Page 5

5

Jeremiah Blake

“The things I would let that man do to me,” I trill, resting my head on the back of the sofa and letting my eyes flutter shut for dramatic effect. “I’m telling you, Ness, it would make even you blush.”

Vanessa is, by her own insistence, a pervy little kinkster, though I’ve never seen any evidence of that side of her. She says she keeps that part of her life private as she’d hate to shock me or mar my good opinion of her, but personally, I think it has more to do with the fact that you have to leave your house and interact with people you don’t know before you’re able to be kinky with them. At least, that’s what you have to do when your best friends, and the only people you see outside of work, are two gay men.

She turns on me, leaning in just close enough to make her seem threatening, and slides her finger up the bridge of her nose, pushing her glasses up with grim determination. They stay where she puts them for one, maybe two seconds, and then begin their descent to where they were before. “Like what?” she demands.

I let my mind drift and land on Ben’s face. He was sitting on his porch swing the first time I got a decent look at him. His legs were crossed, an ankle resting on a knee. Thighs open. Ordinarily, thighs like his would give me pause. Thick thighs always do. But as soon as I saw his face, I couldn’t see anything else. Not the house. Not the swing. Not the sky. Just his face.

And holy shit, what a face it is.

His bone structure is perfect, and I don’t say that lightly. You know how lots of people are attractive but have a narrow margin of attractiveness? Like, if their nose were a tiny bit bigger or their lips a tiny bit thinner, they wouldn’t be nearly as good-looking? Well, Ben’s nothing like that. Each of his features is gorgeous. Comfortably gorgeous. Brows. Nose. Lips. All beautiful in an almost brutal way. Dark hair. Dark brows that are thick and heavy enough to cast a shadow over the upper quadrant of his face. Stubble that does nothing to hide a strong jaw. All of it speaks to a rugged, stripped-back masculinity that would be borderline scary if it weren’t for his eyes.

His eyes.

God. His eyes.

I wasn’t ready for his eyes.

“What are we talking about?” says a smooth, albeit bored-sounding, voice from the corner of my living room. Marcus has let himself melt into my beanbag. He’s one with it now and not going anywhere anytime soon. He looks up from his phone and glances expectantly at me and then at Vanessa.

“Oh, you know, Jer here is still banging on about how hot the boy next door is,” she explains.

“Um, ex cu se me, Ness,” I say, breaking the word into three separate syllables, “but Ben’s not a boy. He’s a man. Believe me, he’s about as far from a boy as a human being can possibly get. He’s all man. He’s a man’s man. The kind of man who cooks meat on an open fire and chops wood with an axe and doesn’t even know that those are manly things to do because they just come naturally to him. He’s like that, but, like, better. He’s what would happen if you took masculinity and pressed it through a sieve until the juice was removed and all that was left was the grit. That’s what he’s like.”

“So, wait,” says Ness, not following my analogy, and honestly, who can blame her, “is he the juice or the pulp?”

“He’s the pulp,” I explain patiently, “the grit. The hard stuff left over when all the softness of masculinity has been extracted.” My voice drifts and fades because, for all I’ve just said, Ben Stirling’s eyes don’t match his face. “Ben Stirling,” I whisper a couple of times for no reason except that I like how it sounds. “It’s unfair how some people aren’t just born with a hot face and body, but they get a hot name as well, don’t you think? Have you ever noticed how often that happens?” Neither friend answers, so I say, “Ben Stirling,” in a dreamy voice, and then, “Ben Stirling,” in a deep voice typically used in trailers for action movies and thrillers.

Ness and Marcus look at me funny, so I stop there. There’s a fine line between perving over someone and being creepy, and I think that last “Ben Stirling” might have nudged me over.

“Did you say Ben Stirling ?” says Marcus.

“Uh-huh,” I reply, loathe to say his name aloud again so soon after my recent performance.

A pair of deep-set coffee-brown eyes blink at me from the corner. Marcus taps on his phone screen, clicks on something, and then turns the phone toward us. “Is this your new neighbor?”

Vanessa cranes her neck to see Marcus’s screen and considers the image on it for no more than a couple of seconds. “If that’s your new neighbor, you’re one hundred percent right, Jer. He’s definitely not a boy. That man is a soft Dom if ever I’ve seen one.”

I look at Marcus’s phone, fully expecting to see an unfamiliar face, but I’ll be damned. The man on his screen is my new neighbor. Marcus has good stalking skills, but that was quick even for him. “Yeah. That’s him. Hot right? How did you find him so fast?”

“Jeremiah,” says Marcus. “This is Ben Stirling. The Ben Stirling.”

I’m finding it hard to follow as my brain severely short-circuited at “soft Dom” and has yet to come back online. Vanessa pats me urgently on the knee to draw my attention to what Marcus is saying. It doesn’t help.

“He’s a hockey player,” Marcus spells out when it becomes clear that simply saying his name over and over is of no help to me.

“Hockey? Aw, yeah, Luca has mentioned hockey a few times. I think they enjoy it.”

“Jer…” starts Ness.

“He doesn’t enjoy hockey, Jeremiah. It’s not a hobby to him. He’s one of the greatest players in the history of the game. He is a legend . An icon . He was the captain of the Tampa Bay Blackeyes for almost ten years. He’s scored more goals than any other player, living or dead.”

