Double Blind (55 page)

Ethan opened his eyes and blinked. What?
But what about Evelyn?

“Don’t tell him I told you,” Randy went on. “But you need to understand, Slick—this place, Herod’s—it’s all he has left of Billy. His Billy. He wouldn’t fuck with it. He’s got some plan with it and you, and fuck if I know what it is, and I wouldn’t try to guess. But it’s not that he’s just having a good time at your expense. I swear, if I thought for half a second he were pissing with you, I’d tear Nevada apart until I found him, and I’d take out his fucking teeth one at a time.”

He’s in Utah,
Ethan almost said, then realized he couldn’t trust that, either. He looked up at Randy instead. “Why?” Ethan asked. “Why would you do that?”

Why are you choosing me over him?

Randy stared at him for a few seconds, his face hard to read but looking mostly like it was washed with heavy desperation and irritation. Then, finally, he took Ethan’s face in his hands and looked him straight in the eye, his dark, beautiful Randy eyes cutting holes through to the back of his head.

“Because,” Randy said, “my name is not Nick Snow.”

It was like they were running the “Hallelujah” chorus backward through Ethan’s head, or running it on a jumbled feed. He had never felt so many emotions at once in his life—joy, fear, disbelief, anger, sorrow, and love, beneath it all, love—so he just shut his eyes.

Randy kissed him lightly, but before Ethan could rouse himself to kiss back, Randy shifted, and then he was standing and pulling Ethan to his feet too.

“Come on,” Randy said, and pulled him into the hall.

“Where are we going?” Ethan asked, following, but blinking. He felt as if he were coming out of a very deep, dark hole, disoriented and wary.

Randy didn’t answer, not right away. As they walked, Ethan felt Randy’s fingers brush against his hand, and he felt Nick’s ring brush against his skin. Randy was still wearing it. Ethan hadn’t gotten used to that yet, and he never brought it up, but he noticed it at least once a day. He’d thought it was a reminder, either to Randy or to him. Some sort of warning not to get too close, to go too deep. But maybe that was wrong. All his thoughts seemed to be wrong, so this one must be too.

But he couldn’t think for the life of him why Randy would be so attached to some other man’s ring, if it weren’t for that.

Outside the door to Ethan’s office, Randy stopped, and faced him.

“I want to go in there,” he said quietly, “and I want to make love to you.”

The words, as they always did, warmed Ethan, and roused him, but then he remembered. “You said the office was bugged.”

“Oh, there’s hidden video, too, most likely,” Randy said. And grinned.

Ethan blinked. Then, as Randy’s grin turned wicked, Ethan’s blood began to hum.

“I owe you”—Randy reached out and ran his hand down Ethan’s neck—“a lap dance, for the fountain. And it occurred to me that you might like to play out the fantasy you confessed the other night too. Because don’t think for a minute that Crabtree won’t have an entourage with him, wherever he is, and he’ll bring them all in to watch the porn show.” When Ethan frowned and started to protest, Randy touched his fingers to his lips. “Show him, baby. Show him how strong you are. How strong I know you are. Because that’s what you do, Slick. You had it right before. When life fucks you over, you don’t slow down. You don’t stop. You don’t let it get you. You just keep going, keep moving, and you keep your eyes peeled for the next opportunity, the next dance. Don’t get bogged down in the endings.” His fingers faltered, and his eyes shifted to Ethan’s chest. “Or in the parts where you know you’re fucked even before you get there. Just do it. Just barge in there, guns blazing. Bluff, baby. Bluff. Bluff until they all fold or until you start to believe it yourself. If you fail, get up and bluff again.” He ran his fingers down the line of Ethan’s stubble, then leaned forward to kiss the edge of his jaw before he whispered in his ear. “Bluff him. But don’t bluff me.” He nipped at the lobe of Ethan’s ear. “
Fuck
me.”

Ethan might have told him no. He should have told him no, should have said or done something, but Randy was stroking him, kissing him, licking him, rubbing his body against him, and somehow Ethan didn’t object at all. Somehow he didn’t just fail to object, but he opened the door to the office, pushed Randy inside, then pushed him back against the door as it slammed closed and ground against him as he took Randy’s face in his hands and kissed him hard and fast and deep.

When Randy pushed him back onto the small sofa Sam had dragged out of storage so he had somewhere to sit, Ethan went, sinking back into the vinyl and spreading his legs, his cock swelling as he watched Randy begin to dance before him. There was no music, but it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter at all, because it was Randy, and he was moving, lean and hard and graceful in a way only he could. He could have been a pole dancer, the way he rotated his hips, so expert, so smooth, so perfect, so professional—Ethan realized, distantly, as his libido began to take over, that knowing Randy, he very likely
had
been a professional. There seemed to be very little that Randy hadn’t been.

And he worries about me seeing him as not strong. How could I see him as anything but?

Randy smiled a wicked smile, keeping it in place as—hips still undulating to an unheard beat—he pulled the hem of his T-shirt slowly up the sides of his body, over his nipples, over his shoulders. The fabric tangled in his arms, briefly obscuring his face as he exposed himself, as he pulled the shirt higher and higher and higher. Then he pulled it off and stood, still dancing, still smiling, cool and easy and beautiful, still Randy, moving before him.

