Rogue Desire: A Romance Anthology (The Rogue Series)

by Adriana Anders

  “Drive! Fucking drive!” A male voice, high pitched and gasping for air.

  The guy jumped on the back of the bike, scrambling onto the passenger seat on the rear fender. The arm he wrapped around Kaz’s waist was a thin iron band as he smacked Kaz’s hip with his free hand. “Come on.”

  Kaz twisted on his seat, turning to say something to his unasked for passenger. Something like dude, what the fuck? Or get off, weirdo. He had no patience for the anti-fascist protestors who had sprung up since the election and seemed to like fighting as much as the fascists did, no matter what they said about denying Nazis platforms. When shit got violent, brown and black bodies were the ones who ended up suffering most, from the violence or the inevitable police action in response to it. Angry white guys, fascists or antifa, were a demographic he stayed far away from.

  But before he had a chance to say a word, a growling mob poured around the corner, a roar rising from them like thunder when they spotted Kaz’s passenger. Way too many flag T-shirts and red baseball hats and camo pants, with a bonus dollop of Confederate flag insignia.

  Stay or go wasn’t the question. He needed to get the hell gone, asap.

  Let this dude catch a ride or kick him to the curb? He only had a split second to decide.

  CHAPTER 2

  I t was the armbands that did it. The guy had what looked like rainbow duct tape wrapped around his biceps over his black, long-sleeved hoodie. Kaz had no patience for reckless antifa violence he saw in the news, but he knew sure as shit the fucking Nazis would take extra pleasure out of kicking the crap out of a queer dude.

  He’d already turned the key and put the bike in neutral. A push of the start button had the engine chugging and then they shot forward just ahead of the chasing crowd, the bike’s acceleration disturbingly slow with an extra rider’s weight on board.

  Good thing he’s a skinny little fuck or we’d be getting our asses kicked in about three seconds.

  “Suck it, you little-dicked Nazis,” his hitchhiker shouted to the mob that chased them down the alley, all jostling shoulders and shouts.

  No time to complain about the body-shaming when his ass was on the line. Kaz wove the Honda around the plywood cornhole boards the neighbors had left in the middle of the alley.

  Even as they picked up speed, the Honda handled like a sack of mud, sluggish and awkward, although the guy behind him leaned into the curve of each turn like he’d ridden before.

  Come on, baby, you can do it. Get us the fuck out of here.

  He sent up a quick prayer that this wasn’t one of the alleys that dead-ended, holding his breath as they turned one corner, then another, zooming past backyard after backyard. When an exit to the street opened up before them, Kaz sucked in oxygen and his hands tingled with the sudden rush of relief. The bike’s horn was anemic-sounding, but Kaz thumbed it for all he was worth as they bombed over the sidewalk and into the street. The alley had zig-zagged enough to make him unsure of where they were, and who knew how far behind them the mob was, so Kaz leaned into the turn and accelerated for all he was worth, his passenger’s grip tightening as the stranger leaned with him.

  He hooked a right on a red at the first corner in a convenient traffic gap, wanting to get off the street and out of view of any lingering chasers as fast as possible. Uber conscious of the fact that Pink Bandanna had neither a helmet nor, apparently, any sense of self-preservation, Kaz gritted his teeth and wove his way out of Capitol Hill changing directions almost at random, just in case some freakishly tenacious pursuers were still following. After a mile or two, he figured they’d gone far enough and prepared to pull over and kick his passenger to the curb.

  Just his luck that he pulled up to a corner next to an unmarked squad car, only spotting the blinking red and blue lights on the rear dash at the last minute. The officer in the driver’s seat glanced out the window, caught his eye, and began lowering her window.

  Adrenaline flooded through him, his heart racing and sweat breaking out on his forehead.

  “Don’t stop,” the man at his back shouted in his ear.

  Kaz didn’t dodge the cops. He cooperated obediently with law enforcement, with only one exception, in his regular, everyday life. Because he was smart. Because he didn’t get in trouble. Because he understood exactly what could happen.

