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Authors: Amy Jo Cousins

Tags: #m/m;New Adult;contemporary;friends with benefits;love triangle;art;painting;geology;camping;New England;college

Love Me Like A Rock (6 page)

BOOK: Love Me Like A Rock
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Zzzzzip. Zzzzzip.

The hiss of zippers being stripped open sounded loud in the tent.

“Oh my God, you are such a whiner. C’mere, princess.” Sean sighed and pulled Austin bodily on top of him, until they were pressed together from shoulder to ankle, then tugged at Austin’s sleeping bag until it was draped precariously on top of them.

Austin immediately felt guilty, even as he tucked his head under Sean’s chin and settled in. “You can’t sleep like this.”

“You’re more than welcome to wear me out a little first, you know. In the interests of helping me sleep.” The low buzz of Sean’s voice wrapped Austin up like a blanket, rumbling in his ear and vibrating through the bones of Sean’s chest beneath Austin’s cheek.

Which was just what Austin had been hoping Sean would suggest. He didn’t know why he was holding back from doing the suggesting himself. Something about being the new guy, probably, although most of the time he was the last one to worry about whether or not someone else approved of him. That was certainly how he’d ended up getting busted blowing that twink in the boathouse freshman year.

But maybe because these guys were Sean’s friends—more than friends, actually, since they were peers in the geology department, and probably colleagues down the road who’d be competing for internships and jobs—he’d been reluctant to make a move, in case this wasn’t that kind of party.

“Yeah? You don’t mind?” he asked slyly, reaching between them to push Sean’s sweatpants down past his already hard dick. “Because I get hyperfocused when I’m a little high. And really, really oral.”

He was pretty sure Sean’s grunt wasn’t just because Austin had accidentally elbowed him in the stomach while sliding down low in the sleeping bag, which was basically just a mat spread out beneath them now, as his own bag slid off his shoulders.

“Shit, yes. I mean, no. I don’t—ahh—” Sean’s voice cut off with a sharp inhale as Austin slid his mouth over the tip of his dick.

Going deep could wait. Austin wanted to taste. Sweet and metallic and smoky with that burned-wood smell that soaked through your clothes after six hours around a campfire, flavors exploded in his mouth and he hummed in happiness until Sean’s fingers clutched his hair.

“Jesus, Austin.”

He swiped his tongue around the head and then slipped his lips back down to clamp right beneath the ridge that defined it, sucking on the tip like it was a Popsicle and he didn’t want to drip on the sidewalk.

He scraped the edge of his blunt nails against the tight, wrinkled skin of Sean’s balls, pulled up tight against the base of his oh so sensitive dick, until a muffled groan ripped out and he looked up to see Sean with his wrist shoved in his mouth.

Screw those other guys. Like they wouldn’t be banging their girlfriends if they’d been smart enough to bring them.

Austin tugged Sean’s hand down.

“I wanna hear,” he muttered, and sucked a mark onto the inside of one thigh before turning his attention back to Sean’s cock in his mouth.

“Austin. Austin. Austin.” Sharp tugs on his hair. The words had been background noise, but the tight bursts of pain in his scalp pulled his focus back a little.

He knew why Sean was pulling his hair and didn’t care.

He sucked harder and forced himself deep, wanting the taste of Sean so far inside him it would linger on his tongue until dawn. The first spurt made him shiver and he swallowed again and again while Sean shook and clutched at him with strong fingers in Austin’s hair.

The thump of Sean’s heartbeat under his cheek afterward was a counterpoint to the beat echoing in his own dick.

Sean groaned and pushed his hands down Austin’s back until he had a palm on each butt cheek. “God, get off me and I’ll…get you off. Man, that sounded dumb.”

“Sounds awesome.” Austin slid to the tent floor, tugging his sleeping bag under him. Then remembered that he’d smoked up. “But I’m still pretty buzzed, so it’ll probably take forever.”

“I’m not worried.”

“I’m just saying, if you get bored, I won’t take it personally if you want to stop.” He’d learned not to get high before fucking around with Vinnie, because Vinnie would give up after a while, telling Austin to come back when he was sober and could come.

