Love Me Tenor

by Annabeth Albert

  Chapter Eleven

  @NextDirectionShow We can’t wait to hear the tracks

  @CarterNCarson @StandOutTrevor and @StandOutJalen are laying down this week! Changing things up & looking good guys!

  @StandOutJalen Looking forward to chilling with

  @StandOutTrevor tonight!

  “So it’s on?” Trevor kicked Jalen’s thigh lightly.

  “Oh it’s on.” Jalen grabbed Trevor’s waist, intending to flip him. But Trevor fought like a wet cat. Their legs tangled and Jalen narrowly avoided a knee to his nads. Trevor laughed, a gorgeous high-pitched tinkle that held nothing back. So many times Trevor put his hand over his mouth while he laughed, or started high, then started cough-laughing to hide his natural sound. Jalen loved his unrestrained real laugh.

  Grappling around like this was even hotter with the lights on. He could see Trevor’s grin, see his eyes flicker as he shoved at Jalen, watch his mouth soften as Jalen finally got him pinned. A flush spread up Trevor’s chest, up his neck, all the way to his hairline.

  “Put your arms up. Grab the bar.” Jalen released Trevor so that he could stretch for the metal rail right above the pillows at the head of the bed. He didn’t want to make more bruises on Trevor’s wrists—well, he did, but there was also no way to predict what wardrobe would have them wear. Besides, this was hot, too, Trevor stretched out beneath him.

  Trevor grabbed Jalen’s hand, put it on his shoulder before he grabbed the bar. “Make me,” he whispered. “Hold me.”

  Forever. Jalen wanted to pin Trevor to the mattress and never let him go. “I will. But first you got too many clothes on.”

  He scooted so that he could pull off Trevor’s pajama pants before getting rid of his own. Stripping Trevor made his dick throb. He liked being the one to yank Trevor’s clothes off. Trevor got into it, too, wriggling his hips and breathing hard until Jalen straddled him again, trapping Trevor’s legs with his own.

  Their bare dicks brushed each other. Trevor’s was every bit as sexy as Jalen had figured—cut, with a gentle curve to the right—like it couldn’t wait to snuggle up with Jalen’s dick. It was the perfect size for Jalen’s mouth, but Trevor was in far too wiggly a mood for oral. Jalen knew first hand that teeth and blow jobs did not mix. Instead, he rewarded the dick stretching toward him, gathering it up with his fist. He braced his other hand against Trevor’s shoulder.

  “Yeah.” Trevor gave a little sigh—the one he usually reserved for almost asleep—as soon as Jalen pressed on his shoulder, locking him in place. Trevor glanced down at their dicks in Jalen’s fist. “That’s . . . hot. I’ve . . . never . . .”

  “Never?” Jalen loved this kind of frot, because it was kind of like dick wrestling—trapping the other dude without needing to hold him down. Although holding Trevor down while doing it added to the hot factor times infinity. The base of his spine buzzed with a different kind of pleasure—it was nice getting to show Mr. Jaded a thing or two.

  “My . . . playlist’s a bit . . . limited,” Trevor said between breaths.

  “Let’s work on that.” Jalen wanted to try everything with Trevor. Every fantasy. Every dirty thought he’d ever had. He wanted to wrestle and rub off and do it again until their dicks were too raw to go again. With other guys, Jalen always felt weird about the images running through his head, never felt like he could confess what really got him off. But with Trevor, he seemed downright hungry for even Jalen’s filthiest suggestions.

  Intoxicating. Terrifying. Freeing. His whole body vibrated like he’d downed three Red Bulls without pausing for breath and they were all hitting at once.

  “Wrap your legs around me. Tight.” Jalen shifted so that Trevor could comply. Trevor’s legs digging into Jalen’s thighs made that high sensation even better. It was like they were locked in combat, tied together.

  “Harder.” Trevor chewed on his lip, and Jalen couldn’t tell whether he meant Jalen’s fist on his dick or the weight of his body, so he went for both. He pressed down with his hand, fingers splaying against Trevor’s neck and collarbone, pushed hard with his pelvis, and tightened his fist so that every part of Trevor was claimed. Owned.

  Jesus, that thought shouldn’t be so hot, but it pushed Jalen right up against the edge. “Come with me.”

