by Cameron Dane
The response was immediate. Colin's eyes flew open, and his mouth gaped with a choking noise. His entire body went rigid in a straight line, and as he came, he shot one long arc of cum right over the edge of the bed where it splashed on the floor. For a moment, he hung strung tight and then went lax, cushioning himself on the front of Marek's body. At the same time, his lips parted with, “We need—”
Marek covered Colin's mouth. “Just get some rest for now.” He let his hand slide down Colin's arm and wrapped it around his waist. “Everything else can wait until the morning.”
“You're right.” Colin covered Marek's hand on his stomach and snuggled back into complete contact. “It's late, and we're both tired. It'll hold.”
Marek held his new lover close, not closing his eyes until he felt Colin's breathing soften and knew he was asleep.
Chapter Twelve
Marek stretched his arms and legs across his bed, yawned, and immediately knew something wasn't right when he didn't bump into another body. No Colin.
How do I already know, after one night, that he should be here with me?
Shifting up against the headboard, Marek rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, yawning again as he spotted Colin across the room. More accurately, Colin's naked backside. The man stood facing the wall and had the flat of his hand, fingers spread wide apart, against the plaster. Marek scratched through the new growth covering his jaw, studying his bedmate as worry about Colin's state of mind crept up on him again.
Colin broke the silence without turning around. “Morning.” He shifted some, dragging his fingers over the wall. “Did you sleep well?”
Huh. Marek sat up straighter, shocked that no exhaustion lingered in him right now. “Good morning. I feel very rested. Thank you.” He tilted his head and scrunched his brow, following Colin with his eyes as he continued to feel up the bedroom wall. “What are you doing?”
Finally turning, Colin lifted his gaze to Marek's. His eyes were clear, and Marek started breathing easier. Thank goodness. He did not need a repeat scare of last night.
Offering a sweet smile, Colin said, “I'm deciding whether I should tell you something crazy.”
That got a chuckle out of Marek. He settled in and crossed his arms against his chest. “Now why should you start worrying about that now?”
“Fair point.” The burn of a blush started at Colin's chest and worked its way up to his hairline. “Probably should have thought a bit more about that earlier, huh?”
Marek's heart hammered with ridiculous giddiness. Colin was so damned cute; he could not possibly want the man any more than he already did. “Don't worry about it. Go ahead, sweetness,” he said. “I shut you down last night. Say whatever you want now.”
Grinning, Colin grew even redder, but his eyes lit up like a kid's on Christmas morning. “I like that.”
Marek knew just what Colin meant. “You called me baby last night. I liked hearing that too.” He drew the rumpled sheet up to his waist, determined to listen and to ignore his morning erection. “Now go ahead and get to what you wanted to say.”
Putting himself to pacing across the foot of the bed, Colin nodded. “Okay. Well, I've gone through a lot of ideas about why I started having dreams about this house and the red door and you. I want an answer. I don't like unsolved mysteries, and I don't like things I can't understand. I've been accused of desiring…control”—he rubbed his hands on his legs, making Marek wonder if he was sweating over sharing this information—“and I suppose that's not entirely untrue.”
Marek bit his cheek so he didn't laugh. “You're not admitting anything I haven't figured out about you on my own.”
Colin pursed his lips and shot Marek a little glare. “Then you figured it out a hell of a lot faster than the other guys I've been intimate with.”
Marek raised a brow right back. “I'll consider that a compliment.”
“If you want it to be. Those other men in my life…” Colin paused, and his jaw clenched. “When they really saw who I was every day, they decided they would be better off with someone more relaxed than I am.”
What Marek didn't want to do was sit there, look at Colin, and think about him with other men. His hard-on no longer an issue, he raised his knee and rested his elbow on it, watching as Colin worried a hole through his lip.
“All right. But that's not what you started out wanting to tell me,” he prompted. “You're getting off track.”
