by Cate Ashwood
“I should head home,” he said, breaking through my thoughts. “I’d planned on picking up a few shifts before my regular rotation started next week, but I’ve somehow managed to get really fucking distracted.”
He grinned, and the feelings of panic that had begun to well up blew away like smoke in the wind.
“I’d apologize, but I’m really not sorry,” I said, leaning in to kiss him. Knowing that he wasn’t going to be hanging around, expecting this to become something else, alleviated some of the pressure.
“I’m not either.” He shot me a boyish grin. “But real life calls.”
I had the urge to tell him I’d call him later, an impulse that I quickly bit back. “Real life blows,” I said instead, then kissed him once more and headed to the bathroom to shower. Less than five minutes later, I was pressed against the wall, Jackson’s tongue down my throat and his cock hard at my hip.
I was almost an hour late to work.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled as I hurried into the operating room. Gage was elbow-deep, metaphorically anyway, in Warren Hick’s abdomen. It was his first shift back since he’d been out for the last few days. Although I’d seen Holden the day before, Gage had been hiding out, presumably with a puke bucket, but he seemed to be back in action, finishing up an appendectomy.
He glanced up and gave me a half nod, wordlessly accepting my apology. I hadn’t meant to dump the surgery on him, and guilt over being late and missing the procedure, almost completely from the looks of it, shot through me.
Although Gage was almost finished, I was scrubbed in and masked up so I would be available to help if he needed me. He worked quietly for a few minutes; the only sound was the music, playing on low over the speakers off to the side.
“How was the clinic?” he asked, breaking the silence after a time.
“Routine,” I replied, trying to keep my tone even. He didn’t need to know about my random hookup with a former patient.
“Good.” He nodded. “That’s good.”
I watched him tying Warren’s sutures, trying to figure out if Holden had told him about Jackson or not. I couldn’t remember the last time Gage had checked in with me after getting back from an outreach trip, and I wondered if Holden had worked everything out and filled Gage in on the details.
There was a good chance, but Gage didn’t ask me directly about it. Not that he would. Especially not when he was flanked by Natasha and Patty, two of our surgical nurses. Gage was one of the most professional guys I knew—when he wasn’t fucking his boyfriend at work anyway. Personal stuff and random gossip didn’t make it past his lips all that often.
Less than an hour had passed since I’d left Jackson and my brain was running in the red. I was losing it, and he was the reason why. I should probably have stuck to my own rules and kept things simple. As good as the sex was, it was making me second-guess everything, even my friends.
We finished up with the patient and scrubbed out of the surgical suite and headed downstairs to the doctor’s lounge. It was closing in on lunchtime, and I’d skipped breakfast that morning in favor of a blowjob from Jackson.
So much better than the sesame seed bagel I usually went for.
Gage and I had barely made it through the door before Holden sat up in his seat, practically vibrating with excitement.
“So who’s the guy you’re fucking?” he asked, with more enthusiasm than he usually had.
“What?” Gage asked, his eyebrows knit together in confusion.
“I think he’s talking to me,” I said.
“Yeah. Logan’s got a new boy toy.”
“I do not have a new boy toy.”
“So that’s how it’s gonna be? That’s how you’re going to play it?” Holden smirked and crossed his arms over his chest.
I moved across the lounge and grabbed my food from the fridge. Nothing—including this impromptu interrogation—was going to keep me from my lunch.
I avoided looking at Gage. It felt weird to talk about this in front of him, which was ridiculous. “I dunno what you want me to say, man. And the way you’re waving that knife around’s not instilling a ton of confidence if I’m being honest.”
Holden laughed and set the cutlery down on his plate. “Better? Though for the record, if I did want to kill you, I’d do it somewhere that wasn’t filled with highly trained medical staff.”
“Noted.”
Now Gage chimed in. “You’re seeing someone?”
He sounded surprised, and for some reason that grated.
“No.”
“So the delicious hunk of man that I had in my office yesterday—the drop-dead gorgeous man with your home address scrawled across his hand—the hunky man whose surgery you couldn’t perform for some undetermined reason… you’re not fucking him?”
“You’re sleeping with a patient?” Gage’s surprised tone from two seconds ago became irritation.
“He’s not a patient.”
“So, you are sleeping with him.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t. I said I wasn’t seeing him.”
“Semantics.”
“A very important distinction,” I pointed out.
Holden waved me off. “What’s he like?”
“You don’t seem to need any information from me. You know as much about him as I do.” From the expression on Holden’s face, I figured I was about ten seconds away from a high five, but I was going out of my skin with this conversation, Gage and Holden’s eyes both trained on me. I felt like a kid again, caught by my mom with my first crush. I shrugged. “It’s not serious.”
“Didn’t say it had to be.” Holden beamed. “If I wasn’t already engaged, you might have had a fight on your hands.”
Gage half growled, half grunted, and I couldn’t help the half smile that crept onto my face because Jesus, Jackson had this weird fucking power over me, even when he wasn’t in the room. He turned me out in a way that I still hadn’t recovered from.
