by Rick R. Reed
THE INNUENDO, Flynn thought, had been fun and… revealing. He was now driving Mac and Barley home, after they’d enjoyed their ice cream sitting on the low retaining wall of an attorney’s storefront up the street from Molly Moon’s. For the record, Mac ordered the “melted chocolate,” which he shared with Flynn. He told him he was right about how good it was—rich dark, and fudgy. Flynn went with his old standby, salted caramel.
After, they’d driven over to Gas Works Park and lounged on the grass to watch the boats and the seaplanes landing and taking off. They’d let go of Barley’s leash so he could do what he did best, sniff intently. But Flynn was smart and kept the leash on so he could grab it if Barley bolted. He’d learned the hard way how quickly Barley could take off on the trail of a scent.
And now they were in front of Mac’s house. Flynn turned the car engine off, a subtle way of nudging Mac to invite him in. Their windows were down, and sweet air rolled in, a little cooler now that it was dusk. The horizon was painted in hues of lavender, orange, and slate blue as the sun set over the Cascades.
They’d kidded each other a lot. There was much sexual innuendo and flirting for the entire late afternoon and early evening. They’d sat close at Gas Works, their shoulders and sometimes their legs touching. Flynn found these seemingly innocent touches intensely erotic. He didn’t think his erection had flagged much past half-mast the entire time they’d been together. He wondered how he had enough blood flow to his brain to drive or to make even mundane conversation.
He needed, he knew, to go inside with Mac and Barley. He seriously thought that if Mac were to turn to him and say something along the lines of “Well, thanks for a lovely time. We’ll see you later in the week,” Flynn would simply die… or explode. Especially the latter—and right in his pants.
He couldn’t recall a time in his sexual history when he’d been so turned on by a guy. And that was no small claim, since Flynn had never been the type to play hard to get. Okay, he was easy and had no standards or morals. So yes, he’d been around the block a few times with a few, or a few hundred, fellows.
But Mac? Mac was something else entirely. His lust for him was like something red-hot and burning inside. He honestly didn’t think he could stand the disappointment if Mac were to leave him here in the car, alone.
Right now, Mac was babbling about Stephen King and the Hulu adaptation of his book 11/22/63 that had aired the spring prior. Flynn was ashamed to realize that the poor guy might as well have been speaking Japanese as far as he was concerned. But he couldn’t stand it, he was so frustrated and in such a state of need. He blurted out, “So are you gonna ask me in or what?”
Mac stopped midsentence and burst into laughter. “What a smooth talker you are! I was going to, but now I’m having second thoughts,” Mac teased. “Pushy!”
“Oh, please don’t say that!”
Mac held up a hand. “Hey. You can come in. I want you to come in. But I also want you to know an invitation to come inside my house is not also an invitation to come inside me.” Mac snorted. “I know that’s putting it kinda raw, but you seem a little, um, fired up. And we may need to get you a cold shower as our first order of business.”
“I can’t help it,” Flynn said. “You’re just so totally hot.” And I’d take a cold shower, the coldest, as long as you took it with me.
“Flattery won’t get you everywhere, buddy. How about we just go up on the porch and have some beers? See where it goes from there?”
Flynn remembered how as a little boy, when his family went to their swim club in the summer, he’d have to be restrained by his dad in the changing room. He would itch to burst through the doors, dash outside, and cannonball into the pool. There was such an intensity of want accompanied by zero patience. That particular combination had not exactly served him well in his young life.
His need for Mac was the same, except multiplied by, oh, like, one hundred.
If he didn’t get this man in bed tonight, he would die. He would simply shrivel up and die. All that would remain would be an erect penis, twitching, with precome running down the shaft. Somehow he managed to smile, to draw in a somewhat deep breath, and say, “A beer would be great.”
THEY MANAGED to talk for far longer than Flynn would have thought possible. He also didn’t think it was possible that he could enjoy their conversation so much in his state of agitated need. But they covered everything from how much Seattle had grown in the past few years, to their favorite horror movies—Flynn’s was The Omen and Mac’s Rosemary’s Baby, and both of them chose The Exorcist as a close second, cementing a bond in their passion for religiously themed horror—to why dogs were better than people.
