by Cara McKenna
“You and Vaughn. Have you . . . How far have you two gone together, exactly?”
“Not much further than you’ve seen.”
“Oh.” Pity.
“Why?”
“Just curious,” she said. “I’ve wondered, that’s all.”
“I’m curious about that, too, trust me.”
“Can I ask you about all that? About when you’re with guys?”
“Absolutely.”
“Are you the . . . Do you tend to be the one who . . .”
“Am I the top or the bottom?” he prompted, making her feel about twelve.
“Yeah.”
“Depends on who I’m with.”
“How so?”
“Well,” he said languidly, sounding as though he were stretching, “for one, it depends on what the other guy’s into. I’m flexible. I’m a switch, it’s called. I can go either way—giving or receiving. If we’re talking about anal, that is.”
“Yeah, we are.” No point mincing words with this bluntest of men.
“So, either way excites me. If the guy’s more aggressive, and I’m attracted to that about him, then chances are I’ll want to see that taken all the way, with him on top. Though sometimes it’s the opposite. Maybe I meet some cocky, pushy type and get curious about what it’d be like, topping a guy like that. Messing with personas and that kind of thing.”
“With Vaughn, if you two had gotten that far, which of you do you think would be on top?”
He answered without hesitation. “Him.”
“Oh yeah? He doesn’t seem all that aggressive to me.”
“No, but he’s straight. Trust me, a straight guy’s going to default to being the one penetrating.”
She shivered—a pleasurable little tremor. He was speaking frankly not to titillate her, but something about that word, penetrating, pinged hard on her sexual radar. “That makes sense.”
“Though, believe me, I’ve spent more nights than I can remember imagining every possible scenario with him.”
“I know you said before you don’t get feelings for guys, and that it’s all just physical . . . but really? You don’t think you love him, that way? Not even a little?”
“Not exactly. I’m not in love with him, no. But there’s nobody in the world I’m closer to, and few that I’m that attracted to. He’s my best friend, and that’s the most important thing, but I’m also infatuated with him. I have been since we were teenagers.”
“And he knows you feel that way?”
“Yeah. Every bit of it.”
“It’s pretty cool that it doesn’t freak him out. Some straight guys would probably be totally terrified if their best friend told them all that.”
“Probably. But our bond, or whatever you want to call it, it is what it is. It’s been intense almost from the very start. The same way he probably sensed that I was attracted to him, how he always knew I was bi, I could sense he was curious. Not ready to do anything with that curiosity, not for years, but I knew it was there. I bided my time. I got him drunk. Shit happened, and we stayed friends long enough for it to happen again.”
“Huh.” She was both impressed and upended by how casually he was saying this, admitting to having plotted and coerced Vaughn into whatever they’d done in the past.
“Clock’s ticking,” he said, his voice warm and conspiring. “You want to talk more about this, we better make it filthy.”
She laughed, but actually . . . “We could. If you’re serious.”
“Just tell me what you want to hear.”
“I don’t know. What you’d do with him, if he’d let you, maybe.”
“Everything.”
“And you’ve imagined it all, you said. Tell me about it. Anything.” And to Clare’s surprise, it was her own hand that was inching low now, settling between her legs, over her underwear.
“What I want most for now,” he said, “is for him to go down on me.”
“Not a big leap.”
“Yes and no. Doesn’t seem that way, considering what I’ve done to him. Seems only fair, right?”
“Pretty much.”
“But doing anything with me takes him out of his comfort zone. When it’s me sucking him”—Mica’s voice had dropped lower, his tone darkening, ripening—“at least he’s still in the masculine role. Going the other way would be a mind fuck.”
What if I dared him to? Clare had to wonder. If they had another threesome, and she asked Vaughn to do it in a seductive way, like he’d be making her fantasy real, not Mica’s . . . To tell Mica so felt too much like them scheming. She’d just have to keep it to herself and maybe see where it took them all. If she had the balls in her, that was. The balls, and enough wine to rally them to the task.
“So you’ve imagined that,” she prompted.
“A million times.”
“How does it happen? Or is there no context?”
“Oh no, there’s context. I love context. Sometimes it’s spontaneous—we’re on one of our trips, I get him off, expect that’s all that’s going to happen, and then he surprises me. Puts a hand on my chest and pushes me onto my back, doesn’t say a word. Pushes me down and opens my fly, takes me out.”
“What’s it like?”
She didn’t need to clarify. Mica knew exactly what she was after.
“He’s clumsy,” he said, a smile in his voice. “I don’t dare give him directions at first—I’m too surprised, and I don’t want to put him off. But he figures it out, and I tell him when it feels good. Stroke his head, moan when he does something right. Tell him, Like that. Nice and deep.”
The scene unfolded in Clare’s mind, as surely as it was playing in Mica’s. She couldn’t guess what one of their campsites looked like, but her imagination sketched one together, putting the two of them on a blanket on the scrubby Southwest earth, a campfire lighting it, a bottle of something strong open on the ground nearby. Two beautiful male bodies, weary from a day’s exertion but loose from the alcohol and warmed by the flames at their sides. Warm from more than the fire, as well. From the fresh memory of what Mica had just done to Vaughn.
