Physical Therapy (12 page)

“So, what do you think?” Ken used the small wooden, snap-apart chopsticks to dig into St. Nacho"s very own Yen Chin “Three Ingredients Taste.” “Was it worth taking a chance I might violate your airspace?”

“Would you do this with your physical therapist?” I asked.

“No, but she"s a big Romanian girl with a mustache like Stalin. You"re not my physical therapist. You"re my masseur. Why don"t you come here and lay your hands on me?” He shot me a cheeky grin.

I rubbed the hand that wasn"t holding my burrito over my face, which was a mistake because I got plum sauce in my eye. “Ow, shit!” I grabbed a napkin and started scrubbing at it. I felt Ken"s big, gentle hand take hold of my wrist.

“Stop, you"ll make it worse,” he said. “Let it tear up a minute and then dab.” He held the napkin with such delicacy. He touched it to the corner of my eye, and I began to feel better immediately. I was blinking frantically, but when I could focus, his face came into view inches away from mine. He dropped the trash into the bag between us.

“You still have some sauce,” he murmured, cupping the back of my head and bringing me in for what I thought would be a kiss. I closed my eyes and was shocked to feel his tongue lap at my cheek. “Mm. Good.”

He was so close his breath misted my face, the pungent garlic aroma not unpleasant when the scent of Chinese food was all around us. “What are you afraid of?” he asked.

“I don"t want to see you get hurt. I don"t want to feel like I"m overstepping—” 64

Z. A. Maxfield

“Come on. You work ridiculously long hours from what I"ve seen. Did you do that when you were in the Bay Area too?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I guess.”

“Well, then where did you meet guys?”

I was silent for a while. I didn"t really want to have to tell him I didn"t meet guys. I didn"t want to get into a discussion of just how long it had been since I"d been with someone, because I sensed that was just the sort of leverage he was looking for. “Here and there.”

“In the Laundromat? In the garden department at Home Depot?” I looked away, but I could feel him watching me. I noticed his chopsticks were in his left hand. I decided to change the subject. “Are you a lefty?”

“Yes.” He allowed the conversation to drift. I watched him put a perfectly juicy-looking shrimp in his mouth. He smiled around it for a minute and then began to chew.

There was a little sauce on his lips, making them glisten when he smiled at me. “If you keep looking at me like that, we"re not even going to finish dinner.”

“Fine.” I took a deep breath. “Let"s see. Big, left-handed… First baseman, am I right?”

“How come not pitcher?”

I dared a hand on his beefy shoulder, letting it trail down his back over his traps and his lats. “You need all this for batting, not pitching.” He nodded. “You play?”

“Sure, in school. But my true sport was competitive chaos, and my hometown was so small we didn"t even have enough players to field a team.”

“You"re pretty hard on yourself.”

“I earned it. Look, Ken,” I told him, putting my food down. “When I was young, I thought I was bulletproof. I was such a jerk. I hardly ever got caught. Cooper and I were smart enough, and in his case talented enough, that we could talk our way out of all kinds of crap we should have caught hell for.”

“And?” He put his food down too, and I could tell he was bracing himself for the honesty I promised him, but it scared me. I"d told the story often enough. I"d even gone with the MADD groups in Wisconsin and the Bay Area to talk to kids in school. If there was anything I could do to keep one more person from fucking up like I had, I was determined to do it. But it was hard, here in this hotel room with someone I admitted, if only to myself, that I cared about.

“I was at a graduation party for some friends who were a couple of years behind me in school. No… Well, they weren"t friends. I guess I can say that now. We just crashed every party we knew about in those days.” I lowered my eyes. “Where there"d be booze. I wanted to leave; it was boring, and the afternoon had been long and hot. It was a huge party, and there were people everywhere. I was agitated for some reason; I don"t even remember why. I was such a shit. I didn"t want to stay at a dull party when Physical Therapy

65

there might be another with more going on. Cooper said he was too drunk to drive. He told me he thought we should take a nap in one of the bedrooms, sleep it off. It was twilight, so it was around nine, maybe nine thirty. It gets dark late in River Falls in June.

