Fic: Foreplay (Jack/Sawyer, AU)
Random Friday fic, because we all know that Kate’s muse likes to time things so she posts when there are no readers. Anyway, I'm going to make a valiant effort at staying off LJ this weekend, to air out my brain a little and to get some work done, and I wanted to post this before I did.
Title: Foreplay
Pairing: Jack/Sawyer
Rating: Adults
Summary: AU. Sawyer is a bartender, and Jack is in the band playing one night. I suppose this might put them a bit younger than they are on the show. We’ll say thirtyish.
Note: I dearly wish that my muse wouldn't slap me with AU porn at 12:30 in the morning. Well, thank goodness I’ve got nothing better to do than stay up and write.
Foreplay
The bar was always sticky, and it often made Sawyer want to punch something. He didn’t mind the noise of the live music, the loud, nasal whine of the college girls, or the constant haze of smoke. What he did mind was the constant stickiness of the bar, as if he sloshed out every drink he poured, which he did not. At any rate, it was owing to this obsession with stickiness that he even noticed him at all before he went on stage. The bassist came to collect his free drink, and when Sawyer plunked the draft of Newcastle down in front of him, he gulped half of it down and then returned it to the bar, only to pick it up and slide a napkin under it.
It was only the strange combination of fastidiousness and raw but brooding energy that made him notice the man at all, and when he did, looking up finally, he saw what was, without fail, the prototype for tall, dark, and handsome and at the same time, one of the prototypes for these damn musicians: quiet, mysterious, serious, hard. Except this one seemed like the quiet type by nature, and if he was mysterious, it wasn’t a self-conscious act. And he seriously doubted that he was really all that serious and hard once a person got to know him. He was also, more than likely, the last man in the world to respond to dimples.
Yet Sawyer flashed them anyway. “Let me get you another one to take up there with you.”
The man’s face produced a tentative smile as he said, “Later. Can’t play worth a damn when I drink too much.”
Sawyer sized him up. He was too big a guy to hold his liquor so badly, but yet apparently that was the case. It did not in any way explain his downing half a glass at one time.
Sawyer glanced at the Newcastle, and the bassist grimaced a bit before allowing his face to light into a sheepish smile. “I can’t play worth a damn if I don’t drink at least a little.”
“Nervous?”
He just nodded and suddenly floated away from the bar with his drink, out into the sea of people crowding tables and booths. Sawyer watched him disappear out the side-stage door, and he leaned himself on his elbows for half a second before some young blonde thing giggled at him about a mojito and he found that his elbows were now covered in something pink.
He could only hope this bassist’s band didn’t suck.
*****
He watched him play, at least as much as he could, his eyes drifting toward the stage when he washed glasses and shook drinks. He was startled to realize, after it was all over, that he hadn’t paid much attention to the music or the lead singer. Usually, the lead singers were his type. Male, female-if he could attract them, and he usually could, he couldn’t resist them. There was an open sexuality about a lead singer, at least a good one. They could draw you in, make you feel like you were seeing something personal about them. Sawyer played a similar game behind the bar, sometimes trying to draw a lead singer to him the same way, but with just the simple movements of his job-the deft handling of a glass, the sly smile at a customer-although he had been known to openly flirt with singers across the smoke-filled bar. He’d even succeeded in drawing a couple of them out through the crowd to him. There had been that lithe little blonde girl and her club music, and that androgynous, long-haired guy improbably fronting a straight-up, whisky and Hank Junior rock-n-roll cover band. Even the goofy falsetto parts of “Beast of Burden” sounded especially nice when the singer was singing to you, underscored as they were by the loose but palpable tension in the song.
But bassists were typically not his speed. Too much like genius lead guitarists who didn’t sing: too much posturing, and not in a fun way. Or they were the mopey types, turning their back on the crowd and playing to the drummer. He’d been with a few of them, nearly all of the women that came through because they didn’t exactly fit the mold, but a quiet, contemplative, focused male bassist was exactly what he didn’t need.
But this one was playing for him.
