by Amy Lane
“Yeah, well, I don’t see anyone going into your room to clean up your bloody needles and vomit. You still have someone on the other end of the telephone. Tory didn’t. I don’t. So I think you should take my help. Because you didn’t ask for this, and I don’t think you deserved it. But you’re doing it. And that maybe makes you not so much of a douche bag.”
“Wonderful. Atonement. I’m a saint.” John was snarling, and he didn’t want to. He took a deep breath (cleansing breath, right? The kind that washed the dickitude out of a guy and made him a human person again?). Another deep breath and he managed to ease the scowl off his face. One more, under Galen’s bemused regard, and he could speak. “Thank you,” he said primly. “That would be kind.”
To his surprise, Galen threw back his head and laughed. “Oh my God, there he is!”
“There who is?”
“You said you were raised in Florida, but I hadn’t seen the Southern gentleman until just now.”
John pulled up one corner of his mouth in an acid smile. “Oh he’s here all right. He’s just not good at jizzing for the camera.”
Galen cocked his head, the lines of pain relaxed enough for the gesture to look natural and simply interested. “You’re not a bad-looking guy. Why didn’t you ever do it for the camera?”
John’s skin prickled under his flush. He could think of one person who preferred him to Tory, and when he and Tory had met up with Brant again, he’d never mentioned wanting John more. Talk about weirdo virginities. “No one has ever asked me that,” he muttered. “Not once. I assume it’s because nobody really wants to see me have sex, Galen. Wouldn’t you assume nobody wants to see me have sex?”
Galen moistened his mouth, and his full lips parted, and his eyes opened luminously. “No,” he said, his own Southern gentleman fully weighted in that one syllable. “I would not assume that. I know I would not mind seeing you have sex.”
John was aware that his grin was goofy, open as a kid’s, deceptively innocent, and now it was stealing across his face like a cookie-snatching urchin, oblivious to its own corruption. “I, uhm… well, that’s good to know,” he said, not able to meet Galen’s eyes. “I’ll, uhm, keep that in mind.”
Galen moved stiffly off the kitchen stool and limped to where John stood behind the counter. It wasn’t that long a distance, but he moved slowly, and that stretched the moment out, dragged it down John’s skin. Suddenly he remembered that he enjoyed touching very, very much. Eventually Galen stood in front of John, eye to eye, both of them an inch or two under six feet, and John had a moment to think, God, he’s beautiful. The scars on his cheek and his temple just make him look dangerous.
Then Galen cupped John’s cheek, his palm rasping against the stubble. Galen smiled. “You hardly know it’s there until you feel it,” he whispered. “It’s like, ‘Surprise! Man hair!’”
John could taste his pulse, fast and coppery, but his sarcasm was fully functional. “Same thing with my privates. It’s like, ‘Surprise! Manhood!’”
Galen sucked in a breath, and he dropped his hand to John’s crotch, flagrantly forward, kneading hungrily. John’s entire body blew up under the massive blood rush, and he leaned his forehead against Galen’s. “You shouldn’t—”
Oh my God. His cock worked. He’d almost forgotten he had one. So much porn, so much of it with his head buzzing, his heart pounding, chemically screaming, and he’d forgotten the simple pain of desire.
He squeezed his eyes shut, wanting to cry with it.
“Not a surprise at all,” Galen whispered. “It’s pretty impressive, really.”
“It’s no porn cock.”
Galen’s breath against his lips made him open his eyes. “It’s a man’s cock,” Galen murmured. “A grown-up’s. It’s perfect.”
“You….” Oh, the temptation to get lost in this pretty man without judgment and just savor his skin was so strong. “We have something to do,” he said, not wanting to think about it. But he was done running, right?
“We’ll do it,” Galen whispered. “But first….”
Soft lips. They’d both eaten pizza—that was irrelevant.
