Shiny! (2 page)

“No, she doesn’t,” Will protested, blushing, and Kenny went from insouciant party observer to center of attention in 0.05 seconds flat.

“Of course she does!” Kenny repeated, sitting up excitedly. “You haven’t heard this story? Not at all?”

Will blushed even more. “Kennnneee! My
mother
hasn’t even heard this story.”

Kenny grinned wickedly and Will covered his face in mortification. “Oh come
on,
Will—you’ve got to admit, it’s a
great
story!”

At that point, Ashley returned with two glasses of punch, and Nina set the cups down and grinned at the two of them. The crowd was starting to dance, and the DJ was playing at just the right tempo and volume—not too loud to talk and fast enough to make dancing fun. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, clearly enjoying herself. “I’ll have Ashley keep us supplied with cake and punch if
you
tell me the story of how you met.”

Kenny looked up at the little girl sardonically. “Okay, sweetcheeks, but I’ve got to tell you—she’s going to be run off her little tushie, because a
lot
of this story is
not
suitable for children.”

Ashley grinned. “My aunt’s a lesbian and my dad’s in prison for tax evasion. Try me!”

Nina grimaced. “Yup—she’s pretty savvy. I’ll just bet you won’t shock her.”

Kenny shrugged. “How ’bout you go get us some cake for the first part, short person. The rest of it is probably pretty PG.”

“Did you want the chocolate or the vanilla parts?” Ashley asked, all attention.

“Chocolate!” Kenny said at the same time Will said, “Vanilla!” and Nina threw herself back into her chair and clapped her hands.

“This is going to be
some
story!” she chimed.

Will patted Kenny’s knee. “You’ve got to start it.”

“Yes, yes I do.” Kenny nodded. “Okay, Nina, you asked for it. Can you remember the worst breakup you ever had?”

Nina pursed her mouth. “You mean when I told my husband I was a lesbian?”

“Oh, ouch! Yeah, that hurts, but Will and I? We got that story beat.”

“Oh
man.
Well, get to it, boys. I’ve got my niece on retainer, we’ve got a sugar rush barreling down at us in a tulle dress, and Cara is going to be dancing with her uncle for at least another fifteen minutes. I have
got
to hear this!”

Kenny grinned salaciously, and Will couldn’t decide whether to groan or kiss him. Kenny really did love telling this part first.

“Okay,” he said. “It all started when I got home early one day to surprise my boyfriend….”

Things You Don’t Want Back

O
NE
OF
the best things about having a grown-up job was that you could take long lunches. No, not all the time, but once every other week or so, you could run errands, or take your mother out, or, in Kenny’s case, run home for a quickie.

He usually wasn’t quite such a horndog, but he’d
just
gotten the job as a graphic designer at the software firm, which was a huge scary deal. He hadn’t been home that much in the past two months—he and Gif had been like ships passing in the night, mostly. Hell, he hadn’t even been able to collect Gif’s share of the rent, much less actually
have sex
with the man, and the last time they’d gone out to the movies had been….

Well, shit. Kenny couldn’t remember.

And after two months of working his ass off and noticing the “long lunch” policy was pretty universal as long as you got your work done, he’d figured, what the hell. He’d worked Saturdays for a month—it was time to get some back. So even though he lived in a sketchy little suburb in Citrus Heights instead of a pricey home in Folsom, which would have been closer to the company, he piloted his electric-blue smart car across the river and up Auburn Folsom Road, past the big cemetery with the fountain, and through the suburban maze that was Citrus Heights.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy, Kenny was gonna get him some today! God, sex! Remember what sex was like? The taste of a man’s skin? The feel of his cock in your hand? Oh
hells
yeah! Kenny had even skipped breakfast and done the extra-special bathing ritual so he could have Gif’s cock
everywhere
today. Gif’s cock was
amazing
,
or at least it had been the last time Kenny had actually
touched
it, or had it in his hand, his mouth, his ass, or any of the parts it felt good as a whole.

And it was perfect! Gif worked the night shift as a nurse in Roseville, and he’d worked the last of his string of four shifts the night before. He’d just be waking up when Kenny got home, and he’d be all slender, blond, soft and sleepy man.

