Finding You: The Complete Box Set (a contemporary MM romance series)

by Ana Ashley

  I gently stroked Joel’s face to wake him up. His eyes scrunched up as though he wasn’t too pleased with being woken up. I chuckled.

  “Shut up,” he said with a groggy voice and indignation. “I was in the middle of a dream, and you ruined it.”

  “I’d like to be sorry, but we need to find a way out of here before it gets too hot.”

  “It was already too hot, but you stopped it, you ruiner of hot, sexy dreams.” He pouted.

  I leaned over to his side of the car and kissed him, gently at first, but when his tongue came out to lick my lips, I couldn’t resist having a taste.

  “Tell me about your dream.”

  “Not as hot as your kiss, even though Matt Bomer was in it.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” I gave him another quick kiss and made my way out of the car.

  It took us a while to figure out how to pop the hood to see if we could find out what the problem was. I didn’t know the first thing about cars, so I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at.

  “You’re Portuguese. Can’t you find a way to fix the car?” Joel said as though this qualified me to do it.

  “Well, you’re half Portuguese. Can’t you half fix the car?”

  We looked at each other and laughed.

  I knew what he meant. Most of my friends would know what was wrong with the car just by looking at it. I was sure it wasn’t an exclusive trait to the Portuguese people, but everybody always seemed to just know stuff. I’d recently overheard two middle-aged women in my café talking about the plumbing in their bathroom and how the guy they got to fix it had done a poor job.

  The few friends I had who would know how to fix the car had learned those skills from their dads. Growing up without a father meant I learned other skills from my mom. Even my uncle had never been interested in typically male activities. For as long as I’d known him, he’d been attached at the hip to my aunt, working in the café and taking as much of the hard work from her as he could. In my view, it was the only redeeming quality he had.

  “Look!” Joel called out and raised his arms, waving wildly at an approaching pickup truck.

  The truck pulled up in front of our car and a man in his mid-fifties wearing a well-worn and paint-stained polo shirt and jeans walked up to us.

  “Bom dia,” the man drawled in his Alentejo accent, slow and relaxed as though he didn’t have anywhere else to be. “Do you need help?” he asked.

  “Bom dia, the car stopped last night. We don’t know what’s wrong,” I explained.

  He asked if we could try starting the car. Joel went behind the wheel and turned the key. The engine cranked but didn’t start.

  “It looks like your battery is dead. I have the cables to jump-start it. Do you know where you need to go?”

  “Yes, I think we’ll go to our hotel and call a mechanic from there.”

  “Were you going to Hotel Casa Do Campo?”

  “How did you know?” Joel asked.

  “There's only one place this road leads to, the hotel. You boys are lucky. The main road to the hotel is on the other side of those fields, so the locals who live nearby are the only ones that use it.”

  Our rescuer, Senhor Rodrigo, turned his truck so it was facing our old 2CV and then got the jumper cables out of the back. We only stood there watching as he expertly connected the cables. Once we had both cars running, we had to wait a few minutes before we could disconnect them.

  We found out in that short time that Senhor Rodrigo was born and bred in Évora and had a wife of twenty-five years and two daughters at university, one locally and the other in Lisbon. He was a painter and decorator and worked exclusively for the hotel. Since they had three locations in and around the city, he was kept busy.

  Once we had a functioning car, we drove the few miles to the hotel, and it wasn't difficult finding the entrance to the hotel off the main road since there was a tall iron gate attached to a white wall with bright blue trim on either side.

  The driveway up to the hotel was paved with the traditional smooth cobblestones, and there were landscaped gardens with trees on either side of the road leading all the way to the small parking lot by the hotel.

  The reception desk was a dark-polished wood with two big chairs in front of it for guests to check in comfortably. It felt wrong to sit on them considering I was in desperate need of a refreshing shower.

  The receptionist behind the desk was dressed in a hotel uniform that made me feel slightly out of place in my jeans and creased T-shirt, but her smile put me at ease. Joel had booked this hotel, so I sat there looking around at the surroundings and wondering how much of a fortune Joel had spent on the room. They moved us from the city hotel, so maybe we also got an upgrade for our trouble.

  Joel explained what had happened the night before and also asked for advice on getting a mechanic to pick up the car and get the battery changed today since we’d agreed to spend the day relaxing in the hotel.

  I was barely paying attention to their conversation when I heard her speech falter.

  “What’s that?” I asked, turning my attention back to her and Joel.

  “I’m so sorry, sir. I don’t know what happened, but we seem to have you booked in a king-size room, and we don’t have any twin rooms left.”

  Joel looked at me and frowned as though he was confused. I wasn’t any less confused than he was.

  “I didn’t book a twin room,” Joel said. “I booked a double or king-size room. Isn’t that what you have for us?”

  The girl looked at Joel, and then at me, at the computer, and back at the two of us until something seemed to click. “Oh. Oh! Er...yes, we have a... that booked for you. So there isn't a problem at all. Here are your keys. Would you like us to help you with your bags?” she asked.

  We declined help and made our way to the room.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “That was the receptionist assuming that because we are two guys, we would have booked a twin and then realizing we had purposefully booked a room with only one bed because, well, you know.”

