The Losing Game (14 page)

“Yes. She was, wasn’t she?”

Lucas dragged one of the stools to the other side of the breakfast bar, so he was seated opposite. He lifted his wineglass, inhaled the bouquet, sipped, sipped again, then downed the rest of the glass. Dante winced.

“
Cin cin
,” he said, belatedly. Then he lifted the bottle, examined the label, and refilled his glass.

Dante was about to suggest Lucas slow down, but Lucas exchanged his wineglass for a hunk of bread. Dante followed his lead at a more leisurely pace, reveling in the sight and sound of Lucas eating and drinking, as much as the smell and taste of his own fare.

Lucas slid a cherry pepper over his lips, into his mouth whole, and hummed his approval. After he swallowed, he said, “These are delicious. Have you had one yet?”

His lips shone from the oil marinade. He licked his fingers, one at a time, lazily sucking each into his mouth and dragging it out again, shining with his saliva. As he reached his thumb, his gaze drifted from his hand to Dante.

Dante’s wineglass rested on his lower lip. He set it down slowly, gently, all the while his eyes not leaving Lucas’s moist fingers, his wet mouth.

The air was charged. Dante could feel the pinpricks of electricity crackling over his skin, penetrating his subcutaneous layer, deeper, deeper to the nerve endings buried below. His cock stirred. He licked his lips.

Lucas downed his second glass of wine and wiped his mouth with his serviette. Dante watched, frozen and fascinated, as Lucas rose from his stool, one hand clutching the counter as he rounded the breakfast bar and planted a hand on Dante’s shoulder.

His breath was sweet with wine and peppers as he pressed his lips to Dante’s ear and said, “I should have mentioned, alcohol makes me really horny.” He sniggered. “I want you to fuck me.”

Dante gasped, and the noise he made surprised him more than Lucas’s demand.

“I mean it. Fuck me.”

Dante stared at his lap, rubbing the cold sweat from his palms onto his trouser legs. He swallowed thickly. “Lucas. You’re upset. This isn’t the time.”

“It’s the perfect time.
We’re
not dead, Dante. We’re here. We’re alive, and for once I just want to feel like I’m actually living.” Lucas squeezed Dante’s shoulder. “Tell me you don’t too.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to. I can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“There are things about me…. If you knew, you wouldn’t….”

“Do you have an infection? Because—”

“No. It’s not that.”

Lucas placed his hand on Dante’s jaw, forcing him to face Lucas, and look at him. “For the last eight months, I’ve felt nothing but loss. There were times when I wondered if I was ever going to feel anything else again. I’m not asking for…. Just this. Just us. No strings.”

Like a house of cards tumbling around him, Dante’s carefully—thoughtlessly—made plans lay in ruins. The intensity in Lucas’s gray eyes stripped him bare.

Dante wanted this. He wanted Lucas. Why should he deny it? Deny himself? He was, after all, flesh and blood.

Just like the rest of us. Scared and needy and wanting.

Dante smoothed his napkin across his lap, folded it in half, placed it on his empty plate, and stood. Lucas took a baby-step back, his head tilted, and a slight frown creasing his tired brow. He looked like he couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry.

Dante grabbed him, one hand slipping around his waist, the other around the back of Lucas’s head, and took his mouth with a bruising kiss. Lucas gasped. His back bent, and for a second his knees seem to give, as if he’d melted. Moments later his strength returned to his arms, his tongue, and then his legs.

It was frantic, that first kiss. Their teeth clashed. They tugged and tore at each other’s shirts, searching for heated skin. A shirt button popped—Dante wasn’t sure whose—and bounced on the floor.

Spinning, polka-fast, Dante pinned Lucas against the counter. Lucas wrapped a leg around Dante’s thighs and drew him closer. Together, deeply, hungrily, their chests rose and fell.

Lucas’s mouth tasted sweet and bitter at the same time. With his shirt buttons undone, the scent of his body—soap and fresh sweat—rose headily. Dante slipped his hands under Lucas’s shirt, gliding them over his back and down, down…. He slipped his fingertips inside the waistband of Lucas’s trousers, teasing at the elastic of his underpants.

Lucas arched into the touch, breaking their kiss, allowing Dante a moment to look at his face. His eyes were open, pupils dilated.

Dante wanted to say something, but words eluded him. He ran his fingertip over the plump swell of Lucas’s lower lip. Lucas sucked it into his mouth, drawing it deeper as he pressed his tongue firmly along its underside. A sharp pulse of arousal clenched through Dante’s balls, drawing them up, making his cock tingle and swell.

