To Say I Love You (23 page)

His next thrust hit my prostate, and I groaned.

“Hey, Ben,” Will said, looking over to where he was playing with his balls.

“Mm?”

“Do you wanna suck him while I fuck him?”

“Fuck, yeah,” he mumbled. Will pulled out of my ass and rearranged me on my side so he could spoon-fuck me from behind. I was drifting through a strange sort of subspace; not deep, like he’d take me in a session, but hyper-aroused and only half-aware of the world around me. It was strangely liberating to close the whole world down to three men, dicks and ass and testosterone and fucking.

Will pushed back inside me, and the head of my cock was engulfed in warm, wet heat.

“Holy shit,” I said, the words sounding distorted by lust. From behind me, Will chuckled.

From that point, I let loose. I didn’t care about the people in the rooms on either side; I didn’t care what anyone thought of me or the noises I was making. I didn’t think about anything—thinking was overrated—I
felt
instead.

Will kissed my neck and reached around to squeeze my nipples between his thumb and forefinger, tighter than what was comfortable, teasing the piercings. I thrust forward into Ben’s mouth, back against Will’s cock, forward again, back again, building and building the curling heat in my stomach.

When I came, I yelled—almost screamed—riding the waves of pleasure as Ben sucked me dry and Will pounded against my prostate, pinching my nipple harder to give that delicious bite of pain to compliment the pleasure.

“Holy
shit
,” I said again, making him laugh as we extracted ourselves from each other.

I twisted in his arms and caught his lips in a breathless laugh.

We didn’t rest much the whole night; instead of each of us finding our release, then dozing off, the sexually charged energy kept us buzzing for hours and hours. We took it in turns to trade blowjobs, and I got to commit to memory the sight of Will on his knees sucking Ben, which was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. Then I fucked Ben again to get him off, him lying on his belly, me on top of him and pinning him down on the bed.

Then Will fucked me again, slow and easy, and I didn’t come but he did and that was fine.

We’d planned on leaving the hotel and going back to our own, letting Ben stay in it overnight. By the time dawn started to break over the city, we were almost spent and I had no energy left to move anywhere except to the bathroom, wincing with every step.

I slept in Will’s arms, my head on his chest while Ben spooned me from behind. When Will’s alarm went off, giving us an hour to get out of the room and check out before two, we all piled into the shower again and traded lazy, almost painful hand jobs, our orgasms dribbling out of tired, sated cocks.

A
FTER
THE
night with Ben, we pushed the whole Matthew issue aside. I wasn’t ready to forget it completely, but Will had to go back to his day job and work with the guy on a regular basis. I didn’t want to make things worse between us—he couldn’t change his job and his responsibilities. Matthew wasn’t going anywhere, so I had to do something with my problems and deal with them and trust my partner.

I did trust him, after all. With my life sometimes.

It was almost like the threesome had replaced a negative experience with another guy with a good one. A really hot, intense good experience.

Despite the underlying problems not being so easy to dismiss, I felt better about my relationship. I could be confident that Will and I were solid. Things would come along and rock us, but underneath it all, we had a relationship built on years of love and trust.

I was sprawled on the couch in my underwear, watching crap TV, when my phone buzzed with a message. It was from Ben.

Repeat performance?

Shit.
Shit.
We hadn’t discussed hooking up with him again, just left him to sleep it off with no promises. I felt bad, like we should have made that clear earlier. I could have ignored the message, but I genuinely liked the guy, and leaving him hanging just didn’t sit well with me.

Will’s in Atlanta, and we don’t play alone. Sorry!

I set my phone on the counter and forced myself to do an hour of chores. Cleaning the bathroom took time, then folding all our laundry. When I went back, there was another message.

No worries. Want to go for a drink? Nothing else.

The gentle letdown was forming in my head as my thumb hovered over the screen, but my fingers seemed to be working independently and the word “Sure” was sent even before I knew what I was doing.

Two more messages revealed we lived closer to each other than I’d thought, and there was a mall and restaurant area off the highway about thirty minutes’ drive for both of us.

Feeling like I was doing something incredibly stupid, I called my dad and asked to borrow his truck for the afternoon. If he said no, it would get me out of the whole thing.

He wasn’t planning on using it. I could have it until the next morning if I wanted, to save having to take it back late at night.

I knew I should have sent Will a text, to let him know what I was doing and with whom. But it was only a drink, a couple of beers because I was driving, maybe something to eat. With a friend. Who I happened to have fucked.

In the thirty minutes it took to drive to the bar, I worried and justified it to myself. A couple years of therapy had made me good at examining my feelings in a detached sort of way, and after some soul-searching, I decided I was lonely.

Even if I didn’t have sex with him again, Ben was a nice person whom I liked and who wanted to spend time with me. Since there was no one else for miles around who felt the same way, I decided that was good enough for now, our history be damned.

The parking lot was about half-full, which was good. There would be other people around but the bar wouldn’t be so packed we couldn’t talk. I wondered whether I should go in or not. Letting him down at this late stage would be an incredibly douchey thing to do. So I went in.

Ben was standing at the bar with a bottle of beer in front of him, casually watching a ball game on the wide-screen TV. He smiled when I approached and pulled me into a loose, friendly hug.

“Hey. How you doin’?”

“Good, thanks,” I said.

“Let me get you a drink,” he said, and waved the bartender over before I could protest.

When another group left, we snagged their booth and ordered a big plate of wings to share as the game wound down.

Ben was easy to talk to. So easy to talk to. We had a lot in common from growing up in a similar environment, and he told me about playing soccer and baseball at his high school until the gay rumors forced him to stop. I’d seen that happen, heard of it, but not experienced it myself.

