Chapter 14
We make it to St. Matthew with two full planes, get the cargo unloaded, and then help some of the locals with deliveries and stocking. We have nothing else to do but wait until the flights with our return cargo come in, treating this island as a midway checkpoint. We meet up with a few people we know for dinner at the lodge, catching up since we only see them once every few months.
I brought the whiskey. Zahn brought the extra whiskey. So I guess our night is set. There’s a good chance we’ll be here all day tomorrow, waiting around, so there’s nothing better to do than drink, chat, and play some cards.
I will admit, I was a bit worried things would get strained between me and Zahn after the weekend in Anchorage, but it hasn’t. Other than him incessantly going on about the ‘blindfold blowjob’, things have been normal between us. He’s still his blunt, funny self, and I’m still working through my head while he sort of helps me without even knowing he’s helping me.
Our friendship is still the same. Our business is still thriving. Our banter hasn’t lost its edge. The only thing that’s different since we started this fuck-pact is our openness to talk about it. Well, more like the comfort to admit that we like it and want to keep it going. It’s been fun to plot and plan future ideas of things we want to try with our next hookups, and it’s become a bit of a game. Naturally, Zahn takes the game to heart and wants to win by blurting out the most ridiculous shit, but I love him for it. He’s always got some crazy idea.
Like this morning, when he suggested we go for Gar together. I mean, I’m not as sexually open as Zahn is, but I’d get sexy with Gar. He’s everyone’s exception to the rule, and I’m not even afraid to admit it. Gar is one sexy, cute mix of a man, and he gets my dick jumpy whenever he’s around. I can be honest about that. So, of course, we spouted off a bunch of Gar fantasies, decided Laken would kill us, and called it a done conversation.
“Would you ever wanna bring another guy into it?” I ask him from my bed while he lounges on his across the tiny room. A scotch in each of our hands because someone gave us a bottle, and now we can keep our whiskey bottles as backups in case we get stuck here for longer than expected.
“Like just a guy? You, me, and a guy?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I laugh, shrugging. “Just wondering.”
“What would you do?” he asks, grinning. “You’re not into guys.” Am I not? “I’ve never actually messed around with a guy without a chick being there.”
“You wouldn’t?” I want to know because that’s the part that confuses me. He says it’s all about the vibe and the heat of the moment, yet he’s never found that heat in a situation with another guy? Why would gender matter if he says it’s all about the atmosphere? “You don’t want to know what it’s like to have guy-on-guy action?”
He shrugs, looking down at his lap for a second. Shyness? On Zahn? No fucking way. “I mean, I would, I think. I’ve just never… been in the right place where it was all set up for that. I think I’m easier to rile around a woman or something. So far, at least.” He looks at me, green eyes curious. “Why are you even asking me this? What would you do if it was just us and a guy?”
Watch. Maybe more. I’m sweating.
“Don’t tell me you’ve adopted my pervy ways.” He laughs, throwing his pillow at me.
“A little,” I admit, not ashamed of it. “It’s hot to watch. It was hot to watch at Cody and Cara’s sexy toy party night.” I shrug again.
“Hell yeah it is,” he agrees, tilting his scotch at me. “Did you…”
“What?”
“Nothing. Nevermind.”
I shake my head at him, completely baffled that he’s being shy and awkward. “What’s with this? Why’re you shy?” I laugh. “Don’t wimp out on me now, Zahn. Just ask it. You want to know if I watched you at Cara and Cody’s, right?”
He has the nerve to offer me the shyest, sexiest little grin. “Did you?”
Shit. Okay. How much of this do I want to admit to without ruining or risking our friendship? I’ve got secrets, and if he thought about them hard enough, he’d already have all the answers he’s looking for. But nerves upset my stomach and I chicken out.
“Yeah.” I shrug. “I watched you.” Eye-fucked him, more like. Admired him. Got hard because of him. Watch is such a subtle term for what I did. My whole mind shifted that night, and it’s been fucked up ever since.
“Alone? Or were you getting played with, too?” he asks.
I swallow a mouthful of booze and let it burn the words in my throat. “Started alone. I watched from farther back, and then Cara brought me over and fucked with me while they fucked with you.”
Zahn nods a bunch of times, biting into his bottom lip like he wants to ask something else. I know him, and follow-up questions are his thing. He wants all the information, but he’s being weird about asking for it, and I’m not sure why. I hope it’s not because he feels uncomfortable.
“What?” I widen my eyes at him. “What? Ask what you want!”
Zahn fills both of our glasses, taking the time to gain courage, and that’s such a sign of something being off with him that it sets unease spreading through my chest. Zahn doesn’t get uncomfortable and doesn’t get shy, and most of all, he isn’t afraid to ask straightforward questions. Which means he’s wondering one specific thing, and I haven’t yet figured out if he wants the answer to be yes or no.
Handing me my glass, he sits back on his bed, kicks his legs out to appear casual, and asks, “Did you touch me at all? Like… anywhere?”
Despite the sweat gathering on my lower back in this cold room, I lick my lips and pretend to brush the whole thing off as a joke. “Isn’t that the whole point of a blindfold? To not know?”
“Remy…”
Goddammit. Why does it please me to hear my name from him like that all of a sudden? We’ve been running a strong sex game for most of our adult lives, and now he looks different and sounds different just because I learned he’s into guys? Or is it because I unabashedly watched him in pure pleasure while he wasn’t able to look back at me? Did that blindfold give me free rein to see him in a new light? Because the things I did that night…
“I touched you,” I admit, not adding anything else. I keep my eyes on him, studying his body language to see if he shows relief or panic. But I can’t read the meaning of his clenched jaw or the purpose of his subtle shift when he places his glass on his crotch.
