Violated (5 page)

It wasn’t that Russ wasn’t welcome at his sister’s on holidays, but most of the people he worked with had families of their own. Russ usually volunteered for holiday coverage to help them out. So it was his own fault he ended up alone. Still, it sucked.

At least he was invited to Shannon’s next weekend. That should help him shake these blues.

He opened the screen door and called out, “Come on, buddy. Let’s take a leak before bed.” The shepherd was a little sluggish getting off the couch—it was past his bedtime too—but he thumped down onto the hardwood floor and came outside. “It’ll be a bonding experience,” Russ reassured him. “You’re too young to drink a beer with me.”

D
EREK
LET
himself and Gracie into the dark, empty cabin and saw the answering machine flashing in the kitchenette. He went to look at it and saw there were nine messages.
Jesus
. Taking a deep breath, he hit play and listened through them. They were all from Tim, of course. Once he got it into his head he wanted to talk to someone, he obsessed on it until he reached them. To make matters worse, Derek had forgotten to take his cell phone to Russ’s. He usually grabbed it whenever he left the house, but walking the short distance down the hill to the neighbor’s hadn’t felt the same as “leaving,” so he hadn’t bothered.

The messages started out angry, but by the time he’d reached the last one, Derek detected a note of anxiety in Tim’s voice, as if he thought Derek might actually be thinking of leaving him over this latest argument. Derek didn’t feel any pleasure at the thought. He hadn’t been ignoring Tim to make him “pay” for his behavior. The last thing he wanted was more tension between them.

He picked up the landline and dialed.

When Tim answered, he sounded small and frightened. “Hello?”

“Hey, hon.”

“Why have you been ignoring my calls?” Tim asked. He sounded as if he’d been crying, and Derek wished he could take him into his arms and soothe him.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t ignoring you, hon. I just forgot to take my cell phone with me when I went out.”

“Where were you?”

Derek took a deep breath. He didn’t want to stir up the argument again, but he couldn’t think of a plausible explanation other than the truth. He certainly couldn’t claim to have been out shopping until midnight, even if he’d stopped to eat. “Gracie and I were down the hill at Russ’s,” he said, bracing himself for the explosion. “He was grilling burgers, and then we watched a crappy movie.”

“You were at Russ’s?” Derek could hear the surge of jealousy in Tim’s voice.

“Nothing happened,” he replied, growing irritated. “We ate. We watched a movie. That’s all.”

“What movie?”

“
Independence Day
.”

Tim was silent for a long time. When he spoke again, Derek was surprised to find the note of anxiety back in his voice, as if the fight had gone out of him. “Will you come be with me tonight? I don’t want to sleep alone.”

“You don’t want to come back to the cabin?”

“I’d rather you come back to the condo. Please?”

Derek sighed. “All right. Let me shut everything up here, and then I’ll head back home.”

“Thanks, hon. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

D
EREK
PANTED
into Tim’s ear as he thrust into him, burying himself to the hilt and causing a low, animalistic growl to rise up in his fiancé’s chest. This was when things were best between them, when they were lost in ecstasy and passion, when Tim’s heat enveloped his cock and pulled him in deep.

When they didn’t talk.

Unfortunately it couldn’t last forever. Derek felt his orgasm building, and he stroked Tim frantically to make him come at the same moment. They’d stopped using condoms after they got engaged, at Tim’s insistence. It still made Derek a little uncomfortable, but he had to admit the intimacy he felt as he released, as the man he loved accepted all of him into his body, was overwhelming. It always brought tears to his eyes.

He sometimes wondered what it would be like—being the one to take his lover inside him, to feel his body filled as he filled Tim’s. But then all the vile words from his childhood came back to haunt him: pansy, queer, fruit, fairy. “You can let a guy suck your cock,” one of his friends—Mason—had told him when they were fourteen. “You can even fuck him. You’re still a man if you do that. But if you take it up the ass, you’re a faggot. There’s no going back.”

