Chapter 6 Rhett
RHETT
Fuck this guy.
The door hits the wall behind me as I leave The Bar. I don’t even bother saying anything to my brothers as they watch me storm out. I barely look at anything except for the gravel on the ground until my hand reaches the handle.
And then I remember.
It’s Dawson’s fucking truck, not mine.
Godammit.
I drop my hand and stand there in the parking lot, like an idiot. The music thumps through The Bar’s walls. I can’t go back there.
That’s not a thing I’m capable of doing right now.
Probably has something to do with the raging boner tucked into my waistband.
For a moment, I think I could just start walking down the county line in the dark toward home. Eventually, my brothers would drive home and pick me up. Anything is better than going back through that door and looking at Colton Dawson’s face.
Instead, I lean against the side of the truck and cross my arms.
My outburst was completely warranted. He had no right to put his hands on me like that. I’ve told him twice, as plain as I could, and he still pushed. Still backed me into that wall like my boundary was a suggestion he could talk his way around. Like he knew something I didn’t.
I’m not interested in whatever game he thinks he’s playing. I’m not.
So why the fuck am I still—
Fuck me. I got hard. I’m actually hard as a fucking rock right now.
I’m pacing without meaning to now. Three steps toward the road. Three steps back.
The bastard caged me in and pressed himself against me like he had every right to. Then he had the audacity to say, in that low, lazy drawl of his, “Straight men don’t get this hard for another man,” like the words were nothing, like they weren’t going to take up permanent residence in my skull.
I stop pacing.
Because that’s the real problem, isn’t it.
I’m still hard.
My body hasn’t gotten the message that this is wrong, that I don’t want this, that I am Rhett Thornwood and I do not—
Fuck, I’m still hard.
I move to the far side of the truck—the dark side. The side facing the tree line and the empty road. The side where The Bar’s windows don’t reach.
I check the lot in both directions.
Nobody. Just me and the cicadas screaming from the trees and the distant bass line leaking through the walls.
I tell myself I’m just taking a minute. Just cooling down.
I think about Molly.
Her face. The vanilla smell she always wears. The way she looked at the bonfire in that yellow dress, tilting her face up to mine, asking me to kiss her with her eyes. She’s beautiful—I know she’s beautiful. I can see it objectively in the same way you can see that a sunset is beautiful.
That thought slides sideways, and I yank it back.
Molly. Focus.
I think about her hand on my thigh in the truck, her thumb tracing small circles on the denim—the warmth of her.
I think about the way she looked at me outside her door—”Do you want to come in?
”—and how any normal twenty-three-year-old man would have been through that door before she finished the sentence.
I hold onto that.
I glance once more at the empty lot, then yank my belt open with a clink of the buckle. The zipper follows, before I shove my jeans and boxers down just enough, pulling my cock out into the cool night air—already leaking and throbbing—and wrap my fist around it.
A bit of pre-cum drips from the tip and lands onto the pavement below me near my boot, but I don’t give a fuck because the relief my cock feels from being fisted is enough to send me over the edge already. My free hand goes flat against the metal of the truck as I face it and begin jacking off.
I close my eyes and I think about Molly—her face, the yellow dress, her thumb on my thigh.
My cock softens.
“No,” I mutter, teeth clenched. “No—No, this isn’t—fuck!”
I try harder. I imagine her in the truck, her hands on me. Her mouth goes to my jaw the way she does when she’s trying to get my attention and I—
The ink stops me.
In my head, the hands sliding up my ribs are tattooed, with rings on two of the fingers.
Colt’s rough hands replace Molly’s and work my cock.
I shove the image away, but my grip tightens, my hips moving before I tell them to.
Molly. Molly. Come on—
But she’s gone.
What replaces her is Colt at the pool table, leaning into my space with his thigh pressed to mine, his voice low and warm near my ear. I think about the way my whole body went tight and hot, and how I stood there, hating him for it.
My breath catches.
Colt across the bonfire, watching me kiss Molly, jaw tight, knuckles white around his beer. The jealousy and rage he had seeing me with her. My cock leaks at the thought of him watching me with her.
I did not just get hotter thinking about him watching me with her.
I did not—
The hallway.
And then, Colt in the hallway.
The full weight of him pressing me into the wall. He’s not soft, and doesn’t smell sweet. It’s just a man’s body against mine with nothing apologetic about it. His fingertips dragged down my chest like he owned every inch they touched.
My hips are moving now, working into my fist, and I have completely lost the war. My brain keeps throwing things at me, and my body keeps saying, Yes. More. Keep going.
