The Blinding Light (21 page)

I was exhausted from working three different jobs but I found my legs pedaling furiously toward Patrick’s house. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I arrived. Knock on the door? Ring the doorbell? It was after 2:00 a.m.

I told myself I was just going to ride past. I rounded the corner and saw the veranda lights on. Why would a blind man need a light on? As I approached the house, a dark shadow detached itself from the garden. I jumped a freakin’ mile before I realized it was Gregor coming to greet me. Patrick wasn’t that far behind. No words were necessary as Patrick took my hand and led me inside, apart from, “Go and shower, Jake. You smell of smoke and alcohol.”

We had spent Saturday afternoon together, having coffee at a riverside café, throwing a ball to Gregor in the park, and walking hand in hand along the sandbar. I took off to see Maria and Mum for a bit before my Tav shift, only to find myself back with Patrick that night, warm and content in his bed.

And then he had the balls to ask if I really liked him? Four nights with him and virtually every single moment of my spare time?
Ah, duh.

He was silent for a moment before tentatively asking, “So the blindness doesn’t bother you?”

It was an issue we seemed to keep coming back to, so I made sure I was very clear in my answer. “Baby, it is a part of you. If you ask me if I wish you weren’t blind, then the answer would be yes, of course I wish that you could see. But you can’t, so it’s a dumb thing to ask. Anyway, if you weren’t blind, then you wouldn’t be who you are now. You would be someone different and our paths probably would never have crossed.

“But if you’re asking me if I dislike you because you’re blind, then that’s a different type of question. I like you
despite
your blindness. Yes, it can be a pain sometimes and yes, I have to make special allowances for you because of your blindness, but those things are not an obstacle to me lo… liking you or seeing you.” I stumbled over the
love
word. I wasn’t ready to admit that yet, even to myself. “But it’s something I take as a part of the package that is Patrick. It’s the same as if I was dating someone who was allergic to seafood. We probably wouldn’t be eating fish and chips at Kailis Brothers or going fishing, but there are plenty of other things we can do.”

He seemed to think about it for a while. “I just don’t want you to get… tired… upset….” He was having trouble finding the word he wanted. Ultimately he settled on: “Angry. Angry at having to put up with me.”

“Like the guy who dumped you?” I queried with sudden foresight.

“Yeah.”

“Patti-cake, it’s almost universal that untruths are hurled during a messy breakup. Whatever the slimebag said to you at that time is going to be a big fat lie, or at least a half truth. You should discount anything he said. He may’ve had a problem with your blindness, but I’m sure that every boyfriend you’ve had hasn’t found it to be a glitch.”

His answer was almost too quiet to hear. “Only one boyfriend.”

I blinked in the darkness. One boyfriend? Patrick was older than me, and even as bad as I am, I’d had at least five boyfriends. “One? Who? You mean the arsehole who trashed your house a couple of weeks back that I had to clean up? Because that sort of stuff pisses me off. You could’ve hurt yourself badly.”

And that mess reminded me of a certain blue silicone butt plug that I still had tucked away in the laundry. How the fuck was I going to bring up that subject?

Thinking of the plug made me think of places that little monster could’ve been and I was distracted for a moment, not realizing that Patrick hadn’t answered my question. The guy had gone stiff in my arms, his breathing shallow. “Patrick?” I asked in confusion. “What is it?”

“I… I don’t know how… to tell you….” He paused. “I’m sure you’re going to hate me if I tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“About the guy… guys… who were here that weekend.”

Hang on! Guys? As in plural? As in more than one? At the same time? As in it
was
a freakin’ orgy?
My estimation of Patrick’s pulling power rose another six notches.

“Holy shit, Patrick! How many guys did you have in your bed that weekend? And why in the hell would I hate you for it? I hadn’t even met you at that stage.”

Patrick was still as stiff as a board in my arms and he rolled away. I wasn’t having any of that and firmly yanked him back until we were plastered up against each other, chest to back, crotch to butt. He sighed once and sagged back in my arms. “You’ll hate me because… because you have made your views clear on the matter.”

“What matter?” Did I even have clear views in any matter? Every time I voted I still just numbered the boxes in any order I felt like on the day. I didn’t think I had any firm beliefs.