The man only smiled once or twice, as if to himself, and over something only he understood, but it was clear that he was focusing his energy out over to room to someone. A few people in the crowd even turned toward the bar to figure out who, but Sawyer knew. There was a certain self-consciousness that a person could see if he knew what to look for. And he saw it in this man, picking at his electric bass and stealing long, hard looks at the bar whenever he had the chance. His face stayed mostly calm, stoic even, but his hands and his posture spoke volumes, telling Sawyer that he was nervous as hell but determined not to show it, and by the time the show had ended, the bassist wasn’t nervous anymore, not about his playing and not about catching Sawyer’s attention.
The next to last song was a long one, the sort that stays buoyant, almost static for a long time. It had a rolling, wonderful, but utterly repetitive baseline, and through most of that early part of the song, he did all but lock eyes with Sawyer. Then the song drifted into something quiet, and the bassist turned back to the drummer, for the first time all night. Sawyer knew he was being coy, and it almost irritated him, but he forgot to be irritated when he turned back to the crowd just as the song began to wind up again. Most everyone was watching the lead guitarist/singer as he brought the song back up to its first intensity and then continued to build it higher, but Sawyer was listening to the bass line, coming back like before but beginning to vary until it pulled off some intricate inversions and arrhythmic feats that were both surprising and so easy to get caught up in. It was lucky that everyone too riveted to the stage to order drinks, because Sawyer was also watching closely, watching as the man’s eyes stayed on his fingers even as he managed to project some energy into the crowd, all the way to Sawyer. He wondered if he wasn’t just imagining it, but when the lead singer finally lit back into the chorus again and the song held that familiar tune, but now at a fever pitch, the bassist looked at him and smiled. Slow, confident, deeply sensual, and aimed straight at him. Sawyer simply raised a glass to him, and the bassist nodded at the tap. So Sawyer did what he rarely did because he wasn’t supposed to. Only occasionally and when he was absolutely enamored of a particularly dynamic or unreadable lead singer did he carry the free beer out to the band. But this day he did, setting the second Newcastle on the edge of the low stage before he slinked out the stage door, a cigarette already lit in his hand.
It was bad timing, he knew. By the time they finished playing, he’d have to go inside again. Who knew if he’d manage to catch him. With cool brick behind his head, he smiled to himself. He mumbled, “It’ll happen.” Not soon enough to satisfy the deep, aching arousal in his body, but it was a certainty. Nobody ever played for him that didn’t end up in his bed or on their knees in the back room.
*****
The man’s name was Jack, they told him. They also told him they had no earthly idea where he’d gone. Not too far, because his car was still there, but he’d disappeared, or at least pretty near to it. It wasn’t like Sawyer could leave the bar to roam around looking for him.
He tried not to think about all the mischief the bassist Jack could be getting himself into, especially given the penchant of a few of the bar’s regulars for not so subtly groping anything big and muscular and wearing a black t-shirt, and a musician no less. After scrambling behind the bar for an hour or so, turning his sexual frustration into generous shots of tequila and lightening-speed cashing out of tabs, all while clamping his usually talkative mouth shut, he soaked a rag in hot water, gave the bar a vigorous wipe down, yelled at his fellow bartender about absolutely nothing, and was told to go, for fuck’s sake, and get over his shit with a cigarette. It was well known he couldn’t go more than a couple of hours without a smoke before he got cranky. Add horniness to the mix and he was halfway dangerous.
The back stage door slammed shut behind him, and he jumped at the sound, muttering to himself and drooping down onto the cool pavement, knees up and back against the wall. A few people milled around, carrying equipment in and out of the side stage door, and he watched them-some drunk, others weary and dragging, a few practically bouncing off the walls of the alley. This was typically his favorite part of being a bartender, watching people and meeting most of them, but tonight he was restless, and he couldn’t really enjoy it, only notice that they seemed to move with so much energy while he felt like he was muffled in cotton.
He’d finished half a cigarette when a voice in the oval of darkness opposite him said, “Thanks for the beer.”
When Jack stepped out toward him, he had the impulse to hit him, so much was his annoyance at himself for being this hard up and at this man for so nonchalantly floating back into his company. But he couldn’t take his eyes off him, and he stood up slowly and reached out with his pack of Marlboros, lighter clutched against the side.
Smoking suited Jack. He had long fingers, and they seemed just as sure holding that cigarette as they did stroking the bass. Precise, they were. They would be good hands, plucking and dragging over his skin. He stared at them instead of the man as they talked. He had the sudden urge to play hard to get, which was so rarely his style but seemed appropriate here, with this man who had never left the bar but had stayed out of his sight, either to drive him crazy or because he was a big fucking coward. Sawyer doubted the latter, now that he had seen the man play.