  “Can’t.” Trevor’s breathy reply had a heavy dose of make me to it.

  Jalen brought his fist to his mouth and spat in it before resuming jacking their dicks, faster this time. Tilting forward, he claimed Trevor’s mouth. Not gentle now. Not nice. Not waiting for permission. Taking.

  Trevor moaned against his lips, body straining toward Jalen.

  Then they were both moaning, someone whimpering, bodies on a collision course with climax. “Now. Now, now, now,” Jalen chanted against Trevor’s mouth before his tongue fucked into Trevor’s waiting heat.

  Oh fuck. He was totally coming first and wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. The first spurt made his fist slicker, let him go faster, trying to get Trevor there, too. Then, with a strangled cry, Trevor went over, and Jalen milked them both until the contact grew too painful.

  Carefully, he untangled their bodies. He grabbed his towel from the floor on the side of the bed and cleaned them both off. Gathering Trevor close, he kissed his neck and shoulders. Trevor was boneless and snuggly, right up until the moment his whole body tensed.

  “I’m gonna go shower.” Trevor pulled away, getting off the bed.

  “Don’t go.” Jalen hated this helpless feeling.

  “It’s not bad.” Trevor wasn’t meeting his eyes. Liar. “Just don’t want to have to rush in the morning.”

  “Liar. You’re the perkiest morning person I know outside of Dawn. You said hugging helped last time. Let me hold you?” He opened his arms and waited.

  And waited.

  Trevor chewed on a finger. All the flush of earlier was gone and his skin was too pale, eyes too flat.

  “Okay.” Trevor sat back on the bed, let Jalen wrap them both in the comforter, but Jalen got the impression that this was more about doing something for Jalen than about what Trevor really needed right now. Fuck.

  Tomorrow he was going to Google the fuck out of “feeling bad after orgasm” and come up with an action plan because keeping his hands off Trevor clearly wasn’t working, but he couldn’t keep causing misery either.

  It sucked balls that feeling so good had to feel so fucking lousy.

  “You have to listen to this!” Jalen held out his headphones.

  “What is it?” Trevor took the last bite of his sandwich and accepted the headphones. They were on a lunch break at the movie studio, having spent the morning filming Jalen’s lead on the Frank Ocean song. Jalen had been subdued after filming, chilling with his phone.

  Trevor liked how they could hang like this without needing to talk. The last two days things had been easy between them. Nice even. They’d grabbed food from the craft service table and headed to the same couch without discussing it, ending up with Jalen’s head against Trevor’s thigh, his long legs hanging off the edge of the sofa. Every so often Jalen tapped out a rhythm against Trevor’s leg.

  “It’s the newest Frank Michaels. You have to hear these high notes. I’m demanding that Dawn let us cover it next.”

  “You think you can go that high?” Trevor asked. Jalen had a rather impressive if untrained range, but he was definitely a baritone, not a high tenor like the R&B superstar.

  “Don’t be dense.” Jalen whacked Trevor’s leg. “You. I can do the background vocals no problem. We’d need to fiddle with the arrangement a bit to get the other guys in, but you’ve got to give this a listen. It’s perfect for us.”

  It was the first time Jalen had seemed so invested in what the group sang. He was usually the most placid of them—accepting whatever they handed down, rushing to find good covers with similar arrangements to learn the song from with a minimum of grumbling. Trevor liked helping him double-check his part against the official arrangement because Jalen spent so much tim
e worrying about what Trevor ate and stuff like that. It was nice to have a skill that Jalen needed to repay all the little ways he took care of Trevor. Intrigued, Trevor put the headphones on and waited for Jalen to cue up the song. It opened with a hypnotic trill and climbed up from there, a plaintive ode to love lost and love won. It wasn’t a ballad precisely, and the faster sections would really suit Stand Out!’s emotional pop vibe. It was catchy and full of feels. Dawn would undoubtedly green light it if she could get it cleared.

  The song made Trevor’s insides turn wigglier than the macaroni salad from lunch. It was unashamedly a high tenor song, displaying the singer’s considerable falsetto at every turn.

  “You really think I could do that?”