“I don"t know why I was so insistent, that"s the thing. I try to remember back, but it"s a blur now. Cooper gave me his keys and said flat out he wasn"t driving drunk. I took them and told him to get in the damned truck. We were still fighting when I started backing out of the driveway.” I swallowed hard. “What we didn"t know,
what
neither of us could possibly have known
, was that Bobby Johnson, the little brother of the girl who was throwing the party, was out there on his Big Wheel. He was so low to the ground, I never saw him. I heard the plastic scrape—”

“Oh
shit
.” Ken put his head in his hands.

“The rest is distorted in my memory.” I placed what was left of my food back into the foil wrappers it came in and put it away. No way was I eating anything else. “I went to jail. That was before the truth in sentencing laws went into effect, and I was still eligible for early release. I don"t know what would have become of me if—” Ken wrapped his arms around me. He held me in a hard embrace, as if lending me his strength. “Shh.”

“I can"t,” I told him. “You don"t understand. I"m not like you, not like everyone else. I owe something I can never repay. I can"t be distracted. I can"t forget. I can"t let it all go and just be…pleasured. Not anymore.”

“At the risk of sounding flip, you could just pleasure me.”

“Oh, fuck you!” I wanted to push him off the bed, but at the last second I remembered how hard it would be for him to get up.

“If you insist.”

It was either kill him or lean back against the headboard in defeat. My head hit the cheap laminate really hard and sent it crashing against the wall. “Are you
trying
to be an insensitive jerk?”

“Will it make you look at my lips again?”

I turned away with what I hoped was contempt. Probably from his point of view, it looked more like longing. Maybe I
was
conflicted.

He stroked the skin of my arm with a finger. “I get that you think you have to pay for your past. I"m the last person who would want you to forget what you did.”

“So what"s all this then?” I asked. “I"m the first gay man who"s come along?”

“In St. Nacho"s? Hardly.” Ken laughed. “Maybe the first since the accident.”

“Great.” I got up and went to the bathroom to get the plastic bucket for ice. “You want a soda or anything?”

“Coke would be nice.” He turned where he was sitting on the bed as I picked up my key. “You know how attracted I am to you, right? You know that when you come back through that door, I"m going to do everything I can to make something happen between us.”

66

Z. A. Maxfield

Jeez
. I stopped before opening the door. “Yes.” I didn"t want to turn around and see him lying on the bed, watching me with those blue eyes. I swallowed hard and pulled open the door. “Coke?”

“Please,” he answered.

On my way to the ice machine, I couldn"t think about anything but how it felt when Ken pulled me into his body. The rush of that embrace was so enticing I"d have walked over broken glass to feel it. There was heat there, and I"d been cold for a long time. It"s not like I didn"t want things to be different. I wanted to be pure and shiny and new for Ken, the way he was for me. Not used and filled with guilt. I wanted to offer him something he couldn"t get in a thousand other places, but I didn"t have anything to offer except the almost painful desire I had inside of me to see him happy.

It didn"t stop me from bringing back sodas and ice with the single-minded determination to be the best thing he would experience between the sheets in his life, ever. The best first time. The most conscientious lover. It didn"t stop me from imagining his cock sliding between my lips or my ass cheeks. It didn"t stop me from entering the room, setting the sodas down next to the ice bucket, and crawling up between his legs on the bed to show him how I kiss a man when I"m serious. I took his face in both my hands, and for the briefest flicker of a moment I could tell he had last-minute doubts.

“Too late,” I told him, bringing his mouth to mine in a way that left not a single question about who had the experience between us.

“Good,” he hummed against my lips.

My throat closed around a barely whispered, “Say yes.”

“
Yes
.” He sighed against me in surrender, gripping my shoulders as he opened for me.

I broke the kiss to travel down his throat, tasting his skin as I went. His hands moved across the muscles of my back, mapping out my shoulder blades, the ridges in my spine. I felt his callused palms slip down the back of my jeans to circle my ass cheeks a little, and then he squeezed them and pulled me up and into him at the same time, fitting our bodies together.

“I love your muscles,” I told him, unbuttoning his shirt and slipping my hand inside. “Love this skin.” He had crisp dark hair I"d seen before when I"d worked on him. Now I let my fingers play, finding the swirls of hair that surrounded his sensitive nipples. He hissed out a breath when I ran a fingernail lightly across one of the buds, pink and rippling under my touch. I used my other hand to spread the fabric apart so I could reach it with my mouth.

