13. Luka
13
LUKA
The panic set in as soon as my orgasm started to fade.
What had I done? What had we done?
I’d spent the last few hours in my apartment freaking out and trying to figure out what I was supposed to do now that I knew Zander and Nice were the same person.
That I’d unknowingly sexted with not only my friend, but my coworker.
I knew I had to tell him, even though a part of me wanted to just delete my profile on Kinksters and pretend like Nice/Zander hadn’t taken me apart and brought me to my knees with just his words. To ignore how we’d listened to each other come or that I’d shared stuff I’d never told anyone.
But I couldn’t do that. Zander wasn’t just some guy on an app. He was my friend. And more than that, we worked together. There was no way in hell I could show up to the shop on Monday and pretend everything was fine when it felt like my entire world was crumbling around me.
I didn’t even remember making the decision to come to Zander’s house. One minute I was pacing across my living room and wearing a hole in my carpet, and the next I was hurrying down the path that connected his street with my parking lot. There was no plan for when he opened the door; I just needed to see him.
“Luka?” Zander’s soft voice broke through my thoughts before I could start spiraling again.
“Hmmmm?” I pressed my face against his neck, not quite ready to face reality.
Strong hands rubbed circles over my back. “Are you okay?”
I let out a choked laugh. “I have no idea.”
“Do you want to come in for a bit?” He tightened his arms around me in a reassuring hug.
I nodded against his neck.
He pressed a kiss against my temple. “Whenever you’re ready.”
With a sigh, I reluctantly pulled away from him. I wasn’t looking forward to this conversation, but it needed to happen.
We took a moment to put our dicks away, then Zander motioned for me to follow him into the house.
I glanced around, taking in the small space as we walked through a short hallway that held a coat closet and what I assumed was the door to the garage. Beyond that was a staircase that led to the second floor and what looked like a living room, only it was set up like a library with bookshelves, reading lights, and big, squashy chair.
Past that was a small dining room that was empty except for a pool table and another living area that had a couch, a coffee table, an easy chair, and a TV. A door in the living room opened up into the backyard, and another door led to a kitchen.
There were a few paintings and several black-and-white photo prints on the walls, but other than that, there wasn’t much decor or personalization.
Zander paused when we were in the middle of the living area and raked a hand through his hair nervously. “Do you want anything from the kitchen? I don’t have much, but I’ve got beer, wine, water, and soda.”
“Maybe some water?” I asked, feeling as shy as he looked.
“Have a seat.” He motioned toward the couch. “I’ll be right back.”
Still feeling completely off-kilter from my confession and the mind-bending orgasm I’d just had, I parked my ass on one side of his sofa while he went into the kitchen. A moment later he returned with two bottles of water.
He sat on the other side of the couch and handed me one.
We sat there for a good thirty seconds, toying with our water bottles and not looking at each other.
“I have no idea what to say right now,” I confessed.
“Me either.” He toyed with the label on his bottle, picking at it and smoothing the pad of his finger over the raised edge. The move didn’t seem agitated, more distracted. “Did you figure it out today?” he asked after a lengthy pause. “About me being…”
“Yeah.” I ran my nail over the tiny bumps in the bottle cap nervously. “When I sent Nice…you that meme.”
“That had to be a shock.” He flicked his gaze to mine but quickly looked away.
The change in him was stark. This was the Zander I was used to, and the confident man who’d so easily taken me apart over the phone and again in his hallway just now was nowhere to be found.
“You could say that.” I laughed, but there was no humor behind it.
I was still having trouble merging Nice and Zander in my head. I knew they were the same person, but it was still a mindfuck to think that my shy, reserved friend was the same dirty-talking man I’d sexted with.
“I spent the last few hours freaking out and trying to figure out what to do.”
Zander met my eyes, and the encouraging look in them helped calm some of my lingering nerves. He wasn’t judging me, and he was just as unsure about this situation as I was.
