Sirus flexed his arm in an even tighter band around Grey’s middle, holding him in place. “No way.” He finally eased his fingers off Grey’s perineum, but deliberately kept his dick tucked all the way inside the man’s tight ass. “You’re not going anywhere yet.
We’re not done talking.” Sirus smiled, but didn’t have the energy to lift his head. “God willing, we never will be.”
Grey’s muscles bulked up tight on top of Sirus for a long, drawn out moment, pushing against the python-snug hold of Sirus’s arm. It felt like the man waged an internal war, but he eventually relaxed and leaned into Sirus once again.
Swallowing the shout of victory, Sirus rolled his head and pecked a kiss against Grey’s sweat-soaked hair. Under all his clothing, Sirus perspired like hell too. He didn’t dare make a move to remove them though; that would mean letting Grey go.
Not gonna happen.
At least, not any time soon.
“That was mean as hell of you,” Grey eventually said, his voice still unnaturally scratchy. “Taunting me with threats of going to Noah.”
“Never a chance of it happening,” Sirus murmured. “Deep down, you know that.” He rubbed his fingers over Grey’s stomach, his heart constricting at the pain he caused Grey, no matter how temporary. “You needed to see it though, in your mind, to know how much it would bother you if I ended up with another man.”
Grey snorted, and Sirus swore he rolled his eyes. “I didn’t need the extra visual, thank you very much.” He shifted his legs, grunting as he unfolded them one at a time and let them fall straight next to Sirus’s jeans clad ones. Sirus held on to Grey’s middle the whole time, never letting him move far enough apart to risk his semi-hard penis slipping from the smothering hold of Grey’s passage.
Picking at Sirus’s bunched up jeans, Grey added, “It bothered me plenty enough to see Noah in your studio, protecting you like that … from me. Goddamnit.” Fire erupted in Grey’s voice again, exciting the hell out of Sirus. This was his Grey. The real one beneath the cool façade. “He dared to protect you from me. I wanted to kill him.”
“He thought you were trying to hurt me,” Sirus explained. “When you shoved me up on my worktable, my head banged into the surface pretty damn hard.”
“I’m sorry.” Grey turned his head and looked at Sirus, his hazel eyes deepening to nearly green as he searched Sirus’s face. “I didn’t mean to do that. I was about one second away from crawling on top of you and probably tearing off your clothes to fuck you. I was so angry at your accusation I could barely speak, but I was strung too tight with too many emotions to turn around and walk away.” His jaw clenching, and his eyes narrowing, Grey started to look a bit like a trapped animal. “At least until Noah showed up and played a damned effective knight in shining armor. You were right behind him, as if you were hiding from me, and then when you put your hand on him… Well, it looked to me like that’s where you wanted to be.”
“I don’t. You never have to worry about that.” Sirus caressed Grey’s face, trying to soothe away the hardness still living there. “I promise. Noah didn’t know the full scope of what went down between us, and he reacted to the final piece he witnessed with his own eyes. There wasn’t anything more to it than that.”
“That man has feelings for you,” Grey said. Certainty sharpened his gaze. “Trust me when I say there was a little more to his quick jump to help you than simply lending a fellow citizen a hand.”
“
That man
is struggling to find a place where he can admit to his family and friends that he’s gay.” Sirus closed his eyes, breathing through the short conversation he’d shared with Noah, and the sheer volume of emotions Noah had radiated during those few minutes. When Sirus pulled himself together, he faced Grey again. “Noah has children, and he has been married for a long time. He’s in his forties, and he’s just now facing who he is. Try to imagine that, and then tell me you don’t have any sympathy for how mixed up his feelings and life must be right now.”
“I didn’t say I don’t have any sympathy for him.” Grey bit off each word, and tension filled his body once more. “Again, don’t put words in my mouth. That’s what pissed me off so much earlier.”
Sirus immediately put his forehead to Grey’s, kissing away the hard line of his lips.
“Okay, okay; I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You’re right. I did do that. Both times.”
Grey pulled back, but he did link his hand over Sirus’s against his stomach. “What I said was that Noah has feelings for you. At the very least, he has a crush, if not more.”
Grey still looked a little surly, and Sirus had to bite down a laugh. His man was a little jealous, and it was sweet to see.
