Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Tim
IS IT POSSIBLE TO die from being both scared and aroused? Because I feel like I’m going to die from at least one of those conditions before this night is through.
I slouch into the hotel room behind Keannen. The snick of the door shutting behind me rings out way too loudly, like a gavel in a courtroom. My crime: Being a jerk when I was seventeen. My sentence: A night imprisoned with the guy who hates me for it.
I tried to reason with him in the elevator, but it doesn’t seem like Keannen is interested in reasoning. It seems like he’s interested in testing out how long a guy can endure blue balls before one of them literally explodes. My whole body aches from the teasing, but I try to look as normal as I can as we enter the hotel room we have to share tonight .
The second I throw my duffel bag on a bed, I fish out my toiletry bag and rush for the bathroom. I might be trapped in a hotel room with Keannen, but the bathroom is a private space. Hopefully I can get myself under control in here, clear my head, maybe go downstairs and drink in the hotel lobby until I have the courage to crawl into bed. Yeah, that could work. I can avoid Keannen for most of our waking hours and slink out of the room while he’s still asleep in the morning. I’ll probably be groggy as hell tomorrow, but it’s worth it if it gets me through this hellish situation.
After this, I really need to talk to Emmett or Daphne about the other tour stops where Cameron plans to meet up with his boyfriend. Randomly throwing me in a room with the other band’s drummer is not cool. They probably didn’t know about our past when they made this assignment; I’m sure they merely thought of it as convenient. Regardless, it can’t happen again. I won’t survive another encounter like that one in the elevator.
“Hey,” Keannen calls out as I rush for the bathroom. “What if I need to piss or something?”
“There’s a bathroom downstairs,” I fling back at him.
Then I’m safely sequestered in the bathroom. In my rush, I didn’t bring clean clothes with me, but I’d rather dress in what I wore all day on the bus than go back out there and miss my opportunity for seclusion. When I start the shower and strip, I’m half hard from Keannen’s teasing. My jeans helped a little, but the second I’m naked the full force of Keannen caging me in and leaning so close hits me in a fresh rush of heat.
“Damn it,” I hiss at myself.
I can’t let him work me up like this. I’ve been a virgin for twenty-five years. One shitty ex-boyfriend shouldn’t be beyond my tolerance. I’ve survived all this time, after all. Not out of choice, perhaps, but that’s irrelevant. No matter how badly I’ve wanted to lose this pesky V-card, I’ve never had trouble controlling myself. Why does it have to be Keannen who’s punching past my self-control?
I all but throw myself into the shower, hissing when the water hits me and it’s a bit too hot for comfort. At least the painful spray helps calm me down. I adjust the water temperature and stand under the spray taking deep breaths.
He’s only messing with me, I remind my dick. He doesn’t mean it. He doesn’t want me. He hates me. Keannen is doing this because it gets a (very literal) rise out of me. None of his flirting is sincere. He can get whatever he wants, and I am definitely not what he wants.
Yet there was a moment in that elevator, a second or two when all his smirking fell away. When the lights went out, plunging us into darkness, and I grabbed his shirt on instinct, I expected him to shove me away, and he simply … didn’t . He let me cling to him, and if I didn’t know better, I would consider his reaction kind.
The memory is working me up. I curse at myself and give in. The situation isn’t going to improve if I try to ignore it, and this is my only chance for privacy. I should grit my teeth and get it over with. Twenty-five years of celibacy has left me well enough acquainted with my right hand to solve this quickly.
I brace a hand against the shower wall while using the other to reach for myself. The water sprays over my head and runs down my back. A few pumps is all it takes for me to be fully hard, and if I had any space left in my brain, I might feel embarrassed about that. Two seconds, and I’m hard as a rock to thoughts of Keannen standing too close in that elevator. Truly, a more pathetic twenty-five-year-old man has never existed.
My dick doesn’t care about shame, thankfully, and the longer I stroke myself the less the lingering burn matters. Instead, I let my mind drift to what could have happened in that elevator, Keannen’s lips meeting mine, his eyes peering up at me as he kneels, his hands reaching up to peel my zipper down—
“Whoa, hey.”
I snap my eyes open with a gasp. I’m still holding my cock when I swing to gape wide-eyed at Keannen entering the bathroom.
“What the hell are you doing?” I squeak.
“Brushing my teeth,” Keannen says. “It’s been a long day and you’re taking forever. I want to go to bed.”
“Can’t it wait? I’m showering.”
“Oh, you’re doing a lot more than showering. ”
I look down to where I’m holding myself. Keannen’s sudden appearance has not deflated my arousal whatsoever, and I can’t exactly turn away to hide it. The shower is all glass. If I put my back to him, I know he’ll stare at my ass, and I’m not sure I can handle that right now.