Derek knew it wasn’t true. He knew being the receptive partner in anal sex didn’t make a man any less of a man. The idea was ridiculous. It was just stupid, homophobic bullshit—the fear that a man might magically turn into a woman if another man fucked him. And of course, that was just misogyny, plain and simple. He knew that, but the thought of a guy fucking him still brought on cold sweats. He hadn’t even wanted to do it to Tim when they first started dating. It had seemed so… degrading. But Tim had pushed him, and eventually he’d gotten past that. But he was grateful Tim never pushed him to be on the bottom. He couldn’t do that. He just… couldn’t.

Even as he lay there, holding Tim in his arms and attempting to catch his breath, Tim was already pushing him away. “You need to shower if you don’t want to be late for work.”

Derek hesitated, then reluctantly said, “Yeah,” and pulled out.

Tim showered after Derek did, and they ate breakfast together in chill silence. Things had been rough between them for the past several days. The subject of Derek’s evening with Russ was best avoided altogether. But the trip to Florida was an even bigger sore spot. Tim had accepted that Derek was going, but he was definitely
not
happy about it.

The trip was likely to be boring as hell—discussions about how to integrate the support department in the new acquisition in Tampa with the one in New Hampshire—and Derek hated flying. He was only going for Victor’s sake. But that was the problem, of course. Victor. It didn’t seem to matter that Victor was straight. He’d been friends with Derek longer than Tim had, he was Derek’s workout buddy, and Tim knew he wasn’t at all shy about showering and dressing in front of Derek. Derek had foolishly made a joke about thinking Victor was kind of hot—which he was, if he looked past what a disgusting pig Victor could be—and Tim seemed convinced the two of them were going to discover the joy of hot man-on-man action in the shower any day now.

Derek would be leaving directly from work to go to the airport that afternoon, so he attempted to kiss Tim good-bye on his way out the door. Tim turned away, so the best Derek could do was kiss his cheek. “I’ll see you on Saturday, hon.”

“Sure.”

I
N
SOME
ways, having a dog was just like having a kid. Russ couldn’t leave the poor guy locked in the cabin all day while he was working. He was away about ten hours a day, from 2:00 p.m. till midnight, when he figured in commute time. Max didn’t need to be crated—he was fine wandering free in the house, now that he’d gotten past his book-chewing phase—but ten hours was too long to go without companionship or being let outside to pee.

He’d looked into doggy day care, but the problem with those places was they expected him to pick Max up in the middle of his shift. So he’d had to hire one of the neighbor kids to come around once a day to let Max out for a bathroom break and some fresh air.

The other problem with getting off work so late was it pretty much killed his social life. But that was okay. Russ wasn’t a particularly social guy. He enjoyed chatting with his coworkers, but he’d long ago figured out there was no one in the department he could date—that whole having-to-be-gay thing—and there was only one male officer he considered to be more than just a casual acquaintance. Toby was a cool guy, and they’d hung out together a few times on their days off, gone to movies, stuff like that. Toby sometimes even hugged him, which was a little weird, considering he was married to a woman and didn’t show any other signs of being
interested
. He really did seem straight. Russ had to assume the hugging was to prove he was cool with Russ being gay, or something like that. He went out to dinner occasionally with his partner, Romina Chavez, but of course, she was female.

At any rate, that was Russ’s social life, such as it was—coworkers during the day, a straight guy some days off who touched him just enough to get his motor going, and then home to Internet porn so his dick wouldn’t forget what it was for.

Tonight, as he sat in a lawn chair at the end of his dock with Max curled up at his feet, Russ couldn’t help thinking about Derek. He hadn’t seen him since the Fourth—the cabin had been locked up when he and Max walked by the next afternoon. He hoped Derek hadn’t gotten too much shit from Tim about spending the evening there. It had been perfectly innocent, after all, even if Russ had a few not-so-innocent thoughts about Derek during it. The looks he imagined he’d been getting from Derek had probably been just that—his imagination.