“Oh.
Sweet
,” he said when I teased his nipple with my tongue. He dug his fingers into my hair and held me to him. I slipped a hand lower.

“What"s off-limits?” I asked. “Anything hurt?”

“Nothing,” he replied between panting breaths. “Nothing is off-limits. Just keep going—” His head fell back when I cupped his package with my hand. I flicked open Physical Therapy

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the button on his jeans, feeling around before opening the zipper. His underwear was already damp with precum.

“Maybe instead of limits I should have asked what you hope will happen.” I was working my way down a trail of hair that led to the curly thatch I was uncovering. I slipped his jeans and briefs off his hips, pushing them down his long, strong legs and off when it occurred to me how hard it must be for him to look at his body, which for all intents and purposes was strong and whole, and know that it didn"t work.

When he didn"t answer right away, I looked up at him and saw the stain of arousal on his cheeks and across his chest.

“Everything,” he told me finally, pulling his arms out of the sleeves of his shirt and tossing it on the floor by the bed. “Whatever you want.” My cheeks burned. I wanted to taste him. I wanted to suck his dick and fuck him with my tongue. I didn"t say it out loud. I just worked my way lower and lower until he couldn"t mistake my intentions. I reached an arm up to pull my toiletry kit off the nightstand, opening it with a spill of razors and shaving cream and Band-Aids until I found condoms and lube.

“Latex okay?” I asked. I hated it. Hated the taste, even the flavored ones, but I never made a move without them. That didn"t mean I didn"t give his cock an experimental lick up the underside, along the vein, just to taste his skin and feel his pulse beat there.

“Yeah,” he said. “Whatever, yeah.” I remembered being that new. The “whatever, yeah” stage, and I was determined to protect him, from me, from disappointment, from disease. From
whatever
.

I rolled the condom down his cock with my mouth, mostly because I could and I wanted to show off. I slipped my arms under his thighs and pressed my face against his balls. He was gorgeous. Big and sweaty, and all mine for a little time at least. I sucked first one and then the other testicle into my mouth, playing with them, stretching the skin and letting it pop out with a little tug. I licked the sensitive skin behind his balls down to his hole. When I ran a gentle tongue around the tightly puckered flesh there, he jumped like he"d been hit by lightning. There was no way to describe the effect being in control of Ken"s body had on me. I flicked him with my tongue again and blew on the dark skin a little, and he jerked and shivered in my hands. I laid them flat on his abdomen, holding him down so he wouldn"t jump and break my nose, and breached his ass with my tongue.

Oh yeah. That got his attention.

“Holy mother of…
Fuck
!”

I wrapped a firm hand around the base of his cock near his balls, and then I murmured against his most sensitive skin, “Buckle up,
Junior
.” 68

Z. A. Maxfield

Chapter Eleven

Ken"s legs trembled next to my ears as I moved from his ass to his gorgeous cock.

He was thick and long, with a perfect, fat mushroom crown that had a spot just beneath it that made his legs shake uncontrollably when I gave it even the slightest bit of attention. I wrapped my lips around the head, swirling my tongue over the slit in the tip through the latex, and his hips jumped for me again. I could tell he didn"t expect it either. He had no idea what his body was going to do from one minute to the next.

I knew what it was not going to do… It was not going to come until I was damned good and ready. Until I had my fill of that velvety-soft sac against my face, until I had pushed my fingers into his tight heat. He wasn"t going to have to beg; we were way past begging and halfway to incoherent puddle of goo.

I took him deep, calling on all my arcane, magical dick-sucking powers to catch him off guard, to bring him to the edge and pull him back from it. I don"t know why I was so determined to control him like that, except that I could, and maybe I wouldn"t get another chance. There were plenty of hot, young guys standing around at Nacho"s Bar every night who wouldn"t remind him of the worst day of his life every time he looked at them. I was as certain as anything that sooner or later he"d look at me and see just another drunk driver. Or he"d see me as nothing more than a guy who"d sucked him off when he was curious.