Stand by Your Manny

by Amy Lane

  Well, playing for a packed house of people who thought he’d changed their lives. That was one. And knowing what he wanted in the world—even if it wasn’t what his uncles probably wanted. That was another reward.

  And having the patience to wait for a guy who’d fallen off a building and restarted his life.

  That was only a reward if the guy Sammy was waiting for had enough courage to leap too.

  Cooper wanted that much courage.

  He pulled off the freeway at Hazel and headed toward Granite Bay, checking on Sammy every so often at the lights. Sammy’s eyes were closed, his expression peaceful, even as he nursed his milkshake fitfully.

  “What?” Sammy asked after one such glance, his eyes still closed. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I want you to stay with me tonight, even if you sleep on top of the covers. I don’t want you to go back to your room. I want you to be mine tonight.”

  Sammy’s smile expanded to a full-fledged grin, and he put his shake down to peer up at Cooper from under his blond lashes. “Is that in the traditional caveman pocket-romance sense, or—”

  Cooper silenced him with a finger across his lips. “That’s however you want it to be, Sam. I just don’t want you to disappear up into the bowels of the house again. I… I sort of like my quarters. They feel like a really nice apartment. If it’s supposed to be an apartment, then I want you to stay as a guest.”

  Sammy smiled against his finger, and Cooper returned his eyes to the road. “Okay, Cooper. I’d be honored to be your guest tonight. But I may run up to my room for my sweatpants and a pair of underwear, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Yeah,” Cooper told him, peace and excitement warring for first in his stomach. “That you can do.”

  They entered through the garage, and Cooper turned to go to his room. He was stopped by Sammy’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him into a kiss in the dark. He closed his eyes and let the kiss wash over him, the now-familiar taste of Sammy comforting him and energizing him at the same time. By the time Sammy pulled back and rested his forehead against Cooper’s, they were both breathing hard, and Cooper felt like his body was going to fly apart.

  “Sammy…,” he mewled. This wasn’t want—it was need, and Cooper had it, and he’d beg if he had to.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Sammy breathed. “A quick one. I don’t want to sleep on top of the covers, Coop. I want to sleep under the covers, and I want to be clean. Can we do that?”

  Cooper nodded, thinking about his small shower cubicle, and he wasn’t sure if it could contain his swelling heart.

  “I want you,” he said rawly. “Just… you. Want. You.”

  Sammy’s strained chuckle told him that maybe he could wait long enough to shower and make it good.

  “Back in ten,” he whispered in Cooper’s ear. “I promise.”

  Cooper twisted his mouth wryly. “Unless you fall asleep in the shower.”

  Sammy’s eyes opened comically wide. “Stopping off at the fridge for some juice! Make it fifteen!” And then, with a quick, hard kiss on the mouth, he was gone, trotting through the darkened house with his portfolio banging against his hip.

  Forever and a Few Short Weeks

  SAMMY had to test his balance on the way out of the car to make sure he was good to go, but once he could put one foot in front of the other?

  Nothing was going to stop him from kissing Cooper again.

  He’d heard—of course he’d heard. Cooper standing up to Tino. Telling Tino he was a good man. Sammy had never expected a champion; he’d always wanted too badly to champion everybody else. Big brother—it was his job, right?

  But Cooper’s kisses weren’t brotherly in the least.

  Sammy got to his room through the darkened house, ducked inside, and stripped quickly for the shower, trying not to think about being naked in front of Cooper, of touching Cooper’s bare skin all over his body.

  He only had so much energy left—he wanted to save it all for what was left of the night.

  After toweling off and dressing in sleep pants and a T-shirt, he paused for a moment at his end table drawer.

  When he’d been seventeen, right before his first prom, a small box of condoms had appeared there. Tino’s writing had flared across the receipt, with “We trust you. Be safe and be kind.” The box had never been opened.

  The next year, after he’d spent most of his year at home or in the hospital, sick or recovering, a new box had appeared, this one with “Let’s try this again” scrawled on a Post-it. That box too went into the trash untouched.