“Prostitution,” he sighed.

“Prostitution?” I was beginning to sound like a bloody parrot. My brain was whirling, leapfrogging ahead to whatever Patrick was going to tell me that would make me hate him.

I felt him swallow. “You’ve already made your views clear about people who pay for sex. You were so angry when you thought I was offering to pay you.”

“Whoa! Hold up, Mighty Mouse,” I huffed. The pieces fell into place and I could’ve smacked myself for it. “Are you saying you
paid
someone to have sex with you?”

“Yeah. Two guys.”

“Together?” I asked, completely floored. My cock, which I thought was thoroughly sated for the night, twitched at the image.

“Uh… yeah.”

“Well, damn! That’s so sexy!”

Patrick pulled completely out of my arms and scrambled off the bed. I could see him in the glow of the moonlight as he stalked toward the bathroom, entirely at ease in the dark where I would’ve been stumbling around.

“Patrick? Where are you going?” I called, confused as to what was going on. People always say that men are bad communicators, so how in the hell was a gay relationship ever to survive?

I could hear him mumbling to himself in the bathroom and the toilet flush before the tap was turned on. When he reappeared, he had a bathrobe wrapped around his body. I could tell from the sharp movements of his body that he was angry.

“I don’t get you,” he snapped at me. “I tell you I paid two hot guys for sex, and you think that’s sexy? Yet you nearly threw me out the window a couple of days ago when you thought I was offering to pay
you
for sex?”

I sat up, pulling the sheet around my waist. “Keep your knickers on! I was angry when I thought you were offering to pay me for sex, firstly because I never signed on to be a hooker, and secondly because you pay me less than twenty bucks an hour. I betcha you paid your guys more than that. And I know they were here for a while because I had to clean up pizza and beers.”

“Of course I did!”

I was amazingly calm. Maybe all that sex had worn me out. “And you didn’t coerce them or force them or hurt them, did you?”

“No!” he shouted.

“Were you safe?”

“Yes!”

“Did you enjoy yourself?”

His lips twitched. “Yes. But not as much as I enjoy it with you.”
Ka-thunk. That was my heart that just fell on the floor.

“Then it’s okay.”

“It is?”

“Absolutely. As long as you don’t do it again while I’m in your bed.” Silence descended on us then, and I shivered a bit in the night air. “So…. Uh…. Can you come back to bed now?”

Still, he hesitated, not coming back to me but not running away either. “If I do, will you allow me to tell you about them… him… Mark?”

I was torn. Did I want to hear about Patrick and another man? On one hand it sounded sexy and hot, but on the other hand I didn’t know if my fragile heart could take the risk without getting furiously jealous.

Patrick must’ve taken my silence for refusal. He rushed on. “I just want to explain about how and why…. Not details of the night or anything. I don’t want to…. What we have is twenty times better than that anyway.”

I couldn’t refuse him anything. “Were the guys really hot?”

“Yes.”

“And you did them… together…?”

His face screwed up in what I thought could’ve been amusement. “Does the thought make you turned on?”

“Come over here and check that out for yourself,” I invited in a sultry voice.

He laughed but did my bidding. He shed the robe and climbed back into my arms, wriggling his bottom on my half-mast cock before starting his story. “It was Max who introduced me to the escort agency.”

I hugged him tighter, knowing that he didn’t find this easy but that for some reason he needed to tell me. “Max?” I queried. “Was Max into a bit of masculine flesh too?”

Patrick chuckled. “No. Max was 100 percent straight. He was a rich man and paid for top class girls to entertain him. The type of girl who he could throw out of the house in the morning and they wouldn’t expect a phone call or a marriage proposal. Max hated commitment. But he loved me, so he bought me a girl for my eighteenth birthday and told her to educate me.”

I snorted. “How did that work out?”

I had to imagine the wry smile on his face since it was dark in the room. “Not so well. Max obviously didn’t know I was gay—hey, I wasn’t even sure. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity for a blind gay boy from a sheltered, rich background to experiment. So when Lydia turned up, I thought I’d have a go. See for sure, if you know what I mean.”

“And?”