Jack said, “Think they’ll have us back here?”
“You kidding? Sure. You’re not quite the usual for this place, but they liked you as well as they’ve liked anything in a long time.”
“It’s hard to gauge sometimes. You get caught up in what you’re doing and you forget that there are people watching you.”
“I somehow doubt that you lose track of the crowd that much.”
“You’re right. Not totally. And sometimes the crowd is the only thing you see.” Jack exhaled slowly. “Makes it hard sometimes.”
“Oh?”
“It’s easier to play for yourself. When you play for the crowd, it makes you take more chances, fuck up worse.”
“You don’t take chances?”
He smiled and shook his head as he tossed the cigarette down the alley. “Yes and no.”
It was an opening, as likely a one as he’d ever have with this guy. Sawyer showed him his dimples without turning on the 100-watt smile, and then he said, “I bet I know you already. You sneak up on chances, get so close that you can’t help but fall over into them.”
Jack laughed this open, nervous, but completely spellbinding laugh. “I don’t believe anyone’s ever called me a coward before so openly, but with such little actual insult involved.”
“Ain’t cowardice. You don’t have to take that step forward at all, but you do.”
Shaking his head, Jack said, “This would be so much easier if we weren’t standing here talking in metaphors about whether I was waiting for you, which I was.”
“I know that. I’m just letting you sweat a little.”
At that comment, such a mix of emotions played across Jack’s face that Sawyer almost kissed him, just to put him out of his misery, but there was something fascinating about waiting for him to make the move. How would he do it? Sawyer leaned back into the wall, giving himself up to being ravaged and groped against the wall. He could almost feel that thick body rocking into his.
But Jack only met his eyes and said, “What time do you get off?”
“Late.”
“I’m at the Midtown Vistas, number 31. If I’m asleep, I’m sure you can think of a way to wake me.”
Then he slipped a key card into the back pocket of Sawyer’s jeans as he went back into the bar through the back stage door.
Sawyer smoked another cigarette, then two more, then he went inside, and, not finding Jack anywhere, settled up his open tabs, feigned a massive migraine, and went home. He wanted to shower, and quickly. To hell with the hard to get. He’d thought all he would have was something quick and dirty against some hard surface, but the thought of that broad-shouldered man in a bed made him both impatient and so sublimely happy he didn’t even notice the traffic on the freeway.
*****
The Midtown Vistas sounded like a shit-hole, but in reality it was a refurbished Motel 6 or Super 8, which explained the key card and also made it rise to a certain level of lower-class respectability. It did not explain the rose-colored wallpaper in the interior hallways. He was relieved when the door to number 31 opened and the room was blue, ugly but blue.
Jack was not asleep. He was standing by the open window, leaning down to blow the smoke from his cigarette out the window.
“Hey,” he said with a smile.
“You run off your band-mates?”
“I bunk with Billy, the drummer, and I seriously doubt if he’ll be sober enough to find his way back here anytime soon.”
Nodding at the cigarette in his hand, he said, “This is a no-smoking room.”
“Well, this is a sodomy law state, but that didn’t stop me from almost going at you in the alley.”
His demeanor was so different now, so lacking in that initial nervousness, that Sawyer’s brain swam as it adjusted. This was the man comfortable again, in his element just as he had been on stage. Sawyer asked him, “Why didn’t you?”
He rolled his eyes impatiently, at himself.
“What?” Sawyer said.
“I’m a bit of a clean freak.”
Sawyer smiled and took a few steps across the room. “Lucky for you, I’ve had a shower.”
“I haven’t. Didn’t expect you this soon.”
“Well, also lucky for you, I’m not a total clean freak.”
The cool night air caught him about the time he got his hands around Jack’s biceps. He tugged him to the bed, and only after he felt the wonderful, crushing weight of Jack’s body on top of his did he finally seek out his mouth. He had thin lips, and he tasted, predictably, like stale beer and cigarettes, but his tongue instantly slipped into his mouth, forceful but without any sense of heavy awkwardness. His tongue practically took over Sawyer’s mouth for a while, and he happily let himself be taken. That wasn’t hard, because Jack’s hands were in his hair, alternately tugging it gently and stroking fingers through it.