“Turn around. Brace yourself.”

Dante pushed the wineglasses, the platter, and the plates to the edge of the breakfast bar closest to the wall, then removed his jacket and his tie as Lucas bent forward, forearms resting on the countertop, palms flat. After that, Lucas didn’t move. Not a centimeter. Dante wondered if he had any idea what that did to him.

Dante aligned his body behind Lucas, thigh to thigh, cock to arse. With his hands holding Lucas about the waist, Dante tilted his hips forward. Hard already, he made sure Lucas got the merest hint of it, a ghost of a touch, through the barrier of their trousers.

Lucas groaned and pushed back.

Dante whispered against the shell of his ear, “You like it like this?”

“Yes,” Lucas replied, with a shivery breath.

“I didn’t come prepared. I wasn’t expecting….”

Lucas turned his head. A fierce blush raced up his neck to his cheeks. “The drawer with Avery’s card inside it. There’s lube. Condoms.”

Dante smirked. He couldn’t help finding it funny, whether Lucas meant that way or not. “How very apt.” He leaned in and pressed a kiss on the thin, fevered skin behind Lucas’s ear. “Stay right there.”

Taking his time, steadying himself against the dizzying thrill of making love to Lucas for the first time, (he was already thinking,
this is only the first time, but it won’t be the last. It can’t be. I have so much I want to show him
) Dante ran his hands down Lucas’s thighs. Up again.

The muscles in Lucas’s legs tensed and quivered. Dante repeated the motion over Lucas’s back, over each bump in his spine, each rib and plane of muscle.

“You’re strong,” Dante said, with admiration.

“For a skinny bloke,” Lucas huffed.

“You’ve lost weight since I saw you last.” Pressed up to Lucas’s back, Dante reached around and unbuckled Lucas’s belt, unbuttoned his trousers, and lowered his zip. “It’s been a difficult time for you.” Dante closed his grip around Lucas’s erection, over his underwear, and massaged the rigid flesh.

Lucas’s breathing quickened. He turned his head. “Don’t want to talk about…. Not now.”

“No.” Dante pressed a firm kiss to his mouth, hard and urgently. “No more.”

The moisture leaking from the tip of Lucas’s cock had soaked through his underwear. Dante eased the elastic over his erection, and with one swift motion, yanked Lucas’s trousers and underwear down as far as his thighs. They fell to his ankles.

Pushing Lucas’s shirt up to his armpits, Dante was struck by the contrast in their skin colors. Every blue and magenta vein, every mole and bruise and blemish, was laid out on the milky canvas of Lucas’s skin. He was as pale as Dante was dark—extreme and opposite ends of the pigmentation spectrum. Opposite, and attracted.

Dante ran a slicked finger through the downy hair in Lucas’s crease, taking longer at his entrance to coax Lucas’s muscles into submission. Lucas swore under his breath. Dante leaned over him, pressing his chest over Lucas’s back.

“What did you say?”

“Fuck. That’s good.”

Close enough that Lucas would feel his knuckles against his buttocks, Dante unbuckled and unzipped and let his trousers drop. His cock bounced free and lined itself (
it does have a mind of its own
) perfectly in the crease of Lucas’s arse. Lucas hissed and pushed back into it.

“Soon.”

“For God’s sakes, I knew you’d be like this.”

Dante chuckled and licked the back of Lucas’s earlobe.

“Like what?” he asked, rolling the condom over his cock.

“A tease. A bossy, bossy tease.”

Lucas couldn’t disguise his mirth. His shoulders shook with it, and his legs buckled.

“Steady.” Dante had seen Lucas stretching. He bent down and freed Lucas’s left leg from his trousers, lifted Lucas’s thigh, positioning his knee up on the counter, opening his stance wide to give him extra balance. He’d need it.

They didn’t speak again. Lucas’s body was vocal and responsive. Dante could read every arch and curve, every stuttered breath and sigh. The breach was tight, and then it was bliss. Dante lost himself in the slap of their thighs and the thick, heavy scent of their arousal.

It was over as quickly as it had begun.

Lucas took his cock in his fist and came, soundlessly at first but ending with a deep, resounding grunt. His muscles clamped around Dante’s cock, and that was all Dante needed to send him over, hurtling and crashing. Dante squeezed his eyes shut, as his toes curled in his shoes and his fingers dug hard into Lucas’s hips.

