Boys in Season (Boys In... Book 2) (12 page)

“My partner?” Jake stared with some confusion. “Oh, right. No—we’re not partners now. Not at the moment. Well, not at all. Fuck knows.” He leaned his head back again and stared up at the cloudy, early morning sky. “I’m seeing a lot of these arse-cracks of dawn, you know. I wake up all the time and... he’s not there.” He tried to keep the pain from shaking his voice, but it always seemed to be so damned near the surface of everything he did. “I thought he didn’t need me—but it’s a fact
I
need
him
.” Now he lay in bed most nights in his friends’ spare room, listening to Dave and Cory whispering and laughing in their bedroom beside him, guys who’d been together since shortly after they all left college, young men who balanced each other out, who shared, who tolerated, who fucked, but both quietly and gently because they knew Jake was next door and damned miserable and wouldn’t appreciate hearing Dave yell out Cory’s name, and Cory’s shoulders hitting the headboard time and again.

Jake groaned aloud.

“I know other warriors,” said the king, confidently. “I can see you are strong and bold and have a vibrancy about you that is most handsome. I am glad I am no longer surrounded by my courtiers, for I think you would be… distracting.” The king’s gaze ran up and down Jake’s body and he flushed, as if that were also a bad thing to him personally. “But I believe you need more training and less talk. I have rarely heard so many words in such a short space of time. However, even under the quantity, I can hear and judge the quality. You are dispossessed, possibly betrayed, and most certainly vulnerable. Let me find you another worthy partner.”

Jake shook his head. “Nah, man, that’s no good. There’s no one else I want. Never has been. I’m his, you know?” His voice finally started to break. Fuck, was he going to cry? He cursed lack of sleep; lack of proper food; lack of proper purpose in his life.

Lack of
Matty
.

***

It had been a long hour, but the barman had been greatly comforted by his glass of fine whiskey. The dark-haired man hadn’t drunk much of his own, but he was calmer now. “It’ll be okay,” the barman said. He thought he’d probably said that a few times already, but it sounded just as unlikely as the first time around. “These things happen. Couples argue. All part of life’s rich tapestry.”

Matty glanced at him. There was gratitude in his look, but a fair amount of cynicism, too. “We
don’t
argue, that’s the whole issue. Or maybe not argue—just discuss. He likes to talk, and I don’t. This has been brewing for months. Maybe ever since we met. But this time, I told him to shut up, he said I was acting like a prick, and he left.” He sighed. “Sounds so straightforward, said just like that, right?”

“Right,” agreed the barman, knowing it was anything but.

“He does it all the time, though,” Matty said. “Talks.” He stared down at the counter, his mind far away. “Even talks during sex. Talks about doing it—talks while we’re in the middle of it—talks about it after we’re done.”

The barman whistled softly. His face felt a little flushed. Way too much information, but hey, the guy needed to talk. “So long as it’s complimentary, huh?”

Matty glanced up, confusion on his face. The barman remembered every joke of his that’d ever misfired, and this one looked like it was winning the gold award.

“It’s incredible,” Matty said, slowly. He was still facing the barman, but his eyes had slipped out of focus again. “
He’s
incredible. In bed, you know? Well, anywhere we do it, really, because it’s not like I had much experience before, of how good it could be. Or where you could do it—or how often—or how much fun it could be.” He was smiling now, very, very gently, lost in his own memories. “He’s done all that for me. And to be honest, I guess the words make it even more stimulating. But it was just that last personal comment he made—I was still trying to catch my breath, he’d got tangled in the sheets and yet he was still talking...” He focused back on his companion, maybe looking for support of some kind. “He caught me at the wrong time, you know? I didn’t want to joke. I wanted to hold him—to sleep—to think. To savour it all. I told him to shut up.” He winced at the memory. “And he left that night.”

The barman swallowed, curiosity loosening his tight throat. “What did he say? Was it really gross? Was it...?”

Matty was gazing back at the counter. His eyes looked suspiciously damp.

The barman sighed. “Yeah, right, gotcha. So it was complimentary. That’s the worst thing, eh?” When Matty didn’t answer, the barman reached over and picked up Matty’s phone from the counter. He nudged Matty on the arm to get his attention.

“Call him,” he said, firmly.

***

The king was beginning to wonder when full morning would come. Maybe there would be reinforcements from beyond the eastern borders. Maybe this young man would seek another quest. Maybe the king would be able to catch up on his sleep then.

“You will seek out your partner and speak to him,” he said. It was an order, not a question, and he expected the unruly-haired man to obey it accordingly. “In the heat of battle, many things are said and regretted, but they must be forgotten for the sake of your duty.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “I would have apologised, right? It was just... I was blown away that night. He was so spectacular, so fierce, so tender, so delicious.”

The king felt a strange uneasiness in the pit of his royal stomach. He had never heard such sensuality in a soldier’s tone—such physical passion. Maybe he might have had interests that way himself, once, had circumstances not burdened him with his own royal responsibilities here in the city.

Jake smiled gently. “So gorgeous. So passionate. I just wanted to express that. He’s the best I ever saw—the most generous I ever touched. He gives it all to me, he teaches me what it’s really about.” He turned as the king shifted uncomfortably beside him. “I know, I know. I should shut the fuck up, eight times out of ten. Matty said that, didn’t he, and it pissed me off. Should have taken time to think it through.” His voice dropped. “I told him he was acting like a prick. Even then, he didn’t come back at me. I was so fucking angry, I had to leave before I said a whole bunch of even worse stuff.”

The king found it difficult to steady his voice. “You must trust your partner. There need not be words. It’s enough that you bear arms together.”

