‘And what did I do in these fantasies of yours?’
Luthor’s smile broadened enough to show off his perfect teeth. ‘Mostly you looked amazing and screwed me a fuck of a lot. As in an awful lot. Would you please bloody well touch me?’
‘Like this?’ Xane asked, unbuttoning Luthor’s fly. He sucked the head of Luthor’s cock through his underwear. Luthor’s whole body curled and arched beneath him. He made an oh sound and then a guttural groan that might have been a plea for more. ‘What was that? You want me to unwrap you from this nasty cotton and suck you until you spill right down my throat. What makes you think I want to do that?’
‘Please. Touch me any way you like.’
‘Oh, I will, Luthor. I’m going to touch you exactly how I like.’ And he was going to savour the opportunity, because it wasn’t something he’d had the chance to do yet. Yes, he wanted Luthor’s dick, but he needed to explore every other precious inch of him too, and that might take a while. Good thing they had the whole night. As long as he slipped in beside Dani before daybreak, then that was in keeping with her wishes.
He mouthed the head of Luthor’s cock again, then knelt in order to strip Luthor’s shorts from him, before stretching out full length above the other man so that their hips and mouths were aligned, if not yet touching. ‘If you want me, show me.’
Xane looked down into the pools of Luthor’s hypnotic eyes as Luthor unbuttoned him and shoved his denim down his legs. He was naked underneath, and the kiss of the cool night air made him shiver. So too did Luthor’s touch. If Xane was determined to prolong this, and stretch it out for hours, then Luthor was intent on driving him to the point of no return in about the time it took him to sing one of Black Halo’s major hits. He was all mouth and tongue and fists and desperation. He strained and he jerked, stroked, clawed and caressed until they were both buzzing, and Xane’s shoulders ached from the effort of holding them both apart.
‘For Christ’s sake fucking touch me.’
Xane’s mouth led the descent, followed by his hips, until they were locked together and their erections were trapped between their bodies, hard and too fucking eager for what was to follow. Too bad his phone started vibrating and singing with Dani’s assigned ringtone.
‘Gotta answer it.’
Luthor groaned enough for both of them.
D: Where’s the charger for the MP3 player?
‘Guess Spook’s still keeping her busy.’ He hit reply to open the dialogue box, only for another message to arrive.
D: Doesn’t matter. I found it.
X: Great.
‘I can believe she’s thwarting us by text now,’ Luther bemoaned.
‘No one is thwarting anything.’ He leaned in and devoured Luthor’s mouth in a way that left them both slathered in sweat and flushed from head to foot.
Xane’s phone beeped again with the same ringtone. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’
D: I know what you’re doing. I trust you to show some restraint. Kissing, hand and BJs fine. Just nothing that involves a condom and you getting inside him.
‘What was that about her not cock-blocking us?’ Luthor remarked, reading the screen at an angle.
‘I think she gave us plenty of options. There are many ways to fuck, Luthor. Maybe you’re not familiar with them.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Just choose your pre-sanctioned, Dani-approved method.’
That got him a laugh.
‘In all seriousness though, we’re still following her rules.’
‘Yes, but a few hours ago we weren’t even allowed to kiss, so things are looking up.’ Luthor’s cock for one. ‘All we need do is give it time and build some trust. Oh, and work on overcoming her good-girl ethics.’
‘Because she believes bedding the both of us will send her straight to hell?’
‘More or less. It’s what a strict religious upbringing does to you.’ She was still carrying around more of their ridiculous doctrine than she liked to admit.
‘And there I was thinking the only issue we needed to overcome was your past as a player.’
Xane slapped Luthor across the abs for that remark. Honestly, it was uncalled for. In any case, what Dani had specific issues with wasn’t so much that he’d fucked a whole lot of people but rather that he’d had a three-way relationship with Steve and Elspeth, and she knew he’d loved Steve. She feared Luthor would fill the void in his heart that Steve had once occupied, thus leaving her as lovelorn and lost as Elspeth. What she kept failing to take into account was that he loved her, whereas he’d never loved Elspeth. They’d taken advantage of one another. That was all. ‘I doubt your sexual history is any more salubrious.’
