Accidentally in Love (8 page)
Read Accidentally in Love Online
Authors: Jane Davitt,Alexa Snow
Tags: #Romance, #M/M Contemporary, #Contemporary, #Gay, #Source: Amazon
“Okay, I’ve got to go. I have to be up for work in the morning.” Joe sounded genuinely regretful, and he asked if he could kiss Tom again before he left. Tom nodded, and this kiss was longer but no less gentle than the first. He held a hand up in farewell as Joe walked away, and turned to find Cal leaning against the wall of the building watching him.
“Everything okay?” Cal asked.
“Depends on your definition of the word,” Tom said. “In some ways, I’m freaking out, which I guess isn’t okay, but he, uh… We kissed, and that was…nice.” He touched his fingers to his lips and then flushed and let his hand fall to his side. “And now you must think I’m a complete idiot getting bent out of shape over a kiss. Or possibly a teenage girl.”
Cal shook his head slightly. “Nope. You’re allowed to react however you react. The two of you looked good together, for what that’s worth.” He sounded possibly a little bit regretful about the fact, and Tom wondered if he’d wanted Joe for himself. Well, too bad. Cal could get anyone. Joe was his.
Here, outside the club, Tom was aware of a sense of relief. Maybe it was evident on his face, because Cal suggested, “Want to call it a night?”
“Yes, please,” Tom said gratefully. “Not that it wasn’t fun, but—”
“Not your kind of fun. It’s good to stretch your boundaries, but it’s good to know them too.” Cal nodded and patted his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”
They walked in companionable silence back to where they’d left the car and drove home.
“I still want to see those photos,” Tom said as they went inside and shut the door.
“Sure. Come on up. I’ll see if I can find some of the magazines.” Cal led the way upstairs, and Tom tried not to stare at his ass as they went. Cal did have a very nice ass. “Sit,” Cal said, pointing at the ugly upholstered chair.
“I’m not a dog,” Tom protested mildly.
Cal gave him an appraising look. “No, you’re not. Sorry.”
“I’ll still sit, though.” Tom collapsed into the chair. It was comfortable enough to explain why Cal kept it around, though not why he didn’t change the cover. “I feel exhausted. Like I did a half marathon.”
“New can be tiring,” Cal said absently, wandering around the room and opening drawers at random before hauling a box out of the closet. “Fun, though. Here they are.”
He put the box on a small table close to where Tom sat. “Most of these are for architectural magazines, a few are for the ones that show you other people’s spectacular houses, and the rest are for
Sirius
. Ever read it?”
Sirius
was a gay-themed glossy magazine with a sprinkling of artistic
seminudes
among the articles, a mixture that seemed to work for its readers. Tom nodded. “A few times, yes. I don’t buy it regularly. More when I was younger and I wanted something to, ah…”
Cal grinned at him knowingly. “Got it. Well, if it was that long ago, you wouldn’t have been jerking off to anything I took. See what you think of them. They’re not all nudes. There’s a great spread in this first one about a house built on the ocean by a gay author, at the top of a cliff. The views were incredible. I was lucky enough to be there when a storm rolled in, and it was like being part of it. I won an award for one of the shots I took that day, and it really helped my career take off. There was this moment with the sun coming out just as a bolt of lightning cracked open the sky. Darkness everywhere and these two competing sources of light…” Cal shook his head. “Still gives me chills remembering that. A second either way and I’d have missed it. So lucky.”
“Or you have good instincts.” Tom reached into the box.
“Want a drink?” Cal said. “I can make coffee, or I’ve got some whisky if you feel like a nightcap.”
“I’m good, thanks,” Tom said, already turning pages.
It was easy to get lost in the photos and the stories they told. The places where Cal’s work appeared were marked with slips of paper, and when Tom finally set the last magazine on the haphazard pile he’d created, he felt a sense of regret that it was over.
“There aren’t any more?” he asked.
Cal, who’d gone into the next room and been clicking away at his computer, said, “On here. Come see.” Tom joined him, standing behind the computer chair. “Do you want to sit?”
