Talker (10 page)

“Aaaaaaaahh.…” Tate’s head fell back, and he grasped Brian’s shoulders so hard he threatened to leave bruises. Brian didn’t mind.

“G ood?” he asked, stroking again. The skin was so damned soft, and the heat and the hardness shot desire right up Brian’s spine. Tate made that sound again and finished with a, “Please please please… oh G od more….”

The sound of Tate’s pleading was almost enough to make Brian come, but he had something he had to do first. He really wanted to taste it, to take it into his mouth and suck on it, but Tate was too raw, too close right now, and he was clutching Brian’s shoulders like he didn’t want to let him go. Brian had to settle for stroking it, and every time Tate spurted pre-come on his hand, Brian shivered. He started rubbing the head with his thumb, and he loved that little keening sound Tate made when he did that, so he kept it up, and then he felt Tate’s cock throb in his hand and he made one himself. It didn’t take long after that, a few awkward pumps, some frantic strokes over the cockhead, and before he knew it, Tate threw back his head again and shuddered. His cock Talker |
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throbbed violently in Brian’s palm (oh, such power!) and the space between them was spattered and hot and sticky.

Brian ignored the hot stickiness and pulled Tate back into his chest so he could hold his dream boy while he trembled the last of his orgasm into Brian’s arms.

“O h,” Tate murmured, when he could speak again. “That’s sex.”

“’s not sex,” Brian panted, his breath fluttering the ribbon of hair over Tate’s perfect ear. His groin was stil hard and every muscle in his back stretched taut with the aching need to come. “’s soooo much better than sex.”

Tate pulled away for a moment, and a dreamy, glowing version of his usual luminous grin was shining up at Brian. “You haven’t even come yet.”

Brian grinned back. “Not gonna. Something I’ve got to do first.”

Wel , first he needed to fetch a washcloth and clean them both up—but he had to confess to a secret yearning to just clean Tate off with his tongue. The thought made his cock (already bobbing rather incongruously as he walked to the bathroom) jump and throb. Maybe someday, when they both knew what they were doing, they could get sloppy like that, but right now he had a promise to keep.

He cleaned Tate off, and Tate laid there and watched him with those ink-dark eyes. When he was done, he put the washcloth on the end table and bent his head to the exact spot on Tate’s stomach where the old scars met the smooth skin, and kissed it, extending his tongue a little to touch. He extended his hand downward, down to the apex of Tate’s thighs, and looked curiously and without shame in the yel ow glare of the street lamp through their window.

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Tate’s hip and flank and upper thigh had al been burned. His scars extended to one of his testicles, and it was shriveled, bald, and unthrifty, but the rest of Tate’s equipment seemed to be unblemished and in working order, and Brian was glad. He extended his hand down the tender swel of Tate’s stomach, rubbed his thumb along the demarcation between unblemished skin and proof of Tate’s survival, down his stomach, down his thigh, and gently, gently, along his most tender of flesh.

“It’s… not perfect,” Tate whispered.

“Bullshit,” Brian responded reverently, and kissed his way down to Tate’s hipbone, tickling carefully with his tongue.

“Brian,” Tate objected, turning sideways so Brian couldn’t reach. “Please. Not tonight. Please don’t touch me there. Not when you can see.”

Brian sighed and rested his chin on Tate’s hipbone. “I want to kiss you everywhere,” he said softly.

Tate twitched, lying there in the bed. “I couldn’t stand it if you turned away from me,” he said. “Not here. It… I mean, it’s you. I couldn’t stand it if you thought… if you were al like, you know,

‘eeeeewww’ and….”

He was getting upset, which was not what Brian wanted at al .

He kissed his way back up to Tate’s stomach, and nuzzled it, proud when he elicited a giggle. “O kay—so I love you, and I think you’re beautiful, but we’ll take a little time with that, okay?” Which was something Tate had not taken with his other attempts, Brian thought with a sigh. He’d left himself vulnerable and bare to people who didn’t know him, didn’t love him, and he could hear it in Talker’s voice—they’d scarred him all over again.

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Tate grunted and ran his hands through what was left of Brian’s hair, and Brian kissed again, using his tongue gently on the rough flesh. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

“Then what do you want me to do?” Brian asked, keeping his voice pleasant—and giving Talker some control.