He might have cried out, he couldn’t recall. His mind was a bliss-washed blank, and his thighs had turned to jelly.

“Fuck,” Lucas said at last.

“Yes,” Dante replied, puffing breathlessly against Lucas’s neck as he slowly withdrew and pulled off the condom. When he found the strength to stand, he tied it off and dropped it into the discarded paper bag that had held the food and wine. Then he turned Lucas around and kissed the moisture from his eyelashes.

Lucas looked thoroughly spent. Exhausted, in fact. He stumbled as he found his footing, regaining his balance by leaning back against the counter. His eyelids looked heavy, but the upturn at the corners of his mouth expressed a pleasant satiety.

Toying with the top button of Lucas’s open shirt, Dante recalled the night Lucas had come to Le Plaisir, and the blush he’d seen disappearing inside the collar of his shirt.

“That night you came to the shop, I wondered how far down this blush goes.” Dante touched the blotches of flushed skin across Lucas’s sparsely haired chest, around his dusky pink nipples.

“Now you know.”

“You look like you’re ready to drop.” Dante ran his thumb softly over the purple skin under Lucas’s eyes.

“I could do with lying down. Will you come with me?”

They pulled up their trousers, and Dante followed Lucas upstairs. In the center of Lucas’s bedroom, there was a double bed covered in a slate-gray-and-burgundy striped duvet, neatly made. They sat side by side on the end, removing their shoes, as if it was something they did together all the time.

They settled on top of the covers, shirts undone but fully clothed, like two weary warriors who have at last found a safe place to rest. Dante imagined a sun-soaked blue sky above, the kiss of warm summer air about, and the peaceful lull of the ocean rolling over hot sand. A dreamful, carefree place, shared by the man in Dante’s arms.

Lucas was curled on his side, one arm loosely over Dante’s stomach. Dante held him close. Neither initiated anything more.

Dante was glad. This felt good. Right.

Lucas circled his fingertip over the tight curls of hair on Dante’s chest, as if he was unwinding, slowing their racing hearts, their breathing, their troubled minds.

Dante had no doubt that Lucas was troubled. He could have counted his ribs without feeling them. Then there was the way he cried and the way he laughed. The way he fucked.

Lucas ran the treadmill of his life, day in, day out, but he was looking for a way to jump off. Dante had sensed it the first time they met. Known it the moment Lucas gulped down his wine. Felt it when Lucas ejaculated—it was a desperate, overwhelming release—over his breakfast bar and his trousers and his shoes.

Softly, yet certainly, eyes on the ceiling, Dante said, “If you still want me to, I’ll find a way for you take care of Richard Shaw.” He pushed a lock of hair from Lucas’s forehead and let his hand rest upon his face. “A way you can do it and not get caught.”

Lucas pushed up onto one elbow. “You know you’d be breaking the law as much as I would, if I went through with it?”

“Yes.”

“And that doesn’t worry you?”

With the one arm around Lucas’s shoulder, Dante squeezed him tighter. “Not as much as it does you.”

“What made you change your mind?”

Dante was a hair’s breadth from confessing. He wanted to. But wouldn’t it be easier to never mention it? To lie? Rather than ruin any chance that he and Lucas might have together, because he’d been too wrapped up in all the wrong things when Lucas first presented himself to Dante.

“It doesn’t matter,” Lucas said, saving Dante from a lie. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“You don’t?”

“No. You were right all along. I don’t have it in me to kill anyone.”

If Dante had had any concern about offering to help Lucas, that would have been it. Despite the will and desire, Lucas wasn’t a killer. Dante wanted to be relieved and glad that Lucas had come to his senses. He should have been. Only he wasn’t, because he wasn’t convinced.

“That’s good.”

“Is it?” Lucas splayed his palm on Dante’s chest and hooked his leg over Dante’s thigh. “You don’t sound like it is.”

“I’m tired. That’s all.”

“I know how you feel. I’m tired too. And tired of being tired.”

Lucas rested his head on Dante’s shoulder. Soon after, he fell asleep and rolled away, onto his side.

Something wasn’t right. Dante didn’t know if it was his feeling of disappointment where he should have been delighted or if he didn’t believe Lucas or if a deeper part of him didn’t want to believe Lucas. He’d watched him go out at night. Today he’d been as close to him as a man could be.

Something didn’t add up.

He ought to have left well alone, but Dante cared too much about Lucas to walk away.