Chapter Twenty-four – Jack
Chapter Twenty-four
Jack
I strode out, bottle in hand, weaving through the crush of people waiting for the bar. “Here,” I said, handing the bottle to the brunette I’d been watching earlier.
“Um, thanks?” she said, her eyes bugging out a little.
“You’re welcome—you can snag my table if you want—tell them I’ll be back.”
“Will we?” Paco asked, following me outside.
“Not tonight.”
The evening was cool, which was good because I was pissed. Paco gave me a bemused look.
“First time, eh?”
“First time what?”
“That you’ve had that happen to you.”
“Yeah.”
“Because you pass for straight.”
“Because I’m bi. Which means I’m half-straight, or something.
” I ran a hand through my hair knocking pieces of it back into place.
The way I’d come up on that guy without thinking—and then whammied him—it was like a bomb had started ticking inside of me and was still counting down now.
I inhaled and exhaled, trying to get back to normal again.
I waved a hand out, not knowing where we were going to go but knowing I wanted the hell away from here. But an Uber pulled in half a block up instead—I saw the guy who’d confronted us inside the club about to get in.
He saw us, too.
He slammed the cab’s door and started walking our way. He was with two other friends in addition to his girl and she was already trying to pull him back. One of my hands twitched, and I wished I’d kept the bottle.
“Oh, shit,” Paco said, seeing what I was looking at.
“Stay back,” I said, putting myself in front of him.
He gave me a sideways look. “I take Krav Maga.”
“Fine then, you take the girl.” I said, as the first guy lumbered up. I wanted him to take the first swing, so that technically whatever befell him next would be his own fool fault.
“How many assholes you kiss today, faggot?”
And there he went. I grinned wickedly. “What’ve you got against kissing assholes? Your girlfriend kisses you.”
He swung before I could finish my sentence.
He was corn-fed, broad-shouldered, no neck, and out of the club he’d wasted no time putting his baseball cap back on.
He swung wide, leaving his side exposed—I could’ve broken his knee, some ribs, bruised a kidney, popped a spleen, but instead I just cold-cocked him.
His jaw could’ve probably taken a normal man’s punch—but I was no normal man.
Teeth clamped shut with an audible click, luckily for him he didn’t bite through his tongue.
He went down like a sack of bricks, baseball cap fluttering to land in the gutter.
By then, one of the other guys was trading punches with Paco, while the girlfriend screamed, and the third guy looked really unsure about his commitment to this course of action.
“Let me,” I said, and reached over, grabbing the guy about to punch at Paco with one hand, not spinning him by his shoulder, but holding it instead.
He started howling as delicate bones crunched and popped and his arm suddenly slumped down, no longer controlled the way it ought to be, since all its muscle’s attachment points were sliding down.
I didn’t let go of him. I really should’ve kept the other guy awake to apologize—the girl was crouched over him, crying, and the third friend had that anxious do-something-but-to-scared-to thing going on, like they were dancing in place, alcohol grinding their decision making process to a halt.
“So you’re sorry, right?” I asked the guy I was holding, pulling his shoulder out and up.
“Yeah,” he agreed, coming up on his toes, his voice rising like I’d kicked him in the balls.
“Then say it.”
“I’m sorry!” he said, all one word, in a high pitched moan.
I looked to the uninjured man. “What about you? Are you sorry?”
He nodded, eyes wide with fear.
“Say it,” Paco said, getting into the spirit of things.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry you didn’t just get into your cab and leave like sane people? Or sorry that you insulted my friend and I here?” Paco asked. There was an angry weight behind Paco’s interrogation, born of a lifetime of indignities—most likely the very things that’d inspired him to take Krav Maga.
“Sorry for both!” the guy pleaded, as the one I’d concussed began to come around.
I looked to Paco—he was still angry, but our work here was done—or was it?
I could feel the blood trembling inside the man I held.
I could pull his arm off and bathe in the subsequent warm spray of blood, glory in the sheer destruction.
For a moment, fever dreams overtook me—and then the man groaned and Paco gently touched my other arm.
I let go of the man’s shoulder and felt him hiss in relief and pain, falling backwards a few steps.
“We’re going to call the cops!” the girl threatened from beside her stirring man.
“Do. And tell them that a couple of faggots beat your ass.”
I turned on my heel, listening for them as Paco followed me, catching him surreptitiously looking back. “They’re not following us.”