  But he had a bandanna-masked guy riding pillion and who knew what trouble Kaz was in—up to his neck now—if it turned out this guy was on camera somewhere doing something illegal.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I don’t need this shit.

  He didn’t need to miss his own bus ride back to campus either, something almost guaranteed to happen to the brown guy with the Arabic name who got busted with an anarchist-slash-antifa brawler in his back pocket. He’d be lucky if he didn’t end up getting picked up by ICE before he was charged and bailed out by Jesse. And those bastards had held onto more than one legal US resident for weeks without bothering to verify their documents, moving people from jail to jail without notification.

  Keeping his face turned from the cops, he pretended he hadn’t noticed her hold on there, son wave and accelerated through the light. His stomach ached with nausea.

  “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath as they pulled away, casting a glance over his shoulder to see if the police were following. He wouldn’t actually evade pursuit, so if they were, Pink Bandanna here better be prepared to pull over and show some ID.

  But no pursuit was evident behind them. Relief flooded him, bringing with it a wave of lightheadedness that made him slow down for safety. Pink Bandanna snugged up tighter behind him and pressed his cloth-covered cheek to Kaz’s neck, speaking with a normal voice over the quieted rumble of the engine. “Thanks. There was some trouble earlier. Think I better keep clear.”

  Kaz didn’t want to know.

  A few more zigzagging, direction-dizzying turns later, he found an empty loading zone and eased the Honda to the curb. He was fairly sure they were somewhere in Navy Yard, but a quick Google Map scan ought to set him right.

  Just as soon as Pink Bandanna took off.

  Seek life elsewhere, buddy.

  The tap on his shoulder was almost chipper somehow. Kaz knew what was coming even before the question was asked, slightly muffled by the mask.

  “Any chance you give me a ride back to the Mall? My friends and I arranged to meet up at the Capitol if we got separated and couldn’t get a signal.”

  The guy wasn’t a total idiot then. Ballsy to ask Kaz to play taxi, but not stupid. Cell towers got totally overwhelmed when a million people showed up to protest on the Mall. Expecting to be able to call anyone was a nonstarter, and even texting was a gamble.

  “Plus, I lost my phone,” Pink Bandanna added cheerfully. “And since you didn’t flinch at rescuing a queer guy and are outrageously hot, I’m hoping I can throw in some heavy flirtation and beg for mercy?”

  Take back the idiot part.

  He waited for irritation to rear its head at the pushy, sexy request. Waited with a hard male body pressed against his ass and back, and found himself opting to keep it there for a little while longer. Sometime between being chased by neo Nazis and evading what had admittedly been only a handwave of a suggestion by the police that they stop, he’d realized he was anticipating each left or right turn because Pink Bandanna held him even closer when they tipped into the turn, torque and friction battling them to the point of perfect balance.

  Still. . .

  “Show me your face,” he said, twisting in his seat.

  Pink Bandanna froze for a moment, then raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you want to be able to identify me in a police lineup?’

  “Not even a little,” Kaz admitted, flinching at the mere idea.

  If the guy had hustled him, or even asked nicely a second time, he wouldn’t have done it. But Pink Bandanna just sat there patiently, hands on his own thighs now as Kaz twisted in his seat to stare at him, as if looking hard enough would tell him something, anything, he didn’t already know.


  Piercing ice blue eyes flashed out from rings of smudged black guyliner. Pink Bandanna had one straight dark eyebrow, and one slightly arched one, which gave him an inquisitive look Kaz wasn’t sure was intentional. As Kaz stared at him, Pink Bandanna’s cheeks bunched up under his improvised mask, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he smiled, as if Kaz had already said something he wanted to hear.

  Or as if Kaz’s inability to say anything at all told him all he needed to know.

  “Okay,” he said, knowing it was a dumb move but not caring, still skating on the gloss of adrenaline and the success of their narrow escape.

  Half a dozen blocks into the trip, his senses on high alert as he kept an eye out for Nazis and cops, Kaz became aware of something else. The rainbow duct tape on his passenger’s sleeves had been a pretty good sign he was queer. But even if Kaz had missed the outright statement—you didn’t flinch at rescuing the queer guy—he could hardly miss how the guy snuggled up close behind him the way straight guys rarely did. Or, more importantly—and impressively—the hard dick now rocking against his ass.

