Before long Eliot seemed to be done exploring, and Loren moved to him, putting a tentative hand on Eliot’s shoulder and saying softly, “I’ll take that hug now if it’s still being offered.”
Eliot smiled and turned, sliding his arms up around Loren’s neck as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Loren closed his eyes and pulled him close, and they both sighed as Eliot nestled in, his face buried in the side of Loren’s neck. They stood like that for a long time, swaying a little in place until Loren pulled back.
“Why don’t you go take a shower and get cleaned up, El?” he suggested, bringing his hand up to stroke Eliot’s cheek. “Are you hungry?”
Eliot shook his head, and he turned his face into Loren’s palm, kissing it.
“Come shower with me,” he whispered, and a jolt of arousal shot through Loren at the words.
“No, El,” he said, stroking Eliot’s cheek again to soften the refusal. “I didn’t come over for that. I can’t—”
“Please,” Eliot said simply, looking up at Loren with those green eyes he never, ever was able to resist. “I don’t want to be alone, even to shower.”
How could he say no to that? Loren gave a mute nod, and they moved to the bathroom. The shower was a glass-enclosed affair, not a tub/shower combo, so after Loren got the water started and set to a pleasurable temperature, he was pleased to find they could both fit comfortably under the spray, Eliot’s back to Loren’s front.
“Let me take care of you, El,” Loren whispered, and Eliot leaned back against him in contentment as Loren washed his hair for him, massaging Eliot’s scalp with his fingers in soothing motions, the small sounds of drowsy pleasure he was making shooting straight to Loren’s balls. He was erect in minutes, but he tried to ignore it, willing his body to calm down. This wasn’t about sex; it was about reconnection, forgiveness, and comfort.
Eliot didn’t seem to get the message, though, reaching up over his head from behind to wrap his arms around Loren’s neck, undulating, rubbing his slick, wet body sinuously against Loren’s.
“God, what you do to me, baby,” Loren gasped out, and he settled his back against the cold tile of the shower wall, cushioning Eliot’s body from it with his. “Lean back against me,” Loren instructed, and Eliot relaxed into his body with a sigh, arching his back and widening his stance in clear invitation. He circled his luscious ass against Loren’s aching dick, and Loren groaned.
“Fuck me, Loren, please,” Eliot begged in a hoarse voice. “I need you inside me.”
Loren mouthed the side of his neck, taking hold of Eliot’s erect cock with one soapy hand and stroking it slowly.
“No condoms in here,” he murmured, “but shhh, I’ll take care of you.” He tightened his fist into a slick tunnel, encouraging Eliot to thrust through it, banding Eliot’s chest with his other arm, stroking a sensitive nipple with his thumb. Eliot’s soft broken moans were music to Loren’s ears as he writhed in pleasure.
“That’s it, come for me,” Loren crooned in his ear as Eliot’s cries increased in volume, his cock swelling impossibly bigger in Loren’s fist just before he froze, hot jets of come filling Loren’s palm and stringing through his fingers as Eliot’s entire body was wracked with spasms.
The stimulation of Eliot’s soapy skin against his, the sounds he was making, and the sight of his helpless pleasure brought Loren to the edge, and he thrust a few times against the cheek of Eliot’s ass and came hard, a groan spilling from his lips.
Eliot turned in his arms and collapsed against him, and Loren held him up, letting the spray beat down on them until the water started to run cold. He helped Eliot out of the shower and wrapped him in a towel, leaving him to get dressed.
Loren slipped his boxer briefs back on before padding to the kitchen and looking at the dosing schedule that came with Eliot’s meds. He was to get a sleeping pill about an hour before bed, so Loren set that out on Eliot’s small bedside table along with a glass of water.
After a few minutes, Eliot emerged from the bathroom and moved to his tiny closet, dressing in a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt.
“You want to go somewhere?” Loren asked in surprise, thinking they would just stay in and relax.
He watched Eliot walk over to his freezer and dig through it, Loren’s eyes widening as he withdrew a plastic-wrapped brick of something, which turned out to be cash, and a lot of it. Loren choked.
“Eliot, where did you get this?” Loren moved to the freezer and looked inside, seeing several more similarly wrapped bricks set amongst old freezer-burned packs of hamburgers and chicken breasts.
