“I’m sorry,” Luke said.
Alex held up his phone. He was breathing too hard and hated himself for letting this guy get that level of a reaction out of him. “Who calls me and what they want from me is none of your goddamned business. Who I take home and fuck, also none of your business.”
“I know. I know. I’m sorry,” Luke repeated, then again, softer.
The two beers Alex had during dinner had given him a warmth close to a buzz, but he was far from drunk. He had no excuses for his tone or his words. He was an asshole, simply that. “You’re nobody to me.”
Luke didn’t argue the point. He took two steps back. In the flash of light from the streetlamp, his mouth had gone thin and pinched. His fists clenched at his sides.
“I picked you up in a fucking country bar,” Alex continued.
In his hand, his phone rang again. Jamie, again. He wanted to turn and throw the phone into the river as hard as he could. Watch it sink, still ringing.
He didn’t realize he’d walked to the edge of the concrete wall overlooking the water, phone raised, until Luke appeared beside him. He grabbed Alex’s wrist, but gently, and lowered it. With his other hand, he took the phone from Alex and tucked it into Alex’s front jeans pocket.
They stood close enough for Alex to smell the beer on Luke’s breath and the undertone of his cologne. Something frat boys would wear, Alex thought, shaking with anger. Shaking with something, anyway.
When Luke put his arms around him, Alex didn’t fight the embrace. He pushed his face against the side of Luke’s neck to breathe in the warm, male scent of him. He closed his eyes. Not crying, nothing as stupid as that.
“You don’t even know me,” Alex said.
Luke’s hand came up to thread through Alex’s hair, resting on the back of his neck. “That’s okay.”
“I’m not asking you to come home with me tonight,” Alex said.
Luke just squeezed the back of Alex’s neck and stepped back with a smile. “That’s okay, too.”
Chapter 7
The leads Alex had on the freelance consulting stuff had panned out in a big way. He wanted to think it had everything to do with his resumé and not the tight pants he’d worn to the meeting or the flirting he’d done with the head of HR, who he knew for a fact was unhappily fucking the guy who’d interviewed him. He knew that because Patrick, the lawyer he’d met in Japan before everything had gone to shit, had kept him up on the gossip chain. In the end, did it matter? Not when it got Alex some work. He would owe Patrick, though, and he didn’t like owing anyone anything.
He hadn’t spoken to Luke since the Tuesday they’d spent at the Mütter Museum and the argument they’d had after. They’d shared a cab, dropping Alex at his hotel and taking Luke on home to wherever he lived. They hadn’t kissed goodbye, but that might have been because Alex was still being pissy or because Luke didn’t want the cab driver to see him kissing a dude. It was hard to say, and Alex was irritated with himself for even thinking about the reasons why.
The messages from Jamie had started off lighthearted but gotten darker. He’d been drinking. Alec could hear it in the growing slur of his words and the pleading tone in his best friend’s voice.
“You don’t have to come home,” Jamie’s last message had said. “Just tell me where you are. I’ll come there.”
Alex had not yet returned his friend’s call. He wasn’t sure what he could possibly say. He couldn’t talk to Jamie the way they’d always done in the past. That had been in what Alex would now always think of as before.
Before Anne.
Now he was in the after, and only time was going to make any of it better. Maybe not even that. Every day he woke up thinking he might stop thinking about her, might stop aching, that she would slip from his mind as easily as the turning of a page in a book he wanted to finish.
Anne was not a page in a book. She was the entire fucking novel, a story without a happy ending, and not even Alex was dumb enough to reach out to her husband and try to pretend that none of it had happened.
Jamie never mentioned Anne in the phone calls. That was unexpected. Jamie typically was a rug sweeper. That he was saying nothing meant he knew exactly how much had happened and what it all had meant. He never even spoke her name, not even in passing. Jamie knew it all.