Jake turned to stare at him, startled. “You’re some guy, you know? Guess you’re right. I didn’t need to say anything at all, even if I thought it was amusing, even if it was meant to make him feel good. I just wanted to tell him he’s so big and deep inside me, he makes me come until my balls ache. And when
he
comes, he hisses in my ear like a wild cat, like something fierce and feral—”

Maybe he heard the king’s groan of embarrassment beside him, or maybe he was just distracted by a new trickle of warm, sticky liquid from an open drain at the side of the alley. He paused anyway, much to the king’s relief.

“I miss him so bad,” he said, softly. “I just chatter on and on because I’m worried I don’t understand what he’s thinking, or what he wants. I don’t know what to do to make him happy, to make it perfect. I need to know that—and I thought he’d understand. But how can I go back, after I ran out on him like that, after what I said?”

The king was suddenly tired of this audience. He had other matters on his mind, notably what to eat for his own meal, and what the approaching dawn would bring in the way of dangerous adventure. “Seek him out,” he said, dismissively. “Send word. It is never too late.”

The young man had something cradled in his palm—a strange, rectangular object with a glowing panel where words could be entered. The king had seen these in the hands of other, less friendly people, and he believed they were for communication. Something from the ancient world, yet reliable enough for their purpose. “Your life is too short to waste,” he said, sternly. The young man still looked startled, and he was brushing his fingers across the surface of the device as if he were preparing to use it.

But the king’s attention had passed on by. He peered away down the alley to where the young man had dropped his food on entering the kingdom.

“Was there mayo on that?” he asked, thoughtfully.

***

Matty stood outside the door of the bar, listening to it being locked tight behind him. He knew he was taking a ridiculously long time to fasten his jacket. He wasn’t drunk; it wasn’t the cold dawn that numbed his fingers. He just didn’t know how to start putting things right.

And yet he wanted to, more than anything.

That’s what he’d said on the phone, in the message he’d just left on Jake’s voicemail. He’d sort it out. He, Matty, would apologise. Okay, so maybe that would take practice—Jake always said he sucked at apologising. Whereas Jake did it with ease and charm and genuine passion. Hell, Jake did everything like that.

Matty tugged his jacket around himself. The morning sun was nudging up over the horizon and the wind was cool and quiet. He started to practice some suitable phrases in his mind. He tried to remember exactly what Jake said, when he apologised. All he could remember was the way Jake looked. The way he smiled at Matty—the way he stroked a hand down his arm whenever they passed in the kitchen, or on the stairs. The way he laughed. The way he talked. The way he gasped when they were in bed, eyes half-closed, hands digging into Matty’s shoulders, pleading for more, for Matty to take him, for Matty to tell him how it felt, for Matty to say...

I never do tell him
, Matty thought. Not enough. Never enough.
I’m not fair to him, letting him express everything for the pair of us
. He felt things just as deeply as Jake, but he kept them to himself.
And that’s why those are the only persons here this morning
.

Me and myself
.

It hurt, but it was the truth, and he welcomed that, didn’t he? He stepped out of the shelter of the doorway and paused, re-orientating himself with the way back to the flat. He’d sort it out. When the sun came up properly...

And then he noticed the man hurrying towards him.

***

Jake turned the corner rather unsteadily. He was rushing too much and the pavements were still damp from the earlier rain.
I’ll find a place to stop
,
to call him up, to speak to him
. His phone was clutched in his palm, itching to be used. Suddenly the thought of hearing Matty’s voice was far more tempting than the worry about what actually to say. Hell, and when had that ever been a problem for him? Until now. Until Matty. Until saying the right thing—explaining how he really felt—mattered more than anything else in the whole damned kingdom.

He grinned to himself, his heart suddenly beating more quickly than his brisk walking merited. He was sounding like that weird old guy in the alley, like he was on some kind of a
mission
! This was the first time for days he’d felt any energy, a desire for anything but misery. He didn’t want to be in anyone’s guest room any more. He wanted to be going home to his own place, to be amongst his own stuff, to see Matty there. His mind was full of memories of Matty’s face, of the way he felt under Jake’s hands, of the smell of his skin in amongst freshly washed sheets, of the way he turned to greet him at the end of a working day, slow and careful and thoughtful and with a smile of unbidden pleasure.

I never give him the chance to reply
, he thought.
Never listen, even to his silences
. He realised how much they had to say to each other, in so many more ways than words. Matty spoke to him all the damned time—with his smile, with his frown, with his wit, with the way he tilted his head sideways as if puzzled.

Jake just needed to listen better.

Then his phone beeped, alerting him to a message, at just the same time as he saw the man emerging from the closed bar.

***

They stopped a foot away from each other. Jake saw Matty’s eyes widen in shock, and suspected his own looked the same. They’d both lifted their hands, pausing halfway up as if they were going automatically for a handshake. Then they stood there for another few seconds in silence.

“Look,” Matty began. “I was—”

“—I was a prick,” Jake said, at the same time.

They laughed suddenly. Comfortably, familiarly.

“And I’m sorry,” Jake said.

“Me too,” Matty added. His words sounded odd, too fast, too excited. “Stupid mess. I shouldn’t have let it get to that—”

“Nah, I pushed it there.” Jake shook his head. He felt strangely tongue-tied, and he couldn’t help but remember the glazed expression on the old guy’s face, back in the alley. Guess Jake’s rambling could destroy the most royal of audiences. He felt the vibration in his phone again, begging to be answered, and glanced down at it. “I was just going to call you,” he said, slowly, surprised. “But you beat me to it.” He looked up again at Matty, his eyes feeling moist. “
Message from Matty
. You hoping to get a word in edgeways for a change?”