Eliot shrugged. “Sometimes my mom gives it to me, and some of it is the tips that I make dancing. I don’t spend all that much of it. My mom pays the rent and utilities, and there’s a shit-ton of money in my bank account that I don’t use.” Eliot withdrew several bills from the brick and rewrapped it, returning it to the freezer. “Sometimes I kind of go on a buying spree, but usually what I spend, most of the time it’s on drugs and booze,” he admitted.
“Where do you want to go?” Loren asked, heading toward his own clothes that were thrown across Eliot’s futon.
“I want to get Sam his medicine,” Eliot replied quietly. “I won’t be around for a long time, and I want to say good-bye.”
Loren was touched, and he nodded, getting dressed and following Eliot out the door.
“WHY AREN’T
you out at work, Loren?”
Eliot’s voice was relaxed, drowsy. He’d taken his sleeping pill, and he and Loren were entwined together on Eliot’s futon, Eliot in Loren’s arms, lying against his chest.
Loren ran his hand up and down Eliot’s back, thinking about how he would answer.
“When I first realized I was gay, back in high school, I never considered not coming out,” he said. “My parents and brothers would have accepted it even back then, I think. After what happened—well, after what happened with you, I didn’t date at all for a long time, so it just wasn’t an issue.”
Eliot pushed up a little so he could look into Loren’s eyes. “Did I hurt you so badly, then, Loren?” he asked, regret lacing his tone, and Loren pulled him into a fierce hug.
“No, God no,” he said in fervent tones. “It was my own foolishness, Eliot, only mine, that hurt me. You didn’t do anything on purpose, I see that.”
Eliot relaxed back down against him, drawing lazy patterns on Loren’s bare chest with his fingertips, sending a pleasurable shudder through Loren’s body.
“And when I finally did meet someone, neither of us was ready for a relationship at first, so coming out still wasn’t an issue.”
“How many boyfriends have you had?” Eliot asked, a thread of teasing running through his voice. “I bet there are a string of broken hearts in your past.”
Loren smiled. “Nope, no broken hearts, and just one boyfriend, surprisingly enough. I’m not saying there haven’t been a string of anonymous hookups over the years; there have been quite a few of those, but only one man that I’d ever say I was even close to being in a serious relationship with.”
“What happened? With him, I mean.”
Loren sighed. “I guess the best way to put it is that we just sort of—grew apart. It was hot and heavy at first, like all new relationships, and for a little while he thought he was in love with me. I
wanted
to fall in love with him, and I tried, but after a while we both realized we were much better suited as friends.”
“Friends with benefits?” Eliot asked, his voice laced with curiosity, and Loren snorted.
“God, I hate that term. And he is so much more to me than a fuck buddy, so much more. I love him and he loves me, but not in the way either of us deserve. We could have settled and been really happy, but when I see him and Jeremy together now, settling would have been so unfair to him. And to me.”
“He’s with someone now?” Eliot lifted his head again, his face stricken, and Loren stroked his hair.
“He didn’t break my heart, El,” Loren assured him. “Like I said, we had outgrown each other a long time ago, but neither one of us wanted to admit it. It was easier and more convenient to let things just go on as they always had been. When he met Jeremy, we finally had to face it. And we let each other go.”
“So you didn’t come out at work because you guys weren’t serious?” Eliot’s voice was just a little bit more drowsy as the pill started to take effect, but Loren could tell he really wanted to know. He debated with himself for a minute, and then he pushed up a little bit more on the pillows, settling Eliot against him.
“When you join a police department, you get all sorts of diversity training, the proper way to deal with gays, transgender people, cross-dressers, you name it. It all looks good on paper, and people know how to say what the powers-that-be need and want to hear. But when it’s time to put it into practice—
“My patrol partner and I got called out one night to secure a murder scene at a local park. We were supposed to help control the rubberneckers and the traffic, keep the integrity of the scene intact until detectives and forensics could get there, usual stuff. We were the first responders to the 911 call, so when we arrived, my partner contacted the caller and I went to check out the situation and the victim.”
Loren must have tensed because Eliot started up the soothing motions of his hand on his chest again, and he made a little noise of commiseration.