Mac did most of the talking, and when they at last fell silent, it was comfortable. Now that it was dark, the air around them was cool. The breeze off Green Lake was bracing but not too cold. The traffic on Green Lake Way had slowed a lot, and Flynn pulled out his phone to see what time it was. He was stunned to see it was after 11:00 p.m.
“I miss fireflies,” Mac said.
“What?” Flynn asked.
“Fireflies. Or as we called them back in West Virginia, lightning bugs. Since you’ve been in the Pacific Northwest all your life, you probably don’t think much about them.”
“I’ve only seen them in movies, to be honest. I guess I probably think they’re kind of rare, since I’ve never laid eyes on a real one.”
“They’re not rare,” Mac said. “When I was little, I’d be up until late with neighborhood kids, chasing them. They were magical, even though they were common. These little bursts of golden light against the dark sky. When I think of lightning bugs, I think of carefree summer nights and childhood.” Mac stared out from the porch, his gaze lingering over the dark water across the way. “We’d get a jelly jar or something and catch them. I’d keep mine beside my bed and pretend the bugs trapped inside were a natural lamp.”
“Did they die?” Flynn asked.
“Oh no. I poked holes in the lid. And when I was asleep, my mom or my dad would sneak in, and they would release them. I never minded. I didn’t want to keep them prisoner for long anyway. But I still have fine memories of drifting off to sleep as I watched the lightning bugs flitting around in my jar.”
“You sound like you had good parents.”
“Oh, I did. But I lost them early on. Remember? I told you before. They died in a car crash. I was twelve.” Mac looked away. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Sure. I’m sorry, Mac.”
“Oh no! Don’t be. I had a good childhood with them. My mom never tired of reading me stories, and when I could read for myself, she’d make sure I got to our little downtown library every Saturday so I could take out my weekly allowance of six books. And Dad and me, he’d take me over to our spot on the Ohio, and we’d fish for bluegills.” He sighed and was quiet for a moment and then went on. “I still remember them, but sometimes what kills me is that I don’t. Like, I try to see their faces and they’re sort of blurs, you know? I can fill in the blanks with what I know from photographs, but when I try to really see them in my mind’s eye, it’s elusive. I can’t quite get to it anymore. And that makes me sad.”
He released a breath, a little shuddery, and Flynn’s heart went out to him. His horniness for Mac and his admiration for his sensitivity were now running neck and neck. Flynn wondered if this was what love felt like.
“But you know what?” Mac said, a little louder, a little more cheerful, as though putting the pain of his lost parents away for now. “I didn’t have a bad upbringing at all. I had my grandma. She was strict and she could be a pain in the ass, but that woman saw to it that I always had everything I needed… and she loved me. Still does, of course! I’d love to get back to see her. But it’s so expensive to go back there from Seattle. I just can’t swing it.”
“Can’t she come and see you?”
“Grandma? Dude, she’s never been on a plane. I don’t even know if she’s been any farther than Pittsburg
h, which is about an hour from where I grew up.” Mac shook his head. “Not gonna happen.”
Flynn was also impressed by Mac’s intelligence and, although he didn’t voice it, was a bit sad that Mac hadn’t been able to do more with his life so he could travel a bit. He knew a lot of people who didn’t have Mac’s smarts and sensitivity who had advanced degrees and were pulling down six figures. Sometimes life was just unfair.
“I’m always afraid I’m gonna get the call from back home that she’s gone, and I won’t have seen her—for years.”
Flynn wanted to tell Mac he’d take him back to West Virginia. But that just seemed like too much. Too big of a gift. Too soon.
“I’ll figure something out,” Mac said. “Maybe get one of those incredible last-minute deals that I hear about but yet never see.”
“I know, right? They’re like unicorns.”
“I’m getting tired,” Mac said after a while.
