Rock N Soul (36 page)

“Fucking hell,” I whispered after he blinked and lost the Staring Game. And then, because I didn’t have any other appropriate response, “Fucking hell, Chris.”

He let out a breathless chuckle. “Wow. That was . . .”

“Ridiculously overdue,” I finished. “Jesus, you don’t know how long I’ve wanted that.”

“I can guess,” he said, and he dipped his head and kissed me before rolling off and lying on his side facing me. He traced his fingers over my stomach. “See? Blue.”

I looked down at myself and grinned. He was right—there was a glowing blue puddle smeared all over my stomach. I dipped my fingers in it and brought them to my mouth. A barely there salty taste spread over my tongue—more the
suggestion
of salt than the actual taste, but it was definitely there.

“Can you taste it?” he asked, kissing my chest.

“Surprisingly, yeah,” I said. “I mean, a little bit.”

“Do you like it? Your first time tasting spunk?”

I rolled my eyes. “Dude, that’s not my first time tasting spunk.” He gave me a Look, and I shrugged. “Well, fine, it’s the first time I’ve tasted someone
else’s
spunk. But yeah, I like it.”

“Good,” he said. He smiled at me with that same
happy
smile as before, and I swear I felt butterflies. “Yours shot through the back of my neck, you know. Which was an odd sensation.”

I laughed out loud. “Seriously?”

“Yep,” he said. “Apparently this whole ‘touching’ thing doesn’t apply to your bodily secretions.”

I looked down at my stomach again, and it was clean now. “Sad,” I said. “Yours disappear pretty fast.”

He shrugged and grinned at me. “Less cleanup this way.”

“So I’m guessing this means we’re dating now?” I asked him, running a hand over my stomach just in case there was still something there to feel.

He laughed and kissed the side of my head. “Yeah, I’d say that’s a valid assumption.”

I rolled over onto my side and propped my head on my hand. “Maybe . . . we should wait a while before we go see your sister.”

And then it hit me—a shattering feeling of
wrong
, of
no
, that curled around my lungs and squeezed until I could barely breathe, and then raced up my skin, leaving goose bumps behind it. It was the same soul-crushing dread that we’d both felt when I suggested putting off the LA trip, only worse this time. I shivered and scooted closer to him like his almost-warmth would help take the cold away.

He let out a long, shaky breath. “As much as I want to say yes . . . I don’t think it works that way.”

“How do you know?” I asked, even though it was pretty obvious.

He hooked his leg around my waist so we were pressed together again. “I don’t, really. I’ve just been giving that some thought and I keep getting this feeling that if I’m not actively trying to finish my business, then . . .”

I didn’t need him to continue. So I just ran a hand down his arm and kissed him, slow and deep, and we gave in to each other’s hands and mouths and heat and didn’t talk about it again.

Since we’d gone to bed before the sun had even gone down all the way, I woke up ridiculously early the next morning, when the city itself was just starting to go to sleep. Chris was curled up behind me with his arm draped over my waist and his chin tucked into my shoulder. His chest was warm on my back and his breath fanned against my neck and holy shit, I was getting spooned by a dude.

It wasn’t as awkward and weird as I’d always thought it would be back before I had ever acted on the gay side of my bisexuality. It was actually nice, to be held instead of being the one doing the holding, and I was enjoying feeling a soft cock pressed along the curve of my ass, so I snuggled back against him and smiled to myself.

“Good morning,” he said, and kissed my shoulder.

“Morning,” I said back. My voice was sleep-slurred and a little rough, so I cleared my throat. “Have you been there all night?”

“Yeah,” he said. “No big deal. I was comfortable.”

“I should have turned on the TV for you so you wouldn’t get bored.”

He laid his hand flat on my stomach, playing with the light line of hair that led downward from my belly button. “I wasn’t bored. Not this time.”

“You’re warm,” I said. “I can feel you.”

“All the way?”

I gave that some thought, experimentally evaluating all of the parts of my body that were in contact with parts of
his
body, and I sighed. “Not yet. You’re still . . . fuzzy. Not totally solid. But you’re getting there. Maybe—” I stopped myself. There wasn’t much more time now. It felt like time was speeding up, rushing us toward the inevitable end of all this.

His hand slipped lower, following the trail down but not quite reaching its destination. My body started taking notice of where Chris was touching it and extrapolating from that where he would be touching next, and I let out a tiny moan and was rewarded by Chris’s cock stirring against my ass.

“I want to fuck you,” he whispered in my ear. “We could try it.”

And
that
jump-started what had been a slow rise to power on my dick’s part, because I wanted that too. I rolled over to face him, and we both hissed through our teeth in unison as our cocks made contact.

“Brandon stole my lube, remember?” I said. My cheeks started to burn with the words, but it wasn’t like there was any other way to say it.

“Fuck,” he said, stroking us both again like he’d done last night. “You’ll have to go buy some more today.”

I put a hand on his hip and dug my fingers in. “Yes,” I said, drawing out the
s
and answering both the lube question and the unspoken question in Chris’s eyes. I wasn’t even sure what that question was—
Can I touch you? Are you horny? Do you love me?
—but regardless of the question, my answer would be yes.

Later, I batted Chris’s hands away when they started in on a round three for the morning. Which would have been round six overall, and Jesus, I hadn’t even come six times in one night back during my freshman year of college when I’d been furiously sowing my wild oats.

He pouted at me. “You’re done?”

