Page 25

FIFTEEN

PATRICK

Go ahead. Call it predictable. Call it sugar-rotting sweet. See if I care , I thought at some imaginary spectator as I knocked on Shane’s door. It was another Saturday, another week since we hooked up the first time.

If someone could see me now, beaming as I listened to Shane’s approaching footsteps, they’d probably think I had nosedived into this thing without a second thought.

Maybe I had. It didn’t bother me. I had never nosedived so hard in my life, so I didn’t have a reason to worry.

I’d done all my worrying before our clothes dropped off and unimaginable lust burst to life between us.

I didn’t fool myself, though. This was no work of lust. I should know. I had spent the last two years of college chasing every spark of lust right to its cold, extinguished grave. Lust made you jump off the cliff; it didn’t make you fly.

It was Shane, pure and simple. His analytical eyes, his scribbling, his attention, his profound understanding of the core of who I was. How could a boy not come back for more?

When the door opened, Shane’s eyes almost popped out. “That’s huge. Are you crazy?”

I cleared my throat and pitched my voice to a modestly embarrassed tone. “Thanks.”

“The flowers, Patrick,” Shane said, pretending to be tired of me. He fucking wasn’t even close.

“Oh,” I said, lifting them up and pushing them at Shane. It was a bouquet of one hundred and one red roses, and Shane did not have anywhere to put them. “Hold these.”

“Thank you,” he said, sounding bewildered.

I bent down and picked up the vase. It was a simple clay one with a nice, abstract design and subdued shades of green paint melting from one to another. It was just about big enough to fit the bouquet. I knew that, as Shane would have put it, from empirical research.

He laughed out loud as I hauled the thing in and set it on his desk. “If you could call the firefighters to fill this up, that’d be magic,” I said.

Still laughing, Shane set the flowers on the desk by the vase and tossed his arms around my shoulders. “I didn’t get you anything.”

“Seriously?” I asked, a frown warping my face. “I thought we were celebrating our fortnight. Is nothing sacred to you?”

He laughed on, leaning in and planting a blazing kiss on my lips. It was more than I’d hoped for and just enough to last me forever. “Happy fortnight, Mr. Romance.”

“You owe me so bad,” I muttered, my hands going for his ass.

“Tsk.” His lips were almost on mine, but he pulled his head back a little. “I didn’t say you’re not getting anything.” He moved his hand behind his back and put it on mine, lifted it off his ass, and slipped it under the waistband of his pants.

Where I expected fabric, there was bare skin, and my entire body perked up with attention. “Oh,” I said, delighted. My fingers dragged over the strap under the curve of his cheek, following it towards the middle. “A jockstrap at the movies. I like it.”

Speaking nearly against my lips, he said, “Keep going.”

I didn’t need much convincing. If Shane thought we had enough time for a quick one before the movies, hell, I would try to get us there twice.

But when my fingers moved over his hole, there was something there.

It was firm but not hard, and it took me a second to realize he was wearing a plug.

“Fuck, I wish I put it there,” I said, hoarse and right over Shane’s lips.

“You’ll get to take it out,” Shane said. Then, before I had the time to close my fingers around the plug and give it a little push, Shane pulled my hand out of his pants, biting his lip in that sexy way when he was being sneaky.

“It came with this,” he said and tucked his hand into his pocket. What came out was a very small disk with three buttons on it.

I reached for it, but Shane pulled it away.

“Um, I haven’t…tried it yet,” he said. Meaning he wanted to try it with me. “Don’t go crazy right away.”

I smiled to myself. All I had thought about the reasons I couldn’t look away from Shane was still there and as true as ever, but lust still played a part, too. Nobody could bait me this hard and still get away with it. Nobody but Shane. “I’ll be gentle.”

Shane gave me his most flirtatious look, the kind he hadn’t dared make a month or two ago. “Only at the beginning.” And the fucker winked as he handed me the remote and spun away from me.

He carried the vase into the bathroom and filled it with water, then placed the roses inside and picked up his jacket. Before we went out, he pressed a kiss to my lips and thanked me for the roses. I hadn’t been sure whether or not he would like them.

The movie was a lavish drama-comedy starring Caleb Elison as an attractive gay assassin at a doomed wedding, falling for the groom’s twin brother.

