Mind (Naughty Wishes #3) by Joey W. Hill Read Free Book Online Page B

best strategizing when he was under, where his subconscious could toss out the bullshit. He might need a drink to settle his spinning mind, though. Or a whack with the type of blunt object he’d considered using on Chris.
    It was near eleven when he came back into the house. He locked the door, activated the security panel and dropped his keys in the stupendously ugly, brightly colored fruit bowl in the kitchen. Sam had found it at a yard sale, and it had become the collection point for things needed when walking out the door. Spare change, extra keys to their vehicles, pens picked up here and there, many of them with the logo of Sam’s bank. Clothespins clipped on the edges of the bowl held reminder notes, like the one Sam had left before she departed on her trip. “Pick up organic milk. Happy cow logo.” Chris had added “oatmeal” in his large scrawl beneath it.
    Geoff slipped open the buttons of the shirt he’d donned to meet Logan and loosened the cuffs as he moved down the hallway. Chris’s TV was still on that low drone. Either he hadn’t hit the sleep setting or he’d woken up again and reset it. Even on weekends, Chris tended to go to bed earlier than Geoff did, since his system was programmed to be up with the sun, the pathological need for coffee to kick-start him notwithstanding. There was very little chance he was still awake.
    Even so, Geoff slowed to a stop. Something had changed. The bedroom door was open. Not cracked or closed. The large rectangle of darkness flickered with the blue-gray light of the TV.
    He’d told Chris—rather emphatically, with pretty Dom-like panache, if he did say so himself—that he’d wait until Chris came to him. But that had to do with other things, the undefined Dom/sub nuances between them, how that power exchange would play out. His revelation in the car made this a different kind of moment. You had to learn how to walk before you could run. Or, as the first Master he’d ever met had told him: “Learn how to fuck; then learn how to top.”
    Chris was the only man who’d ever seen Geoff cry. When Geoff’s mother told him she was staying with his father, despite his blatant and continuous infidelity, she’d given her son a look so distant, it was as if she were someone he didn’t know, had never known. “If you can’t treat your father with respect, Geoff,” she’d said stiffly, “you aren’t welcome in our home.” Geoff had packed and left.
    To this day he didn’t really remember making a conscious decision to go to Chris’s place. He’d just somehow foundhimself back at college. The guy lived in an eight-hundred-square-foot box with a postage-stamp-sized patio—one step up from a storage building, but it was adjacent to the organic garden the botany students had started. Chris was allowed to room there because he watered the plants.
    Chris sat him down on the patio in a sturdy lounge chair next to a huge pot of white, purple and red flowers, then went inside to get him a beer.
    Geoff looked past the patio boundary, at rows of some kind of vegetable he didn’t know. It didn’t matter, because he didn’t see them. He was staring at nothing, and it felt like someone had shot him. His heart seized, his throat closed up and his shoulders were hunched against the pain. When Chris came back to the patio door, he could have retreated without being seen, or done the awkward shoulder-pat thing, but he hadn’t done any of that.
    He’d come out and set the beer down. As the pain got worse and Geoff started shaking, he’d wrapped his big arms around Geoff from behind, leaning over him and pressing his head on top of his, holding Geoff tight while Geoff let his childhood and his family go with those tears.
    When he was done, Chris had given him a light pat, a hard squeeze of his shoulder, and said,
“Hey, let’s splurge on Luigi’s. You know their lasagna cures everything. We might get that waitress with the great smile and the double Ds.”
    Chris was