Don’t slow down. Bluff.

But don’t bluff me.

Ethan still felt raw inside, but he kept his exterior cool, taking strength and security from Randy, replacing his veneer as he watched his lover dance and strip before him so expertly that there was no question: Randy had done this before.

And now he’s doing it for me,
Ethan forced himself to see, made himself bask in that truth as Randy, clad now only in his underwear, straddled him on the couch and continued his dance.

Ethan
knew the body undulating above, hell—
on
him—so well he could almost paint it, but this was like seeing it for the first time, and he didn’t know where to look, because he was trying to see everything. Randy’s thighs, so strong, not tanned like his torso, but very defined and muscular. Thighs that hugged his beloved bike, that tensed when he crouched down, that twisted with him when he maneuvered beneath an engine. Thighs that liked to spread out over a chair, one leg extended to the side while he played poker.

Thighs that grazed Ethan’s own now, and thighs that bore him, stabilized Randy as he leaned back, arching his back as one hand braced against the edge of the couch and the other slipped inside the waistband of his underwear to touch himself.

Ethan looked at Randy’s chest, broad and thick with muscle. He looked at his stomach, taut, but not completely—he was older after all, and didn’t get to the gym every day. He saw Randy’s belly, just a tiny, tiny bit of paunch that Ethan knew he was self-conscious about. The tiny bit of paunch that Ethan loved to touch, to kiss, because it made Randy quiver and go soft.

Ethan looked at his arms: thick, highly muscled arms, his prizes, which he liked to show off with shirts too tight and with sleeves barely there. He saw the black tattoo on his lover’s shoulder: a spade, small and subtle, but there. Ethan had kissed it. Licked it. Suckled it.

Bitten it.

He took in Randy’s hair, always floppy, always just a little bit greasy, because he used too much gel. Sam was always after him for it, and Randy would yell at him back then run his hands through his mop, making it worse. Dark, floppy, unruly hair, made darker by the stubble on his jaw, the dark wildness of his big brown eyes.

Ethan looked at Randy’s mouth, thin, wide, always hitching on the right side, the tiny scar that curled into the left. Tiny, but it was there.

He saw the cleft of his chin. The slope of his neck. The taut pebbles of his nipples.

Those nipples were inches from Ethan’s face, moving, moving, moving, teasing him, brushing against his mouth before Randy stepped back off the couch again, and then, still swaying and dancing, pushed his underwear down and stepped out of them. Then he braced his hands on the wall behind Ethan’s head, knelt on the couch, and began to dance again.

His cock was visible now too. His fat, long cock, rough and uncut like the rest of him. Thick and full of veins, it had been the source of hours of fascination for Ethan. He’d never touched an uncut penis before Randy, and Randy was happy to let him play with it at any and all times, he’d told Ethan, and he’d lived up to his word. It was a very erect cock now, and the head of Randy’s penis was pushing out through the sleeve of his foreskin, bulbous and pink and straining. Ethan liked best to grip it, to hold it tight and slide the skin, feeling it shift under his hand, a membrane between himself and Randy’s organ that was of him but not the organ itself, like a veil that never lifted—except for when that head came through, sliding out to wink its hello. Ethan would slide the foreskin back farther with his lips and suckle, slipping his tongue inside the slit, then around, then slip beneath the sleeve of flesh, then go around and back again, all the while sliding, massaging, claiming the shaft.

Mine. My Randy.

And as if to make the claim for the benefit of their silent viewers, to let them know this cock, this man, this sensual creature was his, Ethan reached out, took the shaft in hand, and then drew it smartly into his mouth.

Randy gasped, then growled and thrust, pushing himself into Ethan’s throat until Ethan grabbed those hips and forced him into a new rhythm, into his own. He held Randy’s thighs, slid his hands up to that stomach, to that chest, teasing those nipples, lingering there to pinch and roll them because he knew that made Randy go a little crazy, and he did, crying out and then sinking into him, into the touch, into the claiming. When Ethan pulled back from his lover’s erection, Randy slid down Ethan’s body, down against his shirt, settling on the tent of Ethan’s cock through his trousers, his naked body humping insistently against Ethan’s clothes.

Ethan claimed Randy’s mouth next, kissing him confidently, carnally—all his hesitation gone, or at least no longer piloting the ship. He didn’t understand how Randy could see him come so unglued and then so easily yield to him mere moments later, but that was what was happening, and, really, this was what had been happening between them since they started. What would, he assumed, keep happening.

He hoped it kept happening. He didn’t know how to keep this from ever stopping, but if he could find
that
answer, he’d seize it in a heartbeat.

Ethan wanted to claim him more, wanted to claim him all the way. He wanted Randy to come against him, against his skin, and he wanted to come with him. He undid his pants, and Randy, reading his mind, finished the job, taking Ethan’s cock out and sliding it against his own. It reminded Ethan of the other night, when they’d begun this way and ended with Sam paddling Randy while he crouched over Ethan. It made him hot. It made him want to press Randy back into the couch and hump against him, hard and rough and fast, until they were both breathless and gasping, cum spraying everywhere between them.

