Bounced! Chapter 1
Who knew Satan made towels?
Not the idea of a towel. A specific towel.
One handed to me by a pink-haired kid at the front desk. The cloth was folded into a tidy little square that unfurled into what I could only describe as a washcloth with delusions of grandeur.
I held it up, looked at it, then looked at the kid.
He blinked and smacked his gum, utterly disinterested.
I am six foot three. I spent decades lifting things most people would call a two-man job.
My biceps are thicker than pink-boy’s waist, and somewhere across my chest and shoulders, beneath a mane of graying hair, is the accumulated architecture of all that lifting.
My last boyfriend described me, fondly, as “aggressively mammalian.”
“This is a napkin,” I said, holding the towel with two finger like it might be diseased.
“It’s the size we have.” Pinky blew a bubble and popped it. “This is a bathhouse, not the Four Seasons.”
I let out a breath and made my way into the locker room, stripped, and somehow got the towel around my waist. Its pseudo-knot sat at my left hip like a threat.
When I stood, the two edges met with maybe a quarter inch to spare.
That quarter inch had to do the work of about eleven inches.
It knew it, too. I could feel it resenting me already.
I took a step.
The whole arrangement gave a soft, disappointed sigh and let go.
I caught it.
Barely.
One hand shot down and pinned the failing edge to my thigh, and I stood there, half-crouched, gripping my own hip like a man who’d pulled something, while a slim, completely naked guy three cubbies down watched the entire performance over his shoulder with open, delighted interest.
“Need a hand?” he asked.
“I need a bigger towel,” I growled.
“They don’t have a bigger towel.”
“So I’m learning.”
“You could go without.” His eyes made an unhurried trip down and back up, taking inventory in no rush at all. “From what I can see, you’d be doing us all a favor.”
“Thanks. I’ll make it work.”
“Pity,” he said, turning back to his locker like a man who’d made a reasonable offer and could afford to wait for my surrender.
I re-wrapped the napkin, this time aiming the knot dead center, figuring a symmetrical load would distribute the stress better. This was genuine construction logic. It should have worked.
The towel disregarded it entirely.
That particular towel was not built to code and had no interest in physics.
My brain spun. I can cover my front or my back. Those were my only options the geometry allowed, so I chose front on the theory that a man should meet a room face first. Also, I figured if my lower front was uncovered, nobody would be looking at my face anyway.
I knew gay men. We are a singularly focused species.
Towel repositioned, I stepped into the main corridor with one hand hovering at my hip like a gunslinger who’d forgotten what a gun was for.
And then the hallway got hold of me.
The heat came first, wet and close, wrapping around my bare skin like a second body pressing in from every side.
Steam rolled through from the pool room next door and hung in the amber light, thick enough to taste, so the whole corridor swam gold and low and dreamlike.
The tile was warm and slick under my feet, and the air was heavy with eucalyptus, clean sweat, and the deep salty musk of men, of skin, of desire made humid and breathable.
It settled into my lungs and stayed there.
Underneath it all, a low, wordless pulse thrust through the speakers, more felt than heard, a slow beat I registered somewhere below my ribs and lower still.
I paused at a shut door.
On the other side, a man exhaled, ragged and rough.
Another voice answered him low.
Sounds rose and broke and settled into a rhythm I recognized in my blood, the oldest rhythm there was.
They grunted and groaned.
One cursed in pleasure.
Their voices rose like some erotic chorus, following me down the hall as I moved on.
Behind another door, skin slapped against skin, a slow, wet sound. Then I heard a murmured, “Yes!” The heat in the air seemed to thicken with it.
My body woke.
I felt it happen, felt the slow warm drag of it move through me, the way the steam opened my pores and the sound opened everything else.
My skin had gone taut and alive, every inch suddenly aware of the thick air crawling over it, of the fur on my chest now damp and flat, of the slick tile under my soles and the towel’s thin edge whispering against my hip.
This was what places like this did. They reached in through the heat and the dark and the sound and turned a man back into an animal, unhurried and hungry. My body was answering the call before my brain had decided anything at all.
More doors lined the corridor.
Some were shut, failing to seal the sounds behind them.
Most stood open.
“Open” was a language.
“Open,” said, “Come in.”