“I’m not gonna get bored. I’ve got you to play with.”

Not believing him didn’t mean Austin was going to stop Sean from going to town. He could always finish himself off in the end, and it would still be better than jerking off back at the dorm in his room by himself.

He shucked his underwear in ten seconds flat and tucked himself halfway into his sleeping bag, because it was damn chilly still. But he left all the important bits accessible, and wrinkled up his nose when Sean laughed at him.

“I can’t believe you don’t have sleeping bags we can zip together or something. Don’t they make those anymore?”

“I don’t usually have company when I’m in the field. Or camping for fun. My stuff’s meant for work, not play. But we can make it work. And if we do this again, I’ll loan you my silk long johns.”

Austin could already tell he’d be saying yes anytime Sean extended an invitation. But he kept that tidbit to himself, because it sounded a little too…something he didn’t want to think about.

“As slinky as that sounds, if we do this again, I’m buying you zip-together sleeping bags,” Austin said with a sigh as Sean grabbed the open zip edge of his sleeping bag and dragged him closer.

The sudden halt to his slide across the tent floor caught him off guard. The look on Sean’s face was indecipherable.

He’d done it again. Waved his family’s money around like an incredibly obnoxious flag without even thinking about it. “Shit. Sorry. These sleeping bags are great. I’m really grateful you found an extra one for me. Sorry.”

“Shut up, Austin,” Sean said, leaning over him and pressing a kiss to Austin’s open mouth until he was breathless and squirming. “I’m not offended by your apparent ability to buy me twice over. I’m just reminding myself not to get too worked up when you say stuff like that. Like you’re planning on sticking around for a while.”

“Shit. Sorry,” he repeated, but then lost the capacity for words when Sean dragged his beard down Austin’s neck and chest, tickling his nipples, his skin, every inch of him until Austin’s skin was so sensitized Sean’s breath ghosting across it triggered shivers.

He arched his back and waited for Sean’s hand or his mouth or the nearest fucking body part to land on his dick, thick and heavy against his belly. The pull of muscles in his stomach, tugging down to his groin, felt so good he did it again, knowing he looked like a total hedonist, writhing under the touch of Sean’s mouth and hands. Knowing and not giving a damn.

“God, just look at you.” Sean’s voice was thick, his hand tracing up and down Austin’s butt cheek and upper thigh, skimming close to his dick but not touching it yet, no matter how much Austin groaned and squirmed, not giving a shit who heard him halfway to begging. “You’re so fucking gorgeous.”

It was a powerful drug, lying there stretched out under the hungry eyes of someone who wanted him so hard.

“Did it feel like this when I was watching you?”

“When?”

“When I was drawing you and you were staring at me and I noticed?”

“It always feels like this when you see me.”

For a minute, Austin felt bad, because he’d looked at Sean so many times, apparently, without ever really seeing him. But then Sean’s hands moved lower, pushing Austin’s legs apart, and the looking got too intense to let him keep any other thoughts in his head except desperation for Sean’s touch.

“Please please please…” The stream of words pouring from his mouth should have been embarrassing. Begging carried with it a vulnerability he didn’t usually allow himself if he wasn’t sure of the man in his bed.

But somehow there were no doubts with Sean. And begging was easy and playful, because he knew nothing was going to be withheld and every sound he made was as much of a turn-on for Sean as it had been for Austin with his mouth on Sean’s cock.

The memory of that hard length pressing deep was enough to shoot his hips up, heels digging into the plush sleeping bag. A cry ripped out of him as Sean’s mouth sucked him in at last, wet heat blazing from his crown to his balls in one deep swallow that made Austin see the stars he knew spilled across the midnight-black sky.

Chapter Six

“Oh my God, my clothes all smell like bacon. I forgot about that part.”

“What?” Sean’s sleepy voice rose from where his head was buried in his sleeping bag.

“I forgot that sitting by a campfire for a couple of hours was going to make my clothes smell like bacon.” He’d gotten up at what looked like the asscrack of dawn because he had to piss.