John needed him closer. He pivoted and drove Galen back against the counter. With firm fingers, he cupped the back of Galen’s head through his curly hair and held him in place. God, his mouth was lovely—warm, hot. John devoured him. Galen tilted his head back, baring his throat, openly vulnerable, and John couldn’t refuse him. Kissing, slowly, tongues and lips, lingering, tasting. More, deeper, deeper, deeper, John rutted up against him, the ridge of his cockhead catching on the seam of his cargo shorts. He pulled back and buried his face against Galen’s shoulder, smelling the faint yeast of sleepy sweat.
“Good kiss,” he muttered. “Gimme a sec and we can be awkward about that.”
Galen stroked his hair back from his cheek, which felt strangely comforting. “Let’s skip the awkward and go right on to pretending it didn’t happen.”
“Yeah,” John breathed, planting a kiss on Galen’s neck, and then behind his ear. He kissed down the line of Galen’s jaw, stopping to nibble at the cleft of his chin. “Didn’t happen. Won’t want this again.” He sighed and wrenched himself back.
“Yeah, we will,” Galen said soberly.
John swallowed, legitimately afraid. “I’m a recovering addict—”
“And I’m not recovering,” Galen said. Those luminous green eyes narrowed and glittered. “Not yet. But I want you. And you need someone. So you need to decide how this is or is not going to happen, because it’s an issue.”
“Great,” John said, looking away. “It’s an issue. So’s getting the job done.” He pulled away and limped around his hard-on to the pile of bags, which he gathered in both hands. “Easy shit first. Let’s go clean a hazmat zone.”
Broken Wishes
ONCE JOHN was outfitted, he realized that yes, he did have the organizational faculties to get this done. Needles in the hazmat bins, everything else in the garbage bags, lots of trips down in the elevator to the trash bin, scrub brushes, bleach, and some badass fucking carpet treatment.
He could do this.
He only had one set of protective gear, and he didn’t want Galen losing his balance in that room of all places, so Galen pulled a chair from the dinette and perched on it near the doorway, talking to him randomly. He covered everything from movies to books, frequently choosing the topics from Tory’s stash. By the time he got around to asking if John ever crushed on Dennis Quaid, or Will Smith, or Nathan Fillion, John realized what he was doing.
His questions, the stupid, random convo—it kept John’s mind off the wreckage. Galen’s gentle Southern voice with its barbed, cutting humor meant John could stop picturing the boy he’d known wasted, whoring, body covered in track marks and shit and dried jizz, in this horrible, wretched room.
John finished up and turned around at the doorway, looking at his handiwork.
The room glittered. He’d shoved the mattress out the window onto the street in the alleyway below and scrubbed the apartment-white walls with Formula 409. He’d recognized the porn vids—they were all Johnnies. He had no problem at all throwing those away. There were no pictures in this room, no curtains. Just the laptop, the carpet (which he’d scrubbed with Woolite), and the blank walls.
“You’re going to have to take the laptop,” Galen said practically from his little stool.
“I am aware,” John said softly. He’d cleaned out the bathroom, thanking God every minute for the Teflon gloves and Dex’s advice on the shoes. He was sweaty, disheartened, and proud of himself all at the same time. He’d see that room in his nightmares, sure, but right now those nightmares would only be his and Galen’s. No one else had to know.
“You did good, cleaning this instead of calling the super.”
He looked down next to him and Galen regarded him with sober eyes.
“It would have felt wrong,” John gasped, feeling raw. “Dex—”
“Your unrequited love interest?”
“My friend,” John corrected. “He had suggestions. He’s… he’s done this before for some of the guys. I mean, nobody’s died, but….”
“Your work does lend itself to a certain kind of trouble,” Galen said. He kept his voice neutral, which was a good thing.
“Yeah, well. Sometimes perfectly healthy, normal people say, ‘Look at me! I can do this and it’s gorgeous!’ And sometimes the people who are the most beautiful and look the best on the screen are the ones who are driven by something a little more painful.”
