The Bucket List

by Douglas Black

  Kade launched himself off the bed when Blake stroked two long digits deep inside him then scissored them inside and he held back the urge to pant out Blake’s name, right up until he pushed that third finger inside him.

  Then Kade gave himself over to feeling. He wanted to feel everything—every last inch of want and need pulsing deep inside him. He moved back onto Blake’s fingers, trying to take Blake deeper, faster, harder, but Blake just kept pushing and probing slowly, gently combing him inside, pressing down where it mattered most and making Kade jump and buck, biting down on the pillows to keep from crying out.

  When Blake finally removed his fingers, Kade waited for what was coming next. He could feel Blake moving behind him, heard the snap of the bottle of lube and the foil of a condom packet being ripped open. He heard everything but felt nothing except for the ache where those fingers had been.

  Then Blake flipped him onto his back. Kade looked up at Blake’s damp hair. Blake leaned in to kiss him, but he changed direction to avoid his mouth and dive on his cock instead. Blake sucked him for a few minutes, lapping his tongue around the head before he pulled back and slid the condom down Kade’s length.

  Kade’s breath caught in his throat. Blake crawled up his legs and straddled him. He ran his rough hands down Kade’s heaving chest then he reached behind himself, taking Kade’s cock in his hands. He lined them up, and Kade tried hard not to come as Blake lowered himself to take Kade inside him.

  Blake’s cock was already leaking, making Kade’s belly slick. Kade reached down and dipped his fingers into it, brought it to his mouth and tasted. It was every bit as good as he remembered. Blake started moving up and down, slowly, and Kade knew that stretch and pace had to be hard to take.

  Blake was concentrating, but when he opened his eyes and saw Kade looking at him, his expression changed and he groaned, smiling. He moved a little faster, and although it didn’t seem like their pace was fast enough to get either of them off this side of the next decade, it did.

  Blake came first, spilling onto Kade’s chest and moaning out words that were so filthy they should have been obscene, not erotic. They sounded erotic to Kade, though, and when Blake clamped down tight on his cock, Kade came too, calling out over and over again the only word he could remember…Blake’s name.

  Kade would have been perfectly happy to just fall asleep like that, with his chest sticky and Blake’s sweaty hair falling into his eyes. He didn’t want to pull out, didn’t want to have to deal with the condom or the sheets or the fire or anything else.

  Blake eased off him and collapsed onto his back, lying half on the bed and half on Kade.

  “Just in time,” Blake told the ceiling.

  “In time for what?”

  “For our date night.”

  “We’re having a date night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Kade thought about that for a little bit. “Don’t you usually have sex after the date?”

  “Maybe. But I’m flexible.”

  “I noticed,” Kade said and laughed.

  Blake swung out of bed. Kade was impressed the man could still walk, since his own legs felt like they had turned to jelly long ago. He was pretty sure the room was spinning again, but it was difficult to tell in the darkness.

  “Get dressed, will you?” Blake said, already pulling on multiple layers of clothing.

  “Anything in particular you want me to wear on this date?”

  “Aim for warm and waterproof and see what you can come up with.”

  Kade groaned. Does it always have to involve the bloody outdoors with Blake?

  He got slowly from the bed, stripped the condom and stepped under the shower for a few minutes before toweling off and starting to assemble an outfit.

  He pulled his trackies back on again. They were old and the fabric was thin, but he liked them. They also fit pretty well under his jeans. Next, he pulled on the waterproof trousers he had borrowed from Blake when they’d first gone kayaking. He knew Blake had more than one pair. Two T-shirts, a jumper and a jacket later, he was ready for whatever Blake had to throw at him, but he did help himself to another glass of water and some more of that Rescue Remedy, just in case.