“What?” Tate put out a hand to Brian’s flank and petted him.

“I was gonna kiss down to introduce myself to Mr. Happy… not an option. So, you know, I need a plan.” He kissed again, gratified when Talker wiggled. “You’re always good with plans.”

“Kiss up my body,” Tate said, his voice husky. “So I can kiss you, and then I can kiss your Mr. Happy.”

Brian smiled softly at him, and “Mr. Happy” gave a vicious, painful throb of its own. “Deal.”

He kissed Tate’s scar-line again, and again, up to Tate’s shoulder, where the tattoo began, then up to his neck and his chin.

He felt the places where the skin was so thin, he couldn’t imagine putting needles and ink there, or the pain it would entail. He felt the rough, lumpy parts, and the twisted parts, where skin and flesh had fought in the healing. By the time he’d made it to Tate’s chin, Tate was whimpering. Brian kissed the scar where Tate’s lip piercing had been, before it had gotten infected, and then stroked his tongue along Talker’s lips with a tease.

Before Brian claimed his mouth, he said, “You are all beautiful, Tate Walker. You hear me?”

Tate nodded and opened his mouth under Brian’s. The kiss went on a long time, and al of Brian’s urgency, al of that glorious, gimme gimme gimme, need it need it need it omigod gotta gotta have it ba-bee was back when Tate’s warm mouth broke off from his.

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Tate didn’t go for subtle—there was no kissing his way down Brian’s body. O ne minute they were kissing, and the next, his open mouth was engulfing Brian’s swollen cock. Brian about came off the bed, it was so sudden, and then Tate’s mouth tightened and he sucked in his cheeks and bobbed his head up and down so his lips massaged the ridge of Brian’s circumcised cockhead. His fist came up to the base and squeezed, and within seconds, Brian was seeing stars.

As blow jobs went, it was not the most expertly given—no foreplay, no tasting, no licking or teasing—it was all about Tate’s craving to have Brian’s flesh down his throat.

Brian could live with that.

It took a minute, maybe two, before Brian thrust into Tate’s mouth hard, moaned “C oming.…” with just enough time to give Tate some warning, and started shaking with gimme gimme gimme gotta have it ba-bee before he groaned hard and came. His entire body came off the bed, and he clutched Tate to his groin as he shook and shuddered and groaned some more, curling around his dream boy as he dumped come into his mouth.

His dream boy swallowed like it was something he’d dreamed about too.

When the convulsions of climax had stopped, Tate pushed himself back up to face to face, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and grinned.

“No one’s let me do that before.”

Brian nodded. “I can see why,” he breathed, stil trembling.

“Your technique’s sort of dangerous. You suck me any harder and you’l be choking on my eyebal s.”

Tate’s grin widened and he chortled softly, and Brian kissed him because he had to.

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They fell asleep, practically in the middle of the kiss. Brian woke up a little later and reached down to arrange the covers over both of them, and while he was doing that, Tate mumbled something about “little spoon” and rolled over on his side. Brian took him up on it, and they fel asleep, Brian’s front to Tate’s back, so Brian could engulf Tate in his arms and his wide shoulders and keep his dream boy safe.

It didn’t work. Tate twitched in his sleep. Not constantly, but occasional y. And he almost woke up twice with bad dreams. E ach time, Brian thought about al the times no one had been there for Talker when he’d had bad dreams, and his chest hurt.

It hurt bad enough to wake him up about half an hour before his alarm. He laid there, snuggling into Talker’s body and peering thoughtfully at his shoulder tattoo in the gray light coming in from his window, and thought very carefully about what he wanted for himself, and what he wanted for Talker.

He was slow on the uptake sometimes, but he did get shit eventual y, when he had some quiet in his own skull to figure them out.

“What are you thinking about?” Talker’s voice was sleepy, and Brian kissed the skin on his shoulder with a small smile.

“How do you know I’m thinking?”

“Dunno. Just do. It’s like the silence changes.”

That made Brian smile, too, and he rubbed his cheek on that decorated rough and smooth shoulder. He liked the feeling—mostly because it was Tate’s skin.

