Rough Canvas (2 page)

Not only had Thomas touched those sensual, firm lips with his own, they had

touched every part of his body. He remembered his arms and legs spread and bound as Marcus’ mouth moved over his belly, his chest, nuzzling his throat briefly before he straddled Thomas’ face and fed his thick, long cock between his eagerly waiting lips.

His jaw had rubbed against the rough texture of Marcus’ leg and the smoother skin of his inner thigh as he’d sucked and licked and done everything to drive Marcus mad.

When Marcus’ grip on his hair fisted and the thighs hardened to drive himself deeper into his slave’s throat, Thomas had felt triumph.

How many lips had touched that impressive cock since Thomas’? Probably more

than he could count. Thomas hadn’t been anything special. Lots of people knew how to give good head.

He told himself cruel things like that and tried to paste them as words in Marcus’

mouth to wean himself from the images that haunted him. He’d been successful enough that they plagued him mostly at night now, or when he’d worked a sixteen-hour day at the store and everyone else had gone home. Then it was just him and the silence of the old building, the sky dark outside and winking with stars that certainly couldn’t be seen in the night sky over New York City.

That long cock was contained in dark slacks probably custom-tailored by some

impressive name like Armani. A blue T-shirt was tucked into it and Marcus wore a dark suit jacket over that. The Swiss timepiece on his wrist probably cost as much as their John Deere tractor inventory. Thomas knew Marcus would be wearing snug cotton

boxer briefs in his preferred black. Glancing down, he saw Marcus wore Italian loafers.

New York Upper East Side casual, which would be the equivalent of church clothes around here.

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“Tommy, this man had some questions I didn’t know how to answer.” Les held up

a small handful of clips. “How much weight can these hold if you’re using grade-two nylon line? I told him he might prefer the twine stock, but—”

“Too rough,” Marcus said, his green eyes focused on Thomas’ face. “I want

something that won’t scratch.”

“Oh, like to protect a boat’s gel coat.” She nodded. “How much weight did you say it needed to handle?”

Marcus’ gaze dropped, passed down Thomas’ torso and back up again. It only took a moment, just long enough that Celeste turned to him as he reached Thomas’ flushed face again.

“About one sixty-two. Not that much, after all.”

Son of a bitch. Thomas had been one-ninety before he’d come back here. How did

Marcus do that?

“Oh my God, Thomas. What’s happened to your hand?”

He’d been holding the rag over his fingers, but sometime during Marcus’ perusal he’d put his palm on the repair check-in counter top and gripped the edge, hard. A fine stream of blood had dripped past the rag and down the side of the paneling.

Celeste was two steps closer than Marcus, but somehow Marcus got there before

her, grabbing hold of his wrist and tugging off the rag to see the bloody finger.

He wanted to snatch back, snap at him, but the feel of those long fingers manacling his wrist, the fact he was now close enough he could smell him… Dry-cleaned clothing mixed with the scent of travel, that expensive aftershave and cologne he wore, just a light touch so it became part of the air around him… Thomas could identify him even with his eyes closed.

The first time he’d followed that scent it had been their initial night together.

Marcus had taken him home. The sex had been… Thomas could say it was the most

amazing sex of his life, but it had been more than a great fuck. He hadn’t even known he wanted to do some of the things he’d done that night until he found his cock responding to nothing more than Marcus’ commands.

Afterward, Marcus had given him the courtesy of his own room, but Thomas had

been stirred up with all the new feelings, aching inside in a way that went beyond the physical. In the early hours of the morning, he’d found himself following the lingering scent of Marcus to his room. The door had been open and he’d gone in like a guilty thief.

He’d hesitated at the foot of the bed, knowing he hadn’t been invited. So instead Thomas knelt on the carpet and laid his head on the mattress, his hand slipping ever-so lightly onto Marcus’ calf where it extended out of the folds of covers.

About five minutes later, Marcus sat up, propping himself on his elbows. He’d

reached out and touched his hair. Thomas knew then he hadn’t been asleep. He’d been watching him, waiting to see what he’d do.

