Screwups (21 page)

Steve interjected, “Dude, that’s pretty crass.”

“What? I’m just curious. I didn’t say it was bad. I’m just trying to imagine it.”

“Don’t strain yourself.”

“Yes,” Danny said finally. “I suck dick.” Not that he’d done a lot of it. Just one guy during his freshman year, before he moved to Massachusetts. But they’d done a fair amount of fooling around together.

“Duh!” Taylor laughed. “He’s gay! Of course he’s gonna suck dick.”

“Do you like it?” Taylor asked.

“Yes.”

“I just can’t imagine it,” Randy said. “I mean, pussy, yeah—that’s all soft and nice. But a dick, man… that’s all hard and… I don’t know… chewy.”

Alan snorted. “You’re not supposed to
chew
on it.”

Danny laughed along with the others. It didn’t seem like they were making fun of him, though he still wasn’t sure.

“Whatever,” Randy said. “If that’s what you like, Danny, that’s fine with me. The world needs more cocksuckers.”

“
Yeah
!” Danny wasn’t sure who shouted—it was sort of a general chorus of agreement—and then they all took swigs of beer or MD 20/20. But it was Steve who said, “I doubt it really feels all that different if a guy sucks your dick or if a chick does it.”

“Hell, I’m drunk enough,” Alan said. “Wanna suck my dick, Danny?”

They all laughed, except for Danny. He smiled and took another sip of beer, hoping the joke would die there. But he knew it probably wouldn’t.

“Come on, I’m serious,” Alan persisted. “Why not? I’m not afraid to try it.”

Of course not
, Danny thought,
since nobody gives a fuck if you’re the one being sucked off
.
It’s only the guy sucking you who’s a “
faggot.
”
But he didn’t voice the thought aloud. He had a sense that things could turn ugly very quickly if he didn’t tread carefully. “I’m not really in the mood.”

“I don’t blame you,” Blake said. “I’ve seen his dick. It’s pretty gross.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my dick,” Alan insisted. He grabbed his cock through his sweatpants and moved it to show everyone it was hardening. “And all of this talk about blowjobs has got me horny as hell.” He appealed to Danny. “Dude! You say you like it. Let’s help each other out.”

Though Danny would never admit it to these guys, the thought of it did produce a mild stirring in his crotch. Alan wasn’t bad looking. None of them were. The only one he
really
wanted was Steve—and he wanted Steve so bad he could taste it—but the thought of sucking off Alan wasn’t totally disgusting.

Still, that didn’t make it a good idea.

“Hey,” Blake said, “if my kid brother gets to have a blowjob, I should get one too.”

Danny frowned at him. “I didn’t say I was going to give anybody a blowjob.”

“Count me out,” Taylor said, his face screwed up in disgust. “No guy gets to touch my dick, period.”

“Fuck it,” Randy said, “I’ll do it.”

Danny stood up, surprised to find himself unsteady on his feet. He’d drunk more than he realized. “Nobody’s getting a blowjob, okay?”

“Why not?”

The sound of that deep, resonant voice brought him to a halt. He turned and found Steve smiling calmly up at him. Their eyes met and Danny felt himself falling into those pools of deep blue.

“I could go for a blowjob,” Steve said softly. “Is four of us too much for you to handle?”

It wasn’t. Danny knew that. Maybe some guys would hate it, find it disgusting, but he’d inherited a very casual attitude toward sex. And he loved it. The thought of having four guys at once, or one after the other, actually kind of turned him on. Why not? How many straight guys would turn down four women at once? It might be kind of fun. Especially if one of them was Steve….

His voice sounded small when he replied, “I don’t want you to think I’m….”

What? A slut? A perv? He wasn’t really sure. He just wanted Steve to like him.

“Do it,” Steve said, his mouth opening slightly, as if he were panting with arousal. He slid his hand down over a noticeable bulge in his jeans. “I want to watch. Then I want you to do me last. It’ll be fucking hot.”

Danny grew hard at the sight of Steve touching himself, promising to give himself to Danny.

“You guys have fun,” Taylor said. “I’m gonna do a potato chip run. Try to make it fast.”

Danny would never really be sure, looking back, if he agreed to it or not. He didn’t refuse. And when Alan pulled down the front of his sweatpants—he wasn’t wearing any underwear—Danny just went along with it. It wasn’t bad. Part of him enjoyed it, despite the alarms going off in his head.