“I knew I had to tell you, but I had no clue how. Then I got in my head and started panicking, and the next thing I knew, I was on my way here and knocking on your door.”
“I still can’t believe it.” He shook his head incredulously. “I mean, I know it’s true, but what are the odds that we’d know each other in real life?”
“No clue.” I twisted the bottle cap off and took a sip. The cool water soothed my tight throat. “But I’d love someone to do the math because I’m guessing it’s pretty damn small.”
“Yeah.” He opened his bottle and drank down a few gulps. “Looking back, I can’t believe I didn’t put the pieces together and see it sooner. Or at all.” He took another distracted sip of his water.
“I didn’t either, not until I saw you answer your phone when I sent that meme.” I huffed out another laugh. “I went round and round in my head trying to explain it away and pretend like it was just a coincidence and you got a random notification at the exact same time that I sent it, but that didn’t work, as you can probably tell.”
He shot me a wry grin. “And to think I only turned my notifications on today because it was so dead. Usually I have them off.”
“That makes perfect sense because today is the one time I broke my rule about only messaging you after work, and I only did that because it was dead and I was trying to distract myself from checking you out.” I flicked my gaze to him, my cheeks heating uncomfortably at my confession.
Which was stupid considering we’d just blown each other, and he had his tongue in my ass less than twenty minutes ago.
My cheeks heated even more at the memory of him rimming me. That had been one of the hottest things I’d ever experienced. I’d figured it would feel good considering how much I enjoyed touching myself there, but nothing could have prepared me for just how incredible it felt.
And it wasn’t just the physical pleasure that sent my brain into the stratosphere and pushed me dangerously close to my orgasm. It was the intimacy of not just the act, but sharing that first with him that had almost done me in. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat as my dick went half-hard.
Thank fuck Zander wasn’t looking at me, because there was no way I could hide the bulge in my pants.
“You’ve checked me out at work?” he asked, his eyes on his hands.
“At work, off work.” I swallowed.
He shot me a quick look, his cheekbones darkening with a blush. “I have too. Checked you out, I mean.”
“I had no clue. I thought you were straight.”
He smiled, but there was something off about it. It wasn’t a sad smile, more resigned. “Most people do. I thought you were straight too.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of by design.” I bit my lip. “Are you out?” I asked hesitantly.
He didn’t owe me answers. We might have just discovered that we were unknowing sexting partners, and gotten off together, but that didn’t mean I had any right to pry into his personal life.
“No.” He resumed picking at the label on his bottle. “Only four people know about me. Well, five now.”
“Only five?”
He nodded. “Ivy, her husband, Nate, Dev, and now you.”
“Are you…?” I had no idea how to ask how he identified, or if I even should.
“I’m gay.” He shot me a quick look.
“I’m bi.” I flushed warm again. “I’ve never actually said that to anyone before.”
“No one else knows?”
I started to shake my head but stopped. “Well, one person does, but other than you and him, no. No one else.”
Zander arched his eyebrow questioningly but thankfully didn’t ask me to elaborate.
“You didn’t figure it out until you were older?” I asked tentatively.
He shook his head. “Not until after I was married.”
“How does that work?” I asked before I could stop myself. “You don’t have to tell me, but you said you were married for a few years?”
“Three years.” He nodded.
“And you weren’t…intimate with her in all that time?”
He chewed on his lower lip.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“It’s fine.” He shot me a small smile. “It’s just not exactly fun telling someone that I spent three years trying to force myself to enjoy sex with my wife.” He sighed and leaned back against the couch. “Being with women doesn’t gross me out or anything. It just doesn’t really do anything for me. I can perform when I’m into it, and I can usually…finish, but it’s a struggle. That made Ivy self-conscious, which put even more pressure on me, and…yeah. The more I tried, the less it worked, and the worse we both felt.”
I didn’t know what to say. It sounded like a horrible situation, and I was amazed that they’d managed to stay so close after going through that.
“It took me a long time to fully come to terms with not just my sexuality, but also my…preferences,” he continued softly.
