Acting Out

by Tibby Armstrong

  Nodding, Melissa gave one last soul-deep sigh in Kit’s direction and left.

  “Nice work, but I give it three and a half minutes,” Kit said, shoveling food into his mouth as fast as he could.

  Remembering Kit’s intimacy with the effects of fame and his dead-on prediction of the paparazzi’s behavior back home, Jeremy slapped money on the table before gulping the rest of his coffee. They slid out the back door into a cobblestoned courtyard just after a news van screeched to a halt in front of the restaurant’s plateglass window. Exchanging glances, they both grinned—and ran.

  Shops flashed by as they put long-legged distance between themselves and the restaurant. Ahead by a few paces, Jeremy led them, careening around a corner and into a posh antiques shop. Breathing harshly in the hushed confines, the scent of old wood and musty textiles tickling his nostrils, Jeremy bent forward and pressed his palms against his thighs.

  Kit leaned against a wall and caught Jeremy’s lifted gaze. Gasping, barely able to breathe, they began to shake with laughter. The thrill of the chase and their escape—the game of cat and mouse—bubbled around them with effervescent energy.

  “Did you see her face?” Kit whispered around gasps of laughter, then, in a breathy squeal, mimicked, “Oh my God!”

  “I—” Jeremy coughed, choking on his inhale. “I thought she was going to piss herself. How—how do you keep a straight face?”

  Rubbing a hand over his eyes, Kit wiped away the tears streaming from the corners. “It’s why I flirt. It gives me a way to play with them so I don’t laugh.”

  “Dude. That’s way harsh,” Jeremy said, deliberately mimicking Kit’s voice.

  Kit snapped the back of his hand out to hit Jeremy’s shoulder, but he grinned as he said, “Shut up.”

  “May I help you, gentlemen?” The question, delivered with a sniff, directed Kit’s and Jeremy’s attention to the bow-tie-sporting store clerk.

  Obviously not a follower of pop culture, the round-faced, round-spectacled man didn’t bat an eyelash in recognition when Kit pushed away from the wall and slung an arm around Jeremy’s shoulder. The warm weight, Kit’s tight squeeze turning the gesture into something more than friendly, sent Jeremy’s heart into a trip-hammer rhythm. Was he about to…?

  “We need a new bed.” Heat and smoke curled around the words, turning them suggestive as Kit fucked with the stuffy clerk’s head.

  The man blushed and backpedaled, glancing between Kit and Jeremy. “There’s nothing… We don’t have anything…er…big enough.”

  One side of Kit’s mouth kicked up in a half smile. Nodding, he dropped his arm from Jeremy’s shoulders and headed for the door. “Okay. Thanks, man.”

  Amused and a little dumbfounded at discovering this side of his lover, Jeremy followed him more slowly into the bright November sunlight. Chill wind buffeted his cheeks and quickly turned his sweat-soaked cotton shirt to ice under his coat. He shivered and looked around for Kit. One black motorcycle boot peeked from an alley between two brick buildings. A glance up the street told Jeremy the news truck prowled farther up.

  “I’ll be right back,” Jeremy called.

  Jogging up the street, he closed in on the news truck. When he knocked on the white door, the camera guy rolled down the window.

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re on their way back to Falkner’s estate.” Jeremy breathed the words, letting his eyes go wild and starstruck.

  “Shit.” The comment from the reporter almost made him grin until the guy said, “I wanted to get a shot of Harris with that boyfriend of his.”

  “Actually, when I delivered sandwiches there yesterday, I saw his girlfriend with him on set.” Where the words came from, Jeremy never understood. Protecting his budding relationship with Kit, however, drove him. He’d do anything—say anything—to gain a little more time to solidify what they had before he exposed it to the harsh media spotlight.

  “Do you know her name?” the overly hair-sprayed mudslinger asked.

  Latching on to the first name that came to mind, Jeremy blurted, “Amber. Amber Winslow.”

  Without so much as a thank-you, the camera guy put up the window, and the truck sped toward Greg’s estate. Guilt nipping at his heels, Jeremy made his way more slowly down the brick sidewalk toward Kit. Apparently detecting the news crew’s departure, Kit emerged from the little alley and met Jeremy halfway.

  “What did you say to them?” Kit asked, then followed up with, “I can’t believe they don’t recognize you yet. Usually they know an actor’s famous or dead before the actor realizes it himself.”

