Chapter Nine
Iknow it takes more than three beers to get Cade drunk, but he’s riding on a wave of elation I rarely see from him.
Maybe it’s just getting out of the house and hanging out with other people who don’t treat him like shit.
Or being around people where we can act like ourselves without having to censor everything.
Maybe it’s the eyeliner. I really don’t know.
Even situations like this where I’m genuinely happy to be here with my friends are still…
draining. To a certain extent. But Cade’s not like me in that way, and it’s making me realize how much time he spends cooped up at home, slowly wilting like an unattended houseplant.
Tonight was a good idea. Going for the ride was a good idea. Doing things that aren’t wrapped up in me and my broken brain seems to be good for both of us. My bad days are well and truly outnumbered by my good ones, and I’m sick of both of us seeming to revolve around them, regardless.
Everyone—in fact—is having such a good time, I don’t think the others even notice when Cade grabs me by the hand and leads me toward one of the single-occupancy bathrooms. Normally, I would discourage him from getting too horny in public because Gunnar tries to keep this place relatively upstanding, and I don’t want to do anything to ruin that for him.
But maybe I’m high on the tone of the evening, too, because I don’t object.
All I can think about is how fucking diabolically hot he looked yesterday while we fucked over the bikes. I’m not an expert on relationships, but I know people talk a lot about the sex aspect getting worse. Or less interesting, maybe.
Cade and I definitely have some problems, but that is not one of them. If anything, it seems like the more the world is falling apart around us, the more desperate I am to cling on to him in any way I can.
That’s probably not good, either. But I’m not going to worry about it now.
Cade drags us both into the stall, closes and locks the door with a click, and then shoves me against it. I bounce off the surface a little, raising my eyebrows at him.
“That’s how it’s going to be?” I ask.
Cade doesn’t reply. Instead, he makes a show of looking me up and down, licking his lip before biting it and giving me a slow, sensual nod.
“I could hear you guys while I was waiting at the bar. Tristan was right, you know,” I say, reaching out to touch his cheek like Tristan did before, but with a very, very different purpose. “You look fucking phenomenal. I want to make you cry it all off. Does that make me sick?”
I’m mostly teasing, but there may be a slight undercurrent of concern there.
I’m aware that we go hard, sometimes. A part of me worries it’s too hard.
But we’re both into it, and I know Cade would always tell me if he wasn’t into something, so fuck it.
I guess we keep going until something happens to change either my desire to make this boy fucking wrecked, or his desire to get it.
“Maybe it makes us both sick,” Cade says, voicing exactly what I was just thinking.
There’s no time to reply, though, because he falls to his knees with an eager smile and absolutely attacks my fly.
I’m half-hard already from the proximity to him when he’s like this.
He has no difficulty finding my cock, pulling me out and then immediately inhaling it like he’s been waiting all night for this moment.
It’s overwhelming. The soft, wet heat of him. I let my head loll back until it thunks against the door, taking a deep breath as Cade ravages me.
But like always, it’s not enough. My fingers wind through his hair, tugging and pulling sweet little noises out of him that garble around my cock. I tug harder and harder, rolling my hips until I’m pushing deeper into his mouth.
Cade goes a little slack; still sitting up and working over my cock, but softer for me.
An image pops into my head, and I can’t resist.
With a single fluid movement, I pull myself out of Cade’s mouth and spin us around, until he’s on his knees but pinned between me and the door. When I sink back in this time, his head is leaning back into the surface.
I crowd over him, slowly pumping myself in and out of his mouth, letting him acclimate to the new position and how restricted he is.
The only things he can really move are his hands, which he brings to the back of my thighs at first, before his fingertips crawl up and grab the edge of my back pockets as something to cling to.
Heat curls in my stomach, and I reach down to grab him gently by the throat. If I drop my shoulder, I can reach him from the side, and while my fingers don’t wrap all the way around, it’s enough to hold him still and put pressure if I want to.
Slowly, inch by inch, I push into his mouth until he starts to choke. I stroke my thumb over the tender flesh it’s covering, and then I squeeze, choking him there, too. A few seconds pass as Cade’s muscles tighten, his eyes start to water and his skin turns red, then I release.
I pull myself all the way out of his mouth and look down, checking how he’s responding. Cade is gazing up at me through wet eyelashes, eyeliner smudging and his face going blotchy.
The expression on his face is making me feel drunk. I don’t even know what it is. Devotion?
Whatever it is, it fills something deep inside of me that’s always felt catastrophically empty.
I continue this pattern: push in, squeeze, retreat so he can breathe. Again and again, while the tension between us builds to a fever pitch.
“Touch yourself for me,” I whisper, and Cade hurries to obey. He’s uncoordinated, swimming in endorphins, but he manages to get himself in hand and start frantically stroking.
“Oh, fuck, Cade,” I mutter, letting my forehead thunk against the door as I fuck his face. “I’m gonna come.”
