Level Hands: Bend or Break, Book 4

by Amy Jo Cousins

  Waiting for Denny on the stone steps of the library, he called home and got Lola on the phone. He had something good to tell her for once, so he was still talking when he spotted the shiny blond head poking out from behind a group of girls strolling up the path.

  “Tengo que irme, hermanita,” he said, and made his littlest big sister laugh as he said he had to go.

  “Okay, big brother.” He’d made her start calling him that when he turned twelve and realized he was taller than her. “Hasta luego. No dejes que los gringos te muerden en el culo.”

  The only gringo he wanted to let bite him on the ass was standing right in front of him.

  “Cállete.” He told his sister to shut up and ended the call. He’d be hearing about that next time, no doubt.

  “Hey.” Denny loped up the bottom steps to the library, and Rafi could’ve sworn he had a fucking halo. Not for angelic behavior, just that shining light that lit him up like a sparkler in a fog when Rafi spotted him walking through a crowd.

  “Hey.” Because hey was safe. Hey kept the I want to kiss you until the sun comes up tomorrow from spilling out of his mouth. “Ready to work?”

  Denny eyed him from his lower step, which put his face way too close to level with Rafi’s dick. “Unless you’d rather go dancing…”

  The crotch of Rafi’s jeans was suddenly too tight.

  Dancing with Denny. Yes. But… That was dangerous.

  Safer to study. Plus, for once he was actually excited to do it.

  He grabbed his backpack and headed into the library, knowing Denny was two steps behind him. Staring at his ass.

  You know he is because you’d be doing the exact same thing. He had way too many opportunities to stare at Denny’s body. He had a hard time keeping his eyes to himself through an entire practice, especially on the days when Denny wore nothing but Lycra. In the racing shell, Coach Lawson usually slotted him right behind Denny, which meant staring at his back and ass for hours every week, so close to Denny that he could smell him. It had gotten to the point that Rafi was busting his ass to get first seat in the boat, not because he wanted to be more competitive than anyone else on the team, but because if he landed that spot, the only person he’d be staring at was the cox.

  Rafi was pretty sure he could keep his dick under control with Austin in his face, at least. The guy was cute, no question. If you wanted to toss a little guy around, he had a feeling Austin would…well, shit. Now that he thought about it, the dictatorial cox seemed way more likely to want to top than give his ass up. Fucker had probably been born with a bullhorn in one hand and a stopwatch in the other. There was no way Austin didn’t give the orders in the sack.

  Rafi shook his head. Jesus, where was his head? Damn. He needed to get laid. If he was starting to speculate about what it would be like to fuck Austin, things had gone seriously awry.

  “I’ve gotta get some books.” And thanks to Bree, he had a whole strategy for finding entire sections where he could browse for books that might be helpful, instead of hunting down one or two particular titles and hoping they had what he needed. Sounded simple, but it was so different from how he’d looked at the library before.

  “I’ll find us somewhere to sit and text you,” Denny said, and headed to the stacks while Rafi hit the computerized catalog. He spent fifteen minutes searching keywords until it was clear the books he wanted to look at were mostly located in three sections.

  His phone buzzed with a text before he even left the computer to go hunt down his books.

  Got two carrels on the fourth floor. Go left from the elevator, halfway down the wall on the front of the building.

  When he showed up, arms piled so high with books he’d wedged the top of the pile under his chin, Denny’s face was cartoonish with its surprise.

  “Did you leave any on the shelves?”

  He’d meant to start going through some of the books in the stacks, but it had taken him so long to find the call numbers he’d started to feel self-conscious about leaving Denny alone.

  Even if they weren’t really studying together as much as they were studying near each other. Still, Rafi was pretty sure he was going to need an hour to scan the tables of contents and indexes of these books for what he needed, and it felt weird to spend that hour two floors away from where Denny had snagged them study space.

  Weird? Or like you want to be close to him whenever you can? No need to answer that.

  He dumped the books on his carrel tabletop.

