Citywide

by Santino Hassell

  “Well, we won’t be stuck in the building,” I said. “You could always head out and walk to Caleb and Oli’s if y’all want. It’s not like they don’t have the room. And I could walk to Nunzio and Michael’s spot uptown. They haven’t moved into their new place yet.”

  Jace’s generous mouth pursed into a slash, dark eyes fixing on me with the utmost skepticism and annoyance. “We’re not splitting up.”

  “It’s fine, for real. It would take less than an hour—”

  “Chris, stop. We’re not fucking splitting up in an emergency. That’s how bad shit happens.”

  If he were anyone else, I’d have laughed him off and made a few jokes about how a blackout wasn’t exactly a zombie apocalypse, and how the city had always been fragile to circuit overloads during times of extreme heat, but . . . it was Jace. So I didn’t. For all that my crew and I acted like we were so hard, it was Jace who’d grown up poor as dirt in the Edgemere Houses in the Rockaways with a drug-dealing father and a mother who’d been murdered in front of him at age seven.

  It was Jace who’d been used as currency by that same father, until he’d met Aiden’s mom—yet another person struggling with addiction back in the early nineties. And it’d been Jace who’d been abandoned by his father only a few months later.

  That was as much as I knew about Aiden’s and Jace’s history. They’d been thrown together by the crack epidemic of the eighties and nineties, raised together from sixteen by a woman who’d had no idea how to even raise one son let alone a kid as wild as Jace had been, and they’d somehow fallen in love. It was the most fucked-up story I’d ever heard, but one that always made me check myself before I belittled one of Jace’s seemingly irrational concerns or paranoid questions. The dude had reason to fear the dark and distrust strangers. And Aiden had reason to be so overprotective.

  “All right,” I said, throwing my arms along the back of the sofa and slumping down. “Then we stay here and kick it. I bet you anything they have a kitchen stocked full of goodies for these spoiled-ass employees. All my job keeps for us is some stale peanut butter crackers that were probably engineered during the Cold War.”

  Jace relaxed and turned sideways, throwing one of his legs over my lap so he could cling to me with every limb. “They usually have all kinds of nonperishables and cases of water.”

  “So we won’t starve?”

  “No starving,” he confirmed. “And I bought sandwiches, chips, and lube from the bodega by the house, so we’re covered for dinner.”

  A laugh started in my belly, manifesting in a silent shake of my shoulders until I was laughing hard enough for my eyes to tear. The way he slipped in lube so casually in that low husky voice of his had me dead, because only he would add sex as part of a three-course meal.

  “All right,” Aiden boomed, striding back over to us. “Internet is already acting funny, but I managed to get everybody on the horn.”

  “Who is everybody?” Jace asked. “Your mom? Caleb and Mere?”

  “And Clive. They’re all at home and sitting tight for the night.” Aiden plopped down next to me, his bulky body causing the couch to screech backward just a bit. “And my father sent out a stilted-ass fucking group text asking if any of us need the services of his security team. He’s acting like the boroughs could turn into a war zone with the power out.”

  “Because it could happen,” Jace muttered. “People are gonna be left stranded everywhere, and security systems will be down in stores. Also, circuits get jammed with the cell phones and most people don’t have access to landlines, let alone a pay phone these days.”

  “You’re just paranoid,” Aiden said, waving a hand. “So’s my father.”

  I could sense Jace giving him the evil eye, so I patted them both and changed the subject. “Regardless of what happens outside, our asses are in a luxury office that I hope holds onto the semi-cool air through the night with heroes from the bodega and snacks in the office. We have nothing to worry about except who is sleeping on which couch.”

  “Aiden has a huge pullout couch in his office for when he stays late,” Jace said. “We can snuggle until it gets hot as fuck and I kick both you sweaty assholes off it.”

  Aiden snorted. “You might wanna just banish me in advance. You know I sweat like a fucking beast.”

  Jace smirked at his husband and squeezed me tighter against him. “Just me and my boo, then. You can sleep on the floor after we take turns on your dick.”