It had all the elements of an old rom-com, except that it went in wild directions with violence, intertwining stories of multiple characters, and a gut-wrenching ending that had the internet going crazy and meme makers in ER for their thumbs falling off from the amount of work they did.

Caleb was handsome like always, somehow managing to come across as a Hugh Grant type of bumbling and cute, but with a dark and complicated depth swelling to the surface in the most surprising ways.

This was easily his millionth big-screen gay role.

“You know, I’m starting to suspect this guy is gay,” I said to Shane at the thirty-minute mark.

Shane chuckled. “What could have given you that idea?”

And just for being a tease, I touched one of the buttons on the remote, watching as Shane’s chuckle hitched in his throat and his knees crashed together, thighs rubbing as he squirmed from one side to the other.

“Fuck,” he whispered, his breath shallow.

That was the PULSE option, then—a single wave of sudden vibration that left Shane shuddering for breath for ten more seconds.

I bit my lip against a rising smile and focused on the film.

Caleb Elison was tracking the drink he had laced with a sleeping drug, but an overbearing aunt of the groom descended on him with too many distractions.

Crazy idea, but I was on the edge of my seat, especially as the upbeat mix of electro and classical music filled the screening room.

Shane leaned toward me and rested his head on my shoulder. Nobody knew us here. We were just two guys watching a movie. There was no pesky research project, no ethical conundrums, and no teasing from my teammates. It didn’t matter if someone saw us smooching in the corner or holding hands.

Instead of holding hands, mine rested on Shane’s knee, and it moved a little higher as the movie progressed.

He didn’t seem to mind it. And though we were doing a lot of things a lot of the time to one another, I could shake off this feeling of nervous excitement.

Whenever I touched him, my body reacted the same way.

It always felt like the first, risky time.

Except for one big difference.

I didn’t see myself freaking out and bailing on him. Hell no. I was going to stick around. I was going to be his roguish lover boy.

For as long as he wanted me.

The thought, oddly enough, didn’t fill me with fear. I didn’t think he would stop wanting me soon. Sometimes, it just felt right. Sometimes, you just knew a good thing when it landed in your lap and kissed you on the lips.

So if there was a worm of fear boring into my heart somewhere deep down and undetected, I failed to see it.

And if I considered it a reward rather than a sudden burst of fearful jealousy, I would; I pressed the PULSE button again, making Shane grab the armrest and my forearm, digging his nails into my flesh and twisting his back in wild ways.

I could feel it, too. In my imagination, here in the dark, I could feel that provocative, unscratchable itch traversing his body and the desperate need to move and shake it off.

Three seconds passed, and Shane settled down, exhaling a nearly silent “Fuck.”

The other function that the remote offered was just as fun, especially while Shane’s lips closed around the paper straw dipping into his milkshake in the diner across from the cinema.

He sat in the red, faux-leather, retro booth across from me while Elvis sang about falling in love with you from an old jukebox that had legit vinyl records and a crackling sound of the needle moving through their microscopic valleys.

Shane slammed the thick glass of frothy, creamy milkshake on the smooth surface of the table and pressed his back painfully against the back of the booth.

His lips parted, but he held back the sounds, and I adored the expression he made.

That pleasured, tormented wave of heat that made his cheeks redden and the shudder that ricked his chest. “Fuck,” he said when the intensifying wave of vibration I’d sent into his plug passed.

It had lasted a solid eight seconds. The trick was to hold the button and let the current grow.

“I never should have given you so much power.”

I took his milkshake. “Don’t lie. You love it.” My lips closed around his straw and sucked a mouthful. It was very sweet, but it couldn’t compare to what I was going to suck on in an hour. The thought amused me as I pushed the milkshake back across the table and folded my arms.

Shane had a slightly embarrassed, heated look on his face, and I knew he loved it even more than he was willing to say.

It was another hour before we went to his place.

Climbing up the stairs behind Shane and giving him sudden waves of vibration pulses was a kind of joy I hadn’t thought existed.

It was hard to imagine being with anyone else, and not only because Shane was so eager to push the boundaries of what was allowed but because he did it at the same rate as I. We matched. It was as easy as that.