Luthor grinned at him, as if he had plenty of secrets to tell. ‘I fucked a guy after a gig once.’ He pursed his lips as if thinking hard to recall any other naughtiness. ‘You know how it is, the drummer never gets any. The only one who scores less is the bassist.’
‘Don’t let Paul hear you say that.’
‘Come on, it’s the truth, and I bet he knows it too. You and Ash are the ones who see all the action. Spook would, if he wasn’t celibate.’
‘Yeah, well, Ash and I are spoken for these days.’ He tickled the red mark he’d made on Luthor’s abs with his tongue, refusing to give him what he knew he wanted.
‘Are you going to suck me, or do I have to go and find Dani and see if I can persuade her to do it?’
‘Good luck with that.’
‘It might not take as much persuasion as you think.’
Perhaps not; he’d seen how Dani had looked at Luthor earlier. She might be wary as heck around him, but there was definitely admiration of an interesting kind there. That said, the visual that appeared in his head of Dani on her knees sucking Luthor off did give him a serious case of the butterflies. The damned things bowled around his insides, making him antsy, which in turn made all the hairs on his body stand on end.
However, unlike Dani, Xane refused to give in to his fears. ‘Scratch what I said earlier. If it so happens that you get past first base with Dani, I’m not going to insist on witnessing it. If I’m there, then great, but if I’m not …’
‘If you’re not, what?’
‘I’m not putting restrictions on how you explore your attraction to one another.’
‘Xane Geist,’ Luthor said, crunching into an almost sitting position. ‘Did you just give me permission to fuck your girlfriend?’
He figured that’s exactly what he’d done. He wasn’t about to say it aloud again though, and to distract Luthor from his question he finally wrapped his lips around his lover’s cock.
Brzzzzt!
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Xane rolled his eyes at yet another interruption. Did the universe have it in for him? What could she possibly want now? Except he realised, as he swirled his tongue around the tip of Luthor’s cock, that it wasn’t Dani’s call alert beeping at him now, but something thrashy with a truckload of drums.
‘It’s mine.’ Luthor’s groan rolled up from somewhere in his belly. ‘It’s in my pocket if you can reach it.’
Xane felt it vibrating away against the base of Luthor’s cock, in a way that was clearly as pleasurable as it was an interruption.
‘Please.’
‘Can’t take that much of a buzz, eh? I’ll have to remember that when I next get my toys out.’
Xane fished the offending object from Luthor’s front pocket. He was tempted to throw it at the nearest hard object. Only with great reluctance did he swipe the screen. The device mocked him with a numeric keypad.
‘I see you took Sally’s lessons on security seriously.’
‘Considering she ranted at me solidly for four hours about how Ash’s inability to keep hold of his possessions caused a shit storm so big it makes all your sexual antics put together pale, you’re damned right I did.’ He tapped in the code. 1907.
‘My birth date, how cute,’ Xane remarked. ‘What’s Dani said to you? Are you restricted to condomless activities as
well?’
Luthor wriggled beneath him. He frowned at the message. ‘It’s not from Dani. It’s from Lykke, out of my old band. Take a look.’ He turned the phone around.
L: Have you seen this? Thought you might have settled in before you decided to out yourself.
There was a link to a Tumblr site. Xane followed the breadcrumb trail and landed on a video clip of him and Steve Matlock shagging. ‘What the fuck!’ In his surprise he dropped the phone, which skidded onto the floor under the swing. They both climbed off to hunt for it.
‘That’s a way old picture, right?’ Luthor said. ‘I mean, he’s gone. That’s nothing new.’
Xane found the phone and stared at the image again from on his knees. The video looked as if it had been taken using a phone camera. Sound, thank God, was minimal. Just a few urgent grunts rather than any strings of endearments, but it still wasn’t what he’d been expecting to see. Or what he wanted doing the rounds on the internet when he was still mourning … Actually, at any time.
