Mind (Naughty Wishes #3) (3 page)

Chris nodded, realizing he was gripping Geoff’s forearm across his chest.

“Okay. Okay.” Geoff’s forehead touched the back of his head, his breath a sigh across Chris’s neck. “Crap. Sorry about that. How about a truce, big guy? Ice for your lip and we eat some meat loaf.”

Since staying out in the backyard and trying to kill each other for reasons Chris couldn’t articulate wasn’t as appealing an option, Chris offered an agreeable grunt. As he steadied, he didn’t want Geoff to help him up, so he pushed him away. The brief flash of hurt on Geoff’s face was like a screwdriver twisting in his gut. He got that tight look, the set to his jaw that said Geoff was thinking he should have coldcocked Chris and left him sprawled in the yard. That might have been preferable. But Sam’s meat loaf was good. If Chris was unconscious, Geoff would eat it all just to spite him.

* * *

Chris ate his in front of the TV, Geoff at the table. Geoff should have opened his laptop and handled that work he needed to do, but he didn’t feel like it. Chris had the TV on
Mike & Molly
reruns, which they all enjoyed, but when some of their favorite punch lines happened, Chris didn’t register them. Geoff couldn’t say he was hanging on every word of it, either.

Instead, he kept replaying every step of what had happened in the backyard. Once he’d been sure Chris truly was steady on his feet, Geoff had gone into the laundry room and left his shirt there. When he came back through in a T-shirt and jeans, he’d seen Chris squirting some of the OxiClean on it that Sam said worked for almost all stains, but Geoff knew it was pointless. The shirt had a jagged tear in the back, because a branch hidden in the mulch had punched through the fabric.

“I’ll pay you for your shirt,” Chris said suddenly.

Geoff pushed aside his plate and turned his chair around to face him. Putting his ankle on his knee, he took a sip of his beer. “Damn straight you will.”

His casual tone relaxed Chris a little. Maybe Geoff should leave it alone tonight, but his gut suggested otherwise. “We’ve avoided talking about it long enough. Spit it out. What’s on your mind?”

Chris’s gaze flicked to him, then away. He didn’t say anything for several long minutes, such that anyone else other than Geoff or Sam might think Chris wasn’t going to say anything. Geoff just waited until his friend gathered his thoughts and finally spoke.

“The first time, how did you know I’d take her in her room instead of mine?”

“Besides the fact you have no proper bed? It’s like taking a team down on their home turf.”

“You’re the competitive one.”

“It’s not about competition. It’s about territory.” Geoff drew on his beer, studying Chris. “You’re not competitive, Chris. But it doesn’t change the fact you feel like she belongs to you, and you have some definite topping qualities. Along with a few nontopping qualities.”

He didn’t call it
bottoming
, because Geoff already knew it wasn’t that straightforward with Chris. He had an intriguing area that would give way, like a mighty oak for the wind, yet that didn’t stop him from being an oak. He just respected the laws of the wind.

Geoff wanted to be the wind.

He’d gone back and forth on it a hundred times this week. He still wasn’t fully decided on how his Dom nature would fit with Chris, about how far he could take it between them, but the wrestling match in the backyard had given him a big clue that Chris had been thinking about it just as hard. Quite a bit, whether he acknowledged it consciously or not. And while Chris might be feeling messed up some about it right now, Chris’s reaction to everything Geoff was doing when he was on top of him had left Geoff feeling as honed as a lethal knife.

They’d both shied away from it until now, far more than either one of them had in their imaginings about Sam. There were more walls here, more tricky areas. But Sam’s desires had reached the point where she’d made the leap. Maybe it was because feelings and hormones had taken her to a
Fuck it, it’s worth a shot
point, but Geoff knew she was no more willing to risk their friendship on a whim than Chris or he was. Yet perhaps her initiative had been the key to helping them feel their way toward one another.

“She belongs to us,” Chris corrected him.

Geoff smiled. Chris’s declaration had circled his own thoughts. He lifted the bottle in a salute. “She belongs to us.”

They’d both accepted it, though Geoff expected they’d always enjoy some friendly rivalry over it. “And to each one of us. Just as we belong to her, together and separate. Heart and soul, mind and cock.”

Chris sent him a curious look, then his mouth eased into a smile. “Yeah, there’s that. Does it seem weird to you? I mean, most guys aren’t into sharing a woman.”

“Does it seem weird to you?”