Galen nodded and huffed out a breath. “Lawyers are some of the most fucked-up people,” he said. The comment had the same random origin as his comments about movies or music, but it felt more personal. “They pound vodka and embezzle money and I swear, none of them could be faithful to a spouse. But just when I’d start thinking we were everybody’s bad joke, I’d meet someone from another walk of life. A friend of mine’s sister was a teacher, and he brought her to a party once. She drank us all under the table, did two lines of blow, and called her brother from a stranger’s bed. I nursed that woman through what she termed a ‘mild’ hangover, and when I expressed surprise, she laughed.” Galen shook his head, both of them still gazing into the bleached white and empty room. “I will never forget that laugh. She said that teachers were the most fucked-up group of people you will ever dare to meet, and most of them were on their second marriage because they all got so used to controlling every last detail of their classrooms that either they couldn’t control their private lives for shit, or they controlled the shit out of their spouses until it was either leave or die.”
John turned away from the room at last and looked at him. “There is a point to all that?”
“Yeah.” Galen met his eyes levelly, and although his pupils were still a little dilated, he was as stone-cold sober as a stoned man ever got. “We are all a fucking mess. Porn stars don’t corner the market on it. They’re just brave enough to do it naked, so we see it more often.”
For the second time that day, John felt his grin stealth attack his goofy, freckled face. “That is the fucking wisest shit I’ve ever heard. I’ll leave the laptop for tomorrow. Right now, if I ask you to get the hell out of here, can we not make it about sex?”
Galen blinked, as he should because it was a rapid change of subject. “Mm, no,” he said decisively, but he held up his hand when John’s shoulders drooped with his discouragement. “But I will accept that the answer may be ‘not tonight.’ I would dearly love to get the hell out of here.”
Ah, that grin again. John knew it wasn’t sexy, but he just couldn’t ever keep from doing it.
GALEN PACKED a small gym bag while John stashed the cleaning supplies in Tory’s kitchen. He figured he’d leave a lot of it for the future tenant when he was done sorting the actual possessions, and he tried hard not to think of the terrible dichotomy of that apartment. The comfortable, happy living room and the haphazardly used kitchen, as opposed to the genuine filth and decay of the bedroom. God, that was Tory down to a capital T, wasn’t it? The bright and the shining back-to-back with the corrupt and the rotten?
John had loved them both passionately with all of his soul. He’d had to rip a sizeable chunk of himself out to leave. Walking down the crappy hallway to Galen’s apartment, John felt his knees wobble. It was like he was bleeding from that wound all over again, and he had to close his eyes to keep from reaching for Tory, whom he’d thought of as the one person in his life who had ever been there when he’d needed someone.
And who had let him down the hardest.
He was standing, hand against the wall, trying to pull his shit together and shove his entrails back in his body cavity, when the door opened and Galen peered out. His eyes were dilated a little more. Oh good, John’s new boy had fixed.
“You okay?” Galen asked, and he sounded okay. Just enough, apparently. He’d taken just enough not to hurt. God, John should be able to tolerate that, right? Just enough not to hurt? Just enough to keep him awake or to help him through a rough patch. John had done that for years. Hadn’t hurt anyone, right? Not until the end.
And Tory had never asked him how he’d been.
“Fine,” John said, pasting on a smile. “Let me get my stupid hat, and we can drive with the top down.”
Galen smiled and waved the hats they’d bought the day before. “I’m way ahead of you. Lawyer, see? We plan ahead.”
Smart, articulate. Only a little stoned. John would take it.
GOD, THE convertible was awesome—the sun trying to burn the rough edges of their day away, the salt wind blowing the ashes behind them. John remembered sunblock on his nose and cheeks so that he might not peel when they got back to the place in Cypress Point. There wasn’t much conversation, but he put some classic rock on the radio and turned it up so there didn’t have to be.
He was tired of talking anyway, even of the conversations in his own head.
But he wasn’t so wrapped up inside himself that he didn’t hear Galen’s gasp.
“You live here?”
John smiled at him, liking how his eyes blinked like a bemused puppy’s. “Actually, we shoot porn here sometimes. But yeah, my grandmother tried to leave it to me when she died.”