“Open” said, “The light’s low and the offer’s standing.”
The first open door revealed a man reclined on the bench, one knee up, the amber light pooling in the hollows of him.
He wore an expression that had clearly worked on a great many men and fully expected to work on me.
He was beautiful, with dark eyes, a runner’s build, and one hand resting easy and low on his naked stomach like it might wander any second.
He lifted his chin. That chin spoke in complete, understandable sentences.
I lifted mine back, which meant briefly taking my eyes off my towel, which meant my towel seized its moment and slid a solid two inches south before I got my hand back on it.
His gaze dropped to the newly exposed skin and darkened. “Nice,” he said, making the single syllable do a great deal of work. I felt the word blaze along the length of me.
“Thanks,” I rasped, with all the dignity a man could muster while physically clinging to his only garment and losing a separate, quieter battle below the knot.
“Come here.”
He didn’t reach for me, rather let his hand drift lower, slowly, watching my face while he did so. It was an invitation with no pressure, which was its own kind of pressure. “I promise I’ll be nicer to you than that towel is.”
Something low in me answered before my brain got a vote, a deep primal pull that tightened everything and quickened my breath.
I let myself imagine it. For one long second, I saw it all: the give of the bench, the low gold light, that clever hand leaving his own body for mine, a stranger’s mouth without conversation, only the heat of the room swallowing us both whole.
My pulse dropped into a slower, heavier gear.
It would be so easy to step through that door.
Instead, I gave him a half-smile and kept walking.
My plan, apparently, was to keep walking. It was a plan my body had committed to without running it past me first, and it had done so, I noted, over the loud and increasingly physical objection of every other part of me.
The next door held two men who’d clearly known each other a while, tangled loose and easy on a bed, one mouth grazing the other’s shoulder.
They looked up at me with the synchronized, welcoming brightness of people who had been discussing exactly this.
One of them patted the empty stretch of sheet between them, as though smoothing a place at a table set for three.
“There’s room,” he said. “We’ll make room.”
“There’s no room,” I said, gesturing at the entirety of myself. “I’m a fire code violation. I’d have to be grandfathered in.”
The brow of the guy who’d spoken furrowed.
His friend was undeterred.
“We’re flexible,” he said, letting the word breathe, as his hand resumed its slow path along his partner’s thigh to demonstrate.
They laughed.
They probably thought I was flirting.
But I was estimating square footage, mostly. And I was pointedly, desperately not thinking about the part of their offer that had nothing to do with square footage, the part my body had already accepted on my behalf and was clearly expressing through my now-tented towel.
I moved on. The moving on was harder now, the heat working in me like something poured.
Here is what a very large man in a very small towel learns quickly: people look.
I could’ve been fully clothed and they’d stare, but a towel built for Frodo raised the gaping-factor to ten.
They looked when I came in.
They stared as I passed.
They were still looking as I strode the halls.
The looking wasn’t cruel. It was hungry, in the easy, unembarrassed way this place made permission for, and God help me, the hunger was contagious.
Every pair of eyes that dragged over my chest left a warm trail.
I felt each one. My body kept its running tally, and the tally was getting loud.
There was interest, increasingly, in the open question of whether the towel would survive my next ten steps, a question the entire hallway now seemed emotionally invested in.
Honestly, so was I.
A guy leaning in a doorway held out a paper cup of water as I approached, the way you’d hand a runner a drink at a marathon, his own towel slung low and loose and losing its own argument.
“You look like you’re working hard,” he said, and let his eyes make clear he’d be happy to give me a reason to.
“You have no idea.”
“I could help with that. I’m good with my hands.” He turned one over, palm up, as if to prove the point. The promise in that gesture went straight through me.
And something in me, tired of walking, tired of being a monument to restraint in a building designed for the opposite, said, “why not?”
I stepped into him and put my free hand flat on his stomach, felt the warm give of him, the quick catch of his breath. I let it slide over his chest the way three men had slid theirs over mine, and God, it felt good to be the one doing it.
He made a low sound and leaned into my palm.
His skin was so damn hot.
His towel gave up entirely and neither of us cared.
He rubbed against me through my towel.
I wanted more.
I ran my thumb along his collarbone, up the side of his throat, and cupped the back of his neck.