Strong Signal (Cyberlove #1) (19 page)

The Chat went nuts.

Shit, I was half naked.

“Fuck, I’m sorry.” I backed away. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“No! It’s okay! Um, I think?” Kai shot me a nervous smile. “Don’t feel pressured or anything though.”

I glanced at the screen again.

“Wow, these people don’t know how to act.”

“Hush. We can discuss later,” Kai chastised. “C’mere if you want.”

I took reluctant steps forward at first, but Kai’s encouraging smile motivated me. Squatting beside his chair, I gave Chat a good look.

A startled laugh burst out that I found impossible to swallow. They were truly ridiculous, but there was something about the sight of dozens of people, even the folks who normally lurked silently, cheering Kai on that was comforting. Or it was until Garvy and Mitch went at it.

“This motherfu—”

“Okay, Chat, this is Garrett. Say hi, Garrett!”

A stream of “Hi, Garrett!” spammed across the screen along with several other questions about everything from where we’d met to my dick size. I gritted my teeth and muttered a low greeting of my own.

“He’s—” Kai waffled and glanced at me for help. I stared at him blankly. We hadn’t gotten far enough to assign labels. “He’s my Garrett!”

Kai snorted and started up a steady stream of chatter about the character selection process in the game. I tried to back out of the frame of the camera, but he grabbed my wrist and sent me a puppy dog look that instantly caused me to cave. There were no battle defenses against that level of adorable.

With my knees bent and my arm propped against his desk, I watched him design an androgynous Demigod with black and pink hair. He asked Chat which class he should try first and I suggested he go with the thief/rogue combo. I was always intrigued by the characters with stealth capabilities.

“This is more Garrett’s thing than mine,” Kai said as he hit the Create button. “He’s big into ranged or dagger types. Melee is not for me.”

“Neither is shooting if I go by your shitty targeting in
Apocalypse
.”

Kai laughed and swatted me, but a few of his Chat folks instantly came to his defense. It was so over the top that it reared up my irritation again. Who did these people think they were? The question popped into my head multiple times as Kai played through the starter area of the game, but then I reminded myself that I’d once been one of them too.

I also noticed that, for the next twenty or so minutes, people subscribed and donated enough money for him to have made over a hundred bucks. In twenty minutes. He was averaging per minute what people in some states made per hour. It was unreal. I also noticed that he thanked everyone who subscribed or donated money, and addressed everyone by name.

“Who the fuck is this clown thinking he can say this shit to you?” The words were out of my mouth before I could swallow them. “If you want to watch porn, why don’t you click to Pornhub, you piece of shit. I don’t know what it says about your functionality as a human that you can’t watch a dude on a video game without begging to see some dick.”

“Garrett—”

“No, fuck that. And your sorry ass fucking mod,
Garvy
, just sits there with his thumb up his a—”

Kai clapped his hand over my mouth. I tried to evade but he used his free hand to ditch the headset and tackled me to the floor with his palm firmly in place. I gnawed lightly on his finger which prompted him to snort-laugh, and then it was likely a mess of flailing limbs on the webcam as we wrestled on the floor.

“Kai, get off—”

“You can’t say that stuff about my—”

“Those mods need to—”

“Oh my God, I don’t know if I’m irritated or turned on by your shit talking.”

I grabbed his dick. “I’d say turned on.”

Kai was flushed, breathing hard, and his hair was everywhere, but he didn’t look angry at all.

“Just be cool,” he murmured. “They’re excited.”

“Not all of them.”

“And I am too,” Kai pressed on. “They’re my only friends and they just met my…”

“Boyfriend?”

“Yes?” Kai tilted his head. “Right? I mean we are, right?”

“Fuck yeah we are.” I cupped his dick again and leaned in to flick my tongue at his mouth. Everything about him felt so good that it was hard to keep my hands off, and he gave no indication that he wanted me to do so. “Can you get away with cutting out of your stream for an hour or so?”

“Um…”

I kissed down and dragged my teeth along his throat.

“Oh, shit, yeah.” Kai squirmed out from under my weight and crawled back to his computer. I was glad I couldn’t see the reaction of his Chat when he popped into view of the camera with his eyes dilated and hair everywhere. “Hey, I’ll be right back, guys! We have to, err, discuss Chat etiquette and stuff.”

“Or the etiquette of me stretching out your ass.”

Kai smacked my leg while simultaneously closing out his stream. “If they hear you say that I can guarantee the sexual harassment will intensify by about a billion percent.”

“Oh fuck.” I propped myself up on my elbows. “They can’t, can they?”

“I dunno. My microphone is pretty elite.”

“Uh huh. I’m sure with all of your special perks.”

Kai finished logging out and turned around with a double thumbs up. “You’re so jealous of my connections.”

“You got it. You have the best job ever while I’m going to have to bust my ass to go work in a plant.” I huffed out a breath when he pounced on me again, twining our legs together and shimmying temptingly. “Mmm. You’re so hot.”

“You’re hotter.” Kai kissed the tip of my nose. “What’s this about a plant?”

“I told you, the only thing I’m qualified to do outside the Army is be a mechanic and I’m mostly qualified to work on diesel machines. And the only place that’s going to happen is in specific factories and plants.” I thudded my head back against the floor. “I got a certification between my enlistments and I have almost a decade of experience from being in the service, but who knows what kind of money I’ll make if I just end up on the assembly line. I know it would be great because some people don’t even have that, but at the same time it’s sort of a blow to have done all this and then be stuck making around thirty thousand dollars a year.”

