And that had fucked everything up.
Shit, he could remember staying awake during the day and staring at his ceiling, telling himself that when they were yet again at the club, in those bathrooms, or wherever it went down, he wouldn’t do that anymore. But each time they went out, it was like an addict being offered the precise flavor of pill he needed.
Then there had been those two kisses—the first one down the hall from here, in the clinic’s examination room. And he’d had to beg for it. And then their second up in his bedroom, just before he’d gone out with Saxton for the first time.
He’d had to beg for that, too.
Abruptly, Blay gave up pretending that he was actually pumping iron and put his hands down on his thighs.
He told himself to leave. Just get the fuck off the seat and walk out before Qhuinn moved to the next thing and his cover was blown.
Instead, he found his eyes back on those shoulders and that spine, on the tight waist and tighter ass, on those muscular legs.
Maybe it was the alcohol. The afterburn of that argument in the flatbed. The whole sex-with-Layla thing…
But at the moment, he was sexed up. Hard as stone. Ready for it.
Blay looked down his chest to the front of his loose shorts—and felt like shooting himself in the head.
Oh, Jesus, he needed to get out of here right now.
As Qhuinn continued set after set of pull-ups, his hands were numb, and he felt like his biceps were being peeled from his bones with dull knives—and that was just mindless chatter in comparison to his shoulders. They were the real problem. Someone clearly had come up from behind, put varnish stripper across them, and then buffed them with an industrial sander.
No idea how many reps he’d done. No clue how many miles he’d run. No count of the sit-ups, squats, or lunges.
He just knew he was going to keep going.
Goaclass="underline" total exhaustion. He wanted to pass out the moment he went upstairs and got horizontal on his bed.
Dropping from the bar, he put his hands on his hips, lowered his head, and breathed heavily. His right shoulder immediately seized up, but that was his dominant side, so he expected it. To loosen the knot of muscles, he swept his arm around in a big circle as he turned—
Qhuinn froze.
On the other side of the blue mats, Blay was on the machine closest to the door, sitting as still as the weights he was not lifting.
The expression on his face was volcanic. But he wasn’t mad.
No, he wasn’t.
He had a hard-on big enough to see from across the room. Maybe across the state.
Qhuinn opened his mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.
In the end, he decided this was a prime example of how life never failed to surprise. Of all the situations he thought they would ever be in? This was not it. Not after…well, everything.
He pulled his earphones off and let them hang from his neck, the pounding beat downshifting from concert-roar to impotent little hiss.
Is that for me? he wanted to ask.
For a split second, he thought it might be, but then how arrogant was that? The guy had just finished giving a speech about how the two of them were nothing but hourly wagers working side by side on vats of trans fat. Then Blay shows up with an arousal the size of a crowbar—and the first thing to come to his mind was it could, possibly, maybe, sort of, kind of…be for him?
What a prick he was.
And PS, what the hell would he do if he suddenly found himself in a parallel universe, with Blay pulling a hey-how-’bouta in that department?
Of course he wanted the guy.
For fuck’s sake, he’d always wanted him—to the point where he had to wonder how much of that pushing-away thing that he’d done “for Blay’s benefit” hadn’t really been for his own.
Pondering that one, he noticed the glass down by the guy’s feet. Ah, alcohol was involved—he sincerely doubted the dark inch in that squat glass was Coca-Cola.
Shit, for all he knew, Saxton had just texted him a crotch shot and a half, and that was the cause of all that erection.
And wasn’t that a deflator.
Your cousin is giving me what I need all day long, every day.
“You got something else to say to me?” Qhuinn asked harshly.
Blay shook his head back and forth once.
Qhuinn frowned. Blay was not a hothead—never had been, and that was part of the reason that, for the longest time, they’d been so tight. Balance and all that crap. At the moment, however, the guy seemed like he was a thin inch from losing it.
Trouble in paradise between the happy couple?
Nah, they were too good together.
“Okay.” Man, the idea of hanging around here while Blay amped up for another session with Saxton the Magnificent was untenable. “I’ll see you later.”
As he walked by, he felt Blay’s eyes on him—but they weren’t on the level of his face. At least, it didn’t seem like it.
What the fuck was going on here?
Pushing out into the hall, he paused to double-check that the concrete walls weren’t melting and that he didn’t suddenly have fish for hands or something. Neither were true, but a trippy sense of unreality dogged him as he went down to the locker room. A shower was mandatory; he was covered in sweat, and as much as the doggen loved a good mess, he wasn’t about to give them more work just because he’d tried to kill himself in the gym—
Hard. Aroused. Ready for sex.
As that image of Blay battered around the inside of his skull, he closed his eyes, and then hit the door into the land of tile and water fixtures. He intended to go over to the showers directly, but ended up stalling out in the front half of the room, where the lockers were stacked in orderly rows and the benches ran down the middle of the aisles.
Parking it, he unlaced his Nikes, kicked them off, and peeled his socks free.
Totally fucking aroused.
Blay had been out of his mind for it.
For some reason, Qhuinn’s last two sexual encounters popped into his head. There had been that redheaded guy at the Iron Mask—the one he’d seduced and fucked in the bathroom. He’d picked the random out of the crowd for that one defining physical characteristic, and naturally the sesh had done nothing extraordinary for him. Then again, it had been like wanting Herradura, and putting ginger ale down your throat.
And then there had been the stuff with Layla—which had been nothing but a physically demanding job, like digging a trench or building a wall….
God, he felt like a louse for thinking like that—and he meant no disrespect to the Chosen. But at least it was fairly clear she was of a similar mind.
That was it for the last year. Just those two.
Nearly twelve months of nothing, and he hadn’t been jerking off, either. He just wasn’t interested in anything, like his balls had gone into hibernation.
Funny, right after his transition he’d banged anything with two legs and a beating heart, and as he struggled to remember some of those many faces—God knew he hadn’t bothered to get names a lot of the time—an uncomfortable feeling tightened his gut.
All that anonymous, nameless, faceless fucking…in front of Blay. Always with the guy, come to think of it. At the time, it had felt like a buddy/buddy kind of situation, but now he wondered.
Yeah, screw that. He knew what it had been about.
He was such a pussy, wasn’t he.
Getting to his feet, he stripped naked and let his wifebeater and his b-ball shorts flop onto the bench in a wet mess. Walking to the shower room, he picked one of the showerheads at random, cranked the thing on, and stepped under the spray. The water was nut-shrinking cold, but he didn’t care. He faced the onslaught, shutting his lids and opening his mouth.