Page 9

Chapter Nine

Jay

I shouldn’t have pregamed with Maddy and had those four shots of tequila before we left her apartment.

I shouldn’t have chugged the first beer that was handed to me, quickly sipping the second one.

I shouldn’t have let my guard down, hung out with Ryan so publicly, been introduced to his friends.

And I especially shouldn’t have been stuffing my dick down his throat in the Shenanigan’s stall.

But… fuck, I wanted to do it again. And again and again and again and again.

It was everything I’d imagined it would be and more. I wasn’t a virgin, and I didn’t lack much self-confidence, so I’d hooked up with a good number of guys before, but none of them could ever compare to the kind of intoxicating rush I was hit with the second Ryan wrapped his lips around me. It was fucking nirvana. Cockvana?

Shit… was that where that car sales company got their name ?

“What do you want to drink?” Ryan asked as he leaned against the bar. The purple lights above him made his bright green eyes glow an otherworldly kind of color.

It was beautiful. He was beautiful.

God, I needed to get my dick back into his mouth before my balls exploded.

I looked at the bartender, trying to ignore the ache between my legs. “What do you recommend?” I asked.

The bartender, a taller guy with brown hair and a charming smile, leaned forward. “I’ve been known for my Screaming Orgasms, although I do usually reserve them for my boyfriend.” He flashed a cheeky smile and looked over to a quieter guy sitting next to me. He dropped his head, his cheeks blushing red. But there was a smile there. “I’m Perry, by the way. Have I seen you before?”

“I’m pretty new on campus,” I said. “And I think I’ll take a Screaming Orgasm.” I tried to ignore the dull ache between my legs.

“One Screaming O coming right up,” Perry said, grabbing a bottle and twirling it in his hands with impressive ease.

Ryan leaned into me. “If that’s what you wanted, then we should have stayed in the bathroom stall a little longer.”

My cheeks burned. The ache grew stronger. I trained my gaze on the shelves of expensive liquor that was mostly untouched, everyone usually going for the cheaper options. A breeze carried in from the nearby ocean made Ryan’s cologne waft in my direction, giving my knees another reason to buckle.

“What does Maddy want?” Ryan asked as he started ordering another drink after Perry brought me mine.

“I think she’s sticking to the beer tonight. ”

He ordered drinks, grabbing a Leg Spreader for his friend Colton and a vodka pineapple for himself. We also grabbed another pitcher of beer. They’d gone up in price to thirty whole pennies.

We went back to our group. It was only Colton and Maddy left at the table, the other guys having dispersed into the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. Damn, there was a ton of people here. I considered grabbing Maddy and getting lost in the crowd. It would avoid any potential issues that could come up from me hanging out so closely with a Redpine.

Then again… fuck that. I was drunk, horny, and kinda intrigued by the sporty gamer with silly Dad jokes that made me genuinely laugh.

Besides, with pitchers of beer being worth about a quarter, I figured no one else in this bar would remember tonight anyway.

We were safe.

I sat on a stool next to Ryan, setting the drinks down on the circular high-top table, already sticky with beer.

“You two were gone for a while,” Maddy said, wiggling a recently plucked brow. If she didn’t enjoy being a doctor, she could definitely become a detective with how suspicious she constantly was.

“Had to make a pit stop at the bathroom.” Ryan was nonchalant about it, sucking down a big gulp of his drink through the two tiny pink straws.

It flashed me right back to having those same sexy lips around my thick pink straw.

Annnnd I was hard again. Fuck.

Colton didn’t seem as suspicious of us. He was a cool guy. I liked him. He had a bearish kind of vibe to him. Dark hair, scruffy beard, bushy brows. He had a little bit of a belly and some dark chest hair peeking out from the collar of his dark blue T-shirt. He swirled his Leg Spreader and said, “Maddy and I were talking about how that one Freshman FUker went viral for doing that funny dance during orientation.”

“Ah, shit, yeah, I saw that,” Ryan said. He started to move his hands and hips in a terrible impersonation of the viral dance.

“Bless you and your lack of rhythm,” I said with a sad hand to my chest.

“I’ve got plenty of rhythm when it counts,” Ryan said.

I narrowed my eyes and turned away from him. “It went more like this.”

I did a perfect imitation of the dance, swirling my hands like I was casting some kind of spell, moving my hips in the same way. My feet moved as if I were dancing salsa. All in all, the dance looked like a weird and messy mix of a hundred different kinds of dances, and that was probably why it took off.

Plus, the guy was cute, and the video was reshared by a ton of different celebrities, so that all helped.

“Yeah, Jay’s right,” Colton said, looking impressed. “You’ve seriously got no rhythm, Ryan. You looked like one of those blow-up things they put outside of car dealerships.” He lifted his arms and waggled them in the air, all of us laughing.

“You do that pretty well,” Maddy said. I noticed she leaned a little closer to Colton than she had when we’d first gotten here.

“My uncle owned a Ford dealership,” Colton confessed. “I spent way too many afternoons dancing with that thing.”

More laughter. The Screaming Orgasm Ry had gotten me was making my head feel all light and my hands feel kind of numb and my balls feel really full. Damn it. What kind of spell did Ryan cast on me? Because that really had to be the only explanation as to why I was ready to throw away all of my carefully curated morals so I could hop on his lap.

