Chapter Four

Fuck, he saw me. And since I hadn’t figured out how to phase through floors yet, he was still seeing me.

Tan took in my fumbling with a slow grin. His head cocked to the side as if I was some spindly praying mantis that had climbed up his coffee cup.

God, he’s stunning. Grabbing an electric fence while wearing ten sweaters in January and licking a toaster stunning. A smile that’d light a city mile beamed at me and I wanted to rush forward to press my own stupid grin against his.

He wants his flowers, dumb ass.

“Ah.” My floppy face melted to what I prayed didn’t look like disappointment. “Yes. Sorry about the delay, I was…”

My erratic heartbeat that I should probably get looked at faded from my ears enough that I could pick up on music floating through the air. A set of those light-up speakers with color-changing water bubbles belted out a violin song that sounded like it accompanied a jewelry commercial. Music. Candles. Flowers in my hand.

All that was missing was…

“Where’s your date?” fumbled past my lips and splattered to the ground before my brain could curb-stomp it.

Tan flushed, his sculpted hand darting through his short hair so the twisted tips danced like wheat. “That is a, um, rather…” His cute, kissable nose wrinkled as his gaze skipped over my head. “Embarrassing matter.”

This wasn’t right. This couldn’t be right. No one ditched Tan Nguyen. No one with their marbles intact, at least.

How could this gorgeous, kind, sweet, perfect example of humanity be left alone on a romantic balcony overlooking the river on Valentine’s Day? He’d gone to all that trouble getting candles, setting up music… Shit! I realized why the chill didn’t permeate my awful suit as I caught sight of a standing heater propped up on the balcony. The universe couldn’t be this cruel.

My own schadenfreude shot up to eleven and I buried my focus on the challenging task of putting a basket on the table. “So…” My mouth searched for any way to talk through this awkwardness as I delivered a romantic basket to a stood-up man. “It sure is wet out.”

For the love of God.

Tan took pity on me. The hand that’d been rifling his hair apart fell. He bounced the tips of his fingers together in a pseudo-golf clap before nodding. “Yep. I feared it would never stop. But…”—wafting his hand out across the city that glittered like diamonds, he finished—“luck was on my side.”

Luck. That was one thing to call being ignored or dumped on Valentine’s Day. Okay, I could buy a blind date ghosting him, but no way in hell had Tan Nguyen ever been dumped.

“That should…” I stepped back from the basket, my eyes darting everywhere but him. “That should do it. I’ll just—” Follow the red line back down to my van and out of your life.

“Wait.” Tan leaned forward, his fingers nearly glancing across my wrist before he tugged them back. Instead, he gestured to the basket. “Why don’t you stay? I’d like you to…to help me get through this?”

I was on the clock, the van was parked in a fifteen-minute zone and that cursed suit that had probably stained my skin pink was still strapped to my body. But how could I say no?

“Sounds…okay.” I nodded, wincing at my horrific word choices. Granted, ‘I would love nothing more than to watch you sip champagne with your beautiful mouth’ would probably send him leaping off the balcony. At least my libido was staying out of this.

Mostly.

Tan gave me one more pity smile and busied himself in the basket. Uncertain, I tugged on the chair meant for his date and sat. The horrific suit kept my back straight as I drummed my fingers on the table.

While he laid out the offerings in the basket, cheese first, Tan said, “I’m surprised you’re working at a flower shop. Weren’t you going to art school?”

“Went, graduated and am looking at paying off those loans until I’m twenty years dead,” I admitted before wincing. Who cared how pathetic my life was? Especially someone who lived in a penthouse. Okay, there were like ten more stories above his, but the place was far nicer than mine.

I picked up the sealed cutting board and began to unwrap the cheeses as Tan moved on to the champagne. “Things were going okay after I got out of school. Nothing except commission work, but I expected as such until it all started drying up. Then I did some advertising and graphics for the florist and, next thing I know, my seven-to-five hours of the day are spent arranging daisies and lilies.”

The deepest eyes in the universe turned to me, Tan pausing his unwrapping of the champagne cork. I wiggled in the chair, wanting to tell him he could save that bottle for later. It had to have cost him quite a lot, courtesy of my boss’s markup. But at the look burrowing into me, I froze.

“You haven’t given up drawing?”

“No, no,” I assured him while trying to remember the last time I had finished something that wasn’t a half-sketch. “Weekends, sometimes at night if I’m not…” Exhausted and just want to fall asleep on the couch while Netflix checks to see if I’m dead.

