“Jesus Christ, where the fuck have you been all my life?” Carson gasped when the kiss finally ended.
“Working?” Zach answered with a shrug.
“Jerk,” Carson laughed, slapping playfully at Zach’s shoulder, followed quickly by a groan as Zach pulled out and disposed of the condom.
“You okay?” he asked, settling on the bed, propped up against the pillows with a bottle of water. Carson shifted to his side and looked up at him adoringly.
“Are you kidding me? I’m not going to be able to walk right for two days. That was amazing.”
Zach laughed softly and threaded his fingers through Carson’s hair. In another life, I could have fallen for him, he thought. But not now. I’m too old for him. Not to mention the crazy hours I work. Carson’s hand tentatively hovered over his chest. Interesting. All that bravado and now... He squeezed his hand gently in Carson’s hair, encouraging, and Carson’s hand settled between his pecs, absentmindedly toying with the hair there.
“I haven’t done this in a long time,” Carson admitted in a soft voice. “Been a while since I had a boyfriend, and even longer since I had a one-night stand. Even though I was looking for one tonight.”
“Well, you were celebrating,” Zach reminded him.
“Mmm, and quite the celebration it is.” Carson grinned as he straddled Zach’s lap and leaned in for a kiss.
Zach groaned.
“Sweetheart, I’m forty, not twenty. It’s going to take me more than five minutes to recover.”
“Are you kidding? In your shape? I’m sure I can help with that.”
As it turned out, Carson was able to do just that, and an hour later, he collapsed, languid and smiling, against Zach’s chest.
Chapter Three
Carson was wrong. It was more like four days before moving in certain ways no longer sent reminders of his night with Zach shooting through his body. Carson had woken up cramped and cold, still lying on top of Zach, in the middle of the night. He’d managed to slip from the bed without waking him, but he’d been unable to resist the urge to press one last kiss to those full lips before he left.
“Thanks, daddy,” he’d whispered, grinning like a fool.
“See ya around, kid,” Zach had mumbled back.
The same idiot grin was on his face now, almost three weeks later, and he wanted to smack himself for it.
He was literally never going to see the man again. He’d known that going in, yet here he was mooning over a fling.
“Moron,” he chided himself as he taped up the last of the boxes. The moving company would be there early in the morning, and then he and Ophelia would begin the day-long drive to the city. He had no interest in arriving before his stuff and sitting around an empty apartment.
They’d thrown him a going away party at the Hot Box, which had been nice. He was going to miss his friends. His foster parents were happy that he’d be living closer to them again, since they were the only family he really had. They didn’t quite understand his chosen field and thought he could do “that computer stuff” from anywhere, which, while technically true, he couldn’t make the kind of money he wanted while living in rural Pennsylvania with them.
He refused to ever worry again about where his next meal would come from, or if he’d be able to pay the rent.
So first he’d gone to Boston, then Norfolk, and then Detroit. He was confident that this new job would be it for him. ZIM Tech was owned by the best in the business. The application and interview process had been long and rigorous, but they paid the best and he’d have unlimited opportunities after this with them on his resume, if he moved on.
Ophelia came over and forced her way into his lap.
“I know, sweetie. You don’t like moving. But you’re almost as much of a pro at it as I am by now, huh, little girl?” She purred and rubbed against him as he petted her and soothed her. “You’ll see, baby. This’ll be it. Promise.”
****
Late the next night, with the sounds of New York City floating in through the open windows, Carson flopped onto the bed and looked around his room. His room. The bedroom alone was half the size of the studio apartment he’d had. The living room was almost the same size as his old place. Even though he still had a few boxes of odds and ends to unpack and the rest of his clothes, the place was going to be empty. He’d gotten used to having only a handful of things. Moving around often as a young teen had taught him the expendability of most material possessions. Well, I’m not buying anything until I have my own place, not company housing. I’ll get used to it.
****
Two days later, he arrived at work.
“So, Vladislav, this will be your station.” Meg, his new supervisor, swept an arm into the room.
“Please, just call me Carson,” he said absently, as he looked around. He hadn’t seen a single cubicle wall in the entire building. There were rooms, with dividers, but they all appeared to be made of glass. The entire place was open and airy and had a generally relaxed feeling to the staff. Clusters of couches and armchairs and tables were located at intervals around the floor, helping to divide the space into work areas. There was a full-service coffee shop on one floor, a deli/cafeteria on another, and a small convenience store on a third. All of those were open twenty-four hours a day, as was access to the work floors (after passing a security checkpoint), since the company did business worldwide. Down the block was an all-hours gym that they had access to if they wanted. “Just show your work ID at the desk!” Meg had chirped happily.
“I don’t think I’m in Kansas anymore.”
Meg laughed and brought him to the empty desk near the far end of the room. A large rubber duck holding a sign that read “Welcome Aboard!” and a bow on its head sat on top of the desk. Carson laughed and opened his bag, pulling out a little rubber duck in a vampire costume.
“Hey, with a name like mine, you have to have a sense of humor,” he grinned.
“Clint! Pay up!” the man at the desk next to them yelled.
