Dangerously Happy (39 page)

After my last day of work and a couple celebratory hours at the bar across the street from the office, I got home to find Dario upstairs, the recently erected walls of our soon-to-be den freshly painted a soothing tan that would have been boring except for one radiant cyan wall, still wet. I couldn’t believe he’d done it all himself.

“
I thought this was our weekend project,” I playfully reprimanded him.

“
I wanted to surprise you. I wanted you to start off your new life composing, not doing construction.”

I went to him, paused for a moment, then gave him a small, soft kiss. For days, ever since subjecting him to the restraints and the blindfold, things had been strange between us. I was anxious all the time because I honestly couldn't tell if the tension between us, if Dario's quiet fragility was a sign that he was on his way back to himself, on his way back to me, or if I'd made everything worse.

“
You’re going to spoil me rotten,” I said. “Soon you won’t be able to stand me.”

He grinned. “If you get to be too much of a handful, I’ll just put you over my knee and teach you some manners.”

Fuck, that sparked up a flare of want in me. Not that particular image, but the teasing way he'd said it. So like he'd been our first nights together when he'd made me blush and made me want him, grinning and gazing at me with his lovely, dark eyes. But I didn't want to risk spoiling our playful moment, putting him on the defensive by acting on my swelling yearning, so I just teased him, saying, “Oh no, I’d better keep in line, then.”

“
You can start by making dinner.” He held up his paint-spattered hand. “I don’t think I could lift a spatula.”

“
My pleasure. How does my spicy black bean soup sound?”

“
Almost as delicious as you.”

He gave me a lingering, tender kiss that went straight to my chest. Made me ache. Then he drew back, gazed at me a moment, then went to the bathroom and closed the door, and a minute later I heard the shower going.

It was a recipe I’d been cooking most of my adult life, one of those staples I’d make a huge batch of and live off for a whole week. Within fifteen minutes I had everything in the pot, simmering away. I went back upstairs to have another look at the den. When Dario had suggested the colors, I’d doubted, but now, imagining it with furniture, it looked like a set out of
Mad Men
. I started to peel up the tape protecting the baseboards, then stopped, tore off the chunk I’d stripped up, wadded it up, threw it in the cardboard box Dario was using as a trash can, and went into the bathroom.

“
Am I taking too long? Is dinner getting cold?” Dario’s voice emerged from the hiss of the shower.

My heart already beating heavily, I said, “It’s just stewing. Take as long as you want. Are you starving?”

“
No. No rush if it needs to simmer a while.” The gush of water went silent, except for an intermittent splat of a few residual drops hitting the wet floor of the shower, and Dario stepped out. So fucking beautiful. Wet, flushed from the heat of the shower, grinning at how I was looking him over. “Hand me a towel.”

I pulled a towel from the rack, but didn’t hand it to him. His grin blossomed into a real smile. “You’re going to make me blush, you standing there with all your clothes on, staring at me standing here naked.” More out of nervous uncertainty than anticipation, my heart was thumping harder, faster. Instead of handing him the towel, I walked over to the far wall—solid mirror from side to side and floor to ceiling—and wiped the steam away.

“
Need to do your makeup?” he teased.

So strange, being that nervous with him. Afraid it would go badly. That he'd turn me down, because except for letting me tie him up, he hadn't wanted to do anything sexual except please me a few times, which almost felt like maintenance, however sweetly and tenderly he'd carried it out those few scant occasions the past few weeks. But I made myself say it. “I thought you might enjoy watching.” I'd even managed to sound playful.

God, I loved that eager, aroused grin of his. God, I'd missed it. “Watching what, love?”

I said, “Watching me get down on my knees and sucking your cock.”

A little huff of an aroused laugh. Then a deliciously assertive, “Get undressed.”

Oh, God. Yes.

By the time I stripped and sank to my knees, in profile to the mirror so he’d be able to see everything, his cock was swollen, hanging heavy, twitching in its effort to rise. He came to me, breaking his gaze to watch the scene of us in the mirror as he approached, as he stroked my hair with both hands, not pulling me to him or pushing his cock toward my face. Just combing his fingers into my hair, gazing down at me, grinning, his breaths shallow with anticipation.

When I started sucking him, he sighed so sweetly it made both my chest and my cock ache, and I’d had him in my mouth less than a minute before he was hard as steel. He kept looking into the mirror, then gazing down at me, holding my gaze as I worked over his cock with my lips and tongue, ducking down now and then to lick and mouth his balls. After another minute or two I had to back off because he was already groaning and quivering at the edge.

He grinned at me, panting. “Shift around a little. I want you to look, too.”

Fuck, it was strange, angling toward the mirror, shifting my gaze to that reflection of us, seeing Dario’s wet, flushed cock by my face, seeing myself, naked, my hard cock sticking up as if it were pointing me toward Dario’s, seeing my own lips part, watching them envelop the swollen, glistening head of Dario’s cock, then watching the turgid length of him disappear into my mouth. Christ. I think watching us, now that I was watching, too, drove Dario even crazier. He kept making me stop, making me wait, and then each time I started to lick and suck him again he was whimpering and quivering within seconds.

I had him grunting and shaking for the tenth or fifteenth time when he pulled himself free of my mouth, panted, “Fucking hell.” Then, “Wait here.” He disappeared for a few seconds and was back with condoms and lube. “Please. Please, love. Let me fuck you like this.”