Chris shook his head. “I just wonder if it’s supposed to seem weird for us not to be that way about her. Like you say, there’s some competition, but it’s not about that.”

“Yeah.” Geoff studied him. “We could share her, simple as that. Stay friends who happen to be in love with the same woman, and who happen to have the unique situation of not making it a competition, because she loves us both. That’d probably work out for a while, though we might have to set up a schedule so we don’t wear her out. She didn’t say so, but I think she was hobbling a little bit toward the end of the week. I told her it was your fault.”

“Uh-huh.” Chris’s chuckle was humorless, though. “She has a lot of fantasies about having the two of us with her . . . at the same time. We could do more of that.”

“Yeah. And I expect we’ll all enjoy the hell out of it. But there’s more than one way to do that. You want me to repeat what I said in the yard, in case your memory is failing you?”

Chris’s brown eyes sparked. “Don’t be a dick.”

Geoff pulled back from that sharp edge, though it took an effort. “I’m just saying. You want me to spell out the obvious?”

Chris’s gaze shifted back to the TV, an involuntary response to the elephant in the room. Chris had always known and accepted Geoff’s flexible bisexual nature, so it wasn’t that. And if Chris weren’t wired to get a hard-on for a guy, there’d be no elephant now. The problem was, Geoff knew they responded to each other, though they’d often channeled it other ways. There were a variety of reasons for that, most never spoken, but all boiling down to one thing. Their friendship was as vital to each of them as the air they breathed, and sometimes you bypassed certain roads if you thought the oxygen might get too thin there.

Then Sam had come into their lives, and she’d let them see that sometimes the air was just fine down those roads—better, even. So now they were facing the wall they’d built in front of that line they’d never crossed, and Geoff was pretty sure they were both seeking a door.

Everything was always timing. Sam would say the timing was here and now, no more excuses, no more waiting. But Geoff liked to have a handle on a problem before he jumped in with both feet, and he couldn’t quite grasp the shape of that problem for Chris.

“You remember that day when you found Sam and me together in the shower? You punched me.” He tried to keep his tone casual.

“Fond memories.” Chris tossed him a neutral
Can we talk about anything else?
look.

“Yeah. Asshole. You were pissed and hurt.” Geoff’s tone softened, and Chris shifted uncomfortably on the couch. “I’m sorry for that. You stepped back from me after the punch, sending out this
Don’t touch me
vibe as big as a football field. But I’ve thought a lot about that since then. For just a blink, you looked at me like you were wanting just the opposite.”

Geoff had chased him from the shower to the kitchen, where the punch had happened. He’d managed, barely, to hold on to the towel he’d hastily grabbed. Chris’s heated look, brief as it had been, had slid over his bare shoulders, the water beaded on him, the precarious hold of the towel low on his hips. Whenever Geoff had thought about it since then, it never failed to get him hard. “I think you were torn between wanting to punch me and wanting something else. You’re a fighter, Chris, but that fight isn’t always about wanting to be on top.”

“I’m not like Sam.”

“I know that, Chris. Look at me.”

He sharpened his tone just enough to walk that fine line he was talking about. Because he managed it, he earned a glance out of Chris’s brooding brown eyes. “Keep looking at me when I ask you this next question. Have you thought about my mouth being on you? On your mouth, on any other part of your body? On all of it? When I told you out in the yard that I want to be inside you next time you’re inside her, I could tell it wasn’t the first time you’ve thought about me fucking you. And how it would feel.”

Christ, just saying it aloud had his jeans biting into his dick. Chris’s jaw firmed. He was white-knuckling his beer.

“Chris, I know you’re not fighting some bullshit sexual identity crisis. So what the hell is it? Talk to me.”

Chris’s look could have seared paint off of metal. He drained his own beer, set it aside and got up. “Don’t push it. I’m going to bed,” he said. He flipped off the TV, tossed the remote aside and moved around the coffee table, headed for the hallway.

“Gonna lock your door?” Geoff asked caustically.

Chris stopped and eyed him. “Do I need to?”

Despite the turmoil in his gut, Geoff shot him an even expression. “When it’s time, you’ll come to me, Chris. Not the other way around.”

* * *

He shouldn’t have said that. But hell, he was frustrated. Over the years, he and Chris had reached a point they could practically communicate without words, so the brick-wall routine was pissing him off. And worrying him. His friend could be as deep as a cave that went right to the middle of the earth. When he was like that, it was usually about the things that mattered the most.

