Chapter 6
WALL
MY LEGS START shaking on the third stair.
Inconvenient, given there are at least nine more.
Behind me, the bar roars along under the campaign banners, packed wall to wall, nobody looking up. I check anyway, over my shoulder, twice, because a man on his way to review sponsor numbers has nothing to hide and apparently checks for witnesses like he's about to rob the place.
Sponsor numbers.
That's what's upstairs.
Patrick said so, and as co-chair, reviewing the live tally falls squarely within my duties. Every word of that is true.
He also said it against my ear and I've spent the thirty-two minutes since translating a sentence that never needed translating.
Stair five. Somewhere overhead, something thumps.
I stop with one hand strangling the railing.
A voice follows the thump, low and unmistakably Patrick. And then a second voice answers, and the second voice is the problem, because the second voice is Theo's, and it's ragged.
Below my belt, my body files a report.
I decline to read it.
On stair seven, I make a deal with myself. I'll glance at the tally, and if the office is occupied, I'll leave. On stair nine, the deal gets amended: I'll leave unless leaving would be rude.
Whatever committee in my brain is drafting these terms has stopped pretending by stair eleven, because stair eleven's version doesn't mention leaving at all.
The landing is dim. At the end of the short hall, warm light spills through an office door standing half-open.
I know that gap. I've been watching Patrick not close that door in my head for half an hour.
From inside comes a sound. Wet and rhythmic.
There are explanations. Frank might keep a sink up here. The sponsor packets may have become unexpectedly moist since this afternoon. I stand in the dark hallway generating alternatives like a machine built for exactly this purpose. Then, Theo groans, carefully, like a man rationing his own volume.
The machine burns down.
My hand closes around the edge of the door.
Last chance. Nobody knows I made it this far. Patrick might suspect, but suspecting isn't seeing, and the difference between those two words has become strangely important to me tonight, for reasons I'll examine sometime after my death.
I was invited. To look at numbers.
I open the door.
***
PATRICK IS ON his knees.
That's the first thing I see. Not the office, not the tally I allegedly climbed a staircase to read. Patrick, all six-four of him, folded down onto the floor of a bar office. And then, there’s Theo's cock in his mouth, and every light in my skull goes out at once.
Heat detonates under my sternum and floods straight down. I stand in the doorway, not breathing. I should either leave, or announce myself. Instead I do the thing I've been thinking of doing since Milwaukee.
I watch.
Theo's braced back against the desk, jeans open and shoved to mid-thigh, one hand white-knuckled on the edge.
His head is tipped back, throat working every time he swallows a sound.
His shirt has ridden up over a lean stomach that keeps clenching in rhythm with the slow slide of Patrick's mouth, and there's an old bruise yellowing on his hip, right where Patrick's thumb rests.
And Patrick... Black dress shirt open at the collar, sleeves shoved up past his forearms, flexed hard where his fist rings the base of Theo's cock, veins standing under the skin.
His eyes are closed. Theo's too. They don't know I'm here, which means I could still back out with nothing lost, which means the decision is still entirely mine to hold.
"God, your mouth," Theo breathes at the ceiling. "Your stupid criminal mouth. I'm gonna get it laminated—"
Patrick hums, and the sentence dies with a crack down its middle.
He takes his time, dragging his lips up the length of Theo's cock like the night has nowhere else to be. When they reach the head and tighten, Theo's hips jerk off the desk. Without hurrying, Patrick spreads one hand flat on Theo's stomach and presses him back down.
The pinning is doing something to me.
Why is the pinning doing something to me?
Nothing in the twenty-eight-year archive of things I know about myself has a single word to say about it.
Patrick pulls back to drag his tongue up the underside, root to tip, and I get my first unobstructed look at Theo's cock. Flushed dark and curved up toward his stomach, shining everywhere Patrick's mouth has been. The head is swollen, leaking against Patrick's knuckles.
It's a good-looking cock.
Wait. Hold the fuck up. It's a what?
I don't have opinions about cocks. A few thousand locker-room showers, and I've never once had an opinion about a cock. Except now my mouth has gone dry over this one. I grab that thought, stack it somewhere dark, and stand on it.
"If you stop I'll die," Theo informs the ceiling. "I'll die right here in the bar and you'll have to explain the body—"
Patrick takes him back in.
"—fuck, thank you. Thank you—"
I'm staring at a man's mouth. At Patrick's mouth, wet and stretched, his beard dark and damp at the corners, cheeks hollowing on every pull, while my own cock is aching behind my zipper, full and heavy and getting worse each time his lips slide down.