Alan came in his mouth then stepped aside for his older brother to take his place. Danny kept glancing at Steve, watching him rub himself in his jeans, and the sight drove him mad with desire. Steve had always pushed him away when they’d been alone, afraid to go that far. But this was sanctioned by his friends. In this sleazy context, he could allow Danny to bring him off and his friends wouldn’t think he’d done something “gay”—after all, they’d done it too.

It would be different for Danny, of course. But they were Steve’s friends, and he’d kick their asses if they treated Danny badly.

Danny finished with Blake and moved onto Randy, but he was barely conscious of Randy’s cock in his mouth. It was all for Steve. Once they’d done this, maybe Steve would be more comfortable doing it when they were alone together. That was what Danny really wanted, of course.

“Yeah… suck that cock, faggot….”

Danny tried to yank back at that, but Randy held him there as his come started spurting into Danny’s mouth. When he was finally finished and relinquished his hold, Danny pulled away and snarled, “Don’t fucking call me that!”

“Sorry, dude,” Randy laughed. “I talk dirty when I’m about to shoot my load.” He didn’t seem sorry at all, and Danny glared at him. But fuck it. Danny hadn’t really been doing this for Randy or any of the other guys.

He turned to Steve, ready to take as long as he could, to make this the best blowjob Steve had ever had. But he looked up at Steve’s face and there was something there he’d never seen before, something cold. Those soft pools of blue had turned to ice, and Danny felt a shiver crawl up his spine. He had his hand stretched out toward Steve’s crotch, but it froze there for a long moment, until Steve said, “You just sucked off three guys. Get away from me, you filthy cum whore.”

Danny was so shocked he couldn’t speak. Then Steve lifted his leg and kicked him across the floor while his friends laughed. They all began to kick him then, shouting “cum whore” and “faggot” at him while they laughed. It hurt, especially when Steve kicked him in the stomach, but Danny barely felt the blows and barely heard the epithets, as if he were somehow disconnected from the scene, looking down upon it. His mind was frozen in place at the moment Steve had spoken—at the moment the boy who’d practically been Danny’s boyfriend for months had turned into someone else.

You just sucked off three guys. Get away from me, you filthy cum whore
.

All those times making out in the forest together… how could that all have been a lie?

Some instinct for self-preservation kept his hands and arms wrapped around his head and his face to shield him from the kicks, but though it hurt, they weren’t putting much energy into it. They weren’t aiming for serious damage—just utter humiliation. At last, they dragged him out of the garage onto the back lawn, out of the light of any street lamps.

“Hold him down,” Steve ordered.

Randy sat on his legs, his fly still gaping open, while each Harris brother grabbed an arm and pinned it to the cold damp grass. Then Steve straddled Danny’s chest, unzipped, and started to piss….

D
ANNY
WOKE
up to Jake shaking him. “Danny! Danny! What’s wrong?”

Disoriented, Danny felt Jake’s hands on his shoulders and thought he was holding him down. He thrashed around, and fortunately Jake was smart enough to let go. Danny bolted out of bed and ran naked into the kitchen. He was only half awake and had no idea what he was doing—he just knew he had to get the taste out of his mouth.

“Dude!” Jake said in a hushed voice, looking around frantically, “your mother might be home now!”

Danny ignored him. He yanked open the refrigerator door, grabbed a bottle of orange juice, and chugged it.

“A C
YLON
appears and kills you with a lightsaber.”

Jake looked up at Paul in confusion. “Isn’t that from like…
Star Wars
?”

“There are no Cylons in D&D,” Eva said. She added to Jake, “And Cylons are from
Battlestar Galactica
.”

“Whatever!” Paul threw his hands up in disgust. “We might as well be playing
Star Wars
or something, because these two aren’t paying any attention!”

Danny and Jake exchanged sheepish glances, and Jake took his hand off Danny’s knee, where it had been slowly creeping up under the leg of his shorts. Jake hadn’t
intended
to feel him up in the lounge, but there were times when his hands seemed to have a will of their own.

“Sorry.”

“Maybe you’d like to go to your room for an hour,” Eva suggested, “and meet us back here, after you’re all… tuckered out.” She batted her eyelashes at them.