I think about Colt’s jaw when he’s pissed off, the way the tendons in his forearm flex when he grips something, the chain around his neck that catches light, and the particular way he looks at me, like he sees every single thing I’m trying to hide and finds it funny and fascinating and his.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. This isn’t who you are. You are Rhett Thornwood. You do not stand in dark parking lots with your jeans open thinking about a man’s hands on you, a man’s chest against yours, and the way a man’s voice drops when he’s got you cornered—
I push rational out of the way. I’m close—embarrassingly close. Because apparently three minutes of losing an argument with myself is all it takes, and that’s a piece of information about me that I’m going to have to live with—
The Bar’s door opens, then Jesse Palmer and his girlfriend barrel out, laughing about something.
I go completely still.
I’m on the dark side of the truck, and they are on the other end of the lot.
There’s distance and shadow and the angle is wrong for them to see me and I know this—I know this—but it doesn’t matter, because my heart is slamming so hard against my ribs it feels audible.
I’m standing in a parking lot with my cock in my hand thinking about a man I work with and—
Don’t.
Don’t you dare.
Do not fucking come right now, Rhett.
The orgasm hits me anyway.
Of course it does. Because apparently my body has decided that sheer mortal panic is the exact right finishing ingredient, and I spill over my fist in two weak, graceless pulses while every muscle I own locks up simultaneously—nearly silent, teeth clamped so hard together my back molars ache, forehead mashed against my forearm, one hand white-knuckling the truck door to keep myself vertical.
It is, without question, the worst orgasm of my adult life.
I didn’t even get to finish while thinking about him.
The couple crosses the lot without looking over, gets in a car on the far end, and drives away.
I don’t move for a long moment.
My legs are shaking slightly. Not from the orgasm, which was roughly as satisfying as getting cut off before you finish a sentence, but from the adrenaline, the cortisol, and the particular biological punishment for having just done what I did in what is essentially a public place.
I look down at my fist.
“Great,” I say out loud. “Really great, Rhett.”
I shove my cock back into my pants, then use a discarded flannel in the back of Dawson’s truck to wipe off my hands, reminding myself to throw it in my laundry later.
Then I straighten up, fix my clothes and hat, and lean back against the truck like nothing happened.
The worst part isn’t what I was thinking about.
The worst part is that I was thinking about him watching me. About what it meant that he was jealous. About that look on his face at the bonfire—the one I told myself was nothing, and my body just—
I put both hands flat against the truck and breathe.
I think about Molly and feel nothing below the waist.
I think about Colt looking at me across that fire and I’m already getting hard again.
I push off the truck.
I’m not doing this. I’m not standing in the parking lot of the only bar in Cedarbrook having whatever this is. I’m going to go back inside. I’m going to look Colton Dawson in the face, and I am going to feel absolutely nothing, and that is final.
My phone buzzes.
Not fucking again.
Unknown Number:
Well. That was something.
Fuck you.
It buzzes again.
Unknown Number:
See what I told you, Golden Boy? Told you so.
I can’t breathe. I literally cannot pull in a full breath.
My lungs have stopped cooperating, my hand is shaking around the phone, and my eyes are moving over the words on repeat, like they’re going to rearrange themselves into something that makes sense—something that isn’t what they clearly, obviously, undeniably are.
Someone was watching.
Or…or they weren’t. Maybe they couldn’t actually see anything from wherever they were.
Maybe this is a guess. Maybe Colt just guessed, took a shot in the dark, and now I’m standing here, handing him the confirmation on a silver platter.
There’s no other plausible answer. He’s doing this to fuck with me.
Well, I won’t play along.
Fuck this guy. I’m going to walk right in there and put my phone in his face, then I’m going to back him into a wall like he did me and smash his fucking skull against the brick.
I shove my phone back into my pocket so fast I almost drop it, my heart slamming against my ribs as I storm toward The Bar.
But then, the bar door bangs open, and Cash stumbles onto the gravel with Dawson following along, causing me to quickly turn my face back to neutral.
Cash stares at me. “There you are. You disappeared on us. You good?”
“Needed air.”
“You’ve been out here this whole time?”
“Yeah.”
Cash looks at me for exactly one second longer than comfortable, then lets it go, because Cash always lets things go. “Colt was asking where you went. Told him you probably got a call from Molly.”
Something tightens in my chest. “What’d he say?”
“Nothing. Just nodded.” Cash shrugs. “You two have a thing in there?”
“No. Nothing.”
Yes, a thing. A very big thing.