Bad Company (3 page)

Nice raise, but Nate still had the winning hand. He grabbed Kellan’s hips and ground them together. “Sucking is nice. Be my guest.”

“Oh, I knew you had it bad for me.” Kellan breathed the words into Nate’s ear. “Did you jerk off thinking about me?”

Nate shoved his hand between them. “And I suppose this is a roll of quarters in your pocket.” He found the thick length of Kellan’s cock and stroked it.

Kellan jerked away. “Friction’s friction.”

“That’s what I thought.” Nate put his elbows on the counter behind him. “If you’re going to play gay chicken, you’d probably be better off playing it with someone who isn’t actually gay.”

“I’m not chicken.”

“Yeah? Gonna prove it?” Nate undid the top three buttons on his fly. The pulse in his cock probably had more to do with anger than arousal, but he was going to win this round. Nate hated Geoffrey Brooks on general principal, but Kellan’s betrayal had been personal. “How desperate are you for a place to stay?”

“What are you saying?”

“I told you what I wanted in the bar.”

Kellan wiped his hands on his thighs and then shrugged. “Okay.”

“Just like that?”

“Like it’s some big deal. I’d do my own if I could reach it.” Despite his words, Kellan simply stood there.

Nate arched his brows. “That’s all you got or were you waiting for kneepads?”

“Fuck you.” Kellan dropped to his knees, eyeing Nate’s crotch like he was waiting for it to attack.

Kellan would back down now, Nate was sure of it, but he threw in another taunt. “Afraid of trouser snakes?”

“Shut up, asshole.” Kellan popped the last two buttons of Nate’s fly.

“Why did it have to be snakes?” Nate teased.

They’d watched
Raiders
together a million times, skipping over the boring romance bits, replaying the explosions on slow speed. The line used to always make them laugh, but with Kellan’s breath hitting the thin layer of cotton over Nate’s dick, he wasn’t laughing. Kellan’s smile flashed for a second and was gone.

Seven years of being closer than Nate imagined even brothers could be told him to back off, to reassure Kellan he could stay as long as he needed provided he forgot this stupid plan. But those years melted into nothing stacked against the memory of that one year of eviscerating betrayal, of hearing Kellan’s laugh behind the taunts of
faggot
and
queer
as Nate got tripped or shoved into lockers by someone who always disappeared when he turned around.

Nate took the last step and shoved his jeans and boxer briefs out of the way. His dick wasn’t totally convinced it was about to get some action, so he gave it a couple of strokes, concentrating on the shape of the lips, the angle of the waiting jaw. A man’s face. His cock. It would work. “Put up or shut up, Brooks.”

Kellan licked his lips, nothing but nerves in the flicker of his tongue, but Nate imagined that first wet touch on his skin. That did the trick, a sweet flood of blood swelling him until the head stretched toward Kellan’s mouth.

Nate put his elbows back on the counter and waited. Everything else was up to Kellan.

Chapter Four

Kellan swallowed and licked his lips again. He could do this. It wasn’t that big a deal. Like Nate said, it was only a game of gay chicken, and no matter what, Kellan was going to win. He reached out and wrapped his hand around the shaft, ignoring how weird it felt to be holding a dick not his own. Wrong angle, wrong hold, but he still expected to feel the grasp on him because in some ways it was the same, satiny skin and heat and the pulse underneath. He jacked the shaft once, and then went for it. Nothing half-assed either. He did that thing he liked, where chicks kept their lips closed and slid the tip back and forth, let it glide across his cheek and then back to his lips.

Nate shifted, a gasp slipping from his throat. Oh yeah, Kellan was going to win.

He’d tasted his own come—off a girl’s lips and once off his hand as a curious kid. Nate tasted—smelled—different than Kellan did too.

“Not bad.” Nate wasn’t gasping anymore. “I hate to break it to you if that’s all the head you’ve been getting, but if you’re going to blow me, you have to open your mouth.”

Kellan looked up, and the way Nate was staring down dropped a heavy weight onto the squirming sensation in Kellan’s gut. If Nate gave that look to all the guys about to suck his dick, no wonder he was so desperate to get done. His eyes were narrowed like he was pissed, his lips thin, flat, shut tight.

Opening his mouth, Kellan tucked his lips over his teeth and went down hard and fast.