Fuck yes. God, I was hard for it. And so fucking happy my chest hurt.

He moved the shag bath mat in front of the mirror, I got on, and he knelt down behind me. Even more than watching myself blowing him, the sight of myself down on all fours, Dario up on his knees behind me drove a hot, startling thrill through me: incredible arousal tinged with—amplified by—embarrassment. And Dario, gazing at that reflection too, at the two of us. And then, just meeting my gaze in the mirror. My love.

And then we started. I thought it would be hot. This terribly sexy thing which—strangely enough—we'd never done before. And it was. But the surprising thing was how incredibly intimate, poignant, sweet it was, watching the two of us seeking each other, moving together, fingers intertwining, mouths seeking flesh, his arms wrapped around me, braced against my belly, against my chest, holding me to him as he moved inside me. His chin on my shoulder, his face by mine, our two gazes looking back at us. And—strangest of all—seeing my own face, the urgent need, the stunning, maddening, transporting pleasure giving me an expression I’d never seen in the mirror before. Seeing the love in my own eyes while we made love.

And the rousing, raunchy thrill of watching his greased-up hand wrap around my dick, stroking as he fucked me, the hot as hell sight of our bodies writhing and straining together as I braced myself against the mirror, arms overhead. Then Dario’s smile, his groaning, pleasure-wrought laugh as I ejaculated against the mirror and my cum trailed down our reflections in cloudy streaks as he fucked me in a desperate, flushed frenzy until he clutched me, groaned, and came inside me.

After dinner, we made love again. And again the next morning. We were us again.

A couple nights later I played my solo set. It was an utterly transcendent experience, unlike anything I’d felt before, like the audience went away, like I went away, or like all of us melted into the music in my head, in my soul, vibrating through me and spilling into the space, into them. It took me a while to come down from that high, drifting in the gentle chaos of warm bodies and voices, and when I did, it was like I’d woken from a trance or from death, woken in some ominous other world where there was just Dario, watchful, seeking, but always far away, and between us a thousand phantoms floating, weightless and immaterial, but somehow keeping us apart, like a tidal flood of invisible but poisonous jellyfish. I felt anxious. But Dario looked like a tormented animal. Caged. No, hunted. No, like an animal, a panther stalking prey beyond its reach, on the other side of a barbed-wire fence.

As the night wound down, he seemed more and more on edge each time another little clump of people drifted out, until the crowd had dwindled down to the last dawdling stragglers and I thought Dario was going to take the broom handle to them like a cattle prod and drive them out. When the final cluster finally shuffled off, Dario locked the door, turned around, and said in a voice so intense that I was suddenly afraid something was really wrong, that he was furious about something, “Go upstairs.”

I told myself he was just starting something, that he was going to turn that frightening energy that had possessed him for the last two hours into a supremely intense session of domination. He came up after me and, when we were by the bed, fixed his predator’s gaze on me and without a word, started stripping. I was weirdly nervous. So nervous, it was like vertigo. Like stepping off an unnoticed ledge. I just stood there, frozen, expecting, awaiting some instruction. But when he was naked he just came up to me and started pulling my clothes off.

Then he kissed me. Fuck, that kiss. Like he was trying to devour my soul.

Instead of looking sated, he looked like a feeding lion being threatened by the rest of the pride as he got me on the bed, put a condom on me, got under me, his open thighs pleading for my hips, and took me in. He wouldn’t let me stroke him.

“
No. Just, hold on as long as you can. Hold on forever. Then, please, love, please give yourself to me. Then, if you can, fuck me again. I want us to be endless.”

We kept at it for hours, until neither of us had the strength to move.

When I woke in the morning he was watching me. Watching me sleep. Watching me wake. Watching me smile. The look on his face, I couldn’t tell if he was supremely happy, or bereft.

“
I think you drugged me,” he sighed, his little tease pricking me with the memory of the ugly things that had poisoned our happiness recently. Maybe he'd caught it, too. Shifting metaphors he said, “I think you’ve learned to harness dark forces with that fallen angel’s voice of yours.” Still looking at me as if he was expecting me to turn to air before his eyes, he ran his fingers through my hair.

“
Love? You okay?”

He smiled, but that smile only made me more anxious. “What was it like for you, after that first time we messed around? The night the guys didn’t show up for rehearsal?”

“
It was . . . a lot of things. Exciting. Confusing. Scary, I guess. And it was . . .”

“
What, love?” he asked, his voice small and nervous.

“
I mean, there was that wild jumble of feelings that were about doing something with a guy for the first time. And then there were other feelings. About you.”

His sweet smile.

“
Every time I thought of you, my stomach would do that twingy flip thing. I guess the butterflies people talk about. I hadn’t felt that since high school, you know? That thrilling want mixed with fear.”

“
Really?” He sounded so hopeful. And a little fragile.

I kissed him. “Love. Didn’t you know? I don’t think anything less than being totally bewitched by you would have gotten me past all the stuff in my head about being with a guy. I mean, if I’d realized all of a sudden I wasn’t really into women, that I was gay, that would have been one thing. But . . . you know, I decided to be with you. Just for you.”

Melancholy smile.

“
Dario? Did I say something wrong?”

“
No, love. I’m just thinking about how it was for me. And you saying that just really hammers home how easily you could have made the other choice. Sometimes, I can feel it. The absence of us. The loss of us, when I think about how hard it must have been for you to choose me. It scares me to death.”