It was odd, but they seemed to kiss for a long time. Sawyer had never been much for foreplay, and it wasn’t like he didn’t feel the hard press of cock against cock or he wasn’t ready to tear Jack’s clothes off, but something about this scenario made him willing to lie there and be kissed. Maybe it was that it was really good kissing-he couldn’t remember the last man or woman to leave him breathless like this-but he knew it was just a whole different energy than he was used to. This man wanted to be kissing him, and he wanted to turn him on with it. He was somehow giving and not just taking. It had really been that way all night, this thing going back and forth between them.
When things got too urgent for simply reveling in the slow grind of bodies and the concentrated tangling of their tongues, Sawyer pushed him back and pulled off his shirt, revealing a slightly pudgy but damn sexy stomach and a broad chest and massive shoulders. Jack made a move for his shirt, but Sawyer was already pushing his hands away and going for Jack’s belt.
Sawyer said, “I wanna suck you off.” He knew it would be a hard sell, somehow, not because Jack didn’t want it but because he wasn’t the type that enjoyed things that weren’t somehow reciprocal, so, as Sawyer finally freed Jack’s cock and wrapped a steady hand around it, he added, “You can make it up to me later, but right now, I want this in my mouth. I want you to fuck my mouth.”
Jack was already dripping, and Sawyer slid his thumb over the head just for good measure: there it was-Jack surrendering to it, letting him finish taking off his pants and crouching back over Sawyer’s chest, his dick hang there in front of his face. Jack took the headboard in his hands as Sawyer guided him in.
It didn’t take long before Jack was rolling his hips toward Sawyer’s mouth, groaning with every slow slide back through Sawyer’s lips. For a while, Sawyer kept his eyes wide open to watch the straining in his large, muscled thighs, how they pushed his hips forward so that the darkness of his pubic hair rushed toward his face as his dick slid in and out. He was average length but thick, and he was so wet Sawyer had to constantly take him in all the way just to be able to swallow a bit. Not that any of this bothered him, and he eventually closed his eyes and simply felt it all. With every thrust, Jack murmured affirmations or his name, and with nearly every pulling back of his hips, he broke up the rhythm of words with a moan.
Jack said, “Do you have any idea how hard up I’ve been all night?”
Sawyer just opened his eyes and looked up at him and swiped his tongue over his slit.
“God,” he moaned, and he set his hips on a faster pace, and with that pace came more force as he really fucked his mouth now with abandon. He forgot any words at all, but he made more noise with grunts and moans than just about anybody Sawyer had ever heard. Whoever was next door was getting quite a show. Sawyer kneaded his fingers into Jack’s ass, feeling how his whole body had tightened. Pulling Jack’s hips forward, with a hard suck he groaned around his cock, and soon Jack was coming, the semen pulsing out as Sawyer struggled to swallow all of it down, so salty and sweet at the same time.
Almost immediately, and still breathing heavy, he pulled himself back and said, “You can fuck me. Please.”
As Jack lay himself face down beside him, Sawyer said, “I guess you aren’t too shy, are you?”
“Not normally, no. Not once I get to know a person.”
Sawyer pushed open his thighs and held open the cheeks of his ass as he started opening him with his tongue, teasing over the warm pucker of his asshole before pushing the tip of his tongue inside. After a few curses and squirms of protest, Jack mumbled, “God, I am such a fucking moron.”
Sawyer just made a questioning noise.
“It took me almost three hours to figure out you weren’t gonna jump Rick’s bones.”
Sawyer stopped, pulling himself up for a moment. “What? Who?”
“The lead singer. He was doing his damnedest to get your attention all night.” That was indeed news. It inflated his ego but confused him all at the same time. How didn’t he notice that? Two words: hot bassist.
But he said, “And you thought I’d just pass you by?”
“That’s usually the way.”
“Well, how’s this: I couldn’t even tell you what color hair that motherfucker has, and I didn’t have a clue what his name was.”
“You were talking to him.” The not at all well hidden jealousy was almost distractingly hot.
“And not paying him any attention. Sexy, I was only talking to him to find you.”