Alex had checked out of the hotel to spend a few days traveling to Pittsburgh for some consulting work, then to follow up on the offer for a multi-month gig not so far from Philly in good old Chocolatetown, USA. Hershey. The money was nice, and the work would keep him busy. Hershey was a small town in the center of Pennsylvania, a couple hours from Philadelphia, a couple from Baltimore, DC, just a few longer to New York City. Even if he only spent a short time there, it would be enough, he thought. Enough to get him back on his feet. Enough to get him on track. To settle him. So far, though, he hadn’t taken it. He did, however, go back to Philadelphia.
“Welcome back, Mr. Kennedy.” The front desk clerk’s broad grin held no hint of flirtation, something Alex appreciated. “Your luggage was taken up to your room. You’re on the sixth floor this time.”
“Great. Thanks.” Alex took the fresh keys and made his way to the sixth floor.
The new room was identical to the old room, except reversed. He laughed at that, thinking that if he were to get stoned or shithammered drunk that he would end up pissing in the trash can at the side of the bed instead of the toilet. Getting stoned or shithammered suddenly sounded like the best idea he’d had in the past week.
Do a little drinking. A little smoking. Maybe some pills. Get drunk, get high, get laid. A perfect Friday night, one guaranteed to erase any guilt he felt about not answering Jamie’s messages.
In the shower, Alex bent his head beneath the hot spray of water and closed his eyes. He’d taken a couple shots from his almost empty bottle of Jameson before coming in, and his head was pleasantly buzzing. His hands moved over his body, assessing it. A little thicker here, in the places he pinched. Muscled unexpectedly here, from walking so much all around the city. His face, scruffy with the bristle of beard he’d been letting grow in, although he almost always preferred to be clean-shaven. His hair, too, had grown overlong, but he felt no urge to cut it.
Beneath the water, he got on his hands and knees. Eyes closed. He wanted to cry, but couldn’t find the tears. He didn’t deserve them, he thought. He didn’t deserve the release of weeping. He opened his mouth to let out a scream, but nothing came out except a hiss of air.
He was never going to see her again.
He had walked away from her because it was the right thing to do. He had broken her; he had slaughtered himself. It was the right thing to do. The right and best thing. The most awful thing.
He loved her, and he would never be with her, and he had chosen that when there had been the chance for something else. A moment in time when if only he’d had the courage to be happy, everything might have changed.
Everything changes, Alex thought.
If he could turn back the time, if she could forgive him, he thought, then maybe he could learn to…what? What could he learn? To feel? To trust? To fucking love, the way other people did? He would never be good for anyone but himself, and he couldn’t even be counted on to be that.
The whiskey had hit him harder than he’d thought it would. An empty stomach. Melancholy. Emotions surged over him, and he gave up to it a little because of the hot shower and his sudden and utterly brutal loneliness.
He loved her, Anne Kinney. His best friend Jamie’s wife. Jamie had invited him into their marriage, but Alex had been the one to take advantage. To step too far. He’d been selfish and greedy in his love. It had never been meant to become so much, but oh, God, it had, and now he tried so hard to weep and found nothing but an empty and barren desert where his tears ought to have been.
Alex got to his feet. He tipped his head back to let the hot water fill his mouth. To wash over his eyes, still closed. His hands moved over his body. Between his legs, to h
is soft cock. It took a few strokes to get it to respond.
He deliberately did not think of Anne.
He could not let himself imagine her. The flavor of her kisses. The scent of her. The sounds she made when she came. He could not let himself remember how it had felt when she put her arms around him, how the rest of the world had faded away and become something he thought he might be able to bear, if only he could face it along with her.
Now, he thought of Luke. That hard body. The bristle brush cut of blond hair. His smile, sometimes shy or innocent or self-effacing. The sound of his voice when he came.
In his fist, Alex’s cock rose. Thick and hard and eager to seek pleasure. He groaned into the spray of water, thinking about how it had felt to slide into Luke’s tight but welcoming asshole. How the other man’s body had gripped him. How Luke had moaned and moved so eagerly.