“Fuck, dude, I’m gross and my balls are tired and empty. I need to take a shower and find some food to refuel.”

“I don’t want to let you out of bed,” he said. He moved his hand away from the danger zone but curled his arm around me to pull me closer. “You might not come back.”

I kissed him and smiled. “I’ll come back. With lube.”

He laughed. “I guess maybe it’s worth the risk, then.”

A dimple appeared, and I flicked my tongue at it. Chris’s breath caught in his throat, and I decided what the hell, there’s not
that
much difference between five rounds and six in the grand scheme of things, and it wasn’t like the shower was going anywhere.

When Chris finally let me out of bed, it was still well before sunrise. We’d had a brief bargaining session that had ended with me promising to blow him later if he left me alone while I showered, and then I grabbed my toiletry bag and scampered to the bathroom before he could change his mind about the deal.

The cold tile floor of the hotel bathroom was more of a shock than usual after the nice warm bed, and as I carried my soap over to the shower, the easy contentment seeped out through the soles of my feet to be replaced with something a lot less like magic and a lot more like fear. I turned on the shower and stepped in.

We had to go see Allison, and soon. I wasn’t sure what would happen if we didn’t, but there was no doubt in my mind that if we tried to cheat the system, bad things would happen. And I got the uneasy feeling that whatever those bad things were, they’d be a lot worse for Chris than for me, which was unacceptable.

I wondered if it would have been better to have held all these feelings inside me and kept up the boundaries that we’d had before last night. If that would make it easier for both of us after Allison. I didn’t regret what had happened, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like it had been a bad idea, at least on some level. Specifically, the level where I had to learn to live after he was gone. The thought of letting anyone else in like this made me nauseous, and it occurred to me that maybe this was how widowers felt.

The shower relaxed me a little, and I definitely felt less disgusting after I’d scrubbed all the sweat and jizz (mine, obviously, since his was self-cleaning) off, so that was something. We’d made plans to see Eric again today, and I had to be on my game. Last night, the thought of talking to Eric again had pissed me the fuck off, but after spending the night hearing only
my
name come gasping out of Chris’s mouth, I felt much better about the whole thing.

It didn’t matter that he’d loved Eric before. It didn’t even matter if he
still
loved him. All that mattered was that he wanted to be with me for as long as we had left. And I believed he did.

I dried off and tied a towel around my waist to go out into the main room. Chris was back in the sitting area with his guitar, dressed again and playing—I kid you not—“Free Bird.” Which was a perfect opening to get back to the ragging and bickering.

I rolled my eyes at him and pulled a pair of jeans and some underwear out of my backpack. “Of
course
you’d be playing that.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong with it?”

“You just must have known that I was going to come out here and yell ‘Play some Skynyrd!’ at you, and you decided to beat me to the punch,” I explained. “Because you’re a dick.”

He smirked at me. “You seem like the type to do something cliché like that.”

“Well, carry on,” I said. “Don’t let me rain on your little Skynyrd parade.” I let the towel drop to the ground and smirked when Chris fumbled and missed a note.

“If you’re not back on the bed in thirty seconds, you’re going to be getting rug burns on your ass,” he warned me.

I smirked even harder and was about to say something snotty when there was a knock on the door. “Fuck,” I said, grabbing my boxers and jeans, and struggling into them. “It’s like 5 a.m. Who the fuck knocks on a door at five in the morning?”

“Didn’t you put the sign on the door?” Chris asked, putting his guitar down.

“I did,” I said. “I don’t think it’s housekeeping.” I went to the door and looked through the peephole, then frowned. “It’s Eric.”

Chris must have sat back down, because after a second I heard the guitar start again. Still with the “Free Bird.” I groaned and opened the door.

Eric glanced at my bare chest and raised his eyebrows just a bit. “Good, you’re up. I would have called but I didn’t get your number yesterday.”

“That’s cool.” I held the door open. He walked inside, and Chris didn’t react as Eric walked over to what must have seemed like a floating guitar to him. I cleared my throat. “It’s really fucking early, dude. What do you need?”

He looked a little sheepish. “I had trouble sleeping. So I decided I might as well see if you were awake.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” I told him. “I’m almost never up this early.”

Eric sat down beside Chris and put his hand on Chris’s arm, which didn’t piss me off as much as it had the day before, especially since Chris didn’t react to his touch with that broken sort of hope he’d had on his face yesterday morning. I tried to be subtle as I sauntered over to the bed and nonchalantly rearranged the sheets so that the spots all over them weren’t so obvious, but Chris and Eric both turned to stare at me. Chris chuckled, and Eric’s eyes flicked back and forth between the sheets and my bare chest and then back to the guitar.

“He knows our secret,” Chris said.

“Fuck off,” I told him, helpfully holding up a middle finger in case he wasn’t sure what I’d said.

Chris gave me a shit-eating grin, and I rolled my eyes and got a T-shirt out of my backpack and tugged it on over my head.

“So,” Eric said after a second, “I thought you couldn’t, um . . . I mean, I thought he wasn’t a physical presence for you.”

“He means he thought I couldn’t shag you until you screamed,” Chris translated.

I started to point out that he hadn’t
technically
shagged me, but instead I just flipped Chris off again. It was good for him to be reminded that sappy feelings aside, he was still a douche. “I’m not talking about my sex life with you,” I told Eric. That was vague enough that I wasn’t giving away too much detail, but it also made it clear that yes, Chris and I had fucked, and so I had a claim on him now, and Eric could back off on that level.