Jack seemed to sink into the mattress in relief and lingering annoyance, but he didn’t have time to do too much brooding, because Sawyer had gone back to working him open, slowly. Since apparently the whole night had been foreplay, a little more couldn’t hurt.
Title: Foreplay
Pairing: Jack/Sawyer
Rating: Adults
Summary: AU. Sawyer is a bartender, and Jack is in the band playing one night. I suppose this might put them a bit younger than they are on the show. We’ll say thirtyish.
Note: I dearly wish that my muse wouldn't slap me with AU porn at 12:30 in the morning. Well, thank goodness I’ve got nothing better to do than stay up and write.
Foreplay
The bar was always sticky, and it often made Sawyer want to punch something. He didn’t mind the noise of the live music, the loud, nasal whine of the college girls, or the constant haze of smoke. What he did mind was the constant stickiness of the bar, as if he sloshed out every drink he poured, which he did not. At any rate, it was owing to this obsession with stickiness that he even noticed him at all before he went on stage. The bassist came to collect his free drink, and when Sawyer plunked the draft of Newcastle down in front of him, he gulped half of it down and then returned it to the bar, only to pick it up and slide a napkin under it.
It was only the strange combination of fastidiousness and raw but brooding energy that made him notice the man at all, and when he did, looking up finally, he saw what was, without fail, the prototype for tall, dark, and handsome and at the same time, one of the prototypes for these damn musicians: quiet, mysterious, serious, hard. Except this one seemed like the quiet type by nature, and if he was mysterious, it wasn’t a self-conscious act. And he seriously doubted that he was really all that serious and hard once a person got to know him. He was also, more than likely, the last man in the world to respond to dimples.
Yet Sawyer flashed them anyway. “Let me get you another one to take up there with you.”
The man’s face produced a tentative smile as he said, “Later. Can’t play worth a damn when I drink too much.”
Sawyer sized him up. He was too big a guy to hold his liquor so badly, but yet apparently that was the case. It did not in any way explain his downing half a glass at one time.
Sawyer glanced at the Newcastle, and the bassist grimaced a bit before allowing his face to light into a sheepish smile. “I can’t play worth a damn if I don’t drink at least a little.”
“Nervous?”
He just nodded and suddenly floated away from the bar with his drink, out into the sea of people crowding tables and booths. Sawyer watched him disappear out the side-stage door, and he leaned himself on his elbows for half a second before some young blonde thing giggled at him about a mojito and he found that his elbows were now covered in something pink.
He could only hope this bassist’s band didn’t suck.
*****
He watched him play, at least as much as he could, his eyes drifting toward the stage when he washed glasses and shook drinks. He was startled to realize, after it was all over, that he hadn’t paid much attention to the music or the lead singer. Usually, the lead singers were his type. Male, female-if he could attract them, and he usually could, he couldn’t resist them. There was an open sexuality about a lead singer, at least a good one. They could draw you in, make you feel like you were seeing something personal about them. Sawyer played a similar game behind the bar, sometimes trying to draw a lead singer to him the same way, but with just the simple movements of his job-the deft handling of a glass, the sly smile at a customer-although he had been known to openly flirt with singers across the smoke-filled bar. He’d even succeeded in drawing a couple of them out through the crowd to him. There had been that lithe little blonde girl and her club music, and that androgynous, long-haired guy improbably fronting a straight-up, whisky and Hank Junior rock-n-roll cover band. Even the goofy falsetto parts of “Beast of Burden” sounded especially nice when the singer was singing to you, underscored as they were by the loose but palpable tension in the song.
But bassists were typically not his speed. Too much like genius lead guitarists who didn’t sing: too much posturing, and not in a fun way. Or they were the mopey types, turning their back on the crowd and playing to the drummer. He’d been with a few of them, nearly all of the women that came through because they didn’t exactly fit the mold, but a quiet, contemplative, focused male bassist was exactly what he didn’t need.
But this one was playing for him.
The man only smiled once or twice, as if to himself, and over something only he understood, but it was clear that he was focusing his energy out over to room to someone. A few people in the crowd even turned toward the bar to figure out who, but Sawyer knew. There was a certain self-consciousness that a person could see if he knew what to look for. And he saw it in this man, picking at his electric bass and stealing long, hard looks at the bar whenever he had the chance. His face stayed mostly calm, stoic even, but his hands and his posture spoke volumes, telling Sawyer that he was nervous as hell but determined not to show it, and by the time the show had ended, the bassist wasn’t nervous anymore, not about his playing and not about catching Sawyer’s attention.