  The year after, his first year of college, he’d confided to his uncles that he was meeting a young man for coffee. This time, for the Great Condom Expiration Ritual, the note read, “We’re rooting for you, Sammy!”—and it was held down with a small bottle of lubricant as a paperweight. That relationship had ended with only a few kisses—and another box bit the dust.

  At twenty, the note had read, “It’ll happen,” and the lubricant had been in a very optimistically sized bottle.

  This last May he’d been twenty-one, and the note on his end table had read, “Some. Day.” The bottle of lubricant had been the very pricey kind, in a more modest size.

  That’s the bottle Sammy grabbed now. He looked at the box of condoms and bit his lip. No. Not with Cooper. Two clean slates, Cooper and Sammy. That didn’t happen often—a rare and sort of magical thing.

  Aware that Cooper was waiting for him, he grabbed the lubricant and ventured out of his room, only to almost run into Tino. His hands came up, and he fumbled the bottle, barely catching it before it landed on the floor with a thump.

  And there he was, holding a sexual aid and staring at his uncle Tino with ginormous eyes.

  Tino’s eyes were not any smaller. “Uh, Sammy?”

  “Yes, sir?” Oh God. He hadn’t called Tino “sir” since he’d passed out at soccer after deliberately throwing his breakfast in the trash.

  “Are you, uh, missing something there?”

  Sammy stared at the bottle, trying to figure out what was missing with lubrica—oh. “Oh no.” He smiled, because it was magical, right? “We’re both virgins. We don’t really need condoms.”

  Tino put his hand on his chest and gaped, and Sammy turned and ran down the stairs, praying he’d left his uncle—and the highly embarrassing moment—behind him.

  TINO stayed on the stairs for a moment, holding his hand to his chest and watching the boy he loved like a son scamper down the stairs to his future. His heart ached, whether from fullness or nostalgia, he couldn’t tell.

  With a sigh he turned back down the hall, since his whole reason for being outside Sammy’s room was to see if he was home.

  He got back to his bedside just as Cooper’s text flashed across the screen of his phone as it sat in the charger, and he laughed.

  “What?” Channing slept shirtless, and he wore his cheaters when he read in bed. He could not have possibly been more adorable.

  Tino shook his head, not sure if he could articulate the pain of watching Sammy run down those stairs, happy as a kid at Christmas. “Kids are home,” he muttered, sliding in next to his husband.

  “Martin, what is it?” Channing removed the cheaters and set them on the end table next to his Kindle. “You look….” His mouth—his ridiculously soft mouth—turned down at the corners. “Sad. Baby, what’s wrong?”

  “Sammy—he’s fine. He’s just….” Just going to lose his virginity with another virgin, and they’re both painfully innocent and helpless, and they’re just going to hold hands and go skipping out into the rain. “Just growing up is all,” he said, when he could get past the swelling in his throat.

  He was grateful when Channing didn’t try to jolly him out of the mood. “Yeah.” Channing nodded and leaned back in bed, opening his arm so Tino could snuggle on his chest. Tino did, stroking the hair that had grown there in the last thirteen—almost fourteen—years.

  “Cooper’s nice,” Tino
said weakly. Cooper was better than nice. Cooper had stood up for Sammy in perhaps the bravest of ways. Tino and Channing were in an almost unfair position of power—not that they’d ever abuse it, but still. It must have been difficult to speak out against the two men who had taken in his foster sister and then offered him a job that would allow them to grow up in the same house.

  But Cooper had done it, and he’d done it for Sammy.

  “Cooper’s… a work in progress,” Channing said thoughtfully. “There’s some good material there, but I think… I think he’s just beginning to see that the world doesn’t have to be all about basic survival. He can have some things in his life that are just Cooper’s.”

  Tino’s laugh felt a little hysterical and highly inappropriate. “You might be right,” he chortled, aware that tears were gathering in the corners of his eyes.

  Channing pulled back and stared at him. “What in the holy hell?”

  “Sammy,” Tino said simply, feeling the loss of this stewardship keenly. “Sammy is now exclusively Cooper’s. He just ran downstairs with a bottle of lubricant to seal the deal.”

  Oh, it was not often he saw his husband’s mouth drop open in complete shock.

  Of course, Channing’s shock was usually followed by immediate action.