Sean snorted. “They don’t smell like bacon.”

“They totally do. I’m going to have to buy all new stuff.” He stuffed his face in the fleece jacket he’d worn the night before and smelled it again. Yup. Bacon.

“Or you could try, you know, just washing it,” Sean said as he sat up and stretched until his hands brushed the tent ceiling.

God, Austin really liked looking at naked Sean.

He dragged his attention back to the smoked-meat reek of his clothes. “I’m going to smell bacon every time I look at this jacket.”

Sean snagged his wrist and tugged Austin closer. “I fail to see how that is a problem, actually.”

“Bacon is for eating, not wearing.”

“Says you,” Sean growled into Austin’s neck, biting at the skin there with sharp teeth until Austin shuddered.

Maybe he did want to wear bacon after all.

* * * * *

“Coffee on the fire.” One of the other geology guys lifted his chin toward the crackling wood in the wobbly ring of rocks they’d built last night. If he’d been awake by the time Sean had let Austin come, he either didn’t feel the need to comment on it or didn’t care, which was fine and dandy as far as Austin was concerned.

He had a bit more on his mind at the moment than post-coital public embarrassment. His early morning piss in the woods had been quite the wake-up call.

Especially when Sean had offered him what Austin was calling the poop digger in his head.

“Cool, thanks,” Austin said in response to the coffee offer, but made no move to grab some, despite the smell twisting across the campsite and luring him in like cartoon magic potion smoke.

Sean slung an arm across Austin’s shoulder and the temptation to lean into him was irresistible.

“I made Chris bring the good stuff for you,” Sean said into his ear.

Which was sweet as hell, and Austin felt like a wretch for not immediately racing to the campfire where there was undoubtedly some primitive kind of coffee pot sitting over an open flame.

He shook his head no, remembering the problem. “I can’t.”

“You can’t what?”

“I can’t drink coffee here.”

“What? Why not?” Sean pulled away far enough to look him in the eye. “Thought you couldn’t function in the morning without it.”

“Yes, but…” Holy crap. This was too embarrassing for words. Austin opened his mouth again, then shut it with a click. Nope.

Sean tugged him away from the campfire and back toward their blue tent.

“What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

Austin shot a glance around the clearing, making sure no one was close, even as he dropped his voice to a whisper.

“Coffee makes me poop.”

Sean snorted, but not loud enough to turn heads, so although Austin’s face felt so hot they could fry eggs on it for their lumberjack-in-the-woods breakfast, he didn’t have to leave all his stuff behind and head straight for the car.

“And?”

“We’re in the woods.”

“You noticed,” Sean said, and smiled as he slung his arms around Austin’s waist, which still felt kind of weird in this group of beardy dudes who liked rocks and other things found in the dirt.

Austin gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to poke Sean in eye with a pointed finger. “I am not going to go squat over a hole I dig in the woods and take a shit.”

A cloud of confusion passed over Sean’s face, settling in for a drizzle of perplexity. “But, we’re here for two days.”

“I know.”

It was possible he hadn’t thought through this plan with a true grasp of human biology.

“But you’re not going to not crap for two days,” Sean said slowly, staring at Austin as if waiting for him to clear things up. Austin didn’t say a word. Sean’s eyes widened. “Are you?”

“Well, I thought…” And he couldn’t finish that sentence. He just couldn’t. Because it was obviously the dumbest fucking idea he’d ever had in his entire life.

This time Sean’s snort erupted like a baking soda and vinegar volcano gone wrong, spilling out into the quiet of the morning until yes, heads were turning, faces smiling at them as Austin stood with an iron-poker-straight spine.

“Austin, I swear it’s not as bad as you’re imagining. You’re going to be way less comfortable if you try to avoid it.”

And so began the most embarrassing ever argument of Austin’s life. Plus, proof positive that Sean could out-stubborn him with ease.

* * * * *

His quads were burning, the ball of unspooled toilet paper crumpled in his hands as he squatted over the fucking hole in the fucking ground he’d dug himself.

“How you doing?” That voice was way too close.