“But you don’t know if you’ll be a cog on the assembly line,” Kai said. “And you’ll be building like…tanks.”

“Or school buses.”

“Even better!”

I laughed and smacked his ass. “I love your enthusiasm.”

“I love your face.”

An “I love you” nearly slipped out before I choked on my tongue and focused my attention on kneading his ass. “Your stream is kind of creepy.”

“Oh geez, here we go again.”

“Are they not creepy?” I dug my fingers into the crease of his ass through the thin material of his pants. “That guy Mitch should be banned.”

“And he will be. Garvy and Cherry were too busy being distracted by your perfection to slam the ban hammer on his head.”

“Garvy was too busy angsting over your lack of single status,” I countered. “Do you realize how fixated all of these people are on you? I bet about 70 percent of them watch solely because they’re convinced you know who they are and give a damn about them, and think they have a shot with you romantically. It’s a textbook definition of a parasocial relationship but with like…thousands of people.”

“Babe—”

“And at least a couple thousand of those people,” I continued. “Would likely let you piss on them for kicks if it got you to mention their names even once.”

“I bet only one thousand would get down with a golden shower.” Kai pushed his hips against mine again. “Babe, you’re being super fucking judgmental. Like, it doesn’t make sense. I met you on
FWO.
You
found my Twitch stream.
You
messaged me first after looking me up. How can you hate on all of them?”

It wasn’t anything I hadn’t already told myself, but it was still easy to say it was different. We’d connected. It’d gone somewhere real.

“Because if you’d told me to fuck off, I would have done so. I’m not masturbating to the sight of your leggings.”

“These are not leggings. They’re compression pants I use to work out.”

“So. Leggings.”

Kai smacked my shoulder. “Look, I think it would be neat if you popped into Chat sometimes. Like…Saturdays with Garrett! You’re really smart about video games, and they’ll dig the contrast of our personalities.”

“Are you using me for promo?”

“Totally.” Kai sat up, straddling me. “But if you’re going to grumble about it every single time, I’m not going to stream in front of you, okay? It’s my job, and I can’t have my man dissing my job. I know they’re not always the best, but they’re fans. I can’t just sit around trash talking my fans, even the ones that are creepy. My mods will handle them as soon as they stop being excited that I suddenly have been struck with a love life.” He waved his hands around as if searching for a better explanation. “Shouting at my Chat isn’t the way I do business. I let other people do it while I maintain my charming persona. Also, some of them are not so bad and have actually become friends.”

He had a life before me, and he still had an online life despite my presence in his apartment. I needed to remember that, no matter how much his fucking chat made me want to hulk out sometimes. “You’re right. I’ll do my best not to be a dick. Honestly, I’m impressed with what you created—this whole community.”

“Really?”

I squeezed his thighs. “Of course. I want to support you. You want me on camera dropping truth bombs about gaming, then I’m all about it.”

Apparently that was the right thing to say, because Kai rocked his hips, pressing his hard dick into mine as he slowly began to unbutton his shirt.

Kai

I was never going to get back into a regular streaming schedule with Garrett around, and fuck it if I cared. I wanted him all the time. And even when we weren’t having sex, he was a grade-A cuddler. I’d told him that and he’d scoffed and got all macho, but he totally cuddled like he was made for it.

I fit perfectly right on his chest, under his chin.

Although right now, I just wanted him to fit in my ass.

I slipped my shirt down my arms and braced my palms on his chest, thrusting my hips into him so that our hard dicks brushed together over and over again. His hands were kneading my ass and my thighs as I curled my fingers so the nails dug into his skin. He never cared about that. I could scratch and bite and bruise, and it only seemed to turn him on more. I’d never been with someone I could let loose with like this.

“These are totally leggings,” Garrett said, slipping his finger under the back of my waistband. “And they are hot as shit.”

He yanked the back of them down to the top of my thighs, so my ass was bare. There was something about the cool air of my apartment hitting my bare skin that turned me on even more. Would it always be like this? If so, we were going to fuck ourselves into comas.

His lips were parted, breath coming fast, and I think I knew what he was about to do before he did. I braced myself as his hand cracked down on my ass, the sting and bloom of pain forcing a moan out of me.

“Mmm, that was hot,” Garrett said, before slapping the other ass cheek.

I rode him harder, fucking myself on him through my pants and his boxers. He growled and, with a firm grip on my waist, slammed me onto the floor on my stomach. I landed with an oomph, the air leaving my lungs before I heaved a breath to fill them back up with oxygen.

I bit back a whimper of pain as my hips dug into the hard floor. I knew they would be bruised later, and I didn’t care because I’d end up admiring them in the mirror. The evidence of Garrett wanting me so badly had been my pride and joy the last couple of days. We never apologized for the marks we left on each other. He admired them as much as I did.

Clearly, we were made for each other.

Garrett’s fingers dug into my hair and wrenched my head to the side as his weight settled on the back of my thighs. His lips crashed on mine, a sloppy side kiss that had me panting and whimpering, my dick protected from the floor by my thin pants.

He held my wrists together at the small of my back with one hand, owning my mouth, the head of his cock pressing against my hole. I couldn’t move much but I tried to push back on it, begging him to fuck me.

Garrett pulled away and I let my head drop, my temple resting on the ground. His hand coasted between my shoulder blades, down my spine, before resting on my ass. He smacked it one more time, then the heat of his hand left my skin. When I craned my neck to look at him, he had two fingers shoved in his mouth, sucking on them. He pulled them out, and everything about it, from the saliva glistening off of them, to his rakish hair, to his swollen lips, was so fucking dirty.