Gripping the sides of Randy’s body, Ethan turned them to the side, slid over his lover, and did just that.

But they needed better friction. Ethan bent over and fumbled with Sam’s duffel, turning it inside out as he searched for lube, lotion, shaving cream—anything. He found a bottle of something that said NOMAD, expensive-looking and with a camel on it, but it was creamy, and he fumbled until he had a dollop of it in his hand, and then he slathered it on the two of them, sliding and slipping and tightening until Randy was pushing up against him, begging him in a whisper, “Fuck me, Ethan,
fuck me
,” and Ethan growled into his neck as he leaned over to get more lubrication.

He glanced briefly at the tube, something catching his eye, and then Randy stuck his tongue in his ear and he shivered, whispered, “Fuck!” and dove at his lover’s mouth again. Their hands warred over their cocks until they were tugging them together, their chests rubbing hard and tight against one another, nipples brushing nipples and hair and muscles, and then Ethan pressed their groins together and humped faster and harder until he felt Randy tightening, ready to release—once he began, Ethan let himself go too, following after, and then they collapsed, shuddering together, kissing, humping and grinding in a sort of aftershock.

“Baby,” Ethan whispered, and kissed the nape of his neck. Ethan growled, then laughed, then ground against him again.

The door opened, and Ethan knew they should pull apart and be shocked, but he couldn’t manage it—he was too spent. He just looked up, dazed, uninterested in rousing himself for anything.

Then he saw what was standing there, and he went still.

For a minute he thought he was hallucinating, because there in the doorway was something between a man and a woman and a bird.
Butterfly,
his brain corrected him, but it hardly mattered: it was like nothing he’d ever seen. Slight, rounded, beautiful, full of wings and sequins and glitter and painted face, Ethan had no idea who or what this was. Man? Woman? Angel? Insect? Beautiful and handsome, exotic and sexual and innocent, all at once. Its eyes were round and rimmed with dark lines and glitter. Its hair was hidden by a hood and a sort of headdress. Wings, huge, glittering wings flanked either side of the skin-tight body suit.

“Oh,” the vision said, then backed up. “Wait,” it said to someone behind it. “Don’t go in. They’re—you can’t go in.”

And it was only then, when he recognized the voice that Ethan figured it out.

“Sam?” he said, and sat up.

Randy sat up, too, reaching for his clothes, but unhurriedly, and then when he caught sight of Sam in the doorway, he stopped short.

“Peaches?” he said, as amazed as Ethan.

“Hold on,” Sam said, then came in and shut the door.

He didn’t look like Sam, not at all. The young man Ethan had come to know and love was nowhere in this creature. No man or woman was, either. This had to be the costume Caryle had been speaking of.

It was fucking brilliant.

But Sam was looking at them dazed, and it was clear he was trying to tell them something. Ethan tried to drag his focus back to listen.

“Ethan,” Sam said, whispering. He seemed stunned, in some sort of shock, barely holding himself together. Ethan worried that something had happened to Mitch, but then Sam continued speaking. “Crabtree called. He has the headliners.”

“Oh?” Ethan tried to zip himself discreetly, trying to ignore the fact that his shirt and pants were sprayed with semen. “Who is it? Wait—headliners? More than one?”

Sam looked like he was seriously going to be sick. “One for each night. Some friend of his knows a whole bunch of performers, so we have someone for each of the five nights. A magician, a hypnotist, and three s-s-singers.” He swallowed and sank against the door. “They’re all Australian. Because the friend is Australian.”

Randy had climbed back into his underwear and had his shirt over his head, but was now looking at Sam, clearly torn between confusion and concern. “Peaches, you okay?”

Sam’s fingers curled against the door. “Missy Higgins,” he rasped. “Some singer named Missy Higgins. She’ll be the third night.” He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “And then Olivia Newton-John. She’ll be the last night.”

Ethan’s eyebrows shot halfway up his forehead. “Sam! My God, that’s wonderful!” How the hell had Crabtree done that? Ethan had heard she wasn’t even touring anymore!

Sam was shaking his head, and when he spoke, it was only in a whisper. “The first night—” His eyes were wild, almost crazy, full of wonder and hope and disbelief and utter, utter terror. “Kylie,” he rasped, and began to slide slowly down the door, a technicolor butterfly melting slowly toward the floor. “The first night is Kylie.”

Ethan blinked, not sure what Sam was talking about or who this was, and then he remembered the wax museum. Kylie: Sam’s Kylie. Sam had given Ethan quite the education in the past few weeks about Kylie Minogue; she was on a level with Madonna everywhere but in the United States, and to many here, too, she was as big or bigger. Crabtree had scored
her
? It seemed more than just surreal. It seemed impossible. Ethan didn’t know how to react, and so he just stared at Sam.

But Randy laughed and went forward, still only half-dressed to collect Sam off the floor, and Ethan took in the dazed wonder on the younger man’s face and realized it didn’t matter. However this happened, it had happened. It was going to happen: Butterfly Nights was going to happen.

It was going to be fantastic. And worth every bit of pain and doubt and crazy that it took to carry them there.