“Right. Sorry.” Colin went back to walking the length of the bed. “Solving my dreams. Okay, so when I saw Payton's name on the greenhouse and figured out the connection you must have shared, for a day or two I wondered if Payton might have sneaked into my subconscious and somehow guided me here to you.”
“No.” Marek shook his head as he tracked Colin. “It's not Pay. I've thought of that. I would feel him, and I don't.”
Colin shifted his attention to Marek again, and held it. “Yeah, I don't think it's Payton anymore either.”
The hairs on Marek's arms stood on end, and his heart started to kick up with speed. “So what do you think?”
Circling the bed until he stood right next to where Marek sat, Colin lowered himself and kneeled on the floor. He looked up, unwavering, and Marek's fear grew. “I think it's you,” Colin said softly. “And this house. Specifically, what you're doing to this house.”
Marek reared, and his head spun like on a Tilt-A-Whirl. “What the hell does that mean? I'm not doing anything to this house.”
“I think you are, even though you surely don't mean to. I think you're hurting it.”
He snorted. “That's ridiculous.”
“Hear me out.” Colin crawled up on the bed and grabbed Marek's legs, imploring him with his touch. “I think your pain and grief over Payton's death, and your guilt over not being there with him when he was attacked, is eating at you so much the house is somehow absorbing it and making it its own.”
Marek shuffled across the bed out of Colin's reach, needing space. “That's crazy talk.” He felt like insanity touched him just hearing Colin's outrageous theory.
“Maybe it is.” Colin followed with his stare, and everything about him was open and earnest in every way. “But that doesn't mean it's not true. In my dreams, when I put my hands on the red door, it was always warm with life. And when I touched it, that was when you would appear. When I walked through this place in reality, I could feel its neglect like it was alive and sad. That first day, I touched the door frame to your bedroom, and I saw you masturbating on this bed, as clear as day. I've felt vibrations that I cannot explain. I think this house somehow has a pulse, a soul; I don't know how. Stewart built it with such love for Beatrice, and she never wanted to leave it. Maybe she could feel him here, just as much as not wanting to believe he was dead. Maybe they loved each other so much it somehow leaked into the floors and walls. Everything is energy in some form or another. Why can't those energies get their wires crossed sometimes and meld together? Why can't it be true?”
“Because…because it doesn't make any sense, that's why.” Marek jumped out of bed and picked up the pacing Colin had left off. He threw Colin a pointed look as he did it. “Houses are not alive, Colin. They don't feel pain. See?” He strode across the floor and rubbed his hands all over the dark frame circling the window. “I touch it all the time and don't feel anything. Look? My feet are bare, and I'm touching the hardwood. I feel no vibrations. Nothing. Besides”—he threw his hands up to his sides—“I don't even have a red door on the house for you to see in your dreams.”
Colin leaped off the bed and raced to Marek, taking both of his hands in a firm hold. “But the house did have one before you moved in; even you conceded that. Which is more proof that it's more than just you pulling me to this place. The house is somehow lending elements of itself to the dreams.”
The red door is entirely something from my past. You just don't remember. “That's not tr—” Marek zipped his lip. Guilt resurged, plaguing him right where he stood.
I
can't think about one of the nicest moments in my life without reliving one of the worst that came right after. I don't ever want you to know.
Taking a seat on the windowsill, Marek lifted one of Colin's hands to his lips and pressed a kiss to the center of his palm. Christ. I need this human connection. Even just for a little while. He tried to smile, but it didn't feel like he entirely succeeded. “I know you think you've stumbled onto something about this house; I just don't think the conclusions you're drawing are correct.” There. He gave the truth. Without the details. “I'm sorry.”
Colin looked like Marek slapped him. He pulled away and backed up until he sank down on the edge of the bed. Some of the passion left his eyes, but once again, steel held his back up stiff. “There isn't any other way it makes sense that I could have dreamed about this place, to the detail, without ever having seen it.” He spoke each word clearly and with deliberation. “One of the most puzzling things in my dreams was the pull I felt to this house, just as much as to the man living inside it. It doesn't make sense that even though I didn't know who you were, I already knew your pain and loss before I ever saw your face and heard your story. If you say it's not possible for this house to absorb your energy and somehow send signals of both you and it to me, then you're saying it's not possible for me to have had those dreams at all. And I know I have. You know I have.”