“Whatever Noah has will pass, and it’s not reciprocated.” As much as Sirus loved and was committed to Grey, he didn’t feel it was right to discuss the feelings Noah admitted to having for him. The man knew they couldn’t go anywhere, he spoke very clearly about intending to work past them, and about not letting them interfere in their growing friendship. Sirus believed him. “Mainly Noah wanted to apologize to me for speaking to you at the diner.” Sirus arched a brow. Grey had certainly not told him anything about said conversation, although it did make the certainty of Grey’s reads on Noah so much clearer. “He realized he overstepped his bounds, and he was afraid he might have hurt something you and I were trying to build.”
“And then he saw me attacking you and probably wished he’d interfered some more.” The grumble stayed in Grey’s voice for a moment, but then his eyes softened. “I am so sorry I cracked your head against the table like that.” He wrapped his arm around Sirus’s throat and tried to reach around to the back of his head. “Are you okay?”
Grey’s fingers probed at the back of Sirus’s skull, but Sirus grabbed his hand and pushed it down to his side, trapping it there. “I’m fine,” Sirus said. He figured he would have a little bump and maybe a headache later, but nothing more than that. “My head is as hard as it looks.”
“And what about the other?” Grey glanced away, and when he came back, his eyes were shadowed. “Are you fine with me introducing you to Rebecca? Or do you still believe I had ugly motives for what I did?”
“I don’t… No…” Sirus let go of Grey’s hand and ground his knuckles into the floor.
Banked hurt lived in Grey’s hazel eyes, and it cut Sirus up inside that he had put it there.
“Let me see if I can have this all make sense.”
God, please let Grey understand me
. “I see now that you genuinely thought you were doing something good for me. You did it in your way, the way you understand and know how to, which is to team someone up with a person who can hopefully make them commercially successful and wealthy. That’s what you do; it’s how your brain operates. I’m not judging it or saying it’s a bad thing, believe me. I’ve seen you incredibly focused when you’re working on something, and it’s totally sexy. I just got so damn angry because I thought you were ignoring everything I ever tried to tell you about my art and where I place it in my life. Creating is something I love and do on the side, and it seemed like you were trying to push me into a place I have no interest in going so that I was a more … I don’t know, respectable person in your world. I was angry and I got insecure, and all I could think was that you wanted me to sell to Rebecca because you didn’t think I was special enough just as I am. Once I got past my initial flash of anger I saw that you truly didn’t understand my position and thought you were doing something really nice because you care about me and thought it would make me happy.”
Grey pursed his lips, and his eyes became very focused on a point across the kitchen.
It looked like he chewed on his cheek, and his fingers drummed a one, two, three beat on the back of Sirus’s hand. He wiggled on Sirus’s lap, reminding Sirus with a sharp jolt of pleasure that he still had his cock embedded in the man’s ass.
Seemingly completely unaware of the effect his shifting had on Sirus’s dick, Grey suddenly swung his head back around to face Sirus. “Don’t get defensive.” he started.
“I’m just asking a question, not trying to nudge you away from your position. But can I ask you why you’re so opposed to making a leap into a more commercial market with your art? Do you think it’s selling out, or that you’ll lose creative control; something like that?” Grey clamped his hand on Sirus’s mouth. “I’m not trying to change your mind; I just want to understand where you’re coming from. Your view is leaps and bounds away from the world I function in on a daily basis, and I guess for that reason I cannot wrap my brain around it. All right,” he took his hand away, “you can answer now.”
“Gee, thanks,” Sirus said dryly, but pecked a quick kiss on Grey’s lips. He rubbed his thumb back and forth on Grey’s jaw while searching his mind for words that Grey’s way of thinking could understand. “Painting, sculpting, drawing, carving; it’s all such a wonderful outlet and release for me. It always has been. I get to go into my shed and just let myself go, not ever having to think or worry about anything other than what I’m doing right in that moment. I don’t ever want to stop loving what I do in there or have something practical infect it. I don’t want my art to become a job that I
have
to do to earn a living. I don’t want to resent something that has given me peace and joy all the way back to when I was a kid.
“I also don’t want to ever feel like I can’t attempt something completely new and fail at it miserably because I can’t afford to give it a try.” Passion infused Sirus’s voice, making it sharp and strong. “I don’t want my income and livelihood to depend on art.”
