Warders, Volume One Page 23

  “What are you so scared of?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Simon.” His breath hitched. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  I cleared my throat. “I just don’t wanna be one more thing you hafta deal with.”

  He was silent.

  “Leith?”

  “For crissakes, Simon, you’re the only thing I have that’s mine. Everything else is just….” He trailed off. “But you, I chose you.”

  And he had and I finally got that. His whole life, everything, all of it except me, had been thrust upon him. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah, so can you come home and take care of me?”

  He sucked in his breath. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.

  “Please?”

  “Yes,” he said, voice cracking with relief, grateful for my admission. “I’ll be right there. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Where would I go?” I teased him, trying to lighten the mood. “I’m already home.”

  He hung up and I sighed deeply. I was so glad I didn’t have to finish getting dressed. After I pulled on a pair of sweats and an old T-shirt, I walked into the kitchen and looked out at the pouring rain. It was nice because I loved rain, how soothing it was, but it also reminded me of Leith, and thinking about him was always good.

  Six months ago I had been on my way home and it had been raining, so I ducked into an art gallery until it cleared up. Since I was expected for drinks with a big group, I had no intention of staying, but I was immediately struck by what I saw. The wrought iron sculptures were dark and almost angry, and as I strolled the exhibit, Transgressions, it was called, I found myself enjoying the gothic, masculine feel of the creations. I had been in many galleries in the city, but this one was new to me, and I was suddenly very glad that I’d found it.

  “What do you think?”

  I turned, and there was a man, just slightly taller than me, broad shoulders, lean waist, and long legs. He was muscular but not overly so, toned, defined, with sharp features and an angular face. His curly hair drew my eye; it was long and dirty-blond, thick and messy, and tumbling past his shoulders down to the middle of his back. It looked wet, like he had been outside in the rain.

  “You just get here?” I asked, smiling at him.

  “No.” His deep-blue-sea eyes got wide. “Why?”

  “You got caught in the rain.” I gestured at his hair.

  “Oh no.” He shook his head. “I was at work before I got here, so I had to clean up and make myself presentable.”

  He was fresh from the shower, which was why he smelled so good, like soap combined with some sort of citrus scent. I wanted to inhale him and see if his skin was still warm underneath his clothes.

  “Do you like them?” he asked, licking his lush bottom lip almost nervously.

  I had no idea what we… were… talk….

  “Do you like the sculptures?”

  The way he was looking at me was making it hard to concentrate on anything else. There was hope there, and innocence, and interest, and it was a little overwhelming two seconds after you met a person. I needed to get ahold of myself.

  “Do you?”

  “I-I think they’re actually sort of spooky,” I told him honestly, getting my bearings. “And yeah, I like ’em a lot.”

  Those eyes of his, framed with dark-blond lashes, searched mine. I noticed the freckles on his nose and dimples covered by the fine stubble on his cheeks. “You think the sculptures are scary, but you still like them?”

  “I do,” I confessed, stepping around him, moving to the next piece of art and the next, following the trail down the hall and through the maze. I wanted to see how creepy it was all going to get, take the full tour.

  “Which sculpture do you like best?” he asked from behind me.

  “Why?” I smiled, looking over my shoulder at him.

  “I’ll give it to you.”

  “Why would you do that? Isn’t the point of this for you to sell your work?”

  “How’d you know I was the artist?”

  “Because you just offered me anything I wanted,” I said, watching him as he walked around in front of me.

  “Oh yeah.” He grinned sheepishly.

  “And even if you hadn’t, usually only the artist walks up to total strangers and asks them what they think. It’s like your art is your kid, you want to know what everyone thinks.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty lame; we’re all a little too externally motivated.”

  I shrugged. “Who doesn’t like to hear praise?”

  “But what if people hate it?”

  “That’s the risk you take if you put it out there.”

  “It’s still stupid.”

  “It’s human,” I corrected him, moving on, looking at the next piece, watching as they got more twisted, more sinister. “Christ,” I breathed out when I entered the next room. It was dark, with strange, red-dappled lighting, and I had the feeling I was at the aftermath of a gory battle.

  “You keep walking away,” he said, and I felt his breath on the back of my neck.

  I turned, and he was close, right behind me, eyes glinting in the darkness. He was just slightly taller than my own six one, so our eyes met and locked.

  “I wanted to see how it turned out.”

  “What?”

  “The fight,” I told him, turning back to the pieces. “You said you came here from work. What do you do besides the art?”

  “I’m a welder,” he said, moving to stand beside me. His hands were shoved down in the pockets of his jeans; the sweater vest over the dress shirt looked strange on him, like he should be in board shorts instead, checking out the swells. I wondered what a surfer was doing so far up the coast.

  “A welder,” I repeated, glancing around before looking back at him. “You’re not a soldier? This strikes me as fighting, as good versus evil, that sort of thing.”

  He nodded and reached out and took hold of the lapel of my suit jacket. “There’s no way you’re gonna believe this, but I swear it’s the truth,” he said as his eyes flicked to mine. “I never talk to anybody at these things, I don’t, it’s not me, but… I…. When you came in and you were really looking at the art, not just here to get out of the rain or—”

  “I did come in to get out of the rain,” I told him honestly.