Flynn took this as his cue to get going. He wasn’t as disappointed as he thought he would have been earlier in the evening. Getting to know Mac better was a kind of intimacy that maybe meant more—believe it or not—than sharing a bed with him. Now, that was not to say he didn’t want very much to share that bed, but just that he was more satisfied with the sexless evening than he thought he would have been. Maybe he was growing up… finally.
Flynn stood. “You want me to take Barley for a little potty run before I head out?”
“Sure. That would be nice.” Mac toasted him with his beer bottle. “Hurry back.”
Flynn took Barley down the steps and out onto Green Lake Way and headed down the street for a while. Barley sniffed, watered a few shrubs with his leg lifted, and searched, Flynn assumed, longingly for a duck or goose to cross his path. For just a second or two, Flynn imagined he and Mac were a couple, and he was the one tasked with taking the dog out while Mac waited for him to come back.
The night had gotten very quiet. There was a sliver of moon over the lake, and its silvery opalescence cast a long reflection on the water’s still, black surface.
When he returned, Mac had blown out the citronella candle he’d lit earlier, and the porch was in darkness.
It took a moment for Flynn’s eyes to adjust, and when they did, he gasped. Mac was sitting on the glider, completely naked. His paleness intensified against the shadows as Flynn’s eyes adjusted even more. Flynn was both perplexed and delighted. His short burst of laughter reflected those qualities.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Did you forget?”
“Forget what?”
“We had a deal—you know, you get me chocolate ice cream, and then later, you get me.”
Flynn took a couple of steps toward him, and Mac stood up. He was fully aroused. He pressed naked against Flynn, and Flynn thought he’d never felt anything more erotic than all that naked flesh pressed up against his clothed self. There was something about the contrast that made Mac seem more naked than naked, if that made any sense.
A car passed by, and its headlight beams rode over them as it rounded a curve.
“We should go inside,” Mac said, a little hoarse. He leaned closer to whisper, “Do you want to come inside?”
And Flynn had no words. He nodded.
Mac took his hand and led the way.
Chapter 13
IN THE front hallway, Mac didn’t turn any lights on. Instead he stooped down to unleash Barley. Flynn and Mac stood facing one another in the deep shadows, barely breathing, listening to the click of Barley’s toenails on the hardwood as he headed out to the kitchen. In a second they heard him lapping water thirstily from his bowl.
Flynn squinted a little to better see Mac’s face in the darkness. A grin played about his lips.
“Is this really happening?” Flynn asked. “Or am I still out there on the glider, dozed off and dreaming?”
“Shhh,” Mac whispered, placing a hand on Flynn’s chest. “Don’t say a word.”
Flynn tried to be quiet, but he couldn’t hold back his sharp intake of breath when he felt Mac’s hand on his belt buckle, tugging. He reached out to help him, but Mac gently moved his hand away. He got the belt undone, then the button of his jeans, and at last the zipper. Flynn’s erection strained outward against his boxers, and he knew the cotton was wet with his precome. Mac stared down, a little groan in the back of his throat that sounded like a growl.
Mac dropped to his knees and wetted the fabric of Flynn’s boxers even more with his tongue. Flynn didn’t know if his knees could support him much longer. His breath was already coming in pants, faster, shallower. He hoped he wouldn’t embarrass himself.
Vaguely he heard Barley behind him, coming out of the kitchen, seeing what the humans were up to. When he did, his footsteps retreated, the toenail-clicking diminishing as he walked away. Flynn remembered this about his boy—where matters of sex were concerned, he was shy or not interested in matters of human carnality. Barley might unabashedly lick his balls in the park in front of a hundred strangers, no problem, but if he saw Flynn getting intimate with a guy, he wanted none of it and removed himself quickly and discreetly from the scene.
Mac was tugging at the elastic waistband of Flynn’s boxers. He pulled them down, settling them, along with his jeans, around the top of Flynn’s thighs. And then he went to work. Mac tongued the head of his cock, licking away the precome first. Then he moved up and down the shaft with his tongue, swirling and licking.
Flynn let his hands finger Mac’s hair. As expected it was coarse, but there was a softness to it too that Flynn reveled in. It made him think of spun sugar.
