St. Nacho's 4: The Book of Daniel (12 page)

“Nah. My allergy is nowhere near that serious. In the past, whenever I’ve eaten certain types of shellfish—actually so far it’s only been prawns and shrimp—I’ve broken out in hives. I don’t take a chance it could turn into something worse, but so far I’ve never gotten hives from kissing someone who eats it.” Cam’s cheeks colored. “I admit I don’t spend a lot of time
actually
kissing people and I carry an EpiPen just in case.”

“You kissed me.”

Cam looked back at the menu. “You complaining?”

“That means you like me, huh?” I put the menu aside. “More than any of your tree fucks. I knew it.”

If anything, Cam flushed a deeper red.

When the waiter got there I ordered several small plates, Manchego cheese and grapes, a cured Spanish prosciuttolike ham wrapped around melon, Spanish chorizo with marinated olives, and fiery garlic-seared shrimp with pepper flakes. We got a richly aromatic Rioja wine to go with it and settled in for the relaxing Spanish ritual of wine and nibbles.

“You eat like this a lot?” Cam surveyed the odd assortment of highly seasoned food. “It’s pretty salty.”

“It’s meant to be. It’s supposed to make you want to drink more.”

“Seriously?” Cam flagged the waiter down and asked for water for both of us.

“Little bites of things that have extreme qualities, bitter, sweet, spicy, salty, are fun, don’t you think?” He raised an eyebrow at me. “Jake could explain this better.”

“I guess.” Cam reacted to one of the olives by blanching and taking a big sip of his wine, which seemed to help not at all. “The salami is good.”

“Chorizo.”

He frowned. “Really?”

“It’s Spanish chorizo, which is kind of like salami.” Maybe this wasn’t the greatest idea. “Try the melon.”

He picked up the ham-wrapped melon and smiled. “I like this.”

It was pretty clear he was humoring me about the wine too. “Look, you want a beer?”

He sighed with relief. “Please. And maybe some hot wings?”

I flagged the waiter down again and ordered a beer and a couple of different kinds of hot wings for Cam. Cam took his Corona with a smile, and as he jammed the lime into its neck, he picked up another melon slice.

“Red wine is supposed to be good for you,” I said, tentatively.

“I know it is. I don’t like the flavor.”

“Hot wings are deep fried, did you know that?”

“Mmmhmm.” He spoke around a mouthful of melon. “I’m not going to stop you from eating your fancy munchies.”

“Okay.” I pinched the tail off a shrimp and dipped it into the spicy oil. “That’s good. I’m only just getting used to being able to eat what I like.”

Cam leaned forward to palm a couple of wings. “How come?”

I wondered how much I should say about Bree. Nobody wants to be with a guy talking about his ex on what could arguably be called a first date. “My ex didn’t like food very much.”

Cam paused, his wing halfway to his mouth. “What do you mean she didn’t like food. Any food?”

I picked up my napkin to wipe my fingers. “I told you about Bree. She had some issues. One of her things was she was determined to stay slim. Plus she had this aversion to restaurants. And certain foods. It took an act of God to get her to eat out in a restaurant with me.”

“Poor baby.”

Cam’s frown was formed from pure compassion, and I was quick to deflect it. “No, really. It was a lot harder on her than me. She just didn’t seem to ever fit into her skin. Everything irritated her. Everything worried her. I could still go out for business meals but she—”

“I meant her. I meant,
poor woman
.” Cam put his wing down.

“
Exactly
. Wow. How cool that you see it like that. Sometimes Jake was a little hard on her.” I breathed out a breath of relief and surprise. It was true she was a bitch sometimes. But I still felt a connection to her, and I hated to make her sound like she was crazy. “She had problems. I’m perfectly willing to admit that one of them was me.”

“There are some people at the gym like that. They’re way too thin, and they see themselves as overweight; they work like demons and they’re never satisfied. It makes me sad.”

“Bree could be self-destructive,” I admitted. “Occasionally I had some luck getting her to see a therapist.”

“It’s good that you tried.”

“Not really. There were plenty of times when her problems were convenient for me. When she focused on herself like that, I never had to worry she was looking too closely at what I was doing.” I pushed the food away and picked up my wine. In that moment I was ready to swear Minerva put some kind of spell on me. It was becoming impossible for me to keep very private, even painful, things from pouring out of my mouth, especially with Cam.

