Chapter Fourteen #2
“Maybe I will.” Sasha backed him up against the wall. Lightly
he bit the side of his neck, ducked down and ran teeth and tongue
across his taut nipples. “Why? What's got under it?”
“I don't know. But it bloody burns. It feels too
small.”
Oh, my love. Sasha swallowed the
words. He didn’t think Laurie wanted tenderness now. He wanted
release from whatever the hell it was that had driven him halfway
round the world—restlessness, blind ambition, the desire to create
a better life for Sasha, who would have lived with him in the grim
East Hill bedsit forever. Sasha knelt. He wrapped his hands round
the quivering muscles of Laurie's arse and gripped tight. When
Laurie bucked and cried out, he captured his jutting cock between
his lips: held it for a second, threatening a tease or a bite, then
dived down. He drove his fingers deep, for once not kindly—for once
hard enough to bruise, as if he would tear him apart like ripe
fruit, part him from his skin right here.
Laurie gave a choked howl. Even now Sasha listened, pulling
apart the threads of the sound. Yes—more need in it than pain.
Would he have stopped, otherwise? Yes, he swore to himself, sucking
Laurie's shaft over the root of his tongue. Yes, even though Sasha
might want to pin him, peel him, find out by brute force what was
growing inside that too-small skin and so learn how to keep it when
it burst free...
He sobbed, glad his throat was stopped and silenced. He would
trust. Relying on the pounding jets for lube, he pushed further
into Laurie's core. He let the water blind him, gave up all efforts
to breathe as he found his lover's prostate and worked it, bringing
Laurie's cock to full throbbing length. I'm hurting you, he realised in a
fragmented blood-crimson flash. Hurting,
and you're bearing down to get more, making sounds I've never heard
from you, and these things are turning me on so hard I have to come
or die, right now. He dropped a hand,
grabbed awkwardly at his own shaft and jolted to climax just as
Laurie did. You're changing. So am I. God,
just let me keep up with you, turn like the moon to your
sun...
Laurie
disengaged. He fell to his knees on the water-slicked floor and
took Sasha into his arms. He held him in the pounding jets,
shielding him, rocking him while he coughed and caught his breath.
“Sweetheart,” he rasped, lifting Sasha's chin. “Are you all right?
That was... rough, for us.”
“Rougher than you liked?”
“Did it look that way? I just wish... I'd have made it good for
you too, if—”
“If I'd waited? I couldn't. I couldn't, Loz.”
“My gypsy name again.” Laurie smiled, and shivered in the heat.
The water thundered down on both of them, washing away their sweat
and dust and every trace of their spilled seed, as if these things
had never been.
***
Mr Brett expects a great deal from you. Well, Laurie had bought a hell of a lot on credit, with just
the promise of his talent and his time. He stood in the dusty road
and surveyed his advance purchase. It was quite something. The sun
was rising over the San Marco gated village, one of the best and
most secure in West Los Angeles. The little oasis of hacienda-style
houses was cupped like sweet water in a small, shallow canyon, far
enough from the main road that the whisper of tyres on tarmac
barely disturbed the whirring of the cicadas.
A scent
of sagebrush filled the air. Glowing white flowers—oleanders,
Laurie thought—concealed the iron fence around his house. On the
terracotta gatepost, barely visible among the tumbling
bougainvillea blossoms, a tiny display panel told him that he'd
successfully set the alarm systems for the house, pool and garden.
Safe in his pocket was a monitor which would alert him if any of
these were breached, and a set of key cards which would only work
in conjunction with his thumbprint on the reader screens beside the
doors.
Sasha
had his own cards, monitor and pre-set thumbprint access. Laurie
had been specific over that. He thought he'd sounded pretty
reasonable the night before, sitting at the ironwood table in their
huge, state-of-the-art kitchen, explaining what he needed to the
Ivory Gate housekeeping rep. Laurie had still been damp from the
shower, Sasha conveniently passed out upstairs in jet-lagged,
postcoital sleep. The house must be secure, Laurie had told the
rep, but Sasha, as his valued assistant and friend, had to be free
to come and go as he chose.
Laurie
found his car keys and clicked open the door to the Jeep Cherokee
the studio had provided. He remembered not to climb in on the
right, and was glad of his presence of mind when an inconspicuous
Ford down the road flashed its lights at him in a prearranged
two-flicker greeting. Behind the wheel was an equally inconspicuous
woman, who could have been waiting for her kids or her partner but
was in fact one of the four security guards Laurie had also paid
for on the credit of his gifts. He nodded awkwardly. He started up
the jeep and pulled out into the motionless, deserted
street.
He'd known, of course, that Sasha couldn't drive. He'd banked
on it. Yes, Sash had to be free to come and go, but with no access
to a vehicle, locked up in a gated estate three hot, dusty miles
from public transport, where would he go? The house was beautiful.
The penthouse floor was a well-stocked library, and the internet
connections were ridiculously fast. There was a swimming pool.
There was a fridge and kitchen full of wonderful food, and the
Californian equivalent of Mrs G to come in twice a day and cook it.
Laurie would be home every night and would devote every minute of
his off-duty time to him: in the evenings and at weekends they'd
drive out to the city and coast and live the carefully orchestrated
dream. Sasha hadn't been well. Having little to do, and a warm and
gorgeous place in which to do it, was exactly what he needed.
Mentally Laurie crossed out the words exile and captivity from his mind and replaced
them with holiday.
With salvation, if
he came to think about it, because that, nothing less, was why he
had brought Sasha here.
Laurie
pulled up at the gates. They were nine feet high and made of
reinforced steel disguised as wrought iron. Last night there had
been a friendly warden to check their ID and wave them through, but
now Laurie had to work out which of the half dozen cards in his
wallet would crack open their jaws.
It took
him almost five minutes. By the time he had swiped the right face
of the right card across the right part of the gatepost reader, his
hands were shaking, his arm tense with the effort of reaching that
far through the window. A small queue had built up behind him.
Suspicious faces had appeared around curtains in the houses nearby.
No-one came to help him, to bail him out this once with a kindly
borrowed swipe, but they wouldn't, would they? That was the whole
point of San Marco. Laurie was a stranger, and like everyone else
within the reinforced-steel paradise, had elected to view strangers
as a threat. The damn gates opened at last. Jamming the Cherokee
into gear, Laurie tore through them and off up the canyon road,
taking bitter satisfaction in his own wild cloud of
dust.