Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1
JASPER
Blow jobs always get me in trouble.
At twenty-three, I should know that.
Some part of my brain keeps trying to waive red flags and put up caution tape, to no avail. This blow job should have been easy. Anonymous. Safe.
And while my mind is partially focused on the fact I am standing in the law firm where I will be interning this summer, there is a fair bit of mental real estate being taken up by thoughts of last night. And waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It always drops, and today feels more ominous that most.
A hookup off an app shouldn’t occupy this much space in my brain, but…damn. The guy was tall, older, and hot as hell. And the way he liked it was exactly the way I liked to give it. That’s rare enough to warrant a little bit of mental replay.
I cough, willing my thoughts to control themselves. This is an important day, not one where I can be distracted by how perfectly some guy sank his hands into my hair or how his thighs shook against my cheeks.
Nope. Not today.
Today is the first day of a summer internship that will set everything I’ve worked for into motion. It’s my last year of law school and as the editor of the law review and top student in my class, I intend to go out having left my mark.
I pause in the long hallway, one of the only places in this law firm that doesn’t seem perpetually flooded with natural light. I stare at the portraits. That’s right, honest-to-god oil paintings of the firm’s three current partners. The paintings are displayed in a way that is imposing and at the same time, somehow effortlessly cool.
This internship is over 1600 miles from my law school. But I’m interning with one of the premiere AIDS and HIV advocacy law lawyers in the country. Shadowing him—Marshall Caffrey—during a huge trial he has this summer will make my Law Review article perfect.
I sigh just a bit, a smile pulling up the corners of my mouth. I am the architect and engineer of the perfect summer.
But no. Too soon.
Blow jobs are going to get in the way of all that, I realize as my eyes go back to one particular painting and my mind goes back to one particular blow job.
And, come on, is it really my fault that I love the intimacy of the act? The ability to feel my partner find release with nothing but my mouth? Okay, and maybe a bit of help from a finger or two?
And yet… Despite my mastery of oral love, it always gets me in a pickle.
My skills should be considered a superpower, or at least acknowledged as both art and skill honed from years of watching what my partners like and dislike. Far too few ever get the same sort of high off the act that I do.
But then, when the pants are zipped and the cum has cooled…
Sometimes guys will start to wonder how I got to be so talented with my mouth. It would be easy to explain if they bothered to ask—which they don’t. I am young, unattached, and have chosen to live in towns with lots of available gay men for most of my adult life. I didn’t have that kind of freedom growing up.
Back then, kids told me my sexuality before I got to figure it out for myself—not in a nice way—and by the time I did figure it out, I realized my small town had slim pickings for experimentation. Then the later years of high school happened and I found that not all straight-presenting guys are straight once you get behind closed doors. And a hell of a lot of them played football.
Sure, later there were the college dalliances where guys didn’t mind being open about their sexuality and guys who loved that I loved blowing them, until they got jealous of how I learned the art. Also, not a reciprocal bunch.
So, thanks to you, my love and talent of blowies. All you have left me with over the years are the jocks who wanted me to be a secret and the never quite reciprocated affections of the other men in their wake.
But I still love you, despite the trouble.
Now, the occasional hookup on an app when the bar scene gets too tedious yields about the same results as those high school and college experiences.
And now there is this.
Maybe the biggest trouble blow jobs ever got me in.
And this trouble matters. Way more than jocks or frat boys.
My feet walk me to Marshall’s office. A sleek teak wood door seems to laugh at me, or my reluctance to knock on it. I have to say, million-dollar law firms do not scrimp on aesthetics.
“Did you knock?” a clipped and faintly amused voice asks. The paralegal from the front desk, the very one who had sent me back here, swishes by on red-heeled shoes that look perfect with her pencil skirt and tailored blouse. I could believe she borrowed Meghan Markle’s wardrobe from Suits .
Instead of waiting for my answer, she raps loudly on the door, and with the briefest of pauses where she’s making some sense out of the muffled reply, she opens the door, sweeping toward me with her other hand as if to usher me in.
I swallow and nod at her, straightening my bow tie as I do. I’m not nervous about the internship. I’m editor and top of my class for a reason. I know my shit.
I’m nervous because the trouble here isn’t the guy rising to meet me, well it is, but not because he’s a big shot. Which he is.
I am here for an internship with Marshall Caffery. The Marshall Caffrey.
All six-four, dark hair, light-eyed inch of him.
And he might throw me out before we even shake hands.
Because I recognized him in his painting in the hallway.
Marshall Caffrey is the guy I blew last night.