  My heart started beating faster, and a slight panic crawled over me. “Oh my God, she knows!” My voice strained as I tried to temper my rising concern.

  Joel didn’t say anything, but he opened the door to the room and let us both in. The room was spacious, with a big balcony that had two chairs and a table overlooking the garden and swimming pool of the hotel and the wheat fields in the distance.

  He turned and started undressing me, beginning with my T-shirt and then my jeans until I was in front of him fully naked. I hadn’t bothered with underwear when I changed last night, and his surprise showed on his pinked skin. Without too much thought, I returned the favor by undressing him until we were both standing stark naked in the middle of the room.

  “Shower,” Joel commanded as he pulled me toward the bathroom. The shower was enormous and had a tiled bench that ran across the width of it. He turned the water on and waited until it was a comfortable temperature before we went in.

  Joel picked up a small bottle of hotel shower gel, squirted some on his palm, and was working up a lather before applying it to my chest, working it carefully on my arms and then back. It didn’t take long for my body to respond. For someone who had happily lived without intimacy for such a long time, I was surprised at my body’s sudden sexual awakening.

  “Why do you care?” Joel whispered in my ear as he massaged my back in slow circles, moving lower and lower.

  “Wh...what?”

  “Why do you care what the receptionist thought?”

  The truth was, I wasn’t sure why I cared. She didn’t know me, and she likely didn’t care whether Joel and I slept in the same bed or not. Her reaction had been more of embarrassment rather than disgust.

  “I know that Portugal is quite a progressive country when it comes to LGBT rights. Most people accept or ignore when they see a gay couple walking hand in hand on the street. I’ve seen it myself and wondered if one day I wo
uld be able to do the same.” I paused and turned around to face Joel, looking straight at his beautiful blue eyes, “I know all that, but knowing it and believing or trusting that I can be accepted are two very distinct things.”

  It was my turn to wash Joel, so I held my hands out for some shower gel and proceeded to torture him with my hands.

  “Don’t come,” I whispered in his ear.

  “Fuuuck, David, you’re going to have to keep your hands to yourself if you don’t want this to go any further.

  “Oh, I want it to go further.” I winked. “Much further...” I let that comment float around us and washed my hair before I got out of the shower and dried my body with the fluffiest towel known to humankind. Joel followed me with a pout and the saddest face he could muster until I suggested going down for breakfast since they were still serving.

  We didn’t talk about the subject again. I loved that I could talk about my fears with Joel without feeling judged. He asked questions purely to understand my point of view, and then he’d challenge it. I had nothing else to hide from him. He knew all my issues, well, apart from one. I was absolutely terrified of the day he had to return to New York, and there were two reasons for it. I didn’t know if I could now live without him in my life every day, and I was afraid that once he was gone, I’d never see him again.

  After breakfast, we got our swimming shorts on and went to relax on the grass under the shade of a palm tree. The swimming pool was shaped like a lagoon with lots of plants and small trees giving it a few secluded corners where you couldn’t be seen by anyone. I took full advantage of that a few times by catching Joel off guard and pressing him against the wall of the swimming pool and kissing the life out of him. The first time I’d done it, he’d gone all wide-eyed, clearly not expecting me to kiss him openly like that until he realized that while we weren’t completely covered up by the plants, it was unlikely that we’d be seen.

  We played this game of cat and mouse, taking turns until we were both too turned on to stay by the pool only in our shorts.

  “You go ahead, and I’ll check in with reception if they can arrange an early breakfast we can take away tomorrow. I’ll be right up,” Joel said.

  When Joel got back to the room not ten minutes later, he was holding a tray with some fresh fruit and a plate with six custard tarts. He looked like he was struggling with the tray, but my hands were busy, so I stayed where I was until he finally looked at me after setting the tray on the desk.

  “Fuuuck,” Joel said in a low voice.

  I was lying on the bed, naked and leisurely stroking my erection.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “Wh...what?” Joel looked positively out of sorts. His eyes checked me out from head to toe, lingering slightly on the motion of my hand, and I felt a rush of confidence take over me. The tent in his swimming shorts was inviting, and I licked my lips in a very clear message.

  Joel's eyes locked on my mouth, but suddenly he shook his head and said, “No! No, you’re not supposed... fuck, you’re so sexy, David.”

  “I’m confused. You want me to stop?”

  “No, yes, argh, I’m making a mess of this.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Joel, come sit here.” I patted the space on the bed next to me, and he moved to join me.

  “What’s up?”

  He sighed. “I wanted to do something to you, but then I came in, and you were like that looking all sexy, and my brain stopped, and now I can’t even remember my name.”

  “I was only warming up for you, sweetheart. What did you want to do to me?”

  While Joel was getting up the courage to tell me what he’d been fantasizing about, I started taking his clothes off, stopping only to give his dick a few strokes.

  “Okay, so now who’s going outside to get the beers I left on the floor by the door?” He chuckled.

  I got up and got to the door in two seconds. Opening it carefully, I poked my head out and checked no one was coming before I grabbed the beers. On my way back to the bed, I passed by the tray and picked the plate with the custard tarts.