  “Of course you could.” Jalen’s smile was wide and miles deep, and his conviction did nothing to quiet the riot in Trevor’s gut. “You guys have almost the exact same range.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not . . .” He shifted against the slick vinyl couch.

  “A six-two, two-fifty-pound black dude?”

  “That.”

  “You think I can’t sing Timberlake? Or Beyoncé? Or whoever the hell I feel like?” Jalen sat up more. “And we been singing all these straight guy songs for two weeks now. Maybe we need to cut that out. Steady diet of Adam Lambert and Sam Smith for us. ’Course they sing about chicks all the time, too.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Sure.” Jalen drew the word out, one eyebrow raised like this was the moment when Trevor revealed himself to be horribly prejudiced.

  Gawd. How to explain this without sticking his foot in it worse? “I’m me. Not other people. And people would laugh. At me. In theory—”

  “In theory you have a kick-ass voice, this song was made for us to do a four-part harmony arrangement on, but you’re being narrow-minded and self-defeating. Again.”

  “I don’t mean to be,” Trevor said softly.

  “You know, Mama Ivy and Mama Kern even wear each other’s clothes sometimes.”

  “Uh?” Trevor wasn’t sure what that had to do with singing.

  “See?” Jalen fiddled with his phone, holding it out to show a pic of two women hugging—they were both middle-aged, older than Trevor’s mother, but not by much. The shorter woman had long graying dreadlocks and warm chestnut skin and the other had short, spiky platinum hair and a ruddy freckled complexion with deep laugh lines around her eyes. Both women were round and soft and looked like they gave good hugs.

  “Yeah.” Trevor wasn’t sure exactly what he was supposed to be seeing, but he nodded anyway.

  “It doesn’t bother them that they’re an interracial couple. It’s not even a topic of conversation at our house. Never has been. They just love each other.”

  “It shouldn’t matter.” Trevor finally got what Jalen was trying to say. An interracial couple. For the first time, he realized that that’s what he and Jalen were. Oh crap. He hadn’t really thought about it because when he looked at Jalen, he saw . . . Jalen. Not some label, other than the straight one he’d erroneously kept pinning on him. Had he hurt Jalen’s feelings by rejecting the song as something Trevor shouldn’t cover? “It doesn’t matter,” he said with even more firmness. “They look really happy together.”

  “Yeah. They are. This is the rest of the family.” He swiped his finger on the touch screen to reveal a crowded picture of the two women, Dawn, Jalen, and two other girls, one Asian with forearm crutches and a big grin, and the other with a complexion similar to Jalen’s and a fluffy Afro framing her shy smile. They looked so happy, so bonded that Trevor’s jaw ached from clenching around a surge of emotion.

  “You’re the only boy?”

  “Yup. Mama Kern says it just worked out that way. I got moved to a social worker who knew them from the adoptions of Dawn and Mia, and when I was running into trouble in the foster group home, she called them up.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Bullies. That sort of shit. I wasn’t exactly out, but I also didn’t take shit when they called me fag. I knew what I was and I wasn’t about to let them tell me different.”

  “Oh.” Trevor truly was an idiot. He’d focused so much on the bullies in his own past, on being picked on for being a scrawny, high-voiced nerd, that it never occurred to him that someone big and tough like Jalen could also have been bullied. “That sucks.”

  “Eh. It got me Mama Kern and Mama Ivy. And my family rocks.” His expression dared Trevor to say different.

  “Yeah. They really seem to. You’re lucky to have them.” He meant that from a place deep inside him, the lonely place that longed for that kind of acceptance and love from his own family. Never gonna happen. He missed them so much, and even knowing they were closed-minded zealots didn’t ease the ache.

  “Yeah. I am.” Jalen relaxed back down against Trevor’s leg. He looked up at Trevor and their gazes held. A strange undercurrent zoomed between them. It was as if Jalen could see every lonely place in Trevor, and Trevor could see the vulnerable parts Jalen kept well-covered. This was a moment, even if Trevor didn’t quite understand the significance.

  “Your family would care, wouldn’t they?” Jalen asked, breaking eye contact. He fingered the seam on his jeans.

  “Yeah.” Trevor nodded. No sugarcoating it. Of course, they’d care most about the gay thing, but the interracial thing wouldn’t escape their scrutiny either. Not like they’re ever going to know anyway. Jalen would never have to meet his family, and if that made Trevor a little sad, he tried to remind himself that this whole thing was temporary anyway. “But I’m not them. It doesn’t matter to me. At all.”