“Because of your upbringing?”
He nodded.
“You didn’t feel attraction to men before you got married?” I asked before I could stop myself.
He shrugged. “I’m sure I did, but I started dating Ivy when we were fifteen, so I most likely ignored it or didn’t see it for what it was. I didn’t start noticing men until after we split up. Then I really started noticing them.”
He met my gaze, and the question in them was clear.
“I figured out that I’m not straight pretty early,” I said slowly. “My first crush was on a guy.” I shot him a quick look. “I didn’t understand it at the time, but I could sense that there was something different about me.”
“Different?” he questioned, giving me space to keep talking if I wanted.
A part of me wanted to shut the conversation down and leave it at that, but a bigger part needed to talk about it. I’d been holding this in for years, and the weight of my secret was crushing.
“When I finally figured out that what I felt for him was a crush, I kind of panicked. I didn’t really know what gay was back then, just that it was a word everyone threw around when they wanted to insult someone or talk shit about something.
“How old were you?”
“Twelve. All my friends were talking about girls and everything I learned about sex only talked about straight relationships, so I felt like a freak, like there was something wrong with me because I didn’t feel what everyone said I was supposed to feel. Then I went to middle school, and my next crush was on a girl.” I blew out a breath and took a sip of water to try and soothe my arid throat. “But I didn’t stop noticing guys or getting crushes on them.
“The next year I got my first girlfriend and had my first kiss, and I kind of convinced myself that my attraction to guys was just me being a hormonal teenager and I was actually straight because it was safer that way.”
“Safer?”
“Hockey isn’t exactly an inclusive sport. Most guys who play aren’t homophobic assholes, but they throw around the slurs enough that it put the fear of god into me, especially when I started playing at the elite level, so I did everything I could to suppress my attraction to guys and play the part of the straight jock.”
“You don’t have to tell me more if it’s too hard,” Zander said, breaking me free from the memories that were threatening to come crashing down on me.
“I need to, if that makes sense?”
He nodded.
“I didn’t really date after my first girlfriend and I broke up. More just messed around with girls when it was convenient.” I pulled in a deep breath. I’d never told anyone this, and my chest tightened with emotion.
“I spent so much time focusing on hockey and hanging out with my friends that my grades started to slip. I was assigned a tutor so I didn’t get kicked off the team. My tutor, Danny, was this shy, quiet kid who didn’t have a lot of friends. We were complete opposites, but there was something about him that drew me in. One day, when we were studying together in my room, he kissed me.
“It took me by surprise because I had no idea he was into me that way, but that kiss was…perfect.” My cheeks flushed. “That’s when I knew for sure that I like both, even if it took me a while to fully accept it.”
I snuck a glance at Zander. He was studying me curiously, like he knew there was more to the story but was contemplating if he should ask or not.
“And you never told anyone?” he asked instead.
I shook my head.
“Would your family be okay with it?”
I huffed out a laugh. “Yeah. I know they would.”
“But you still haven’t told them?”
“No,” I said softly. “I tried so many times, but I just couldn’t. Then my dad died, and I couldn’t dump that on my mom or sister while we were grieving and struggling. But the longer I kept it a secret, the more I felt like I was lying to them. I was so scared of hurting them, of potentially losing them because of my lie, that I kept it to myself. Now it feels like too much time has passed, and every time I try to say something, the words just won’t come out.”
“That’s a really difficult position to be in,” he said sympathetically.
“It’s not fun.” I fiddled with the cap on my bottle. “And you’re not out because of your mom?” I asked with all the subtlety of a pie to the face.
“Not just because of her, but yeah.” He drained the rest of his water in a few long gulps.
My eyes were drawn to his throat and the way his Adam’s apple bobbed. My dick, which had gone soft as soon as I started talking about my lack of coming out, went half-hard again.
“Not just because of her?” I asked cautiously. He’d already shared so much with me, but I wanted to know him better, to understand him the way he inherently seemed to understand me.
