Twenty-One
TWENTY-ONE
ETHAN
A round 11:00 a.m. on April 1, fifteen teenage girls pull up in a limo outside The Castle with backpacks and suitcases and perky, high-pitched laughter.
Ethan’s medicating a tension headache from lack of sleep with the strongest morning blend they’ve got at How Do You Brew. He usually takes it black, but this morning, he went a little wild with the sugar. Lord knows he’ll need it to keep his energy up with this bunch who’ve already shot off confetti poppers on his freshly mowed lawn.
From here on in, not only does he need to supervise and assist his daughter and her friends, but he has to pretend that he and Taylor are passing acquaintances. Today, he is Eve in the garden and Taylor is the apple. Does that make Gabriel the serpent for nudging him to take a bite? And if so, does that make Amy God because…?
“You good, Dad?” Samara asks, waving her hand in front of his face.
“Yeah. Great!” It’s an overcompensation for sure. He leads the charge inside to get the girls all set up with their cottage assignments and keys. Suddenly, he’s a school trip coordinator, too. But, really, anything for Samara is worth it. The smile already stamped on her face as she talks with her best friend, Lily, about the songs she plans to use for her candle lighting ceremony does more for Ethan’s headache than the coffee ever could.
The festivities begin with a tour of the grounds. Each girl wears a pair of trainers and lululemon leggings. “Was there some kind of dress code?” Ethan asks Taylor when they’re on the march back to The Castle for bracelet-making.
“It’s the style.”
Taylor placed boards over the foosball table and took the net down on the ping-pong table in the Knights and Knaves game room. Each girl has her own chair marked by a sparkly nameplate and her own DIY friendship bracelet kit. Music pumps out at a low volume from the speaker system in the room—no doubt a song by an artist Taylor and Samara were discussing last night at dinner. Ethan resolves that forty is the year he expands his musical knowledge. Whatever this is, he can’t help from bopping his head along.
In the front corner is a small table from How Do You Brew with dozens of different bead styles. Ethan doesn’t know when Taylor had the time to do this, but he’s impressed all the same.
Unlike story time, which took a bad turn, Taylor commands the workshop with ease and skill, knowing when to step in and when to let the girls fail on their own. Like when Lily forgets to tape her string and the beads go clattering to the floor, rolling off in eight different directions.
Thankfully, nobody laughs. Jeez, kids must’ve gotten nicer since his childhood days.
Bracelet-making is not rocket science, yet when Ethan tries his hand at the craft just to get out of further small talk with Amy, the only other adult in the room, he finds his thick fingers aren’t made for this kind of work. Samara’s already on her third, and he’s busy grinding his teeth together with frustration.
Ethan abandons his string, instead choosing to watch as Taylor makes one at the front of the room. The beads are purple and gold—the colors of Ethan’s favorite flannel. That’s certainly not why Taylor chose them, but Ethan can fantasize. For a moment at least.
“The new signage looks superb,” Amy says. It was only a matter of time before their conversations turned to business—-the only topic they have between them besides Samara these days.
“They’re shiny, that’s for sure.”
“Taylor gave me the inspection report and it seems as if everything is shipshape. Thank you,” she says. He’s certain she doesn’t mean for this to come out like he’s her underling, yet it rubs him the wrong way all the same. They whispered sweet nothings to each other once. He doesn’t want that back, but surely there’s a better middle ground.
“Of course. I love this place. I wouldn’t let it fall into disarray.” He regrets it the minute he says it. There are too many ways to misinterpret his words. And he really shouldn’t be throwing around the L word in particular. After playing it in Scrabble last night in Taylor’s cottage, it seems to be popping up everywhere. Even one of the girls nearby is making a friendship bracelet in all pinks and reds that says it. Is it a warning sign?
She nods, eyes flicking over him in appraisal. “What happened to your hand?”
“Accident with some glass,” he says, hand burying itself into the pocket of his jeans on instinct. She always knows how to strike a chord, even if she doesn’t intend to.
The reverberation of that plucked nerve, however, lasts until he’s out at the field, once again realizing he can’t teach an archery lesson with a healing cut on his palm.