“Shut. Up. If you talk to me while I’m doing this, we’re never fucking again.” And speaking of fucking, hell, no. It was going to be hand jobs from here on out this weekend. Austin had never thought of himself as a particularly fastidious person, but he’d grown up with indoor plumbing for Christ’s sake, and apparently getting used to that kind of luxury spoiled a guy for shitting in the woods.

Biodegradable wet wipes were great, yes, but still…

He’d also never thought of himself as shy, but when the guy you were sleeping with was one bush over, that put more than a little shine of self-consciousness on the moment.

“I’m just going to wait for you—”

“Fine,” Austin snapped. Then sighed as the sound of Sean rustling away gave his digestive tract permission to get in gear.

By the time he made it back to where Sean sat on a rotting log, waiting for him, Austin’s temper was battling with his sense of the ridiculous and losing.

“I don’t want to do this anywhere fucking near you. Ever again,” he swore as he handed Sean the trowel to put back in the pack. “But. It wasn’t awful. Don’t say it.”

Sean took the warning to heart, dragging pinched fingertips together across his lips, zipping them tight. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Not until they entered the edges of camp, strolling between tents from which sounds of people getting dressed or talking casually escaped, did Sean give in to the temptation Austin knew had to be killing him.

“Told you so.”

“I swear to God, I will kill you if we keep talking about this. Kill you and hide your body, and you know there’s plenty of places out here I can do that too.”

* * * * *

By the time Sean cajoled him into stuffing his feet in his boots and hitting the trail, the sun had risen high enough to let his fingers bend again and Austin insisted on tucking a sketchpad and pencil into Sean’s pack.

He was going to offer to take turns carrying the damn thing, but after Sean laughed at how Austin’s bedheaded curls stuck out from under the edge of his knit hat like octopi feeling around for lunch, Austin decided Sean could carry everything, all day long, thank you.

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing things with rocks?” Austin thought to ask halfway up whatever hill they were climbing. The path was uneven, bare dirt rucked up with rocks and tree roots, and his thighs were pleasantly burny from the uphill hike.

“Busman’s holiday,” Sean said, giving him a hand over a log across the path.

They’d left the rest of the group at the campsite, playing cards and debating their own plans for the day that mostly seemed to involve things way less full of exertion than the “walk” Sean had proposed.

But when they reached their destination, Austin didn’t regret a second of the long hike that left him wishing they’d brought something more substantial than trail mix and granola bars for a snack.

“God, it sucks that I didn’t bring my watercolors. Why the fuck didn’t I bring my watercolors?” he demanded of Sean, hands on his hips and annoyed at the world because his hands itched to be painting and his frigging pencil wasn’t going to cut it.

“Because we had to hump all our stuff into the woods and you didn’t want to add to the load?” Sean asked like a totally reasonable person would, which was just rubbing it in as far as Austin was concerned.

He hand-waved that argument away. “I’ve got a travel-size set the size of a deck of cards. You could fit it in your back pocket. Shit.”

The pressure to draw had built through their entire hike up to this. This…this was a scenic fucking outlook if he’d ever seen one.

Hills and valleys and mountains in Massachusetts weren’t glorious. They didn’t beat at your eyeballs like the Rockies or the Alps, demanding respect and awe, slashing across the landscape like razor-edged giants. Massachusetts’ geological formations were old and worn, rough edges rubbed off by the passage of millennia—eons? What time frame did erosion take place in?—their presence more like the afghan knit by a grandmother draped over the back of the couch. Soft, in the background, easy to forget.

But with a little elevation and the haze of a morning whose mists hadn’t been burned away yet by the day’s sun, the view in front him sparkled with a shiny prettiness that cried out for being laid down on paper.

“It’s so pretty,” he murmured, slipping his hand into Sean’s and leaning against his solid bulk. “So different from the mountains in Colorado.” Ski trips out west had spoiled him for East Coast mountains. Or so he’d thought until now.

Sean squeezed his fingers. “That’s because the Rockies didn’t get flattened by a couple of ice ages like Massachusetts did.”