  Aiden’s eyelids lowered to half mast, his lips curving up in a dirty smile as he likely pictured something filthy enough to turn my penis into a traitor. I was supposed to be having serious discussions with them, not fucking in their office building.

  I repeated it in my head, but the words faltered as soon as Aiden reached down to adjust the swollen length in his shorts.

  Christ, I was screwed.

  The IT guy’s desk was the only space not among the rest of the open-concept rows of work stations. He had his own little glass-encased office filled with spare equipment stored in tidy closets and cubbies. It was so clean that it freaked me the fuck out, because every IT dude I’d ever known had preferred controlled chaos to the sterile environment this human being operated in.

  While I was not one to snoop on another dude’s hardware, I needed space. After scarfing the turkey, ham, and swiss cheese hero sandwich Jace had brought for me (which was made exquisitely because my boy knew exactly how to order), I excused myself to see what I would be working with once the power came back on. Truth be told, I had no idea when the power would be back on. I’d bullied my phone into loading Twitter just enough to see headlines implying it could be anywhere between eight hours to forty-eight hours. Which . . . no. I refused to be stuck here for that long.

  The thing people didn’t get about New Yorkers was that the city relied on mass transit to operate. Once you took away the MTA, we were fucked. We regularly commuted between boroughs to go to work or sometimes even to go to a certain store. Getting caught out there on the wrong side of the river could leave you temporarily homeless depending on the timing of an emergency. I had little doubt that the streets down below us would be full of people camping out for the night. Or the weekend.

  And I was here with Jace and Aiden.

  My two suitors who were not shy at all about telling me exactly how and when they wanted me, and my dick wasn’t hesitant to respond. My big squishy heart wasn’t either. Every time Jace cozied up to me or Aiden went into daddy mode, I got all warm and fuzzy inside. It was time to lay it all out on the table and just talk about it. Tell them my feelings, find out where they stood about me, and figure out where to go from there once and for all. But now that we were trapped together, was it the best time? Being an emo mess with nowhere to go hide seemed awful.

  Releasing a disgusted sigh, I sat in the IT dude’s—Travis—desk and looked around. It was dark as hell in the room with the exception of two candles from the stash Jace had dug up in Caleb’s office. Why the man had a hoard of expensive-ass candles in his office was well beyond my comprehension, but they smelled like apple pie so I was all in for this form of lighting.

  Travis’s chair was far more comfortable than the ratty one I had at work, and he had a way bigger desk. Oddly, there wasn’t much on it. No personal effects, no signs of side projects, no gadgets or stress toys to occupy his hands. Just a big blank-ass desk and an iPad. On a whim, I turned it on and was thrilled to see it had 4G and wasn’t password protected.

  Again, I wasn’t usually one to use another person’s electronics, but my phone was already more than halfway dead and it wasn’t like I could charge it anywhere. Aiden had reassured me that there had to be a solar charger in someone’s desk in the office, but I wasn’t going to count on that.

  I used Travis’s iPad to navigate to Reuters, and was thrilled when it loaded faster than my phone. The brief highlight of positivity lasted for only a moment before I loaded an article on the topic and realized the situation was pretty fucking dire. In fac
t, it seemed to mirror the situation that had happened back in 2003. Several states were without power due to grids that had failed in a domino effect, and it was entirely possible we would be here for a while.

  Given the fact that the air had already lost its chill, and I was already sweating beneath my shirt, it was probably a good time to go forage for food in case we were trapped for the weekend. Before going to share my less-than-stellar news with Aiden and Jace, I started to type in BBC.com and was greeted with a dropdown of Travis’s recent browser history.

  My eyebrows flew up.

  The dude spent a fuck-ton of time on Breitbart, an ultraconservative website. There were links to articles over twenty deep. Cringing, I opened his full search history and found a Twitter account. His handle was @deplorablehipster89. Scrolling through his feed was downright scary.

  Not only was this dude a down-low racist, but he had homophobic shit all over his Twitter, despite working for a queer company. What the fuck?

