by Amy Lane
Readers love the Johnnies
series by AMY LANE
Chase in Shadow
“I would expect nothing less from a book by Amy Lane… For all its pain and strong emotional content, I found this to be a beautifully moving story of forgiveness, acceptance and love.”
—Smexy Books
“It's a wild, emotional ride, a delicious ache.”
—Between the Covers
Dex in Blue
“For Amy Lane fans this is a satisfying addition to the canon, and I highly recommend it… For those who aren’t already fans of hers, I think this could be a good book to start with…”
—Reviews by Jessewave
“I liked this story, I liked the author didn’t underestimate the side effects of being in the porn industry for these young guys; I liked also that she wasn’t too dramatic.”
—Elisa - My Reviews and Ramblings
Ethan in Gold
“Amy Lane is brilliant. She knows how to weave a story that pulls on all my emotions and makes me feel like the characters are my family, my friends. I felt honored to be able to review this…”
—Live Your Life, Buy the Book
“Ethan in Gold is quintessential Amy Lane… Fans of this series should move this one to the top of the TBR pile.”
—The Novel Approach
By AMY LANE
Behind the Curtain
Bewitched by Bella’s Brother
Bolt-hole
Candy Man
Christmas with Danny Fit
Clear Water
Do-over
Gambling Men: The Novel
Going Up!
Grand Adventures (Dreamspinner Anthology)
Hammer & Air
If I Must
It’s Not Shakespeare
Left on St. Truth-be-Well
The Locker Room
Mourning Heaven
Phonebook
Puppy, Car, and Snow
Racing for the Sun
Raising the Stakes
Shiny!
Sidecar
A Solid Core of Alpha
Super Sock Man
Truth in the Dark
Turkey in the Snow
Under the Rushes
Wishing on a Blue Star (Dreamspinner Anthology)
GREEN’S HILL
Guarding the Vampire’s Ghost • I love you, asshole! • Litha’s Constant Whim
THE KEEPING PROMISE ROCK SERIES
Keeping Promise Rock • Making Promises • Living Promises • Forever Promised
Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS
http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com
By AMY LANE (Continued)
THE JOHNNIES SERIES
Chase in Shadow • Dex in Blue • Ethan in Gold • Black John
THE KNITTING SERIES
The Winter Courtship Rituals of Fur-Bearing Critters
How to Raise an Honest Rabbit • Knitter in His Natural Habitat
Blackbird Knitting in a Bunny’s Lair
TALKER SERIES
Talker • Talker’s Redemption • Talker’s Graduation
ANTHOLOGIES
The Granby Knitting Menagerie
The Talker Collection
Three Fates
Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS
http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com
Copyright
Published by
DREAMSPINNER PRESS
5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA
http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Black John
© 2015 Amy Lane.
Cover Art
© 2015 Reese Dante.
http://www.reesedante.com
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.
ISBN: 978-1-63216-552-7
Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-553-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952117
First Edition January 2015
Printed in the United States of America
This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
To Mary, Laura Adriana, and Grammy, who all started out sure they couldn’t love John and were surprised when he was just as loveable as any of the other guys. And to Mate. Because he’s always my Mate.
Acknowledgments
In the spring of 2011, Elizabeth asked me to get on a plane and fly to Florida. Now, I’d do anything for Elizabeth, and for the first time in my life, I found myself on a plane alone. Orlando was beautiful and so was the beach. Since that trip, I’ve been to Florida a number of times, and each time I’ve seen something new. So this is for Elizabeth, who has given me new places to write about. I’m no longer the small-town girl who has seen very little of the world—and now I know bits of Florida too.
Author’s Note
JOHN TALKS a lot about porn in this book, and John and Tory’s scenes happen when they are very young. For the record? I don’t condone sex and porn for the junior high set, and I think the ultimate ending of this story will make that clear. But just to elucidate, my philosophy has been this:
Children who trust that home is a kind and loving place that accepts them for who they are don’t usually look for sex and porn in the wrong places at too young an age.
When they do go looking for sex at the appropriate age, porn is a perfectly acceptable—and sometimes sordid and sometimes glorious—form of human sexual expression. It all depends on who’s behind and who’s in front of the camera.
I did not set out to make Johnnies a “real” porn house, but I did set out to make the people who worked there human.
Anybody who takes any exception to the things I’ve just said will probably not be happy with the philosophies that drove this book. Just thought you all should know.
Bad News Meets Worse News
IF JOHN Carey ever had any doubts that his best friend truly cared for him, they should have been eased by the quality of the rehab center Dex drove him to when Dex had probably been pissed enough to kick his balls up to his throat instead.