The pornographic text messages he’d sent two minutes after I’d left the house had only made me want him harder, and I had no idea when—or if—I’d see him again. I was so fucking tempted to trade Holden and Gage for the trips to Belcourt. My dick certainly thought it was a good idea.
Maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Two hookups didn’t mean there’d be more. There shouldn’t be more, but fuck, I wanted him again.
“You gonna introduce us?” Holden asked.
“You’ve met,” I reminded him.
“You’re such a pain in the ass.”
I squinted at him. “I believe you’re actually the reigning title holder on that one.”
“Used to be, but I think you’ve superseded my reign.”
“Not possible.”
“You’re avoiding the question.” Holden leaned forward, pinning me in place with his gaze, and Gage rolled his eyes.
“I’m not avoiding anything. There’s no reason to formally introduce you because A… you’ve met him. And B… he’s just a guy I hooked up with a couple of times.”
“You’re not going to see him again?”
I shoved my hands in my pockets. “Probably not.”
“Why?”
“Because neither of us is looking for anything serious.”
“It doesn’t have to be serious to see him again,” Holden said.
“No, but what good would it do? He’s leaving Alaska at the end of the year. I work more hours than any sane person should, and that alone isn’t conducive to a healthy relationship.”
“Gage and I work as many hours as you do, and our relationship is perfectly healthy.” He sounded almost indignant, but Gage stood there, his face completely neutral. I couldn’t tell if he had an opinion on this or not.
“It’s not the same thing. It was never meant to be more than a hookup. That’s why neither of us has brought up seeing each other again. If we do, fine, if we don’t, that’s fine too.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, remembering the early days of Holden and Gage’s
relationship. “It’s not like it was with you and Gage. There’s chemistry, but it’s not instant infatuation.”
“I wasn’t instantly infatuated with Gage,” Holden protested, and Gage laughed.
“Either you’ve developed early onset dementia, or you’re just completely full of shit. I remember when you got here. You’d been in town all of six seconds before you were bending over for him.”
“He’s not wrong,” Gage added.
Holden laughed. “You make it sound so romantic.”
“I’m making a point. The moment you two met, it was like a fucking Nicholas Sparks movie… you know… after Gage got past the whole hating you thing.”
“Yeah, that sucked for a little while.”
“I figured it out eventually. I just needed a little persuading,” Gage said.
I shook my head, recalling the drama that had surrounded them finally getting their heads out of their asses. “You sucked him off and you lived happily ever after.”
Holden grinned. “Just like a Nicholas Sparks movie.”
Jackson
The term “man camp” brought to mind images of sweaty bodies and testosterone-fueled orgies. But in reality, it wasn’t as much fun as it sounded.
In fact, it wasn’t fucking fun at all.
The next two weeks were boring as hell. Returning from Sawyer’s Ferry, it was back to the same old routine. Hours and hours of tripping pipe at fifty-five feet in the air, followed by cafeteria food and shooting the shit with some of the guys, maybe a round or two of pool in the common room before heading home for the night.
Sitting at one of the tables in the caf, I was reminded of how much better it was to live off-site. The barracks were depressing temporary buildings that were actually permanent. So what if I had to wake up a few minutes earlier than the other guys to make it to work on time? It was a small price to pay for somewhere to live that didn’t have paper-thin walls and communal almost everything.
“Me and Spence were talking about Juneau. You’re in, right?” Ollie tipped his head back, draining the last of his Red Bull before handing the can to Spence, who crushed it in between his palms.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I replied, setting my tray of cafeteria food down on the table and sliding into the last empty seat at the table.
Juneau was close enough to Belcourt that a quick road trip wasn’t out of the question. It was where I usually went to pick up supplies, for a change of scenery, and to get laid. It was also a major port for cruise ships, and so there was a steady stream of tourists, which meant a steady stream of anonymous hookups I wouldn’t have to worry about getting the wrong idea.
It was no strings, no complications.
The trip had started out as a monthly ritual me, and somewhere along the way, Ollie and Spence had become a permanent addition. Since the number of women on-site willing to entertain the possibility of fucking them and the number of gay guys I hadn’t already fucked was approximately zero, it made sense to get outta town when we could.
“Dunno. Just thought we’d remind you. You’ve been zoned the fuck out all day, bro,” Ollie said.
“A fucking monkey could do our jobs. Doesn’t take much concentration.” It came out harsher than I’d meant it to, and Ollie narrowed his eyes at me.
“You gotta be an industrial-sized bag of douche? Maybe we don’t want you coming along after all.”
“But Jackson volunteered to be first in the new driving rotation,” Witt pointed out.
Witt was new to the crew. I hadn’t been able to get much of a read on him yet—he was quieter than any of the other guys I’d ever worked with—but he seemed all right so far. This was going to be the first time he ventured out of Belcourt with us, and he seemed more excited than anyone. And that was saying something because Ollie lived for these trips.
I hadn’t given the upcoming trip much thought, since the only thing I’d been able to think about for weeks was Logan on his knees. It was a very distracting thought, and even now, after exhausting the image for hours and hours, it still pulled my attention away from absolutely everything else.
“Who gives a shit who drives?” Ollie asked, reorienting me to the conversation.
“What’s the point of trading off on who drives if we don’t stick to the rotation?”