Thankfully, Taylor is present and ready to step in like last time. Ethan would have asked the birthday girl herself, but as most teenagers do, she possesses strong warring affinities for attention and self-consciousness. As he lays out the markers, he witnesses his daughter shrink, not wanting to be the only one in the group with any sort of skill at this. As if she won’t be the only one in a lavish ball gown and a tiara tomorrow evening. Or whatever her equivalent of the look entails. Did she ever send him a picture like he asked her to? Whatever. He’ll be surprised on the day.
Ethan schools himself into appropriateness as he goes back through the motions with Taylor, ignoring the thrumming just underneath his skin.
Getting into his T shape, Taylor turns his head, and Ethan gets a strong whiff of his shampoo. It’s not the ocean-scent he keeps stocked in his own shower any longer. It’s the neutral, floral scent stocked in the canisters of every shower on property. Noticing this makes his heart pinch and his words stutter, though the girls seem none the wiser.
Ethan’s about to let Taylor shoot, but his hands are burning balls of desire. Even though Taylor doesn’t need the adjustment, Ethan sidles up behind Taylor, mirrors the pose, and adjusts his front hand. Gliding his finger pads along Taylor’s smooth knuckles is enough to satiate the shouting devil on his shoulder that wants him to take this sharp, capable man back to his cabin and keep him there forevermore.
Zip . Taylor’s arrow slices across the field and hits the mark right at the bull’s-eye.
The cheers from the girls take up in Ethan’s chest. That target might as well be Ethan’s heart, and the arrow directly from Cupid’s bow.
* * *
Later, Taylor’s off with the decorators and other staff members getting the barn set for tomorrow night’s party. Dinner was thin crust pizza with custom toppings, and Ethan is stuffed to the gills. Everyone sits around the fire pits on the outdoor patio with blankets over their laps and pillows at their backs, making s’mores and chatting about guys from school.
Ethan is awed by how easily these girls express their feelings without guise. Has he ever had someone to do that with before? He sips from his beer bottle and considers it. Amy comes up beside him, snickering at the turns of the conversation.
“I don’t think I was ever that young and that romantic,” Amy says, bordering on judgmental.
Ethan bristles. “I beg to differ.” He remembers moonlit boat rides and candlelit dinners and chocolate covered strawberries fed to each other naked on Valentine’s night. “We had our share of romance.”
“Because of you,” she says, some of the edge to her voice wearing down. “You were the romantic. I was the realist.”
“I suppose opposites attract,” he says, tipping his beer up to his lips as fortification. What number beer might she be on that she’s talking this openly with him?
“I don’t know. I think Silvan is a realist as well, and I quite like him,” she says.
He tries to place the name, but comes up empty. “Who is Silvan?”
She huffs, folding her arms. “Did you not hear me talk all about him at dinner last night?” The cadence of her question is unsettlingly familiar. He’s whisked back to nights where he got lectured for forgetting to take the chicken out of the freezer to defrost in time for dinner, or the time he nearly got them into a car accident when he glanced up and saw a green light, only to realize as he slammed on the break that it was the left turn only arrow.
At present, he can understand both of those symptoms as ADHD. He’s even shared this diagnosis with Amy, not as some sort of excuse for his past actions but as important information needed to coparent with.
“What does that matter?” she’d asked. “It’s not like you’re in school and taking tests and need extra time.”
She couldn’t understand. Or didn’t want to understand. That’s her right.
Still, the difference between Amy’s reaction and Taylor’s is stark and blazes through his mind.
“He’s the photographer for the California location. We connected last week,” she says.
“Should you be mixing business with pleasure like that?” he asks, despite knowing better. There’s a dark string between his brain and his mouth that grew strong toward the end of his relationship with Amy. He learned to give the provoking comments as good as he got them from her. Over time, he worked hard to find the sharp scissors needed to snip that string, extricate that impulse, but here it is, weak yet still present.
“Oh, please. You’re one to talk,” she says, elbowing him in the arm. Four beers down, at least. There’s no way she’d elbow him otherwise. And that elbow sends a worry spiraling through his core. Does she know something? Did she infer something he fought hard to conceal during the archery lesson?