He choked and backed off, eyes watering from the bitter taste and the quick gag in his throat. Crossing his eyes, he tried to see how much dick he’d managed to get wet since he hadn’t come close to hitting his fingers where they wrapped around the shaft. Shit. It was practically nothing. How the fuck did girls manage it? Kellan’s dick was longer, though he thought Nate’s was thicker. Maybe that was it. Too thick. He licked around the head, and the taste was mostly salt now.

He licked again, and then wrapped his lips right around what Keegan had told his curious baby brother was the helmet of his little soldier. Nate groaned so deep Kellan felt it echo in his belly. Then Nate’s hands smacked into the sides of Kellan’s head, shoving him off and away.

Kellan had barely regained his balance before the front door slammed behind Nate. The sound echoed around the apartment as Kellan sat back on his heels. “I guess that means I win,” he told the empty room.

Nate had never been great at repressing anything. He’d taken his first psychology course to earn early college credit during his junior year of high school. When he’d heard about hiding problems under a metaphoric rug in his brain, he was the only one in class who couldn’t relate. Nate was always too busy sweeping out the dust to let anything hide.

But after what he’d just done to another human being, he gave repression, rationalization and outright denial his best shot. He sprinted down the stairs, slamming against the wall and the handrail as he tried to do up his pants, started his scooter and took off down the sidewalk going the wrong way, fighting the accusations screaming in his head with every step. But there was no denying it. He was a rapist. Nate Gray, columnist, assistant editor of
Charming Rag
,
Baltimore’s Premier Alternative Weekly
,
was a fucking rapist.

He’d taken classes in every ism known to sociology and knew there was no excuse for such a blatant abuse of an unbalanced power dynamic. He pictured one of the separatist wimmin from his Feminist Analysis of Twentieth Century Literature course sharpening a blade for his imminent castration. If it wasn’t Nate’s equipment she planned to render inoperative, he’d have supplied her with the whetstone.

Desperate to distance himself from his own behavior, he tried framing it as a letter to his advice column.

Hey Gray,

My dad threw me out of the house, so I went to see an old friend. He said I could stay with him if I blew him. What do you think I should do?

Homeless

Hey Homeless,

There’s a word, a legal word, for coercing someone into sex. That word is rape. Run. If he contacts you, call a cop.

Except he had been the one to run.

A pathetic whining excuse in his head tried to purify some of the guilt. Nate hadn’t forced Kellan, hadn’t so much as touched him. No one had pushed Kellan to his knees. He wouldn’t have gone that far if he hadn’t wanted to. For all Nate knew, the whole thing was some bizarre initiation game in some weird heterosexual conspiracy in straight men’s endless quest to humiliate gay men. Kellan had definitely earned his way into that club.

Maybe if Nate was out of the apartment long enough, Kellan would disappear back into his own life. There had to be someone to take him in. Someone who wouldn’t demand a blowjob as a rent payment. Someone who wasn’t a despicable rapist.

And if he was still there, well, Nate’s conscience would have to scrub itself clean by letting Kellan stay there as long he needed. And Nate’s libido was going to have to find a way to live with that.

Chapter Five

Kellan licked his lips, still tasting Nate’s come, the skin of his dick. Nate probably figured Kellan would be dashing to the sink to scrub the evidence from his mouth, and Kellan would have thought he would too, but it wasn’t like they’d gotten far. If either of them was honest, it wasn’t the first time one of them had had his dick out when they were together. They’d dressed together after sleepovers, gone skinny-dipping, and when Kellan had finally managed to shoot his first load right after he turned twelve, he’d gone running to tell Nate about it, fucking showed him how until Nate could do it too.

Not that what had happened back then—or that other time—was anything like today, but Kellan didn’t feel any need to wash away gay cooties. All he felt at the moment was hungry, vaguely turned on in the kind of way he would be at the thought of getting some later, but mostly hungry. The beer he’d sipped while they talked sloshed around his empty stomach.

He rolled to his feet, stomped over, yanked open the fridge door and glared at a whole lot of empty space. He sure as hell hoped Nate would come home from his freakout with some food.

