Chapter 17
I’m pacing the sitting room of the lodge, waiting for that fucker to come back inside before I break my word and go out there. I can see the borrowed company truck running, and his phone is lit up through the windshield, probably talking to either my mom or Laken. But I want him to talk to me, not anyone else. I’m his person, and no matter what, I always want to be his person.
But going out there and demanding that he talk to me before he’s sorted it all through in his head is not the best move. Remy is the kind of guy who mulls everything over. He’s a thinker, and more importantly, he’s sensitive. It bothers the hell out of me that he’s riddled with guilt about this. I saw it, plain as day, in the blue of his eyes and the anger that overtook him. He lashed out because he felt terrible about something he never meant to tell me. But I wouldn’t shut up about the blowie, and look where that got us.
Right where I want to be.
It makes sense that it was him, and I don’t know why I didn”t think of it before. Of fucking course it was Remy! I don’t have that chemical reaction with Cara or Cody, but I sure as shit do with the man who has been a part of my sex life since we were teens. Yeah, a line got crossed, but to be honest, I think it was his line. Not mine. I never considered it could have been him because there wasn’t a chance in hell I thought he’d ever do it.
I keep pacing, wanting him to come inside so I can finally put his mind at ease.
I haven’t thought far enough ahead to figure out where I want this thing to go. I mean, he’s my Remy… but sex with him was supposed to remain a ‘look and don’t touch’ thing, and now that the line has been obliterated… What do I want?
I sure as shit know I don’t want to lose him. He is everything to me. I have my family and I have Remy. That’s life. That’s how life has always been, and that’s how I want life to remain. I love that stupid fuck more than I love pretty much anyone or anything else.
When the truck shuts off and the door slams, my stomach ends up in my throat and my fingers tingle with nerves. I watch through the window as Remy gets his jacket pulled tight and keeps his head down through the blowing snow. He’s coming, and now I’m locking up with anticipation and nerves because I don’t know what’s about to happen.
I’m the type to ‘do’ without thinking. Talking has never been my strong suit. I say shit I shouldn’t say, and I think things I shouldn’t think. Remy knows that, though, so he should be okay with it if I fuck up a little.
When the front door opens and he catches me just standing here like a dipshit, he looks at me quickly before taking his coat and boots off. There are three thousand things I want to say to put his mind at ease, but my tongue gets tied and my words get lost in the vastness of my mind, and the only thing I do is swallow hard and start to sweat.
His mouth opens and then closes. That same mouth that brought me the best pleasure I’d ever experienced. Those lips that have been wrapped around my cock, and that tongue that has tasted my cum. I’m staring, and I don’t jar out of it until he clears his throat awkwardly.
“You sober?” he asks.
That’s random. “Uh, mostly. Why?”
He walks past me to the kitchen pantry, and I follow because he’s got me on an invisible leash I never knew was there. He thrusts a sealed bottle of cheap whiskey against my chest and says, “Get unsober.” Spinning, he grabs two mugs from the cabinet and brings them to the sitting room, me following along on my leash again. When he sits down and I just stand there, he nods at the other end of the couch.
I drop to my ass on the cushion and watch my hand shake as I pour us each a double. Make it a triple. Guess we need to get tipsy for this chat.
Drunk in one night round two, here we come.
We sit and sip in silence, gathering guts and bravado or something equally as tough sounding, trying to work up the courage to say a single word to start this conversation. I can’t just blurt out, “I fucking loved it when you sucked my dick,” and hope that kicks things off in the right direction.
The silence isn’t exactly awkward; it’s never really awkward with him. It’s the nerves and the unknown that make it uneasy, but it’s still us, so that has to count for something.
Remy sucked me off. I liked it. Where do we go from here?
Remy drains his mug and fills it again. “Look, it was just the heat of the moment or whatever. It won’t happen again, so can we move on?”
Uh, no. No, we cannot move on. Because I have a plethora of inappropriate questions and a smaller plethora of appropriate ones. Plethora! What is a plethora? I know I should be gentle, compassionate, and understanding about how I phrase them because Remy’s feelings are important to me. I should ease us into this topic gently. Baby steps to get us where we need to go.
Plans never work for me.