“No, it’s fine. Whoa, what are those?” He pointed to some tiny black-and-white images on the bottom corner of the screen, and Cal clicked on one of them. The photo that filled the screen was of a man’s bare thigh and the underside of his balls, and now that Tom knew what it was, he felt himself flush slightly. “Oh.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. It’s cool.” Cal clicked on the arrow to bring up the next photo of a man’s lower abdomen, the muscles clearly defined.
“Was this for a magazine?” Tom asked. It was strange how these photos seemed so much more personal than the ones he’d just been looking at.
“No, this was for me, I guess. It was just a guy I hooked up with a few times, but there was something about him. He was really sensual. And gorgeous, obviously.” The next photo was of the man’s erect cock, one hand cupping his balls and causing his erection to be thrust forward.
Tom had seen a reasonable amount of porn in his life. He had a computer, and like most people, he’d used it to satisfy his curiosity and scratch an itch from time to time. The flat eyes of the male models in the photographs and the by-the-numbers fucking in the movies had eventually bored him to the point that he’d more or less given up. What he could conjure in his own head, using what he’d seen as a starting point, was so much hotter. These photographs were different, stirring his body to an arousal profound enough to rob him of breath for a moment.
The difference was that these were intimate without being intrusive. The man posing for them had offered himself up to Cal’s lens with a generosity and lack of inhibition that lent power to the images.
Cal gave him a quick glance, and Tom wondered what his face was saying, because Cal smiled and clicked on another, then another, never lingering, but not rushing, leading Tom through the gallery.
Tom felt his mouth go dry. Beautiful. The curve of a muscular ass, or a bent back, arms folded across a wide chest, a close-up of a nipple, hard and shining as if it’d been licked and sucked on just a moment before. Tom flashed on Cal leaning over, his tongue swirling across the nipple, teasing it erect, then sitting back to capture it. Cal’s presence was in the photographs, if not his image—though once or twice he’d angled himself so that his shadow fell over the man’s body, an intangible, coaxing touch.
The series ended with the only photograph showing the man’s face or part of it. A mouth, the lips curled in a smile, pure, sweet seduction captured in a black-and-white image.
They were both quiet, and slowly the silence went from comfortable to awkward. Tom was unhappily aware of his swollen cock in the jeans that were so much tighter than the ones he usually wore, and that if Cal turned around he’d see it. He was determined not to blurt out some excuse and leave. That would be just as awkward, and he didn’t want to do anything that might damage the friendship that he and Cal were slowly creating.
“What do you think?” Cal asked finally, turning his head to look up at Tom over his shoulder.
“They’re amazing,” Tom said. “Really.”
“Thanks. I think they’re probably some of my best work, even though no one will ever see them. So it means a lot that you like them.” Cal was still looking at his face, studying him, and Tom felt a rush of something go through him as their eyes met again. He wasn’t sure what it was. It was definitely something much more complicated than simple lust.
His hand was resting on the computer chair’s headrest. Cal shifted, reaching toward Tom’s hand, the two of them still looking at each other. Tom’s skin tingled in anticipation of Cal’s touch.
In Tom’s pocket, his cell phone rang. He jerked, jolted out of the moment, heat rushing into his cheeks.
“Better answer it?” Cal made it a question as if he’d remembered Tom’s reaction to being told to sit. “Could be important.”
Tom nodded and fumbled for his phone. “H-hello?”
“Hey. It’s Joe.”
“Oh!” Tom bit down on his lip, the small pain grounding him. “Hi, Joe.”
Cal shifted in his seat, a small movement that Tom wasn’t sure how to interpret. He stood and wandered over to pour himself a drink.
“I got home, and I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” Joe's voice was warm without gushing. “I’d like to see you again, somewhere that we can talk, get to know each other. Are you interested?”
The smell of the whisky Cal had poured stung Tom’s nose, aromatic, pungent. He stared at Cal, who was tilting his glass, studying the amber liquid as it spilled from one side of the glass and back.
“Yes,” Tom said, and felt as committed and yet unsure as a man skydiving for the first time, the ground rushing up at him, the safety of the plane left behind him. “That sounds good.”
He let Joe make the arrangements—time, place, date—and then he ended the call.
“So,” Cal said, his expression encouraging, if distant. “I guess it all went the way it was supposed to.”