Well, that and the copious amounts of alcohol I’ve consumed.

“I remember that dealership,” Ryan said. He rested his forearms against the table, and I couldn’t help but notice how fucking sexy they were. I was big on hands and arms, so the fact that his forearms twitched with muscle nearly had me start drooling. He wore a light blue shirt with the short sleeves rolled up so that showed off even more of those juicy biceps of his. “We would pretend we were in the Fast and Furious movie all the damn time. It’s wild how good our imaginations were as ten-year-olds.”

“Seriously,” Colton said. “It would feel like we were racing over mountains and shit, but those cars never moved an inch.”

“Fun times.”

“Major,” Colton said.

“How long have you guys been friends?” I asked.

“Pfft, since I can even remember,” Ryan answered. “I think we were in the same preschool together. Been pretty much inseparable ever since. Colton’s been through it all with me.”

“And you’ve been through it with me, man.”

Hmm. How did Ryan continue to keep on surprising me? I was the kind of guy who floated around and added more and more friends to my orbit like little electrons circling a neutron. I had a few people I considered best friends back in New York, and Maddy had quickly taken that title here in San Luco, but I didn’t really have any lifelong best friends the way Ryan and Colton were. That took a lot of work and effort to maintain, and it was refreshing to see.

“Colton’s the first person I came out to,” Ryan said.

Colton puffed out his chest proudly. “We were, what, in sophomore year of high school? It was after football practice. You thought you were dying, so you told me because you didn’t want to go without people not knowing.”

I chuckled at that, picturing a sweaty and panting young Ryan coming out on the football field.

Ryan’s smile was wide, his eyes lit up with the memory. “And you told me that it didn’t matter, that you loved me and that I wasn’t dying; I was being a little bitch.” He shrugged. “And you were right.”

“Always am.”

The conversation continued on, bouncing from topic to topic, the night flying by. When Ryan had first invited me to come out, I really considered staying in the dorm instead. Not because I didn’t want to be around Ryan but because I found myself wanting to be around him all. The. Fucking. Time. And that could quickly become a problem if I didn’t keep it in check.

So yeah, I was so close to staying in with some dumb movies, some good porn, and an entertaining book all keeping me company while everyone got blasted at Shenanigans.

It was Maddy who convinced me to go, and damn was I happy she did, because this night was really turning out to be one of the best I’ve had in a long time.

At some point, one of Ryan’s rowing buddies came back to the table and pulled Colton away, mentioning something about an interested sorority girl. I noticed Maddy’s shoulders drop a bit, but they quickly picked back up again when an upbeat pop song started playing through the speakers.

“Oh, I love this song!” she said, swaying from side to side on her stool. “You know, random fun fact and since it’s the theme of the night, but it was the song playing on the car radio when I came out as trans to my parents.”

Ryan perked up. “That’s awesome. It’s a great song to have as a theme song to an awesome moment… wait, shit, sorry for assuming anything. How did it go?”

“Don’t even worry about it. It was great, thankfully. Both my parents are liberal doctors from the North East. Mom’s a cardiologist, Dad’s a pediatrician. It’s almost expected they were going to have a kid who was part of the Rainbow Mafia.”

I laughed at that. Maddy and I had already talked about her journey to accepting herself, but I was happy to see Ryan as understanding and interested in her story as I was.

“When was that?” he asked.

“I was seventeen. Started hormones the day I turned eighteen and haven’t looked back since. I feel happier than ever.”

“That’s so fucking amazing.” He raised his cup. “Cheers to that.”

We tapped our plastic cups together.

“Thanks, dolls,” she said. “I’m saving up for my FFS next, so if you want to support, my Cash App is… joking, joking.”

Ryan and I both laughed, but I could already see the question forming on Ryan’s lips before he asked it: “What’s FFS?”

“Facial feminization surgery,” Maddy explained. “Not that it’s by any means necessary or needed for me to be my authentic self. I just have some body dysmorphia things I have to unpack and feel like FFS would help with that. I want to see me when I look in a mirror for once, you know? A beautiful, confident, accomplished woman.”

Ryan nodded and leaned in. I hadn’t heard Maddy talk about FFS yet, so it felt good to have her opening up the way she was. It was also a good sign that she appeared to be trusting Ryan with this. Maybe I needed to take a page out of her book.

“Well,” Ryan said, placing a hand on hers atop the table. “If it means anything from this slightly drunk himbo jock you just met at a bar: I think you’re already a beautiful and confident woman, and I’m sure you’re accomplished too. Don’t let anything—mirror or person or yourself—tell you otherwise. Ever.”

I nearly toppled over my stool. Maddy started to tear up. Ryan appeared a little confused as to why we all looked completely rocked. As if he hadn’t said one of the most beautiful and honest and touching words I’d ever heard.

“What?” he asked, eyes opening wide. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No, no. You said everything right,” Maddy said, dabbing away a tear. “Thank you.” She pulled him into a tight hug. She looked over his shoulder and smiled at me. “Get in on this group action, Jay.”

I didn’t need to be asked twice. I joined the hug. I rested my head against Ryan’s back and, likely for the first time since I met him, allowed myself to sink into that warm, fluttery feeling I got every time Ryan was around.

I could really get used to this.