Sex & Sourdough (14 page)

The desire to bury his cock inside of Anders was a constant, niggling source of tension. He’d almost gotten used to it. But the desire to pull Anders down, to claim his mouth, surprised him. Kevin had hooked up with friends, both guys and girls, throughout high school. He had kissed a few girls—or, rather, he’d been kissed by a few girls—but never the guys. The times he’d hooked up with other guys had been brief, adrenaline-fueled, and frantic. They had torn at each other’s clothing and bruised each other’s skin, but they’d never kissed. Somehow, touching another man’s lips always seemed too intimate, too personal, when he and his partner just wanted to get off.

He was shocked by how badly he wanted to kiss Anders. The idea of touching Anders’s tongue, of feeling their breath mingling, left him stunned.

“I just….” Kevin ran his hands up Anders’s back. “Can I ask you something?”

Anders leaned back a little and cocked a single eyebrow at him.

Kevin took a deep breath and tried to think of what to say. He’d never been very good at expressing himself. He grabbed Anders’s cheeks, tilted his head down, and kissed him.

He wasn’t trying to be aggressive, but the taste of Anders’s lips bypassed his dwindling self-control and shot straight to his cock. Anders’s taste was an intoxicating mixture of salt, spice, and the lingering flavor of the mint milkshake he had been drinking. Kevin grabbed the back of his head and pulled Anders’s mouth against his, hard, pouring the desire he’d been fighting for a month into the kiss. Anders melted against him, not fighting for dominance but surrendering completely.

Kevin gasped when he felt how turned on Anders was.

“Please tell me that wasn’t your only question,” Anders whispered against his lips.

Kevin groaned as Anders rubbed small circles over his shoulders. “Not even the beginning….”

Anders dropped his forehead against Kevin’s chest, and Kevin felt him draw in a deep, trembling breath. “Good.”

Kevin tilted his head up, sitting up straight to kiss Anders again. He set his hands on Anders’s shoulders and pulled him down into the kiss. He flicked his tongue across Anders’s lips and delved inside the moment Anders opened for him. The slender man’s taste was intoxicating and addictive. He scraped his tongue over Anders’s teeth and ran his hands down Anders’s shoulders, over his muscular back, to cup his ass.

Anders pulled away, panting. “You know, I’ve got more than enough room in my tent, if you want to share tonight.”

Again, Kevin could only nod.

They grabbed dinner quickly, raced to finish their food, and had to set up camp in the dark. Kevin was nervous about not setting up his own tent, but when he watched the casual way Anders tossed his sleeping bag into his own bright-orange tent, his willpower crumbled.

The moment they were inside, Kevin pulled Anders to him and kissed him again. As hard as he was, as much as he wanted to fuck Anders until he couldn’t move, he wanted to drown in the taste of him more. Kevin kept kissing Anders as they squirmed out of their clothes, stealing panting breaths every time their lips parted.

“Condom?” Anders gasped.

Kevin shook his head. “Don’t have one…. Just let me touch you…. We don’t have to… I just….”

Anders smiled. “All right.”

Kevin kissed Anders as they stretched out facing each other, and kissed him again as he jacked them both off together.

I
N
THE
twelve days it took them to hike into Virginia, Kevin became addicted to Anders’s lips and tongue. He became so fixated on their nights that he rushed through setting up their campsites and making quick, cold dinners so he could drag Anders to bed early. Each night he would fuck Anders’s hand and then stroke him off, and when they were finished, he let his hands wander over Anders’s chest, ass, and thighs in languid caresses until Anders fell asleep.

And every night, when Kevin fell asleep, he dreamed of doing more. He wanted to shove his cock down Anders’s throat, shove him down to his hands and knees and take him hard, but he didn’t want their first time to be on the ground in a tent. As they hiked through the last stretch of the Cherokee National Forest, Kevin picked up the pace, pushing hard each day so they could get into Damascus, and a hotel bed, before he went insane.

