Rock N Soul (23 page)

I laughed, a little weakly. “Deal. I’ll make sure to have a tape recorder on hand too.”

“You should get to sleep. You’re starting to weave.”

I nodded and eyed the bathroom. Ever since Chris had showed up in my life, I’d gotten into the habit of only changing clothes in the bathroom, and since I slept so bundled up during the winter, it occurred to me that he hadn’t even seen me with my shirt off. Which seemed weird since I’d seen him totally naked, at least in videos, but whatever. Anyway, the bathroom door seemed way too far away to fuck with, and it wasn’t like I was going commando under my jeans, so I started taking them off.

Chris widened his eyes. “Dude, you’re stripping in front of me.”

I shimmied out of my jeans and left them on the floor with my shoes. “I’m wearing boxers, dude. Don’t get too excited.” And then, because I had apparently lost all my common sense, I took my shirt off too.

Chris sucked in a breath and glanced away.

I rolled my eyes. “What?”

“I just didn’t know you were ripped, is all.”

I peered down at my midsection, which was flat and slender enough, but wasn’t anything approaching what you would call “defined,” much less “ripped.” Then I looked back up at him with an eyebrow raised. “Thanks, but you need to work on your vocabulary.”

“What?” He blinked.

“Well, saying I’m ripped implies a six-pack. I don’t have a six-pack. I don’t even have a four-pack. I don’t even have a
pack
.” I pulled back the covers and snuggled down under them, letting out an involuntary sigh.

Chris walked over to the side of the bed. “You don’t sleep like that at home,” he said, looking like he was off his game.

Something in my stomach gave a strange twist when he said “home,” but I ignored it. “What do you mean?”

He motioned at the lumpy expanse of person under the blanket. “Like that. You usually wear, like, flannel. Shirt and pants and everything.”

“At home there’s three inches of snow on the ground and it’s ten degrees outside. Here it’s maybe fifty, and you can smell the ocean.”

He laughed. “I think that’s smog, dude, not the ocean.”

I flopped over onto my side and got comfortable. “If I want to believe it’s the ocean, let me have my dreams.”

“Okay,” he said. “I guess I can do that.”

I drifted off to sleep without noticing that he hadn’t asked me to turn on the TV.

Another thing I didn’t notice before falling asleep was that I’d forgotten to put in my earplugs.

“Tyler,” Chris said loudly. “Tyler. Wake up. Tyler. Tyler. Tyler.”

I opened my eyes and squinted up at him. “
What
, Chris?”

“It’s ten in the morning,” he said. “I let you sleep more than eight hours and now I’m
bored
and it’s time to get up and go find people.”

I blinked several times. “It can’t be ten. It’s still dark out.”

“That’s because you left the curtains closed, you dumbass. I would have whipped them open with a dramatic flourish but I’m noncorporeal at the moment, so you’ll just have to imagine it.” Chris grinned and flopped down on the bed beside me, which was weird because my body’s muscle memory expected the bed to heave and the covers to pull in predictable ways, but of course nothing happened, not even a breeze. He continued. “I also considered brewing some of that disgusting-looking coffee in the room’s coffeepot and yanking your covers off of you, but I can’t do those either, so you’ll have to imagine that as well.”

“Making me coffee, huh? That’s extremely domestic of you,” I said, swinging my legs through him and off the side of the bed, then pulling the covers back. No morning wood today, and thank goodness for that, because he was awfully close to me and I wasn’t sure how I’d keep him from noticing it when all I was wearing was boxers.

Chris carried on talking. “Once you’re ready, I’ll tell you Jerri’s number and what you should text her to get her to meet you. And we need a game plan for how to convince her you’re legit.”

I grabbed my backpack, pulled out my hella-manly toiletry bag, and walked into the bathroom. Chris followed me in. I thought about shooing him away, but I figured he knew what he was getting into, following a guy into the bathroom, so I just turned my back to him and prepared to relieve myself.