“Shut up,” Jake mumbled, feeling the color rush into his face. Eva just laughed at him.

Danny kissed him on the cheek and got out of his chair. “As much fun as spending the entire day fucking sounds, I’d actually like to play this campaign. So why don’t I move to another chair?”

Jake felt like crawling under the table and hiding for the rest of the game. Was he really that bad? “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Danny said, tapping Wallace on the shoulder so he’d switch seats with him.

That put him on the other side of Eva. “We’ll kill the cultists and steal the enchanted ruby. Then after dinner tonight, we can go back to our room and play dueling lightsabers.”

Jake hadn’t thought it was possible to blush when he was already blushing, but he felt another wave of heat wash over his face. “You all suck.”

“Dude,” Wallace said, smirking at him, “just keep your hands below midthigh. That’s all I ask.”

Jake made a noise that was halfway between a groan and a snarl, but he stayed put and did his best to focus on the game for the next hour or so. It was actually kind of nice to be teased like that, knowing that his friends were totally cool with him being gay—even Wallace.

The thing that was bothering him the most, though, was Danny. Not that Danny wasn’t still terrific in bed and as enthusiastic as ever for sex in the morning, just before bed, and pretty much whenever Jake wanted it—except, apparently, during D&D—but he still felt closed off in some way. The nightmares were obviously continuing and he still refused to tell Jake what they were about. It was like a ghost story Jake had heard at summer camp about a guy who marries a beautiful woman with a velvet ribbon around her neck. She refuses to ever take the ribbon off or tell him why, and so he becomes obsessed with it. Then one night, he cuts the ribbon off her while she’s sleeping and her head snaps off.

Jake was
trying
not to obsess about Danny’s nightmares, but he was beginning to think there was something dark and horrible there he needed to know about if they were ever going to be happy together. At the same time, he was afraid to find out what it was.

The answer came less than a week later, so suddenly it broadsided both of them.

It was late afternoon on a Sunday, so there wasn’t much going on. Danny was playing piano quietly in the upstairs lounge, and Jake was lying on one of the couches, listening and on the verge of drifting off to sleep, when Mark came in with a book and staked out the other couch. By now, Jake had pretty much written the guy off as a loser. He liked to drop an occasionally sarcastic line to see if he could get people worked up, and once in a while he managed to get in a good one and ruffle some feathers. But most of the time, Jake was able to ignore him.

Most of the time.

“Haven’t you played that same song like ten times already?”

Danny stopped playing, but he said calmly, “It’s called ‘rehearsing.’ But I can switch to something else.” He began playing one of the pieces he knew better—by now, Jake could tell which ones he had down and which he still made mistakes on, though he never tired of listening.

“Yeah,” Mark said in a tone dripping with sarcasm, “that one’s
much
better.”

Danny ignored him and kept playing, but Jake wasn’t in the mood. He went to the piano and bent down to give Danny a quick peck on the cheek—he no longer felt self-conscious about doing that in front of people at Eaton House. “I still haven’t showered today. I’m gonna do that now.”

He thought that would be the end of it, but after he stripped in their room and wrapped a towel around himself, he walked into the bathroom to find Mark in there, taking a piss in one of the stalls with the door wide open. Even for Eaton House, that was kind of crass. A girl could walk in at any moment, and though she might not object to Mark toweling off after a shower, watching him piss was another matter.

Jake had gotten over his bathroom terrors, for the most part, so he walked past Mark to turn on one of the showers and then took the towel off. He hung it on one of the hooks and just stood there naked while the water heated up.

“So you two are an item now,” Mark observed as he zipped himself up. He didn’t bother flushing.

Jake didn’t want to talk to him, but he couldn’t think of an excuse to be rude. “Yeah.”

“Well… if that’s what you want.”

Jake frowned. “Yeah, it’s what I want.”

“That’s cool,” Mark said. “I have no problem with gays.”

“So I hear.” It was impossible for Mark to miss the contempt in Jake’s voice.

“Yeah, I know everyone thinks I hate gays because I couldn’t stand rooming with Danny. But it’s not gays in general—it’s just him who grosses me out.”

Jake could feel heat rising in his torso and neck. He finally turned to face Mark head on and said in a quiet voice, “Dude. He’s my boyfriend. Why do you think I’m gonna put up with you talking shit about him?”