The next to last song was a long one, the sort that stays buoyant, almost static for a long time. It had a rolling, wonderful, but utterly repetitive baseline, and through most of that early part of the song, he did all but lock eyes with Sawyer. Then the song drifted into something quiet, and the bassist turned back to the drummer, for the first time all night. Sawyer knew he was being coy, and it almost irritated him, but he forgot to be irritated when he turned back to the crowd just as the song began to wind up again. Most everyone was watching the lead guitarist/singer as he brought the song back up to its first intensity and then continued to build it higher, but Sawyer was listening to the bass line, coming back like before but beginning to vary until it pulled off some intricate inversions and arrhythmic feats that were both surprising and so easy to get caught up in. It was lucky that everyone too riveted to the stage to order drinks, because Sawyer was also watching closely, watching as the man’s eyes stayed on his fingers even as he managed to project some energy into the crowd, all the way to Sawyer. He wondered if he wasn’t just imagining it, but when the lead singer finally lit back into the chorus again and the song held that familiar tune, but now at a fever pitch, the bassist looked at him and smiled. Slow, confident, deeply sensual, and aimed straight at him. Sawyer simply raised a glass to him, and the bassist nodded at the tap. So Sawyer did what he rarely did because he wasn’t supposed to. Only occasionally and when he was absolutely enamored of a particularly dynamic or unreadable lead singer did he carry the free beer out to the band. But this day he did, setting the second Newcastle on the edge of the low stage before he slinked out the stage door, a cigarette already lit in his hand.
It was bad timing, he knew. By the time they finished playing, he’d have to go inside again. Who knew if he’d manage to catch him. With cool brick behind his head, he smiled to himself. He mumbled, “It’ll happen.” Not soon enough to satisfy the deep, aching arousal in his body, but it was a certainty. Nobody ever played for him that didn’t end up in his bed or on their knees in the back room.
*****
The man’s name was Jack, they told him. They also told him they had no earthly idea where he’d gone. Not too far, because his car was still there, but he’d disappeared, or at least pretty near to it. It wasn’t like Sawyer could leave the bar to roam around looking for him.
He tried not to think about all the mischief the bassist Jack could be getting himself into, especially given the penchant of a few of the bar’s regulars for not so subtly groping anything big and muscular and wearing a black t-shirt, and a musician no less. After scrambling behind the bar for an hour or so, turning his sexual frustration into generous shots of tequila and lightening-speed cashing out of tabs, all while clamping his usually talkative mouth shut, he soaked a rag in hot water, gave the bar a vigorous wipe down, yelled at his fellow bartender about absolutely nothing, and was told to go, for fuck’s sake, and get over his shit with a cigarette. It was well known he couldn’t go more than a couple of hours without a smoke before he got cranky. Add horniness to the mix and he was halfway dangerous.
The back stage door slammed shut behind him, and he jumped at the sound, muttering to himself and drooping down onto the cool pavement, knees up and back against the wall. A few people milled around, carrying equipment in and out of the side stage door, and he watched them-some drunk, others weary and dragging, a few practically bouncing off the walls of the alley. This was typically his favorite part of being a bartender, watching people and meeting most of them, but tonight he was restless, and he couldn’t really enjoy it, only notice that they seemed to move with so much energy while he felt like he was muffled in cotton.
He’d finished half a cigarette when a voice in the oval of darkness opposite him said, “Thanks for the beer.”
When Jack stepped out toward him, he had the impulse to hit him, so much was his annoyance at himself for being this hard up and at this man for so nonchalantly floating back into his company. But he couldn’t take his eyes off him, and he stood up slowly and reached out with his pack of Marlboros, lighter clutched against the side.
Smoking suited Jack. He had long fingers, and they seemed just as sure holding that cigarette as they did stroking the bass. Precise, they were. They would be good hands, plucking and dragging over his skin. He stared at them instead of the man as they talked. He had the sudden urge to play hard to get, which was so rarely his style but seemed appropriate here, with this man who had never left the bar but had stayed out of his sight, either to drive him crazy or because he was a big fucking coward. Sawyer doubted the latter, now that he had seen the man play.