Several heads turned in their direction. “What? Aww, ducky, no!” the one presumably named Clint moaned as he picked up a duck from the collection on his desk and threw it across the room with perfect aim.
“Yes!” the man next to him exclaimed as he snatched the duck from the air. “Thanks, man. I’ve been trying to get this back for months,” he said to Carson, brandishing the little duck in a Captain America costume like a trophy. “We had a bet going about you,” he continued, using the coveted duck to point toward the one in Carson’s hand. “And on how cool you would or wouldn’t be with your name and your duck. Name’s Sam, by the way, if you need anything.” He placed his prize between the screen and his keyboard, patting its head before he resumed his work.
Carson set his bag on the desk with a grin. He was going to like this job.
****
It took a month for Carson to master the programming system that ZIM Tech used—a fact that both infuriated him for how long it took while at the same time gave him pride as being one of the fastest to do so. Zachary McAllister had taken all the best parts of different interfaces and somehow made them all work together. Seeing up front and in person just how amazing it was, Carson wasn’t entirely sure that the man hadn’t sold his soul to the devil to make it happen.
The general use internet security programs they had were one thing, but the ones customized for businesses were something else, entirely on another level. Carson genuinely wondered if it would be easier to hack into the Pentagon than it was to hack this system. It constantly changed, shifted, and adapted at the blink of an eye with an artificial intelligence so advanced he couldn’t figure out how the government hadn’t stolen it for themselves.
Of course, they were probably were a top-secret client that nobody on staff knew about except McAllister. Zach… Carson found himself staring through the glass wall and out in the hallway as he swore he knew those shoulders walking away—but of course it couldn’t be him, and he wrote it off to mental asso
ciation because he’d been thinking about the owner, and the first name was the same. It was merely coincidence. New York was a city with nearly ten million people in it. Even if the man he’d fucked was in the city, the odds of them ever running into each other were astronomical. And it wasn’t like Zach was the only person on the planet who could have that build.
He told himself the same thing when he went for a stroll through Central Park and thought he saw Zach’s face in the crowd. I’m tired. I’ve been working a zillion hours learning the system. My brain is fried, and I’m lonely. Of course I’m thinking of him, so it’s only natural to think I saw him, too.
And again, two weeks later, at the local grocery store, just a glimpse, and a deep voice like warm maple syrup, but never anything concrete, always easily explained away.
Work was going well, at least, which made up for all the lack of sleep. His skills didn’t go unnoticed—after all, that’s why he’d been hired—and he found himself co-heading a project to secure the systems of an international company after only a few months on the job. Which was how, at two in the morning, he found himself in a mostly-empty office staring at his screen, cursing.
“Did you use your duck?” Sam asked, voice muffled, from where he was faceplanted on a nearby couch, supposedly napping.
“Fuck these goddamn ducks. They’re not doing their jobs. Fuck Dracula,” he said, throwing his duck at Sam. “And fuck Batman, and this stupid asshole,.” He sent Matt’s Batman duck that he’d borrowed sailing across the room, followed by his large welcome aboard duck. “And fuck Captain America, too!” All the ducks found their marks, landing somewhere on Sam’s prone body.
“You’re not supposed to fuck them, man. You talk to them.”
“I know that! You know what, fuck this shit. I can’t stare at this anymore. I can’t talk it through with the loser squad anymore. I’m—”
“Aw, hey man, Cap isn’t a loser!” Sam interrupted.
“Well he sucks a fat one tonight! I’m going to the gym. I need to punch some things.”
Sam lifted a hand and waved a farewell as Carson stormed past him. He grabbed his gym bag from the closet and took the stairs because he didn’t think he could stand still long enough to get down seven floors.
The night clerk at the gym knew him on sight by now, and Carson breezed into the locker room to change. He stretched a bit, and then started in on the heavy bag. His last foster dad had liked boxing, and they’d spent many weekends together in the gym throughout high school. After half an hour, he moved to the weights. It was in the middle of his third set of leg presses, while he was zoned out, that he heard him.
“Of all the twenty-four hour gyms in all the world, you had to waltz into mine.”
Carson felt heat suffuse his limbs, above and beyond what he felt from the physical exertion. Awareness tingled through him, raising goosebumps on his arm despite the sweat dripping off him. He let the weights down slow and carefully dropped his legs before he turned his head in the direction the voice had come from.
Zach.
He was real, not a figment of his imagination, not a ghost of a memory.
Carson’s mouth was suddenly drier than Death Valley.
“What, you couldn’t find a pool hall to hustle?” he asked, one eyebrow raised, pleased that his voice sounded at least mostly normal.
Zach snorted, the smile on his face and in his eyes warm, as if he was pleased to see Carson. Which was ridiculous, really. Because Carson was absolutely not acknowledging the flutter in his stomach right now.
“And besides, I’ve been coming here about two months now and haven’t seen you yet. So how exactly is it yours? Or wait—do you really work in gym equipment? Do you own this place? Because I was just joking about that.”
“Or something,” he replied, and wasn’t that what he’d said the last time, too? Fuck, was he involved with a drug dealer? Why was he so cagey about his work? Not that Carson had disclosed any of his own personal information, but he wasn’t evasive with his answers like that whenever Zach asked.