“Do you have an extended family?” he asked, his dark eyes boring into mine. “Aunts, uncles, maybe grandparents and cousins who have their own families?”
I nodded. I didn’t have a huge family, but enough that our holiday gatherings were always a little chaotic.
“I don’t.” He flipped the empty bottle in his hands. “My mother is my only living relative.”
“She is?”
He nodded and stopped flipping the bottle. “She’s also an only child, and my grandparents died in an accident three months after my dad left. That’s why I don’t really blame her for the drinking and all the other crap we went through when I was little. She lost everything in the span of a few months and was left with a baby she never really wanted and no support system when she was nineteen, and she used alcohol to deal with her grief. When that didn’t work, she tried to fill the void with male attention. Now she uses religion.”
I had no idea what to say to that, and it hurt my heart that he’d had to deal with so much in his life.
“If I lose her, I lose my entire support system. I might not be an active member of the church anymore, but if there was an emergency and I needed help, I could still call any of my mother’s friends or even my old friends that I don’t talk to anymore, and they’d help me. If they find out I’m gay, I won’t have that safety net. That terrifies me, so I’ve kept the truth to myself.”
“Sounds like we’re both stuck between a rock and a hard place,” I said.
“Yeah.” He put his bottle on the floor at his feet. “Are you okay with all this?” He waved between us. “We did that dump our traumas on each other thing again and still haven’t talked about the big reveal.”
I huffed out a laugh. “We really need to work on our small talk skills.”
“We do.” He smiled, some of his earlier shyness gone. “But are you okay?”
I smiled at his concern. He was the one who’d just been blindsided with all this, but he was worried about me. That made me feel way too good.
“Yeah.” I rolled my water bottle in my hands absently. “I’m still a bit in shock, but I’m not freaking out anymore.”
“That’s good.” He smiled.
“What about you? Are you freaking out?”
He shook his head. “It was a shock, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.”
“Makes sense?”
He scraped his teeth over his bottom lip, his expression shy again. “I didn’t understand how I could feel so comfortable talking to a stranger about such personal things. How I could feel such a deep connection to someone I’d never met. It scared me because I felt the same for you.”
“You did?” I whispered.
He nodded and swallowed, like he was trying to fortify himself to keep talking. “I tried to hide it because we work together, and I thought you were straight, but I did.”
“I did too,” I said, my voice a bit scratchy. “I didn’t understand it either. But yeah, I felt it and tried to hide it.”
We fell silent.
“I have no idea what to do right now. What to say.”
“Me either.” He raked his hand through his hair.
I put my bottle on the floor so I’d stop fidgeting with it. “I don’t think I can just pretend like none of this happened,” I said softly, taking the initiative and starting the conversation.
Zander blew out a breath and nodded. “I don’t think I can either.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“I’m not sure.” He chewed on his lip. “I like you, Luka.”
It wasn’t a grand declaration or anything, but my chest still tightened, and my heart did a weird sort of skittering beat because of how he said it. It was the intense look in his eyes and the softness of his tone that made it feel like so much more.
“I like you too.” I swallowed. “I’m not good at this.”
The corner of his lips curled up in a smile. “At what?”
“Talking about what I want and how I feel.” I swallowed to try and wet my dry throat. “But the truth is, when I was spinning in circles in my apartment earlier and freaking out, I wasn’t scared that you’d suddenly hate me or judge me or be an asshole about things.”
“You weren’t?”
I shook my head. “I was scared that I’d lose you. That you wouldn’t want me anymore once you knew it was me on the other end of the phone.”
“I’ve wanted you since the moment I first laid eyes on you.”
My heart swelled a bit. “You did?”
He nodded. “It’s only gotten stronger the more I got to know you.”
“Yeah, for me too.” I paused, choosing my words carefully. “I know us working together makes this messy, but I want to keep exploring things between us.”
His smile was so bright and happy I couldn’t help grinning back. “You do?”
“Yeah.” I shifted so I was angled toward him. “If you do.”