He asks around a huge wad of spit in his throat, “What does that mean?”
Her right eyebrow quirks like she thinks he’s brainless. “You and I. Storybook Endings.” She gestures around at the expanse with her free hand.
A relieved sigh slips out of him. “Right. Well. Look how that turned out.”
Something in his sentiment moves Amy. Her shoulders—-always thrown back, poised—rise and inch forward. Her mouth relaxes, from pursed to pleasant. There’s a hint of the Amy he met in undergrad. “We had many good years, we launched a thriving business and we made a great daughter. In this day and age, I don’t think marriages get more successful than that.”
To that, he must concede. Some of the hurt he still harbors chips away, enough that he tips the neck of his beer bottle to hers.
* * *
Come to my cabin? I have something for you. Ethan’s already halfway there with his hoodie pulled up when the text pings in. There is no way he’s losing a single solitary moment alone with Taylor when he is leaving in two days. He crunches up to the cabin door and knocks.
“That was fast,” Taylor says, gesturing him inside.
This time, Ethan takes off his shoes and hoodie and makes himself comfortable. He intends to stay for a while. Instead of saying anything, he produces a bottle of wine from his hiking backpack. Taylor, with a knowing smirk, goes and grabs some glasses.
“What is it you have for me?” Ethan asks, heart a slingshot against his rib cage. There’s another question lying in wait behind his lips that he’s nervous to let out.
After setting down a glass of wine in front of Ethan, Taylor fishes into the pocket of his joggers and produces a friendship bracelet. “For you,” he says, gently setting it in Ethan’s palm.
It’s the same colors as his favorite, trusty flannel and in the center are his initials, separated by a bow and arrow symbol pressed onto a flat circular bead. String and plastic should not be able to hold this much raw emotion, yet pleasure fans out from the place where it sits in his palm. “Thank you,” he mutters, struck still.
“Do you like it?” Taylor asks. The hesitation in his voice is endearing.
“I love it,” he says, breaking the muzzle in his mind telling him not to utter that word. He slips the snug bracelet on his wrist, then holds it up, admiring the way the light gleams off the yellows.
“I had fun being your right-hand man again today.” Taylor’s eyes appear hooded over the rim of his glass. He’s got his knees tucked up to his chest, his bare feet resting on the lip of the wooden chair across the table. Christ, Ethan could rip this table clean off the wall with the heavy-duty hormones coursing through him.
Ethan taps his fingers against the tabletop. “You’re a natural instructor. You’d make an excellent activities coordinator at a Storybook Endings location.”
The sides of Taylor’s pretty mouth fall. “One day, maybe. That would be a dream. During my interview for the assistant position, I was drawn in by all the talk of career growth and hospitality opportunities, but nothing like that has materialized in the three years I’ve worked for Amy. Maybe I’m only meant to be an assistant.” He stares into his wine.
“That’s categorically untrue. Your initiative for Samara’s party alone has shown you to be far more capable than coffee and scheduling—I’m sure of that,” he says with all the conviction he has stored inside. Building Taylor up is the friendliest thing a friendly friend can do. Because they’ve agreed to be friends.
Yet…
Fuck.
That’s the dominant f word that keeps rising to the top of Ethan’s tall glass of thoughts.
“Thanks.” Taylor’s bashfulness entices Ethan to lean in.
“I’m only stating the truth,” he says. The flourishing power of truth and his now-empty wineglass compel him to add, “You have no idea how badly I wanted to turn you around and kiss you today during our lesson.”
Taylor gulps loudly. “I could tell by the way you adjusted my hand. I wish you could kiss me now.” His brown eyes dip to Ethan’s lips.
“Friends don’t kiss their friends the way I want to kiss you,” Ethan says. His internal filter dematerializes. “Friends don’t fuck their friends the way I want you to fuck me.”
A delicious shock sparks on Taylor’s face. “I didn’t know you had such a dirty mouth.”
“I didn’t until you showed up,” he growls. It’s nearly animalistic and reminds him of mating season in the nearby woods. Oh, the sounds that keep him awake at night as nature takes its course. “I had no desire to bottom before you showed up either, yet here we are.”
