Heat Stroke (Beach Kingdom, #2)(11)

Marcus made a choked sound and stepped back as much as he could, which was only a matter of a couple inches. Enough that their lower bodies continued to brush together with the train’s movements. Marcus dropped his forehead to the plastic partition beside Jamie’s head and sucked in shaking breath after shaking breath. Jamie, also attempting to recover, watched Marcus with a growing weight in his chest.

“Marcus, listen to me. Everything is going to be okay. You are okay.” Jamie swallowed and looked away. “Find someone who can help guide you with this. It…look, it just can’t be me.”

Thank God the train doors chose that moment to open, announcing their arrival in Long Beach. Jamie wove his way through the other passengers, his cock still digging into his zipper. Needing the man he could hear walking behind him along the platform. He found no relief for his condition in the hot July air, but he kept moving, descending the stairs in record time. He was about to cross the street when Marcus gripped his elbow and turned him around.

“Jamie…” The poor guy looked shell shocked. “I don’t know what just happened.”

“Yes, you do, Marcus.” Jamie centered himself with a slow breath. “Listen to me. We didn’t do anything wrong. There is nothing wrong about you.”

“Why does it feel like there is?”

A spike twisted in Jamie’s side hearing Marcus say what they’d done felt wrong. Stupid, so stupid, to take it personally. But he’d heard it before. He’d been blindsided and almost killed over someone feeling wrong about what they’d done. It cut so much deeper coming from Marcus and that scared the shit out of him.

“I have to go,” Jamie said. But he didn’t move.

Marcus took off his hat and twisted it in his hands, leaving his hair in disarray on top of his head. “Did you have a good time?”

That wasn’t an innocuous question and they both knew it. The importance of Jamie’s answer was proven in the way they both held their breath. If Jamie said he didn’t have a good time, Marcus would stop asking to have his chair assigned next to Jamie. He could cut the time they spent near each other in half with one word.

And he couldn’t do it. Because he would have been lying.

“I had a great time, Diesel.”

The last thing he saw before turning and heading home was Marcus’s face splitting into a grin—and the image stayed with him until the very last second when he fell asleep that night.





CHAPTER FIVE





“Okay,” Marcus muttered under his breath, arranging the laptop on his coffee table at the perfect angle. “Might be gay. Might be gay.”

It would come as a surprise to no one that watching porn was one of his favorite pastimes. He’d always felt kind of awkward and bumbling while talking to girls, and porn was safer. No one rolled their eyes or laughed at him. Don’t get him wrong, he’d hooked up with a respectable number or girls, but they always seemed to evacuate the premises like it was on fire when he tried to have an actual conversation with them.

His go-to videos were bookmarked, but it had been a while since he’d watched them. Over a month. They’d been replaced at the top of his favorites list by juice recipes and fitness websites. Clean eating. Drink Your Immunities. Calves That’ll Stop Traffic.

Fuck, he’d gotten boring.

Marcus clicked on a video he’d watched upwards of a hundred times. Two men, one woman. She was on her hands and knees, servicing one of them with her mouth. The other dude thrust into her from behind, his mouth dropped open on a groan. Marcus wasn’t inspired to reach into his workout pants yet. No, his dick didn’t even get hard until he’d almost reached the end of the video and the two men leaned forward and kissed over the top of the woman’s head. It was hesitant at the start, like maybe it was the first time, but as the kiss deepened, both men started driving their hips faster, faster, their tongues sliding in and out of one another’s mouths, the woman moaning between them.

Marcus looked down to find his cock in his hand, the naked woman on his forearm flexing as he gave a tight stroke, root to tip.

Still, it wasn’t just right. He was swollen and aching, but his head wasn’t in it.

With a hard swallow, Marcus shoved himself back into the same sweatpants he’d worn to the gym that morning and scrolled through the videos. All the same. Two men, one woman. Every last fucking one of them. Had he ever truly focused on the woman or just the guys?

Admit the answer. Admit it.

He shook his head vigorously and slammed the laptop shut.

Marcus O’Shaughnessy wasn’t scared of anything. He was six foot four and he could probably bench press a medium-sized gorilla. He’d been raised by sanitation workers and they were salty motherfuckers who’d passed on their balls of steel. His size had made him the target of countless scrapes growing up. Yet touching Jamie Prince had made him feel stronger and more himself, more real than his intimidating size or anything in his past.

Yeah, he wasn’t scared of anything. But that.

The possibility that…maybe he didn’t know himself at all.

Marcus closed his eyes and fell back against the couch, his callused fingertips moving over the bite marks on his cheek, remembering how he’d almost ejaculated in his pants when it happened. With Jamie pressed up against him on the train, he hadn’t been worrying about his technique or if he’d maintain his erection—or if he’d crush Jamie to death—things he worried about when he occasionally hooked up with girls. Being with Jamie was like…breathing. In and out. Nothing else to worry about, except maybe having to stop.