“I think I pretty much worked out in the first ten minutes that Lydia wasn’t the one for me. She worked it out too. She was really nice about it. The escort agency doesn’t employ just any old whore off the street. Their employees are guaranteed clean, educated, and of a high degree of class and niceness. She asked me flat out if I was gay. I think I stumbled and mumbled a bit, but she got the gist that Max didn’t know so made a discreet phone call and then told me Erica was on her way.”

“Erica?” I asked, perplexed at the turn in the story.

Patrick continued. “I remember being terrified and confused myself. The doorbell went and Lydia went downstairs. I heard Max ask what was going on, but she just laughed and said that I needed two women to satisfy me. Then I heard Erica speak and the sound of her high heels on the stairs. I was sure they were going to do something ghastly to me, but the minute Erica stepped inside the room, I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“I could smell her… him. Erica was actually Eric but he was feminine enough to pass Max’s scrutiny.”

I chuckled and kissed the back of his neck. “And did Erica show you a good time?”

He shuddered at the memory. “God, yes. And then I knew for sure I was definitely gay, but that rather limited my choices in sexual partners. I was at university and meeting plenty of people, plenty of guys, but how was I to work out who was gay and which of them would put up with me? There was a guy in one of my classes with whom I fooled around a couple of times, but he was far in the closet and didn’t call me back. So I used to pay for Erica to come over every couple of months, or when I needed a partner for a social function. He’s a great guy—sophisticated and well-educated and I’d pay him to take me out, not just for sex. Eric’s out of the business now and has a husband and baby son all of his own, but we’re still good friends. I managed to tell Max that I was gay and he had a good laugh about the Erica/Eric business.”

Hmm. I think that is jealousy in my stomach.

“Then I met Seb. He’s the son of one of Max’s good friends. We were kind of set up on a blind date and I fell for him pretty hard. We saw each other for over a year before he got tired of looking after me.”

I broke in at this point. “Patrick, when you’re in a relationship with someone, it’s not looking after them, it’s caring for them. Helping them. If this Seb guy was too selfish to see that, then he wasn’t worth five minutes of your time.”

I felt him swallow. “I guess.”

I tried to lighten the atmosphere with humor. “Hmm. You guess? I’ll have to work on your attitude again. Shall I write it in bullet points and leave it in the laundry?”

He shrugged but I could feel him smile.

“So, come on now. Finish your story so we can get some sleep.”

Patrick rolled over in my arms so he was facing me, our legs tangled together under the covers. “So, then for the last seven years since Seb dumped me, it has just been a couple of one-night stands and Erica, who then introduced me to Mark. Mark was new at the agency and needed to work up his client list, and when Eric was leaving he hooked us up. Mark’s studying engineering and works for the agency to pay his bills until he has graduated. He’s really nice—caring and polite and… well, sexy as all fuck. He isn’t even gay, which sometimes can make the situation hotter. He’s willing to do anything you want him to. But at the end of the night, he’s paid, which doesn’t always make you feel good.”

Caring and polite?
The man who left Patrick’s house in a pigsty wasn’t caring and polite.

“So I called up Mark every couple of months and that’s pretty much my sex life; then something strange happened.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. I got this new housekeeper who smelled divine, gave me hot, horny fantasies for weeks, and cleaned my house better than anyone before him.”

I smiled into the darkness. “Yeah? Who is this paragon?”

“So I’d come home and I’d spend the whole night with an erection that couldn’t be satisfied and this paragon wouldn’t change his scent and help me with my misery. And worse than that, he did everything so perfectly in his job, I couldn’t even demand that he be fired.”

My tone was full of mock sympathy. “Poor you. So what did you do?”

“So I called up Mark and told him to come around, and that he’d better bring a friend because it was going to take something really special to banish the smell of my new housekeeper from my memory.”

My body was crying out for sleep but I couldn’t help myself. I ran my hands down his stomach until I found his semi-erect cock and began to massage. “So did this Mark bring a friend? Did they help banish this poor new housekeeper?”

Patrick was fully erect in my hand now, arching his back so he could push his flesh further into my hand. “Mark brought another guy and it didn’t work. My new housekeeper had some sort of super powers and it was a total waste of two thousand dollars.”