  Talk about a sign.

  For a minute, he was absolutely offended. The polite thing to do with an accidental hard-on was to scoot back a little from the dude giving you a free taxi ride to your rendezvous point with your friend. Polite was not pressing up against him until he could hardly miss feeling the guy’s erection. After all, Kaz hadn’t even confirmed out loud that he was gay, so for all this freeloader knew, he was about to embarrass them both by hitting on a straight man who didn’t mind when gay guys flirted with him for rides.

  A lifetime of having manners drilled into him by his parents at embassies around the world had Kaz’s every reflex matching Miss Manners at her most circumspect. Rudeness irritated him. And the brilliant Judith Martin would surely have had something scathingly witty to say about unexpected transit hard-ons.

  Then he glanced down and spotted the spiky edges of a blue-black tattoo poking out from the cuffs of the stranger’s sleeves, twisting lines writhing like snakes around his wrists, and suddenly Kaz’s brain was too busy imagining how far up his body those tats stretched to give a shit about manners.

  Fuck it. He’d busted his ass all week, organizing and coordinating his students’ protest bus, herding undergrads like cats, sacrificing sleep to midnight emails about last minute accessibility questions and food allergy restrictions. Yes, we can request nobody eat peanuts on the bus. And, the bus is ADA-compliant for anyone using a wheelchair, absolutely. And he’d been happy to do it, but if the universe was going to reward him with a (theoretically, he couldn’t actually tell) hot hitchhiker with a hard dick and wandering hands—they kept moving from his hips to wrap around his waist and back again—then Kaz was gonna say thank you and more please.

  Paused at a red light, he abandoned manners with a vengeance. He braced his feet on the pavement, lifted off the seat an inch and settled back down again, pressing his ass against the hard length. The arms circling his waist squeezed tight, then the guy let one hand drop to hang from Kaz’s waistband by a thumb, fingers dangling over Kaz’s crotch.

  Riding a motorcycle required a level of alertness that mostly kept him from being distracted by the vibration between his thighs and under his balls. Mostly. But when his passenger’s dangling hand got active, rubbing with a flat palm over the front of Kaz’s jeans, roaming the inside of his thighs, his stomach, reaching up his chest to scrape over his nipples, the whole driving-slash-concentrating thing became impossible.

  Riding a motorcycle with Pink Bandanna was like sitting on a giant vibrating sex toy, with a horny one-night hookup at his back. Except it was broad daylight, the sun just starting to sink over the city in the west, and Kaz’s hard-on was going to make them a road fatality statistic, damn it.

  “Knock it off if you want to make it back to the Capitol in one piece,” he said over his shoulder, and Pink Bandanna showed he could listen at least some of the time by pulling his hands back to rest safely on Kaz’s hips.

  He was almost entirely happy about that.

  By the time he found a spot to pull over on the south side of the Supreme Court building, squeezing the bike in between two massive SUVs—must have been tourists, because no DC resident was going to expect to find street parking for a big-ass car like that—he didn’t know whether he wanted to yell at Pink Bandanna or get his number for a hookup the next time he came back down to DC.

  Yelling won out, because he had no business getting mixed up with a guy who liked to start fights, no matter how hot it was riding around with him on the borrowed motorcycle.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Suck it, you little-dicked Nazis?” he asked, having remembered something—one of many things—he’d wanted to call out since way back at the beginning of this hostage situation.

  Safer, at least, than accusing Pink Bandanna of trying to wreck them by giving Kaz the closest thing to a hand job on a motorcycle he’d ever gotten.

  His passenger laughed, bandanna fluttering against Kaz’s cheek before sitting up, removing himself from the close press of his chest to Kaz’s back. Kaz turned to face him, and Pink Bandanna’s cheeks and eyes shifted in a hidden smile again. “Man, fascists really don’t like it when you make fun of their dick size.”