Galen wrinkled his nose. “What do you mean ‘tried’?”
John sighed and steered his way through the very exclusive development. Christ, every white-columned house here was as big as his grandmother’s, but they all shrouded themselves in native trees and veils of shrubbery, so it was easy to lose track.
“Well, my grandmother did in fact leave it to me, but by then I’d left for Sacramento and started my second pornography business, so when my mother found out, she hired a lawyer to try to keep it from happening. So I hired a lawyer to keep her from getting her scritchy-scratchy harpy claws on it, and it was going to be a big fucking hassle.”
Galen was looking at him avidly now, and John sort of hesitated to tell this part of the story. Hell, he hadn’t even told Dex this part of the story, and Dex had been out in the waiting room when John had “negotiated.”
“So…,” Galen prompted.
John hoped his blush could be assigned to sun and windburn, because seriously—shouldn’t he be beyond this? “So I locked the door to a law office and my mother’s lawyer agreed that if I gave the house and the property to my grandmother’s much younger lover, who sort of still loves me and has been leasing me the property, my mother would have no case.”
“Wait a minute….”
John pulled the car into the driveway and idled for a moment watching the garage door open as opposed to looking Galen in the big green puppy-dog eyes.
“What?” John asked, because the door was open, it was time to drive in, and John needed the other shoe to drop so Galen could know what a whore he really was.
“You had sex with him, didn’t you?”
John grunted. “It was only a blowjob.”
“A blowjob?” Pure skepticism.
“And a finger-fuck,” John supplied grumpily, hitting the Close button. “He was married and closeted. I pretty much only had to look at him and lick my lips and he got hard.”
They were in the garage, which John had always thought of as the asshole of the house: close, dark, and humid, a place where waste came out and the car was inserted and removed with slow, fornicational regularity.
“Would you do it again?” Galen asked.
John opened his door, gesturing for Galen to do the same. He headed for the door into the laundry room but paused on the stoop when Galen cleared his throat.
“Would you?”
John thought about this place, about knowing he had his grandmother’s house, no matter how renovated it was, about Crosby’s dry voice going over John and Tory’s lessons, and about the times he and Tory had snuck out to have sex in the Jacuzzi.
He thought about the beautiful porn shot in this house, of the boys who’d never been outside of Sacramento baring their bodies, feeling lovely, giv
ing the world something gorgeous that made them feel good, and of how his nana would have crowed with delight knowing he was scandalizing the prune-faced fuckers who disapproved.
“I’d bend over and let him fuck me dry,” John said truthfully. “I’d have rimmed him until he passed out. I’d have fisted him, no enema, just to have my nana’s house.”
Galen let out a whoosh of air, the combination being impressed and laughing, John suspected.
“Well, then,” Galen said, mostly humor in his voice. “I say we go enjoy your grandmother’s hospitality.”
NANA SURE did know how to entertain.
Or, well, Dex did. John had seen steaks in the freezer, and before he took Galen to his room, he put those in the microwave to thaw. He shouldered Galen’s duffel like the Southern gentleman Galen had accused him of being, and led the way through the east wing.
“Why east?” Galen asked, lips quirking like he was expecting a fun answer.
John shrugged. “Well, it gets really hot in the west wing at night, so we use the west side of the house to shoot porn in the mornings. There’s two bedroom/bath combos over there that are ‘sets’—we film in them exclusively—and one den that, well, Dex actually does use it as an office when he’s got the house full of models, but he also shoots in there.”
“Oh my God!” Galen clapped a hand over his mouth.
John paused at his doorway, two doors down the hallway from John’s bedroom. “Oh my God what?”
“He just… just does business in the den? Where they shoot porn?”
John blinked. “Well, yeah. He’s shot some scenes on the kitchen table too, but I still ate my oatmeal there this morning. That’s what spray bleach is for, right?”
But Galen was still looking at him with wide, bright eyes. “But… but… I mean, didn’t you say you grew up here?”