  “Seriously. Are you starting work on your thesis or what?” Denny hadn’t gone back to work yet, obviously.

  “Nah. I just need to flip through ’em, figure out which ones are gonna be useful.” He bit his lip. It strummed his guilt string, knowing someone else was going to have to reshelve all these books, but Bree had told him that was one of the student jobs at the library. So he tried to look at it as another way to keep his fellow fin aid students employed, and pushed the guilt away. His sisters were big believers in not leaving messes behind for someone else to clean up, so he figured he was molded by almost two decades of being bossed around by four take-no-prisoners women.

  Tough stuff.

  It did indeed take him most of an hour, but he managed to sort out the losers from the half-dozen books that were going to do him the most good. He’d tracked down some truly kickass political comics from the French Revolution, the parliamentary debates during the American Revolution, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine and the Green Revolution in Iran.

  He was pretty sure this was going to be the best history of politics in media paper ever.

  Now he just had to write it.

  But the buzz of successfully researching this paper, of pulling together different sources, none of which were assigned reading from the class—it was like he was creating this whole argument that the professor hadn’t even mentioned, which was kind of thrilling—made it hard to sit still in the cavernous library.

  Even huddled in his carrel in their hideaway on the fourth floor, the vastness of this enormous building hulked around him. This whole space filled with books, books, books. And for the first time in his life, Rafi could see how he might start to fill in some of the blanks on a library map. Here are the books about art and drawing, and here are the books about politics. Here are the ones where those two things overlap. It was pretty impressive.

  But it wasn’t what he wanted right now.

  Spinning around in his chair, he tapped Denny on the shoulder. Headphones on, head down, Denny had been focused on one book for the entire time they’d been at the library, as far as Rafi could tell. Flip, flip, flip. He’d forgotten his own headphones, so the rhythm of Denny turning pages had been his background music for the past hour.

  “Dude.” He didn’t know why he was whispering. As far as he could tell, no one was within a mile of them. Thursday nights early in the semester were not jumping at the library. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “What?” Denny sat up, stretched. Visible under his close-fitting T-shirt, the arc of his obliques as he leaned right and left with his hands stretched over his head was a curve of perfection. “We’ve barely been here two hours.”

  “I’ve gotta move. Do something. That’s all the brain work I got in me tonight.” It was okay if Denny wanted to stay, but Rafi needed to get out of there.

  His tapping feet, his bouncing knee, even his fingers drumming on the desktop—his entire body was suddenly so full of a deep desire to go, go, go, he knew he needed to run. Run fast, run far. On his feet, on a bike, in a boat. Just go. He could fight or he could fuck or he could fly. Only one of those didn’t come with its own set of problems.

  “I have to get out of here.” He pleaded with his eyes. He begged. Understand me.

  Denny shoved his book in his open backpack. “Okay. Let’s go to the river.”

  They weren’t supposed to take any of the bo
ats out without permission. The rule-breaking of it amped Rafi’s adrenaline so high he thought his heart was going to pound out of his chest. Denny laughed at him as they prepared to maneuver the two-person boat off its rack.

  “We’re not supposed to, but people do it all the time.”

  “I don’t wanna get busted,” Rafi protested, but halfheartedly, because he wanted more than anything to be out on that river.

  “Coach has to know,” Denny assured him, careless in a way that Rafi both resented and envied. “No way they weren’t doing it back when she was a student.”

  “She went to Carlisle?” That was news to Rafi.

  “Yeah, this program is kind of incestuous that way, you know? Doesn’t let you go. You’re in it for life. That’s part of the reason my dad and the others could just talk about it and, you know.” He looked awkwardly at Rafi. They didn’t discuss this much, which was maybe part of the weirdness that hadn’t yet faded between them.

  “Pick me for the scholarship,” Rafi said flatly, trying not to betray how uncomfortable it made him to talk about this thing that felt like a favor he owed Denny. Owed somebody. Because he sure as shit hadn’t earned it on his own, and that was a truth he hadn’t known would be such an uneasy fit.