Oh geez. Kenny just wanted to rub his tongue all over that man and
come
.

There was a Mercedes parked in front of the neighbor’s house, and Kenny had just enough time to sneer at them a little. In
this
neighborhood? The only saving grace was the prim little church, complete with parochial school and playground, right across the street. Other than that, a Mercedes might or might not get its hubcaps stolen in five minutes or less.

Yeah, Kenny was making good money
now
,
and so was Gif, for that matter—but when they’d found the house less than a year ago?

No, not so much.

But that was why the college and why the hard work to find a good job, and why Gif was working all the late shifts at the hospital, right? So they could move somewhere that
didn’t
look disapprovingly at all the gay pride bumper stickers Kenny had pasted on the back of the smart car like wallpaper.

But enough with the forethought already! Jesus, Kenny just wanted to get
laid
!

He started undressing pretty much the moment he hit the door. Unbuckled went the thick silver-studded belt, down went the nice black jeans with the decorative white seams, off went the fashionably tight purple paisley shirt.

The bright neon turquoise-and-green boxers?

Those he kept on.

He folded the clothes haphazardly on the couch and tiptoed down the hall, careful of the runner, which tended to bunch when Princess, his magnificently fat white Persian cat, tried to run on it. But Princess was asleep in the spare bedroom, on Kenny’s office chair, probably plotting how to open his home laptop so she could sleep on the keyboard. Excellent, Kenny wouldn’t have to kick her out of the bedroom to—

“
God, yeah, fuck me harder
!”

Kenny’s head snapped back. It had been… well, had it been quiet in the house? He’d been in such a hurry, but that was definitely the sounds of someone….

He threw open the door to the bedroom and froze.

There was Gif, the top of his dreams, hands tied behind his back with one of Kenny’s brightest interview ties, ass up, facedown on Kenny’s brand-new comforter, taking it up the ass from a perfect stranger.

Who, in turn, was taking it up the ass from Kenny’s favorite butt plug/cock ring combination.

The one with the neon-green plug and the gaudy brass cock ring.

In that instant that was all Kenny noticed about the guy—he had Kenny’s sex toy jammed up his ass and clamping the base of his johnson. Period, the end.
Kenny’s
sex toy. The one Kenny had used
frequently
while Gif watched and beat off.

Oh God. Was there
anything
in the goody drawer untainted by this anonymous stranger’s ass?

“God, yes, Oscar!” Gif begged. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop fucking—”

Oscar (apparently) reached forward and dragged Gif’s head up by the hair. “Don’t tell me what to do, you little bitch,” he snapped and then drove deeper into Gif’s ass, punctuating the thrust with a hot little pop on his flank.

Kenny watched with fascinated eyes as a red handprint appeared. He had the absurd thought that maybe he should leave and let them finish, and then Gif, who was lying with his head turned so he could breathe with his face mashed into the mattress, caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of his eye.

His knees went out from under him and he flattened on the bed, struggling against the silk tie, while Oscar swore at him to keep his ass up and fuck like a man.

“No, Oscar, my boyfriend—”

“So, he can join us!”

Gif was a big guy, actually, and when Oscar pulled back, he used the opportunity to roll over and struggle with the tie around his wrist.

“No, asshole,
he’s right there
!”

Oscar suddenly stopped fucking. He turned around, and Kenny got the impression of a wide-shouldered Hispanic man with broad cheekbones, big brown eyes, and a wickedly handsome smile.

“Your boyfriend isn’t really old?” he asked.

Right then, Kenny felt sorry for him.

And then he remembered to feel sorry for himself.

“You’re using my butt plug,” Kenny said succinctly. “I’d appreciate it if you took that out of your ass.”

Later, Kenny couldn’t say who moved first. It was sort of a group effort at chaos, really, but the star of the show was Gif, struggling to pull out of the necktie and then put his pants on all at the same time.

Kenny had an advantage—he’d kept his shorts on.

By the time Gif was even halfway dressed in a pair of old scrubs, Kenny had managed to dump a third load of clothes on his front lawn.