He wets his lips, ready to ask yet another question I’m not ready to answer, but then changes tactics. He squeezes the back of his neck, clears his throat, and asks, “Are you ever going to tell me who gave me that blowie?” His grin is back to being playful, like the past minute never happened.
Well, I can pretend it never happened, too. I throw out a laugh that hopefully sounds real. “Why do you want to know so bad?”
He sits up a little straighter. “Because it was the best head of my life, and I want to know who to go to for it again.” He smirks. “Just tell me if it was a guy or a girl.”
“No. That’s basically name-dropping.” Sort of. Depending on how many players he thinks were in the game. “Just live in the mystery, enjoy it, and let it go.”
“I can’t let it go, Rem. Shit, it was hot. Like… Cara gives good head, right?”
I nod.
“But it felt different from when she usually does it. So it had to be Cody, right?”
I lift a brow. “You saying Cody gives better head than Cara?”
“No. I didn’t think so. But now my mind’s all fucked up, and I can’t stop thinking about it.” He laughs, taking a sip. “So fucking hot, Rem. Like, I wish you did the whole blindfold thing after me.”
I’d chickened out because my mind had been a mess. But this is a great segue to get the conversation on to a different point of view. “That’s it, right? It was probably just that good because of the whole blindfold and no-touching thing.” I shrug, thinking that’s probably the best explanation. “The buildup and the edging.”
“Maybe,” he says, nodding. “But I’m fixating on it. I want that over and over and over again.” He tilts his head and tries to give me the puppy dog eyes that absolutely don’t work. He’s got too much devil in him to pull off a look that innocent.
“I’m not fucking telling you.” I laugh, climbing off the bed and discreetly tucking my boner into my waistband. “You’ll just have to recreate the scene and see if it’s as good.”
“Call ‘em up,” he says. “We’ll go right when we get back.”
I turn my back and fill my already half-full cup, just to take a second to breathe and think through my responses. In all honesty, I don’t want to go back to Cara and Cody. I don’t want them to become a regular thing, and it has nothing to do with them. I love them, and they’ve been eye-opening as fuck, but didn’t we agree to keep things fresh and exciting?
Fucking hell. Even I can’t ignore that lie. I don’t want to go back to them because something sits weird in my chest to know Zahn enjoys them so much. This new and very greedy part of me wants him to enjoy me that much, which is an absurd thought because we don’t… we’re not…
We’re just in a fuck buddy partnership that brings us to the same room but doesn’t allow us to focus on each other. Get used to it, Remy.
“You’ll find someone who beats it. Does better,” I tell him, not sure if I want it to be true.
“Blindfold me and suck my dick, Rem,” he says, making me close my eyes in a moment of pure exasperation. “I need to know if it was the blindfold or the person.”
“I will if you will,” I joke, grabbing the iPad off the table. I flop down on my bed with it in one hand and my drink in the other, opening the weather app that shows our flight routes. “Fuck. Look.” I turn it for him to see. “Massive storm cells coming in. We better get out of here by tomorrow, or we’ll get stranded here for days.”
Zahn gets up and flops down beside me, studying the radar. “It could dissipate. Doesn’t look likely, though. We’ll figure it out tomorrow.”
A pilot’s second relationship is with the weather, and this bitch of a storm cell rolling in looks like the worst kind of mistress.
“Cargo won’t even be here until tomorrow night,” I remind him.
“We could always leave and come back for the cargo once the weather clears.” He shrugs, clicking out of the weather map. My porn history pops up, and he laughs. “Bi-threesomes? Jesus, I’m pulling you over to the dark side, aren’t I?”
I snatch it from him. “You don’t even know what side you’re on. Most days, you don’t even know what fucking lane you’re in.”
He laughs. “Touché. But it’s been fun, right?”
A little too fun, to be honest.
But by mid-morning, we’re already shit out of luck. We stayed up late to track the progress of the storm, but it rolled in and intensified faster than the meteorologists figured it would. Air traffic control radioed out to us, requesting that we stay put after we put in an emergency flight pattern to leave the island a day early.
For now, we’re stuck on St. Matthew.
We’re hoping that since it blew in faster than expected, it might dissipate faster, too.
Zahn calls his family to let them know we’re stuck, and all it does is remind me I don’t have anyone to call. No one to ask for favors either, so Zahn gets Rydan to head over to my place to make sure the furnace is on low after a power outage, making sure my water pipes don’t freeze.
My parents aren’t good parents. They aren’t bad people, but they’re selfish and thoughtless when it comes to anyone but themselves, so asking them for a favor like that would come with a promise to do it and then the disappointment when they don’t follow through. My brother is too high and mighty for my lifestyle, and because of it, we don’t have a good relationship. We were raised in the same town, but I had the Dares to help me out, and he had a business owner take him under his wing. We were influenced by two entirely different outlooks, and not to be smug, but I think I got the better bargain.
The storm is so fierce that we can’t even snowmobile or spend time outside. The wind is suffocating and the snow whips around, creating whiteouts so intense we can’t even see each other if we’re more than five feet apart. There’s no boarding, no hiking, and nothing to do but sit around the lodge and wait.
We try watching Netflix for a bit, but neither of us are TV people, and that gets boring pretty damn fast. We play cards for a bit, but after the agitation of being stuck indoors all day, we end up bickering and being sore losers. Zahn asks me four more times about the ‘blindfold blowjob’, and I deny him the answer four more times, getting snippier and snappier each time he asks. We try sleeping to pass the time, cooking with the few ingredients in the lodge, and splitting up when we get on each other’s nerves. Too bad the lodge isn’t big enough to really give us much space from each other.
All in all, we’re moody, bored, pent-up, and restless. Mostly, we’re sick of each other in this confined space.
It’s a recipe for disaster.