“When was that?” He’d definitely learned this stuff in grade school, but it hadn’t stuck.

“Last one was about fifteen thousand years ago. Lasted for a thousand years and left behind Cape Cod when it retreated. Plymouth Rock is an erratic from the Wisconsinan glaciation, the ice age before that.”

Austin let go of Sean’s hand and sat down with his tiny sketch pad. “Wisconsinan?”

“Funny, huh? The other one was the Illinoian.”

“Those Midwesterners get all the good stuff.”

While he was talking, his hand had started unconsciously sketching Plymouth Rock instead of the landscape. He’d seen it on enough school field trips as a kid to remember its shape forever.

“The glaciers just picked the rock up somewhere in Canada and left it behind in Massachusetts?” he asked, curious.

Sean snorted. “Sort of. There are a bunch of different way glaciers move rocks, and ice rafting is one of them. But Plymouth Rock came from what would become Africa, before the Atlantic existed.”

“Cool.” He liked learning stuff like that. It always showed up in his art sooner or later. Everything did. “So when you’re looking at rocks or the ground or whatever, the layers don’t necessarily make sense when you first look at them, because of things like glaciers, but you can figure out the story if you study it long enough?”

“That’s right,” Sean said, and the excitement in his voice almost escaped Austin, because something he’d just said was important, but he wasn’t sure what. Something that set his art brain buzzing in the background, that hum of
what could be
that always meant he was about to access something awesome.

But the mountain and the valley and the fading mist of the morning were too present, too distracting for him to grab hold of the thought. He let it go. A good idea never vanished for long. It would surface again at some point, like a submarine poking up through the ice in the Arctic Circle.

In the meantime, he could draw, and maybe take some of the details back home with him so he could recapture the misty pinks and greens and blues of what might be spruce trees in the distance. Sean moved away, his steps noisy as he headed into the trees off the path, probably in need of a piss after the quart of water he’d forced them to share on the walk up.

By the time Sean returned, Austin was so far deep in his own head he didn’t hear a thing until there were boots crunching the dry leaves next to him.

“Here. Try these.”

“Hmm. What?” He picked a stone out from under his butt while looking up, shading his eyes against the bright sun.

“Here.” Sean squatted next to him and started laying leaves and rocks and what looked like translucent pink berries on the ground next to him. “Gimme your sketchbook.”

Handing that over without revealing his reluctance to do so was a challenge. One he failed apparently.

Sean shook his head, smiling. “Don’t worry. I promise not to hurt it.”

“I know—” Austin cut himself short as Sean flipped to a blank page, pinched one of the pink berries between his thumb and index finger and smeared it across the middle of the page, leaving a streak of pale pink goo with bits of berry skin stuck in it. “Oh.”

A crumpled-up leaf scraped across the paper left a greenish tinge. After Sean washed the dirt off one of the stones with some bottled water, he used it to make an ochre, chalky smudge.

“So you can have some color, if you want.”

Austin figured he’d been sitting on the edge of the overlook for about an hour, lost in his head while he drew broad landscapes and tiny detailed sketches of individual leaves. He’d assumed Sean was off doing whatever geologists did. Licking rocks or something.

Instead, Sean had spent that time focused still on Austin. And it was a strange feeling, to know he’d had Sean’s attention that entire time, even when Austin hadn’t been thinking about him at all.

“What’s that look for?” Sean asked, nudging him with an elbow.

“I’ve always had this feeling, ever since I was little,” he began, unsure of how to explain himself. But absolutely certain now that Sean would want to listen to him. That was another weird feeling. Certainty. “I don’t know if it means I’m a total egotist or the opposite.”

Beside him, Sean rocked back from his squat until his butt hit the ground, wrapping his arms around his knees and resting his chin on them. Quiet, listening. The way he always listened to Austin.

“It’s always surprised me, whenever I hear people say things like, ‘We were just talking about you the other day.’ Because a part of me thinks that if I’m not right in front of someone, there’s no reason for them to think of me at all.”

BOOK: Love Me Like A Rock
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