“Whatever. Keep your secrets, then.” He dropped to the floor—a strategic move, he wasn’t too ashamed to admit—and began doing crunches.
“How’s the new job going?” Zach asked instead. He dropped to the floor at Carson’s feet and straddled his legs, large, soft hands holding Carson’s ankles.
“Going great,” Carson huffed as his chest hit his knees. “Love my coworkers. Stuck on a problem right now though with a program not running right, so I’m here punching bags instead of my computer screen. Even the damn ducks aren’t helping.”
“Ducks? You have office pets? And they’re ducks?”
Carson laughed.
“No. More like a mascot. Rubber ducks. When you can’t get a particular piece or section of coding to work right, you try talking it out. Aloud. Somehow, somewhere, someone started talking to rubber ducks, and it became a thing. Because when you are trying to explain what the code is doing, or what it’s supposed to do, you usually see your mistake.”
“Gotcha. I remember reading something about that somewhere online one time, I think.”
“It’s silly, but it works. Usually. I’ll figure it out, I always do. I’m just tired. Been working weird hours trying to get this done.”
“So you work with computers then?”
Carson paused in his crunches, wrapping his arms around his legs and holding himself up.
“Or something,” he smirked. He’d signed his damn life away with confidentiality paperwork and an intensive background check. He couldn’t tell anyone what he actually did.
“Smartass,” Zach grinned.
“So what brings you here, anyway? Another business trip?”
“Or something.”
Carson laughed. “You’re such a jerk.”
He licked his lips and noticed how Zach’s gaze focused on his mouth. He pulled his bottom lip between his teeth and worried it, and heard the sharp inhale Zach made when he did.
“You know, I keep thinking about you,” Carson admitted softly.
Zach’s hand cupped his cheek, thumb stroking over the week’s worth of stubble there.
“I like this,” he said.
Carson shrugged. “Been too preoccupied with work to think about it.”
Zach pulled Carson forward and kissed him roughly.
“And I’ve been too preoccupied with you,” he growled.
Carson gasped.
“What the fuck is it with you, kid? Why can’t I get you out of my head?”
“I told you. Ain’t nobody like me, daddy.”
Zach groaned and pressed their foreheads together.
“Fuck me,” he whispered.
“Gladly,” Carson immediately replied.
“Goddamn it, get your ass in the showers.” Zach pulled away, freeing Carson’s feet, and dragged them both to standing.
Carson wrapped his arms around Zach’s neck and kissed him deeply, plastering his body into Zach’s, and felt the hard length of his erection pressing against him.
“Now,” Zach growled, breaking the kiss. “Before I fuck you right here.”
A whine escaped Carson at the idea of someone wanting him that much.
“Hmm, you’d like that, huh?” Zach’s hand gripped his ass painfully. “Go.” He shoved himself away and moved to pick up the weights Carson had been using. Carson finally noticed the gym bag that Zach had dropped near the weight bench and registered the fact that Zach was wearing jeans and a t-shirt that did nothing to mask the muscles underneath. His mouth watered, and he swallowed hard before hurrying to the showers.
Normally Carson showered at home, since everything was close enough together. This was a gym he’d never have been able to afford on his own, and it showed in every detail, even the showers. Each shower was its own enclosed room, stocked with little mini shampoos and body washes, with an actual door and not just a curtain, and a full dressing area separate from the shower itself with towels that didn’t feel like sand
paper.
He was in the middle of the world’s fastest shower, rinsing the soap from his chest, when a hand appeared, slapping a condom packet onto the shelf in front of him. The breath left his lungs in a rush.
“I decided I’m not waiting. My place is too far away.” Teeth bit into the top of his shoulder, and Carson moaned.
“But, what if, someone might—”
“Nothing a little cash and an out of order sign can’t help with.”
“Jesus, Zach, we can—ungh!” His words cut off in a strangled cry as Zach’s hands spread his cheeks wide and his tongue dragged over Carson’s hole. “Fuck!” he hissed, bracing himself against the wall.
Zach took a break from torturing him long enough to reply.
“That’s the plan here, sweetheart.”
Carson’s thighs trembled.
“Zach, I can’t, fuck, my legs are already, God how do you find that so fast, from the weights, I can’t—” Carson couldn’t think straight, let alone get a coherent sentence out, with the combination of Zach’s tongue and fingers inside him. His legs were jelly from the presses. He’d done more weight than usual, and he couldn’t hold himself up for this. But Zach seemed to understand, as more and more of Carson’s weight fell onto him. Those large hands circled his waist and held him firmly as Zach rose behind him.
“You need help, sweetheart?” he asked sweetly, nibbling at Carson’s neck. Carson let himself fall against the broad chest as he nodded, unable to speak thanks to the hand tugging on his cock.
“Stand up,” Zach breathed into his ear, taking his hands away from Carson’s body. Carson did as he was told, and Zach spun him around so they were facing each other. His arm snaked past Carson’s head to retrieve the condom he’d brought in, and he held it out between them.
Billion Dollar Love: Manlove Edition Page 9