Smiling, Tan said, “Good,” and popped the cork on the champagne. It didn’t ping around and shatter his window, or bounce off and stick in my eye. No, the obvious expert wiggled it so slowly that it plopped to the table and nary a drop of fizz was spilled.

So much skill in those taut fingers rolling down the bottle’s neck. What else could he do with them?

“A-ha.” I snapped my head away fast, terrified that he could read the dirty thoughts scrolling through my brain. I squeezed my eyes tight, trying to will them to stop. Why were there so many?

“Jack?” His delectable voice rolled my pedestrian name and I turned to the man offering me a flute of champagne.

After I took it, Tan raised his own as if in a toast. Here’s to shitty Valentine’s Days. I was about to take a sip when he leaned closer and the edge of his glass grazed mine. The clink was dull courtesy of the plastic flute, but electricity arced through me at the touch.

There you go imagining things again. It had been one thing when I was fifteen and needed to pretend anyone giving me attention was flirting. But come on. I’m a grown-up. More or less. I know how reality works.

Just drink the cheap sparkling wine.

With the gulp of alcohol, a strange clarity swept over me and I turned to the man sitting beside me. He’d pulled out the chair so that it was free of the table and aimed directly at me. “Mind if I ask why you care about me drawing?” God, that was as subtle as a rhino tap-dancing, but I couldn’t stop the question. What would he care what some random dork from high school did?

To my shock, Tan’s face turned red. Like, I was almost worried he was suffering an allergy attack from the champagne red. But he didn’t tug on his open collar or start gasping for air. He glared at the basket, the edges of his eyes crinkling as only the sound of a harp and piano duet filled the silence.

Maybe I should leave. Poor guy was having to spend his Valentine’s Day with me of all things. Probably the last thing he had planned or wanted. And here I was just making it harder for him by asking stupid questions.

“You don’t have to answer.” I raced to try to wipe my dumb mistake away. “I was just thinking out loud and—”

“No,” Tan interrupted, and a hauntingly doleful look drifted across his face. I’d dreamed of kissing him for so many reasons, but this was the first time I’d ached to do it to wipe away the sorrow knotting his mouth.

The edge of his tongue lapped his lips to a squeaky shine. “I was visiting back home, cleaning out the old room because my parents were going to chuck it all into a dumpster soon if I didn’t get rid of it. Doesn’t matter. I came across…” He leaned forward and fished out a scrap of paper from a back pocket. As he laid it out over the table, my breath caught in my throat.

It was Tan. Young Tan—though I’d swear he was more handsome now—drawn in charcoals. The only hint of color were the eyes as beautiful a brown as one could manage with tea staining. Which I’d know because I was the one to have drawn it.

“I…” The warning blared harder from my gut, and I leaned back in the chair, an arm stretched across the back. “I forgot I even did that.” Total lie.

Tan snickered, and he looked at me. “I didn’t,” he whispered, sending my heart careening into my throat. I was an idiot then. Okay, a bigger idiot, who’d honestly thought that if I slipped him that image, he’d take one look and realize all those words I could never say. Of course, it hadn’t happened that way. The handsome popular boy had thanked me and left to be with his girlfriend. When the pain had stopped, I’d thanked God he hadn’t figured it out.

And now?

Swirling his glass, Tan watched the few bubbles rise to the top while musing to himself. “I didn’t realize at the time. Thought it was, ya know, a…gift.”

Oh shit.

My eyes darted to the door, but my body was paralyzed as my greatest fear reared its head. Think of something. Say it was for a class. You copied it off a yearbook photo. Anything other than the truth!

“That.” I tugged on the collar of my jacket, the polyester strangling me. “I did it for…” For a portfolio. For a contest. Out of boredom.

Every life-saving lie fled from my tongue as I focused on those tender features burned into my memory. How his nose flattened at the tip. How his left eye was slightly higher than the right. How his jawline swept out like a swan’s wing. This many years on and I could still draw him from memory.

Tan watched my silence contemplatively, tapping his fingers up and down the plastic glass. “I’ve always wanted to tell you that I… I thought you were so brave.”

“Brave?” I sputtered, scrolling back through a history of my regular panic attacks as I made a second home in the bathroom stalls. High school hadn’t been entirely hell, but it had rental property on the river Styx.

“You were you,” Tan said as if that made any sense.

Yes, me. Awkward. Uncomfortable. Quiet. Lonely.