“What’s he like?” she asked. “Excited, or nervous . . . ?”
“Nervous. Unsure, but curious behind it all.” Mica was stroking now—she could hear it in the quickened pitch of his breathing.
“Eager?”
“Hungry,” came his answer, the word itself low and husky, steeped in craving.
“Slow or fast?”
“Fast at first. He thinks he owes it to me, thinks that’s the way to get it done quick. But the more he gives, the more into it he gets. He goes slower, deeper. Lets himself feel it all.”
“What are his hands doing?” Her own hand was still cupping her sex through her panties, warming that already heated space.
“One on my hip,” Mica said, and swallowed. “The other wrapped around me, tight. Not stroking, not yet. He has to concentrate on his mouth at first. That’s so much, to start with.”
“It’s his first time,” she hazarded, thinking that must excite Mica. She thought right.
“Yeah.” Panting filled a brief pause. “Yeah. He’s never done that. Never wanted it before now. With me.”
“What if it were different? What if you hadn’t gone down on him first?” The fantasy was unfurling in her mind, and the words slipped out so easily—more easily than dirty talk had ever come to her before. “He’s still hard and hurting and impatient when he decides to finally do this to you.”
“Yeah.”
“And you stop him, before you come. You tell him, Get ready. You’re finally going to fuck me tonight.”
A thick groan came through the line. “Good.”
“He meets your eyes from where he is, on his knees, and he looks a little scared, but there’s heat there, too. Then he’s up, strippin
g away his shirt.”
“I’d do the same. Strip everything.”
“Let him keep his pants on,” she said. “Let him feel more in control.”
“Yeah. Let him feel that, for me as much as for him. I’d want him that way—in control.”
“What do you do? Hands and knees?”
“Knees, not hands. Not on the ground. I’d brace myself on something—a cooler or a rock, whatever. I’d need to be able to turn, to watch him.”
“Good. So you’re outside.”
“Always.”
“Campfire? A bottle of something?”
“Always a fire. And whiskey. Every time we’ve fucked around, it’s tasted like bourbon. He’s never kissed me, but if he did I know it’d sting.” Now that was some filthy poetry, right there.
“Go on.”
“The ground’s hard,” he said. “Even through the blanket, I can feel it under my knees.” He’d put some thought into this. Many, many nights’ worth of theorizing. “His hands are rough. Fresh scrapes from the day’s climbing.”
“Where do you feel them?”
“All down my back, over my hips, my thighs, my ass. I can hear him taking himself out, getting himself harder. Then he’s holding me, one hand on my shoulder as the other brings his cock to me.”
“What’s it feel like? Going there with him?”
“Dangerous. He’s big. But he’s wet, from his spit. And I’m ready.”
Her body flashed hot, and from fantasies she’d never been too drawn to before she met this man. “How is it, when he takes you? Slow and careful? Or rough?”
“The first time? Slow. Even if he was pissed at me, he’d go slow. I know that much. He’d take ages. He wouldn’t talk to me, though. He wouldn’t ask how it felt. He wouldn’t dare. But he’d take it slow, and he’d stop if I asked, or if it sounded like it was hurting me.”
He would—Clare knew that, too. Vaughn couldn’t take his anger out on a lover, she bet, not even in a sexy way, not even if they wanted it and asked for it. She couldn’t picture that anyhow.
“Would he watch?” she asked. “Would he keep his eyes open?”
Mica chuckled softly. “I’ve always wondered that. I’ve always hoped he would. I’d wait until he found a pace, until it was smooth. Then I’d turn, lock our eyes over my shoulder.”
Clare’s fingers were teasing her clit through the cotton of her panties. She abandoned the effort to switch off her light. The fantasy in her mind was as vivid as high-def, and she wanted to get lost in it. She could just about smell the fire, mingling with the scent of two men’s sweat. “What would you see there, on his face?”
“Fuck . . . So much. Fear, or disbelief, on the surface. But under that, lust. Excitement. Relief.”
“Relief?”
“That we finally went there. He finally gave in. Because I know he knows I want that. He sees it in my eyes when we’re hanging out, when we’re drinking and I can’t pretend it away like I can when I’m sober, even if nothing sexual’s happening between us. He knows I can’t help it. I want him. I always have.”
“And he wants you.”
“Sometimes. He doesn’t want to, but he does.”
“How does that make you feel?”
Another low and wicked chuckle. “Fucking good.”
“Powerful?”
“Maybe. Maybe a little evil.”
“So what comes next?”
“Very little,” he said. “When I fantasize, this is where I stay. With our eyes meeting, our bodies meeting.”
She asked and Mica answered, and this shared fantasy fell apart into a flurry of moaned and muttered scraps of phrases—Rougher now. How’s he feel? So big. What else? His hand on my cock. Clare beat Mica to the punch, and she bet he had no clue. His voice had become nothing but harsh pants and swears. She lay back with her lungs racing and listen to him coming apart fifteen blocks away, his mind two thousand miles across the country.
His groans raced, crescendoed, then went silent for a long beat. An exhalation, a breathless “Ah, fuck,” half lost in a laugh.
