Page 16 of Sam & Justin

So, that was what he meant by old-fashioned?

“I take it he didn’t respond well to you being gay?”

“He did not.”

There was a tone of finality in his answer. I studied him, noticed the way his body had tensed. His knuckles were white, wrapped tightly around the neck of the glass bottle he was holding. I didn’t think he liked talking about his family, and I didn’t have the right to pick at his old wounds, whether they were open, scabbed, or scarred over with time. It wasn’t my place. I let the topic die in the air between us, drowning it with a sip of my beer. When I didn’t say anything, he began to relax.

Unfortunately, it left a lull in the conversation.

I noticed a few people starting to dance, even though Timbers and Tallboys wasn’t usually the type of place where that happened. “Do you want to dance?” I asked him after another moment of tense silence.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

I led him onto the dance floor. There were other couples dancing nearby, and no one paid any attention to us. By the time the second dance came, our bodies were practically plastered together. By the third dance, he was resting his forehead against mine. I could feel the warmth of his breath on my lips, and my heart began to pound. And then he kissed me. It was slow at first, gentle. It lingered only a moment before he pulled away.

I wanted more of that kiss, so I chased his lips and captured them with mine. In theory, we were still dancing. Our bodies were moving, but the only thing I cared about was the way his mouth moved against mine. My tongue slipped between his lips, and the kiss grew deeper. His hands found my hips, and I completely forgot where we were. There was a heat to the kiss that I’d only felt a few times in my life, an inevitability to it.

And when the kiss finally broke, there was only one thing I wanted.

Him.

“Should we uh…” I questioned, rubbing the back of my neck. I noticed Gabe eyeing us from across the bar. He lifted his bottle toward me before turning his attention back to his conversation with some guy who we’d played D&D with back in high school.

Sam didn’t seem to notice Gabe’s raised bottle. His attention was all on me. “Yeah,” he agreed.

“My place or yours?”

“Mine,” he said immediately. He told me where he was staying, and we started out of the bar. It wasn’t until we hit the parking lot that we remembered that we’d both driven separately. Given the fact that I had to be at the school early the next morning, we couldn’t just take one car. We made plans to meet at the motel.

Was I really doing this?

I watched him walk to his car and I decided that yes, yes, I was. I stopped at the twenty-four hour pharmacy on my way to his motel to get condoms and lube. I couldn’t be sure that he packed supplies, and while there was no guarantee that things would go that far, I didn’t want to be caught without if it did. After I paid, I drove directly to the motel Sam was staying at. I found his room easily and knocked. My heart was racing as I waited for him to answer.

I didn’t do this. I didn’t go out and hook up frequently. I had always been the type that preferred relationships and deep emotional connections. The few times that I hooked up when I was single, they were friends with benefits situations. I’d tried the apps when I was in college and finding myself, but they’d always left me feeling hollow. I didn’t want this to turn out the same way.

Maybe coming here was a mistake.

But when he opened the door, still dressed in the same outfit he’d been wearing at the bar, I felt more at ease. He looked nervous too as he stepped aside to let me in. I took in the room as I entered it. There was a battered hard-shell suitcase against one of the walls. The bed was rumpled but still made. Therewas a pair of jeans abandoned on the floor by the dresser and a hardback book sitting on one of the bedside tables. He’d only checked in that afternoon, but the motel room looked lived in.

When I looked back at him, I noticed that he was studying me. “It’s not much,” he said quietly. “Didn’t feel like staying where everyone else was.”

“I’m not judging,” I assured him. “I’ve never stayed here, and it’s nicer than I thought it’d be.”

He grinned at that. “Bed’s pretty nice.”

“Is it?”

He nodded and sat on the edge of the bed, patting the empty space beside him. I joined him, sinking down into the mattress. It was softer than the beds at other hotels I’d visited, ones that had stars and room service and didn’t look like they had hourly availability. Maybe I was a little bit of a snob because the fact surprised me more than I’d like to admit.

“Bedisnice,” I agreed as I rested the small plastic pharmacy bag beside me. He reached over me to grab it and peek inside. “I didn’t know if you had supplies.”

He laughed and put it on the bedside table, right beside a half-empty bottle of lube and a few condoms I hadn’t noticed. I felt my face flush red. “Guess we’re on the same page,” he commented with a grin.

He kissed me.

It was different than the kiss at the bar. It was heated from the start, the kind of kiss that promised that there was more to come. I pulled him backward on the bed, and he followed me back willingly. His tongue slipped past my lips, and it was like a spark to gasoline. I pushed up his shirt, desperate to feel the warmth of his skin under the pads of my fingers. He read the touch for something else and pulled away from the kiss long enough to lift his shirt over his head and toss it to the floor.

Instead of falling back into his lips, I was transfixed by the pattern of black ink that covered his torso. I knew he had tattoos. I’d seen the pictures online. His arms were covered with them, but his chest? There was barely any unmarked skin. I wanted to lick each of the lines until I had committed them to memory. I pushed him back onto the bed and began to follow the first down with my tongue. He let out a breathy sound that went straight to my cock. I traced the first tattoo to his nipple and pulled the dusky pink bud into my mouth. I sucked until it peaked hard and then I nipped down on it.