Page 4 of Bend
4
Eli
Iteetered on the edge of orgasm, endorphins and pleasure surging through me, tingling all over my body. One last stroke, one thrust of my hips and… I bit my lip as I toppled over into it, the warm tide of pleasure churning through me as my dick pulsed and unleashed hot over my hand.
I was surrounded by hot men and women, all of us packed on a train for hours a day for three weeks and counting. And most of them were untouchable to me for one reason or another. Not that I would’ve anyway; I didn’t like to mix business and pleasure. But this train didn’t stop for Grindr hookups when I was horny, either.
A knock at the door interrupted the pleasurable course of aftershocks contracting my muscles, and I huffed out a sigh as I eased off the bed, grabbing for the first thing I could find to mop myself with, which happened to be a sock. Yanking up my pants, I stood, already frowning and ready to give Derrick hell for interrupting the very delicious and highly improbable fantasy I’d been entertaining involving Mars, a tie, and some duct tape. The duct tape was for his mouth, obviously.
I ran a hand through my hair, trying to straighten it, and caught the flush painted over my cheeks in the mirror. I looked like a guy who’d just gotten off, or else had gotten into a solo wrestling match with his pillow. Not that Derrick would care. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before. We spent a lot of time traveling together for different projects, after all.
But what lurked at my door instead was six and a half feet of Appalachia and more interestingly, he looked surprisingly less surly. In fact, Mars looked a little peaked. Then again, I imagined I looked much the same. But I had a good reason.
“What can I do ya for?” I asked, trying to affect a Southern accent. It was a poor imitation of the smoky roll of Mars’s vowels, and he didn’t even bother with the civility of looking amused.
“You could put a shirt on, for one.”
“I’m standing in my cabin. Emphasis onmy.You’re welcome to take your shirtoffif you’re feeling the need to be on common ground.” I leered and had to blink away the mouthwatering wonder of what he might look like with his shirt off. So much skin, so much muscle. Geez, you’d think I’d been hiding away in a monastery rather than having just blown my load. “Evan and Les send you to escort me?”
He grunted and looked down at the phone in his hands. “They sent me to reschedule it. They’re uh…”
Did I detect a little color rising in his cheeks? That was a surprise from nowhere. My gaze lingered because Mars didn’t strike me as easy to fluster, so I was curious about the source.
“They wanted to go to bed early. And I know y’all usually shoot those B-roll things or whatever when we stop, so I figured I’d save my hands some work.” I thought he flushed a little further as he cleared his throat. “And just do it in person.”
“Itismuch better in person,” I teased.
He frowned, though a quiver at the corner of his mouth said he was tempted to smile. “Right. Anyway, I’m looking at their schedule. Would 2:30 work? Gives you time to do your thing. They’ve got a radio interview at noon, then a signing at 4:00, and they’ll need to be at the venue around 5:45 for sound check.”
I mentally calculated, then nodded. “Works fine. I’ll probably set up in one of the lounge cars, and if you want them to have them just show up at 2:30, I’ll have everything ready to go and we’ll wrap with plenty of time for the signing. Shouldn’t be more than an hour tops.”
Mars’s mouth bunched up in thought, and then he nodded. “All right.”
“That it?” I asked, sensing he was on the verge of saying something else.
“Yup.” His voice was resolute, but his eyes struck me as indecisive. His gaze flickered over my shoulder to the cabin behind me. There wasn’t really anything of interest back there besides my laptop, a pile of laundry, and a couple of camera bags.
I followed his look over my shoulder to my rumpled bed. “You wanting a guided tour or something? It’ll have to be a bullet-point tour unless you want me to detail various items in my dirty laundry pile.” I gave him a cheeky grin and threw in a flutter of lashes just for kicks. “There might be a jockstrap in there somewhere, and something tells me you’d be into that.” I pictured Mars as the type to enjoy snapping the straps, then had to push that thought aside for how quickly it threatened to get me hard again. I did love a good manhandling on occasion.
“Nope.” He popped his lips out as he mashed a button on the side of his phone, then tucked it back in his pocket. “See you tomorrow, I guess,” he said, and headed back down the hall, leaving me surprisingly disappointed he hadn’t come at me with some barb I could retort to. Killjoy.
* * *
The next morning, I went to check on Derrick, who’d texted late in the night saying he’d come down with something. I hurried the hell out of his cabin once I’d assured myself he wasn’t dying, but definitely had a case of food poisoning or a stomach bug. It left me in a lurch, and as I sat down at the table in the dining car, I looked at my schedule, trying to figure out how to shift my tiny crew around. I had most of my team following the bands that day, which I’d been keen on doing. But I wanted to do local interviews, too. I supposed I could just do B-roll footage and no interviews, or run the cameras solo and do the interviews myself. I’d had plenty of practice doing that, after all, before one of my docs on a violin prodigy had won me a couple of awards and opened a lot of doors.
Mars, Les, and Evan arrived, along with a bunch of other band members, and they scattered themselves around tables, laughing and talking as they slurped the coffee Marv and Linda came around pouring from big carafes.
“I’m running light today,” I said as I approached their table. “One of my crew is down for the count.”
“Food poisoning?” Evan asked. “A few others have it.”
“Did they eat the flank steak thing?”
Les nodded and jammed his elbow in Evan’s ribs. “See, aren’t you glad you went with that slaw dog you complained about?”
Evan ignored him and focused on me. “Do we need to do the interview some other time?”
“Might have to, yeah.” I didn’t want to because the Phoenix show had been awesome and the farther away you got from the event, the more the energy tended to drain from an interview. “Or we could just do a recap on the next show if I can’t get all the other shots done in time.”