“Did you fucking like it?” Shit. I’m such an asshole.
“Fuck, Zahn.” He leans back, covering his face with one hand. “That’s not important.”
“Yeah, it’s fucking important because…” No. Wait. Don’t blurt that one. “Did they force you to do it?”
He snorts condescendingly. “I have a fucking backbone, Zahn.”
“So, you wanted to do it?”
He shrugs with his arm still covering his face. I pull it away, my fingers wrapping around his wrist.
“Don’t touch me right now,” he barks at me, pushing my hand away and yanking his to his chest. “Just… don’t right now.” He takes a long gulp and a longer breath, followed by the longest sigh ever. “I wanted to, alright? It was the whole atmosphere thing you’re always going on about. I got caught up in it, and I shouldn’t have done it without talking to you. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say sorry.”
“Well, I am sorry. Really fucking sorry.”
“Because you regret it?” I ask.
His head turns in my direction, the back of the couch propping it up. “Do you?” He turns the question on me. “I never planned on telling you, man. You wouldn’t shut up about it, and it pissed me off because I felt guilty about it, and it just… came out. Now that you know… is it less…”
“Less?”
“Fuck,” he groans, squeezing his eyes shut. “Did you change your mind on how… was it still the… fuck!”
I actually crack a laugh because Remy isn’t the type to stumble. “Was it still the hottest BJ I’ve ever had?” I finish for him and grin, preparing him for my blunt honesty. “Fuck yes it was.”
He blushes and tries to hide his face from me. So, I take a sip and wind up for a speech.
“I don’t give a shit who it was. It was hot as hell, obviously blew my mind because I can’t shut up about it, and now that I know it was you… I dunno. It just fucking makes sense that you did it.”
“Why?” He cuts into my speech.
“Because of the whole connection thing, like I said earlier. We have that. I sure as shit don’t have that level of connection with Cara or Cody, but me and you? Fuck, Rem, we’ve got an entire life bond of thick…”
“Chemistry?” he mutters.
“Yes. We do. It’s never been sexy before, but fuck, chemistry can be more than that, right? I don’t know. I just feel it with you. Comfort and closeness and… chemistry. So, no. I don’t regret it, and I don’t take back all the praise either. Where’s your head at with it?”
“My head is so fucked up it’s incapable of thinking,” he says. “It doesn’t matter anyway, right? It’s over now.”
“Do you want it to be over?” I ask, pushing him harder than I should.
“Don’t you?” His voice raises and he gets up to pace in front of the couch. “I’m all fucked up in my head, Zahn! Ever since this whole wingman shit, I’ve been… it’s different from the things we did before. I don’t know why, but maybe you were right. Maybe I do look at you differently now that I know about your sexuality.”
Fuck. That stings.
“And it’s my fault! Because I know you’re sitting here thinking I’m not comfortable around you because you’re into guys, but it’s the complete opposite of that. It’s me. I’m too comfortable now. I’m… looking at you differently because when you showed me who you really are, it gave my mind permission to. Shit’s been changing in my head, man!”
“What shit?”
“Like the fucked up fact that I need you there! Want you there. Like, isn’t that pathetic? I can’t even think about hooking up unless you’re there now?”
“I can’t either,” I admit. “I’m not freaking out about it.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t suck my dick.” He turns his back to me, sighing again. “We should stop this before I ruin it.”
“No.” I stand up. “I don’t want to stop it, and I know you don’t either. Why do we need to plan everything? It’s been working fine for us.”
“Yeah, until I found out what you taste like!” he shouts at me, and even though he’s embarrassed and angry, blood rushes to my dick.
“Do you regret it?” I ask again, ready to push him until he cracks.
“Zahn—”
“Do you regret it?”
“No.” He meets my eyes. “No. But I should.”
“Why? Because we’re best friends?” I ask, trying to coax him out of whatever shame spiral he’s lost in. “Who cares? Sex has always been a thing we’ve been open about, and this is just a new level.”
“A new level,” he scoffs, shaking his head at me. “A new level that can’t go on.”
“Why can’t it?”