“Have you ever…?”
Ethan shakes his head, warding off any embarrassment because Taylor won’t judge him. He’s not somehow less queer because he’s never been on the receiving end of anal sex. “I’ve explored alone. I have a toy. But never with someone else. Nobody sees a six-foot-six, two-hundred-and-seventy-fivepound bear and thinks, ‘He wants to take it.’ They expect me to be in charge.” If only he had the words to tell these men that it would be nice to take direction for a change. He may seem firm and resistant, but he’s capable of submitting for the right reasons, for the right person. “It’s hard to find someone you trust to try something new with.”
“For sure,” Taylor says. He’s holding his glass around the rim, swirling it. Clearly, he’s lost in thought. “Friends with benefits exist for a reason, right? Friends do help friends out every now and then.”
Hearing his own rationale in Taylor’s voice pumps up his pulse. “Could we be those sorts of friends?”
“Gladly.”
They’re horizontal on the bed in seconds, clawing at each other’s clothing—a frustrating impediment.
As his long-sleeved T-shirt is peeled off, Ethan’s shedding his old skin, as well, like he’s that tantalizing, devilish snake. It occurs to him then—all hard and exposed—that in his metaphorical Garden of Eden, he plays all the parts. He’s Adam; he’s Eve; he’s the serpent and God. With heady breath traveling through his long limbs, he’s the living tree that bears the divine fruit, and when Taylor’s teeth bite the hair-covered, sensitive flesh on the inside of Ethan’s right thigh, he’s the apple, as well. Shiny, alluring, ready to be plucked. Devoured.
Taylor primes Ethan’s hole with care. Ethan showered and cleansed and used his toy to ensure he was ready for this, so all Taylor needs to worry about is helping Ethan relax enough to accept the stretch. Glancing down between Taylor’s legs, he’s reminded of just how much of a stretch it’s going to be. Does Taylor’s back hurt from carrying that trunk around all day? Ethan takes a deep breath, committed to the challenge.
On his knees, facing the window, Ethan drops his broad, furry chest to the mattress as Taylor instructs. Suddenly, there’s warm wetness at his hole. A lapping sensation that eclipses his mind. For once, those sprinting thoughts slow to a jog.
“Oh, yes,” Ethan croons. Ethan’s ass has always been large, and he savors the way Taylor makes a meal of it, running his mouth along the hair-dusted fleshiness. Taylor’s hands aren’t wide enough to fully grasp the globes of him, but Christ does he try. It’s in the trying that Ethan begins to pant. “In my bag, uh- fughhu , you’ll find lube…”
Taylor springs away to procure the spoils and snatch a towel from the bathroom. Turning onto his back, Ethan widens his hips by holding his legs up in the air behind the knees. Easily, Taylor slicks his pointer finger and glides it inside. It barely registers.
“Add more fingers,” Ethan says, eyes closed. Then, he remembers himself. “Please.”
“Sure thing. Only because you were so polite about it,” Taylor says, sending a second finger to join the first. Ethan opens even more from hearing this dominant, assured voice roll out of the slender surfer he’s been desperate for. Taylor’s decadently slow in-and-out motion turns him feral. “How’s that?”
“Still not enough,” Ethan says, realizing that this may not be as much about submitting as it is about taking what he wants. About filling his desires and his hole.
“Somebody’s hungry,” Taylor teases.
That third one does the trick, causes that idyllic ache. It’s the trifecta of fingers. The slow brush of their pads against his prostate makes Ethan’s cock leak onto his furry stomach. He cries out Taylor’s name as precum pools in his belly button.
“That’s it. Say it. Say my name.”
“Taylor.”
Brush. “Again.”
“Taylor.”
Brush. Brush. “One more time.”
“Taaaaaaaaaaaylor.”
The finger-fucking starts in earnest, and Taylor’s other hand comes up to grip Ethan’s cock. In perfect sync, he fucks and strokes. Ethan’s body can barely process the sparring sensations that send him tumbling through the looking glass, to a world of rabbits and flowers and hearts and smoke and… “Fuck.”
“Is that what you want?” Taylor asks, bringing Ethan back to earth. “You want me to fuck you?”