  “The hell he is!” Channing swung his legs over the bed and threw back his covers just as Tino threw himself across Channing’s lap in an effort to keep him in bed.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Tino snapped. “What exactly is your plan here?”

  “Sammy! Didn’t you say he’s going to… to….” Channing made motions in the air that, considering what happened in this very bedroom, were both alarming and comical.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing there with your hands, Channing, but if you ever actually tried that on me, we’d both be in the hospital.”

  Channing, blessedly, stopped trying to talk with his hands. “But Tino—he’s our Sammy—”

  “World’s oldest virgin,” Tino reminded him sternly. “Didn’t you tell me that? Last May, when I re-upped the rubbers in his room? You were, like, ‘Jesus, I hope this stuff gets some play, Tino. I don’t mean to pry, but he’s not a bad-looking kid. You’d think he’d have a relationship by now,’ and I was, like, ‘Butt out of his life, Uncle Channing, because every kid does their own thing at their own time, remember?’ and you were, like, ‘Yeah, but I still worry that you didn’t have any lovers before me and you may have made a heinous mistake when you fell for a handsome billionaire with a small child in tow’—”

  “I never said that,” Channing snapped, shoving Tino aside and sliding back into bed to sulk with his arms crossed over his magnificent chest.

  “No, but there was subtext,” Tino told him, barely restraining his smile. “Admit it.”

  Channing rolled his eyes and then opened his arms again. “You were very young,” he said with dignity.

  “So are they,” Tino responded softly. “They’re young and they’re clueless, and unless my mother has taught me nothing, they’re very much in love.”

  “Augh!” Channing scrubbed his face with his hands. “It’s that last one that gets me.”

  “Yeah,” Tino mumbled, feeling the melancholy coming on again. “Me too.”

  Channing pulled him close, breathlessly close, close enough to remember what they liked to do in bed when everybody was asleep kind of close. “We did okay,” he said in the silence.

  “I’m still in love with you,” Tino told him solemnly.

  Channing closed his eyes. “Until I die,” he said, just as solemn. “I will always be in love with you.”

  Tino smiled—and then stuck out his tongue and licked Channing’s nipple, which was tantalizingly close. “Uhm, you know, maybe we should not worry about Sammy. At least, uh, not for the next fifteen minutes.”

  Channing harrumphed. “Fifteen minutes? We’ve got longer in us than that!”

  Tino pushed up in his arms, until their lips were almost touching. “Prove it, old man,” he whispered, just before Channing’s mouth took over.

  New, he thought, as Channing’s lips and hands and body went to work. Every touch is always brand-new.

  Maybe that was wisdom he should have given to Sammy, about how he could know love was real.

  But then, maybe it was something Sammy needed to find out on his own.

  SAMMY’S knock on Cooper’s door sounded obscenely loud, and he grimaced, trying not to shush it like a little kid. Cooper must have been waiting for him, because the door flew open immediately, and Cooper jumped into his arms, pressing him back to swing the door shut before doubt could ever be a thing.

  Ah, his mouth felt so good! Sammy inhaled his kisses, needing more and more and more. He wrapped his arms around Cooper’s waist and held tight, wishing he were stronger, wishing he could be the guy Cooper climbed like a telephone pole and just let ravish him.

  But Sammy wasn’t that guy. The most he could do was take charge, kissing along Cooper’s jaw, nibbling on his ear, tugging gently at the lobe. Cooper moaned, tilting his head sideways, and Sammy kept kissing, tasting a little bit of soap but mostly the spice of Cooper’s skin.

  With an awkward movement, Sammy pulled away, threw the lubricant on the bed, and then rucked up Cooper’s shirt. Oh, look! Little brown nipples—treats!

  Sammy cupped Cooper’s waist in his hands and bent to suck on one, shivering with the joy of tasting another man’s skin this intimately.

  “What was that?” Cooper asked, twisting his body so he could look.

  “Something we might not need,” Sammy told him, moving to the other nipple to pull it into his mouth.

  “Ah! Ah God!” Cooper’s hands tightened in Sammy’s hair, and he bucked a couple of times, hard and fast and not in control in the least. “Why wouldn’t we… oh, geez, Sammy! Why wouldn’t we gungh….”

