lately. Maybe it’s the impending holidays, or maybe it’s something else going on out there that he doesn’t tell me about, but his dark days seem darker of late, and his few light days have been full of shadows.
So, with all the familiar anticipation and dread, I trot down the two sets of stairs to the sub-basement. The Academy’s had this building for only a couple years and there are still traces of the former inhabitants. The files in old cabinets from when it was the AIDS care headquarters. Even the slim white boxes of negative from the days when ABC studios ran it.
The whole place is like an archeological dig of Hollywood’s history.
By the time I get to the third level down, I can smell the ammonia he uses to clean. The lights, hanging from their hooks in the beams, swing back and forth when I pull the chains to turn them on, looking around. “Hello?”
What to Buy for the Vamp Who Has Everything
3
A skitter of sound. I’d think it was a rat in any other place. “Adam?”
That sound again, a shadow moving in the shadows. My heart’s in my throat. Maybe it’s him. Maybe it’s my wishful imagination.
I tread slowly into the room where the big sofa and the gym mats are.
“I brought doughnuts.” My voice echoes a bit. I set the bag down on the table and pull the chain that turns on the table light. I don’t know what it means that more and more these days, I find him sitting here in the dark.
And then, in the time it takes for me to blink, he’s standing there. Two feet from me and my heart has time for one great lurch of happiness and shock and then he’s got me in his arms and I’ve got his scent in my nose, his tongue down my throat.
It’s hard and fast the first time. He gets me on my knees, my pants down around my thighs, fingers rubbing slick into my hole for only a second before he presses in, arm over my shoulder and around my chest to hold me tight against him while he grunts and punches his dick against my prostate a few hundred thousand times it seems, before I’m panting and keening, my saliva and sweat hitting the mats and he’s groaning and twisting against me and we’re both done for.
Then we lay there and he’s still holding me and I can smell the wool of the sweater I brought for him last time and I can hear my own breath, harsh and loud.
He lets me go and staggers to his feet. “Sorry,” he says, and reels away.
Why he always apologizes, I don’t know. I like what he does to me. Obviously. The evidence of my liking is all over the mat beneath me. So I get my pants back up around my waist and I tuck my dick inside and I find some of the paper towels I’ve brought along with the other supplies and I mop up a bit while he stands over there in the corner.
Now we’ve got to go through that awkward period before either one of us gets to talking. Hey, maybe we’re fucking each other but we’re still men. Or at least I’m a man. He’s a…heck if I know what he is nowadays, but he sure as hell is a male one.
4 A. M. Riley
I start putting away the supplies. He’s got a cupboard of sorts over here, bits and pieces he’s dragged up from the bowels of this place. I offered, a few dozen times, to get some wood and some boys down here and put a proper room in. Of course, he’d have none of it.
“They’ll ask questions.”
“No they won’t, not the boys I’d get.”
He doesn’t like it one bit. “Illegals?”
“Christ, Adam, what do you care?”
But he does care and that’s the glory and the curse of the man. See, me and Adam were both working for the LAPD at one time. But he was a very bad man. A dirty cop, a drug addict, and just generally the worst news you could hope to run into in Los Angeles County.
He probably would have gone to jail for it. I might have even been the one unfortunate enough to put him there. If he hadn’t ended up dead.
“I don’t need anybody’s help.” Now, all of a sudden inclined to domesticity, Adam starts to help me
Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, June Scobee Rodgers