33. Scott
THIRTY-THREE
SCOTT
A sound more grating than a dentist’s drill pulls me out of the deepest, most comfortable sleep of my life. If I wasn’t being so harshly dragged back to the living, I might have happily expired here in this bed, with Naz half draped over me and drooling on my stomach.
I groan and blindly swat at whatever is making that god awful noise, only to find empty sheets. The buzzing stops, and blessed silence settles over the room again.
I’ve barely relaxed when a shrill ringing fills the air. It’s then that it occurs to me that the sound is our phones. Those devices that people use to reach us.
Why didn’t we turn those off last night?
Naz mumbles and buries his face in my stomach. “Ignore it. Maybe they’ll go away.”
I hum my agreement, already halfway back to sleep.
The phones do stop.
For approximately three seconds. They then proceed to take turns ringing until, as a crescendo, they start to ring at the same time.
“Jesus Christ,” I grumble.
Naz’s arm tightens over my hips. “They’ll give up eventually.”
“They’re not giving up, it’s getting worse.”
The ringing continues.
With a sigh that feels like it’s being ripped from my soul, I gently extricate myself from Naz’s koala grip and peel myself out of the cloud I died and went to heaven in.
Every muscle in my body protests after the events of yesterday, followed by a marathon of interviews and statements sitting in those ungodly plastic chairs.
The only light in the room comes from the tiny sliver of daylight peeking around one corner of the blackout curtains, and our phones glowing from the floor across the room where we’d dropped our clothes last night. Or this morning? Whenever that was.
I stumble across the room and crouch down just as one of the phones starts ringing again. Stabbing at the answer button without even noticing the name on the screen, I answer with a very polite, “What?”
My voice sounds, and kind of feels, like I swallowed glass.
“Good afternoon to you too, Mr. Riley.”
Blake.
I rub a hand over my face. “Morning.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
That gets my attention. Grunting, I pull the phone away from my ear long enough to look at the screen. I have to blink several times to focus.
It’s almost three-thirty in the afternoon. What the actual fuck?
“Well, afternoon, then,” I say, trudging back over to the bed and plopping down beside Naz, who sits up and turns on a blessedly dim bedside lamp. The warm glow fills the room just enough for me to see his hair sticking up in every direction.
“You look cute.”
“Fuck off. What the fuck time is it?”
“Almost three-thirty,” I answer, leaning in to kiss him. I don’t give a fuck about morning breath, waking up next to a grouchy, sleepy Naz is my favorite thing.
“Goddamn.”
Blake clears his throat. Shit. I forgot I was on the phone.
“Sorry, hold on, I’m going to put you on speaker,” I say.
“You’re on speaker too,” Blake says. “Cory’s here.”
“Overachiever,” I grumble.
“So, what’s happening? Why are you calling?” Naz asks, returning us to the issue at hand.
“Turn on the television.”
I look around the suite. “There isn’t one.”
Naz snorts and reaches into the bedside table, fishing out a sleek black remote. He presses a button aimed at the wall opposite the bed, and for a moment I’m very confused. What I’d assumed was an oversized ocean scape painting morphs into a welcome screen with various choices for streaming apps.
“Whaa?”
Naz chuckles and leans into me. “What channel?” he asks the phone.
“CNN, or any of the major networks,” Blake replies.
Naz finds an app for live news, and as soon as it loads, the top story flashes on the screen.
An image of Curtis Howard, with his hands cuffed behind his back stares at us.
Two federal agents escort him down the front steps of what I assume is his house.
Across the bottom of the screen, a red banner stretches from one side to the other:
BLOGGER CURTIS HOWARD’S HOME RAIDED UNDER SUSPICION OF CONSPIRACY, INCITING VIOLENCE, AND MULTIPLE BOMB THREATS
For several long seconds, neither of us says a word. We just stare at the screen, and then at each other.
“Well, shit.”
After sharing room service in bed, and staring at the news channel until the words and images don’t make sense anymore, we decide we’ve had enough.
There’s a lot we don’t know, a lot of behind the scenes details that Cory and Blake tried to fill us in on, but none of it is processing.
It’s all too surreal. So we shut out the world together.
Naz turned the TV back to painting mode, and I turned both our phones off and hid them away in a drawer so they can’t disturb us.
Blake said we have some other things to talk about, but it can wait for a day or so for us to decompress.
Naz fills the tub while I use the bathroom. I think about shaving, but it seems like a pain. Besides, I think Naz likes me a little rough.