“I wish I’d had your confidence back then,” he whispered to himself while finishing off his glass.

“Are you thinking of a different Jack?” squeaked out of me. I tried to scroll through the rest of our class but could only think of a John that sort of fit.

Tan laughed. “No,” he said, reaching through the space between us to cup his hand over the top of mine. All time stopped as he caressed his talented fingers back and forth against my skin.

I’m dead. I’d been eaten by those cats, or a truck had hit me on the way to a delivery. There was no way on this planet that Tan was beaming his tender eyes at me while holding my hand. A cough of disbelief erupted from my throat because even in the middle of an end-of-life delusion, I had to spoil the moment.

Staring at the half-finished champagne, I thought back to those awkward days of youth. “I wasn’t… I didn’t try to be.” Chewing on my bottom lip, I admitted, “I’m not confident, brave. I was the biggest mess.”

Was?

A soft chuckle rolled off his lips, Tan’s fingers that’d been little more than a whisper against mine beginning to glide up and down. “I believed it my job to be what everyone wanted, expected. Thought that everyone was playing the same game. But there was you, Jack.”

“The weirdo no one wanted to talk to?” I snorted, clinging to the sarcasm that helped me survive.

“That’s not true.” Tan, whom everyone adored, didn’t understand. Sure, people’d acknowledged my existence because they weren’t the kind of assholes who’d literally walk over a kid. But no one had wanted to really talk talk to me, to sit and listen to my foolish ramblings about new art supplies, or just hang.

No one but him.

The truth burned on my cheeks as I realized I didn’t simply have a crush on Tan. I’d known the full of it once, which was probably why I gave him the picture I drew. Wanted it to be real, but denying it, pretending it didn’t happen was easier.

“The only reason I was ever able to be me, the only time I could be myself,” I whispered, watching his fingers slide between the channels of my knuckles. Blinking away years of repressive tears, I met his gaze. “Was around you.”

I don’t know why I did it. Exhaustion combined with alcohol and no longer giving a shit? Wanting to break that eternal warning inside of me? Perhaps I really thought I was dead and damned the consequences.

My body slid on the chair, my knees bouncing against his. Tan tried to shift—whether to stop or accommodate me, I couldn’t say. Bouncing on my heels, I rose toward him. With my eyes closed tight, my lips blindly sought out his. It wasn’t an elegant kiss, certainly not one worth bragging about to my future cats. But as his chin bumped mine, my head swerved and the dread pounding in my heart erupted into glittering butterflies.

God, his lips were softer than I could ever have imagined. He tasted of champagne, of course, but also the gentle kiss of rain while hiding in a bookstore. Of snuggling under a blanket by the crackle of a fire. Of every foolish dream I’d ever tacked to the hope of him liking me in return.

As I pulled back, my lips humming from his body heat and my senses flooded with his existence, the second brick dropped. Who said he liked me? Who said he wanted me? Who said he was even into me?

Chills raced across my skin and my heart clogged with fear. Time slowed to the lifespan of a sequoia. Tan’s eyelids lifted like molasses as his deep brown irises turned to the strange man hovering awkwardly on his haunches above him. The man who had pressed those infernal lips to his without so much as a question. The man who was wondering if someone could survive a six-story drop.

Please don’t hate me.

Tan glided his thumb over his lips, obscuring any hint I could have of a reaction. Was he trying to wipe away the proof that it had happened?

A cramp crawled up my legs, both of them wanting to give out. I bent my knees, prepared to fall back to my chair, roll over its back and make a break for the long drop. Suddenly, Tan launched for me.

He swept his sculpted palm to cup my cheek, digging his fingers through the roots of my hair as he pulled me to his lips. Holy shit! That perfect Cupid’s bow fluttered against my lips, first the top, then the bottom as he tugged my lower lip into his mouth. A soft graze of his teeth sent me reeling.

My hand opened, dooming the champagne to splatter on the concrete. But I barely heard the plink of plastic as I traced my thumb along his chiseled cheekbone, dipping my fingers into the hollow underneath. It was me who parted his soft purse of lips with my tongue, who tasted this man of my dreams while Tan moaned in return.

To hear him groan in ecstasy as I took him in my mouth. To feel his hips bucking against me. To have him hold my hand as he came.

I broke off the kiss, watching my thumb dip and swell with Tan’s cheek. His lips, reddened from my force, rose in a shaky smile. How new was this for him? Shit, how new was it for me?