  “Well, yeah. Carlisle crew doesn’t crack.” He pulled the corner of his mouth to the side, looking embarrassed. “Kind of dumb, but it’s, like, tradition.”

  Rafi wanted to shake this mood off, get back to the good feeling he knew was waiting for them on the water. To the pull of muscle and the thrill of moving in synchronization so perfect it played like music in his body.

  “Have you ever sculled in a double before?” Denny asked him, one pale hand splayed against the green gloss of the fiberglass hull.

  “Yeah.” Aya had taught him herself, taking him out in one of the two-man boats morning after morning, correcting his form over and over again until he could stroke with her as smoothly as if their brains were connected. Like they were a team in that robots-versus-giant-monster-aliens movie.

  “Cool. Then let’s get to it.” Denny’s smile could have set the sky on fire as he mimicked Austin’s terse commands. “Shoulders, ready, up.”

  Getting a two-person sculling shell down to the water was a piece of cake compared to the eight-man boats. Once there, they held the shell for each other as they climbed in and settled themselves in their seats, steadying the two oars they would each use instead of the one used in sweep rowing.

  “Count down.”

  Rafi snorted at the command, which they used in the eights, each rower calling out his seat number to confirm that he was ready to go. The idea was pretty goofy in a double.

  “Two,” he drawled, squaring up his blades and preparing to dip them until they bit into the water.

  “One.” He could hear the laughter in Denny’s voice when he answered. Without bothering to mimic a cox’s commands, Denny put his hand to the dock and waited until Rafi did the same. They pushed off just far enough to give them room to maneuver their blades into the water. “You wanna sprint?”

  “Can we just take it easy for a bit?” He wanted to get there, to hit that perfect moment where the shell was skimming across the surface of the water, flying to the horizon, but first he needed to let his soul settle.

  It was stupid, he knew, to feel so excited about something as simple as learning how to find books in the library. But there was a difference between knowing how to track down a call number, and getting a bigger sense of how the entire organization of knowledge worked in the collection as a whole. He’d been getting stuck on which tree he was standing in front of in the forest, and Bree had taught him that he could see the landscape from a higher view and read the lay of the land.

  He looked at the trees lining the river—not a forest exactly, but some kind of woods—and smiled. Being outside of a city was messing with his brain, giving him all these nature metaphors instead of harsher urban ones.

  He liked it.

  Feathering his oars as he angled them out of the water, and squaring them up in preparation for their first driving stroke, he looked back over his shoulder at Denny. The grins they exchanged matched each other for joy.

  “Let’s go.”

  The rhythm of oars in his hands, the slide of his seat along the rails, the powerful thrust with his legs that began each stroke—all of it felt like sex. Took him out of his head and brought him deep into his body like sex did. And the pure pleasure of moving in perfect rhythm with another person, bending and breathing, pulling and sliding, pushed him higher on the cloud of endorphins as the shadows on the water lengthened and the noises of nearby traffic and birds in the trees faded away.

  They didn’t speak except to check in with each other occasionally about whether to keep going and where to turn around, the careful maneuvering of the boat in the narrow river requiring coordination and skill.

  Near the end, when Rafi was officially physically tired but emotionally centered, he shipped his oars for a moment, letting Denny keep them moving as Rafi turned in his seat to face him.

  “Thank you,” he said. Denny’s face was flushed with exertion, and his smile was all the reply Rafi needed.

  Taking the boat out of the water and returning it to the boathouse, all the steps of cleaning up after their illegal outing were completed in a wordless silence that kept the pink glow of the sunset hovering around them. Rafi figured the walk back to his dorm would be the perfect cooldown and reminded himself to grab some pretzels and hummus or something from the snack bar on the way back.

  He was pulling his backpack out of his locker, enjoying the calm lethargy of tired muscles, when Denny started stripping off in front of his own locker, which wasn’t nearly far enough away.