Pain lanced through Marek, and he rushed to Colin. He cupped his hand around Colin's neck and tilted his face up. “I do believe you about your dreams.” Sliding his knee on the bed, Marek leaned down and pressed his lips against Colin's forehead, lingering, absorbing his life force. “Please believe that.”
Colin grasped Marek's wrist, looking up as he eased back a bit. “Then how can you discount the rest so easily? You saw what happened to me last night.”
“Yes, I did.” Marek's hand flexed around Colin's nape and he scraped a hard, fast kiss against those upturned lips, needing to feel Colin in another way. “Your confusion scared the crap out of me.”
Shaking his head, Colin said, “I wasn't confused.” His gaze, sharp and clear, pinpointed right on Marek. “As soon as I got up from that coffee table, my feet felt tied to the floor. The heaviness crept up into the rest of my body. I reached out to grab the wall because I thought I was going to fall, and it was like this big ball of coiling, intense emotions slammed right into me and exploded inside me. It was full of anger, rage, grief, love, fear, guilt… It overwhelmed me and knocked me right to the floor.”
Marek wiped his hand over his mouth, completely caught up in Colin's tale. “Shit.” He dropped to sit next to Colin on the bed.
Colin turned his head and lifted a brow in Marek's direction. “I know, right? But today, I don't feel all of that.” He shifted to face Marek and folded one leg on the bed, letting the other dangle off the side. Looking around the room, he added, “There's a buzz I can sense if I touch the walls and concentrate really hard, but it's like it's resting or something. I think you were incredibly upset and emotional last night, and the house took it all inside itself. I think it maybe thought I was leaving when I got up, and it was trying to keep me here. I don't know any other way to explain what I felt. What I have been feeling for two years.”
Marek narrowed his gaze and studied the room, searching for life. He dug his feet into the floor, and it just felt…hard. Shrugging, he looked at Colin. “I don't feel it. I never have. I don't know what else to say.”
“You don't have to; that's not why I told you. Shit, I'm still trying to put it all together myself. If I believe everything I told you to be true, and I do, that still doesn't explain why this house reached halfway across the globe and sent your pain and its sadness to me.” Colin offered a little smile and put his hand on Marek's knee, pausing as he watched himself draw circles with his index finger. “I haven't seen you in such a long time, and let's face it”—he glanced up—“we didn't really hang out together very much when we were younger. But at the same time, I definitely don't have any connection to the other people who owned this place to explain why the dreams would come to me, so that leaves complete random happenstance—which I do not believe in—or our brief contact as teenagers as the reason they found their way to me. There has to be something, Marek. There has to be.”
Marek ground his teeth against one another, but the guilt clawed in his throat, choking him where he sat. He looked into Colin's eyes, and words just wanted to spill out of his mouth. “I—” No no no. Marek clamped his jaw shut, trapping the confession inside. If I stay here five seconds more, I'm going to tell you everything, and I can't bear to lose you. Not yet.
“You what?” Colin squeezed his knee.
“I liked you a little bit in high school,” Marek confessed in a rush. He shot up and moved to the window, needing fresh air. He braced his hand on the frame and looked to the calming blue of the Pacific. “I thought about kissing you and getting my hand down your pants once or twice.” Totally true. It was just that Marek had fantasized about a lot of other boys in addition to Colin. Colin's was actually based on the person, though, not just a male body, and that was rare. “Maybe it's that.” Mixed with a heaping shitload of “forgive me” for inadvertently instigating the most awful event in your life.
“I thought you were cute too.” Colin moved in behind Marek, and Marek's pulse started jumping out of control. Wrapping his arms around Marek's chest, Colin settled his cheek on Marek's shoulder and kissed his ear. “But I hadn't filled out quite yet, and you were all big and mysterious and sexy, and you always intimidated me with how quiet and watchful you were.”