“I’ve wanted to tell,” my shaky voice whispered through the still air, “for so damn long. To say…”

Even with my hand cradling his face, even with my kiss lingering on his lips, I couldn’t do it. I was scared.

Tan curled a hand around my waist. He didn’t pull me closer, but his fingers caressed my skin hiding below the awful vest and shirt. “What was it?”

That I’ve wanted you. That I’ve needed you.

That I’ve loved you.

A smirk curled my lips as the thought that I’d once feared more than death somehow softened to the strength of a soap bubble. “That,” I said, swallowing deep. Meeting him eye for eye, I growled, “You’re hot as fuck.”

Tan surged forward, his lips splattering kisses of need and ache across mine. He slipped his mouth to my jaw, nipping with the edge of his slightly crooked teeth that I’d traced by memory dozens of times before. A shudder shook through me, my dick cramped beside my thigh courtesy of poorly designed pants. And how badly it wanted the touch of the man nibbling around the hollow of my ear.

He licked my lobe and sucked it into his mouth. My breath buffeted at the image of what else his talented tongue and lips could do. “Hm,” Tan rumbled in my ear, the delicious voice almost too much to bear. He slid his hand down the tacky vest to slip just under the waist of my pants. He flittered his fingers against my tucked-in shirt but held my scraggly hip in his palm. Those tempting tips rolled closer and closer to my ensnared dick.

As he pulled away, his face sparkled while he took me in. A wry smile rose upon his lips. “I hate to say it, but this outfit of yours is rather…” Tan rubbed his right hand against the fabric on the lapel while his left remained entrenched down my pants. My brain pinged up the helpful reminder that he was a natural southpaw.

I glared down at the scratchy, itchy, terror of commercialized love. “It’s awful.” I sneered. “Tight, uncomfortable, itch—”

My tongue fell numb as Tan drew his delectable fingers up the lapels. He wrapped both hands around the seams as if about to straighten it when a smile I never thought would be meant for me rose. “Then,” he said with a chuckle, “we shall have to get rid of it.”

The suit coat was halfway down my arms by the time I caught his chin in my hand. Roughing my tongue over the hint of stubble prickling along his soul patch, I delved deep. My lips pried his open, giving no pretense of how I ached to taste all of him.

When the cherry-red jacket struck the cold, unforgiving ground, Tan’s fingers drew along the fake-satin vest. They waltzed over my pretend abs, every dip electrifying my skin below. Every touch reminded me that this gorgeous man was only a shirt and vest away from touching my naked body.

Circling his palm around the top of the vest, Tan pressed his hips forward. Oh God in wherever gods sat. I knew what swerved against my inner thigh, what that tightening bulge meant. But I couldn’t believe it.

Pressing his lips to mine, I jammed my fingers down the back of his jeans. There were men of marble who didn’t have as tight an ass as Tan. His waistband would barely stretch but I strained to caress and pinch the shapely muscle that he got to sit on every day.

“Jack,” he shuddered, my name fracturing to pieces in my ear.

That was too much, too fast. Yanking my hands out, I let the man I’d always thought of as straight go free. Maybe adjust himself, smooth down his hair. Give him time.

When Tan curled his fingers over mine, I gulped. When he placed them against the button on his jeans, my heart somersaulted. A coy but also hungry look watched me, his hands releasing mine to the tending of his pants and everything contained therein. With the edge of my eyes, I glanced down at the silhouette straining against the crotch.

He was so hard, I could see even a hint of his cock’s head through the thick denim. And it wanted me. He wanted me.

Taking my time, my eyes never leaving his, I undid the brass button. Tan sifted my hair in his hands, seeming none concerned. Slowly, I pulled the dangerous zipper down, my own dick revving from the tug of teeth coming apart. His jeans were barely slung lower on his hips before the entirety of his cock rolled into the gap.

Fuck. It was…as all things with Tan, perfect. Long but not obscene, plump with a wide head without giving me any internal clenching fears. I didn’t realize I’d reached out, the tip of my finger swirling down the long vein, until Tan’s head snapped back and he gulped in air.

Too much! Pull back! Pull…

“F…f…fuck,” he stuttered. With the fingers that’d been playing with my hair, he tugged hard on the ends. I would happily be his puppet should he ask, but it was me who had control of him.