And if they were real?
Well, nothing had happened. And nothing was
going
to happen. That was the important thing. Russ wasn’t the kind of guy who tried to seduce men away from their fiancés, and he wasn’t interested in the kind of guy who would
cheat
on his fiancé. So whatever may or may not have been going through his and Derek’s minds that evening… that was the end of it.

A small muted sound like a distant gunshot announced the appearance of a trail of fire across the night sky. It disappeared for just a moment, and then the firework exploded in a dome of sparkling gold and green tendrils like a flaming jellyfish. Far be it from the citizens of New Hampshire to let unused fireworks go to waste. They’d be shooting them off for another week, at least. Max whimpered and edged closer to him, his ears laid flat.

“It’s okay, Max,” Russ said soothingly as he stood up. “Let’s go inside.”

It was going to be a challenge when they went to visit his sister in a few days. Her husband had promised to shoot off some fireworks for everyone’s entertainment.

Poor Max.

D
EREK
WAS
hating every minute of this trip. The plane had been claustrophobic and uncomfortable, the airport had been about a million miles long and noisy as hell, and the hotel had forgotten to clean the room before they arrived. That meant waiting another twenty minutes in the restaurant downstairs, downing a beer while bad amateur singers tormented them on the bar television.

He’d been pleasantly surprised to learn that Victor didn’t snore, but that only mildly compensated for the fact the guy insisted on using the toilet with the bathroom door wide open. He also walked around in the nude before bed. That wasn’t exactly surprising, but Derek hoped to hell Tim never found out about it. Not that he was doing anything wrong. While Victor wasn’t bad to look at, Derek had seen it all before at the gym. He wasn’t ogling, he wasn’t lusting in his heart, and he certainly wasn’t touching. But of course, Tim would assume he was—all of the above.

T
HE
NEXT
day, Victor introduced him to the Tampa crew. They were polite but reserved, as if they were expecting to be laid off at any moment. Considering the fact that most of the sales staff
had
been laid off after the acquisition, that wasn’t an unreasonable concern. But Jack wanted to integrate the Tampa staff with the staff in Portsmouth—the phone techs in New Hampshire were overworked as it was without taking on a new product to support. So Victor was there to make sure that happened.

Unfortunately, after listening in on several support calls over the next few hours, Derek became convinced of one thing: these people
were
in danger of losing their jobs. They were disorganized and poorly trained, and their phone skills were dreadful. Listening to the way some of them talked to customers made his skin crawl. When one customer mentioned he was from Dallas, the support analyst replied, “Dallas, huh? Boy I remember the last time I was in Dallas. There was this strip club down on Plano Road where the girls….” And it just kept getting worse from there. To a
customer
!

After the call ended, Derek quietly suggested that what strippers inserted into various parts of their anatomy might not be the best topic of discussion on a support call. Calvin, the support rep, responded, “Well, I don’t know about the customers
you
guys deal with, but ours like to keep things informal. You know… friendly, relaxed.”

“I appreciate that,” Derek said, “but you can still be friendly and professional.”

“I solved his problem, didn’t I?”

Derek had to admit he had. But what he didn’t say was anybody with a little computer experience could have told the customer what the problem was. It had been a simple corrupt file issue.

D
EREK
CALLED
Tim from the hotel bar the second evening of his trip. It was a short conversation. Tim barely said a word, and when Derek told him, “I love you,” Tim merely responded, “Okay.”

Derek hung up and dropped his cell phone into his pocket with a deep sigh.

“Trouble with the boyfriend?” Victor asked, amused.

“Fiancé.” It irritated him that Victor refused to use the word, as if he didn’t consider the relationship serious enough to merit it.

Victor ignored the correction. “This trip is such a waste of time. These guys don’t need to be ‘integrated.’ They don’t know shit. Integrating them with our guys will just dumb us down. We’d be better off firing them and hiring people who can do the job!”

Derek had to admit he more or less agreed. The Tampa team needed a lot of work to get them up to the standards of the Portsmouth office. Though as someone still in the trenches, he felt some loyalty to his fellow support people, regardless of how unprofessional they might be. “We could fly them up to New Hampshire for training,” he suggested.