Chris raised an eyebrow. “You’re just going to piss with me standing here? After all the times you’ve yelled at me to leave and not ogle your privates, suddenly you’re okay with it?”

He had a point, and I really wasn’t up to figuring out exactly when I’d gotten this comfortable with him. “Think of it as a public restroom. Keep your eyes on your own urinal and you’ll be fine,” I told him. “And besides, you followed me in here. What did you think I was going to do?”

“Shower?”

I rolled my eyes at the peeling paint on the wall. “I don’t see how that’s substantially better. You’d still risk seeing my junk by accident.” I tucked myself back in my boxers and then turned around to look at him. “Okay, showering. Get out.”

“But I’m bored,” he whined.

“You’d be bored even if you stayed in here, and so if you’re going to be bored either way, then you might as well do it somewhere else. Like out there.” I motioned toward the room.

He pouted at me. “You’re no fun.”

“I’ll be plenty of fun once I’m out of the shower.” I pulled my little soap bottle out of my bathroom bag. “A regular ball of sunshine. You just wait and see.”

He scoffed and then smiled. “I wouldn’t want you to be a ball of sunshine,” he said. “Sunny people are boring.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not.”

“It is,” he insisted. “You’re a lot of things, but you’re not boring.”

I waited to see if he was going to snap his fingers and go “Psych!” at me, but he didn’t, so I nodded. “No sunshine, then. Just regular me.”

“Good.” He hesitated for a second, his mouth slightly open like he’d barely stopped himself from talking.

“What?”

He wrinkled his nose. “I was going to ask if I could stay. Not look. But, you know, talk to you. Through the curtain.”

It was my turn to hesitate then. On the one hand, no. Dudes do not let other dudes sit outside the shower and talk to them. But on the other hand . . . for some reason I didn’t want to make him leave. “If you promise not to sneak a peek,” I said finally, “then okay.”

“Really?” he said, standing up a little straighter.

I shrugged and reached down to turn the shower on. “Sure, whatever. But you have to
swear
.”

“Dude, you’ve seen
me
naked,” he pointed out, “so I don’t see how this is any different.”

Shit.
There’s
the morning wood. I shifted a bit so he couldn’t see things perking up. “Not in person,” I said, trying to fight back the mental images of Chris twisting the bedsheets in his hands and begging Gabriel to stay in just a little longer. “So that makes it
way
different.”

It was starting to seem conclusive that my bathroom session after the video incident didn’t have much to do with Valerie Nobles and Evie Tellerman, because it was never
them
in my head when I thought about the videos and felt the blood rushing away from my brain, despite how much I always tried to wrangle my thoughts back to the women. Fuck. This was very bad news for my sex life, given that the object of my lust didn’t have an actual body anymore.

“Touché,” he said, and his voice sounded closer, like he’d taken a step toward me.

I couldn’t turn around to find out, though, because the boxer-tent was pretty well pitched at that point, so I just stuck my hand under the water to test the temperature. It was still a little cool, but I couldn’t really risk staying on this side of the curtain for much longer, so I straightened up with my back still to him and said, “Close your eyes.”

“They’re closed,” he said, and yeah, his voice was
definitely
closer.

I sighed. “Back off, Chris. You promised no peeking.”

“Sorry.” When he spoke again, he sounded farther away. “Go ahead. They’re closed. For real.”

I turned around to double-check—not that I didn’t believe him, but just in case—and then dropped my boxers and practically leaped into the shower. I yanked the curtain closed and said, “Okay, I’m in.”

“Cool,” he said. “Thanks for keeping me entertained.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I turned away from the water and tilted my head back, letting the gradually warming water run through my hair and down over my shoulder blades. “So you wanted to talk. Let’s talk.”

There was a long pause. “I didn’t really have a topic picked out.”

“Okay.” I reached up and ruffled my hair to get it fully wet. “Then tell me about little bitty Chris Raiden. What did he want to be when he grew up?”

He chuckled at that. “A veterinarian firefighter.”