Jack said, “Think they’ll have us back here?”
“You kidding? Sure. You’re not quite the usual for this place, but they liked you as well as they’ve liked anything in a long time.”
“It’s hard to gauge sometimes. You get caught up in what you’re doing and you forget that there are people watching you.”
“I somehow doubt that you lose track of the crowd that much.”
“You’re right. Not totally. And sometimes the crowd is the only thing you see.” Jack exhaled slowly. “Makes it hard sometimes.”
“Oh?”
“It’s easier to play for yourself. When you play for the crowd, it makes you take more chances, fuck up worse.”
“You don’t take chances?”
He smiled and shook his head as he tossed the cigarette down the alley. “Yes and no.”
It was an opening, as likely a one as he’d ever have with this guy. Sawyer showed him his dimples without turning on the 100-watt smile, and then he said, “I bet I know you already. You sneak up on chances, get so close that you can’t help but fall over into them.”
Jack laughed this open, nervous, but completely spellbinding laugh. “I don’t believe anyone’s ever called me a coward before so openly, but with such little actual insult involved.”
“Ain’t cowardice. You don’t have to take that step forward at all, but you do.”
Shaking his head, Jack said, “This would be so much easier if we weren’t standing here talking in metaphors about whether I was waiting for you, which I was.”
“I know that. I’m just letting you sweat a little.”
At that comment, such a mix of emotions played across Jack’s face that Sawyer almost kissed him, just to put him out of his misery, but there was something fascinating about waiting for him to make the move. How would he do it? Sawyer leaned back into the wall, giving himself up to being ravaged and groped against the wall. He could almost feel that thick body rocking into his.
But Jack only met his eyes and said, “What time do you get off?”
“Late.”
“I’m at the Midtown Vistas, number 31. If I’m asleep, I’m sure you can think of a way to wake me.”
Then he slipped a key card into the back pocket of Sawyer’s jeans as he went back into the bar through the back stage door.
Sawyer smoked another cigarette, then two more, then he went inside, and, not finding Jack anywhere, settled up his open tabs, feigned a massive migraine, and went home. He wanted to shower, and quickly. To hell with the hard to get. He’d thought all he would have was something quick and dirty against some hard surface, but the thought of that broad-shouldered man in a bed made him both impatient and so sublimely happy he didn’t even notice the traffic on the freeway.
*****
The Midtown Vistas sounded like a shit-hole, but in reality it was a refurbished Motel 6 or Super 8, which explained the key card and also made it rise to a certain level of lower-class respectability. It did not explain the rose-colored wallpaper in the interior hallways. He was relieved when the door to number 31 opened and the room was blue, ugly but blue.
Jack was not asleep. He was standing by the open window, leaning down to blow the smoke from his cigarette out the window.
“Hey,” he said with a smile.
“You run off your band-mates?”
“I bunk with Billy, the drummer, and I seriously doubt if he’ll be sober enough to find his way back here anytime soon.”
Nodding at the cigarette in his hand, he said, “This is a no-smoking room.”
“Well, this is a sodomy law state, but that didn’t stop me from almost going at you in the alley.”
His demeanor was so different now, so lacking in that initial nervousness, that Sawyer’s brain swam as it adjusted. This was the man comfortable again, in his element just as he had been on stage. Sawyer asked him, “Why didn’t you?”
He rolled his eyes impatiently, at himself.
“What?” Sawyer said.
“I’m a bit of a clean freak.”
Sawyer smiled and took a few steps across the room. “Lucky for you, I’ve had a shower.”
“I haven’t. Didn’t expect you this soon.”
“Well, also lucky for you, I’m not a total clean freak.”
The cool night air caught him about the time he got his hands around Jack’s biceps. He tugged him to the bed, and only after he felt the wonderful, crushing weight of Jack’s body on top of his did he finally seek out his mouth. He had thin lips, and he tasted, predictably, like stale beer and cigarettes, but his tongue instantly slipped into his mouth, forceful but without any sense of heavy awkwardness. His tongue practically took over Sawyer’s mouth for a while, and he happily let himself be taken. That wasn’t hard, because Jack’s hands were in his hair, alternately tugging it gently and stroking fingers through it.
