He reached for his rum.
Jaiden pulled the glass away. “Come on, mate. Let me call you a cab?”
He patted Mickey’s shoulder. The touch made Mickey’s skin crawl. He shrugged it off and laughed without humour. “You’re not gonna try get me to fuck you this time?”
Jaiden scowled, scrunching up his pretty face. “Not when you’re drunk enough to actually agree, no. It’s only banter. I know you don’t want it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you’ve been face down in that glass for three hours. You didn’t come here to score.”
Score. Jaiden meant dick, but in the world Mickey was trying to forget, it meant something else. Something that would quiet the agitation crawling in his veins, if only for a moment. “If you want to help me, get me another drink.”
Jaiden shook his head. “Nope. I’m cutting you off while you’re still steady enough to make good decisions.”
“You’re a prick.”
“And you’re a nice bloke having a bad day. Don’t let it ruin our beautiful friendship.”
Mickey glared. “You don’t know I’m a nice bloke. And we aren’t fucking friends.”
“Either way, I’m not serving you anymore.” Jaiden snatched Mickey’s glass away.
Irritated, Mickey lurched from his stool. Jaiden’s pretty brown eyes widened in alarm, but warm hands steadied Mickey before he stumbled, guiding him into an embrace that felt like home. “Leave him. I got this.”
It took Mickey a moment to realise the growled words weren’t for him. And even longer for the voice that had uttered them to solidify.
Benito.
No. Mickey wasn’t that lucky. And in any case, he couldn’t recall a moment where Benito had ever hugged him, and this shit felt so familiar there was no way he hadn’t experienced it a thousand times before.
That voice, though.
Mickey forced his head up, robbing his senses of the scent of clean cotton and man.
Benito stared back at him, his dark eyes wide and worried and his handsome face too perfect to be real. Mickey zeroed in on a tiny scar that bisected Benito’s eyebrow. It clearly wasn’t new, but it was to Mickey. How have I not noticed it before? Until this moment, he’d been sure he’d committed every inch of Benito’s face to an indelible memory.
“Hey.” Benito squeezed Mickey’s shoulders. “Are you okay?”
“What?”
Benito repeated the question, but Mickey didn’t know the answer. All he knew was his brain wouldn’t work fast enough to engage Benito before he slipped away.
He shook his head.
Benito stepped back to take a better look at him.
Mickey grabbed him. “Don’t go.”
“I’m not.” Benito shot a glance at the glass Jaiden was still clutching. “How many of those have you had?”
“Not enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to watch you find a hook-up and walk out with him. So do me a favour and wait for me to leave first, yeah?”
Benito frowned. “I’m not going to do that.”
“Which part?”
“Any of it.”
“Why not? Dude, this is a sex club.”
Benito’s dark gaze flickered. “So you came here to hook up, right?”
Wrong. Mickey’d come to the club for something to do, but he’d known the second he’d stepped through the door—hell, before that—that he didn’t want to play. Just one drink, he’d told himself, but silent promises were too easy to break. One drink had become four, and now he was too drunk to drive home. “I didn’t hook up,” he said. “I had a drink, and now I’m going home.”
He didn’t move.
Neither did Benito, his hands still on Mickey’s shoulders while Mickey fisted the sleeve of his jacket. Tension blistered between them, a beautiful pain Mickey couldn’t decipher. If Benito didn’t want to join one of the snake pits of men scattered around the club, then why the fuck was he here?
Jaiden said something to Benito.
Benito growled a response that made Jaiden nod and stomp away, then he focused on Mickey again. “I didn’t come here to hook up. I just needed some space, and unless I’m with you, this is the only place I know these days where I can fucking breathe. I don’t care why you’re here or if you banged ten dudes before I got here, will you let me take you home?”
Mickey’s head swam, and not from the rum. “You want to take me home?”
“I’m not leaving you here.”
“Why not? Dude, I’m a fucking mess.”
Benito laughed a little and pulled Mickey closer. He pressed their foreheads together, his stare intense. “There is nowhere I want to be right now more than somewhere safe with you. You can come to my place if you want, I don’t care.”
“Kiss me first.”
“What?”
Mickey moved slowly, giving Benito time to pull back.
Benito didn’t.
Mickey gripped his chin and kissed him, soft and sweet, then harder as Benito made a sound low in his throat. Mickey groaned too, and the effects of the rum he’d drunk faded as the intoxication of kissing Benito took over. The club disappeared, save the throbbing beat of the sultry electronica. Oppressive heat became warmth that built and built until Mickey was glad they were in a place where he didn’t have to hide the growing bulge in his jeans.
He slid his hands down Benito’s chest, palms curving around his cut muscles, tracing the jagged scar on his ribs through the dark shirt he wore.
Mickey resented that shirt, but as hard as he was for Benito right now, the heat blazing inside him was far more than the desire to lay him down and fuck him. I want to kiss him all night.
Maybe he could, if he let Benito take him home.
As though he’d heard Mickey’s wandering thoughts, Benito drew back. He brought his hand to his lips and touched them. “Damn. I wasn’t planning on jumping you.”
“No? Why do you want to take me home then?”
“I already told you, man. I just wanna be with you for a while.”
Mickey’s heart was still thumping. Kissing Benito was better than any high. But his words made sense. They could fuck upstairs if they wanted to. There was no reason to leave if that was all they were. “I’m sorry I made you kiss me.”
“You didn’t make me do shit. Kissing you is a fucking trip. I love it.”
Mickey leaned back against the bar. His gut—and other organs—was screaming at him to grab Benito and get the hell out of there, but he needed more truth before he was truly alone with Benito again. Or maybe he needed a moment to process the subtle shift leaving the club together for any reason other than sex would bring. I want to fuck him, though.
But that had always been true. Even in the stairwell outside Rosetta De Luca’s flat, when Mickey’s priorities had been professional, he’d still pictured Benito naked and pressed against the nearest available surface. For a split second.
Like that made it better.
“Look,” Benito said when Mickey failed to speak. “We don’t have to do shit, or we can do it all, I don’t care. Just let me drive you home.”