It was actually a lovely place, with a large fountain in the center and designated smoking sections. The smell of cigarette smoke from the frantic recovering addicts doing the nicotine junkie shuffle didn’t permeate the clothes of the people who were suddenly obsessed with gum.
John was obsessed with gum. Currently he had sixteen different packs of eight different flavors—kiwi strawberry, mint, strawberry mint, melon, green apple, fruit punch, sour cherry, and bubblegum. Dex had sent him all of it, over the past twenty-six days, by the caseload, along with his mail and the financial and personnel reports of the business John had founded from scratch.
He’d also visited and talked to him like a human being, w
hich was more than John deserved.
John hated himself for how much he really didn’t want Dex to visit anymore.
But John only had one more visit to go, the last visit, and then he had an obligation to work with the man like they’d worked together for the past three years, both of them filming, editing, marketing, and frankly enjoying the porn.
It would have been so much easier if John hadn’t fallen in love with him.
It would have been so much easier if John hadn’t fucked him over in the most heinous of ways.
God—drugs were awful things, they really were, but the human capacity for awfulness should not have been so terribly at their mercy.
But Dex owned part of the company now, and he and his boyfriend weren’t breaking up, and their hard-earned little family wasn’t going away. And Dex seemed willing to forgive and forget, which was damned human of him, so maybe John could take a deep breath and see it through. Maybe he could salvage something of the life he’d built in the unlikely city of Sacramento, and maybe he could keep his company in the black in spite of his best efforts to shove the whole damned thing up his nose.
Maybe.
But first—before he could face all of that, and it was a plateful—he had to face the letter in his hand.
John—
You know how your father and I still feel about your business and your lifestyle. We don’t forgive you, and we don’t think God will forgive you, so don’t get your hopes up. But Vanessa Petrelli asked me to tell you that Vittorio took his own life last week, and that the service will be at the end of March. He left a will that asked for you to release the ashes into the sea, and since he can’t be buried in consecrated ground, his mother said that’s fine. Nobody is going to the funeral, so you don’t need to worry about people you’ll run into. As far as the families are concerned, it’s good riddance to bad rubbish. Should you ever repent, Jesus has a place for you, but we do not.
Your mother
Jennifer Carey
Well, it was comforting that Jesus, at least, wasn’t a martyring, social-climbing bitch.
But even that couldn’t distract John from the actual meat of the letter.
Tory.
Oh God.
Tory.
Tory, man, have you tried to rub one out yet?
Yeah—it feels amazing. Think it would feel as good if we grabbed each other’s?
Yeah, but wouldn’t that be, like, you know—gay?
So the fuck what, John. Seriously. So the fuck what.
John closed his eyes and tried to block out the memory. Tory, brown hair long and hanging in his eyes a little, warm chocolate eyes laughing and hurt at the same time. How old had they been? Twelve? Seventh grade? When boys had started talking about jerking off like it was both horrible and gross and the pinnacle of life as they knew it?
He’d been so beautiful.
And now John was responsible for his ashes. Fucking wonderful. Jesus, weren’t these the times that were made for substance abuse?
John, hey, you tried weed yet?
John, hey, coke, man, it’s awesome!
John, man, don’t get mad, but we don’t got rent. I know you said we don’t need more heroin, but… man, it just hurt so bad.
John couldn’t… he just…. In his head he saw the two pictures, the laughing boy who’d first grabbed John’s cock—first sucked it, hard, until John had screamed and come—and the junkie, the guy with the sunken eyes and the track marks who blew their rent for the last goddamned time.
The guy John had driven to rehab three times.
The guy John had left Florida to get away from, because to love Tory was to mourn him, because he wasn’t getting any better.
And here John was, about to flee rehab to battle his demons on his own, and Tory apparently had lost the fight and left John to battle Tory’s demons too.
And John couldn’t even be mad. Because before Dex, who hadn’t loved him back, there’d been Tory, who had. Maybe. He’d loved John and John had loved him, John hoped, and they’d made porn together—gorgeous, aching, sexy porn—but it hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t been enough that John had worshipped him, hadn’t been enough that John had placed him in the sun and let the world worship him. No.
In the end, there weren’t enough cocks or enough coke to fill that thing in Tory, the emptiness carved by emotional neglect, by a world that hadn’t been able to laugh with Tory but had certainly made him cry.
Oh God, they had certainly made each other cry.
John didn’t remember when he’d fallen to his knees. He was too busy staring at his fist with the crumpled letter in it, even as he howled until he couldn’t catch his breath.