He thought, too, of the suction of Luke’s lips and tongue on his cock. How good it had been to give up to those sensations. That pleasure. How it had wiped away everything but desire.
Alex muttered out a groan and came in thick spurts, opening his eyes to watch as the white come jetted out into the shower spray and was washed away into the drain. His cock pulsed and throbbed in his fist. His thighs strained with the effort. The hand he’d put up on the shower wall curled into a fist.
He closed his eyes again, breathing hard and grateful for the hotel shower’s unlimited hot water. The orgasm hadn’t drained him. It had put him in a better mood, for sure. It had given him some energy.
Alex was ready…for something.
He pulled on a pair of slim fitting jeans. No briefs. A dark blue v-necked t-shirt, also fitted. Fingers dragging through his hair, he left it tousled and kept the faint shadow of his beard. He didn’t bother looking at his reflection. He knew too well what his face looked like, and since it almost never let him down, he wasn’t going to worry about it now.
He’d rarely had a problem going out dancing and drinking on his own. He might start out the evening alone, but he never ended up that way…unless he wanted to. Dressed and ready to go with a slow sipping of the last of his Jameson warming his belly, Alex mapped the best way to get to the club. A cab looked like the best bet, so he called for one. He’d have enough time to finish his drink.
He had time to make a phone call.
But when his fingers hovered over the screen to pull up Jamie’s number, he still couldn’t bring himself to do it. The buzz and hum of the liquor in his blood wasn’t strong enough for him to have lost control, not quite enough to make him stupid.
He texted Luke, instead. The address of the club. A sleekly styled selfie, specifically out of focus but sexy as fuck. A command, not a request.
Meet me.
Chapter 8
Luke had not answered the text by the time Alex got to the club. That didn’t matter, Alex told himself. If Luke didn’t show, someone else would. Hell, maybe more than one.
He found a spot at the bar and ordered a whiskey on the rocks, but changed his mind. “No. Wait. I want something fancy.”
“Bushmill’s? We have twenty-five year, the Millennium. That’s pretty fucking fancy,” the bartender said. “Especially for this place.”
“No, I mean one of those drinks with a fancy name and a lot of ingredients. Bonus if you have to put it in a specialty glass.”
And that, friends, was how Alex Kennedy ended up drinking something called The Rimmer, which came in a plastic cup shaped like a pair of butt cheeks, the anus of which allowed the use of the colored bendy straw. It met all the criteria he’d demanded. It also tasted like…well, he thought as he drank with a grimace, like shit.
From his vantage point at the bar’s corner, he could see both the decent-sized dance floor and also the front doors. Every time a blond head appeared he, tensed. This was stupid. He was being an asshole. He didn’t even want to see Luke again. Why would he?
Alex drained his drink and tossed the plastic cup into the can at the side of the bar. He wasn’t going to be ordering another one of those, that was for sure. He pulled his phone from his front pocket, ignoring the pair of guys who’d been trying to get his attention for the past fifteen minutes by gyrating in front of him.
On my way
Relief. That was the weird feeling trickling through him. First relief, then elation. Alex shoved his phone back into his pocket and moved toward the front of the club. He had to jiggity jog around a few hightop tables, but then, there he was.
Luke was looking intense, but his face lit up at the sight of Alex. They hugged, hard but brief. Luke clapped Alex on the back. No kiss.
“You made it,” Alex said.
Luke nodded, looking around. “This is a gay bar.”
“Newsflash,” Alex said. “We’re both at least sort of gay.”
“Yeah.” Luke laughed, looking fucking adorable and shy, and if the club hadn’t been so dark, there’d have been a blush clear on his cheeks.
“Dance with me.”
Luke grinned. “Line dance?”
“I don’t think they do that here,” Alex said, “but maybe we’ll set a trend.”
It had been forever since Alex had been dancing like this, or at least that’s how it felt. Light, free, unburdened — it had been much longer since he’d even drifted close to those feelings, but here he was in the center of a crush of hot guys in various stages of inebriation, all of them dancing and flirting and kissing and groping, and Alex pulled Luke close to him so they could dance together.