“I’m thinking that I’m not enough,” he said after a moment. “I can try to be—I’l die trying to be enough. I’m thinking that so many people have let you down, you need more than just me.”

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Tate grunted a negative. “You’re all I need,” he said confidently, but Brian thought that maybe it was the same sort of confidence that had led him out the door with Trevor and Blaize, without thinking that anything could possibly go wrong.

He especial y thought so when Tate said, “You’re my Prince C harming, saving me from me.”

Brian grunted, and didn’t add, “Yeah, but not soon enough,”

because that was going to be his own burden to carry. He didn’t say, “But what if I die?” either, even though he, of al people, knew that losing the people you loved most was a real possibility. That thought was morbid and it was the last thing Tate needed to hear or think about. What he did say, however, was maybe one of the wisest things he’d ever thought of.

“Yeah, Talker, but do you have any idea how many people it took to get me in that bathroom?”

“How do you mean?”

Sigh. “I mean, it took Virginia to help me come out of the closet, and Aunt Lyndie to help me get dressed and to accept me for who I was, and it took the guy I knew from work to take my shift for me and it took Jed to put the big yel ow sign up so we didn’t get interrupted forty gazil ion times… and that was just to get me into that bathroom. Talker—al you got is me. And Aunt Lyndie—you know that, right? She loves you too.”

“Mmmm.” Tate took one of Brian’s hands and rubbed his cheek against it. “I like her too.”

“G ood,” Brian said. Talker’s neck was there, and exposed, and he had to kiss that before going on. “But you need someone else to help you fix your heart.”

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Tate was quick, way quicker than Brian, and Brian knew the moment he was truly awake and had followed the conversation.

“O h geez… Brian… I don’t want to.”

“I’ll go with you,” Brian said firmly. “And I don’t want to either.

But I want you happy. You didn’t see me. I mean… you saw me, but you didn’t see me. You needed someone to keep you safe so bad, you didn’t see that I loved you too. Now that you know I love you, I think you need someone safe.”

Talker sighed, hunched his shoulders, and shivered. Brian covered those narrow shoulders with his own. “We can’t afford it, and even if we could, I don’t even know where to go.”

“It’s free at school.” He’d looked into counseling the day Tate had made laundry explode al over the washroom.

Talker made a negative sound, and Brian persevered. “I’ll make the appointment for you,” he whispered. “We can go during our break between classes. Please, Talker. Please.”

There was a taut and palpable silence. F inally Tate’s shoulders relaxed, and Brian knew he’d won.

“Yeah, fine. But I gotta tel you, you sure can kil a good morning glow, you know?”

Brian’s naked body was pressed along Tate’s naked back, and Brian’s relief was so acute that all of that glorious skin to skin gave a big, happy throb. He wiggled his hips suggestively and smoothed his hand down Tate’s stomach and al points south.

“Sorry, baby,” he soothed, taking Tate’s semi-hard cock in his hand and playing with it to see what made it grow harder. “Let me make it up to you.”

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E pilogue

Later

HE DIDN’T warn Talker about the appointment. He made it, and a week later, as they were meeting during their class break, Brian grabbed Tate’s hand and said, “C ome with me.” (They’d scheduled a break between classes together since they’d moved in. Thinking back on that decision, Brian had to wonder at his own stupidity.

What guy does that for someone he doesn’t want to sleep with?) Talker’s disappointment when they showed up at the school counseling center was palpable.

“Brian.…” he said, and it was dangerously close to a whine.

“Talker.…” Brian warned.

Tate sighed, and his shoulders slumped, defeated. “You’re coming with me, right? You promised.”

In the past week, Brian had gotten very used to holding Tate’s hand in public, to kissing him briefly in the quad, to not giving a shit about what people thought of the two of them. He’d let Tate buzz his Mohawk into a faux-hawk and then taken crap about his haircut and laughed it off (although he was very glad it was growing back in), and taken compliments on the studs in his ears and the one in his nose. He’d gone into the club to wait for Tate, and although he still didn’t want to dance, he’d learned to appreciate the joy of dancing, and how the men in that club were happy—so happy—to Talker |
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be someplace where dancing with men was safe. He had thanked his friend at work for helping him out—and when Ray asked how his boyfriend was doing, he answered, “Better. But I’m still worried.”