His hips started rolling, and he was sucking and biting my shoulders and neck. There was no finesse, no strategy, but I didn't need those things. It didn't matter that Patrick got lost in the sensations, that his thrusts were frantic and erratic. This was us: close and real and raw.
When his lips moved to my nipples, I was lost. The plastic biting into my skin, his growls and bites, the pleasure trembling through every ounce of my body, it was all too much.
"Just a little more, kitten," he groaned into my skin. "Just give me a little more."
And I always did. I'd give Patrick anything, always.
He came with a quiet roar, his arms locked tight around my shoulders, and everything in me tingled. My nose, my belly button, my toes, my lips. I felt the heat of us conducted through my cells, and if it were possible, I loved this man a little more.
It wasn't about the sex; it was never about the sex. Maybe it started with sex, but it was safe to say we loved each other as nerdy souls long before we got naked. No, it was about feeling infinite and invincible, and endlessly, perfectly possessed.
"No ham," Patrick murmured. "We can do better than ham."
I was too orgasm-drunk to understand a word he was saying, especially considering his cock was still twitching inside me. "What?"
"Our party," he said. "The Chrismukkah tradition we just invented. I'm thinking rack of lamb. Oh, no, wait—tamales!"
"That does sound good," I said. "But only if you really want to do this. We don't have to."
"I want to make traditions with you," he said. He loosened the lights from my body, slowly unwinding them from my arms and kissing every odd indentation and welt as he went.
"So do I."
Patrick's brow furrowed, and he laughed to himself when the strand fell to the ground. He massaged my hands and arms, gently urging the blood flow to return. "Can one of those traditions be that you wear red on Christmas Eve?"
"Sure," I said. "Does lingerie count?"
Thank you for reading!
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A Visit to New Hampshire: A Deleted Scene
Patrick
* * *
"Where is your sense of adventure?"
Andy eyed the fried seafood plate between us, grimacing as she lifted the beer bottle to her lips. I studied the rhythmic bobbing of her throat while she swallowed, and I immediately regretted the decision to cash in on my months-old seafood campaign to drive to New Hampshire when keeping her in my bed was an option.
She lifted an indifferent shoulder and said, "We agreed I would drink beer and criticize things."
"How is this weirder than the green pepper and fennel smoothie you had for breakfast on Thursday?"
Andy waved a hand dismissively, and reached across the white-washed picnic table for my beer. "Peppers aren't the cockroaches of the ocean."
"You're killin' me, Smalls." I shook my head and tossed another fried clam in my mouth. "So you're telling me you'll eat Korean barbeque from that nameless truck near Fort Point, where you've most definitely had kimchi that spent a few years rotting in a basement, but you won't touch a scallop?"
"Yes."
"That's weak," I murmured. "There's gotta be a better reason."
Andy considered me over the beer bottle while I ate, an eyebrow raised in challenge. "Don't you ever want to rebel against everything you knew as a kid? Just give it all away, and say, 'no, this is not me'?"
My eyes drifted over her shoulder, landing on the choppy ocean just beyond the restaurant. April was not filled with gentle showers this year. "Yes and no," I murmured. "Working with my brothers and sister means that there's no escaping, but I like that, and I like them. Usually. The past few years have been hard, but I wouldn't want to do this with anyone but my siblings."
"That's the no. What about the yes?"
Andy propped her feet on my bench and tapped my thigh with her booted toe. "The yes wants to bulldoze Wellesley and never deal with it again."
Andy gasped. "Don't you dare say that about an 1880s Arts and Crafts."
"Don't tell Riley I said this, but that place is fucking haunted, especially considering we can't figure out why the walls moved in some of the rooms."
"So that adds some character. Half of the properties we deal with are haunted," she laughed, sending a curtain of dark curls falling across her face.
"You won't eat seafood because you're from Maine. How is that any more reasonable?"
"It's not, Patrick, it's not even close to reasonable. But the last thing I am is Maine." She shrugged and polished off my beer. "And I went on a field trip to the nuclear reactor up the street when I was in high school, and I'm not convinced I want fish from these waters."
"You can be Persian, and still eat clams," I offered. "Maine has nothing to do with it. Neither does Seabrook Station. But you already knew that."
We stared at each other for several beats while a worker dumped several five-gallon barrels of ice into the soda fountains, each pour roaring through the otherwise empty room.
Andy nodded, her eyes softening. I fell far into the depth of her dark brown eyes with nothing but gray skies and the deserted seacoast around us. They had a language all their own, and I could lose days staring at Andy. Every glance, stare, and flash spoke, and revealed more than any words she could say.
I held her gaze as the last bucket was emptied, and the sudden, deafening silence wrapped around us.
"Didn't you say something about this being a pub crawl?"
Andy reclined against the booth and folded her legs beneath her before sampling the square slice of pizza. "Not bad," she said, and took a few more bites.
"Finally," I muttered.