He was into the Civil War history that had inspired me to get my master’s degree and ultimately led me to work in a museum. We both followed college football. He came from the same sort of old Southern family as me. From the night in the hotel, I knew we were both big, horny bottoms. We didn’t discuss sex.

Going home after spending a few hours with someone who was fun, whom I’d had fun with, was hard. Especially when the house was dark and quiet when I got in, and even the flickering light of the TV wasn’t enough company to pull me out of my funk.

Nights without Will in bed with me were always difficult, and I never slept quite so well. If I thought I could manage it, I would have followed him to Atlanta every week, staying in the hotel or exploring the city while he worked, but it was counterproductive to why I was in Georgia in the first place.

I ended up doing more trips to see family, taking care of the duties my mama used to do, keeping in touch with all the miserable old people who knew I was gay but wouldn’t be rude to my face. Oh no, they’d just bitch about me behind my back after I’d left.

Then Ben texted me again.

I’d told myself if I wasn’t initiating contact between us that made it okay, or more okay, because I deserved someone who would let me just chill out. I didn’t have to perform with Ben, not to either my Master’s or my family’s standards, and it was like a weight off my shoulders every time I heard from him.

Want to go out again? I’m lonely :(

This time I didn’t hesitate before telling him yes. I was lonely too.

In the five days Will had been home, I hadn’t told him about going to the bar. We’d been busy doing other things. He was still working, and I’d picked up another pile of reports from Serena. We’d had another session and made love before going to sleep nearly every night. He hadn’t even mentioned the night with Ben, and I didn’t want it to be weird.

I promised myself I’d tell him when he was home next. If he knew, then I wasn’t going behind his back. And he’d been telling me for weeks I needed to get out more, to be social again. He just probably didn’t imagine I was going to do it with the guy we’d both had sex with.

W
ILL
LIKED
to sleep in in the mornings while I went out running. I left him with a kiss on the cheek, and he usually dragged himself out of bed, into the shower, and to his desk before I arrived home.

So when I got back to the house, sweaty and out of breath, and the curtains were still drawn, I was worried.

I went straight to the bedroom without showering.

“Hey,” I said softly, sitting on his side of the bed.

Will took a deep, rattling breath.

“Oh, baby,” I said and pushed his hair back from his face. “You’re sick.”

“Not sick,” he mumbled, protesting weakly. “Just… tired.”

“I’ll have a shower, then I’ll make you some tea.”

“Not sick.”

“Mm.”

It didn’t take long for me to get clean and changed. I always felt so much better for having a cool shower after a run. I had a bunch of herbal teas in the cupboard and made Will a mug of peppermint. Since I wasn’t sick, I got coffee.

“Do you need me to cancel any of your appointments?” I asked Will as I set his tea on the nightstand.

“I’ll be fine in a minute,” he said, trying to sit up in bed. “I can do the meeting.”

“No, you can’t,” I said gently, pressing him back into the pillows. “Who do I need to call?”

He gave a harsh, hacking cough.

“The doctor, apparently,” I answered myself.

“I don’t need a doctor,” he said. The exertion made him cough again.

“Oh, I think you do.”

“I’ll be fine. There’s some Tylenol in the bathroom,” he wheezed.

“Sure. That’s a great place to start. I’ll call the doctor while you take those.”

Neither of us had been to the doctor here before, so it took a while to make the arrangements for him to be seen. We had insurance—that wasn’t the problem—it was more dragging my stubborn-ass boyfriend to the doctor in the first place. In the end, I threatened him with shots if he didn’t get proper medicine quickly. It was the very last weapon in my arsenal.

“Bronchitis. With a throat infection too,” the doctor said, setting down the light she’d been using to look into his throat. “Congratulations, Mr. Anderson, that’s quite an achievement.”

“He needs to rest now, right?” I said.

“For a few days, yes,” she said with a smile. “I’ll give you some antibiotics. It should clear up in a week. You can go back to work when you’re feeling strong enough. I wouldn’t rush back, though. It won’t do you any favors in the long run.”

“Thank you, doctor,” I said as Will protested weakly about his workload. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

We had to go to the pharmacy to pick up his medicine before going home, and I was tempted to leave him in the car. Will was still insisting he was fine, though, so I let him come with me and got plenty of dirty looks from the other people in the store for putting his snotty, wheezy self around healthy folks.

“Still tired?” I asked when we got home.

“Mm.”

“Okay. I’ll change the sheets later if you want to sleep now.”

He went to kiss me but I didn’t want what he had, so he pressed his dry lips to my neck instead. I brushed my hand over the top of his head, smoothing out the kinks in his hair, then let him go off to bed.

There was something gnawing at my stomach but I forced it out of my mind, not wanting to do any self-evaluation at the moment. With nothing better to do, I took a slow loop around the house, putting anything out of place where it belonged, setting the blanket straight over the back of the couch, emptying the trash.

Now that the house was finished, or at least done as far as we wanted it, there were less things for me to spend my time doing. I could have pulled up my laptop and started some more research for the museum, but I had a feeling my concentration for that sort of work wouldn’t last long.

I had equipment and ingredients in the kitchen to bake. I wasn’t the sort of person to store recipes in my head, though, so I wasn’t really sure what to do with them.

The thought came to me lightning-quick—Mama’s book. Of my mother’s possessions, I’d only taken a few things. She hadn’t left a will, so my dad inherited everything, not that there was much they hadn’t shared. Jennifer got her jewelry, saying if I ever had daughters she would pass it on. Dad had given me her books.