Part Four Orders Enclosed #3
His white-knuckled grip on his car keys tightened even further as he finally stepped out into the car park and pulled his hands out of his pockets.
He let out a sigh of relief when he saw that his car was still there.
Hands shaking with an overload of adrenaline, Scott unlocked the car door and slid behind the wheel.
It was only when he pulled the door closed that the full force of his evening’s activities hit him like a punch to the gut.
There was no way in hell it had been Joe on the other side of the glory hole.
* * * * *
Opening the passenger side door, Joe bent down and peered into Scott’s car.
“What the—!” Scott cut himself off as he apparently realised who Joe was.
Joe grinned as he folded his tall frame into the small space, but his smile didn’t last long.
Whoever had sat in the passenger seat last had obviously been under three feet tall.
After a couple of seconds groping around beneath his seat, Joe found the mechanism that allowed him to slide the seat back.
Finally able to breathe without his ribs hitting into his knees, Joe turned in his seat and ran his eyes over Scott in a quick but thorough inspection. “You don’t seem particularly happy to see me,” he observed, keeping his tone casual and conversational.
Scott didn’t say a word. He just stared at Joe as if he’d never set eyes on him before.
The flickering neon light lent a strange glow to Scott’s face and made him appear even more freaked out by the world than he usually was.
Joe was used to Scott finding it difficult to look him in the eye; he wasn’t quite so accustomed to Scott staring at his crotch as if he thought Joe’s cock might spontaneously jump out and do a little dance for him.
He reached out to put his hand on Scott’s knee.
“I w-wouldn’t if I w-were you.”
Joe raised an eyebrow, and kept his hand hovering an inch above Scott’s leg. “Feeling inclined to throw a punch, are you?”
Scott opened his eyes very wide as he shook his head. “Of c-c-course not!”
“Then what?” Joe asked.
Scott glanced down at his jeans. “The floor in there was r-really filthy. You don’t want to p-put your hand on—”
Joe put his hand firmly on Scott’s knee. Curling his fingers over the joint, Joe made sure his hand covered any bit of denim that might have come into direct contact with the floor. “I’ll decide where I want to put my hands.”
“I…” Scott blinked at Joe’s hand, apparently more confused than ever.
“There’s no fun in dirtying up a nice, clean-cut guy if you’re going to be afraid to touch him afterwards, is there?”
Scott didn’t laugh at Joe’s teasing. He turned his attention from his knees back to Joe’s crotch. He seemed fascinated by his fly. Joe glanced down. There was nothing special about his jeans. He couldn’t even see the line of his cock through them that clearly, now that he was soft.
Joe lifted his attention to Scott’s face.
He’d planned to tease Scott about enjoying getting down and dirty in a rough pub, telling him he hadn’t needed an order, just an excuse, but that plan obviously needed to change.
“You took a while to get started in there,” he offered, as an opening bid toward working out what the hell was going on.
The neon light outside was yellow. It made the blush that rushed to Scott’s cheeks appear strangely orange. “I um…I w-was trying to work out if it w-was yours,” he mumbled.
Joe’s frown deepened. “What?”
Scott cleared his throat. “The lighting in there wasn’t g-great. I…I was trying to work out if I’d be going down on you or—”
“Do you really think I’d have ordered you to go in there if there was any chance that someone else would be on the other side of the hole?
” Joe demanded. He was aware that his grip on Scott’s knee had tightened rapidly, but he couldn’t seem to relax his fingers.
The idea of Scott’s mouth wrapping around anyone else’s cock…
Scott shrugged. “Some guys g-get off on things like that, don’t they?” he asked. “Sharing their…their…Sharing the m-men they’re having s-s-sex with, with other men?”
“I don’t,” Joe bit out. Unable to shake the image from his imagination, he felt more anger flooding into him by the moment.
Scott hesitated several times, before he actually managed to speak. “It c-could have been a j-j-joke or something…” He shrugged again, the movement jerky and unsure of itself. Scott tried to straighten his leg, but Joe couldn’t make himself let go of his knee.
“You’ve got a bloody strange sense of humour if you think that would have been funny…” Joe trailed off. His gaze narrowed. Scott wasn’t that kind of guy. He wouldn’t have thought that was in the least bit amusing. He wouldn’t have played that kind of “joke” on anyone.
Forget anger, ice cold fury poured into Joe’s veins. He tightened the hand that wasn’t on Scott’s knee into a fist. “Who?” he demanded.