“I do.” He chewed on his lip. “We’ll have to keep it quiet. Especially at work. Are you okay with that?”
“Yeah,” I said quickly, probably too quickly. “That’s no problem.”
He smiled. “So I guess we’re going to do this?”
I smiled back. “Yeah, I guess we are.”
Zander held out his hand. I took it and let him tug me across the couch until I was kneeling next to him. In this position, I was taller than him. He looked up at me, his eyes so full of desire my stomach flip-flopped.
Fluidly, I swung my leg over his and sank down so I sat on his thighs, my knees on either side of his hips.
“Is this okay?” I asked shyly.
He wrapped his arms around my back and tugged me closer. “Definitely okay.”
Our chests pressed together, the warmth from his body seeping into my skin and soothing some of my nerves. Gently, I cupped his cheeks and tilted his head back so I could look down at him.
Zander was an incredibly handsome man, but his looks were only a small part of what made him beautiful.
Smoothing my thumb over his cheekbones, I leaned down and brushed my lips over his in a soft kiss. He sighed against my mouth but otherwise held still.
I kissed him again. His lips parted under mine, and our tongues curled together in a hot slide.
Zander rubbed my back, his callused hands teasing my skin as he slipped them under my shirt. I pressed closer to him, needing more kisses, more contact, just more.
He kissed me back, holding me tighter.
Sliding my hands into his hair, I fisted the strands. They were as thick and luxurious as I thought they’d be, and his moan of pleasure was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard.
I melted against him, giving myself over to the moment and enjoying the chance to get to touch him like this. To explore his mouth and body without the desperate need from before.
Our kisses were slow and languid, indulgent even.
My dick, like his, was hard, but I didn’t want to escalate things. I was happy to just keep kissing and touching him, and it seemed Zander was of the same mind.
We stayed like that for a long time, just making out and enjoying each other.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d kissed anyone like this, where it was about enjoying the moment and not about pushing for more. Kissing had always been a means to an end, but with Zander, it was so much more.
When we finally broke apart, we were both breathing heavily and my head was spinning from the good feels.
“I should probably go,” I said quietly, breaking the spell we’d fallen under.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s been a crazy night.”
I snorted out a laugh. “It definitely has.”
Reluctantly, I climbed off his lap. He got to his feet and followed me through the small house to the front door.
“Can I ask why you have a pool table in what I assume is your dining room?”
He smiled. “Not the usual type of table people put in dining rooms, huh.”
“Not something I’ve seen before,” I agreed with a grin.
“No real reason other than I had nowhere else to put it.” He shrugged. “And it’s not like I need a dining room when it’s just me.”
“Makes sense.” I put my hand on the doorknob but paused.
I was completely out of my element. I was no stranger to friends-with-benefits arrangements, but that wasn’t what I wanted with him. I wanted to be with him, to date him, even if it was just casually. Did he want that too? Was that what we’d agreed to earlier? Or did he think we were just hooking up?
“Do you have plans tomorrow?” I asked impulsively.
Zander looked surprised for a moment, but then he smiled. “I’m helping Mark and Ivy with something in the early afternoon, but other than that, I don’t have plans.”
“Do you want to hang out later? Maybe after dinner?”
“Yeah. I’d like that.” His smile was shy and sweet and made my heart melt a bit.
“Great.” I grinned at him like a moron. “I’ll text you tomorrow, and we can figure out the details.”
“Sounds good.” He stepped closer, stopping when his chest brushed mine. “Goodnight, Luka.”
“Night, Zander.”
I closed my eyes as he leaned in, anticipating his kiss. It was as soft and sweet as I expected it to be, and I was grinning again when he pulled away.
“Bye.”
The walk back to my building was a lot clearer than the walk to Zander’s, and I was still grinning like a fool when I was back in my apartment.
Tonight could have been a disaster, but amazingly, everything had worked out.
Zander and I were, well, not boyfriends exactly, but we were something, and that made me happier than I’d been in what felt like forever.