“I see.” He sipped his beer, watching me carefully.

I shook off the mood I’d placed us in. “And just like that, I become the guy who talks about his ex.”

“It’s all right.” He shrugged.

It wasn’t
all right
. “I know that I come with a warehouse full of baggage. For a lot of different reasons I blow hot and cold. I run, then I chase, and I act like I don’t know what I want, because I don’t. But I know what I like. I know what makes me happy, and whenever I see you, it’s like getting a face full of sunshine. Maybe that’s all I need to know. I keep wanting to turn to you again and again, because you make me feel so good.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me.” Cam put his hand down on mine. He stroked the backs of my fingers, and just that small connection between us lowered my blood pressure and sent soothing messages to my brain.
It’s all right. It’s going to be fine. You have time to figure this out.

I lifted my glass to my lips to cover my embarrassment.

Cam asked, “You know what happens when I look at you?”

“Do I want to know?”

“Probably not.” He huffed a laugh.

“All right though. Shoot.”

Cam toyed with his beer bottle. “When I look at you, I just think…that one is mine.”
Aw, man
. How do you resume an afternoon of casual dining after something like that?

“All right.”

I’m not sure what I meant by
all right
at the time. Only that I’d heard him. That I understood, or maybe even that I was willing to capitulate, to fall in with his plans for me—to come when he called—like his cat. I might have.

Probably I would.

Cam smiled then and put his effort into his wings. While he did that I was able to enjoy looking at him. He hadn’t forgotten me but he didn’t seem like the kind of guy to spend a lot of time talking while he ate something he liked, so I paid attention to detail like never before. Every crunch of Cam’s even white teeth fascinated me, every swipe of his tongue turned me on. He had a way of eating wings that would have made Bree faint. It was unapologetically carnivorous. Intrinsically dirty. He dipped the juicy, sauce-coated morsels into bleu cheese dressing and broke them into bits, licking and sucking both the bones and his fingers until I was hard as stone beneath the napkin in my lap. He wasn’t nutritionally irredeemable, like me. He seemed to enjoy the celery and carrots that accompanied his wings just as much, if not more, than the chicken itself.

At one point, he rubbed the tip of his nose with his thumb and smeared a bit of dressing there. It took all the sangfroid I had to keep my face blank—to keep from leaping over the table and licking it off.

One moment, our meal was laid out before us, then after what seemed like very little time passed, we had nothing but plates and garnish left between us. My bottle of wine was empty, but Cam was still on his first beer.

I paid the check, and we left, Cam leading me to the street, holding my hand in public as if it was just another day in St. Nacho’s.

I pulled my hand away discreetly.

“Are you worried about what people will think?” he asked.

“This isn’t St. Nacho’s.”

Public affection between same-sex couples was far more commonplace around St. Nacho’s. It wasn’t like living in a fantasy world, but it was easy to get into the habit of taking a lover’s hand or kissing a date on the street there. In Pismo the populace was older, more conservative, and less likely to approve of open displays of affection from anyone, let alone two men.

“Fuck ’em.” Cam opened my car door and waited while I got in. “I do what I do.”

I grinned up at him. “That’s one way to approach prejudice.”

He knelt down next to the car, next to me, and brushed the hair back off my face. “I don’t hide who I am. If I want to hold my date’s hand, I do. I don’t care where we are. Physically, very few people are willing to push a guy my size around. You’re probably pretty safe with me in a place like this.”

“I guess.” I’d never take him on, and bullies are almost all born cowards.

“But people still talk crap all the time. That going to bother you?”

I couldn’t lie to him. I wasn’t supposed to lie anymore anyway. “I don’t know.”

“That might be a good thing to figure out.” He closed the door and walked around to the driver’s side. I caught him feeling his pockets for the key again and waited for him to remember he didn’t need one.

“Where to now?” He got in and started up the car and glanced over, relaxed and ready for whatever came next.

Even though I told myself I’d planned to make this a real date, to take it slow and amble along the beach, to show Cam a good time instead of jumping him the second we reached our destination, I said, “We could check in at the hotel.”