Keannen hops up onto the counter beside the sink. It sits directly across from the shower, offering him a perfect seat from which to observe my shame. Except when he unzips his pants and reaches inside, I get the impression he wants to do a lot more than watch.
“What are you doing?” I ask again. My voice spikes so hard I could give Erin a run for her money on some of those high notes she likes to bust out in a few of our songs.
“What?” Keannen says. “You’re going to tease me like that in the elevator and then be the only one who gets to jerk off to it? That doesn’t seem very neighborly, Timothy.”
It takes my brain a couple extra seconds to make sense of this. The elevator. He was getting flustered in the elevator? I thought he was messing with me, teasing the virgin. Why would he be flustered from that?
No. No, this must be part of his game somehow. I don’t know how, especially when he’s definitely stroking himself and he’s definitely hard and he’s definitely looking me right in the eyes as he does it, but this must be some cruel extension of his teasing.
Unfortunately, my body doesn’t care.
When Keannen’s dark, piercing eyes meet mine, I’m caught like a fish on a hook. My eyes trail downward, to where elegant fingers wrap around his cock.
Holy shit. His cock.
I’ve never seen anyone’s but my own. Not unless it was in a porn or something. But a video on the internet is very different from a real person who’s only a few feet away, and Keannen clearly knows what he’s doing. His fingers run up and down his shaft in a way I can only call graceful, like Cameron when his hands are flying down the neck of his guitar. Like Keannen when he’s twirling his drumsticks between his long fingers. The way he strokes himself has a beat to it, a rhythm I can’t help but fall into. I find myself stroking along with him, shame be damned as I match myself to the flow of his movements.
A smile spreads over Keannen’s mouth. It should send a bolt of dread straight down to my gut, but that toothy grin only lures me in deeper. It should look predatory, like spots on a poisonous insect, but I go willingly all the same.
“You like that, huh?” Keannen says, his voice as silky sharp as his smile. “You like watching me touch myself? Have you ever seen a man in person?”
“No,” I confess before I can stop myself.
“No, of course you haven’t, but you like seeing my dick. You like when I touch myself. You’d like it even more if I touched you.”
The suggestion zaps through me, hot as a bolt of lightning singing me from the inside out. My dick twitches in my hand, my rhythm stuttering as I contend with a whole new flood of fantasies.
Keannen’s smile widens. He stops touching himself, which nearly makes me groan in protest. I barely manage to bite back the sound. Then he hops off the counter, pulling his pants up. They ride low enough on his hips that his tip pokes out of his briefs, and somehow that’s even more enticing than seeing the whole thing. Maybe it’s because I know what the rest looks like. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen the long shaft and cut head, seen his fingers wrapping around it.
Keannen slinks toward the shower. Every step makes my heart thud against my chest. He comes up to the glass, only that thin, fogged up pane standing between us. I’m stripped bare before him, literally and figuratively, holding my hard cock while he sizes me up. He must find me wanting. I’m not as tall as him. I’m broader, but I’m not some super cut gym guy. I’m just … average. Regular. Keannen must have slept with dozens of guys more interesting and hot and perfect than me, yet his eyes rake up and down me all the same.
“Freckles,” he says. I’m confused, but then he continues: “You have freckles on your chest. Of course you do.”
I have no idea what to say to that. I don’t care about my damn freckles, not when I feel like I might break if he doesn’t keep touching himself .
He drags his eyes back up, looking directly into mine. “Tell me what you want.”
“What?” Confusion cuts through the pulse of my arousal.
“I’m not your fucking toy, Tim, and we’re not kids. You want something. Ask me like a big boy. You can do it.”
I don’t know if this is cruelty or sincerity, teasing or desire. Maybe it’s just another way of messing with me. Maybe he’s going to bring me all the way up to the edge only to leave me there in agony. It’s no better than I deserve, but the thought clenches my guts like a fist.
The words burst out of me.
“You,” I say. “I want you.”
He snorts. “Be specific. I’m not your fleshlight.”
“I want…” I fumble, struggling to drag a coherent thought out of my head.
I’ve never done this. I’ve never even had the chance to do this. At first, I was merely trying to survive as a scared kid in a completely new place. Then the band happened, and I never got an opportunity to…
“Touch yourself,” I gasp. “Please, touch yourself. Let me watch. Let me see you.”
“Is that really what you want?” Keannen asks. He runs a hand down his body as he speaks, and even though he has all his clothes on, I can’t look away.
I fall to my knees in the shower, watching him from the other side of the glass, holding myself pathetically, peering up at him like he’s an angel come down from Heaven to judge me for my sins.
“Yes,” I say. “Please.”
He smiles.