“You look hot tonight,” Luke shouted over the pulsing bass beat.
Alex grinned and put his hands own Luke’s hips to bring him in closer. “I didn’t think you’d notice.”
“Everyone notices.”
Alex moved in close. “I don’t care about everyone else.”
They kissed, bruisingly hard. Luke put a hand on the back of Alex’s neck, holding him close. His other one went to the small of Alex’s back. They danced and kissed and ground their bodies together the way everyone was doing on the dance floor.
A tall black man, shirtless, glitter in his shorn-to-the-scalp hair, danced up behind Luke and began bumping his ass. He made eye contact with Alex in that dance club etiquette of making sure it was cool if you were going to grind up on someone else’s partner. Alex watched Luke’s face turn from giddy joy to concern as he half-turned to see who exactly was grinding him from behind.
“Just dance,” Alex said. He fisted his hands in the front of Luke’s shirt, keeping him facing forward. He watched Luke’s gaze go a little hazy with arousal. “Dance, man.”
They danced.
They all danced, the entire room, bumping, grinding, swaying, jumping. Hands in the air. Raising the roof. The DJ played every single dance floor anthem that had been popular in the past ten years.
Sweating, light-headed and head pounding, Alex kissed Luke again. The crowd turned them. Luke was kissing the guy who’d been dancing behind him. Alex watched them, both so beautiful, and waited to feel…jealous? He couldn’t be. Everything here tonight was love, love, love…no, it was lust, lust, lust, and he was fine with that. Love was something he never wanted to feel again. Love was a thing that broke you, and he was done with breaking.
“Alex? You okay?” Luke had turned back to him, his expression still dazed.
He wasn’t okay. Alex wasn’t sure he was ever going to be okay again. Now was not the time; here was not the place. In the here and now, he was going to dance and kiss and grind and grope and drink, and if there was someone here who’d hook him up with something to snort or swallow, he’d do that, too.
Alex put his hands on Luke’s shoulders and turned him around to face the guy who’d been kissing him. He pushed them together. A beneficent prince, urging his subjects to take care of themselves.
The night wore on and became a blur. Sweating, Alex found a spot by the wall where he could lean. His phone made its way into his hand. He wasn’t going to try and make a call, but he pulled up his text wi
ndow. The last text had not been from Luke, but from Jamie.
Please talk to me
Almost two in the morning. Last call had been announced. It was time to find someone to take him home. Alex’s thumbs moved over the screen. He didn’t know what to say except, I’m sorry.
Immediately, three small bouncing dots on the screen showed that Jamie was replying, but Alex swiped away the message screen and pushed his phone into his pocket. It buzzed against his thigh. He ignored it.
Luke found him. He was sweaty, his shirt opened nearly to his navel. He was grinning wildly, but looked tired, the way Alex felt.
“Let’s get out of here,” Alex said.
Chapter 9
“Shhh. You have to be quiet. Don’t wake up the neighbors, they’re nosy.” Luke hiss-whispered this, but his voice trailed off into laughter as he fumbled with the lock on the basement door.
Alex was not sober, but most of the night’s indulgence had started to wear off. All the dancing and sweating. He hadn’t so much as glanced at his phone since he and Luke had left the club. He didn’t want to see an accusatory messages waiting for him, ones he would find himself unable to answer, or worse, compelled to reply to.
“Shhh,” Luke repeated. The door swung open into the darkness. He gestured. “C’mon.”
Alex followed. Luke hit the wall switch, revealing an apartment of sorts with dated décor. Brown plaid furniture with wooden arms, matching wood paneling, a bar at one end with leather stools that definitely had been new probably before Luke had even been born. A small kitchenette featured a fridge, stove and sink, and through two open doors Alex glimpsed a bedroom and a bathroom.
“My place,” Luke said.
Alex nodded. “Nice.”
“You want some water?”