  “Hey.”

  I jumped, fumbling with the iPad, and slammed it down hard enough to almost crack the screen. Thank God I’d never been tempted into a life of crime. I had zero chill.

  “Uh, you okay?” Aiden asked, laughing incredulously. “What are you doing?”

  Busted snooping on his employee. His employee who regularly threatened liberals on social media, used his IT skills to dox them, and appeared to be a radical white supremacist. Instead of saying this, I squinted at Aiden.

  He looked at me sideways. “Are you using precious battery life watching porn or something?”

  “Uh. No?”

  Fuck, why was I so bad at lying? More importantly, why was I lying? I squinted at him harder, and a sudden dawning fear bloomed inside of me. What if he knew and was okay with it? What if they all knew? What if they aided and abetted and employed trash bigots as long as they were allegedly competent at their jobs? It seemed impossible. They were all queer and liberal as fuck. This wasn’t just about a difference in politics. This dude had legit hate speech on his social media. Threats.

  There was no way Aiden knew about it.

  Aiden’s amusement faded to bemusement. He walked closer. “Chris, seriously, you’re freaking me out. You didn’t just find out this is some sort of terrorist attack, did you? Or a fuckin’ zombie apocalypse?”

  “No . . .”

  Bemusement upgraded to concern. “Baby, are you still wanting to lay down the law and create boundaries? Because I figure that’s where you were going before, but I didn’t think it was a good move to do that as soon as Jace walked in the door. You know how he is.”

  “What? No.” I brandished the iPad, furrowing my brow beneath my baseball cap. “I just don’t want you to think I’m going through your boy’s shit.”

  A little flicker crossed Aiden’s expression, the barest hint of a lip curl, that was just enough for me to know he at least had an idea that Travis wasn’t all gravy with the queer agenda.

  “He’s not my boy. And that’s a company iPad, not his personal property, so feel free to use it for whatever you need while we’re trapped here.”

  My brows shot up. Travis had been posting hate speech on social media on a company device? I supposed that was the weird gray area of being the IT dude. You checked up on everyone else, but no one really checked up on you. Either way, now didn’t seem like the right time to drop the bomb on Aiden about their employee. There were already too many variables that were way out of his control, and it was bound to make him implode with rage.

  “How much does this cat get paid to sit in this sweet-ass office and keep y’all’s network safe?” I asked, finally removing my hat and tossing it on the desk. “Is it over six figures?”

  “Yes,” Aiden said slowly, still giving me that suspicious side-eye. “Why?”

  “Because I probably get paid about forty thousand bones less to do the same job for a lot more people.”

  He cringed. “Baby, that’s ridiculous. You need to look for something else.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “There’s no maybe about it,” he said, getting all fired up and loud the way he did whenever he was passionate about a subject. “That’s below the average for your field. There ain’t no kind of reason why—”

  “‘Ain’t no kind of reason,’” I repeated, mimicking his accent with a fond smile. “Bro, it’s not like I’m hurting for money.” Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I could use more money, but I wasn’t destitute. “I have no kids, no car payment, and my apartment is $1,300 a month. I haven’t tried to move on because I’m comfortable.”

  “Right, and yet I hear a ‘but’ in your tone.” Aiden pressed his palms flat against the desk and looked down at me, brow furrowed. “You may be comfortable, but at the back of your mind, you know you could do better. You know you deserve better. And even if you’re okay with not pursuing a career change right now, you know eventually you will.”

  I raised my hands, brows going up, because honestly—he had me. I had zero surprise that he could read me inside and out. One of the things I’d come to realize about Aiden in our months of texting and our infrequent hookups was that he paid attention. He didn’t just talk to me to get my attention or to wait for his turn to speak—he cared, and he responded, and he always gave me advice. After growing up as poor as he and Jace had, the dude was always looking for routes on how his people could be on the come up. And he was always doing that for me.