  “Hey, those are mine!” Joel cried.

  “Really? All of them?”

  Joel took the plate from me and placed it on the bedside table. It was only then that I realized there was a small spoon on the plate too. He asked me to sit on the bed and then sat on my thighs facing me.

  The next hour was the most erotic of my life as Joel used the small spoon to scoop the custard from each tart and fed it to me alternating with kissing me. My mouth wasn’t the only part of my body to get some of the delicious custard. He accidentally got some custard on my chest, which he helped clean with his tongue. And when once again an accidental scoop of custard fell on my cock, he sucked it all clean until I was writhing under him and cursing the gods of baking.

  After he decided he was full, Joel took both of us in his hand and stroked us until we both came so hard and loud I hoped the guests in the room next door weren’t in.

  We were both a sticky mess for all the right reasons, and I was contemplating hiring someone to bake the custard tarts for me at the café because that would be the only way I wouldn’t sport an erection for the whole of my shift at work from now on.

  Joel got up before me to get the shower started. “Your custard tarts are better,” he shouted toward the room.

  “Damn right they are.”

  18

  Joel

  I always considered myself a morning person. In New York, I went out for a run at least three times a week before work, but there was waking up early and waking up early. Fortunately, the real morning person in the room decided to wake me up by planting soft kisses on the back of my neck, then shoulders and lower back. When he got to my ass cheeks, he bit me, causing me to moan and press down into the mattress, giving me also much-needed friction.

  “Oh no,” he said, crawling up my body to kiss me properly. “We don’t have time. Come on, sleepyhead, we have to go.”

  The hotel staff couldn’t have been more helpful to us. Not only did they manage everything with the mechanic yesterday, leaving me only to sort out the payment, but they also put together a fantastic breakfast in a takeaway bag. They even made us some coffee for the road.

  It took us one and a half hours to get to Santarém where we’d planned to visit the gardens with a viewpoint known as the sun’s gates. It was another one of the locations our moms visited on a school trip, and while they had only spent their lunch hour there, after some research, we decided we wanted to watch the sunrise from there.

  It wasn’t difficult to find parking so early in the morning. The city was still asleep, so we strolled quietly toward the gate that gave entry to the gardens.

  It was that time of day when it wasn’t nighttime anymore, but it wasn’t quite daytime. The temperature was still cool, but you could feel it warming up with the light of the sun, and the air smelled fresh.

  There wasn’t even a breeze, which could only mean it would be another scorching day. I’d read that Santarém often had higher temperatures than the surrounding areas.

  The gardens were nondescript. There were some trees, some areas with grass, but it certainly wasn’t something to write home about. The gardens were part of the old castle, and the tall, thick walls surrounding it had probably served the purpose of defending the city from invaders.

  As we’d driven into Santarém, we’d crossed the river Tagus and noticed how high up the city was, but now from this strategic viewpoint, we could see why the viewpoint was called the Sun’s Gates.

  Unlike the rolling hills of the Alentejo, this part of the country was like a patchwork of colors. Shades of green and brown fields separated in some areas by lines of trees. We could see villages in the distance where we could spot church bell towers taller than the buildings around it, and of course, the river snaking around the land making its way from Spain to Lisbon. The tide was low, and the water was so clean we could see the sandbanks b
eneath it. It was truly breathtaking.

  We took a seat on the east side of the wall, facing the sun as it was rising. It felt warm on my face. There was something about the sunrise that had always appealed to me more than the sunset. Maybe it was that it was the sign of a new day rather than the ending. It was full of possibilities. I was glad we had our travel journal because suddenly I felt like I needed to write.

  “Don’t you want to have breakfast?” David asked, opening the breakfast bag to find a few pastries and two small ham sandwiches.

  “Yes, but in a minute. I need to write something down first.”

  While I was writing, David sat in contemplative silence next to me. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to be quiet for me or if he was using the time for reflection.

  With the sun rising fast and the temperature getting warmer, I put the journal down and had some breakfast too.

  “Shall we read our moms’ journal?” I suggested.

  He nodded and took it out of the rucksack he was carrying. We opened it on the bookmarked page.

  3 June 1983 - School trip to Santarém

  Dear Journal,

  We came to Santarém today to see the church where the man who discovered Brazil is buried. We didn’t think it was very interesting, but we’ve been learning about the discoveries in history class, so we paid attention just in case it came up in an exam.

  We had lunch in the gardens and viewpoint of Portas do Sol. The place has a view of all the fields. It was quite nice, especially as it was a warm day. We had our lunch sitting on the grass.

  Sílvia – Oh, and Paula has a boyfriend!!!!!!!!

  Paula - I do NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Sílvia – Yes, you do because I saw you kiss Vítor by that gate looking over the river.

  Paula - So? It doesn’t mean he’s my boyfriend.

  Sílvia - Do you want him to be?

  Paula - Yes, but I think Mário and Teresa are REALLY boyfriend and girlfriend. Wouldn’t that be weird?

  Sílvia - Of course not!

  We read a few similar entries where the girls had started by describing their day and then carried on with an on-page dialogue. It was the best insight into their young minds, but it also made me miss my mom so much.