“Oh come on,” Gif begged. “Kenny, think about this—we’ve got a house together—”

“It’s in my name,” Kenny snapped. “You pay rent, remember? Except you haven’t
paid
rent for the last two months, so technically, this isn’t a breakup, it’s an eviction!”

“Well, it’s not like we’ve had sex anytime in the last two months!” Gif snarled, and Kenny actually stopped his stomp back into the house to glare at him.

“That hasn’t been all my fault! I try to wake you up all the time—what, were you too sexed out from Oscar here to even
pretend
to want me?”

Oscar had actually taken the time to dress—in a suit with bright patent leather shoes and a tasteful burgundy tie. They couldn’t have used
that
to tie Gif’s hands? “Hey,” Oscar said, holding up his hands. “Don’t look at me! He told me you were impotent with a little tiny dick!”

Kenny had stalked past his car by this time and was sheltered from the school by the side of the garage, which was the only reason he had the courage to do what he did next.

Which was to shove his boxers down, grab his larger-than-average penis, and wave it around before pulling his drawers back up and barreling back inside. Behind him, he heard Oscar saying, “Well, I guess Gifford here lies about
lots
of things, doesn’t he?”

By the time Kenny returned with Gif’s suitcases—filled with more clothes, toiletries, books, and personal electronics—the Mercedes was gone and Gif was still in his jeans, shoving his crap in the back of his blue Toyota.

“Jesus, Kenny, you just had to throw a hissy fit, didn’t you?”

“You were boning another man, Gif. In our bed—”

“In
your
bed!” Gif snapped viciously. “Remember? We kept
your
bed, and
your
table, and
your
chairs—”

“Because you were still sleeping in a twin bed and eating over the sink!” Kenny protested, stung. “Remember
that
? You, two roommates, checking your underwear to make sure they’d been washed because Monty kept borrowing them and putting them back in the drawer?”

Gif’s evil smile was all Kenny needed.

“Ugh—God, even
then
?”

“Monty had a nine-inch cock, Kenny.
Nine inches—
do you have any idea what—”

“
Stop
!” Kenny’s voice cracked. “Jesus, Gif—why even move in with me? I was talking about forever and we actually
picked out and bought curtains
,
and you were just… I mean, you were still partying like a college kid!”

Gif’s vicious little smirk faded. “I don’t know, Kenny. It was a nice dream, I guess. I mean, when I was
with
you, it was really pretty, but, you know, two months—”

“Yeah,” Kenny said, finally remembering to drop the two suitcases on the lawn. “Something else came along. Something shiny.”

“Well, it couldn’t have been that much of a surprise,” Gif said with a self-loathing little shrug, and in that moment, Kenny remembered the night they met, in a club in Sacramento, and how Gif had come prepared with a lubed purple rubber and Kenny had gotten the best bathroom fuck
ever
.
But then, Kenny had been dressed in a gold lamé shirt and hipster glasses, with leather pants so tight he’d been halfway erect all night because of the friction.

“Yeah, I guess I was shiny too,” Kenny said, thinking about it. “For a whole year and a half, I was pretty damned shiny. Don’t go yet. I’ll bring out the drapes.”

The drapes were done in an impressionist pastel floral pattern that sort of made Kenny gag. Of all the things in the house, he’d be happiest to turn those over to Gifford, but sure enough, by the time he could yank them down off the wall by the sliding glass door to the backyard, he heard Gif’s car wheezing out of the driveway. The power steering was bad—Kenny could recognize that squeak from two blocks away.

Kenny was left at the front door of his little blue stucco house, holding an armload of drapes and his pretty dreams for the future, with only one place to put them.

It was a good thing trash was picked up the next day, he thought, shoving them into the barrel on top of the old takeout boxes and—oh God, really?—empty boxes of rubbers. Apparently Oscar—or
someone—
had been in Kenny’s house a
lot
when he hadn’t been paying attention. Abruptly he remembered the sex toys, which were still on the bed.

Oh, gross.

Back into the house, but this time, he had two plastic grocery bags, one to put over his hand and one to shove stuff in, and he didn’t stop at the stuff on the bed, oh no. If Oscar had been using
that
thing, who
knew
what else had been used and just thrown back under the bedside table?