  His shrug was cute. “Yeah, but then you started looking around, and I could tell when you started getting into it.”

  More than just the man’s artwork had me interested.

  “Would you maybe want to have dinner with me?”

  There was vulnerability in him, so that I didn’t doubt him for a minute. He didn’t pick up men; he wasn’t the type. He was shy and quiet but there was strength there too. I liked that.

  “I’m actually supposed to be meeting friends,” I told him regretfully.

  “Could you maybe not meet them?” he asked, curling a long piece of hair around his ear to keep it out of his eyes so he could see me.

  “Why?”

  His eyes studied my face. “I’m Leith,” he said, ignoring my question. “What’s your name?”

  “Simon.”

  “Simon.” He repeated it, and the sound from the back of his throat, achy, needy, was surprising. I stepped forward, into his space, and heard his breath catch.

  “Tell me what you want.”

  He swallowed hard and I saw it, saw the veins in his neck cord and watched the muscles in his jaw clench. I had never seen such raw, exposed need. I was surprised he wasn’t shivering with it.

  “Or just tell me what I can do,” I said, my voice dropping low, the shudder that finally ran through him making me smile.

  The strangled sound he made flipped my stomach over before he lunged at me. His lips sealed over mine, and I immediately felt his tongue pressing for entrance. I opened for him, and I heard his sharply drawn breath before he devoured my mouth. Heat tore through me, and I bucked forward into him when his hand suddenly groped
me through my dress pants.

  I pulled back because I couldn’t breathe and saw the aching desire all over his face.

  “This your thing? You attack guys at your gallery openings?”

  “I—”

  “You’re a twisted piece of work, man.” I grinned slyly.

  He shook his head. “No, listen… I’m not ever like… I’m not sure what’s happening.”

  Lust was what was happening, and since he was plainly not thinking straight, I fisted my hand in his sweater vest and yanked him after me. There was no protest given as I dragged him behind one of the movable partitions of the exhibit and shoved him up against a wall. He moaned as I pressed the painfully hard bulge in my dress pants against the crease of his ass.

  “Please,” he whimpered, squirming against me.

  “What do you want?”

  He shuddered hard, flattened his hands on the brick wall, and spread his legs. It was all the invitation I needed. I immediately went to work on his belt and had his jeans and briefs shucked down around his ankles seconds later. As my hands slid over his right cheek, he caught his breath.

  His ass was gorgeous, firm and round and muscular with appealing divots in each side. When I knelt behind him, spreading the cheeks so I could see his already fluttering pink hole, he moaned deep and loud.

  “What’re you… no, wait, you—God!”

  When my tongue licked over his opening, he jolted under my touch. Clearly he had not expected the deep rimming he was in for.

  “You shouldn’t do—”

  “Shut up,” I said, my voice full of gravel and heat. As I suspected, his sleek skin was still warm from the shower he had taken recently, and he smelled like soap but also, here, musky, earthy, and that was a great big turn-on. When I leaned in, licking and sucking, pushing my tongue in deeper with every stroke, tasting, the other hand moving around front to fist his cock, I heard a low groan of unmistakable, up-from-his-gut pleasure.

  “No one ever… ever… oh please.”

  I wished I had lube so there would just be the slip and slide, but what was on the condom in my breast pocket was all there was. So I pushed more saliva into his clasping channel and then added a finger. The ring of muscles was tight, but between my tongue and my persistent press inside of him, it slowly loosened. When I curled my finger forward and stroked over his gland, I heard the cry of longing.

  “Please.” His breath hitched, and I felt the surge of power wash through me. I was driving the beautiful, sensual man right out of his mind. “I’m gonna come if you don’t stop.”

  The threat had no effect on me whatsoever. I added a second finger that slid in easily, and as he levered back and forth against me, I began gently scissoring them apart inside him.

  Watching my fingers disappear into his tight round ass, over and over, was making it hard to breathe. I felt his muscles contracting, felt the velvety walls clenching around the invasion of my flesh inside his, and knew he was moments away from release.

  “I wanna come with you buried inside me,” he gasped. “Please… fuck me.”

  He was lucky I never left home, or my office, without a condom. I took some grief from friends, keeping a box of condoms in my top desk drawer, but you never knew where you could end up after work. I would never second-guess myself again.

  Letting him go, I moved fast, unbuckling my belt, working the zipper, and pushing my pants down just enough to let my hard, dripping cock out. I almost came just sheathing myself in latex, but the promise of his ass was too great. I wanted to be buried to my balls in him.

  “Please,” he whimpered, the begging so sweet from a man who had been mostly self-possessed when we were discussing his art just a short time before. Watching him come apart from my attention had me shaking.

  Hands on him, I lined up my dick with his hole, spread his cheeks, and shoved forward in one long, hard thrust, impaling him in a brutal plunge.

  “Simon!”

  That sounded good. My name torn from the man’s chest sounded very good.

  “Oh God, please.”