When I come out of the bathroom, the room is transformed. Naz has closed the blackout curtains again, and the room is filled with the flickering light of the fireplace and several candles set all around the tub.
The most beautiful thing of all, however, is the man himself. He’s leaning back against the edge of the tub, half submerged in water, bathed in flickering firelight while tendrils of steam rise around his body. He looks ethereal.
“Are you going to stand there and stare at me, or are you going to get in here?”
I wrestle with it for a moment.
“It’s a pretty nice view.”
Scraping his teeth over his bottom lip, Naz lifts an arm from the side of the tub and touches his chest. Eyes locked on me, he trails his fingers down between his pecs, down his torso and beneath the surface.
The water is slightly cloudy with whatever he put in there, that has the scent of vanilla, sandalwood, and pure sex permeating the air.
He shifts and lets out a soft sound of pleasure, his arm flexing as he slowly strokes himself.
I watch, enthralled, as he bends his knees and lifts one leg out of the water, setting it on the edge of the tub.
Water drips from his toes and down the arch of his foot, dripping on the stone floor, and I’m suddenly thirsty.
I forget everything else—hell, I almost forget how to breathe—when Naz lowers his other hand into the water.
If I drink enough of his bathwater, would I be able to see where his fingers are right now? Would I get to watch him play with that pretty little hole?
“Scott?”
I blink out of a haze, realizing I’ve made my way over to the tub, only to slump over the edge to see better.
Naz pulls his leg back in the water and gets to his knees, leaning forward. I think he might grab my hand or my arm to encourage me to step into the steaming water, but his strong fingers wrap around my rigid dick, sending a jolt through me that wakes me up a little more.
Led by my dick like it’s a leash, I climb into the tub. It’s steamy but not boiling hot like I expected. Naz guides me to straddle his lap.
“What’s on your mind?” he asks, eyes bouncing between mine.
“I was thinking about drinking your bathwater,” I answer honestly.
He laughs, and I lick into his mouth. He licks me back, and then we lick each other, tangling our tongues.
I groan and press our mouths together, not wanting even air between us.
Naz wraps his hand around both of us, slippery and tight.
I roll my hips into him, setting a rhythm that gets too good, too soon.
It occurs to me too late that I should draw this out, make it last, but I’m already too far gone.
“I’m going to come already,” Naz pants into my mouth.
“It’s okay. This one’s a freebie. I’m going to make you work for the next one,” I tell him.
We come together, laughing and spasming at the same time.
When we’ve come down, we lay against opposite ends of the tub, our knees slightly bent and legs entwined. We talk a little, but I don’t think either of us wants to disturb the peace by bringing in any of the outside world.
One of Naz’s feet rubs against the outside of my hip. I take it in my hands and rub my thumbs up and down the arch. Naz closes his eyes and groans in a way that makes my spent dick take notice.
I continue like that for a little while, ending my foot massage with an open-mouthed kiss to the side arch before grabbing his other foot to give it the same treatment.
“Scott Riley, do you have a foot fetish I didn’t know about?”
“To be fair, I didn’t know about it either. I don’t know what it was about seeing your wet foot propped over the edge of the tub, but fuck, it did something to me.”
“You’re doing something to me,” he says, dragging his foot out of my hands before pressing it lightly into my groin. My hips shift, grinding into the wet slope of his foot as he slowly rubs it up and down my shaft, growing hard again under his touch.
“If you don’t think I’ll fuck your feet and love every second of it, you’re dead wrong,” I tell him.
“I have no shame and no boundaries when it comes to you. Every fucking inch of you is perfect. There isn’t a part of you, from the tip of your toes—” I lift his foot from the water and press a kiss to the pad of his big toe. “—to the top of your head.”
“I’m not kink-shaming you or anything, but I don’t think humping the top of my head sounds very sexy.”
“Hmm. Maybe.” I look down at his foot again. “You’re getting pruney.” My tongue darts between his big and second toe, causing him to let out a sharp squeak and pull his foot back, laughing.
“Never do that again,” he says, standing.
Then he reaches a hand down, presumably to pull me up, but I rather like the view from down here.
Instead of standing, I push to my knees and suck the head of his heavy, half-hard cock into my mouth like a noodle.
He laughs again, then groans, one hand resting on my shoulder as I coax him to harden in my mouth.
Just when his hips are starting to twitch, reflexively thrusting into my mouth, Naz pulls back. “Nope,” he says. “Get out of the tub.”