someone finally convinced me they’d make bottoming scenes easier.” He shrugged for no one’s benefit but his own. “And they did.”

  “That’s crazy.” Daniel picked up his water bottle. “It always looks so easy. They come in, they fuck, and they’re done.”

  “For amateurs, maybe. Pros?” Colin whistled and shook his head. “No.”

  “How the hell are you guys not sweating like pigs, then?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Colin said. “The sets are fucking cold.”

  “They are?” Daniel sipped his water and set it aside again. “Why?”

  “Partly for that exact reason—to keep the actors from sweating like pigs. But also because the lights and equipment can get extremely hot. So they blast the air-conditioning to counter that. There’s a reason porn stars wear those big fluffy bathrobes in between takes.”

  “Man, it sounds like it’s not as fun as it looks.”

  “Well, it is work, but it’s still fun. The people I worked with were great for the most part. And I mean . . . I was having sex and making a damn good living. What would be better for a twentysomething kid who’d been trying to make it as a fry cook?”

  Daniel laughed. “Okay, I can see that. And it never bothered you? What you were doing?”

  “Not really, no.” Colin rolled his eyes, then kept working on the intricate outline. “People say I was selling my body, but I don’t see it that way. I was doing a job. One that I happened to find a lot less taxing and demoralizing than pushing a desk for forty hours a week.”

  “Funny how it’s taboo for you to ‘sell’ your body by having sex with people, but it’s perfectly fine for me to rent mine out to be put in the line of fire when the country’s getting low on oil.”

  Colin blinked, startled by the bitterness in Daniel’s tone. “Shit. I hadn’t even thought of that.”

  “Neither did I until after I’d enlisted.” Curiosity tugged at Colin, but before he could say anything, Daniel asked, “Do you ever regret it?”

  “Nope.” He dabbed away some ink and blood from Athena’s shield so he could start adding some more detail. “If I had it to do over, there’s some things I would’ve done differently, but I think I still would’ve done it.”

  “Like what?”

  “The drugs, for one thing. I mean, like I said, they’re not really avoidable. I’ve never met a mortal man who can stay hard for hours and hours without a little chemical help, and the poppers had their place. But there’s side effects. I started getting some weird stuff with my heart—irregular heartbeats, mostly—and my doctor freaked out when he found out I’d been taking Cialis on a regular basis. So if I had it to do over, I might’ve . . . I don’t know, taken less. Not taken it as often. Used weed more than poppers.”

  “So, weed is better?”

 
; “A lot better, yeah. The worst it ever did was slow my brain down a bit.” Colin sighed. “But the other drugs? Yeah, they were causing some problems. Except even that, I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the truth was, the arrhythmias were probably less from the drugs and more from the, um . . .” He hesitated, shame burning in his chest. “From my eating disorder.”

  “Wait . . . you had an eating disorder?”

  “Have.” Colin focused hard on his work so he could ignore the self-loathing balling up in his gut. “It’s a long story.”

  “Whoa.” Daniel paused, probably blissfully unaware of how much Colin was steeling himself for the embarrassing questions. “And your doctors didn’t agree? They thought the heart stuff was from the drugs?”

  “I don’t think they realized I had an eating disorder. No one did.” Colin swallowed. “It was only a few years ago after I wound up in a psych ward that someone actually used those words to tell me what was happening.”

  Daniel straightened, and Colin could hear all the questions coming from a mile away.

  “Anyway.” He waved a hand. “I don’t want to get into the depressing shit. The punchline is that porn didn’t ruin my life—an abusive ex did. A guy I dated while I was in the industry.”

  “Really?” Daniel paused. “Wait, you dated while you worked in porn?”

  “Oh yeah.” Colin waved a hand. “A lot of people did. Hell, I did like a dozen scenes with a guy who was happily married.”

  Daniel whistled. “The things I learn hanging around you.”

  Chuckling, Colin shrugged. “It’s not a world too many people are familiar with. And yes, I dated. I had a couple of boyfriends along the way who were great. Still friends with both of them, actually.”

  “Just . . . not the one.”

  “Exactly.” Colin forced back the acid in his throat. “But I don’t want to get into that tonight.”

  The truth was, he wanted to be open and honest with Daniel, and tell him everything, because for once he was with someone who might not judge him for it. But his ex wasn’t welcome in the same room as Daniel. Not even metaphorically. He had, however, tested the waters by letting Daniel know about the eating disorder. And so far, Daniel had taken it well. That was a plus.