Cade speeds up as he jerks himself. The door vibrates against my face, and I’m so lost in the moment, it takes me a minute to recognize that someone is knocking. Fuck. Well, we’re almost done.
It doesn’t take more than a few seconds and another look at Cade’s messy face to get my orgasm to hit, filling Cade’s mouth as I grind against him.
Cade follows not long after, making a mess but managing to catch most of it in his hand. I let him go, leaning back so he can finally breathe, and hand him some toilet paper to clean up before I situate myself and zip my pants back up.
Once we’re both semi-presentable, I pull Cade up to his feet. He sways a little, happily pressing against my chest. As soon as we’re only inches away, I have to take the opportunity to kiss his swollen lips.
He tastes like cum and beer, and I don’t care. It’s perfect.
Leaning our foreheads together, I only break away from the kiss for a second to tell him the truth.
“I love you more than anything, Cade. I’ll never stop. I don’t think I could if I tried.”
Cade’s eyes are still a wet, bloodshot mess from before, but I think for a second I might see him tearing up.
The moment is interrupted by another knock on the door—this one louder and much more insistent—which puts us both in motion.
I cup Cade’s face in my hands, swiping under his eyes with my thumbs in an ineffective attempt to clean him up as we both laugh softly.
Between the watery panda eyes he’s got going on and the swollen lips, plus a faint red outline of where my fingers were pressed against his throat a minute ago, it’s pretty damn obvious what we’ve been doing in here.
Which isn’t the end of the world, but it’s built into me to be as discreet as possible in all things. Go unnoticed. So, when Cade wraps one long-fingered hand around my wrist and tells me to stop fussing, it’s kind of insane that I just do it.
“Let everybody here know how crazy I get for you. Fuck ‘em,” he says, his voice a hoarse rasp that completes the just-got-facefucked aesthetic.
I can’t help but lean into his space when he says it.
Since the day I met Cade, it’s felt like we were tethered together by something I couldn’t see.
But in these little moments, the tether is so tight, any space between us seems to burn.
My body sways in his direction, like we can push out all the oxygen in the room and fill it with our combined presence instead.
My hand turns the tiny lock and pushes down on the handle, pulling the door inward as Cade wraps one arm around my waist from behind, tied to me as well, prepared to walk of shame our way back to the booth.
I don’t know what I expected. I think I didn’t expect anything—I wasn’t thinking about anything but Cade.
But if I had, even in my right mind I wouldn’t have expected Kyle Waters to be standing there, staring at us.
It’s a toss up who here looks more shocked.
Kyle freezes, raising an eyebrow as he takes in the sight before him.
‘Disheveled’ is not a strong enough word for how Cade and I look right now.
And while we agreed a long time ago that we weren’t hiding our relationship from anyone anymore, I think the concept of being out to his dad and the abrupt, unintentional experience of it are two very different things
The air around me becomes tense as Cade stiffens behind me.
His fingers stay on my hip, but the touch is so light I can barely feel it, and I know without looking that his spine is straightening and his shoulders are pushed back as he contorts himself into the specific version of himself he normally allows his father to see.
Kyle makes a show of looking Cade up and down, and while the silence is better than the explosive homophobia-laced rage I was halfway expecting, it’s still not great. There’s a tremor in the air, and it takes me a second to realize that it’s Cade.
“What are you doing here?” Cade snaps, breaking the silence. His voice is deep and filled with barely-contained anger.
“Drinking,” Kyle drawls, looking entirely unintimidated, his fingers loose around the longneck he’s holding. “Krystal wanted to go someplace nice, and I’ve never been here before. Although maybe I misread what kind of place this is.”
There’s a teasing lilt to his voice, and the mechanism inside me that decodes social intent is whirring and humming, frantically trying to decode if the tone is violent in its intent, or just giving us shit.
I’m not sure. I don’t have the danger-alarms going off that I normally get with the truly violent, but I don’t trust Kyle for a second, based on his history.
Cade is frozen behind me—still trembling, although hopefully not severely enough for Kyle to notice—and the need to diffuse the tension is overwhelming.
“We should go,” I murmur back to Cade, using the same easy, non-confrontational tone I perfected over a lifetime spent with my own explosive father.
I can practically feel Cade doing a record scratch behind me, before he swells up again.
“Fuck that,” he says. “If anyone should leave it’s him. The bar, the state, the plane of existence. Why can’t you just leave us alone?”
Kyle holds his hands up in mock-innocence, but there’s no tension in his body. He really doesn’t seem like he’s about to snap.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he says, his tone still teasing but light. “By all means, as you were. You might wanna check your makeup, though,” Kyle gestures toward his own eye. “You look a little… mussed. Krystal might have something in her purse—”
He doesn’t get the chance to finish his unfunny joke, because that was all it took to push Cade over the line. One second he’s standing behind me, his body at war between frightened child and fronting man, the next he’s on his dad and they’re both tumbling to the floor in an explosion of violence.