  “God, I reek. I’m gonna hit the showers. You?” Denny stood up, buck-ass naked, balling up his sweaty clothes in one hand and shoving them into his locker. And he wasn’t showing himself to Rafi, wasn’t doing anything any guy in a locker room postworkout didn’t do, but he wasn’t hiding a damn thing either.

  Suddenly, Rafi wasn’t tired at all. He kept his eyes on Denny’s face, desperately. Don’t look down. Don’t look down. “I’m good. I’d have to get back in the same clothes anyway.”

  “I always keeps extra stuff in my locker. You never know when you’re going to end up in the water, and I hate going home in wet clothes.” Denny eyed him up and down. Rafi felt it like Denny had reached out and run his hands—his naked hands, attached to his naked body—over Rafi from head to toe. His skin tingled. “I don’t mind sharing.”

  Rafi cleared his throat. Why did everything sound dirty all of a sudden? “No. I’m good. Thanks.”

  “Okay, I’ll be out in five,” Denny said, and grabbed a towel off the shelf as he strolled, still naked, into the showers. As if he assumed Rafi would still be here when he came out.

  Fuck. Like you’re going anywhere.

  The memory of almost being caught dancing with Denny the previous Saturday night at this very same building was fresh enough to have Rafi’s nerves bouncing with anxiety, though.

  It’s not suspicious, being in the locker room with Denny. Not even with naked Denny. If someone comes in, it’s just two dudes, one of them naked, getting ready to head home. Even to a paranoid homophobe, that doesn’t scream Cocksucking Central.

  Although he knew it did, because two gay dudes doing anything at all near each other screamed Cocksucking Central to a homophobe.

  God, he really needed to stop saying words like cocksucking around Denny, even inside his own head.

  When Denny came out of the shower, towel wrapped around his waist, Rafi was tapping his foot on the floor, antsy and ready to go. Denny was in no hurry, though, pulling his towel off and wiping himself down with it like he was polishing a glossy sports car. Carefully. Slowly. With excruciating attention to every nook and cranny.

  “What ar
e you doing?” Rafi’s voice was so thick.

  “What do you mean?” Denny asked, lifting one arm and rubbing it thoroughly with the towel clutched in his other hand.

  “Jesus Christ, you gotta be dry enough already,” he muttered, dropping his gaze to the floor and pulling his T-shirt away from his stomach, wishing the fabric were longer. If he stood up right now, there was no way Denny could miss that Rafi was hard, just from looking at him.

  “I hate feeling all sticky.” Denny’s laugh was husky. “Well, I guess I don’t always hate it.”

  Rafi couldn’t say a word. His tongue had stopped working somewhere in the middle of his brain picturing all the ways Denny could end up getting sticky. Sex! Sweat! Come! All the naked things!

  His brain was a total fucking traitor.

  So were his eyes, because somehow he was looking at Denny again, even though he was sure he’d never lift his eyes off the floor, ever. He was staring, mesmerized by everything he’d wanted to see since the first day of practice. When every guy on the team had been stripping down in the locker room, Rafi had kept his eyes on his own locker like he had Death Star powers and his locker was Alderaan.

  But they were alone. Totally alone, for now at least, and Denny was standing in front of him. Not pushing, but as if being naked was a gentle nudge. Hey, just in case you were wondering whether or not it’s okay to see me naked…

  Rafi looked. From Denny’s bony ankles to the long curve of muscles stretching from hip to knee, those powerful rower’s thighs. From the dark blond hair on his arms to the flex of his shoulders. Denny’s chest was broad, his stomach flat, and his light tan disappeared below the waist. His hips and upper thighs were ghostly pale, which only made the slightly darker skin of his dick stand out more. He was cut, and the head of his dick was pink and looked soft and there wasn’t much else Rafi wanted in the world than to touch it.

  All the blood in Rafi’s body sprinted for his cock. In front of him, Denny’s dick thickened, beginning to rise under Rafi’s eyes.