by Ella James
“Put the plates down, Mr. Rayne.” I set them on the far side of the table.
“Get up there in front of me. Stretch out.”
I’m not sure the thing will hold me, but it’s big enough—and, turns out, pretty sturdy. I lie on my back, the disco-ball light fixture tossing silver flecks over my torso. Luke works my boxer-briefs down, wraps his hands behind my knees, and pulls me closer to the table’s edge. The shift makes my balls drop off the table. His eyes hold mine as he strokes my sac.
“I’m hungry.” He pumps my cock and wraps his mouth around my thick head. I watch as he takes me, inch by inch. God, it feels good. I lift my hips, gripping the table’s edge as I try not to thrust.
Luke blows me like he knows just what feels good. Because he does. He walks me right to the ledge and stops when I’m shaking, brushing kisses over the inside of my leg. He doesn’t meet my eyes again…just makes me come so hard that I feel lightheaded after. When I open my eyes, I find I’m nearly off the table, in his lap. He’s grinning that old cat-that-ate-the-canary grin.
He rubs his hand over my leg. Then he grips my forearms and helps me down onto the seat beside him. He kisses my mouth, and I reach into his lap. Fuck, he’s long and thick and stiff. I slide our plates over and watch as he gets started on his sandwich.
“Hungry?” I ask.
“Didn’t eat enough.” His low Luke voice is gruff.
I sink down under the table. “Don’t think I did either.”
His hand finds my forehead. “You don’t have to. Just because—”
I suck his thick tip into my mouth, and he groans.
“By the time I’m finished with you, McDowell—” I pump his shaft a few times— “I want to see you’ve cleaned your plate.”
For a long time, I just tease him. Roll his balls and lightly stroke his big erection. Kiss his cockhead as his legs stretch out around me and he lifts his ass off the bench. Shit. His legs are shaking. I lick all along his rim and shaft again, and he groans good and loud.
“You like this?” I lick the little notch under his rim and stuff my tongue into his slit. He makes a low, hoarse sound like a growl and groan mixed. Then he starts to rock his hips…he starts trying to thrust that swollen dick at my face.
I lick his balls.
“Vance…”
“If you want something, you should ask, Skywalker.”
He grabs my hair and pushes his thick cock against my cheek. “Suck me off.”
His voice is low and rough, but I can see his toes curl as he issues the order.
“That’s a tell, not an ask.”
“Please.”
I give him what he wants, drawing it out so his leg is wrapped around my lower back. His hand jerks my hair so hard, sometimes I groan around my mouthful. At some point, his leg makes its way in between mine, and I’m humping his calf. Motherfucker tries to get the upper hand; he rubs his leg against my cock, jostles my sac around. I’m pretty sure I can finish him without coming—and then he blows, and his leg rubs me just so. I spend as I’m trying to swallow. He chuckles even as he’s spurting and I’m drinking him down. When I rejoin him at the table, I find he’s eaten both our sandwiches. He gives me a fistful of napkins, and I kneel back down to clean my cum off his leg.
He gives me a lazy grin as I sit back beside him. “Mr. Rayne, it seems my appetite for you is never sated.”
I rub my finger in a drop of mustard on one of the plates and smear it on his jaw—and it’s a fuckfest, that night. Right until the early morning hours, when we fall asleep on the couch. My head’s in his lap, and his arm’s draped over my chest.
When I wake up, it’s nearly noon. The house is quiet, my throat is dry, and my whole body’s achy sore.
I find a note by my phone. “I’m in New York—only for the day. Call in sick and be here when your linner comes at 3.”
10
Luke
I order him a four-course dinner from my favorite French place, The Little Prince. There’s a bank account I use which bears the name of an umbrella LLC. I order online, tip in advance, and ask the driver to set the boxes just so on the townhouse stoop.
Vance texts a picture of himself around 1 PM Pacific time. He’s still lying on the couch. He has a lazy smile, and his gray eyes are tilted at the corners.
Happy.
I made him feel that way. Not me—but my body did.
My head is fuzzy all day. Vance sends more text pictures, showing me that he enjoyed the food. As my plane dips back into the Bay area at 9:45 that night, he sends one from the mural atrium. It’s mostly his paint-smeared hand. I can see the floor behind it, though, and scaffolding.
Wait for me there.
I find him high up on the scaffolding, putting the first color splotches I’ve seen on the wall. It’s shades of green. When he hears my footsteps, his back and arms freeze. A moment later, he turns toward me and grins.
“Mr. Rayne. You’re making progress.”
“Trees.” That’s all he says before he bends to do something with his paints. I watch as he towels his hands, then moves down the scaffolding. He moves to me in a few long strides and hesitates—because he doesn’t know who’s around or if the cameras are rolling.
It’s my pleasure to pull him against me and lock my arms around him. He feels good—so warm and solid. His scratchy cheek brushes my forehead.
“Hey, you,” he says.
I kiss him deep and hard, then grip his hand and lead him into the big corridor beside his atrium.
“Fuck, you’re sexy in those nice clothes.”
I’m wearing a dress shirt, tie, and trousers. It’s rumpled from the day.