  Jeremy tugged his coat collar more snugly around his neck and blew out a frosty breath. “I told them we’d already gone back to the estate…”

  The hesitancy in his voice drew Kit’s narrowed gaze. Studying Jeremy’s face, he asked, “What else did you tell them?”

  Jeremy groaned and pushed his collar further over his face. “I told them you were dating Amber. That she’s here.”

  “What?” The force of Kit’s question rocked Jeremy back on his heels.

  The display in a Laura Ashley shop window suddenly seemed fascinating, making Jeremy wonder if he should contemplate a career in fashion.

  Kit circled around him and got in his face.

  “Let me rephrase that…” Raw betrayal and no little anger sparking in Kit’s eyes, he asked, “What the fuck?”

  Jeremy looked down at his feet. “You haven’t had a call from your PR folks?”

  “No…” The drawn-out word signaled Kit’s dawning comprehension. “What did you see?”

  A couple holding mittened hands brushed past on the sidewalk, and Jeremy lowered his voice. “Not here, Kit. Trust me.”

  “Fine.” Kit pivoted on a booted heel and strode back into the alley.

  Jeremy watched his squared shoulders and wondered how to handle the coming confrontation. How to justify several days of closed-mouthed avoidance. Stepping into the shaded alley, he discovered Kit sitting on a plastic milk crate, back against the brick wall to one side of a Dumpster. Jeremy righted another crate and swiveled it into position next to Kit. He slid down the rough wall and rested his wrists casually on his spread knees. Why did it always seem they had these serious conversations in alleys while sitting next to rusted brown Dumpsters?

  For several minutes, neither of them spoke. Jeremy leaned his head back against the brick and stared at the blank cement wall opposite. Without the wind, the air seemed a little warmer, and he unbuttoned the horn buttons on the wool coat Kit had gifted him with before they’d left LA. Feeling the weight of his betrayal at not saying something sooner, Jeremy said the words he knew Kit waited to hear.

  “Starlite outed you. Outed us.”

  “Outed?” Kit rolled his head to the side, and Jeremy did the same to meet his bemused gaze.

  “Out? As in out of the closet?” How could he not know the concept?

  “I know what it means, Jer.”

  Jeremy cocked his head at the calm acceptance in Kit’s tone. “Then what?”

  Weary acceptance flattened Kit’s expression. “I just wondered at the word choice.”

  “You’re not angry?” Tentative, hope peeked from behind the cloud of fear.

  Kit snorted and took a keen interest in the cement wall. “If I got upset every time someone published a lie about me, I’d need serious therapy.”

  “But…” It wasn’t a lie. Was it?

  “It’s a lie until they have proof.” Kit answered the question without Jeremy needing to ask it. “Because what do they have? A photo of us on the Monster? Eating lunch at some outdoor café? It was bound to happen, dude. We’re filming a gay flick together, and we pal around a lot.”

  The accuracy and insight with which Kit examined the situation highlighted, once again, the depth of his knowledge of the Hollywood machine. He used its energy and momentum to spin his image and project only those parts of his life he wanted exposed. That their relationship lay flatly inside the hidden category
really came as no surprise.

  “So what’re you going to do?” Jeremy asked.

  “My PR people didn’t call because the strategy is already in play. We discussed it before I even met you.” Staring at his fingernails, Kit picked at a cracked cuticle. “They’re doing what you just did—spreading rumors about a relationship with a mysterious woman, leaking doctored photos of us in Ibiza or Saint-Tropez.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Jeremy answered.

  “Why didn’t you?” Sucking on his nail bed, easing the apparent sting of torn flesh, Kit focused on Jeremy. “I thought you were… Never mind. It’s done.”

  In all his dreary imaginings of this moment, Jeremy never pictured such an outcome. Stunned and more than a little guilty, he grabbed Kit’s hand. “Hey. I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you, and I thought you’d get really bent out of shape.”

  “Yeah. It’s all good.” With a one-shouldered shrug, Kit took his hand back and stood. “I have to call my PR people and let them know the identity of my secret new love is about to be blown.”

  Kit walked away, and Jeremy stood. “We could…”

  “No. We couldn’t.” Back still turned, Kit shook his head. “I can’t.”

  Abandonment reared its head—a drowning feeling of being small and helpless, cast adrift in a strange world he didn’t understand—and Jeremy blurted, “Are we still…?”

