Too Stupid to Live(Romancelandia) (15 page)

He managed to sleep the rest of the night after that.

When Ian woke up in the morning, Sam wasn’t there. It surprised the hell out of him and left him feeling strangely flat. He looked at the pillow Sam had used—on the opposite side from where he’d fallen asleep, but it had a head indent and a straight dirty-blond hair on the white case—and tried to figure out what this meant.

He had no problem understanding why Sam wasn’t there. He was trying to determine why he felt flat inside. Because he’d achieved some of that elusive “emotional connectedness”? If he had, it was overrated.

He heard a sound and rolled onto his back to see Sam standing in the doorway and looking at him. Ian was ridiculously relieved.

“Morning,” Sam said. He didn’t look nervous, exactly; he looked out of place and confused, like a startled fawn.

Maybe he looked more like a newborn calf. It was cute. All big, blinking eyes, long nose, and spindly limbs. Ian stared until Sam turned away, cheeks pinking up. He cleared his throat. “Morning. How long have you been up?”

“An hour. I needed to get some writing in.” Sam seemed mildly out of it still. He wandered into the room, stopping when he met Ian’s eyes in the mirror on the closet door.

“You’re in school, right?” Ian propped his head on his hand, truly, surprisingly curious.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I’m getting my Master of Fine Arts in writing.” His face in the mirror looked resigned. He
sounded
resigned.

“Isn’t that what Nik has?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t sound very happy about it.”

Sam grimaced in the mirror. Ian thought he would have to prod him—
and just why am I asking him about this
?—but Sam said, “I sometimes think I’d rather get a doctorate in literature.”

That right there should have been a conversation killer. Ian didn’t know literature from graffiti, and he’d never found his life lacking because of it. “So get that instead. As far as I can tell, a degree in writing doesn’t make you highly employable.”

Sam snorted softly. “Neither does a doctorate in literature.”

“Life’s too short to get the degree someone else wants you to get, only to hit your thirties and realize you don’t care what they think anymore. Do what you want. You gotta be able to get a decent job with a doctorate.”
Hell
. Like that wasn’t a revealing thing to say.

Sam turned around to look at him directly. “Is that what you did?’

“Yeah.”

They stared at each other silently while Ian steeled himself for questions.

“Want some coffee? I found it and made some.”

Ian opened his mouth, but nothing came out for a second. Then, “Uh, sure.”

Sam brought him coffee with a splash of milk. How did he know that’s how Ian liked it? Most people assumed he was a black coffee kind of guy. He usually took it black in public because somehow needing that splash of milk seemed like a weakness.

Sam sat on the bed next to him, took a sip of his own coffee, set it down, and asked nervously, “Can I look at your back?”

Ian rolled onto his side silently, more to avoid looking at Sam than as an answer.

A few seconds passed before he felt Sam’s fingertips on his skin. In his mind, he followed their progress tracing his healed wounds. The swirly burned patch below his left shoulder, then the rough patch closer to his spine. Sam worked his way down, and it didn’t feel awful. When he traced the surgical scar along Ian’s lower back, Ian blurted, “I thought you’d left.”

Sam’s hand stilled. “Huh?”

“When I woke up and you weren’t here in bed.”

“Should I have left?” Sam asked uncertainly, hand hovering just over the scar.

“No.” Ian added an indifferent shrug.

Sam’s hand settled on him again, and Ian let his eyes drift shut while Sam’s fingertips mapped his injuries. It was sort of lulling.

“Do you ever talk about what happened?”

“No,” Ian said reflexively. “I was in an accident at work.”

“You already told me that.” The mild exasperation in his voice made Ian smile. He liked Sam with attitude. Sam stretched out on the bed behind him and continued touching him, retracing areas he’d already visited. It almost felt like a caress.

“It’s a dumb story. The fire was dumb; I was dumb. It’s embarrassing.” Ian sighed. In for a penny or whatever . . . “I got hit by a car on fire.”

“
What
?”

Exactly the response he’d expected. Ian laughed shortly, but Sam’s hand never stopped moving on his back, which must have been why he went on. “I was the Battalion Chief on duty that night. Morning, rather; I guess it was a little after two. Anyway, they tapped out a car fire behind a strip mall. Engine nine went, and they reported a fully involved Volkswagen bus. I figured someone stole a van and torched it when they were done with their joyride. Normal shit.”

“But it wasn’t.” Sam’s hand rubbed circles on his lower back, as if the skin there was the same as any other skin. “What does ‘tapped out’ mean?”

“It’s slang for broadcasting tones.” That probably wasn’t much clearer. “Every time emergency vehicles are sent to a scene, tones precede the information given by the dispatcher to open the radios at the correct station. Like an audio key for the station.”

“Oh. ’Kay.” Ian suspected Sam didn’t really understand. “So . . . ‘fully involved’ means it was engulfed in flames?”

“Yeah. They didn’t report the year of the van. As I pulled up, they put the hose on it, and it just exploded.”

Sam didn’t say anything, tracing the ribs in Ian’s back now.

“The bus was late sixties, and the engine was on fire. Those engines are made of magnesium, which burns in water—it burns anything with oxygen in it. Magnesium will just break the chemical bond and feed the fire with the oxygen atoms.”

“Oh,” Sam said softly. “Chemistry.”

Ian snorted. “Yeah, chemistry. The guys weren’t awake or something, I don’t know. So I jumped out of the command unit without putting on my turnouts—my protective gear. The captain started yelling at the kid on the nozzle, but it took a few seconds before we yanked him off. So then we were standing there, laughing at him, and the stupid thing was still on fire. Geller smothered it with a fire extinguisher, and all of a sudden the vehicle started rolling.”