That seemed like a strange way to put it. Tom hadn’t gone out with the express intention of picking someone up—or being picked up—after all, but it seemed that Cal’s goal had been exactly that. With dawning suspicion, Tom wondered if Cal thought that his life would be easier if Tom were seeing someone and had manipulated events to get his wish.
“I guess it did,” Tom said. Lemonade from lemons. He had a date. It didn’t matter how it’d happened, just that it had.
He couldn’t help wondering what his answer would have been if Joe had called five minutes later, though.
“And then! We found out that we both have a weird fondness for salami,” Tom said, eyes wide and delighted. He’d been home from his first date with Joe for only five minutes, but he’d managed to describe just about the entire three hours.
“That
is
weird,” Cal said blandly. Tom didn’t really seem to require any kind of response to his babbling, but it was only polite to contribute something once in a while.
“He wouldn’t let me pay,” Tom went on. “Believe me, I tried.”
“Did you kiss him?” It was the kind of question Tom wouldn’t appreciate—too personal—somehow, though, it slipped out before Cal could stop himself.
Tom stopped, and for a few seconds Cal thought that might be the end of their conversation. It was hard to filter through all his feelings on the matter to the actual truth. On the one hand, he wanted to know everything; on the other, not knowing might be easier.
Cal’s feelings of regret for having instigated Tom’s foray into the sometimes wonderful world of dating had been growing. Tom had been happy the way things were, hadn’t he? Who was Cal to think he knew what was best for someone else when he could barely figure out what was right for himself? He’d become so confused about what he should be doing with his own life that he hadn’t been out all week, even though he was between assignments. Instead, he’d been hanging out with Tom and going to bed early, only to spend hours staring at the ceiling, wishing for sleep.
“He kissed me,” Tom said finally and slowly.
“Didn’t you want him to?”
“Of course I did! It’s not like getting a shot.”
“True,” Cal agreed.
“It’s just…” Tom waved his hands in the air, his fingers flexing as if he were trying to talk with them. “I never knew which way to tilt my head. Or what to do with my tongue. And when I swallowed, I kept thinking, okay, that’s not just my spit, and it seemed kinda gross.”
Cal shook his head. “You are deeply weird, you know that? Cute but strange.” Cal put his hands on Tom’s shoulders and shook him gently. “You’re thinking too much. Seriously. Relax and enjoy it. If you bump noses, so what? If it feels like a good time to go exploring his back teeth, do it. And spit happens. Sex is messy.”
“We’re not having sex!”
“No, but you will be,” Cal said frankly and patted Tom’s arm before stepping away. He covered up the twist in his gut at the thought of Tom getting naked with Joe by wiping away a fake tear. “I feel so proud. You’ve come such a long way.”
Tom snorted. “Yeah, right. Baby steps.”
“That’s better than standing still,” Cal pointed out. “So what’s next?”
“I invited him over to watch a movie.” Tom cleared his throat. “Friday night. Were you going out?”
“I guess I am now,” Cal said, pretending to be cheerful about the idea. “That’s great. Good for you.” He hoped it sounded more convincing than it felt.
“You think? I kind of feel like I’m stumbling around in the dark here. And crashing into things. With my bare toes.” Tom looked surprisingly vulnerable, and Cal felt a surge of protectiveness. This Joe better not do anything to hurt Tom, or he’d have some explaining to do.
“You’re doing fine. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
Tom glanced at the clock. “Hey, it’s not even that late. You want to watch
The Daily Show
?”
“Of course.” It had become a bit of a routine for them, sitting down to watch it before retiring to their respective rooms, and Cal found himself enjoying the rather domestic ritual more than he ever would have guessed. They’d curl up on the couch, usually with Tom’s feet poking him in the thigh, and afterward say good night and go to bed.
Tonight, Cal half expected Tom to be less likely to want to sit close to him. It turned out that he opposite was true. Tom, whose couch it was, after all, decided to turn during a commercial break, and lie full length along it, draping his legs across Cal’s knees.
“Do I
look
like a footstool?” Cal inquired.
Tom grimaced. “Sorry. My calves are cramping up and stretching out helps. I guess I overdid the jogging yesterday and today. I was worried about going out and then the date. Running calms me down.” He began to draw his feet back. “I’ll grab a cushion and lie on the floor.”