“How do you know?”
I shrugged, and walked on.
Paco followed me silently for an entire block. By then we’d regained the crowds of the strip, losing ourselves in them, no one knew who we were, what we’d done. He moved to walk beside me, just two guys out on another night on the town.
“What was that?” he asked casually.
“What?”
“Don’t pretend.” His eyes squinted and lips I wanted to kiss fell into a frown.
I pulled up short and sighed. “It was nothing, all right?” I needed to get laid. Already parts of me were paying far too much attention to the crowds parting around me, reforming on the other side. The short skirts that showed so much leg, the starched stiff collars that hid such strong necks—
“It wasn’t nothing,” Paco said, grabbing my arm and pulling me toward him, out of the crowd. “That—all looked like it came natural to you. Where do you take classes?”
My eyebrows rose and I barked a laugh. “The school of hard knocks, or something like that.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” he said.
I was chastised by how wounded he looked. “I’m not,” I said more softly. “It’s just something I can’t explain. Do you want to go somewhere together, or what?” I’d inadvertently been leading us back to my hotel.
Paco’s eyes searched mine. “Of course I want to sleep with you. But if that’s all you want—if you can’t be bothered to tell me the truth—then no, Jack, fuck you.”
Tell him the truth—someone I barely knew?
Then again—he was the only person in this entire godforsaken city who wanted to know.
The hook-ups I’d been having were just that—they might as well have been random, a new guy or girl every night.
Paco was the closest thing I had to a friend.
But there was no way he’d believe anything I told him standing on the Vegas sidewalk at 2 a.m.
“If I tell you something cheesy right now like you can’t handle the truth, do you promise to find it funny and charming and still come up to my hotel room in exchange for the actual truth later?”
The look his expressive eyes gave me then culminated in a sigh and a headshake. “Sure.”
“Okay. You can’t handle the truth—yet.” I tried to give him a winning smile. “Come on, let’s cross the street.”
It wasn’t till I’d stepped a few steps out I realized just how badly I was hoping he’d follow me. Ten heartbeats later—mine or his, I didn’t know—he did.
“This is swank,” he said, looking around at the inside of my hotel room, pulling all the curtains open and I made a mental reminder to make sure they were all closed come dawn. I went ahead and set the ‘privacy please’ swinger on the door handle as I closed it behind me.
“Thanks.”
“Have you been here…this whole time?” I saw his mind doing the math of the nightly rate since he’d met me.
“Not always this hotel. But yeah.” I sat down on the bed, watching him pace.
“Are you staying in Vegas?”
“For now.” I couldn’t think of any other town that I could safely get to and get situated in over the course of one night, much less one where people stayed out as late and were as adventurous as here.
“Then why a hotel? Why not an apartment?”
Because leases needed to be signed during the day? “It’s not important, really.” Except it was, if I was going to tell him.
“Is it embarrassing? Whatever it is you’re hiding from me?”
I inhaled. “Kind of? It’s…strange.”
The corners of Paco’s lips quirked up. “You’re secretly an heir to a foreign country, slumming it in Vegas until you get abducted and taken back home.”
“No, but that’s pretty hot, we should roleplay that sometime.” I rocked back on the bed on my arms. “What if…in exchange for not telling you the truth, I let you do whatever you want to me?” If I did, he was bound to get off, and I would reap the rewards.
He turned to stand in front of me and tilted his head. “But what if I fuck the truth out of you?” The look he was giving me—the way his cock was starting to swell in his slacks….
“That’s a chance I’m willing to take,” I said, feeling my own heat rise in response to his. He sat down next to me on the bed.
“Then we should see where things go,” he said, and leaned in to kiss me.
All the desperate times I’d fucked people since being turned, the bathrooms, the bars, the bushes—this wasn’t like any of those.
It was just as fierce—we twined in bed, kissing one another, hands working away each other’s clothing—but it was in relative luxury, of both location and time.
I had the whole rest of the night to be with Paco, I could explore everything about him—and he could explore everything about me.
His shirt was open, his chest against mine, as I kissed his neck and had my hands in his pants. I moved around to cup his perfect ass as his hands reached in my pants for me. I stiffened the moment he touched me, then relaxed, thrusting gently, loving the way my cock felt against his palm.
“Get out of these,” he said then, letting me go to drag my pants down as I kicked my shoes off the edge of the bed, helping him to help me wriggle free.