I shifted to lie on top of him, our groins lining up with no barriers between us. It felt so fucking perfect. “Do you even know how sexy you are and how badly I need to kiss you?”
His eyelashes fluttered and his hands glided down the column of my spine. “Then kiss me already.”
My mouth feathered over Dean’s lips as I watched him. His reactions to me. His breath caught in his throat and he stared back with so much longing it made my cock stiffen painfully.
I licked into his mouth and deepened the kiss, my fingers clutching at his hair and holding him right against my mouth. Right where I needed him.
We kissed until our lips were bruised, Dean’s hands exploring my skin, rubbing over my thighs and ass until I was leaking across his stomach. His hands grabbed at my cheeks and split them apart, his fingers running along my crease as I gasped into his mouth.
“I’ve missed your cock,” Dean said, tugging at my thighs, urging me to straddle his chest. “Let me lick you.”
My knees landed on either side of his neck, my cock stabbing at his lips, dribbling come down his chin. He shoved two digits in his mouth, getting them nice and wet.
When his finger penetrated my hole, I groaned. His tongue darted out to lick around the crown before he suckled on my head. My fingers carded through his hair and clutched tight when he took more of me inside all that heat.
“Fuck my mouth,” he said around my girth. When he plunged a second finger inside me, I arched my neck and drove to the back of his throat. Saliva leaked out the side of his mouth and feeling him hum around me was almost too much to bear.
When his other hand stretched up to tweak my nipple, I almost came right then.
“Goddamn. Wait,” I ground out, dragging my cock from his mouth. “I need. I can’t…”
Dean gripped my thighs, his mouth swollen from sucking me. “Fuck me, please. I don’t want to wait anymore.”
Our eyes met and held. He shifted, turning over on his belly as he reached for the condoms he had placed on his bedside table. He lifted up on his knees, his ass in the air to stretch to the far side for the lube and I couldn’t wait any longer to have him.
I grabbed his cheeks, split them open, and dove straight in.
Dean gasped as my tongue licked at his hole. “Mmmmmm…”
He squirmed barely able to stay still as I continued to kiss and suck around the muscled rim, attempting to wiggle my tongue inside.
“Damn. Hold on.” Dean’s limbs stiffened, his neck bowed back, and he collapsed to the mattress groaning.
I slid behind him in bed, wrapping my arms around his chest, my cock skimming along his crease. I could feel all of his naked skin against me and I wasn’t sure if I would even last being inside him.
“Please,” Dean choked out. “Need you now.”
I tore apart the condom wrapper with my teeth and folded it down my length. Opening the lube, I slicked my cock and then two of my fingers to push inside him. He moaned and drove his ass against my hand.
Finally, I lifted his knee toward his stomach and pressed my length forward. I ground my teeth with restraint and stabbed at his hole, the head of my cock finally breaching him.
My breath whooshed from my lungs and my eyesight fuzzed as I attempted to harness the intense carnal pleasure that whirred through all of my nerve endings at once, catching them on fire.
“Oh fuck,” Dean mumbled into the pillow. “Give me a second.”
“Am I hurting you?” I asked, clearing the fog from my head, ready to pull out.
“Don’t you dare,” Dean said, his fingers biting into my thigh. “I just… you’re so thick… But I want you. Please.”
I took a deep breath and surged forward again. Fuck, so tight. It was hard not to pound him into the mattress except this position made that prospect difficult. But our bodies were pasted together, I was breathing into his neck, and I had never felt closer to him.
I rounded my hand over his hip to his cock, which was stiff and heavy against his stomach.
As my hand slicked over his length, I pumped my hips in shallow thrusts, clenching my jaw, as small licks of flames sparked up my spine.
“Oh God, that’s—” Dean was huffing, arching his back, his nipples were hard, and his fingers were trembling as he slid them over my hand.
“You feel incredible.” I bit and sucked on the skin between his shoulder and neck. “But I need to be facing you. I want to see your eyes when you break apart for me.”
Dean was so far gone he couldn’t even respond, only groaned and adjusted himself to his back after I pulled out my cock. As I hovered over him, I hiked his knees to his shoulders. His eyes latched onto mine, I situated his ankles around my neck and plunged back inside, stealing his breath along with mine.
“Uuuhhh.” The sensation of being inside him again from this position was like a cold punch to my chest. “Goddamn.”
Dean kept his gaze on me, his trembling hand reaching up to outline my lips. I sucked his finger into my mouth and traced it with my tongue. He closed his eyes and sighed.
When he opened his lids his irises were a poignant blue, like a cloudless sky, as they reached inside and dragged me to the heavens. “Need you. Need more.”
“Fuck.” I could hear our flesh slapping together as I slammed into Dean with a demanding pace. His fingers tightened in the covers, his sobs becoming hoarse. I forced his hips upward to change the angle and watching his ass stretch around my length only spurred me on.
I was so deep and striking that spongy place inside him that was driving him wild.
His eyes widened, his moans harsh and keening right before he sprayed his load all over his stomach. His ass constricted almost painfully tight around my cock and I was ricocheted into the atmosphere right along with him.