A smile melted in my gut, my entire body lightening as I slid his pants and boxers off his hips. As they fell, so too did I, planting one knee to the cement ground. It wasn’t until I glanced up at him, the February air dancing through the curls of black pubic hair, that his face lit up with realization.

“I want to suck you off,” I admitted, not even blinking at the enormity of my confession. His eyes widened, his nod turning into a chuckle as he gripped my shoulder. Tan’s shirttails tried to fall around his proud dick, but I wouldn’t hear of it.

I caressed his narrow hips, following his toned V with my thumbs and kneading into the buttocks behind with my fingers. All the while, his cock pulsed, Tan’s lower half jutting back and forth as if he couldn’t wait for me to take him in my mouth. To swallow him down my throat and suck him off to bliss.

I circled my lips with my tongue, wetting and warming them, before I leaned closer. Tightening the tip, I fluttered along his foreskin, helping it to retract the last few millimeters. Tan gasped, raising a hand off my shoulder to curl under my jaw. It was he who pulled me deeper, my mouth opening to suck the head of his cock inside.

Calming the back of my palate, I sucked him deeper down my throat. There was no other skin on the body that compared to the silky heat of a cock. My breathing relaxed to try to fit him but Tan’s ramped up. All the while, I fondled his ass, kneading into the crack without delving to the tempting pucker. I brought my hand forward and curled his balls in my palm. That caused Tan to buck, his cock nearly bounding against my gag reflex.

Do not vomit on the hottest man you’ve ever known!

By some Cupid miracle, I pulled back and my gorge returned to its slumber. Forget showing off your deep-throat skills, fucking enjoy this. I looked up to find Tan’s eyes heavy-lidded but watching.

Bring him to his knees.

Swirling my tongue like the colors up a barber’s pole, I climbed to the head of his cock. All the while, I rotated his balls and tugged on the scrotum. At the tip, I flicked my tongue against his frenulum right as I pressed my finger against his taint.

“Fuck, that feels so…”

He couldn’t finish his compliment as I sucked my cheeks in and dove down. Every time I licked his cock, mine stirred harder. It glided against my pants as I jerked my entire body up and down. Tan shivered from my technique, his skin heating against me as I increased my speed.

Cup and swing his sac. Suck on the head. Pressure on the base. God, don’t go off in your pants. If I focused on the technique, I was safe. But every gasp and moan from the man whose cock I was devouring sent my hips thrusting.

“Don’t,” Tan sputtered, “don’t fu… Shit, keeping going.” His hips twitched, clearly aching to thrust.

Wrapping one hand around his ass, I pulled him deeper into me. His cock swept deep down my throat and I lapped every perfect curve my tongue could reach. I juggled his balls in my other hand, tugging them farther and farther to keep this going, to let me never forget the feel of Tan in my mouth.

A shudder started at his scrote, and he raked his fingers across my scalp as warm cum slipped down my throat. Tan folded toward me even as I kept my hungry lips around him, swallowing every last drop. “God, fuck, that… How was it so…? You’re…”

His words faded as he pulled out of me. I watched the glistening cock I’d brought to its fullness. To my surprise, Tan didn’t hitch up his pants. No, he kept shuffling through my hair, as he said, “I had no idea it could be that fucking amazing.”

Tears tried to rise at his compliment. At the words I’d have killed to hear in high school. To have a beautiful boy cup my face and tell me I gave fucking amazing head. It was all I could have asked for then, and now…

No reason to go looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Pleased to the point where my eyebrows sang, I stood off my knees. That single rose remained in the basket, only it and the mysterious box lingering for the night. Perhaps it could still be salvaged. He could probably give them to whoever he’d really wanted for the night.

“I should…” I began, snaking my arm back to pick up the fallen jacket, when Tan landed his palm against my chest. Could he feel my erratic heartbeat increasingly? My brain flipped between ‘please don’t stop me’ and ‘please keep me here.’ My dick wanted the latter, but the rest of me feared the former. Okay, the heart was fifty-fifty on that one, especially as I stared at his flushed cheeks and panting lips.

Tan folded his fingers loosely and drew one after the other down my cheek. “I thought I needed to get that suit off of you.”

“You don’t…” I snorted, a laugh of utter shock and denial fleeing from my lips. He was kidding. He had to be screwing with me. He couldn’t honestly mean to fuck me? “You don’t have to.”

The hand that’d caressed my cheek snapped fast to the nape of my neck, yanking me until my lips glanced a breath against his. “Oh,” Tan said, every word tickling my mouth, “but I want to.”