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Marcus had opened the covers, drawn him in and spooned around him, his hand

giving Thomas’ ass a proprietary squeeze that was a demand. Thomas had adjusted his leg and Marcus slid his now-hard cock into his still well-greased ass. As Thomas groaned at the feel of it, Marcus had pressed his lips to his ear and whispered that he would sleep that way. Thomas would just have to suffer with no release until the morning.

The hard yearning ache he hadn’t wanted to end that first night surged up in him now at Marcus’ touch, so alarmingly intense he tried to pull away. Marcus, anticipating him, planted his feet. They eyed one another like gladiators.

“Stop struggling. You splatter my shirt and I’ll kick your ass.”

“You could try,” Thomas retorted. Under normal circumstances, Marcus’ eyes

would have glinted with humor and lust stirred by the challenge, but as he looked at Thomas’ hand there was nothing amused in his expression. And these were definitely not normal circumstances.

“You still have the shop bells,” Marcus observed. A casual comment as Celeste

came back with the first aid kit, but Thomas knew there was nothing casual about it.

Thomas had given them to his father one Christmas. His dad had looked a little

perplexed, but once the customers started appreciating them, his traditionalist of a father found he liked that alert system more than the fancy but banal electronic buzzer most stores used.

The memory of when he got the bells swamped him like another blow to the gut,

propelled by Marcus’ intent, knowing expression.

* * * * *

Thomas had seen the bells in the window of an antique store in the Cape Cod

village they were visiting. He’d ducked in, flipping Marcus off when he made a

comment about gay men’s obsession with antiques. Thomas got absorbed in the store, picking out some small prints of Cape Cod scenes done in pen and ink. A music box for his sister. He looked over some pieces of old farm equipment, knowing that when he went home for Christmas he’d describe to his dad how they were put together.

He wished he could take Marcus with him. Even if that was a possibility, he knew he wouldn’t dare ask Marcus. He’d think Thomas was a lovesick idiot.

Knowing he
was
an idiot, he even found and bought something he thought Marcus would like.

Outside the store there was a sprung occasional chair, a relic from the nineteen twenties obviously beyond salability, too worn to be anything but a place for patiently waiting husbands. That significance wasn’t lost on Thomas as he came out and found Marcus sitting in it, his head propped on the headrest as he caught a cat nap in the sun.

He had an ankle balanced on his opposite knee, his slacks perfectly adjusted, one hand lying loosely on his knee, the other stretched along the chair arm.

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He still wore his sunglasses, emphasizing the relaxed curve of his mouth, the slope of his cheekbones. Thomas suspected the female foot traffic along the sidewalk in front of the store had increased exponentially since Marcus had taken the seat. Thomas managed to scare off a covey of them lingering as he stepped out.

He heard their titters, their murmurs. “Figures. He’s too gorgeous not to be gay.”

He dropped to a squat by the chair. After a brief hesitation, he linked fingers with Marcus’, for once trying not to care that they were on a public street. Marcus was much more relaxed about it, but then he hadn’t grown up as Thomas had. Marcus had made his peace with his sexual orientation at fourteen. Even at seventeen, Thomas had been trying to bury any suspicion by being on every sports team he could find and taking girls to the prom, in order to give his mother photographs to share with relatives and linger over fondly.

Marcus opened his eyes behind the sunglasses and lifted his head, his sleepy glance going from their linked hands to Thomas’ face in a way that made Thomas think of every illicit thing they’d done in the course of the weekend. It made him glad he’d dared to touch Marcus this way.

Get a grip.
“Check these out.” He showed Marcus the bells, explained the use for them and their history for shopkeepers as Marcus straightened, touched them and experimented with the sound. “So you think he’ll like them?”

“I’m sure he will.” Marcus squeezed his hand, conveying with the simple gesture his awareness of Thomas’ rocky relationship with his father.

“I got you something too.” Thomas said it casually, even now wondering if he

should have done it at all. Marcus had suits that cost as much as Thomas’ entire wardrobe, starting with his first baby shoe until the present day.

“Yeah? Do I need to search you for it?”

When Marcus made a grab for him, Thomas fended him off with a grin and a

forearm.