“Dean,” I murmured, collapsing on top of him and in that moment it was as if we had no hurdles between us, no distance. We were one, living and breathing in unison.
It was so seamless. Profound. Right.
34
Callum
Dean was still in my arms, in an actual bed, and it felt so damn good that I didn’t want to move.
I had stirred in the middle of the night and felt his hips squirm seductively against mine, so without another word, I clumsily slid on a condom, and stuffed my cock back inside him.
I urged Dean flat on his stomach and ground into him in slow rhythmic moves. Our breaths were harsh and our moans were in sync, as we came one after the other. I remained in that position, my cock buried deep in his ass, my forehead resting against his shoulder blades, simply enjoying the idea that I could stay connected to him for as long as I pleased.
By the time I pulled out and reached for a shirt to clean us both up, Dean was fast asleep again, so I just slipped into his warm bed and passed out.
“Want to go running with me?” Dean mumbled.
“Sure,” I said. “Just lay here for five more minutes?”
He threw his leg over mine, his face at my neck, as he settled back in the sheets.
Just as my breathing was beginning to even out again, he whispered, “Let’s go before the city wakes up.”
“Why?” I mumbled.
“It’s more peaceful that way.” His answer surprised me, allowing a sliver of hope to slip momentarily inside. I wondered if he missed the serenity of the preserve and would consider visiting again.
But then what? Long distance was rough especially if there wasn’t a common future goal. Dean had never said he’d want to move anywhere closer to me and it was selfish on my part, because I couldn’t leave my home. Not when Billie was there, when Grammy was getting up in age, when my daddy hoped to pass on the land to his children one day.
Ten minutes more and we slipped out the door into the dusk morning. Dean loaned me some baggy shorts and a T-shirt that pulled too tight across my shoulders. But they smelled like him and that brought me a quiet comfort.
Some of the corner lamps were still lit and added a charm to the conc
rete sidewalks and cobblestone streets that I hadn’t detected in the drone of the crowd. Right away I noticed the different sounds of the city. Engines revving from early risers. Store owners rolling up their security doors and dragging out heavy signs and displays. A couple of them waved to Dean and looked curiously at me.
By now the gossip would be abundant back home at Sunnyside Up Diner, but out here I suspected we were forgotten as soon as our sneakers rounded the corner. That kind of anonymity was appealing, if not unsettling in its disregard for human connections. It was a strange paradox that only scrambled my brain further.
We slowed to a walk on our way back, as I held my fingers against the stitch in my side, Dean’s sweat soaked T-shirt clinging more snugly to my skin.
At a shop around the corner from his place, we stopped for coffee. He placed Cassie’s order, adding three breakfast sandwiches, and I pictured this being their daily routine. They embraced the city in a way that we didn’t on the preserve.
We used the resources of our land, much like they relied on the local amenities to get their basic needs met in their neighborhood. In that regard, there was more of a sense of community than I had first anticipated.
We sat at the kitchen island eating our organic egg sandwiches and drinking our strong coffee. Cassie was bleary eyed and chuckled at us for getting up so early on a weekend.
“My roommate’s corrupted you,” she said with a gleam in her eye and I had to wonder if she heard us last night. “I thought you’d want to sleep in.”
Dean gave me a lingering kiss in front of Cassie before he strolled off to shower. I had a hard time meeting her eyes, but she seemed nonplussed, which I was grateful for.
“You glad to be back?” I mumbled into my recycled cup.
“It’s bittersweet,” Cassie said. “It’s nice to know you can make it on your own, but you still miss home.”
Though it wasn’t her intent, her words socked me in the gut. Would I ever be able to make it on my own? I knew the thought was ridiculous in many ways, because I’d helped run a large piece of land since I was a teen.
But I also lived with my relatives and only now came out of the closet. I used to dream about building a home someday. Not to get away from my family, but to have something to call my own.
Not an actual house, though there would be room for that on our property. Something more the size of a trailer. A couple of years back, daddy and I had erected the frame of a small place on the other side of the orchard, about eight hundred square feet. But I had abandoned the idea when we got busy.
“What are you going to do about Dermot?” I asked.
“We’ll continue to talk and visit each other,” she said, dreamily. “I’ve only got five months until I move back home.”
My gut tightened. They had a plan, something Dean and I skirted around, because there didn’t seem to be an easy resolution. In Cassie and Dermot’s case, they came from the same small town and knew each other from school. Cassie was happy to return to living and working with her family. There was little to decide.
Dean was a city boy and I was a country boy. Though he hinted at times of things he loved about a quieter life, it was nearly delusional to imagine him making that kind of jump.
“What happens to this apartment?” I asked, looking around at the mish-mash of shared furniture.
“Dean and I will have to figure that out,” she said. “If he stays at his job, he’ll have to find a roommate, unless the pay is good.”
I imagined some hot guy responding to his ad in the newspaper, moving in with him, and I felt bile crawl up my throat.
“Can you see yourself living here?” Cassie asked in a tentative voice, as if I’d bite her head off.
“No,” I said. “It feels impossible. But I…”
“You’re in love with him.”