The stack I'm standing on moves.
Theo reaches for him, buries his fingers in that neat dark hair, and wrecks it. For exactly one stroke, Patrick allows it. Then he catches Theo's wrist, pulls the hand free without breaking rhythm, and presses it back onto the desk.
And Theo leaves it there.
Theodore Moreau, who argues with referees for fun, puts his hand back down like he was asked nicely, fingers curling around the desk edge until his knuckles pale, and my whole spine lights up.
Not at the mouth, not at the cock. At the obedience.
At how Patrick collects it without even opening his eyes.
Filed under later. Filed under never.
"You're so good at this it's actually rude," Theo pants. "All—fuck—all smug, you absolute me—"
Patrick takes him down his throat.
All the way. Nose pressed against the skin at Theo's base, throat flexing around him, holding. The insult dies and morphs into a whiny moan while his thighs shake against the denim trapping them.
My knees consider the floor.
A thought slides in under everything: what would that feel like. That throat. That patience, kneeling in front of—
The fear arrives in an instant. Ice, straight down my back. I slam something shut on the thought, and it doesn't matter, because the image is already inside with the rest of tonight's contraband, and my cock throbs against my zipper anyway.
My palm closes over it.
One second the hand was performing innocence on my thigh, the next it's pressed flat against the denim, and the first slow stroke drags the seam over the head of my cock and my vision whitens at the edges.
I'm leaking. I can feel the wet underneath, warm under my thumb.
In a doorway, over this. A breath punches out of me, too loud.
Patrick pauses.
Every cell in my body turns to concrete. Ten feet away, his mouth goes still on Theo's cock, eyes closed. Then his tongue circles the head and he sinks back down, and I will never know whether he heard me.
"Do that again," Theo demands, voice shredded. "The throat thing. Please, I'll be so quiet. I'll never talk again in my life—"
A huff from Patrick.
Amusement, delivered around a cock.
He does it again.
Theo's whimper is high and helpless, and it goes straight through me and straight down, and my hand is matching Patrick's pace now.
I don't know when that started. Up when he lifts.
Down when he sinks. Pleasure builds low and hot at the base of my cock with every pass, and I'm not stopping. I've checked. I'm not stopping.
Patrick's free hand slides down to cup Theo's balls, rolling them slow, and Theo's back arches.
"That. More of that. I take back every bad thing I've ever said about Wisconsin."
Then, the rhythm turns cruel. Patrick slows, lets Theo's cock slide out until just the head is caught behind his lips, and stops.
Holds him there. Theo tries to thrust and gets nowhere; the fist at his base and the palm on his hip keep him bracketed, and all he can manage is a shallow, desperate grind that is clearly nowhere near enough.
"Please." Ruined. "Patrick, I swear to god, I'll do anything. I'll drive the speed limit, please—"
That's when Theo's eyes open.
Down at Patrick first. Then his head rolls, loose and delirious, and his gaze drifts across the room to the doorway.
To me.
Everything stops. My hand. My lungs. Ten feet of lamplight between us, and Theo Moreau is looking directly into my eyes with his cock in Patrick's mouth. I brace for the yell. For the scramble.
He doesn't blink.
His gaze slides down instead. Unhurried.
Over my chest, down to where my hand is flattened against the front of my jeans, and stays there while heat crawls up my neck.
One second. Two. When his eyes come back to mine, his lips are parted, and under all that wreckage a grin is assembling itself, slow and filthy.
Then, still holding my eyes, he arches his back so hard it shouldn’t be possible.
For me. That's a performance, and I'm the audience. He drags his shirt higher with one hand, baring flushed skin all the way up his ribs, letting me see exactly what Patrick's mouth is doing to him, and the sound he makes next is louder than anything he's allowed himself all night.
I'm watching, and he knows. And he likes it. My cock jerks against my palm so hard I have to bite the inside of my cheek.
Patrick opens his eyes.
They lift over Theo's hip, dark blue and entirely unsurprised, and find me exactly where he told me to be.
And now all three of us are looking. And nobody stops.
Patrick keeps sucking, slow and deep. Theo keeps grinding into it, watching me watch him.
And my hand keeps moving, because it stopped taking my calls minutes ago.
Patrick's gaze drops, half a second, to my hand, to what I’m doing, then climbs back to my face.
And stays.