“Can you be both?”

“Itsy bitsy Chris thought so,” he answered. “I was going to cuddle puppies by day and put out fires by night, I guess.”

“That’s aggressively adorable,” I said with a laugh. “Cuddling puppies. Jesus.”

“I can be adorable. When it suits me, anyway. What about you?”

I thought about his stupid dimples and then decided to stop thinking about them. “International spy.” I poured some shampoo into my hand and started washing my hair.

“Really? Tyler Lindsey, the international spy?”

I smiled even though he couldn’t see me, and the worst part was that I was pretty sure he was smiling too. “Yeah. They always got the girls. I didn’t know what I would
do
with a girl at the time, but it seemed to be the goal as far as movies and shit were concerned, so I figured why not?”

“Makes sense to me,” he said. “Okay, so when did you figure out what to do with a girl?”

I started rinsing my hair. “Do you mean when did I learn what sex was, or when did I do it for the first time?”

“First time.”

Sighing deeply, I tilted my head into the water again and rinsed more soap out of it. “Senior prom,” I said. “Her name was Katerina. Exchange student. I lasted like five whole minutes.”

He laughed. “Good job, man.”

“Hey, I was very proud of myself.” I turned around and when the warm water hit my still-optimistic morning cock, I almost moaned. “And anyway, don’t even lie. You know you didn’t last long either your first time.”

“True,” he said. “Well, with a girl. The guy took longer. More logistics involved, you know.”

“When was that?” I asked, even though I knew I shouldn’t. “The guy, I mean.”

“I was sixteen. It was at church camp,” he said, and I busted out laughing.

“Seriously? You had gay sex for the first time at
church camp
?”

“Yeah. I was a rebellious teenager.” It was really disturbing that I could tell just from his voice what facial expression he was wearing. That spoke to way too much time spent thinking about his expressions. But anyway, he was sort of half smiling. I’m sure of it.

“Sounds like it,” I replied. “
Church camp
.”

“His name was Adam, and—” He broke off.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You can’t leave me hanging like that.”

A couple more seconds went by, and then he spoke again: “He had a tattoo on his chest. A lion. I liked to dig my fingernails into it. I heard he got it removed after that summer.”

“Can you blame him?” My hand brushed my cock, and it seemed to have gotten even harder since getting in the shower. I frowned down at it as if that would help. It didn’t.

“Nah. Especially since he repented and married a woman and now he’s a youth minister.” He chuckled, which definitely didn’t make the situation I had going on any better.

But I’m a dumbass who doesn’t think things through, and so instead of steering the conversation away from sex-related topics, I asked him, “Who was the first girl?”

“Fuck, I don’t remember her name. Claire or Clarissa or something like that,” he said. “I was nineteen, and it was at a party. Eric introduced us. I didn’t last very long.”

I laughed, and it was a throatier laugh than I would have liked to give. “Even though you weren’t a virgin?”

He shrugged at that. I couldn’t even see him and I knew he was shrugging. Fuck. “Well, I’d never been the one doing the fucking before that, if you know what I mean.”

My dick certainly knew what he meant. It gave a cheerful little twitch, and I frowned at it again.
Don’t touch it, don’t touch it, don’t touch it.

Hopefully it was just the combination of the time of day and the fact that before Chris showed up in my life, I’d been in the habit of jacking it at least once a day, sometimes more, and so I had a lot of built-up tension. It had nothing at all to do with the way Chris’s laugh made my skin feel tight or that I was naked and five feet from a guy who’d made it into the top twenty of the Sexiest Rockers Alive list last year. Nothing at all.

But fuck, I had to do something about it. It wasn’t going away and I couldn’t shower forever. I wrapped my fingers around myself and started stroking even though I kind of hated myself for doing it. “So who was the best guy? Was it Gabriel?”

“Yeah, probably,” he said. “Well, there was this one random groupie who was better. I never got his name. He could do some wicked things with his tongue, though.”