I inhaled a sharp breath. It had probably been written all over my face and I wondered now if Dean saw it too, what he did to me. How he made me feel so completely twisted inside out.
“Hell, is it that obvious?” I asked as my chest felt impossibly crowded. “I wish I weren’t. I don’t like this ache, this longing I have. It’s painful.”
“He’s going through the same thing,” she said. “Maybe you should tell him how you feel.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to make it worse. Or leave him feeling guilty. He needs to make his own decisions.”
I drove to the university bookstore with Dean in his used Mazda sedan, the same one he’d brought down to the preserve. It felt cramped in his small interior not only because I was tall but probably because I was used to the truck or van. We purchased his books together for his final class, and though Dean was only three years younger, I felt old in this campus setting.
Dean said as much about himself when we got back in the car to drive someplace for a late lunch. “I know I’ll probably always be in the academia setting, given my degree, but it’ll be nice to not be a student anymore.”
“I don’t think you could pay me to return to school,” I said as I reached for his hand and settled into the seat. I looked out the window at the passing landscape and asked the question I was scared to admit I needed to know. “Do you like this city?”
He looked from my eyes down to my mouth, where my bottom lip was enclosed between my teeth. “You do that when you’re anxious.”
“Do what?” I said, licking at my tender mouth.
He motioned with his hand. “You bite your lip when something’s bothering you.”
I fumbled for a response, so taken with the fact that Dean could read me so well in such a short period of time.
“Yeah? Well you get all brainy on me,” I said, twirling my finger. “You spout off some facts about this, that, and the other. At the beginning I thought you were just some know it all. But then I realized you were only nervous.”
“Because you like to challenge me,” he said with a smirk. “And right now you’re searching for an answer to make sense of what it is that we’re doing. And I’m not sure I have one. Not yet.”
I dropped his hand, but he grabbed for it again and held it firmly in his own. “And now you’re being stubborn.”
“I’m not being—”
“You’re disappointed,” he said, reading me perfectly. “The reason I don’t have an answer is because it depends on where a job will lead me.”
“I only asked if you liked this city,” I threw out. “I wasn’t trying to get you to admit to anything else.”
“Okay,” he said, dismissing my argument, as if he didn’t believe a lick of what I was saying. “I enjoy city life, sure. This one had a lot to offer. But right now my mind is on graduating and finding a decent job. You’re lucky in that regard. You know what you want to do and you have a huge support system.”
“Fair enough,” I said, regretting that I even asked the question. I didn’t want us to fight when I was only here for a couple of days. I had forgotten that his family wasn’t as involved and encouraging as he would’ve liked them to be and that bummed me out.
He was only trying to make something of himself. But damn it, I wanted to be his rock, his support, no matter how ridiculous that sounded at this stage of the game.
Just then my phone beeped with a text from Billie.
Tell Dean I checked on his sugar canes and all looks good. But he better come back for a visit to see for himself.
I relayed the message to Dean, who smiled. “Tell him I miss him and that I’ll plan a trip after I graduate in a couple of months.”
My heart clanked against my ribcage. I couldn’t help feeling optimistic that there was a chance of seeing him again.
And the way he tenderly held my hand through our intimate lunch in a booth at some swanky diner, I got the feeling that maybe he felt the exact same way.
35
Callum
Cassie had a Rascal Flatts concert she was attending with a group of campus classmates at the Greensboro Coliseum, which was one of the reasons she had d
riven back from the preserve early.
She had kissed each of our cheeks, reminding us she’d be home late because of the distance, but that she’d check in with us later.
I had agreed to meet Dean’s friends at a gay bar tonight and I’d admit I was sort of nervous. Not because of the club. I had been to a few out of the way places over the years with Jason and sometimes by myself. But if his friend Tate was any indication, the men in these places were worldlier and definitely livelier.
But I’d been wrong upon entering The Nickel, which I soon realized was a nickname for an establishment called the Five Cent that more resembled a dive bar. It was dim and unobtrusive, much like you’d see at any corner pub in any city, upon first glance.
The tables were full and there was music playing in the background. Men were talking, laughing, eating, and some were even dancing and making out.
When we walked in all eyes seemed to zero in on me, like the bullseye in the center of a dartboard. I tensed and almost released Dean’s hand, but he interlaced our fingers making sure to hold on tight.
“It’s all good,” Dean said. “Just…you know, new kid on the block.”
My eyes widened and darted to his as his lips swung close to my ear.
“Meaning—dude, you are so hot, everyone will want to hook up with you,” he said in a low murmur.
“That’s too bad,” I said, against his neck. “Because I only want to be with you.”
His gaze blazed with affection. “You realize I’m the envy of this place, right?”
“I don’t get it.” I shrugged. “I’m just a hick from out of town.”
“Who just happens to be drop dead gorgeous,” Dean said, motioning with his hands. “And has a cocky swagger.”
“I do not,” I scoffed, shoving my hands in my pockets, as some very attractive man with dark hair and skin made eyes at me.
“Do too,” he said, arching his eyebrow. “Think of when we first met. All that macho bravado. So hot.”
The Deepest Blue (Roadmap to Your Heart #2) Page 18