“Cut it out. Here.” The gift had its own container, a pewter incense house that he now pulled carefully from the protective cardboard box. “You can burn tobacco leaves in it to drive off that flowery shit you wear.”

That Thomas loved.

“Redneck Neanderthal. I’ll just spray your deodorant around the apartment. Eau de

‘I-am-not-gay’, aka sweaty sock and pig wallow smell.” But Marcus tempered the too-close-to-home barb with a hand to Thomas’ jaw. As Thomas looked down and opened the pewter box, Marcus’ hand drifted to his hair, his nape.

He couldn’t help it, he started to tense. Touching hands was one thing. This Cape Cod village was more open, but it wasn’t New York City. If Marcus should try to kiss him here, on a busy street…

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He’d tried to mask it, but his Master was too intuitive. Marcus dropped his touch, a brief flash of disappointment on his face before it was gone, replaced by polite interest in what Thomas was offering, making him feel like crap.

“Never mind,” he mumbled. “I’ll just show you at home.”

“No.” Marcus reached out, closed his hand over the incense container. “You’ll show me now.” He lifted the hinged triangular top, blinked.

“It’s stupid, nothing you have to wear.”

“Shut up, pet,” Marcus said mildly, and the caress in the words, underlined by the gentle reproof, left Thomas silent with a whorl of confusing emotions in his lower abdomen.

Marcus lifted out the dragon tie pin and matching cufflinks. The craftsmanship was exceptional on the antique pieces. They were no bigger than a fingernail and had chips of jade for the eyes, the tiny scales individually sculpted by the long-dead artisan. But his art had lived on. No artist could hope for more than that, to know that when his bones were dust, two people would sit on a street corner and admire what he’d done.

“You remind me of a dragon. Your eyes.”
Your heat. Your intensity.

“Sitting on a hoard of treasure?”

That made Thomas smile, the tension in his chest easing. “That’s why I brave the flame.”

“No. No, it’s not.” Marcus leaned forward then, caught Thomas’ lips before he

could draw back. He kissed him hard and thoroughly, his hand gripping the back of Thomas’ neck so he couldn’t move. He was gasping when Marcus at last pulled back.

Their faces were still close, Thomas’ vision dominated by green eyes. “That’s not why at all.”

* * * * *

That day had come back to him with one casual comment, just as all of it came back with that one touch as Marcus held his wrist.

Thomas had heard how your life could pass before your eyes when it was

threatened. Apparently every memory of that life with someone else could do the same when your heart was threatened.

Of course, it wasn’t as if he didn’t relive it all every day in his mind anyhow. He was reminded by everything he saw, every object, scent or element of nature he’d experienced with Marcus. Air, sunlight, water.

He’d gotten better at closing memories out at work, which was why he tried to

work all the time. It helped make the burning ache a sweet dull longing over which he could more easily shovel the earth of his daily life to keep what should be dead in its grave.

“It’s just a nick,” he said.

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“It looks like you sliced off the top of your finger,” Celeste observed, swabbing at it with alcohol. It stung, but he barely noticed. While to all appearances, Marcus was just holding his wrist as a courteous customer helping out, Thomas felt the strength in his grip. In Marcus’ eyes he saw he’d welcome the fight if Thomas chose to try to get loose.

So he stood still, glad for the counter to press against, which separated at least by a corner Marcus’ body from his involuntary reaction to him.

The desire to struggle often had been part of their more intimate moments, Marcus having to prove he could overpower and Dominate Thomas as if he was also overpowering Thomas’ worries about embracing this unexpected part of himself.

Though Marcus scoffed at “a part of”.

It’s all of you, pet. You want to be my slave. You get hard every time I order you to get on
your knees, to give me your wrists so I can chain you to the bed
…

“You two seem to know each other,” Celeste commented, taping on a bandage. “Is

this one of your friends from New York?”

“I handle Thomas’ work,” Marcus answered with a professional nonchalance that

didn’t match the look he kept locked on Thomas’ face. He was covering every feature, and when he lingered on Thomas’ lips, Thomas felt saliva gather in his mouth. He couldn’t help it, he swallowed. Marcus’ fingers tightened on his wrist infinitesimally.