She drank her weight in beer at the three seafood dives we visited, refusing to even look at the chalk-scrawled menus, and rolled her eyes when I suggested fried dough.
Andy's first murmur sounded when I was reaching across the table for the red pepper flakes. I froze, my fingers wrapping around the plump jar as the hum slipped down my spine and around my cock, and she murmured again. Dragging in a deep breath, my eyes panned up her navy blue sweater and over her neck, landing on her eyes.
Andy was studying her pizza and didn't notice me staring. "Do you have any idea what you're doing? You must really enjoy fucking with me."
Her eyes flashed with confusion. "How's that?"
I rolled the jar between my hands to distract from the swelling behind my fly. "Um, you occasionally make certain sounds while you're eating, like you just did, and, you do it pretty frequently when we're out for lunch during the week, and um—"
"Get to the point, Patrick," Andy laughed. She grabbed the jar, stilling my hands.
My words whooshed out in a compacted mess. "You make sex noises when you eat and I want to throw you on the table and fuck you until you scream."
Andy turned, glancing at the teenage boy working the counter. He was engrossed in the UNH hockey game against UMass-Lowell. "I don't think he'd mind," she shrugged, her eyes lighting while I laughed.
"Are you serious? He stared at your tits the entire time he was taking our order."
"So what? You stare at my ass every day."
"Oh you noticed that," I replied. She tilted her head in a clear sign that she wasn't entertaining my bullshit. "What? Why not? Your ass is incredible. It's especially hot with my handprint on it. I'd like to spend some more time getting to know it tonight."
Andy frowned and picked up her pizza, quietly eating while many interpretations flitted through my mind. I knew plenty of women, my sisters included, who could skim a single comment from a conversation and extrapolate that into a one-woman show highlighting my failings as a man. I didn't think Andy possessed that gene, but in all honesty, she wasn't telling me enough for me to make that assumption.
Maybe she was offended that I didn't explicitly compliment her tits. Or she felt harass
ed when I checked her out at work, and if that was the case, suggesting that I wanted to fuck her in a greasy beachside pizza joint was making matters much worse. It's possible she wasn't comfortable being spanked. It wasn't like we ever stopped and covered the basics before I grabbed her by the knee socks and fucked her into the mattress. Or she didn't appreciate my implied request for yet another night with her, and if so, it was too damn bad.
I wanted Andy in my bed, and I wasn't about to apologize for it.
"Just so I'm clear," she started slowly, gesturing toward me with her pizza crust, "you're not throwing me the table right now? Because I could go for that. Pizza? Good. Sex? Good. I'm not really into people watching, but he seems pretty invested in that game."
I leaned forward and beckoned for Andy to do the same. "Just so I'm clear, I want to see a lot more of this side of you."
To Andy on Valentine’s Day
Andy –
Do you remember that first Valentine's Day? We were at Shannon's apartment, and busy being angry at each other for some reason. I didn't understand you back then. I didn't understand anything. But, in the past four years, I've come to some realizations.
Your fondness for hot mustards of all variety knows no bounds. That you'll order wontons only to break off the crispy corners and dip them in spicy mustard—abandoning the best part of the wonton—astounds me. I'm also deeply appreciative as I get the abandoned wonton centers.
Your knee sock collection is infinite. I don't believe I've seen you wear the same pair twice. It's also possible that I'm rendered mindless by your socks as their reveal is often accompanied by bare skin.
You are frighteningly competent in everything that you do. It doesn't matter whether it's restoring homes or making chicken mole or getting my entire family to show up for Friday night dinners because there's nothing you can't do.
You are exceedingly tolerant. That you allow me to camp in your office instead of banishing me to my own is generous, although it's possible neither of us know how to work independently anymore. I'm sorry about gradually stealing all of the pencils from your desk.
Your hair really will smother and suffocate me in my sleep one of these nights. It's a risk I take willingly. I can't work without you, and I definitely can't sleep without you either.
I've also realized that it will probably take us another four years to get married if for no other reason than we can't decide on a menu for the reception. But I don't want to share wontons with anyone else.
Love,
Patrick
Necessary Restorations
Necessary Restorations
They liked to call me names. Manwhore. Slut. Player. But I make wrong look so right…
* * *
He's a flawed perfectionist…
I can read women better than any blueprint. I understand their thoughts and feelings, their secret desires and insecurities, and I know how to get rid of them once I get off.
* * *
But all bets are off when Tiel Desai slams into my life. She redefines what it means to be friends, and she makes it sound like the filthiest thing I've ever heard.
* * *
I can't read the gorgeous conservatory-trained violinist, but she's the only one keeping me from shattering by small degrees, and I can't let her go.
* * *
She's wildly independent…
My past—and New Jersey—are far behind me, and now my life is blissfully full of music: playing, teaching, and lecturing, and scouring Boston's underground scene with an annoyingly beautiful, troubled, tattooed architect.