Sam had been so worried
her
actions were what would ruin the friendship between the two men. Since Geoff was self-admittedly the most aggressive, and yeah, he’d concede to being the one with the lion’s share of arrogance, he was far more likely to derail the train. Not just derail it, but send it off a cliff and exploding with a big pyrotechnic
foom
at the bottom of a canyon. Wasn’t that a cheerful thought?

He spent a couple of hours debating the pros and cons of how to proceed, but when push came to shove, what mattered to him was serving the best interests of the client. If he didn’t have the skills or information to do that, he found them. It applied to home even more than to work, and he was pretty damn intense about work.

When Logan Scott had given Geoff his cell number, Geoff had programmed it into his phone, even though he wasn’t sure he’d ever use it. But the owner of the hardware store next to Naughty Bits—the erotica store into which Sam had pulled them to get all this started—was also an experienced Dom, and Geoff wasn’t going to let pride stand in the way of his doing this right.

Logan answered on the third ring. Never one to mince words, Geoff offered a brief greeting and a briefer explanation. He didn’t realize how tightly wound he was until Logan responded warmly, loosening that coil in Geoff’s gut.

“Yeah, now’s a great time. I’m at a private party tonight doing a whip demo, but the host says you’re welcome to come on over. By the time you’re here, I should be done.”

When Geoff left the house, Chris’s door was still closed. Through it, Geoff heard the murmur of his small TV. Chris usually set it at low volume when he was using it to fall asleep. Geoff was tempted to try the knob, just to see if it was locked, but he’d meant what he said. Chris might be a balanced bastard, with top, middle and bottom qualities, but Geoff was pretty clear on who and what he was. Though up until now he’d only pursued his Dom side in more of a passive, watch-and-learn mode rather than seeking out a Dom/sub relationship, he’d known what he was since he’d hit puberty. Yet now that he’d
finally found the partners to inspire him to grasp that side of himself with both hands and launch it into play, he was lacking some key information.

Well, that was why he was going to go see Logan. If Logan had nothing useful to offer, he’d just come back, brain Chris with a blunt object, fuck him and let him wake in Geoff’s arms, the deed done. Yeah, that would work, because putting tab A into slot B was the only hurdle here.
Not.

Despite his preoccupation with resolving things with violence, he took the time to leave a note. Neither of them used to do that, but Sam had gotten them into the habit, mainly because she’d only do it if they agreed to do so.

“Boys can get into as much trouble as girls,”
she’d pointed out.
“I need to know where to come and rescue you if you need it.”

The thought made him smile. He scrawled the note out on the back of a bill envelope.
Went out. Have cell if you need me.
That last part was kind of superfluous. He frowned at himself for writing it, but then he shrugged, popped the envelope under the
Despicable Me
bug-eyed Kyle fridge magnet Chris had brought back from his Orlando landscaping trip. As he pulled out of the driveway, Geoff thought he saw a movement at the living room window, but it could have been the shadows.

Logan’s private party was happening in a warehouse down near the NC Music Factory complex. The turn-of-the-century textile mill that had been turned into an amalgamation of trendy restaurants, clubs and entertainment venues wasn’t big on parking, so everything nearby was full up. It took Geoff a few minutes to find a spot, and another few minutes to discover the warehouse entrance. A thirtysomething male with dreadlocks and a trim black suit was watching the door, but when Geoff gave his name and referenced Logan, he was let through with a nod. “Take the lift to the second level,” the man said. “The loud stuff’s on the top level, dancing and such, but session play and demos are on the second floor. That’s where you’ll find Logan.”

When the lift opened up on the second level, Geoff was greeted by a woman in a pink corset and thong, carrying a clipboard. “I’m Daisy,” she said. “Can you sign in and show me some ID, please?”

All pretty standard fare. Despite the wild reputation BDSM had, thanks to TV crime dramas and misinformation, real lifestylers were careful and highly protective of one another. He signed in, showed his license and was told he could find Logan in the whip playroom, which was apparently at the back end of the floor. As he moved through different stations, people spoke in conversational voices but not raucously, respecting the scenes going on between Doms and their subs. He saw some impressive suspension work and a couple of electric play sessions in progress. As he passed a woman in a forced orgasm tower with a Hitachi wand buzzing between her thighs, her face contorted with the strain of the impending climax.