HE WAS headachy and out of sorts the next day when Dex came to visit, and he shamelessly clung to Dex’s hand from the first sit-down in the visiting room.
Dex stared at their clasped hands, cornflower blue eyes wide and surprised. “Uhm—”
“I’m not hitting on you,” John muttered, helpless and not able to fix it. God, Dex’s blond hair looked perfect, he was dressed in a slick, formfitting leather jacket and high-end jeans. John had barely gotten out of his pajamas. But he needed….
“I’m just….” He closed his eyes and rested his chin on the cheap laminate table. Well, it was a decent place but not the Hilton. “I… my first boyfriend died,” he said baldly. Dex’s jerk was more startled than trying to get away, so he went on. Eight years they’d known each other, three as business partners. John had watched Dex date girl after girl while putting out for guys on camera like a born cocksucker. He’d watched Dex have his first bitter, abusive relationship with a man, and sat there, the good friend, the confidant, full of sympathy and cookies, and the whole time he’d been thinking, I love him. If I’m just here like this, listening and being a good friend, he will look up and see me, and finally I’ll fill that void, that missing place where Tory used to be.
John hadn’t even seen the end of that dream when it had come on camera. A gorilla with a soul patch had moved into Dex’s house right when Dex broke up with his douche bag boyfriend, who happened to be John’s dealer. John didn’t see it coming, even when Dex told him.
Kane’s crashing at my place for a while until he gets his shit together.
Let me know if you need to kick him out.
Kane? He’s good people. He can stay.
Apparently Kane was not just good people, he was as good in bed in real life as he appeared to be on camera, because suddenly they weren’t just roommates, they were a thing. And even worse than them being a thing, they were a good thing—a happy thing.
A thing with rings and home improvement and the entire family Dex had forged out of John’s business riding behind them.
And John was left, once again, yearning for someone he really couldn’t have.
And right now, John was drowning and Dex was John’s only rope.
“I….” John closed his eyes. “I need your help. I need to figure out how to get him cremated and have his ashes dumped out at sea.” John’s lower lip quivered, and he remembered the past nearly four weeks in which he’d been a giant oozy hole, sobbing on groups and shrinks and groups with shrinks. He’d bought the Kool-Aid, he really had. He’d nearly flushed his hard-forged life down the toilet—and very nearly lost his only true friend, losing himself to the thing he hated most. He was getting clean—he’d promised himself he’d do anything it took.
He’d told himself getting clean was a matter of mind over habit, really. The coke habit had started to keep him awake through college. Tory had succumbed because he’d been weak and sad, and the other drugs had given him solace and dreams, but John was smarter than that. He’d been able to just use it, just use it, just use it….
Until suddenly he owed his dealer so much money he’d rather sell out his best friend than go without his next hit.
So he’d been dedicated to getting clean—had, in fact, thought that his twenty-eight days were going to do it—but now… his hand shook in
Dex’s.
“David,” he said hoarsely, using Dex’s real name on sufferance. Kane had told him not to, but John needed the real person here, not the glam porn icon, and David seemed to know it too.
“What do you need?” he asked seriously. “I’m sorry about your boyfriend, John. I’ll do what I can, you know that, right?”
Give up the gorilla with the soul patch, leave the business we built from the ground up with your ass and my camera, and come home with me and keep me clean.
“I need to stay here until the day the trip is booked,” John said, knowing it was true. “I need the house in Orlando, with grocery service and maid service, and a car for as long as it takes to get this job done.” John closed his eyes and tried to organize himself. “I need plane tickets, and I need you to keep looking after my house a little longer—is that okay?”
Dex nodded and squeezed his hand. “Yeah. Yeah, John. I got you.”
John nodded and then had a thought. Vittorio took his own life…. “How’s Chase?” he asked, suddenly filled with worry.
Chase had been different—he’d been beautiful and haunted and dynamite on screen, but Chase’s only drug had been the misery eating him alive. The fact that he’d lived through his attempt on his own life was a testament to his own instinct for survival—he’d quit after his first wrist—as much as it was a testament to the friends and the lover who had rallied behind him.
But he’d been John’s employee, and John felt a sort of proprietary worry for the boy, and for his lover, Tommy, as well.
“He’s doing good,” Dex said, smiling sincerely. Oh God—he had dimples. That was the first thought John’d had when Dex showed up at his house to interview. Blond hair, blue eyes, and dimples. John’s stomach clenched at those dimples, even now.
“Good,” John answered absently. “I mean, I worried.”