  The begging was not necessary. One hand in his thick, curly hair, I yanked hard, bowing his back as I pulled out only to pound back inside seconds later. He felt so good, so slick, so hot, so tight, and I hammered into him as hard as I could.

  “Fuck!” he growled, “Simon… oh God, baby, please.”

  I liked the “baby”; it was nice. Seeing my long, thick cock slide in and out of his ass, watching him take all of me and moan for more, rolled my stomach, sending a sizzling pulse through me.

  “Simon! Don’t stop, please don’t stop. I’m gonna come… I wanna come.”

  Good to hear, good to know, and as I drove in and out of the saliva-slicked, fluttering hole, I bent forward and bit down into his shoulder.

  “Harder.” His voice was sexy and low and dark, like maybe it had never occurred to him that being manhandled and marked during sex would do it for him. “I wanna feel you deeper.”

  But I knew he was close, and so when I leaned forward, changing my angle, dragging my throbbing cock over his prostate, grasping his dripping shaft at the same time, he shot his load over my fingers, my wrist, and onto the dark red bricks. It was hot and so was the man.

  He chanted my name as I rode out the orgasm that tore through him, my balls slapping against his ass, feeling his rippling muscles contracting around me, squeezing me tight. When I came, seconds later, I filled the condom and wished, for the first time in my life, that I was filling the man’s channel instead. The idea of my semen coating his insides, of having my come dripping down his thighs, was the most erotic thing I could think of.

  As we stood there together, heaving, panting, him with a final shudder as he leaned his head against the brick and me bracing myself against the wall, I eased gently, tenderly from his body.

  “I miss you already,” he whispered.

  I smiled as I slid the condom from my cock, tied it off, and tossed it into the huge empty garbage can someone had hidden behind the movable wall. It was probably there for cleanup later on but served perfectly at that moment.

  Leaning back, adjusting myself, pulling up my briefs and dress pants, belt buckle jingling, I was surprised to feel his hands on my face. I lifted my eyes and found him staring.

  “What?” I smiled at him, not sure how comfortable I was with the scrutiny being leveled at me.

  “You’re fine.” He breathed out long and deep, his face breaking into the most beautiful smile I had ever been gifted with.

  I was touched by the depth of his happiness. “Why wouldn’t I be fine?” I tried to tease him but only succeeded in having him step forward, into me.

  He looked at my hair and my face, could not stop staring deeply into my eyes, and let his hands linger on the sides of my neck.

  “Am I all inventoried now?” I teased even though it was nice, his overwhelming interest. “Why the concern about my well-being?”

  “Come home with me and I’ll tell you.”

  But I needed to give him his out. “Oh, no, you don’t have—”

  “Simon.” His breath caught. “I want to eat with you and talk to you and take you home and take you to bed and sleep with you. Please let me. Please.”

  It should have been scary, how adamant he was, how insistent, how passionate. But instead it just made me feel wanted, and I liked that. I tended to pick men who were either in the closet or who only wanted me for the night. I wondered, oddly, if my luck had just finally changed with a chance encounter with a stranger.

  “You should stay here,” I told him, raking my fingers through my hair. “And hope to God no one heard us way back here.”

  “No one’s even really here yet,” he told me. “And besides, I put a sign across the entrance before I followed you in here.”

  “Really? I looked easy, did I?”

  He coughed nervously before I got a shy smile. “I was actually just hoping to talk to you.”

  I nodded. “Do you think maybe I could get y
our number?”

  “No.”

  “No?” Frankly, from how he was looking at me, his response surprised me. I had thought he’d be up for seeing me again. “Are you—”

  “No, I mean, don’t go,” he pleaded softly.

  It was his eyes, again, that had me. They were so liquid and dark and the color of the deepest, bluest part of the ocean, a sort of heated aqua, and they were on me, swallowing me, and I was held there and caught without hope of release. As if I wanted any, as if I wanted to be free. I had never been looked at the way he was looking at me, like I was special, like he would not take me for granted.

  So I agreed not to leave by myself but to instead go with him and blow off my friends. When we were on the street, he took hold of my hand. He laced his fingers into mine and spoke low and soft, telling me about his favorite Italian restaurant and the smooth bossa nova they played there. It was in North Beach, and his friend Malic had been the first one to take him.

  At dinner he watched me and listened and told me that my charcoal-gray eyes were the color of solder when it heated.

  “Is that good?” I asked, smiling at him.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice low and husky.

  I studied him: his finely cut features, the high cheekbones, how strong his hands were, the roped veins in them. I liked the bracelets he was wearing, leather and hemp, another made of a metal I couldn’t place that I later learned was recycled material. They were artistic, like him.

  “You’re very perceptive.”

  I snorted out a laugh. Never had I been given that compliment.

  “You are,” he said with a chuckle, signaling the waiter to bring me another beer. “You knew exactly what you were seeing at the gallery.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I nodded, and he tipped his head, studying me.

  “What?”

  He confessed that he had never seen hair so dark black that there were actually blue highlights in it. I started to say something dumb, because self-deprecation came easy for me, but his hand on my cheek stopped me, silenced me, and his fingers slid around the back of my neck and up into my hair. I liked the possessive yank forward as he made sure I was really looking at him.