Page 34 of Dedicated
Les did that side-to-side head-tilt thing again and scratched casually at his jaw. “Sorta.”
“Dancing around your hard edges…” I read off the page, my gaze flickering up to find him watching me pensively. “That’s what I’m like to you?”
“You’re a lot of things, Porter.” He shrugged and picked up his coffee, taking a long swallow.
I ran through the notes again, trying to expand on what he’d given me, and finally collapsed backward in a huff, giving up. Lately, it felt like I was the one stuck while Les churned along easily.
He read my frustration and reached for his guitar, dragging it from my lap. I thought he was going to pick up where I’d left off, but instead he laid it on the floor beside him, then crawled onto the couch, insinuating himself behind me. “I want to try something. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you never touch anyone.”
I hadn’t really, but he wasn’t wrong. Les was always touching people, throwing his arms around shoulders, showing affection or interest with a touch to someone’s forearm or hand. I was careful of personal space, and I didn’t like anyone I didn’t know in my own, which had made working as a bartender an exercise in frustration.
When his hands landed on my shoulders, I flinched. Instead of taking it as a brush-off and retreating, though, he tightened his grip, digging his thumbs into muscle, pressing into the knots and rolling against them. I was about to shrug him off, but he pushed the heels of his palms into my shoulder blades and fuck did it feel good. I let my head drop forward a little and felt him sink more heavily into the cushion behind me.
“Good?”
I gave a tiny nod as he firmly prodded the top of my spine. “Yeah.” It felt better than good, and if he kept going I couldn’t decide whether I was more likely to fall asleep or pop wood.
“Remember when we played Gap Fest and there was a masseuse backstage?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you sleep with her?”
Les laughed close to my ear. “No. I mean, I don’t want to ruin your very flattering image of me, but I was about to say you should do this more often. I get that you have your routines and stuff, but you don’t let yourself deviate and you never relax, and even if you’re not going to relax about ninety-nine percent of your waking life—a masseuse kind of forces you into it for a while.”
“What are you getting at here?”
He let out an exasperated huff. “That you should fucking relax for five minutes and let me do this. Your shoulders feel like rebar.” His touch tripped up to the side of my neck, fingertips working the tendons. The warmth of his skin and the way he rolled his knuckles across my neck was almost orgasmic. I tilted my head to one side, then the other, directed by the pressure of his touch. When he moved on and closed his hands around my biceps, his torso pressed against me and I could feel him, hard and thick against me.
“Pretty sure masseuses aren’t supposed to be sporting wood when they massage someone.”
“That’s why I’m not a professional. Sorry. It’s an occupational hazard with me, I guess. I have a hair trigger, you know that. Do you want me to stop?” He paused, his hands still curled around my upper arms, but his grip loosening ever so slightly.
“No. Keep going.” I tried not to think about how good it felt, because he wasn’t the only one with a hard-on. Which answered my previous question; I was not at all drowsy at the moment.
He released one of my arms and put both hands on the other, initiating long, deep strokes from my bicep to my wrist, pushing at muscle, kneading tendons until my arm went rag doll floppy and loose. Then he did the other arm. Afterward, I felt him shift around, rising up on his knees behind me to tackle my shoulders again. His dick brushed against my back as he dug into me, and I wasn’t unaware that his breathing had quickened. Mine had too and now I was so damn hard my pants were little more than a straightjacket on my cock.
When he reached for the hem of my T-shirt and tugged it up toward my chin and then over my head, I didn’t resist, just lifted my arms, having slipped into some kind of trancelike autopilot mode that I’d blame on the insane eroticism of his touch. Air rushed cool across my skin, and his warm hands pressed flat against my ribs, dragging down to my lower back and then back up again with a friction that almost burned.
“Fuck, you’ve got a killer body. I’ve always been so jealous of that.” Just the lust-heavy sound of his voice made me groan in reply, and I thought for the millionth time about how he’d kissed me the other night. When his boner brushed against me this time, I pushed back against him without even thinking twice.
He dug into my shoulders, finding a rhythm, pushing and pulling against me, his breath coming steadily but in heavy drafts. I was so fucking turned on I couldn’t take it; I reached behind me, grabbed the back of his thigh, and yanked him hard up against me.
“Shit,” he hissed out. “You fucker.” He shifted again, tilting himself somehow so I couldn’t feel his dick anymore. “I’m not trying to perv on you, I’m trying to relax you.”
“It’s kinda hard to ignore your dick.”
“I get that a lot.” He chuckled shamelessly. “Just think of it like… one of those massage wands in the SkyMall magazine.”
“Those vibrate, though, don’t they?”
“Keep arching your back against me like that and my wand will definitely be vibrating.”
“There’s something wrong with you.” More mumble than words as I let my head droop forward again and my eyes fall shut to better focus on the pleasure radiating through me.
He walked the pressure of his knuckles up and down my back, his laughter low and sonorous when my spine swayed back and forth trying to anticipate his next move. My erection throbbed and was well on its way to full-blown ache. What was it with my cock and Les? For that matter, what was it withmeand Les? Why was the worst option in the world the only one both my dick and I seemed to agree on?
“Want me to keep going?” He paused, his hands low around my waist, thumbs sweeping into the dimples at my lower back.
“Yeah.”