“Yes, please,” Ethan begs.
“My, what manners you have,” Taylor says with a smirk, underscored by him breaking open the condom box. Magnums. Far from what Ethan usually buys.
“I’m a gentleman,” Ethan says, sitting up.
Taylor lies on his back, head on the pillow. “We’ll see how long that holds once you’ve got all of me inside you.”
Terror pulls back a heavy curtain and steps into the room with them. Looking more fully now, his toy comes nowhere close to Taylor’s length and girth. Far be it from Ethan to shy away from a trial, but even the strongest will sometimes isn’t enough.
Taylor’s hand reaches out and brushes that pesky strand of hair off Ethan’s already damp forehead. “It’s meant to feel good. If it hurts or you change your mind, say the word and we stop.”
The trust he’s built with Taylor in such a short span causes tears to spring up into his eyes. He glances away to blink them back. Bottoming is vulnerable enough without the waterworks. Once composed, he brackets Taylor’s hips with his thighs. This shouldn’t feel as death-defying as it does, like he’s about to jump off a craggy cliff and into the raging sea below to escape a band of pirates, but it does. Just Taylor’s lubed tip lying in wait between his ass cheeks is enough to turn his blood into pure adrenaline.
“Slow now,” Taylor says once Ethan grips the shaft and shifts himself backward.
Christ, he wants to scream. Not because it hurts, even though the tender burn does border on that feeling. But rather because doing this for the first time with Taylor ignites his pleasure center in a way he’s never experienced. A way he may never experience again.
Resolved, he’s going to milk this for everything he can. Inch by inch, he takes Taylor inside him, gasping for breath, stopping every few seconds to adjust and then descend some more before rocking gently up and down.
“That feels amazing,” Taylor says encouragingly, letting his hands rove over Ethan’s ample, hairy torso. “You feel amazing.” Taylor’s palm brushes over Ethan’s right nipple and then crests the curve of Ethan’s belly.
“You feel—” Ethan’s words get stuck in his throat when Taylor’s cock hits a spot deep inside him that feels like a foot stomping on a car brake. “Oh, I—” He contorts his face, wiggles unnaturally.
“Hey,” Taylor says softly.
Ethan ignores it, grinds away…
“Hey.” The word is powerful now. Taylor’s got Ethan by the chin, forcing him to take in those stern brown eyes. “Ease up. I don’t feel good if you don’t feel good.”
Ethan nods, Taylor’s fingers brushing against his beard hairs. “Okay.” He crashes forward to claim Taylor with a kiss.
Sitting up a bit more, he finds his comfort spot again. Their tongues tangle while his hips circle. Taylor groans into his mouth, high praise that shoots straight to Ethan’s dick. He reaches his right hand between his legs and strokes against Taylor’s smooth, taut stomach.
His body temperature rises in time with his heart rate and, swiftly, he’s feeling that illuminating awareness from underneath. The pressure cranks up to a thousand. He’s not sure how many minutes it’s been, but he knows within the next few he’s going to—
“Come,” is all he ekes out.
“Come for me, Ethan. Come on me.”
Rope after rope, he paints Taylor’s chest, never stopping the exquisite grind that got him there. The undulations of pleasure hit every one of his muscles from his toes to his forehead. He can practically feel the orgasm in his teeth, in his caps and fillings. It’s everything.
He’s loath to stop. He wants to bring Taylor to the place he’s just been, but now that full, superb niggle in his hole has morphed into overload. The sparks fly sharper, so he slows to a standstill.
Perceptive beyond measure, Taylor places his hands on Ethan’s ass and guides him gently up and off. “But—” Ethan chokes out.
“Shh,” Taylor says.
Ethan lies spent beside Taylor on the bed and watches as Taylor removes the condom, ties it off and then uses Ethan’s cum as lube to stroke himself. “Kiss me, Ethan.”
Ethan does so without hesitation, sending one arm up and behind Taylor’s head so it rests around his shoulders. He tugs Taylor to him as Taylor’s pumps become more frantic. “I’m going to come,” he pants into Ethan’s mouth as heat spurts dramatically between them.