He shot a knowing glance my way and backed out of the space. “Sure. Put our stuff away. Take a look around and figure out what there is to do.” He caught his lower lip between his even white teeth, trying to hide his smile.

“Sure. Read the informative hotel brochure.” I really couldn’t look at him when I said that.

It took only a few minutes to get to the resort where I’d booked our room. Cam insisted on carrying both our bags and my briefcase to the front desk. The clerk was friendly and didn’t bat an eye when she handed us our keys.

“Have a pleasant stay, Mr. Livingston.”

“We will, thank you very much.”

Once inside the elevator we were alone. He pushed me against the wall, pinning me there, pulling my hands over my head and proving that he’d had the same reaction to our lunch that I had. I hooked a leg around his in a grossly indecent, needy maneuver that brought our groins together. A bright flash of heat surged directly to my cock when it came into contact with his, hard and ready, throbbing beneath the thin fabric of his shorts. He used it like a battering ram—rubbing and grinding it against me—until I saw stars.

For the first time in my life, I went weak at the knees, and Cam, who already had my duffel on a strap across his shoulder and was carrying two other bags, leaned over and lifted me in an effortless fireman’s carry—probably just to prove he could.

I laughed like a kid as he carried me down the hotel hall that way.

Chapter Twelve

Cam whumped me down onto the bed and divested himself of his other burdens. In no time at all, he was on me, wrestling me out of my clothes while I did the same to him. Finally clad in only socks, I wrapped my legs around him and let him pin me down.

I let go of my deeply rooted need for control and clung to Cam. I was smaller, weaker, and arguably drunker. He kissed me long and hard, opening my lips with a forceful tongue and probing my mouth. I opened for him, but I gave him a fight, and I guessed we both found that satisfactory, because Cam gave me little time to recover between forays. I barely had time to breathe, but he did no more than kiss me and grind for what seemed like forever.

What a sensualist
. He ran gentle fingers over every inch of me he could reach, from my shoulders to my thighs to the bottoms of the feet I had locked behind his back. He gripped and squeezed my ass and nuzzled our cheeks and our noses together. At one point, I think he even brushed his eyelashes over my closed eyelids while he rubbed his lips over mine, his touch featherlight and then gone as quickly as it came.

Then with a great, rolling heave of his upper body our positions reversed, and I found myself on top, able to explore him in equal detail. He had soft, curly golden hair on his chest and in his pits. It grew darker the farther it traveled down his magnificent abs to pool in a thatch of red hair now hidden by his erection.

I thumbed the dark disks of his nipples, watching as they pebbled and flushed beneath my fingers. Laying the flat of my tongue on one, I sucked and swirled until he arched for me, offering both his nipple and his cock, trying to get more sensation, more contact between our heated bodies.

“Dan.” His breath came in short puffs. “C’mon. You’re killing me here.”

I slipped my good hand around his back and insinuated a finger between his ass cheeks as I sucked his other nipple into my mouth. He was salty and delicious, tasting of sweat and man and sea, and I couldn’t get enough. I reached for his jaw with my tender hand and touched his mouth. He licked my thumb and sucked it, shuddering as I teased the tight ring of muscles guarding his channel.

“Ride me.” He panted. “Dan… I need you to ride me.”

I nodded and left him long enough to scramble to my bag for supplies where I came up with a bottle of slick and a couple of condoms. When I got back to him, he lay there, one arm behind his head, one hand on his cock.

I couldn’t believe he was mine.

A smile bloomed over his lips as he welcomed me back, grunting and accommodating my weight. Something in his eyes made my heart lurch, a giddy, thrilling little spike of adrenaline, a rush of happiness that surged through my veins on contact with his skin.

He took the lube from me and gave my hip a light slap. “Come up here.”

One of Cam’s large hands gripped my ass, and he drew me up and up, until I was poised over his chest—my legs spread impossibly wide—so he could nuzzle my balls. I shivered all over when the wet heat of his mouth surrounded my flesh, engulfing me in a moist cave. It was almost-pleasure and almost-pain while his hand kneaded and gripped my cock and his mouth teased and fondled my balls. I had to grab for the headboard because I thought I’d fall right over and crush his head. He flipped the lube lid open, and the hand that held me disappeared only to return, slick and insistent, on my perineum, gliding toward my hole.