“The victim was a young kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen, really good-looking boy. His face looked peaceful, like he was sleeping, but the rest—” Loren couldn’t help but shudder. “The rest was a horror show. He’d been stabbed, not a couple of times but dozens of times, tens of dozens of times. It wasn’t just a random murder; it was definitely a crime of passion. So much overkill. The perp had kept on stabbing him long after he was dead.”
“Jesus,” Eliot whispered.
“To make a long story short, his friend had done it, a gay friend who was secretly in love with the victim and thought the victim had feelings for him too. The victim had asked the gay guy to meet him in the park at midnight, to bring a blanket and something to eat. The kid made up a big picnic, thinking it was going to be a romantic date, and when he got there, his friend had brought a bunch of dudes from school who were expecting to get their dicks sucked because the friend promised them he would. Since ‘that’s what fags do.’”
Eliot shuddered, and Loren kissed the top of his head. “Yeah, and when he refused to suck their dicks, the guys beat him up, roughed him up, humiliated him, and then they left. The friend stayed and apparently was horrified by what ended up happening, and tried to apologize, but the gay kid took a knife out of the basket and stabbed him to death in his hurt and anger.
“Some of the detectives called the case the Gay Soap Opera, spent a lot of time making cocksucking jokes and jokes about murderous pillow biters and all the typical homophobic jokes that groups of straight alpha and macho men tend to do. I wanted to fit in, I wanted to succeed, and so I took that as a hint and never came out.”
Eliot’s breathing was getting deeper and slower as he started to succumb to the sleeping pill, but he managed to mumble, “Thanks for telling me, Loren. I’ll try to remember that you’re not out so I won’t embarrass you like I did at the jail today, okay?”
Loren hugged him close. “You didn’t embarrass me, El,” he whispered. “I was just being an asshole.”
But Eliot was already asleep. Loren lay awake for a long time just holding him, enjoying the feel of him in his arms again until he drifted off too.
When he awoke a few hours later, he sat up straight in bed, disoriented for a moment. Eliot wasn’t nestled against Loren’s chest anymore, but was sprawled on his stomach next to him, snoring quietly, the sheet low on his hips, the rest of him bare. Moonlight streamed in through the window and fell across his flawless skin. Loren couldn’t help but touch, running his palm over Eliot’s back, skimming up to comb his fingers through the hair that fell across his brow.
“You’re so beautiful,” Loren whispered, stroking his thumb across Eliot’s cheekbone. “So fucking beautiful it hurts.”
Eliot sighed, and Loren lay back down, not wanting to disturb him any further. He must have fallen back to sleep because when he opened his eyes again, the room was lit by the pale morning sun. He looked at Eliot, still sprawled beside him, surprised he would still be out, and then smiled when he saw sleepy green eyes blinking back at him.
“Morning,” Loren murmured, and he leaned over to trail his lips across Eliot’s bare shoulder.
Eliot hummed a greeting in return, stretching lazily, the motion making the muscles play across his lithe back, and arousal flared in Loren like lightning. He rolled over on top of Eliot in one swift move, not giving him his full weight but just enough so it pressed Eliot down into the mattress, making him moan in approval.
Loren nuzzled the side of his neck, his nape, before mouthing his way down Eliot’s spine until Eliot was squirming beneath him and making those little whimpers that always went straight to Loren’s balls.
When he got to the small of Eliot’s back, he brushed his nose lightly back and forth in the sensitive hollow, teasing him with his tongue and then blowing on the wet patch, chuckling as goose bumps pebbled that gorgeous skin. Loren eased the sheet covering Eliot down and off, a growl of approval breaking from his own lips when he saw firm, rounded cheeks laid out before him like a feast.
He plumped them in his hands, squeezing, spreading them apart, and he blew into the enticing cleft, making Eliot bump his hips up in blatant invitation. Loren teased him a little while longer, stroking in with his thumbs, dipping in a little deeper each time until Eliot moved his legs apart and whispered, “Please.”
Loren growled again, pulling Eliot’s cheeks wide with his thumbs and then licking him from his balls to the small of his back, again and again, until Eliot was sobbing with need. Loren took pity on him and sucked on his sensitive hole, tracing the excited nerves with his tongue until it pushed out, as if begging him to come inside.
Loren moved down and mouthed Eliot’s balls where they were pressed into the mattress, licking a little, and then he bit each plump cheek before moving back up, determined to kiss every inch of his skin.