I’d forgotten he’d proposed the driving rotation the last time the trip had come up. Witt was a systems engineer, and there wasn’t a single thing that ever came out of his mouth that wasn’t 100 percent analytical.
“I got something you can rotate on.” Ollie grabbed his dick through the heavy fabric of his work pants. Spence laughed like a fucking lunatic, and Witt’s face went crimson. The jury was still out on where on the sexual spectrum Witt fell, but Ollie had apparently made up his mind about where on it he thought Witt was.
It didn’t help that Ollie had stalled out somewhere around the eighth grade when homophobic slurs and fart jokes were considered sophisticated humor. I’d punched him the first time he’d called me a fag, nearly knocking out his front teeth and cutting my hand up pretty good in the process. Weirdly enough, that’s all it took to cement our friendship, and for the most part, he’d kept his homo-joke bullshit checked. It snuck out every so often, but it never took more than a glare pointed in his direction to remind him he’d almost needed dentures over bullshit like that.
“Are you fucking serious?” I asked him, as Witt squirmed in his seat next to me. There was a reason the office guys tended to stick together. None of them ever seemed to want to hang around with the roughnecks, and I got it. Different worlds.
Witt seemed to be the exception. He was friendly with everyone, in a painfully introverted sort of way. I still hadn’t figured out what had brought him to Alaska, but I had a sneaking suspicion that he was trying to reinvent himself somehow.
I stared Ollie down, and he straightened, his cocky grin faltering. “Sorry, man.”
“Don’t worry,” I told Witt. “I’ll drive.”
LOGAN: I came face-to-face with more octogenarian dick today than I’ve seen my entire career.
The text message had come through from Logan, interrupting my quiet ride home from work. After a twelve-hour shift, the humor in it had hit me hard, and I wasn’t sure what I found more hilarious—the fact that he’d texted to let me know, or how amazing the text to speech in my car sounded saying the words “octogenarian dick.”
It had certainly lightened my mood anyway, and after a day that included a run-in with Silas, the most obnoxious bastard on-site, I’d needed it.
When I got into the house, I dumped my shit by the door and headed for the kitchen, grabbing a beer from the fridge and plunking down on one of the chairs at the table.
The last few days of my rotation always seemed to drag on more than ever, like the closer I got to my days off, the more time would bend, stretching the days out longer and longer.
I brought the bottle to my lips, taking a long pull of beer before glancing down at my phone again. Logan’s name was still there, lit up on the screen like the fucking star on top of a Christmas tree, and just as conspicuous.
I typed a message back.
JACKSON: Rough day?
I deleted it. It sent the wrong message.
Unbuttoning my pants, I slipped my cock out. It was already hard, the memory of being buried in Logan’s body enough to turn me on in half a second flat. I snapped a quick picture, then sent that instead.
After tucking my dick back into my pants, I finished off my beer and grabbed another one while I microwaved some Hot Pockets.
By the time I had my food and had found a comfortable spot on my couch to eat, there was a message from Logan waiting for me.
LOGAN: Is that an invitation?
My mood lifted. If he wasn’t hours away, it might be.
JACKSON: Think of it as a palate cleanser
LOGAN: My palate is still bruised from the last time I had that battering ram down my throat.
My body flushed hot with the mem
ory of making Logan choke on my cock. It was goddamn beautiful the way he’d swallowed around me, milking every last drop of come.
JACKSON: I didn’t hear any complaints at the time
LOGAN: Oh, I’m not complaining now. That was the best time I’ve had in a while, bruises or no bruises.
JACKSON: Oh yeah?
LOGAN: Yep
I hadn’t known him long, but I could almost hear the cocky, teasing tone of his voice if he’d said the words out loud.
JACKSON: Pretty hard up for available guys in Sawyer’s Ferry?
LOGAN: Exhausted that supply years ago. Now I have to leave town to get laid.
JACKSON: So you’re a one-man traveling sex show
LOGAN: That sounds like a lot more fun than it really is.
JACKSON: I dunno… I had a pretty good time during your visit
LOGAN: My trips up to Belcourt usually end with me falling asleep in front of the TV in the hotel, so ending up in your bed was definitely an improvement on the regular scenario.
JACKSON: There’s no reason you couldn’t end up back in my bed the next time you’re in town
I stared at the message and the tiny delivery confirmation below it. I’d sent it without thinking, but now that it was out there, I waited to see what his response would be. Logan was the most fuckable guy I’d ever known, and the fact that he didn’t seem to be looking for anything more than a convenient orgasm either made the idea of hooking up with him again seem simple.
Finally, after several minutes, my phone chimed.
LOGAN: Beats the lumpy mattress at the hotel, and if you promise to make me come as hard as you did last time, you’ve got yourself a guest. I’ll even bring the pizza next time.
My blood thrummed through my veins at the thought of seeing him again. He was everything I shouldn’t want but did anyway. Maybe he was slumming it with me—the roughneck from the rigs—but I didn’t care what his motivations were. I knew what mine was, and that was good enough.
We traded text messages for a while, and when I glanced at the clock, I saw it was close to two thirty in the morning. I needed to be up for work in three hours.