“No,” Cal said, wondering at himself. “It’s okay.” He patted one of Tom’s shins. “They don’t weigh that much, even with all those muscles.”
Tom started to reply and then groaned piteously, reaching down to rub at his calf. “
God
. Okay, that really hurts.
Ow
. It feels like the muscles are actually tearing in half.”
It wasn’t a good idea, and Cal knew it, but he knocked Tom’s hand out of the way and wrapped his own hand around the calf Tom had been rubbing. “Stop. Let me.”
Tom went quiet, his eyes wide. Cal could feel him attempting to relax, but even with that, his calf muscle was tight, almost in spasm.
“You shouldn’t run so hard.” Cal began to massage Tom’s calf with a gentle touch. “You need to find something else to do when you’re worrying if this is the result.” He dug his thumb into the muscle carefully, not using too much pressure. Tom moaned. “Tell me if it’s too hard.”
“No, it’s good.” Cal flashed on an image of Tom saying the same thing during a far more intimate moment.
“Easy,” Cal murmured. “Relax.” The TV became background—he had no idea if the show they’d been watching had ended or if it was still playing—as he concentrated on easing the tension out of Tom’s calves. He spent some time on the right calf, then moved to the left for a while before switching back again. “Is this helping?”
“Yeah.” Tom's voice was as tight as his muscles had been. Cal glanced up at him and saw the uncertainty in Tom’s eyes. He’d started this with no thought of anything apart from easing Tom’s pain—Cal knew firsthand how agonizing a cramp could be. With anyone else it, though, it would’ve been an excuse to touch, the massage quickly abandoned as his hands slid teasingly higher. He couldn’t do that to Tom. Tom, thanks to Cal’s own efforts, was interested in someone, happy with how his first date with Joe had gone.
Cal made an effort and looked away from Tom’s face, continuing the massage for a few moments more as if he hadn’t seen that confusion in Tom’s eyes.
“You’ve loosened up,” he said and took his hands away from Tom’s body. It felt like turning away from a fire when he was cold.
The world, his world, was full of available men, experienced, sexy, easy to get.
Tom wasn’t one of them. Cal had to keep that firmly in mind, and they’d be fine.
* * *
“So,” Cal said awkwardly on Friday night. “You’re going to be mad at me.”
“What? Why?” Tom was going through the refrigerator again, tossing a whole new collection of leftovers. Cal had tried suggesting that he not bother to save them at all, but Tom insisted that was wasteful. How it was more wasteful than saving them and then throwing them away, Cal had no idea. It seemed pointless to argue. He didn’t
like
to argue with Tom, which was why he’d been putting off this conversation.
“Because I’m not going out tonight.” When Tom looked up at him, Cal went on quickly, “I have to work, and the laptop’s not going to cut it. I need a new one, actually. I’ve been putting it off because I hate that whole process—transferring everything over and getting a decent browser on there, and my e-mail and everything. Anyway,
Sirius
moved my deadline, which was supposed to be next week, to tomorrow, and I’ve got to work. I promise I’ll hole up upstairs. You won’t even know I’m here. I won’t even come down for a glass of water, I swear.”
Tom stood. He pushed the trash in the bin down, then shoved the bin back underneath the cupboard where it was kept. “Okay.”
Cal had been expecting irritation at the very least. “Okay?” he repeated.
Tom shrugged and began to rinse his hands at the sink. “You live here, Cal. Even if you didn’t have a deadline, I wouldn’t have made you go out if you didn’t want to.” He shook his hands, droplets of water flying. “It’s not like I need the privacy, you know? We’re just gonna watch a movie.”
In a dark room, cuddled up on the couch
, Cal added silently. He’d seen how fast Joe moved to get what he wanted. Not that Cal was any different; it was just that seeing it as an observer had been a revelation. Tom would be lucky if he got to watch anything of the movie past the opening credits.
“Well, I just wanted you to know that I won’t come wandering through and spoil the mood, that’s all.”
Tom nodded and swiped his hands dry on his jeans. “Thanks.”