  At the end of the alley, sunlight just beyond, Kit glanced over his shoulder. “We are.”

  Relief forced Jeremy to sag a little. With trembling fingers, he redid his coat buttons and gave Kit a wide head start. It’d be better if they didn’t ride back together. Especially with the press camped at the gates. He knew all this without having to be told. It seemed he’d learned a few things in the past several months. Cynicism’s toothy maw gaped back at him as he looked into parts of himself he’d never desired to know. Could he perpetuate this lie? Continue pretending to be someone else? It seemed ironic he’d have to do so, all to protect the precise thing that made him who he was—not his career, but the man he loved.

  Kit sent the car back to town for Jeremy and retreated to the master bedroom in the closed-off wing. Hushed and dark, its confines seemed the perfect place to have a pity party. For what, he didn’t quite know. Possibly because he’d had to spend a half hour on the phone with Amber convincing her that, although she hadn’t heard from him in months, he still considered her his girlfriend. God, he wanted to puke. Couldn’t Jeremy have chosen someone else?

  As he lay on the high tester bed, its drawn velvet curtains shutting out the daylight, Jeremy’s face, filled with wide-eyed awe—how he’d appeared when they’d first met—swam behind his lids. Flinging his arm over his eyes, Kit tried to shatter the image with measured pressure. He didn’t want to hang on to that vision, because watching it slowly erode—seeing the sincerity and innocence replaced with jaded Hollywood cynicism—might possibly be the saddest thing he’d ever known.

  He stripped off his clothes, flung them to the floor in frustration, and pulled the covers under his chin. Not usually one to nap, he felt a weary need to simply indulge in the hushed rhythm of his own breath. To just lie there doing nothing. Being nothing. Sometime later, the next things he registered were fingers brushing lightly along his shoulders, then digging deeper. Massaging bunched muscles and kneading more languid flesh.

  He’d rolled over at some point—must have been asleep. Now Jeremy hovered above him, his naked legs straddling Kit’s back. Hot flesh pressed against the summit of Kit’s ass, and his cock responded with the knowledge Jeremy could fuck him now. Might fuck him now. Would he be that brave—that assertive—given the afternoon’s events?

  Waiting, wanting, for weeks, Kit hadn’t said a word since Jeremy told him he’d give it to him when he least expected it. Right now, well, he expected it. Logically, his brain told him it wouldn’t happen. Emotionally, he needed it to. For once he didn’t want to be the one in control. The one who had to know all the right steps and the right things to say. Lifting his head, he looked over his shoulder. Dying sunlight sliced, red, through a crack in the drapes, giving Jeremy’s pale features a heated glow. Gazes connected. Wordlessly, Kit let his eyes speak for him. Beg for him.

  Take me.

  Lowered lids underscored the spark of recognition in Jeremy’s deep-set eyes as Kit watched him mull over the silent request. Never breaking his gaze, Jeremy lifted a hand from Kit’s back to pop shirt buttons, one by one, with focused, deliberate flicks of his fingers. As each button fell free of its mooring, Kit’s heart rate increased, beat by beat, until it thundered so loudly in his ears, he knew Jeremy could see the vein pulsing in his neck. That same pulse pounded through Kit’s cock, twisting his desire and winding it tight—hitching both his breath and his balls.

  Already aroused to the point of pain, Kit gasped for breath when Jeremy pulled off his shirt and leaned forward. Jeans discarded before he’d climbed into bed, Jeremy leaned forward and the rigid line of his cock pressed along Kit’s spine—a heated brand and a reminder of what lay ahead. Nose nuzzling, hot breath puffing along the shell of Kit’s ear, Jeremy whispered, “I’m going to fuck you.”

  An unspoken, And you can’t stop me, hovering in the air, Jeremy slid down the length of Kit’s back to his ass. Using the heels of his palms to push Kit’s cheeks apart, Jeremy flicked the slick point of his tongue against the exposed flesh. Kit arched, at once encouraging and attempting to escape from the intensity and embarrassment of the sensation.

  Mercilessly, Jeremy probed him with his tongue. Kit gripped the carved rungs of the headboard and let the wooden edges bite into his clenching palms when Jeremy pushed inward, entering him. Moist breath and wet muscle plunged past tight membranes, stroking them to tortured awareness. Every nerve in Kit’s ass seemed connected to his cock, and with each stroke, he grew impossibly, unimaginably harder until he had to pull himself forward or risk spilling his load.