I pull open the stairway door. “No one’s as hot as you are in those ripped jeans.”
We kiss in the stairwell, and I think about that Sunday morning. About the stairs at that hotel in New York on one New Year’s the one time. I can barely let him go when we get to the third floor.
“I just need to step out for a second. Make sure we’re alone.” I kiss him again. “I’ll be right back.”
His eyes are so warm. He’s hard—I see through his jeans. I shut the stairwell door feeling like this isn’t quite real. No one’s in the pastor’s suite. I take his hand and lead him toward my office.
I can feel his questions, but he doesn’t speak them. When we get to the wall with all the artifacts—the wall outside my office—his strides shorten.
“This is it,” he murmurs.
I open my office door and put my hand against his lower back. Vance steps inside. For the longest second, as the wall of windows behind my desk shadows him, I can’t seem to draw a breath.
Vance is in my office.
My blood surges.
Vance is in my office, and I’ll take him on my desk.
I take him on the desk and in the port-a-room and in the Prius in his garage one night when I get home first and lie in wait there. I use him until I don’t know how he moves up on his scaffolding. I give him everything my body can—we’re often up all night—and I sleep like the dead on my plane and my office couch.
It’s a glut of lust and satiation. I’m hard all the time. I wear too-tight briefs to keep my hard-on tucked away, and when I can, I show him to supply closets and, once, a stairwell. When I take him in the men’s room right beside his atrium, I realize it’s so risky, it can only be a sort of self destruction. But I can’t stop. I can barely function.
He’s a stallion. I punish him all night, and he paints all day. He’s ready every time I arrive in the evening, often awake when I fall asleep.
One morning about three weeks after he arrived in San Francisco, he wakes me up at 4 so I can go home from his house, and I notice him rubbing at his shoulder as I slip my clothes on.
“What’s wrong?”
“Just a little sore. The sculpting.”
Oh, yeah. His big chunk of marble lives in the church—in another atrium. Sometimes I forget.
“Have you been working on it more?”
“I slip in there when I need a break from the mural.”
Guilt fills me. That I’ve never even asked about it. He rubs my back almost every night as I drift off beside him. I don’t know massage like he does, so I rarely even try. Because I think it won’t feel good.
I move closer to him now, though, and toss my shirt on the bed. “Come here.” I close my hand around the top of a chair, drag it over to me. “Sit here.”
He’s holding a small pot of something.
I ask, “What’s that?”
“Just some CBD rub. Little bit of THC in there, too.”
“Helps your shoulder?”
“Yeah.”
He sits in the chair, and I kneel down beside him, take the rub. I push my fingers in and scoop some ointment out.
“Where is it?”
He presses the spot—it’s between his neck and shoulder—and I rub there lightly. “Tell me what to do,” I tell him.
His eyes close. “Harder.”
I rub harder, gliding my thumb around. He lets out a sharp moan.
“Oh. Did that hurt?”
“Good hurt.”
I keep rubbing, and he’s groaning, and I’m hard. I dig a little deeper, and his body stiffens.
“Too hard?”
“’S okay…”
I find a rhythm and intensity I know he likes, because he starts to slump against me.
“Fuck,” he moans.
“This bothers you a lot?”
“For years,” he says.
“You ever get it looked at?”
“Insurance.”
“They’ll pay for it.”
His lips twist, and his eyes cut up toward me. “I don’t have insurance.”
“You don’t?”
“I’m an artist.”
He groans again.
“A good one,” I add, rubbing harder.
“Fuck that feels good.”
“Does it hurt you every day?”
“It’s okay.”
“My doctor can take a look.”
He twists his face up in perplexed amusement. “No way. That’s too risky for you.”
“You’re my employee.”
He grins. “Is that what I am?”
“It is.” I rub my thumb around a little more. “And I need you in working order.”
11
Vance
Something shifts between us after that rub. He leaves, and I fall asleep. When I wake up, I text him, and he takes a long time to reply. All his texts after that are short and infrequent. He never tries to meet me on the church’s campus, and when I go home at six, sore as shit again, I’m wondering if he’s going to show.
I change into gray sweats and an old, torn Rolling Stones T-shirt and set up camp on the half-heart couch. I don’t want to be up in the bedroom, waiting—just in case he doesn’t come. The couch is danger too, though. Even the booth in the kitchen bothers me.
Every hour that he doesn’t text or show up ratchets up my tension.
And then it’s 10:40. There’s Southern Comfort in the cabinet. Of course. I take a bottle to the couch and take long pulls from it till I’m able to lie back without my heart racing. Still restless, though. I get up and walk to the front window. Why can I still feel it?
More to drink. Less feel-y.
The half a heart couch. I laugh at that.
At first, I don’t realize that the clomps I hear are footsteps. Then he’s right in front of me, an apparition, still in work clothes. He’s got something in his arms. He sets the white box down, steps toward me. His gaze sweeps me.
“V?” His feline eyes are wide, his perfect Luke face troubled. “V?” he says again. “What’s wrong?”
I put a hand over my face. Fuck him.
“It’s because I didn’t text,” he says.