  Blake had started a small fire in the pit in the living room, “For when we get back.” He gestured to the door and Kade followed him, pausing to give Blake time to select a set of keys that Kade hadn’t seen him use before. Blake jogged back to the kitchen just before they left and returned with a bottle of Scotch whiskey—a very expensive Arran single malt.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Kade followed Blake down the beach, the icy night air biting at his nose and fingers. He stuffed his hands into his pockets, but his nose was going to have to deal with potential frostbite on its own.

  Blake walked past the second crannog to a wooden hut that Kade had noticed on his first day but had never questioned. It resembled a falling-down shed, and Kade had just assumed it held more equipment for the water-sports business. Blake let them in and turned on the lights.

  It did hold more equipment for water sports, but it was also flooded with water and had a door that opened out onto the loch. Moored right in front of the door was a little speedboat.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Is it safe to take a speedboat out at this time of night?”

  Blake shrugged. “Pretty much. I’ve done worse. Get in.”

  Kade clambered on board and Blake opened the doors and cast off. He started up the engine almost immediately—the water must have been deeper at the far end of the beach—but he never took the boat above the loch’s speed limit, even though Kade doubted that a limit designed to protect pleasure boaters really applied close to midnight on a cold November night.

  When they got out into the middle of the loch, Blake killed the engine and came to stand in the back beside Kade. There were two small bench seats on either side of an area for standing or stowing equipment. Blake lifted up one of the bench seats and pulled out blankets from the compartment.

  “You have an awful lot of blankets, don’t you?”

  Blake turned around. With only the light of the moon and stars, it was difficult to see him, but Kade thought Blake was smiling. Blake spread the blankets out on the free space in the back of the boat then retrieved more to pull over them as he lay down, taking the whiskey with him. He gestured for Kade to come sit next to him. Kade did.

  “I come from a hot country,” Blake said. “You come from a stupidly cold one. I like my blankets.”

  “You could avoid being outdoors.”

  “Where would be the fun in that?” Blake asked.

  “You could go home, back to where it’s warm and sunny. Not that I want you to, but…”

  Kade took a swig of whiskey and lay back, looking up at the stars. Between Blake and the blankets and the firewater, he was perfectly warm.

  “I like it here. I think I want to stick around, at least until my money runs out. Then I suppose I’ll head back to the land down under,” Blake said.

  Kade flinched. It had nothing to do with the cold, but he cuddled in closer to Blake. “What would you do if you went home?”

  “I suppose I could go back to the oil rigs. Put the engineering degree my parents paid for to some good use.”

  Kade was silent for a long time. He heard wind whistling among the mountaintops and looked up to see the dark outline of trees moving on the hillsides. He spoke to them instead of Blake.

  “Your business…if it was turning a profit… Then you would be able to stay, wouldn’t you?”

  Blake sighed. He took a swig from the bottle and swallowed down another mouthful of whiskey. “Of course, but that’s the one thing it’s not doing right now.”

  “Why?”

  Blake slipped an arm around Kade’s waist and squeezed. “I set the place up on a whim. After…everything that happened in Aberdeen, I knew I needed a fresh start. Designing that hous
e and setting up the business was a sort of therapy. I took it seriously, but maybe I wasn’t looking at things through a businessman’s eyes in the beginning.”

  Blake passed Kade the bottle and he took a sip, careful not to shift around too much in case Blake moved his arm away.

  “Anyway,” Blake said, “enough talking about me. Get ready to enjoy the show.”

  “You mean the stars?”

  The stars and the moon in the cloudless sky were beautiful, but it turned out Blake hadn’t meant that. From the opposite bank, a loud crack sounded. Moments later the sky was alive with noise and color.

  Fireworks flew high into the air, right out over the loch, bursting and shattering, sharing their colors and beauty. They were reflected on the water’s surface, illuminating a landscape as old as time with hues of red, pink, purple and blue. Some whizzed, crackled and frazzled, and all the time Blake just kept holding Kade tight in the bottom of the boat, right until the very end when silence was restored and fresh smoke clouds hung low over the loch.

  “Well?”