  “Neither do I, because that’s body-shaming, transphobic bullshit and we’re supposed to be the good guys.” Shit. His teacher voice shot out of him involuntarily at the most inappropriate times. Or hell, maybe this was the appropriate time. Having saved this guy’s ass—he ripped his eyes away from the sweet curve in those black cargo pants—he deserved to sit and listen to a lecture. “Do better.”

  “Yikes. I will. Sorry. I’m new to the revolution,” the stranger said as he swung a leg over the rear fender and hopped off the bike. “I can make fun of them for misspelling their signs, right?”

  Kaz tried not to roll his eyes. Newbies. “Is making fun of someone’s lack of education or potential learning disability really the hill you want to stake your flag on?”

  “Damn.” The guy reached for his hood as if to shove it down, then froze and dropped his hands with an abortive gesture. “This shit is complicated.”

  “Yeah, it is if you’re doing it right.” Kaz frowned. Fuck it. If Pink Bandanna wanted to keep his identity hidden, it was none of his business why. “Repeat after me: my revolution will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit.”

  “This may explain why I ended up with the group who just wanna punch Nazis.”

  Kaz scoffed. The pro-immigration and refugee rally had brought hundreds of thousands of people together to protest unlawful detention, racism and xenophobia, and punitive legislation that would result in thousands of refugees’ lives being at risk, and this punk thought his half-assed street brawls were what mattered? “Frigging amateur hour.”

  “Well, fuck you too, friend,” Pink Bandanna said, mostly kidding, but with narrowed eyes.

  “Hey, watch your mouth. Show some respect in church,” Kaz said, thrusting a hand out to include the building in front of them, maybe the only house of worship he truly believed in. The famous white marble columns of the building’s front weren’t visible, but if his passenger knew the city at all, he could hardly fail to recognize the building even from the side, what with the back of Capitol Building directly in front of them.

  Pink Bandanna arched a brow. “The Supreme Court is your church?”

  “Damn straight.” And Kaz’s faith was solid enough that he’d decided to apply to law school next year. He wanted to do more than he could as a volunteer in his community, and a law degree seemed like the best way to be able to achieve his goals.

  Plus, with the current administration, a student visa was probably going to be easier to hang onto than a work visa. He hadn’t ever been paranoid about his ability to stay in the country, but current circumstances were less than encouraging.

  “At my momma’s church, they believe in sin and Sunday supper and that sucking cock means I’m goi
ng to hell for all eternity. So, you could say me and church aren’t exactly on the same page.”

  “Well, that’s not what I believe,” Kaz said, or rather, started to say, when the masked man interrupted him.

  “Nobody believes in anything these days,” the guy said, sounding surprisingly bitter.

  Which was a bullshit statement to make after half a million people had gathered that very morning to march for something they believed in with a passion. Kaz couldn’t stand that kind of cynicism, the kind that saw emotion as sentimentality and dispassionate reason as some kind of ideal, as if there ever were any such thing.

  “I believe in government, for the people, by the people.” He meant to stop there, but something about the way the guy looked at him kicked his soapbox speeches into high gear. “I believe in a preferential option for the poor, in universal healthcare, in automatic voter registration and a fifteen dollar minimum wage, in—”

  “Well, I believe in punching Nazis,” the masked man interrupted, grabbing Kaz by the shirt with one hand. His eyes were sky blue and wrinkled around corners smudged with black eyeliner, as if he were smiling underneath his mask. “And kissing hot guys in church.”

  Then he pushed his bandanna up and crushed his mouth against Kaz’s like the fascists might show up any moment to pull him away and this kiss would be his last on earth.

  And Kaz meant to protest, fainthearted though it might have been after feeling that hard-on riding his ass for the last couple of miles, but when he parted his lips, the stranger licked inside as if he belonged there. His mouth was hot and sweet and spicy, as if he’d been eating cinnamon Red Hots, and his tongue danced like fire.

  He hadn’t noticed the stranger’s lip ring until he felt it with his tongue, and then he couldn’t stop picturing it, his tongue in the stranger’s mouth, wondering where else the guy might have let the piercer roam with a needle. The jolt to his imagination made him groan, and he went from half-hard to naked, now in an instant.