“It’s because—” I fumble for the bottle. “Southern Comfort. When there’s Southern Comfort in the Joplin house…you gotta do it.”
He kneels by the couch. A sad smile twists his lips. “I can tell now,” he says softly. “I can see it when you’re lying.”
I laugh—try to. “I’m not fucking lying, dude. I don’t give a shit about your texts.”
He looks somber. “I brought something for you.” He goes over to the box, about the size of a typewriter case. “It’s for your shoulder.”
“What?”
“It’s a TENS unit.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see.”
I get up to check it out, and the room tilts. I’m sort of drunk, I guess. As soon as I get over to him, he wraps both his arms around me. His lips press against my hair. When he draws back, he captures my hand.
“Let’s go upstairs. I’ll come down and get this in a minute.”
Luke
I feel almost ill with remorse. For how thoughtless I’ve been, how unforgivably dense. The chill guy I met on my yacht a few years back— This guy whose hand I’m gripping right now isn’t him.
I should have noticed the night I slipped in and watched him eat his burger, told him to go home. Sometime between the yacht and now—sometime between the cabin and those minutes in the atrium the day he arrived—my Vance changed. Maybe it was when I acted like I didn’t know him in the atrium. It could have been that New Year’s night I left the hotel lobby as he came through the door.
I’m so changed myself—so wasted for him, years on end now—all my focus is on staunching my wounds. I’m not looking past myself.
One of the cameras on the church’s front doors malfunctioned last night, so the security company traveled to our campus today. That meant several sets of eyes on all the footage. Normally, it’s Bruce or Sherry; whoever is on duty isn’t watching closely. Today was much more risky—so I couldn’t try to see him.
Today I felt near sick over all the things I can’t do for him. Today I drank whiskey in my office—and it didn’t help.
We had a meeting of the board of elders at five, and that made the day so much worse. At least I got the TENS unit for him. I paid extra so they’d have it ready for me to pick up when I left the church at seven-thirty. But the place was out near Oakland.
As I drove back toward Haight, Mom called. She heard about Megan from some biddy at the country club. We don’t talk about my situation, but I know that she knows. Just like I know Dad knew. How did I end up at a conversion weekend in Tahoe with Dad’s two good friends if he didn’t?
Mom asked me to bring some dinner over. Chicken fingers, of all things. When I dropped the food off, she pushed up on her walker, grabbed my elbow, and looked into my eyes. She said, “You’re not going to be happy if…”
If what, she wanted me to say. I wonder what she would have said back.
I got out of view of the cameras at her driveway’s gate and had to pull over by the Crestmore’s acreage.
“You’re not going to be happy…”
I’m not. When he leaves, I’ll have a gaping hole to patch up, and I don’t know if I can. Thing is, I don’t care.
We get upstairs, and I lead Vance into the bathroom. I run the tub. He looks tired and still seems quiet, like the alcohol has flattened him—or I have. The water runs while we stand by it.
“V.”
His eyes meet mine. I pull his hand to my chest. “Vance, I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
I wrap my arm around his neck, pulling him up against me—where I need him. I lean on the shower’s glass wall, and I fold myself around him. He feels so good against me. I rub my hand down his back.
“I know I messed up with you today. Don’t tell me I didn’t.”
His cheek’s pressed against my shoulder. “It’s okay.”
“Like it was okay when I ghosted you that New Year? Or when I acted like we didn’t know each other after you first got here?” I straighten, my grip around him loosening—because I want to move away from him. I want to move away from me. “Don’t lie to me, Vance.”
“Okay, Sky.” His ey
es find mine. “What do you want to hear? You were a dick. But it didn’t piss me off today. It fucking scared me.”
I shut my eyes. I pull him against me again, tuck my chin over his head. “I don’t get how you don’t hate me.”
“Now who’s lying?”
I suck air in through my nose. He kisses my throat. “I could never, ever hate you, McD.” His arm comes around me, his hand rubbing my back.
I feel the truth of his words. For whatever reason, Vance can’t wall me out. I don’t know if he’s not able to or if he chooses not to. But he’s open to me—open for me—all the time. Like a boxer with his hands down. So it’s up to me to take care of him. I have to be better now.
We kiss, so long and soft and slow, and then we’re twined together. I brush my lips over his cheek. “I know I should, but I can’t bring myself to send you home yet.”
Vance takes my hand and we shed our clothes and sink into the now-full tub, facing each other.
“I won’t go home.” He takes both of my hands underneath the water. “How long do we have now?”
I shut my eyes. “Seven and a half weeks.”
His hands squeeze mine. “Only seven?”
I watch his face as I tell him, “I’ve got a two and a half week trip to Japan starting about two weeks before your time here is officially up.”
His eyes shut for a moment. Then he’s looking at the water’s surface. His thumb traces the veins inside my wrist. “Fifty-something days.”
“It’s fifty-three.”
“Fifty-two after tonight.” His face is soft now. Careful.
“I won’t do what I did today again.”
His lips give a grim twitch, and he tilts his head a little. “What did you do today, Sky?”
I grip his hands. I’m not a talker. This is Vance, though—somehow he always manages to know me.