Mac swallowed him down in one epic gulp, all the way to the root. The head of Flynn’s cock pulsed against the back of Mac’s throat. If it weren’t already so dark in the house, Flynn fully believed he might have lost his sight for a minute, that the world would have simply gone dark, because all his senses were now funneled into touch—and the amazing things Mac was doing to him with his mouth.
Flynn shut his eyes anyway. His head lolled back all on its own. He groaned.
Mac moved his mouth away, and the sudden absence of wetness and warmth caused Flynn to cry out in disappointment. Mac squeezed hard at the base of Flynn’s twitching cock and whispered, “Don’t get any ideas.” Flynn wasn’t sure if Mac was talking to him or his cock.
What did it matter?
Mac took Flynn’s balls in his mouth one at a time and then, stretching his lips wide, both of them. His sac was encased in a warm bath, intense in its heat, slippery. Flynn longed to reach down and stroke himself. He was so close it felt like his whole body was ramping up for orgasm. But when he did touch himself, Mac again gently moved his hand away.
Mac put his mouth where Flynn’s hand had meant to be. Again he swallowed Flynn down all the way and then let go, sucking with abandon, alternating strokes with his hand as his mouth pistoned up and down Flynn’s shaft.
With attention like that, it didn’t take long. Flynn had felt on the brink of orgasm since Mac laid a hand on his belt buckle, and now, with the attention he was getting, he could no longer hold back. He warned Mac, “I’m gonna come.”
But Mac didn’t move away. He increased the bobbing of his head, tongue swirling and flicking. A finger slid into Flynn’s ass, and that sent him completely over the edge.
Mac gulped down the jets of come as fast as Flynn could shoot them. And the orgasm made not only his dick spasm, but his whole body. He shook, he jerked, he trembled, clinging tightly to Mac’s head, holding him there as his shots dribbled down, erupting with less and less force until there was only a dribble and then… nothing.
Mac moved away, wiping the semen and saliva off his chin and mouth with the back of his hand. He fell back on his ass and grinned up at Flynn. “I hope that was okay.”
“Okay? God, it was fantastic. Best ever.”
Mac stood, giving his half-erect dick a little tug. One side of Mac’s mouth rose up in a lazy grin. “Ah, I bet you say that to all th
e guys. Or girls.”
“No girls,” Flynn said, putting a hand on Mac’s shoulder. He pulled him close, bringing his lips toward Flynn’s own.
Mac jerked his head back a little. “You wanna kiss me?”
“Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?” It only just now occurred to Flynn that this would be their first kiss, after the first blow job. Wow. Gay men’s love stories were sometimes written a little differently, but the path toward the ultimate goal, Flynn thought, was the same as everyone else’s.
“I don’t know,” Mac said. “Some guys don’t like to kiss after they just shot a huge load in the other guy’s mouth.”
“You have such a delicate and romantic way of putting things, Mac.” Flynn smiled. “I’m not ‘some guys.’ I want to kiss you. And it would be a turn-on to taste my come in your mouth.” He pulled Mac close and kissed him, parting his lips with his tongue. Flynn could taste himself, along with a kind of sweet essence that was, simply, Mac. Was he surprised when he felt his dick jerking upward again? Not really.
When they parted, Flynn said, “You should let me take care of you now.”
Mac’s smile was a little sheepish. “Uh, you already did,” he said softly. And he reached down and swiped a palm across his belly. He held it up for Flynn to see. It was slick with come. “I got off long before you did. Just having you in my mouth, man…. It was all I needed.”
“I’m flattered.” Flynn grabbed Mac’s hand and took a big lick of his come. “Better than Molly Moon’s,” he said after swallowing. “Better than anything.”
“Should we go upstairs?”
“Can I take my pants off?”
“Maybe.”
They turned as one toward the staircase. Flynn hurriedly pulled his pants up.
Once upstairs, Flynn quickly got out of his clothes and put them on a side chair in a corner of the room. The moon’s light slanted in just so through the dormer window, casting a silvery glow. He stood naked and at ease as he watched Mac throw back the comforter and the sheets. He moved across the room to turn on a pedestal fan and smiled apologetically.