  “That was…unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.” Kade sat up, taking the bottle of whiskey and some of the blankets with him. “Can I ask you something? Well, actually I want to say something first. Then I want to ask you something.”

  Blake helped himself to another drink. “Okay. Go.”

  “I wanted to say thank you—for coming back to the flat the other night, for putting up with me this weekend and for the sleeping pills and for acting like you—”

  Blake silenced him with a kiss. “You don’t need to thank me for any of that. It was my pleasure. Anyone would have done the same.”

  Kade laughed. “You know that’s not true. Not everyone would have done the same.”

  “Anyone decent would have.”

  “You barely know anything about me.”

  “True. But I want to learn everything there is to know.”

  Kade sat in silence for a long time, listening to the water lapping against the sides of the boat. “I didn’t write that bucket list,” he said finally.

  “Yeah. Ian told me. I was thinking maybe we could write a new one together one day.”

  Kade smiled. “Maybe. I’d like to write one that isn’t half-full of stuff I don’t even understand. And I hear shark cage-diving is fun…”

  Blake smiled.

  “So are you going to get the business turning a profit?” Kade asked.

  Blake shrugged. “My savings won’t last forever, but I don’t really have any intentions of going back home. I could be an okay businessman, I think, if I put my mind to it. I can make it work. One thing I’m not good at, though, is the paperwork side of things. Guess I could use an accountant…”

  Kade laughed and took back the bottle. “My hourly rate isn’t cheap… It’s getting cold. Shall we go back?”

  “Only once you answer a question for me.”

  Kade bit back a groan. “Okay.”

  “Am I managing to impress you yet?” Blake asked.

  “That’s an easy question. You impressed me the very first day I met you, but you continue to surprise. Yes, you’ve impressed me.”

  “Does this mean you’d like to go on another date with me?”

  Kade nodded and took another swig of whiskey. “I’d love to. Is it going to be as impressive as this one?”

  “I promise I’ll try my best.”

  “I’ll make it worth your while,” Kade said.

  “Oh, I have absolutely no doubt about that. Don’t you worry.”

  Want to see more from this author? Here’s a taster for you to enjoy!

  Spanish Heat

  Douglas Black

  Excerpt

  By the time Jack’s plane touched down with distressing enthusiasm at Malaga airport, his headache was in full swing. He leaned forward, resting his forehead against the back of the seat in front of him, and took a few deep breaths of rancid, recycled air.

  The nerves in his stomach were almost crippling. They had been building since he’d rolled from his old bed in his parents’ house in Glasgow and accepted a lift to the airport from his bemused and disapproving mother. Five hours later and still an hour from his destination, they were cramping his stomach in time to the pounding in his head.

  Unfortunately, the woman in front of him, who had spent the entire flight entertaining her colicky offspring with a cacophony of expletives ranging from the colorful to the downright unintelligible, decided Jack’s desperately captured seconds of peace and calm were over. She rammed her seat backward, allowing the gravitational field of her stomach a little more room to manoeuver while simultaneously affording Jack half a second in which to spring back to avoid having his head wedged between his knees under the weight of the orange, plastic airplane seat. He took another deep breath and glared at the woman through sleep-deprived eyes. She, having extricated herself from her seat, was too engaged in flapping her fake tan-streaked bingo-wings at the overhead compartment to notice.

  Jack watched with ill-disguised horror as she pulled down bag after cheap, supermarket beachbag of hand luggage, distributing them amongst herself and her skinny partner.

  The man looked to be about the same age as the woman but was only about a quarter of her weight. He was dressed head to toe in a brilliantly white tracksuit, his forearms and knuckles decorated in tattoos that looked to have been scratched on by an illiterate four year old.

  A neon pink tracksuit top the size of a small tent landed in the man’s lap, the zip whipping across his cheek as it passed him. He opened his mouth as though to protest then immediately thought better of it. He tucked the jacket into one of the many plastic bags while stroking his cheek with nicotine-yellowed fingers. Jack assumed the man had become trapped after an ill-conceived, alcohol-fueled one-night stand and was now prevented from leaving on pain of death.