‘Where’s the link below take you to?’ Luthor jabbed a finger into the screen, and they landed on a news article.
‘Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me.’
‘Elspeth Shriik spills all about her life with Xane Geist and his gay relationship with her husband Steve Matlock,’ declared the headline.
‘Geist was in love with him. He regularly fucked Steve while I watched,’ ran a pull quote, while a second announced, ‘It’s how he keeps the band in line. He’s slept with all of them. Currently he’s breaking in our new drummer, Luthor Albrecht.’
‘I’m going to fucking throttle her.’
‘Is that a picture of us?’ Luthor squinted at a tiny pixelated image. ‘Where the fuck did that come from?’
‘It’s probably faked. The pictures don’t matter. It’s the story that’s going to screw us.’
‘I’m sure this’ll blow over.’ Luthor sounded calm, but he was vibrating with nervous energy, and his expression was ripe with irritation. ‘It’s not as if you haven’t weathered a sex scandal before.’
‘That was different.’ Rock stars were expected to misbehave. And sometimes they got caught out with a lovely lady on their arms. It was an occupational hazard. But this, this wasn’t chance. This was deliberate, and it had just announced his sexual orientation to the world. ‘I’m not officially out, Luthor. I’ve never hidden who I am. It’s unlikely to come as a big surprise to our core fanbase – although Dani had definitely belonged to Black Halo’s legion of mega fans and she’d never cottoned on – but still … This is not what I fucking need. Not personal videos of Steve and me making out. The man’s dead, can’t they respect his memory?’
‘Do you think Elspeth’s actually said all this?’ Luthor had hit yet another link and was now scrolling through what appeared to be the original article. ‘I know she’s a prize bitch, but what would she gain from this? People have been sympathetic about her loss. This makes it look as if her marriage was a sham to cover up a torrid affair between you and Steve.’
‘I don’t know.’ Xane pulled at his long hair. He couldn’t think straight. A riot had broken out inside his skull. What Luthor had just suggested actually sounded scarily close to the truth. Steve’s feelings for Elspeth had been real. And while their marriage hadn’t been a sham, it had been a short-lived extremely sick joke.
The more he read of the article, the more disgusted and irate he became.
She’d sold the whole band out – not only him, all of them. Still, most of the cheap shots were directed his way. She described in detail how she’d watched them, and how uncomfortable Steve had been that first time they’d slept together.
It had been uncomfortable, awkward … The memory of it tingled under his skin. There’d been so much desire there between the three of them, but none of it directed where it might have been appreciated.
Steve had given in to him because he was desperate to please Elspeth. He hadn’t really enjoyed what they’d done. He’d only got off once Xane was no longer inside him, and when Elspeth had been all over him. The way Bang! magazine depicted it, it sounded awfully close to assault.
Xane moved away from the swing and started pacing. ‘Forward me the original message.’ Once he’d received it, he sent it straight on to the other members of the band, as well as their PR guru Sally Kettering and the band’s gargantuan manager Graham Callahan. No, he didn’t really want them reading it, and wondering if that was really how things had been, but on the other hand the guys were being portrayed as a bunch of absolute pansies, and maybe Sally could work some magic and get the article and associated video clips taken down.
He knew that was an idle fantasy even as he pressed send on the message. Who knew how long the article had been up there, or how many times information relating to it had been copied, shared and reposted with additional commentary?
He took a sneaky look at the band’s Facebook page and instantly wished he hadn’t. Numerous video clips of him playing around on stage and hyping things up in a sexually provocative fashion were already playing in continuous loops alongside a plethora of animated fucking gifs, most of which weren’t of him, Steve or any other member of the band, but had been movie-magicked to make it appear that way. There were links to Xane x Spook, and Xane x Ash – sexually explicit fanpics, and someone’s version of the Monte Carlo casino incident cut with images of yet more fucking. Between those were the questions and opinion pieces, all of which made his blood boil.
