“Mm…,” Michael murmured. “Maybe, you know, if you’re sweet, like you were last night, you could do that thing a lot?”
“You’d like that?” Carl asked, his nerve endings beginning to awaken again at the thought.
Michael looked up at him, his eyes heavy-lidded and sensual and his smile excited. “I’d like to try. Lots of shouting about that. Would like to see what it’s all about.”
“Five more minutes,” Carl teased.
“Is that all?” Michael teased back.
“And maybe another kiss.”
His mouth on Carl’s was bold this time, confident in a way that had been missing in the beginning. Carl drank him in, the confidence like an aphrodisiac when Carl had already been humming with sex and pleasure.
This, he thought, was gonna be good.
New Adventures
MICHAEL COULD hardly sit still on the trip to Glencoe.
Part of it was excitement and butterflies because in his entire life, he could never remember feeling like his body was flying before. And part of it was that his bottom tingled.
Carl had just left the freeway when he startled Michael by putting a hand on his knee.
“You’re going to need to sit still,” he said softly into the comfortable silence. “Everybody’s going to know anyway, but you’re wriggling like a puppy.”
“I can’t help it,” Michael almost crowed. “I feel amazing!”
Carl’s deep chuckle soothed something inside him, grounded all the tingles and the butterflies, suffused his body with peace.
God, what a rush.
He’d known, sort of, how good things could get from the night before. But that had been a surprise, and he hadn’t been very proactive about it. Carl had taken over and shown him the light. But that afternoon, he’d not only gotten to hold the reins himself, but Carl had picked him off the kid’s pony and put him on a racing stallion, and now sex was suddenly a whole new animal.
It hadn’t just been the gentle licking, then the one finger and the stretching, and the two fingers, coupled with Carl’s mouth on his cock—but Lord, that had been amazing. It had been the control, the way Carl had told him to say faster, or more, or wait a second, and then Carl had done exactly what he’d asked.
Right up until the moment when Michael had begged, “Please, more, anything, more, now!”
And Carl had slid the third finger in and sucked him down hard, and Michael had flown forever and ever and ever, and when he’d come down to earth, he’d floated and not fallen.
He’d had a hard time putting his brain together after that.
Carl had held him and told him sweet things, and when he’d asked why he was so floaty still, Carl had explained a thing called “subspace,” which meant that when you turned yourself over to someone the way Michael had just done, when you opened your body up for invasion and trusted that it wouldn’t turn into pain, your mind went to a special place that gave your body permission to turn over the controls, so to speak.
“This didn’t happen to you,” Michael had complained almost tearily.
Carl had hmmed. “I think,” he said slowly, “you’re used to going to this place. Only nothing good ever happened to you when you went there.”
And Michael had remembered those vague, numb moments of aftermath in prison, when his body had picked itself up and kept on going, whether he’d been bleeding through his jumper or not. “But this feels so good,” he’d said, wondering.
“Because something good finally happened to you when you went to that place in your head.”
Michael had nodded, and then to his horror—because the night before had been such an anomaly, he never did this, not even that first night in prison when everybody did it—he cried quietly, waiting for his body to come down.
His brain finally started responding to commands, but his body?
Apparently it was flooded with endorphins—at least that’s what Carl said. Michael told him that if this was what endorphins felt like, he liked them, and Carl agreed and kept snuggling with him, grounding him, touching him sweetly, kissing him, until he came down enough to get ready to leave for Glencoe.
He’d managed to function, but he hadn’t been particularly talkative, and it occurred to him now that Carl had been thoughtful and quiet the whole time too.
“Is anything wrong?” he asked as the pretty, ordered streets of the wealthy suburb passed them by on either side.
“No,” Carl said immediately. “I’m… well, part of me is going over what I need to tell everybody tonight, because it’s a lot, but part of it is—” He bit his bottom lip. “—I’m curious about something that’s none of my fucking business, and I don’t know how to ask you.”
“Ask me,” Michael said, chuckling slightly. “I don’t think I can take offense right now anyway.”
“Okay, then. Feel free to tell me to fuck off if it’s too intrusive. You and Beth got together in high school,” he said.
“Right after. We graduated, she took me out to a camping spot in her backyard, and I closed my eyes and thought of NASCAR. Nine months later….”
“Baby,” Carl said, his lips twitching. “Jakey? Didn’t you say it was Jake?”
“Yeah. Jakey, Liz, and Sarah, the baby.” It pleased him that Carl had been listening.
“And the baby’s three. She was only a few months old when you went in.”
“Yeah.” That had hurt. Beth had sent pictures once a month, and he’d watched his daughter grow. Now Beth texted him almost every day. His phone was filling up, but he didn’t care.
“Did you have many… uhm, hookups, like you had with Chuck, while you were married?”
Michael grimaced. He wasn’t proud of what he’d been doing with Chuck, but God, he’d been so damned lonely. “No. I didn’t tell Chuck, but he was the first guy who ever just took me aside and sort of touched me. You know? I guess I was lucky he was sweet.”
“You were,” Carl said, his voice getting odd, scratchy and swollen somehow. “I think Chuck really was good luck for you. If he hadn’t shown up, you probably would have gotten killed in that bank robbery.”
There was an “and” hanging on at the end there.
“And what?” Michael’s focus was returning, brought on by the raw emotion in Carl’s voice.
“And you might never have been touched by someone who knew who you were,” Carl whispered roughly. “I’m overwhelmed, Michael. You picked me? You’ve been waiting your whole life to be touched by someone who knew you, and you picked me?”
Michael thought about that. “I was right, wasn’t I?”
“God, I hope so, baby. I hope in a million years you never regret picking me.”
Carl sounded sort of upset about the idea, but Michael didn’t have it in him to be anything but Zen. “Yeah,” he said, images of that afternoon floating into his head with delicious clarity. “But I think I’m pretty lucky. You’ll do fine.”
MICHAEL DID pretty fine too, all the way through dinner and dessert, even though the verbal roughhousing seemed to be circling the table without him. Carl was part of it, though, giving as good as he got, telling the story of how he’d snuck into Serpentus like Stirling was exaggerating.