Scott blinked, looking more innocent than ever—as if he really didn’t have a clue what Joe was talking about.
“Who played that kind of sick joke on you?”
For several long seconds, Scott stared at him in silence, but Joe held his gaze, determined to get an answer.
Scott looked down, not at his knees or Joe’s cock now, just down—like a man who had suddenly stopped believing he was worthy of looking another man in the eye.
Joe flexed his fingers, forcing them to relax out of a fist shape. Moving his hand to Scott’s throat, he slid it up, until the edge of his index finger was right under his chin. Tilting Scott’s head back, Joe made him look up.
“You’ve n-never been the guy on the outside l-looking in, have you?” Scott whispered.
Joe was used to seeing pain in a man’s eyes when he was administering a harsh whipping—but it was always the good kind of pain. The man in pain was always a hard-core masochist. There was always pleasure in his eyes too.
The pure agony in Scott’s gaze made Joe’s heart race and his stomach clench. It would have been easy to look away, but Joe forced himself to keep Scott’s gaze, no matter how uncomfortable the emotions that swirled around the car made him. “The outside?”
Scott’s lips curved into a strange mockery of a smile.
“You were the most p-popular boy in school, right? I’ll bet both the boys and the girls were th-throwing themselves at you more quickly than you could w-work your way through them.
And you s-sailed straight through your teens, looking all c-cool and gorgeous, didn’t you? ”
Joe didn’t answer. He was still too busy trying to work out what the hell they were talking about.
“I… I was one of those kids who hit his g-growth spurt late. Add in skin you could play join the d-d-dots with, and me being scrawny as hell…” Scott’s Adam’s apple bobbed underneath Joe’s palm as he swallowed several times in quick succession.
Joe stroked his thumb back and forth over Scott’s jaw, as if he could actually make him feel better by doing that.
Scott gave a jerky shrug. “Kids can be cruel, but they’ve really got n-nothing on a certain kind of gay man. The guys I met just after I c-came out were all fashionable and gorgeous. They had m-muscles, and perfect skin, and expensive hair c-cuts. No w-wonder they thought I w-was an idiot.”
Scott tried to laugh, as if there was anything funny about the way those guys had treated him.
Scott failed, but Joe didn’t even try to chuckle.
His stomach twisted into a complicated knot as dozens of scenarios ran through his mind, each one worse than the last. He could easily imagine the kind of jokes some men would play on an easy target who was so desperate to please and be accepted.
A bitter taste filled the back of his mouth.
Fury bubbled in his veins. “I want their names.”
If nothing else, the demand made Scott look Joe in the eye. Some of the pain in his expression gave way to confusion. “W-why?”
“So I can kill them.”
Scott laughed. It was little more than a chuckle really, but it was genuine. The sound eased a little of Joe’s anger, but he still wasn’t sure he’d been joking. If any of the men who’d hurt Scott had been there, Joe would have happily throttled every one of the bastards, one after the other.
Joe’s frown deepened. He never remembered being so desperate to hurt anyone who wasn’t already an enthusiastic masochist. He’d never realised he could feel so protective of another man either. Suddenly, neither Scott’s shyness nor his lack of confidence seemed so strange.
Joe forced the fingers on his right hand to uncurl. He even managed to turn his hold on Scott’s throat into something that wasn’t approaching a Vulcan death grip. “You still haven’t answered my question,” he said.
Scott shook his head. “It…it was y-years ago. I was still l-l-living at home. You d-don’t know them.”
That doesn’t mean I can’t track them down…
Joe cleared his throat. It was all he could do to keep those particular words back, instantly replacing them with more appropriate words was impossible. He sat in silence for a long time, replaying the scene in the back room of the pub over inside his head.
“It was me on the other side of the wall,” he finally managed to say, determined that there would be no more misunderstandings on that point.
Scott glanced up at him through his lashes. “I’m g-glad,” he whispered.
So was Joe. It was better than facing manslaughter charges against whoever had snuck into his place.
“I was watching you from the moment you stepped into the pub. I wouldn’t have let anyone else get to the glory hole before me.”
Scott silently nodded his understanding.
Joe took a deep breath, so far out of his comfort zone he had no idea how to get back into familiar territory. He had no map references for conversations this serious, no landmarks to guide him through deep, important discussions with a guy who’d just started submitting to him.