As a kid, Nate had been eerily neat, so it wasn’t too much of a shock to find the fridge clean, but Kellan had expected that there would be some sign of edible food in there. Nate wasn’t some stick-thin model living on sips of lemon-flavored water. Instead Kellan found a jar of brown rice—uncooked—another jar of uncooked oatmeal and one with a tan paste, the beer—thank God—and some nectarines and grapes. Back then, Nate had loved pizza and Chinese buffets and burgers. When did Nate become a health freak?

The answer came easy.

Some time in the fifteen years since you stopped being his friend.

Kellan would find a way to make it up to him—or at least pay him back for this. Though he hoped it wouldn’t involve any more seriously awkward blowjobs.

A check of the cabinets showed more tasteless things with labels like organic and healthy and whole grain taking up lots of space on the front. There was some tea, but Kellan didn’t need to be hyper and hungry. He pushed the doors closed again. The cabinet next to the sink squeaked when he opened it, and Yin trotted over with a hopeful meow. He shrugged at her and then opened one of the cans of cat food onto a dish. The smell reassured him that he wasn’t hungry enough to fight her for her ocean whitefish and salmon entree.

He didn’t actually think there’d be any better food behind the door in the hall, but he looked anyway. Coats, a couple of suits and a worn guitar case. He didn’t remember Nate going in for band or anything. Probably played—whatever kind of music went with granola and gay.

If he forced himself to answer, Kellan would say he was snooping around to distract himself from his empty stomach, but he knew damned well he was looking for some idea of who Nate was now. What he’d kept from back then, what he’d let go of.

So far he had liking animals, being neat and staying decent enough to not throw Kellan’s ass onto the street. That was the Nate he remembered. Nate’s computer bag was next to the desk, but since a park bench would make a worse bed than this hardwood floor, Kellan didn’t go that far in his search. Instead he opened the drawers. More signs of OCD neatness, paper, pencils and pens and paper clips in trays, but in the bottom right drawer, he hit a jackpot. A folder overfull of newsprint and the edge of a photo sticking out. Kellan tugged it until he could see more of it. Nate and his parents in some restaurant, Nate in a suit with his mom and dad. Based on Nate’s age, Kellan was guessing college graduation, but his mom and dad looked thirty years older than Kellan remembered them.

Kellan slid the picture back inside the folder and tipped his head upside down so he could see to the back of the drawer without disturbing anything.

“Score,” Kellan whispered to the empty apartment.

He got his fingers on the box he’d spied back there, and even before he pulled it out to where he could see it, Kellan knew what he’d find. Berger cookies. Baltimore’s best. Vanilla cookies covered with an inch of chocolate frosting. Kellan grabbed two and stuffed them in his mouth before tucking them back out of sight. The rich buttercream reassured more than his empty stomach. Nate hadn’t changed that much. He’d always been a sweets hoarder, like eating candy or cookies in public was some kind of sin.

Somewhere downstairs a door slammed. Kellan jumped like he’d been stealing cash instead of a few cookies. When the thunk of solid feet hit the wooden stairs, he ran for the bathroom and shower like his ass was on fire. It wasn’t so much that he needed to hide evidence of sneaking into Nate’s stash, but Kellan needed a few minutes to get ready for whatever was going to happen when Nate came in.

As Kellan backed into the spray, his hand reached for the first bottle of gel it could find. For an ancient-looking place, the apartment had good water pressure. Hot needles beat relaxation into his shoulders. Now that he was wet and naked, his neck and back weren’t the only things that would be better off with a release of tension. Looking down at his dick reminded Kellan of the grinding they’d done. It had been good enough to get the usual reaction from close contact with another human body. But when he’d knelt in front of Nate, Kellan’s junk couldn’t seem to make a collective decision about whether it was time to play or duck and cover. Then Nate had made that sound when Kellan licked him…

Maybe if he took advantage of the time to give his little soldier some R&R, neither of them would be thinking about how far he’d deviated from a straight line when he was on his knees. Or how flexible his dick was about what would make it jump up and salute. Because Kellan couldn't remember it ever getting that interested in the sound of a man’s gasp tearing out of a stretched-taut neck. That his dick didn’t care that the sex-moan sound was the result of Kellan having his lips on another man’s cock was something he wasn’t sure would wash away just by draining his balls. Especially not when the climb up to shooting kept filling his head with the hoarse sound Nate had made and the way his eyes had drifted closed, and how right it had felt to shove Nate up against the counter.