  “Oh God.” Kit moaned the plea.

  Hanging his head, still gripping the rungs, Kit heard Jeremy slide upward. Felt him shift to reach for something. His shirt. Looping one arm around both of Kit’s wrists, he gently tied them together before securing the other length of fabric to the wood in front of him. Kit whimpered at the rush of helplessness that sprang from his abdomen and ended in a lunge at the base of his balls.

  Pressing his palm under Kit’s chin, cupping it with infinite care, Jeremy tilted his head back and leaned in, meeting his gaze. Full of iron determination, his expression brooked no refusal and offered no escape as he stole a tender kiss and whispered, “Hold on tight.”

  Olympic gymnasts had nothing on Kit’s stomach as it executed an acrobatic routine of flips and twists. Breathing deep, sucking in sustaining oxygen, he gripped the wood harder and lifted his hips as Jeremy shoved a pillow underneath. A drawer slid open, then closed. Plastic popped free from a top. The liquid sound of lube trailing from a bottle made Kit squeeze his eyes closed. The word gay flashed through his mind like white lightning, and he shoved it away. Hard. It resurfaced at the same time Jeremy slapped the lube between his cheeks and probed deep. Two fingers spread the sticky fluid into his most intimate recesses, and Kit gasped.

  Gay, gay, gay!

  In answer to the silent chant, he gritted his teeth, bared them with a grimace, and defied his internal gods. “I don’t care! Just fuck me.”

  Misunderstanding, Jeremy leaned forward and growled, “You don’t want any more lube? Not my ass.”

  “I must be gay,” Kit muttered, letting the pillows muffle his confession.

  Jeremy’s fingers stilled. “What?”

  “Just fuck me. Take what you want.”

  “Kneel,” Jeremy commanded. “Push up that pretty ass for me.”

  Need snaked through Kit with renewed vigor, Jeremy’s demand taking away the burden of responsibility and absolving him of his desires. He complied, raising himself in silent supplication. Jeremy knelt behind him and massaged his as
s in soothing circles, alternately separating and squeezing the fleshy globes. Exposing and concealing the secret recesses between with embarrassing clinical regularity. Examining. Dissecting. Deciding. Until, finally, he trailed one palm over Kit’s hip, then beneath to his undercarriage.

  A nudge of Jeremy’s thumb over the head of Kit’s cock trailed sticky fluid to the ridge, and Kit clenched his jaw against the urge to thrust forward. Face buried in the pillows, he lacked sight and any sound outside of the galloping rhythm of his own heart and the harsh gasps of his breath. Every iota of his concentration focused on Jeremy’s hands and the cock he nudged lightly at Kit’s opening.

  Jeremy fondled Kit’s balls and gathered them close to his shaft, squeezing gently, increasing the pressure in those two ultrasensitive regions. At the same time he said, “Relax and push back.”

  Kit hummed his trepidation, his stomach doing a sick little flip even as he complied. The wide head of Jeremy’s cock probed and stretched his entrance, demanding and nudging forward despite the sounds of choked protest compulsively welling in Kit’s throat. He wanted this… He did. But…the arousal ached so much more sweetly at the idea Jeremy might make him do it. It felt so much safer. So much simpler.

  A popping sensation accompanied a raw burn that made Kit throw back his head and gasp for breath. Cool air bathed his face and lungs, and he shouted a curse as Jeremy pushed forward, insisting on owning every piece of his ass. Fingers gripped him—squeezed—milking fluid up his shaft. Out his steadily leaking slit. Smoothed the heated moisture downward, and made a round trip. Up and down. Lifting him until pleasure masked discomfort and he found a symbiotic rhythm with his lover’s body.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” he chanted with each stroke, each penetration and withdrawal of Jeremy’s slapping flesh.

  Thoroughly owned. Consummately fucked. He’d never felt more inside himself than in the moment when Jeremy’s hips thrust forward and his hand squeezed just right, nudging every pleasure center. Shouting, Kit fell forward, and Jeremy fell with him. White light and jerks of pure sensation ripped his orgasm from him in long pulses and kicks to his gut. Not nearly done, Jeremy continued to sweat and slap against Kit’s back, drawing out his orgasm with each nudge against his prostate—milking it until Kit rode the knife’s edge of pleasure and pain.