* * *
I'm defenseless against his rooftop kisses, our nearly naked dance parties, the snuggletimes that turn into sexytimes, and his deep, demanding voice.
* * *
I have Sam Walsh stuck in my head like a song on repeat, and I'm happy pretending history won't catch up with me.
* * *
The one thing they have in common is a rock-solid disregard for the rules.
They find more in each other than they ever realized they were missing, but they might have to fall apart before they can come together.
* * *
It's the wrongs that make the rights come to life.
Chuck Bass – this one's for you.
1
Sam
I never thought I'd die in an elevator.
I always figured it would have something to do with my brother Riley leaving the gas stove on all night, killing us softly in our sleep.
Or gin. Chances were good that my liver was well on its way to pickled.
Or doorknobs. Touching those things was like licking the goddamn plague.
But this day was headed for the fires of hell, and it was all Shannon's fault.
"Hi, you've reached Shannon Walsh. Leave me a message and I'll get back to you soon."
Fucking voicemail. Again.
"I don't know where the fuck you are, Shan, but I've been waiting at the Commonwealth Avenue property for a goddamn hour. I thought we were trying to make a cash offer today, but I can't very well do that without you here."
Ending the call, I wet my lips and wiped the sweat from my brow. This heat wave was in its ninth day, and if I had even a lick of common sense, I would have hitched a ride to Cape Cod with my brother Matt and his wife Lauren for Labor Day weekend.
But no, I wanted to see the unit that just came available in the one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old French Revival hotel-turned-condo building in Boston's Back Bay. Specifically, I wanted my sister Shannon—the one who held the firm's purse strings—to buy that unit. I wanted to spend the long weekend drafting plans to demo it down to the studs and then restore the unit to its original beauty. I wanted to lose myself in lines and materials, things I could control.
And I wasn't up for third-wheeling it with the newlyweds.
I also wanted to be alone.
I could handle industry crowds and clients any day of the week and twice on Sundays, and I did it so fucking well they were willing to drop unreasonable amounts of money for my services. I was beginning to think I could finger-paint my designs and still collect six-figure commissions.
But I hated small talk. Bullshit conversations about weather or sports or politics held no appeal for me. I mostly stared at tits and asses until I was getting head in a coatroom or a drink thrown in my face.
And I was in a strange place these days. It was an odd in-betweenness; I wasn't sick but I certainly wasn't well. Not suicidal, but far from happy.
I'd been sliding further into this rut for months, and letting my work keep me too busy to notice. But while I was restoring everything I could get my hands on, the bottom was falling out on me. It was gradual, an evolution too small to notice without stepping back and examining from a distance. It was better this way. I didn't want anyone noticing.
So I was flying solo this Labor Day.
To me, alone didn't mean hunching over my drafting table all night, or skulking around the ancient Fort Point firehouse I called home.
No, alone meant drinking myself numb while some nameless young thing sucked the stress right out of me. There was nothing one hundred dollars pressed into the palm of the right maître d' and a good cocksucking couldn't soothe.
But let's be clear: blowjobs didn't solve problems.
If we were talking solutions, we were talking about my dick in someone's ass, and I didn't have the enthusiasm for that right now.
I needed a steady stream of gin, a blonde who knew her place was on her knees, and an otherwise interruption-free evening.
Go ahead: call me a manwhore.
Slut.
Player.
For all the disgust packed into those words, they were always tied with a fine, shiny thread of admiration. I did what everyone else wished they could, and I made it look good.
And I'd heard far worse. Someone always had some name to call me, and some of those names were hard to shake. For the better part of this year, I'd been replaying my last conversation
with my father. The record was stuck on repeat in my mind, scratching and skipping back to the raw, awful parts.
My younger brother, Riley, had been leading a walk-through at a property in Bunker Hill—a string of decent row houses that my miserable bastard of a father, Angus, bought and dumped on us to restore—with Patrick, Matt, and me.
We were almost finished when Angus showed up, and I knew the minute he walked through the door that he was drunk. He'd been various shades of drunk since my mother died, and that day, he was cruel drunk.
And that was the day I refused to ignore his bullshit. I didn't want to walk away that time. It wasn't rolling off my back. I'd absorbed decades of his hatred, and that tank was long since overflowing.
He attacked everything that I was—my sexuality, my work, my relationship with my mother and my sister, Shannon—and told me I was a mistake. That I was too fucked-up to be alive. That I shouldn't have been born.
That was Angus's gift. He could hear every dark, twisted thought I had, and he knew how to sharpen them into daggers. Ten months later, I couldn't stop hearing those words.
I walked through the unit one last time, photographing what was left of the original design elements and noting restoration ideas. In the hallway joining the twin penthouse units, I texted Shannon to reiterate my annoyance. Then I hit up the manager at the new whiskey bar in the South End to reserve my preferred booth.
The Walsh Brothers Page 55