  “Cool.” Jalen studied his nails, but a little smile tugged at his mouth.

  “You sounded good today, you know. Real smooth.”

  “Yeah?” Jalen’s smile got wider.

  Oh crap. I suck as a boyfriend, even a pretend one. Had Trevor really not told him that yet? Was that why Jalen had been subdued ever since they wrapped? “Better than the original. Your voice has a really interesting texture that I think the audience is going to love.”

  “You’re just being nice because you want some later.” Jalen lowered his voice.

  “I’m going to get some anyway right?”

  “We’ll see.” Jalen winked at him. The last two nights they’d rubbed off, although Trevor had to spend a fair amount of time convincing Jalen he really did want it, bad afterglow and all. Last night, Jalen had insisted they try Trevor eating right beforehand, like it was a workout he was preparing for, and something called a recovery snack after. It had helped a little, but what really made him all warm and gushy inside was Jalen fussing over him and trying to take care of him. Funny how he’d gone from hating people doing nice stuff for him to craving it from Jalen. Don’t get used to this.

  “I’ll do the song,” Trevor said, emotions galloping ahead of logic.

  “So you get lucky?” Jalen raised an eyebrow at Trevor.

  So I make you proud. So I make you smile. So I can pretend a little more that this thing between us isn’t going to end in a tire fire. “Nah. Because you’re right. It’s a great song.”

  “Hey. Cue it up on your phone. Let’s listen to it at the same time.” And so they ended up holding hands and listening to the song on repeat until Carson came and told them it was time to film the next segment. Trevor’s chest ached like that time his uncle’s calf had kicked him and he was twice as breathless. All from linking pinkies and humming along with his pretend boyfriend, who gave him a big dopey grin before lowering his headphones and nodding at Carson.

  “We’re doing more confessions!” Carson said with more glee than Trevor would have summoned for even awesome news like “Hey! They’re giving us the afternoon off.”

  “Yippee.” Trevor ditched his trash and followed Jalen and Carson down the corridor.

  “Your acting is getting way better,” Carson said with a little smirk. “Too bad there weren’t any cameras at lunch today. You guys were tres adorbs! Check my feed. I uplo
aded a pic of you guys jamming out.”

  “Yeah. We’re good.” Jalen made a soft snorting sound.

  Acting. Too bad this was starting to feel like anything but pretend. He wanted to go check Carson’s feed, look at that pic. Study it for clues as to what the heck was happening between him and Jalen. But instead, he had to dream up a new confession. He glanced at Jalen, at his long purposeful stride and fast smile when he caught Trevor staring. I like you far too much. Yeah, the only confessions Trevor had were staying safely hidden.

  “We’re going to have fun with this next segment! Instead of confessing your own secrets, you’re going to share each other’s.” Kaitlyn swung a tan leg back and forth, high-heeled sandal clacking against the rungs of the stool. As usual, the rest of them were arranged in a semicircle around her.

  Aw, hell nah. Jalen carefully schooled his face to stay neutral. Beside him he felt Trevor tense up. His poker face wasn’t nearly as good as Jalen’s and his wide eyes and trembly mouth looked spooked, like he might run if things got too bad.

  I got your back, boo. Jalen tried to beam some reassurance at the side of Trevor’s head. No way was he about to share about Trevor’s diabetes. Or the stuff they’d been getting up to in their room. Some secrets were just for them.

  “Let’s start with biggest fears. What are your bandmates scared of?” Kaitlyn leaned forward as if they weren’t under bright lights with cameras trained on them.

  “Trevor’s scared of crowds.” Carter brayed like this old beagle that lived next door to Jalen’s mothers. Carter still wasn’t over the mall disaster even though that was almost a week ago now.

  “Carter’s scared of letting food groups touch on his plate,” Jalen shared, keeping his voice mild instead of laying into Carter like he wanted. And it was true—Carter ate like every calorie cost a buck while drinking copious amounts of sugary coffee. That little factoid was so much nicer than some of the crap he could have shared. Carter should be grateful instead of glowering at Jalen.