He focused in on Grey, his vision for his future clear. “Aside from all that, I do own my own rig, and I do like driving my truck. It’s actually one of my greatest sources of finding new things to try in my art. Some of the unusual stuff you see at my place isn’t born in my imagination. Take the three dimensional piece I have in my bedroom, for example. I saw a bunch of pieces in that style when I was in Kentucky. I thought they were interesting, I spent a good amount of time studying them and talking to the artist about them, then I came home and gave it a shot myself. Nothing much really came of it; I didn’t have the hand for it, but for better than six months I enjoyed the hell out of trying.”
He shrugged, out of steam. “That’s what my art is to me, not a business. That’s it.”
Grey nodded, but the eyes of a hawk still studied Sirus. “Hear me out.” Grey didn’t blink, but his voice was conversational, not instructive. “This is what I do, and you’re right in a lot of ways, I can’t turn it off. For you, there is the option of giving Rebecca two or three pieces a year, if that’s all you’re comfortable creating for high-end sales. If you’re firm about your position with Rebecca, and you tell her you’re not interested in putting yourself in the middle of a big show or meeting clients, then just say so. She is a businesswoman with a good eye, and she is not going to risk pushing you away by demanding more. You can continue to drive your truck while at the same time give Rebecca—or someone else—the occasional piece to sell. Even Ginny, since I would imagine you have a friendship with her.” Certainty and confidence lived in Grey’s eyes, and Sirus knew this was the Grey that thrived in his work. “There is middle ground, Sirus. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can be financially successful with your art and continue to drive your rig, on your own terms.”
Sirus chuckled, his heart feeling truly light for the first time since starting this
fling
with Grey. “Yeah, but you’re an all or nothing kind of guy, Grey, so when you brought Rebecca to my shed I thought you were trying to turn me into a career artist. Someone you can brag about to your friends.” It was amazing to Sirus that he could hear a laugh in his voice even though he spoke about such a sensitive subject. His heart kicked into overdrive with a skitter of nervous racing, just thinking about searching for a middle ground with his art.
Just as quickly, Sirus shivered beneath his layers of clothing as he slipped back to the flaring tempers of a short while ago. “I’m sorry I snapped in front of you earlier, and I apologize for shouting over your attempts to explain yourself. You eventually got this cold look in your eyes, and you scared the shit out of me when you so coolly walked away. I thought you were coming here to pack your bags and leave.”
“I was.” Grey dropped his head back against the counter again. He looked weary, and Sirus’s chest ached for his struggle to open himself to another human being. “I started to do it, but I stopped to get a drink.” His eyelids fell to half-mast and his Adam’s apple worked overtime. “Christ, I’ve never felt so much for one person before, and I’ve never hurt in the way I did when you accused me of not thinking you were good enough for me.” He turned his head and looked right into Sirus’s eyes, no longer hiding the brightness shining in his. “Nothing could be further from the truth. But when you thought I did…” Grey exhaled shakily. “I just wanted to get the hell away from everything you were making me feel. I figured the quickest way to do that would be to get far away from you.”
Cupping Grey’s cheek, Sirus’s hand trembled. “I would have followed you.” His body shook with wanting, but his voice remained rock steady. “I would have chased you down and demanded that you talk to me. I am not Joe.” He kissed the protest out of Grey before it left his lips, and then curled his hand around the man’s neck. “I would not have let you slip away without a fight.” They touched foreheads, their gazes holding one another. “Maybe not even then.”
Grey wound his arm around Sirus’s neck and closed the small distance between them with a desperate tasting, clinging kiss. Their upper bodies contorted to somehow face one another, while their cores remained connected through the unyielding grasp of Sirus’s arm around Grey’s waist. Grey dug his fingers into Sirus’s jaw and forced his mouth open, deepening the kiss with the rough thrust of his tongue. Mutual moans of pleasure escaped Sirus and Grey as Sirus’s penis grew hard in Grey’s ass, pushing at Grey’s channel and ring once again. Their kiss turned hot, wet and messy, aggressive with shared need for more.
Suddenly, Grey pushed his hand between their mouths, breaking the kiss as fast as he’d started it. “Wait, wait.” He panted heavily, fanning quick breaths of warm air over Sirus’s face. “Help me.” His eyes were a mixture of open lust and raw fear, and both seeped into the roughness of his tone. “Tell me how we’re going to make this work. I need to know.”