  “I’m not gonna lie and say I haven’t been thinking about moving on,” I admitted, nudging the iPad away. “I want to move out of Jamaica, and I want a new car, and I need more money for down payments and new furniture. It’s just that . . .”

  Aiden raised an eyebrow, waiting, and kept waiting even when Jace slipped into the room to stand beside him. He’d already stripped down to his underwear and bare feet, although he was still wearing his threadbare T-shirt. After winding his thin arms around Aiden’s muscular torso, he peered at me with a devilish grin.

  “What are we talking about?”

  “Your old man wants me to get my head out of my ass and get a job making bigger bucks,” I said, slouching back in Travis’s chair. I didn’t miss the way Jace’s eyes dropped to my crotch, where he could undoubtedly see the outline of my meat beneath my basketball shorts. “But, y’know, money isn’t everything. I like where I work now.”

  “What if you found somewhere else you liked?” Jace asked, running his fingers along Aiden’s front. “With people you like?”

  “Heh. Where is this magical place?”

  “Here,” he said brightly.

  I waited for him to explain himself, or for Aiden to tell him it wasn’t possible, but they both gave me the expectant look of people who had discussed this before.

  “Yo . . .”

  Aiden held up his hands, already catching my hesitance with that one syllable. “It was Caleb who mentioned it, sweetheart. Swear to God.”

  The part of me that easily rankled, that had been raised by parents who didn’t like handouts or favors, unbristled. Caleb suggesting it was . . . different. And interesting. He was the most by-the-book person I’d ever met.

  “Why would he mention that?”

  “Because you’re awesome?” Jace detached from Aiden and sauntered over to me. His way of walking almost always caught my attention. He had the type of swagger I was used to seeing on guys around my block, but I didn’t typically want to fuck the hell out of them. “He was impressed with the detailed feedback you gave on the app during the beta. He also brought it up when they started looking for staff.”

  “Then why didn’t anyone ever tell me?” I asked as Jace stood between my spread thighs. With him half-naked in front of me, I forgot all about the fact that I’d just told myself to keep the sex at bay, and put my hands on his hips. “This is the first I’m hearing.”

  “Aiden thinks you’d say no.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you know how much we want you, and he thought you’d think it was hi
s way of trying to lure you into our wicked poly trap on a regular basis,” Jace said bluntly. He took a step forward, making sure his legs nudged against my bulge. “Which, I totally am, but he’s more ethical.”

  As my hands found their ways to his hips and slid down his round, firm ass, my thoughts on ethics, open relationships, and hurt feelings fell away one letter at a time. Who could think that deeply when Jace was staring at me like he was daring me to jump him. He arched an eyebrow, and I jerked him against me on reflex as my tongue darted out to swipe over my lower lip.

  “If he’s the ethical one, then what are you?” I asked, sliding the tips of my fingers beneath the band of his underwear. Behind him, I noticed Aiden watching us with rapt fascination. His green eyes had dilated as I manhandled his husband in front of him. “The horny one?”

  “The one who wants to be spread open on this desk so you and Aiden can take turns on me,” he said sweetly.

  If I had only one way to describe Jace, it would be as a living, breathing temptation. When he looked at me with those flashing eyes and that fuckable mouth, there were no parts of me possessing the self-control to not get up from the seat and move in closer. The remaining letters that had tried to form rational thoughts about standing my ground in the face of fae-looking dudes and their linebacker husbands faded as I stood, pushed him onto the desk with my hands knotted in his long hair, and angled his mouth for a kiss.

  He parted his lips with a sigh, pressing his palms down on the glass and arching up to me. I loved the way he offered himself, how he closed his eyes and raised his brows, how he lost himself to the hungry swipes of my tongue, because every time we touched, I went from cautious to desperate for more.

  More touching, so I stood between his thighs and ground my hardening dick against his crotch. More of his sexy voice, so I went from tasting the inside of his mouth to tilting his head back so I could suck on his throat to the tune of throaty moans. And more of our missing puzzle piece, so I shot a glance up at Aiden, who was already squeezing himself through his shorts.