“Because I’m not fucking gay, Zahn!” he yells at me. “I’m not bi or open or whatever the fuck you think I am. I’m just… confused and learning all these new things now that you’re… and I don’t know. All I know for sure is that I think about you whenever I think about sex. You and sex go hand in hand for me, and I want it to keep going, but I feel like I’ve broken that now.”
“You haven’t. We haven’t. I don’t want this to stop, Remy. I think you just get it now. The vibe thing.”
“Yeah,” he sighs the word. “Yeah.”
I’m glad he gets it. It opens up a lot more options, and it limits the reservations he’s placed on himself by getting caught up in the whole ‘sexuality’ label thing. But my mind has been opening up differently, too. It’s swirling around with all these thoughts about different kinds of bonds and connections ever since that chat on the front porch with Laken.
“Hey, Rem?” I lean back and act casual. He looks at me with annoyance, knowing that whenever I start a conversation with ‘Hey, Rem?’ it’s going to be something utterly ridiculous.
“What?”
“We have a bond.”
“Yeah, Laken mentioned the whole bond thing.”
“Good. So let’s build on it. What if we agree to keep this thing going kind of permanently?”
“What thing, Zahn? Be more specific.” He sits down again, sinking into the couch like the weight of the world is still on his shoulders.
“Our hookup thing. We go at this shit together, like we have been, and keep it running. We become a package deal, you know? Laken’s chat about bonds made me think that maybe I’m not looking for the romantic type. But I can’t think of a person I have a better connection with than you. Do you get it?”
“Yeah, I get it, Zahn, but I don’t know what it means.”
“Let’s figure it out. Whatever happens, happens.”
He laughs, covering his face again. “Yeah, we need more of a boundary line than that. How is it any different from what we’re already doing?”
“Because we aren’t hiding anything anymore. I freaked the fuck out the night that chick sucked us both off because I was worried it would weird you out. It rattled me that I was the one that was afraid of it and you didn’t even bat a fucking lash.” I laugh. “So, let’s keep the communication open, talk about what we want and don’t want, and go from there. No more freaking out. No more making assumptions.”
“You didn’t like that? That night at the hotel?”
“Oh, fuck. I was totally into it. First time our dicks touched, and I had to clench my balls not to come too soon.” I grin at him. “Totally cool with our dicks touching in a situation like that. The rest?” I shrug. “We can figure it out.”
“Figure what out?”
If we want to touch more.“The rest. All the kinky fuckery shit.”
He stands up and decks me right in the mouth. I fall back against the cushions, groaning in pain. It wasn’t a hard hit, but damn. “What the fuck was that for?”
“Lakes said I could hit you if you used that word. Fuckery.”
“That’s my word! Of course I’m going to use it!” I shout at him, checking to see if my lip is bleeding. It’s not.
“I know,” he says, chuckling. “Couldn’t wait until you did.” He pours another drink. “Limits. What are yours? We aren’t doing this unless I know.”
“Sex ones? None. You can blow me anytime you want.” I grin at him as he rolls his eyes. “My limits are about our friendship. Nothing can risk us. Our bond. I’d be lost in life without ya, bud.”
“Agreed.” He brings his cup to his lips and then hands me mine. “And the business. Nothing fucks with that either.”
I nod my agreement. “What’re your boundaries? Tell me what you want out of this.”
His hand goes through his hair again, and the wind zipping around outside fills the silence while he thinks. “I want you… like, the consistency of you. Us being the main part, and whatever or whoever else added in, but we stay central. We get variety and new experiences and to figure out what we like, but we do it together.” He shrugs. “And you have to have at least one sexual boundary.”
I can’t think of one. Maybe if we’re getting into really specific things, I could come up with something. “Not really into shit.”
He laughs. “Piss is fine, though?”
I shrug. “I’d try it.”
Remy grins around the brim of his mug. “Of course you would. I don’t really know mine yet. Can I tell you when I find them?”
“As long as you promise to be honest.”
He makes the promise, and we finish our drinks.
“Sorry about what I did,” he says.
“Don’t be. Ever.”
He nods. “Alright…”
I smile at the memory of his mouth on my extremely hard dick. “But seriously, have you sucked a dick before because that was… fuck.”
“Fuck you, Zahn.” He laughs, shoving me away.