Sam’s fingers stopped. “It could still roll?”

“Yeah. Came right for us. I guess we ran, I don’t remember, but it hit me in the back. It was out, but still hot. Geller said after I was down, the wheel rolled right over my ass and kept going until it hit the green strip. Blunt force trauma with a red-hot ’68 Volkswagen does some damage. I was lying in this pass-through behind a grocery store and there was gravel in my cheek, and I could see lights streaming across wet pavement. That’s what I remember. Didn’t even hurt. You know when you get third-degree burns, it sometimes doesn’t hurt because all the nerves are cauterized? All the lesser burns around it hurt, and when you start healing it hurts like hell, but at first I couldn’t feel much of anything.”

Ian craned his neck to watch Sam over his shoulder. And oh fuck, he’d said a lot. It was all over Sam’s face. Ian didn’t want to see that expression, because it meant he felt something for Ian. Pity and horror and—he started to get up, but Sam grabbed him, skinny bicep squeezing tight around his chest. Ian’s heart pounded under Sam’s palm, and Sam’s arm felt like another band of steel—an external one to match the internal one that he’d swear was wrapped around his ribs right now.

“Sam, I gotta . . .” he croaked. The kid let him go, slowly.

Ian didn’t get up. It was the weirdest thing. He simply lay there and soaked in Sam’s body heat.

It was soothing.

After a while, Sam’s fingers traced his scars again, hesitantly at first. They didn’t talk, and Ian ignored his coffee, but the room stopped closing in on him.

He wouldn’t think about why it was all right to tell that story to Sam.

Sam dropped a kiss on his shoulder. Ian sighed, closed his eyes, and felt Sam’s light touch on his back, making him shiver. Or possibly making his skin crawl, he wasn’t sure. Not an unpleasant sort of crawling—some stimulating mix of exhilaration and apprehension.

Sam slid his arm back around Ian and pulled himself closer. It was almost like cuddling, but what the hell. If it made Sam happy to almost-cuddle him like that, fine. He
had
seemed pretty freaked out by Ian’s story. The kid probably needed some reassurance. He could deal with it if it made Sam feel better.

He could feel how much Sam liked the cuddling in the ridge of his hardening erection. Sam wriggled his hips until he was teasing Ian’s crack with it, and Sam was breathing light and fast.

“You wanna fuck me, Sam?”

Sam froze. “You’d let me?” he squeaked.

Would he? “Yeah, sure, why not? I already kissed you.”

Sam giggled, and it was too cute not to smile about.

“I don’t want to right now,” Sam said eventually, still rubbing up against Ian. Was that Ian’s cue to roll over and start something? He didn’t. He felt warm and lazy now—post-adrenaline lassitude. Now that they weren’t talking about the accident and the kid’s shivery-crawly fingers had stopped.

His touch had felt kind of like a massage: a little uncomfortable while it lasted, but afterward a guy could relax more. Ian pushed back lazily into Sam’s hips, and Sam gusted breath against the nape of his neck.

“Ian,” Sam whispered, tracing circles on Ian’s chest, between his pecs, playing with the hair. He waited to see what else Sam would do.

Sam circled his nipple with those shivery-crawly fingertips, and this time Ian was less conflicted about whether it felt good or not. He pushed his hips back into Sam again, reflexively this time.

Sam hesitated. “You want me to stop?”

“No.”

Sam worked his hand down Ian’s body in small circles, sliding under the blankets at his waist, making Ian start when cool air slipped in with him. But then his fingers were tracing Ian’s belly button, and there was enough heat to go around.

It took next to forever for Sam to follow the trail of hair down to his dick. Ian had expected it, but he still gasped when Sam’s fingers circled the base of his prick. Sam’s touch changed from light to firm as he stroked Ian.

For a kid who’d never seen a foreskin before, Sam was a fast learner. He laid his talented fingertips on the skin covering Ian’s head and worked it, sliding over and back, occasionally squeezing, wiggling his dick between Ian’s cheeks, panting against the back of Ian’s neck like he was the one getting a handjob.

It was uncomfortably exciting. Ian wasn’t used to being the passive one, but Sam’s hand was too tight and moved too perfectly to stop, so Ian managed to ignore his discomfort.

More like he rode the naughtiness of not being in control like a rollercoaster. He reached back and gripped Sam’s hip tight, pulling him into his ass, telling Sam with his body not to stop. It was a hell of a ride, and coming in Sam’s hand felt like going through three upside-down death spirals in a row, especially with Sam’s cum dripping off his lower back and Sam’s mouth all over Ian’s neck.

Ian rolled onto his back, letting the sheets soak up the wet stuff, and gave up the pretense Sam was the only cuddler here by pulling the kid onto his chest. He rested, feeling Sam’s breath on his skin slow from panting to sleep.

Crazy how the kid fell asleep seconds after coming. How did he jerk off in the shower?

Whatever
. Ian let Sam’s weight sink into him, drifting off himself within minutes.

When Sam woke up in Ian’s bed the second time, the air tasted different.
That makes no sense
. Regardless, Sam lay still, savoring the change. Something had happened between him and Ian that wasn’t purely sexual. Very carefully—because it seemed fragile and translucent—he put whatever it was aside in his mind, resolving not to think about it right now.

Ian wasn’t in bed with him. Occasional noises filtered into the bedroom from somewhere close by. Maybe the bathroom Sam had found on his explorations earlier, while Ian had slept. He rolled over to see the bathroom door shut, but the bedroom door was open, and he could see the arm of Ian’s couch and a slice of the mission-style coffee table.