Clare laughed right back. “Success.”
“What about you?”
“Beat you to it.”
“Did you, then?” A groan like he was stretching out across his bed. She could just see it; she ached to photograph it.
“I did.”
“You think about that stuff a lot when you get off?” he asked. “Two guys?”
“Never before I met you.”
“Well, well.”
She smiled up at her ceiling, wishing he were lying beside her. She wanted his voice all around her, his smell, his heat. “You make me want stuff I never even thought about before.” Again, she wondered how far Vaughn might take things with Mica, if she asked him to. What a nice gift that would be to Mica, if she could pull it off. A thank-you surprise, even, for all the new facets of her sexuality he’d shown her these past few weeks.
“Am I seeing you soon?” she asked. “You alone, or the both of you?”
“Up to you.”
Was it, though? She felt like a terminally loyal dog, glued in place until the exact second he called her to come. “The phone is nice, but nothing beats the real thing.” Give me a night, a time. Don’t keep me waiting until the mood strikes you.
But all she got back was “We’ll see.”
“Tease.”
“I don’t know his schedule. I’ll ask him tonight.”
“You better. This entire call’s going to leave me itchy until we wind up in your bed again.”
“And we can’t have that.”
“No, we can’t.” It was the pushiest she’d been with Mica so far, but it felt playful—flirty, not clingy. When she hung up a minute later, she didn’t feel like a fool.
She felt a lot of things—needy and hungry and impatient beyond belief, but not foolish.
“Give him time,” she muttered to herself, and hauled her butt off the covers. “Just give the boy time.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Plans solidified via text over the weekend. Friday was to be the next meet-up, and another three-way was implied. Clare was beginning to get the distinct impression that a large part of her appeal in Mica’s eyes was the fact that she was up for that, and perhaps also that something about her made the scenario doable for Vaughn.
The week dragged on and on until at last Friday night arrived. She ate a light dinner at home, showered, then changed into her favorite jeans, a new top, and matching green underwear, and headed over to the Hill, feeling charged up and eager and pretty. Feeling like a balloon, buoyant despite the fact that she was settling in all this.
Settling, though. Am I really?
What she’d been settling for all this time was a series of red-hot three-ways with two gorgeous and gifted men. It was tough to complain.
She rang unit C a couple of minutes past eight and held the door handle, waiting for the click and buzz, but instead she got the intercom—that was a first.
“Yeah?”
“Vaughn? It’s Clare.”
“Oh, Clare. Hey. Hang on.”
There was a pause, then the door unlocked.
He sounds surprised. No shock there—Mica seemed to revel in springing these debauched encounters on his friend. Or perhaps he knew Vaughn would get nervous and find an excuse to make himself scarce if he had warning about what was in store for him. Clare felt a moment’s pang at that as she hiked up the stairs, but it faded fast. There’s no denying he enjoys what we do. Beyond the evidence of his orgasms, there was heat in Vaughn’s eyes every time the three of them came together. Fierce and genuine desire behind whatever lingering uncertainty he carried into the bedroom with him.
He met her at the door holding a sports drink bottle. A hand towel was slung around his neck and there were tiny water
droplets in his hair.
“You smell very manly,” she teased as she shut the door behind her.
“Oh, thanks. I just shaved.”
She’d brought wine, and she pulled the bottle from its paper bag and went to put it in the fridge. A glance down the hall showed her that Mica’s door was open, though the room was dark. The smallest rock tumbled into her stomach.
“Is he not home yet?” she asked Vaughn.
He shook his head. “You guys have plans?”
“Yeah, he said eightish—I guess he’s taking liberties with the ish.”
“Sounds like Mica.”
“You about to go out?”
“I was thinking about it. But I won’t leave until he gets back.”
“Don’t trust me not to rob you blind?” she asked, smiling, and hung her camera bag on the back of a chair.
He smiled back, but there was something odd about the gesture. Something shy, or maybe even sad. “Not at all. Just seems polite.”
“Polite but unnecessary. Don’t let me keep you. Not if you have someplace to go worth shaving for.” This was her chance at a little two-way action with Mica. She liked Vaughn very much, but she wanted another taste of her first night here, to make sure she hadn’t conflated it in her memories. There had been real intimacy between them, hadn’t there? Even as strangers, they’d connected. With their bodies, and more. She wanted to find that again with Mica, to confirm she hadn’t dreamed it all.
“What are you up to tonight?” she asked Vaughn.
“On Friday nights my dad and a few of his friends meet to watch live blues at this bar over in Bloomfield. I swing by sometimes. He likes that. The old guys all like hearing about whatever’s happened on the job, and I think it makes him proud, that his son’s got all these interesting stories.”
“Of course it would. What does he do? Or is he retired?”
“He works part-time: AC installation and repair in the summer, furnaces in the winter.”
“Got the market cornered, huh? Well, don’t let me keep you. I’m sure Mica’s just late. He doesn’t strike me as Mr. Punctuality.”
Vaughn shook his head. “He’s not, no. And I think he was working until seven. Maybe he had to run an errand after they got the coffee shop closed up.”