Cal opened his mouth, frustrated by Tom’s nonchalance, which he wasn’t sure he entirely believed in. He closed it without voicing his concerns. He’d be around if Tom needed him, and he had to stop fussing. Tom might have started out late, but once he did more than wiggle his toes in the water, he’d soon be splashing around happily.
Something occurred to him, and Cal blurted out, “You’ve got what you need in case things do get hot and heavy, right? Condoms, lube, handcuffs?”
Okay,
now
he’d back off and let Tom handle this solo.
Tom gave him an incredulous look. “Excuse me?”
Backtracking hastily, Cal said, “Okay, I was joking about the last one, but—”
“Cal, I’m a virgin, not an idiot.” Tom was frowning now. “I know what I need. I just… I didn’t think… Well, I have the lube, of course. Condoms, though… They expire, you know.”
That had never been an issue for Cal. He went through a box pretty quickly.
“Maybe I’d better get some more,” Tom said thoughtfully. “Just in case Joe’s don’t fit me.”
Christ
. “Okay, well, I’ve got to get back to work,” Cal said and left quickly, fleeing up the stairs and shutting himself in his office where he tried, very hard, to work. Luckily, Photoshop was a fiddly enough program that it didn’t take long before he’d forgotten about everything but the job at hand. He could spend hours making subtle adjustments to levels, and he often had.
Tonight, he was so involved that when he finally closed the program just to give his eyes a break for a while, he discovered it was two hours later and he could hear a movie playing downstairs in the living room.
He went to the door and opened it carefully, making no noise. He didn’t recognize the movie, from what he could hear, though at least one actor’s voice sounded familiar. There were no other sounds. Either Tom and Joe were absorbed in watching the movie or they weren’t, in which case the TV was turned up loud enough that it was covering the sounds of whatever they were doing. Kissing, for instance, maybe with shirts off and hands stroking over bare skin.
Unable to stop himself, Cal crept down the hallway to the top of the stairs. He leaned against the wall, his body still, every other part of him—senses, consciousness, more—straining to know what was happening on the couch.
Of course, it might be happening in Tom’s bed. Tom and Joe might have started kissing on the couch, then moved to Tom’s room, leaving the movie playing. It was the kind of thing Tom would do, covering up, protecting himself from potential embarrassment. It was also the kind of thing that made Cal a little bit crazy if he let himself think about it for more than a few seconds; he hated it, that Tom felt like he had to do that.
There was a brief moment of quiet, some moment in the movie without sound, and in that silence Cal heard—or thought he heard—a soft whimper. In his head, it echoed, became the whimper Tom made when Joe’s mouth slid, warm and wet along the tip of Tom’s dick.
Cal’s hand, of its own accord, undid the front of his jeans and slid inside. He wasn’t wearing boxers because he was so far behind on laundry it was laughable, so his fingers found his erection immediately.
This was wrong. If Tom freaked out over personal questions, Cal wasn’t sure what he’d say about this. Tom wouldn’t know, though. Tom was lying back, his hands clutching at air…the back of the couch…anything to stop himself from grabbing Joe’s short, dark hair with a too-tight grip.
The images Cal was conjuring, a castle built from a single grain of sand, filled his head as completely as his cock filled the curve of his hand. As his hand began to work himself harder he replaced Joe with himself, so that it was his mouth on Tom, giving him everything that Tom had been missing out on all these years. Sex was always good for Cal, but he could remember his first times—first kiss, first hand on his cock, first blowjob, first fuck—and even when those moments had been awkward, the sensations had been fresh, shot through with an intensity that Cal had never quite recaptured.
Tom would climax quickly, his gray eyes shocked wide with pleasure, words, incoherent, ecstatic, spilling out of his mouth. Cal wanted to hear them—hell, he wanted to
cause
them—but he was lost in the illusion, blood rushing in his ears, drowning out any sounds from downstairs.
His hand knew what it was doing, how to squeeze, when to loosen, the perfect moment to flick and swirl his thumb through the gathering slickness at the tip of his cock and spread it around. Tom wouldn’t know the way Cal liked to be jerked off, but the act itself, at least, Cal was sure Tom had experienced. He pictured Tom’s hand on him and moaned through his gritted teeth as the movement of his hand slowed, altering to become tentative, experimental, the way he thought that Tom would touch him.