“Oh,” I say, slightly huffy from humiliation, “well, in that case, he probably does enjoy hockey, doesn’t he? You don’t get that good at something without enjoying it, do you?”

“Jer,” Ness says again, eyes dancing with something like faintly suppressed glee, “do we need to run through your interaction with this man in granular detail to assess how badly you embarrassed yourself?”

I relent and give them a blow-by-blow account of what happened from the time I arrived on Ben’s property to the time I left. I cover what I said and what he said. Where I sat and what I did with my face, including several live-action replays. I cover it all in granular detail, like Ness suggested, though I leave out what he said about his wife, and I don’t mention that Luca flew his plane down the stairs. Or that Ben calls him sweetheart.

I’m not sure why I leave all that out, but I do.

According to their assessment, there was a lag at the beginning of the conversation, which was when I was supposed to gush and fall over myself at being in the presence of greatness. Ness and Marcus assure me that what happened is a disaster and there’s nothing I can say or do to come back from the situation without humiliating myself further.

“So, anyway,” Ness says, rather cheerfully. “What would you let him do to you?”

“Huh?”

“You said, ‘The things I’d let that man do to me,’ but you never got to what you’d actually let him do.”

We’ve talked about him so much now that I’d almost forgotten how we got onto the subject. I think about his face again, and I think about something else I haven’t told Vanessa or Marcus. I think about Ben Stirling’s eyes. Even though everything else about him is hard and tough, just like I said, his eyes are different. They’re vast and fragile, misty blue orbs that shine a light on such an intense vulnerability that my insides clench when I so much as think of them.

“Anything,” I say at last. “I’d let him do anything to me.”

Marcus extracts himself from the beanbag, which is quite the process given how deeply he’s allowed himself to sink into it, and saunters over to the kitchen, where I’m doing the dishes. Vanessa left a few minutes ago, and as always, there’s a subtle shift in the mood when she isn’t here, though I’ve never managed to work out how best to describe it.

His steps are long and sinuous as he moves toward me. Easy and unperturbed. At least, that’s the impression he wants to give. I know him too well to fall for it. Marcus and I go way back. Not quite as far back as Vanessa and I do, but we go back to college. College 2.0 that is. I met him during the first week of my ill-fated physio course. He’d known exactly where we were supposed to be and what we were supposed to be doing. I’d had no idea. He’s one of those friends who got my number, immediately added me to favorites, and simply never revisited the situation.

I’d have dropped out of college a hell of a lot sooner if it hadn’t been for Marcus.

I noticed his lanky swagger before anything else. His hair was closely shaved then like it is now. I noticed his smile and his skin next. His skin is dark brown and incredibly even, and his smile is nice. Really nice. It’s a smile that made him feel like family right from the start. A smile that always feels like an achievement to me, and not just because he’s choosy about flashing it.

Then, like now, he was a contradiction. Complicated in a way that makes complete sense to me sometimes, and other times, none. Easygoing but also a stickler for rules. Loud and outspoken in certain situations, painfully quiet in others.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the man, but I know this look. This posture. This stride. And it doesn’t fill me with joy.

“Jer,” he says in a loaded, overly concerned way that gets on my nerves.

I sigh loudly and hold up a hand to placate him. “Don’t worry, Moop. I know what you’re going to say. I’ve got it. No need to go there.”

“He’s straight, Jeremiah.”

“What did I just say? What did I literally just say? I said I know .”

His lips press together lightly, but his jaw is tense. “He has a child, and he had a wife. Before he was married, he dated a string of models and actresses. All women.”

“Jesus, Marcus. I know what straight is, okay? Some dudes and dudettes want to bang members of the opposite gender—I understand the concept, and I know straightness exists, believe me.”

“I’m not saying you don’t, but I know what you’re like, and I saw how you looked when you said his name earlier.”

It feels too soon to sigh again, so I roll my eyes extravagantly instead. “I was kidding . My God. I was making a joke. Joshing around. Playing the fool. Taking the piss. Having some fun. You know fun —the opposite of serious. It’s a simple concept. You’d know a lot more about it if you took that giant stick out of your ass.”

Marcus turns and leans against the counter, eyeing me up and down critically. I wait for him to say that he’d be only too happy to take the giant stick out of his ass if I had a giant dick for him to replace it with, but tonight, he misses the opportunity and goes with, “Give him a wide berth, bud. Take it from me.”

That irritates me too. It’s very smug. Very know-it-all. “He’s my neighbor, Marcus. He lives next door to me. I physically can’t give him a wide berth, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. He doesn’t know anyone in Seattle and he’s going through a really hard time. I’m not going to be a dick to him just because he doesn’t like dick.”

I turn my attention back to the dishes, scrubbing the mug I made for Ben a little more aggressively than strictly required before rinsing it thoroughly and putting it in the drying rack, ready for the coffee I know damn well I’m going to take over to Ben tomorrow. Even though I’m almost positive there’s no way Marcus can tell I made this particular mug for Ben or what my intentions for tomorrow are, to be on the safe side, I add, “It’s fine . It’s not like I’m going to flirt with him or anything.”