It was odd, but they seemed to kiss for a long time. Sawyer had never been much for foreplay, and it wasn’t like he didn’t feel the hard press of cock against cock or he wasn’t ready to tear Jack’s clothes off, but something about this scenario made him willing to lie there and be kissed. Maybe it was that it was really good kissing-he couldn’t remember the last man or woman to leave him breathless like this-but he knew it was just a whole different energy than he was used to. This man wanted to be kissing him, and he wanted to turn him on with it. He was somehow giving and not just taking. It had really been that way all night, this thing going back and forth between them.
When things got too urgent for simply reveling in the slow grind of bodies and the concentrated tangling of their tongues, Sawyer pushed him back and pulled off his shirt, revealing a slightly pudgy but damn sexy stomach and a broad chest and massive shoulders. Jack made a move for his shirt, but Sawyer was already pushing his hands away and going for Jack’s belt.
Sawyer said, “I wanna suck you off.” He knew it would be a hard sell, somehow, not because Jack didn’t want it but because he wasn’t the type that enjoyed things that weren’t somehow reciprocal, so, as Sawyer finally freed Jack’s cock and wrapped a steady hand around it, he added, “You can make it up to me later, but right now, I want this in my mouth. I want you to fuck my mouth.”
Jack was already dripping, and Sawyer slid his thumb over the head just for good measure: there it was-Jack surrendering to it, letting him finish taking off his pants and crouching back over Sawyer’s chest, his dick hang there in front of his face. Jack took the headboard in his hands as Sawyer guided him in.
It didn’t take long before Jack was rolling his hips toward Sawyer’s mouth, groaning with every slow slide back through Sawyer’s lips. For a while, Sawyer kept his eyes wide open to watch the straining in his large, muscled thighs, how they pushed his hips forward so that the darkness of his pubic hair rushed toward his face as his dick slid in and out. He was average length but thick, and he was so wet Sawyer had to constantly take him in all the way just to be able to swallow a bit. Not that any of this bothered him, and he eventually closed his eyes and simply felt it all. With every thrust, Jack murmured affirmations or his name, and with nearly every pulling back of his hips, he broke up the rhythm of words with a moan.
Jack said, “Do you have any idea how hard up I’ve been all night?”
Sawyer just opened his eyes and looked up at him and swiped his tongue over his slit.
“God,” he moaned, and he set his hips on a faster pace, and with that pace came more force as he really fucked his mouth now with abandon. He forgot any words at all, but he made more noise with grunts and moans than just about anybody Sawyer had ever heard. Whoever was next door was getting quite a show. Sawyer kneaded his fingers into Jack’s ass, feeling how his whole body had tightened. Pulling Jack’s hips forward, with a hard suck he groaned around his cock, and soon Jack was coming, the semen pulsing out as Sawyer struggled to swallow all of it down, so salty and sweet at the same time.
Almost immediately, and still breathing heavy, he pulled himself back and said, “You can fuck me. Please.”
As Jack lay himself face down beside him, Sawyer said, “I guess you aren’t too shy, are you?”
“Not normally, no. Not once I get to know a person.”
Sawyer pushed open his thighs and held open the cheeks of his ass as he started opening him with his tongue, teasing over the warm pucker of his asshole before pushing the tip of his tongue inside. After a few curses and squirms of protest, Jack mumbled, “God, I am such a fucking moron.”
Sawyer just made a questioning noise.
“It took me almost three hours to figure out you weren’t gonna jump Rick’s bones.”
Sawyer stopped, pulling himself up for a moment. “What? Who?”
“The lead singer. He was doing his damnedest to get your attention all night.” That was indeed news. It inflated his ego but confused him all at the same time. How didn’t he notice that? Two words: hot bassist.
But he said, “And you thought I’d just pass you by?”
“That’s usually the way.”
“Well, how’s this: I couldn’t even tell you what color hair that motherfucker has, and I didn’t have a clue what his name was.”
“You were talking to him.” The not at all well hidden jealousy was almost distractingly hot.
“And not paying him any attention. Sexy, I was only talking to him to find you.”
Jack seemed to sink into the mattress in relief and lingering annoyance, but he didn’t have time to do too much brooding, because Sawyer had gone back to working him open, slowly. Since apparently the whole night had been foreplay, a little more couldn’t hurt.