W
HEN
THEY
got to the small town of Damascus, Kevin booked a room for the night and let Anders shower while he ran to the drugstore. When he got back, he told Anders he was going to shower and start laundry. Anders announced that he had to run a few errands of his own and volunteered to meet Kevin in the pub across the street in two hours for dinner. He used the time alone to shower and change into fresh clothes, and finally he reached for the unused disposable razor he’d been carrying all this time. His beard was so unkempt there was no way the two cheap blades would do more than make a dent in it. Instead, he grabbed his sunscreen and then went to find a barber to help him get cleaned up properly.

He toyed with the idea that he was just getting cleaned up because it had been too long since he’d had a haircut. He tried to convince himself the warm weather in the first week of June made his beard too thick and warm to be comfortable, but he knew that was a lie. In the back of his mind, he knew he was making too big a deal out of it. He was acting like he was getting ready for a date. If he started to think about Anders as someone he was dating, he would just get more hung up on the man. Anders was going back to Florida in two and a half months, and they would never see each other again.

Maybe, Kevin thought ruefully, it didn’t matter.

It was already going to suck when Anders went back to Florida. He didn’t mind hiking alone, but he didn’t want to think about hiking without Anders. If watching Anders walk away was already going to hurt, then maybe there wasn’t any harm in letting himself think about Anders as a lover instead of a friend. He could focus on the present, enjoy himself while he could, and at least have some pleasant memories to look back on.

After his hair was trimmed short and his cheeks were so bare he felt like he was naked, he slathered on a thick layer of sunscreen and hoped the pink rash wouldn’t get worse in the sun.

He spent so long trying to convince himself he wasn’t trying to impress Anders that he lingered on the street outside the bar, enjoying the small-town quiet and the old buildings along the main street. A slow-moving Jeep Wrangler with Florida plates drove past. The driver was creeping down the main street, staring at the small crowds of hikers and locals gathered along the sidewalk. Kevin didn’t think much of it until the Jeep circled the block and drove past again, moving at a crawl. Kevin knew there were a lot of red Jeep Wranglers in the world, but there weren’t that many red Jeep Wranglers from Florida driven by assholes with spiky brown hair. As the Jeep drove by again, Kevin’s suspicions were confirmed—Anders’s ex had come all the way to Virginia to find him. Kevin fidgeted with the belt loop of his pants and watched the Jeep until it was out of sight.

One definite downside to thinking of Anders as a lover, as
his
lover, surged up inside him like fire. Had Anders finally returned his ex-boyfriend’s calls? Had he invited the man to meet him here? That nagging, jealous doubt battled with a surge of dread that Kevin couldn’t explain. He had no right to feel jealous, because Anders had never agreed to more than ‘stress relief’ outside of Kevin’s imagination. But the possessiveness and jealousy inside fed his fear, irrational as it was, until the dread had grown into full-blown panic.

Then he remembered all of those hours Anders spent pacing in hotel rooms, deleting voice mail after voice mail. The messages were so loud Kevin could usually hear them, even across the room. Anders’s ex was always screaming, always angry and threatening. Kevin didn’t want Anders anywhere near the man, whether Anders was Kevin’s lover or not.

Kevin slipped into the bar and blinked to let his eyes adjust to the dim light. He scanned the bar and the booths, urgently looking for Anders.

When he didn’t see any sign of the blond, Kevin rubbed the bridge of his nose and cursed. For the first time in two years, he wished he had never gotten rid of his cell phone. Though since Anders hadn’t turned his phone on in weeks, it wasn’t like he could have called him anyway.

He saw a familiar couple laughing and sipping beer from plastic tumblers and wove his way toward them through the crowd. “Bumblebee!” He waved. “We caught up with you!”

The older woman locked her gaze on him and gave him a confused look. Then she took in his clothes and grinned. “Sourdough?”

“That’s right. Thought it might be time for a shave. How have you two been?”

She smiled. “No major complaints.” Kevin recognized the expression, though. It was the same type of smile he wore when he was aching everywhere and just didn’t want to talk about it. She had a thick knee brace around her leg and was leaning on her hiking poles, even now. “You?”