“I was just covering my ass and trying to stay off everyone's radar.”
“Yeah.” Colin nodded; Marek could feel the motion against his shoulder. “Being a teenager and gay and terrified to tell anyone will do that to a person.”
It'll do a lot worse than that.
Exhaling the chaos, Marek let the familiar smell of damp earth outside calm him as he breathed back in. Although he couldn't see it from his bedroom window, he knew from living here that some of that ground was already cracking as it dried under the beating of the early sun. Other island treasures lived hidden in the tropical mountain foliage, and right then one of the most special flitted across Marek's mind.
“You want to go for a hike?” he asked. “I'll show you something you won't see in Texas.” Marek reluctantly untangled from Colin's hold, but clasped his hands before he stepped away. “We have to go today; it might not be there tomorrow.”
“I see you're still a little bit mysterious. You have me intrigued.” Colin dipped his head and sniffed himself, scrunching his face afterward. “Okay, I know we're going to sweat, but I still need a shower first. I also want to call my friends and assure them I'm all right.”
“I'll jump in first while you make your calls.” Marek smacked Colin's ass, and Colin mock yelped. “Get moving. Grab those jeans you were wearing last night, unless you brought another pair of long pants. Wait a second.” He grabbed Colin before he stepped two feet away. “Get everything but your shoes; I'll give you a proper pair of hiking boots to wear.” He lined his bare foot up next to Colin's. “Close enough fit.”
Colin reached down and stroked his palm right down the length of Marek's penis. “It's more than close. It's a damn fine fit.”
Marek groaned as his dick twitched. “Geez, you're a cock-tease.” He didn't fight the touch though. In fact, he pushed into it a little bit.
A seductive-as-hell smile lit Colin's face and turned his eyes downright sultry. “If only we'd known it in Henderson. Think of the fun we could have had.” He rubbed Marek's prick with a firm touch, certainly felt it respond under his hand, and winked. Then he let go. “Be right back.”
Marek openly stared as Colin walked away, craving every line of the man's sleekly muscular back, tight ass, and long legs. Just as Colin surely wanted.
Let the man tease. Lighthearted was good.
It was when they got serious that Marek risked everything.
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Chapter Thirteen
“Oh, wow.”
Colin stared, mesmerized and enchanted by the view before him.
Halfway up Marek's mountain, Colin stood at the edge of a small pool of clear water, perhaps only twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter. Colin could see the dark, rocky bottom but didn't fool himself into thinking that meant the spring was shallow. He took all that in on a cursory scale…for the moment. Right now, though, Colin could not take his eyes off the waterfall across the span of the pool. Rushing down from a ledge some twenty feet above, the small fall only looked to have a three- or four-foot width, but it didn't matter. The smooth arc of water running into the spring was framed by lush green foliage, and red, yellow, and orange flowers of various varieties, making it a center point of something incredible.
Marek leaned in and nudged Colin's shoulder. “Like it?”
“Are you kidding?” Colin asked incredulously. He could not stop staring at the striking testament of Mother Nature and time, as well as the rest of the amazing surroundings. Colin hadn't thought anything could be as gorgeous as Marek's beach and ocean view. He was wrong. “This is beautiful.”
“You're not too tired or sore?” Marek slid in behind Colin, wrapped his arms around his stomach, undid the backpack waist strap, and slid the pack off his shoulders. “I noticed last night you have some additional scarring on your hip. It's a strenuous hike up the side of this mountain for someone who hasn't done it before.”
“It's from the attack.” That must have been why Marek kissed his hip so tenderly last night. In the heat of Marek finally touching him, Colin hadn't even thought about it. He lived in this body every day; he was used to it. “If I end up sore, I'll recover,” he promised. He bent his right knee off the ground and rotated it from the front to the side and back. His flexor tightened some already, and he knew he'd need some pain relievers tonight before bed. “This is worth a sore hip. Thank you for bringing me.”