  Oh man, Sammy wanted more! He kept sucking, but he busied his hands over Cooper’s slight but fairly defined body. Sleep pants, underwear, Sammy shoved them both down and kneaded Cooper’s tight, small bottom.

  Cooper moaned, spreading his legs a little, probably for balance, and Sammy went to drop to his knees, stopped by Cooper’s hand in his hair.

  “You bruise,” Cooper said shortly, blinking hard like he was trying to remember why, oh why, he’d stop Sammy from continuing on. “Let’s do this on the bed.”

  “Now!” Sammy begged, pulling his shirt over his head as Cooper finished toeing off his pants.

  “Yeah, sure.” Cooper grabbed the bottle of lubricant and pulled the covers down, then turned to look at Sammy. “Why?” he asked.

  Sammy paused, his thumbs underneath the waistband of his sleep pants and underwear.

  “Why what?” he asked, flushing self-consciously. Oh geez. He was so pale! And he did bruise. He probably had bruises all over his thighs from his performance that night.

  “Why wouldn’t we use the lubricant?” Cooper was looking at the bottle like just having it in his hand made him hot.

  Sammy cupped his painfully hard erection through his clothes and keened. “Cooper, I’m not going to last that long, are you?”

  It was a good thing Cooper was sitting on the bed—naked—because Sammy saw his eyes flutter back a little. He took a couple of deep breaths and said, “Not after you get naked—now get naked.”

  Sammy could feel his flush creeping up from his stomach to his chest and even his ears.

  “I’m… uh, you know. Not tan,” he mumbled. “And, uh… not musclebound. And….”

  Cooper stood in front of him before Sammy even realized he’d gotten off the bed. “Hey,” Cooper whispered, stroking his cheeks with gentle thumbs. “I… I think you’re beautiful, Sam Lowell. I just want to touch you. Like you want to touch me. That’s not so bad, is it?”

  “No,” Sam whispered. He shoved his shorts down past his knees, and while he was shaking them off his feet, he closed his eyes and took Cooper’s mouth, sweeping inside with a thought a
nd balancing himself with gentle hands on Cooper’s bare shoulders.

  And he realized that they were both bare, all the way to their toes.

  He pressed closer, his erection filling with a vengeance, and Cooper ground against him, just as needy naked as he had been clothed.

  “The bed,” Sammy begged softly, and Cooper walked backward, pausing only to sit up onto the bed, crawling like a crab until he was smack in the middle, his head resting on the pillows and his legs spread slightly for better access.

  Oh, look at him! His skin carried a darker tone than Sammy’s, and his erection… wow. Sammy had tried very hard not to build those things up as the end-all, be-all of an experience with another man, but Cooper’s erection was, well, impressive.

  Sammy crawled up the bed, bending his head to kiss the inside of Cooper’s knee, and then the other knee, then kissing up, gentle kisses on Cooper’s inner thighs until Cooper spread his knees and begged.

  “Sammy, I’m dying here… just… I’ll stroke it and you can kiss me and… yes!”

  Because Sammy wanted it. He wanted to taste it and suck on it; he wanted it filling his mouth and throat. He wrapped his lips carefully around the head, shielded his teeth, and pulled it deep into his mouth.

  Soft, soft skin and hard, hard flesh. Augh, it was delicious, and Sammy’s hand shook as he brought it up to grip tight. Cooper moaned, dropping his head back to the pillows and abandoning himself to Sammy’s ministrations.

  Sammy vowed to serve him well.

  He used his hand and mouth in conjunction, because basic physics dictated that thing was not going to fit in the back of his throat, and his hand could do what his mouth could not—at least not yet. He practiced, awkwardly at first, moving his head and hand in together, but soon, spurred on by Cooper’s shameless, begging groans, he had his coordination down.

  Cooper helped—he tightened his fingers in Sammy’s hair and thrust his hips, ever so slowly, until Sammy got his timing right.

  He bucked hard, once, twice. The third time Sammy managed to swallow him right down to the back of his throat, and Cooper jammed his hand in his own mouth to stifle a scream as he came.