  “Oi, this here bag naw yours?”

  Jack closed his eyes and dreamed of painkillers. He knew the headache was caused by nerves—nerves brought on by the thought of an impending new job and complete lifestyle change, but he didn’t suppose a painkiller or a few glasses of wine would do any harm.

  “Oi. You ’er. This here bag naw yours?”

  Jack felt as though a metal rod had been staked through his heart. He opened his eyes and winced as he found the woman staring at him, one fat finger pushing into his chest. He took in her lipstick—orange to match her fake tan, her blue eye shadow and green mascara, and her tight, white vest top and ill-fitting, unnecessarily padded pink bra. Finally, Jack settled on her face which was arranged—under a mop of white, straight hair with complementary black roots—into an expression of disbelief of what he could only assume was his perceived stupidity.

  He observed his backpack in her hand and thought of the electronics inside. His phone and camera were in that bag, along with the laptop containing the proof of his entire university education and, more importantly, all of the photographs from his gap year. His most expensive possessions, and his best memories, were now in the clawing hands of a modern day cavewoman.

  He nodded, swallowing hard. “Yes. Thank you.” He extended a hand, and the woman threw the bag at him, driving the nerves from his stomach, along with any oxygen his body had been happily processing.

  He clutched the bag to him and watched as she trailed her partner from his seat and deposited the still-screaming baby onto one spacious hip.

  “Right yous, see here.” She addressed her partner and the young child who had been contentedly coloring away during the flight, oblivious to everything going on around her. She didn’t flinch under her mother’s angry stare.

  Jack supposed he should have admired the woman’s confidence. Not only was she addressing her own brood, but half their fellow passengers who had stopped what they were doing to watch the show.

  “Your daddy.” She looked at the little girl and wiggled her arse around in the tight aisle, making plenty of room for her offspring to disembark through the as yet unopened aircra
ft doors. The act sent a handsome, dreadlocked young man careening back into his seat. He looked up in disbelief at the woman, and Jack only just managed to keep himself from laughing. The young man caught his eye and smiled at him. Jack dropped his gaze, but looked back quickly. Even in his nervous state, the man was disarmingly good-looking.

  “Your daddy, naw that wan hen, yer other daddy. He’s paying fer this so ye better have a bloody gid time. You listenin’ te me? Nin eh this drawin’ and readin’ pish. Yer here tae play and that’s it. Right? Noo, get oot eh there. Move.”

  At her command, the little girl and the frightened partner stepped into the aisle. Since the doors remained closed, there was nothing for the woman to do but gyrate her flesh and shout orders. All other passengers in their immediate vicinity were trapped in their roles as impromptu audience members.

  Jack went back to staring at the inside of his eyelids, concentrating on breathing and clutching his rucksack tightly against his chest. A budget airline flight from Glasgow to Malaga in April, in the middle of the school holidays? He must have lost his mind.

  He looked up at the woman as she resumed swearing at the small, snotty, screaming baby. He had lost his mind.

  “Please, God, don’t let me kill her,” he muttered to himself. “At least not now, when I won’t enjoy it.” Behind the bulk of the woman, he heard a small burst of laughter. He looked over and found the dreadlocked man leaning back in his seat so he could catch Jack’s eye.

  Jack felt himself flush under the man’s smile.

  * * * *

  The heat hit Jack like a wall when he disembarked. Despite his nerves making him in no real rush to reach his destination, he distanced himself from his fellow passengers as quickly as possible, deciding that they had already spent enough time in one other’s company. En route to the terminal building, he quickly overtook the orange woman. She had passed the screaming child off to her partner while she wheezed and sweated her way to the baggage carousels. After two and a half hours trapped on a plane with her, Jack found it unusual to see her mouth closed. He could only imagine the shock and confusion surely being felt by her family at such an unexpected turn of events.