At least Sally would be able to shut that down.
Blip. He envisaged her pulling the plug on their entire media presence.
‘Do you still think Elspeth will still turn up tomorrow?’ said Luthor, approaching with the picnic blanket wrapped around his shoulders as a cloak.
Xane shook his head. Rock Giant had repeatedly stated that Elspeth would be along for his birthday. He hadn’t much cared either way if she showed. Now, after the dramatically bad present she’d handed him, if she had the temerity to appear, he was going to wring her bloody neck.
It wasn’t as if he’d even managed to forgive her yet for the wedding stunt or her part in Steve’s death. She had played a part. If it wasn’t for her actions, there’d have been no breakdown in communications, no weekend in Monte Carlo, no fight, no broken nose. Steve would still be alive. This on top of that shit … They were through. Relationship kaput. The band would have to find a new keyboard player, and a new bassist too if Rock Giant started getting in his face or making excuses for her. The woman was poison. The most cold-hearted, manipulative, calculating bitch he’d ever had the misfortune to meet and screw.
Agitated beyond reason, Xane kept on pacing, leaving the veranda and turning around the corner of the building to the extensive patio. Fog was rolling in off the lake, and it curled around his feet like clouds of dry ice. It wasn’t so much being outed that bothered him, but the method. His privacy had been invaded. He’d never deliberately hidden who he was. In fact, he was pretty damned open about it. Not that he was any kind of BDSM master who treated the band members like slaves, which was definitely implied. Whips and chains and whatnots were stage props, nothing more, and his antics when performing were a bit of good-humoured fan service, nothing more.
But here was the thing: being open about who he was and what he liked didn’t give Elspeth or anyone else the right to sell that story.
It was fucking disrespectful.
‘Here.’ Luthor appeared beside him again and pressed a tall glass into his hands. ‘You look as if you need it.’
Xane gulped the contents, but alcohol couldn’t touch this sort of hurt. With a cry, he hurled the glass at the nearby boundary wall. The glass hit the stone and splintered, showering the potted plants with jagged crystal shards. ‘Fuck! Fucking fuck!’
Luthor curled his hand around Xane’s shoulder, but he shook him off. He didn’t want comforting. He didn’t want stoic, silent support. He was furious. How dare she? How fucking dare she? Yes, they had their disagreements
and their issues, but airing all that to the press at a time when they were all just trying to keep their heads above water was taking pettiness to the extreme. The tour was on hold. Ash remained ill and might never recover. Iain Willows could make bail any day, and who knew what that imbecile was capable of. He’d already had a stab at murder. Then there was his beloved Steve, gone for ever. That was shit enough for a lifetime, let alone a few months.
He couldn’t see any sense in her selling them out. Unless her motive was to sink the band. But why? If she hated it that much, why not just quit? He sure as hell wouldn’t stop her.
Despite the tension between Dani and Luthor, the atmosphere around here had been a whole lot nicer without Elspeth being around. It’d be an outrageous lie to claim he’d missed her. Why would anyone miss her snide asides, and her warped view of reality that made her out to be the constant victim?
Sure, there were truths nestled among the lies that were currently being circulated, but that almost made it worse. She had printed things he’d said to Steve that weren’t meant for anyone else’s ears, and which were no fucker’s business but his.
This was going to set his relationship with Dani back about a millennium too. She worried that she was going to lose him to Luthor, and now here was his former girlfriend claiming he was gay and that his associations with women were a cover.
Goddammit! He wasn’t closeted. He knew what he was and what he liked.
Dani had to see it was all bollocks, intended to cause as much distress as possible.
Dammit, he needed something to do with his hands.
Xane scratched at his skin hard enough to leave lacerations down his arms, but it wasn’t enough. He needed to take action. Do something in retaliation. Do something … anything, even if it was just to scream his hurt at the world.
He picked up a rock and drew his arm back, aiming at the nearest window.
Come Alive Page 18