“I’m glad the weather’s turned nice,” Kevin admitted. “I never did like the cold.”

“So you’re still hiking with Butch?” she asked, looking around. “I thought I saw him a few minutes ago.”

“He came down with the flu about a week after we stopped in Franklin, so we took a few days off. I was hoping you might have seen him.”

Bumblebee shook her head thoughtfully. “Check the bathrooms, maybe? When you see him you tell him to come chat with me. I’ve got to talk to him about something.”

Kevin chatted with Bumblebee and Doc for a few minutes, keeping his eye on both the back hallway and the front door. When the front door opened, he saw a flash of red as the Jeep Wrangler pulled into an angled parking spot outside. Throughout the bar, loud groups of current hikers, former hikers, and locals all laughed, shared loud jokes, and cheered one another on as they recounted how they’d come the nearly five hundred miles from Springer Mountain.

Bumblebee elbowed Kevin in the ribs hard enough to make him gasp. She nodded toward a booth near the back. Anders was sitting in the booth, his curly hair glowing as much as his smile. He was smiling and having fun. “There you go, Romeo,” Bumblebee said as she shoved Kevin toward the booth.

“Hey!” Kevin rubbed his ribs. “We’re not… I’m not….”

She elbowed him in the ribs again.

“All right, all right, I am! For a little woman, you’re kind of brutal.”

“Oh, poor Sourdough! A six-foot-tall hulk beaten up by a little old lady! Whatever will you do?”

Kevin cast the woman’s husband a plaintive look, but Doc just raised his shoulders and grinned. “I’m just glad you’re not armed,” he said honestly.

She giggled and folded her arms. “Why would you assume I ain’t?”

“Uh, because guns are heavy?”

“They are heavy.” She nodded and flexed her braced knee. “But, honey, it doesn’t matter if a police officer is male, female, retired, disabled, white, black, or blue—we’re always armed.”

“Blue? You guys hire Smurfs?” He cast a sideways glance at her.

Her laughter erupted in a loud burst that carried for quite a ways around them. Kevin saw Anders glance up, and the moment those blue eyes riveted on him, he felt like he’d been sucker-punched. Anders’s eyes lit up as a bright smile spread across his face.

Anders hurried from his spot in the booth and wrapped his arms around Kevin in a tight hug. Kevin hesitated for a moment and then gave in. He closed his arms around Anders, holding him so tight Anders’s feet left the ground. He rubbed his cheek against Anders’s ear and neck in a motion that was far too familiar for a friendly hug, just to feel Anders’s skin against his own. He felt Anders freeze against him, felt him tremble.

Anders reached up to touch the side of his neck, where Kevin had all but nuzzled his skin. He cocked his head to the side and waved his finger at Kevin with a smirk. “You shaved.” Anders let go of him and stared, openmouthed.

“I….” Kevin rubbed his hand over his bare chin. He had to say something, and it wasn’t like that was the most provocative statement he’d ever heard. His treacherous brain was taking every word Anders said, running it through a perverse filter inside his head, and making even neutral comments sound dirty. “Yes, I shaved.”

Anders smiled and touched Kevin’s cheek. “I was just getting used to the beard, you know. Without it, you look rosy. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder what kind of perverted thoughts are running through your head right now.”

Kevin looked around, feeling embarrassed and helpless to stop it, but Bumblebee just nudged him in the ribs and laughed again.

Anders noticed the other hikers at the bar. “Bumblebee! Doc! I’ve been running into everybody here! Chex and Spider are right over there!”

“Anders, sweetie,” she said, smiling brightly, “I’m glad I ran into you. Is your last name Blankenship?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There’s been a fellow by the name of Joel asking about you, up and down the last section of the trail. We must have run into him three times now. He said your family’s awful worried about you.”

“Joel….” Anders narrowed his eyes. “He’s not family. We dated for a bit, but….” He shook his head. “I’ve been e-mailing my dad once a week since Georgia, so they know I’m safe. Joel’s just… confused. He keeps leaving me so many messages that I don’t even bother deleting them anymore. I tried blocking his number, but he just calls from a different phone.”