Page 26 of True North
Misha turned to glance through the window toward the dock. “Go swim?”
“Yeah, it’s a good day for it. Hot out. Go get your swimsuit, eh?” JT said hopefully, well aware—to his chagrin—that Misha was more inclined to skinny-dipping. He’d spotted Misha swimming nude in the lake more than once.
“Swimsuit,” Misha repeated, then wrinkled his nose, conveying exactly what he thought about swimwear.
“Well,I’mgoing to put on a swimsuit,” JT said, and retreated upstairs to change. With any luck, Misha would already be in the water by the time he went outside.
His luck failed him. Misha was instead crouched on the dock, fully nude, watching something in the water that JT couldn’t see from the kitchen door. The hunched curve of his back gleamed in the midday sun. He was filling out; his ribs weren’t quite so painfully prominent anymore.
“Christ,” JT muttered, but he was in it now; he was already dressed in his swim trunks and holding two beach towels, and anyway, he spent his entire professional life hanging out with naked men. Misha didn’t have anything he hadn’t seen before.
He walked down the jetty. The sun was hot on his bare shoulders, and the boards of the jetty were hot beneath his feet. Water lapped gently against the pilings. Misha turned as JT approached and gestured him closer, pointing to the lake, to whatever it was that had caught his attention. JT still couldn’t see anything, but another three steps brought him close enough to see the outline of the fish lingering by the rip-rap.
“Looks like a steelhead,” JT said. “Nice.”
Misha’s eyebrows went up. “Steel… head?”
JT grinned. “Sorry. That’s the name of the fish.” He pointed. “It’s a fish. The name is steelhead.”
Misha nodded. He went back to studying the fish, his arms wrapped around his shins, hugging his knees close to his chest. The steelhead wasn’t doing anything particularly interesting, in JT’s opinion, and apparently, Misha agreed, because in another minute he rose to his feet and, in the same motion, dived into the water, his body a clean arc as he went under. JT watched as he kicked beneath the surface, his arms moving in great sweeps, and then surfaced again, blowing water from his lips. He wiped his eyes and then saw JT watching and waved.
JT waved back, a little embarrassed to have been caught, even though he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He dropped the towels on the dock and dived in—probably not as gracefully as Misha, who JT might have suspected of being part fish if he didn’t know better. When he came up for air, Misha was some distance away, swimming out toward the endless open horizon of the lake.
JT watched him go for a few moments, then turned onto his back and floated. The sky above was a cloudless, searing blue. JT closed his eyes and let the sun bake his upturned face. Strange patterns of light filled the darkness behind his eyelids. He bobbed on the gentle waves and let himself go totally limp.
He needed to stop pretending he wasn’t attracted to Misha. He was, painfully, and maybe he had hoped—what? That his attraction would go away if he didn’t admit it to himself? It wasn’t working. If anything, denial had made room for fondness to creep in unacknowledged. If he had been honest with himself right off the bat, he wouldn’t have ever invited Misha to move in with him, but instead he’d been so busy pretending he wasn’t a predator that he’d gotten in way over his head. Now he was beginning to know Misha and like him, and that was way worse than just wanting Misha to rail him.
Misha wassleepingwith him every night, in the same bed. Jesus Christ.
He did a quick roll in the water, wetting his hot face. He didn’t know what he was going to do.
His ears were underwater, but he still heard the muffled splashes of Misha’s approach and wasn’t surprised when he felt hands on his shoulders shoving him beneath the surface. Instead of resisting, he used the momentum to curl into a ball, flip, and shoot upward again, coming up right in front of Misha’s startled face, and immediately dunking Misha under.
The wrestling match that ensued was graceless and full of laughter. JT didn’t have Misha’s innate elegance in the water, but he was a strong swimmer and had spent every summer of his childhood trying to drown or avoid being drowned by Tyler, and he wasn’t afraid to fight dirty. He clamped his legs around Misha’s waist and flipped him and resisted all of Misha’s attempts to free himself until Misha inhaled some water and started coughing and spluttering.
“Shit, sorry,” JT said, immediately worried that he’d playedtoorough. He took Misha by the elbow to help him stay upright as they treaded water. “You okay?”
Misha nodded, still coughing, and then darted a sly sideways glance at JT, his only warning before Misha did some kind of fucking aquatic judo and shoved JT beneath the water again.
They dragged themselves out onto the dock at last, sodden and worn out, and flopped on the boards to warm themselves in the sun. JT covered his head and face with one of the beach towels and let the rest of his body air-dry. He didn’t want to think about anything. He was going to be haunted by the sensation of Misha’s lithe body between his thighs for the rest of his life. He was the biggest idiot in the world.
“I win,” Misha said, after a few quiet minutes.
JT shoved the towel aside and sat up, outraged. Misha smirked at him with absolute wicked delight, so pleased with himself, so pleased to have irked JT, and JT had to turn away from the sheer force of personality etched in every line of Misha’s body, his one eyebrow a little straighter than the other, his incongruously large hands. JT was going to screw everything up for sure.
He lay down again and pulled the towel back over his head. “Yeah, okay. You win.”
* * *
Misha went off into the woods after a while to do whatever bear things he did out there by himself. He shifted into bear form halfway across the yard and loped toward the trees, always faster than JT expected him to be. That was why they told you to stay the hell away from bears: they could outrun you without even thinking about it. Plus the claws. And the teeth.
JT gathered their damp towels and went into the house and upstairs to his unmade bed that smelled like Misha. He didn’t think too hard about what he was doing as he took the little tub of Vaseline from his bedside table and greased up his fingers. One major downside to having Misha in his bed all the time was the lack of privacy. JT had been limited to quickly bringing himself off in the shower every now and again, and it was good to have the chance to indulge himself a little. He needed to get laid, but all of his regular fuck-buddies were in Toronto, hundreds of kilometers away, and finding someone in the Sault seemed like too much work. He was out to his friends and family, but he wasn’t ready to advertise to all and sundry. His hand would do.
The pillow beside him was still slightly indented from the weight of Misha’s head. He slid his hand into his shorts and rolled onto his belly to bury his face in Misha’s pillow as he closed his slick hand around his half-hard dick.
He breathed in the smell of the same shampoo he used, made subtly but critically different by Misha’s body chemistry. Misha had absolutely no modesty and liked to walk around naked after showering, air-drying, taking his sweet time picking out his clothes and getting dressed. He had done it just yesterday, standing naked in front of the dresser he had begun to pile his clothes on top of, while JT changed into his workout clothes and tried not to stare at the unnecessarily shapely curve of Misha’s ass.
The combination of lust and genuine liking was lethal. He was going to lose his cool and try to make a move on Misha, which was the world’s worst idea. He had to burn it off somehow, and this was it: fucking his own hand with long rolls of his hips while he fantasized about sliding over to Misha’s side of the bed in the middle of the night and being welcomed with open arms. Misha would be so warm and sweet, kissing JT with clumsy eagerness, parting his thighs to let JT rut against him. Maybe he’d let JT suck his cock—