2. Tate

CHAPTER 2

TATE

“Harder.”

Both syllables of the demand fell out of my mouth with ease and I readjusted my hands against the expensive rug beneath me. I was on all fours, the man behind me in desperate need of a dictionary because instead of fucking me harder, he only started to thrust into me faster. Sweat dripped down from his forehead, splattering against the small of my back, and I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

My knees didn’t even burn from the friction.

The whole encounter was a waste of time.

“Are you close?” he asked.

I think his name was Jack. Or maybe it was James. Jim. I didn’t care because after he finished and got off of me, I wasn’t ever going to see him again.

“Yes,” I lied, shifting my weight to reach between my legs and stroke my cock. I was barely hard, the slit moist with precum because I was getting fucked, though not well.

Behind me, Jim/Jack’s breathing stuttered, and I closed my eyes and stroked my cock. I didn’t have to think about Brooks for long before I was fully hard, and even less time after that before I found myself coming into my hand. The rough way he’d handled me was a high I’d been chasing since our first—and only—night together. Six months later and I was yet to meet a man who had the audacity to fuck me with such a dedicated level of reckless abandon.

I wanted to cry for the misery of it all, not the pleasure.

James went still behind me, fingers barely digging into my hips as he finished into the condom. The aftershocks of his release hadn’t even died down before I was crawling away from him and pushing onto my feet.

“I’ll be right back,” I muttered, giving a tight pull down my shaft to clear the rest of the cum from my slit.

The en suite was against the far wall of his bedroom, all glaring white marble with gold veins, plush white towels, and gold hardware. It felt like a gaudy hotel, and I should have known from first sight that the night was going to be an absolute bust. Kicking the door closed behind me, I rinsed my hand and my dick off in the sink, then used one of the expensive towels to dry myself off.

I tried to not take too long to study myself in the mirror because I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw, but it was impossible to ignore my reflection entirely. Catching my own stare, I found my cheeks flushed a light shade of pink and my hair barely mussed up out of place. With damp fingers, I smoothed the light brown strands back into place and frowned.

“Better luck next time,” I told myself, tossing the towel onto the floor and heading back into the bedroom.

Jack was on his back, cum filled condom still on his cock and an arm flung over his face. He was spread out on the carpet like a starfish and his chest heaved with every breath.

“Are you all right?” I asked, bending down to gather my clothes up from the floor so I could get dressed and leave.

He breathed out what sounded like a laugh. “Am I all right? Are you all right? I was really going at it pretty hard at the end.”

I buttoned up my jeans and tugged my shirt over my head.

“I’m fine,” I assured him.

I couldn’t find my socks, so I shoved my feet into my sneakers without them. I didn’t care enough to stay and look. In the middle of the floor, Joe struggled to pull off the condom, wincing as the tight latex tugged at his sensitive skin.

“I’m going to head out,” I said after the condom ripped off with a painful-sounding pop. Jim tied it into a knot with one hand and dropped it on the carpet. My eye twitched, grateful that he hadn’t been better in bed because that probably meant my face would have dragged through some old cum stains on the carpet, which…my depravity didn’t go that far.

Yet.

I wondered if it ever would.

Sometimes, when I let myself fantasize about my night with Astor Brooks, I imagined I let him take me home like he wanted and then my mind really ran wild. There were no ends to the ways he would try to make me cry to get himself off, and I loved every fucking second of it. I’d been chasing the high of that adrenaline and arousal since then, but I hadn’t come close to catching it. Instead, all I had was a laundry list of men who thought they knew how to fuck.

They were wrong .

“You don’t have to go,” John said to me, still splayed out in the middle of his rug.

My shoes were already on, though, and the shame was quickly creeping in.

“I know.” I gave him as much of an honest smile as I could manage. “But it’s late.”

“Can I see you again?” he asked, rolling onto his side to get a better view of me.

Brooks hadn’t asked to see me again. The oversight had been a thorn in my side for over one hundred and eighty days, and I knew I should have been flattered that Jerome wanted another round with me, but I didn’t have it in me to pretend his brand of sex was something that I found interesting.

“We agreed,” I reminded him, tapping the pocket of my jeans to check for my phone. “This was a hookup, not a date.”

“I know.” He sighed. “I just?—”

“Not a date,” I interrupted, confirming my wallet and keys were where they belonged.

Josh was still on the floor, showing no signs of moving anytime soon. It felt rude to step over him, so I maneuvered my way around him to get to his bedroom door.

“Alright,” he said, sounding resigned.

“Have a good rest of your night…” I was ninety-nine percent sure his name was Josh. “Josh?”

Behind me, he groaned. “It’s Jason.”

“Right.”

I slipped out of the bedroom and closed the door behind me with a quiet click of the latch. At least I knew with the name snafu that he wasn’t going to come after me and beg me to stay. The rest of Jason’s apartment was as horrible as his bathroom, and I wondered, if not for the first time, fucking rich men was where I was going wrong. Sure, Brooks obviously was dripping with money, as were his friends, but maybe they were outliers.

Maybe what I needed was to get another guest invite to The Black Door, but the friends who had invited me earlier in the year and I had fallen out, so they wouldn’t be able to get me in. I knew all I would have to do was finagle my way back into that club and if I didn’t find Brooks, I’d find someone much closer to his sensibilities than the internet was providing me.

Pulling Jason’s door closed behind me, I decided to take the stairs instead of the elevator. When I reached the ground level, I checked my email, as if somehow the waiting list at The Black Door had decided to cut itself into pieces so I could find myself at the top of the list. Last time I had checked, there were well over a hundred people on the list in front of me, and the admission rate crept along slower than a snail’s pace.

On the sidewalk, I oriented myself and flagged down a cab to go home. It was walkable, and the night air was warm enough, but I didn’t want to have too much time alone to myself to think. If I got home, my roommate, Dylan, would be there. He was a good enough distraction to keep my mind off how absolutely horrible my sex life had been since Brooks.

The car zipped through the city to Chelsea, dropping me off in front of my building. We lived on the third floor, and my legs showed the strength that came with four years of going up and down those stairs. I shouldered my way through the door on the street that was always stuck, then took my time to climb the stairs up to our cramped third-floor unit. From the outside of the locked door, I could hear the familiar sounds of Dylan playing his guitar, and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling as I unlocked the deadbolt and let myself in.

Our apartment was beautiful, but small, and Dylan wasn’t more than twenty feet away on the couch, hunched over with his fingers strumming over the strings. I headed toward him, dropping my keys and phone on the kitchen counter before plopping down across from him on our extremely small sectional. Dylan smiled, soft lyrics I couldn’t make sense of falling out of his mouth while he continued to play.

Dylan and I had started as roommates four years earlier, but we’d quickly become friends. He was a trust fund kid from Connecticut who only used his family money for rent and food, which was more than I had, but it ensured I never had to worry about eviction so I didn’t begrudge him for it. Dylan was a talented musician, thanks to a lifetime of lessons, but he was making a decent amount of money on his own from the random gig on top of his usual bartending job.

Propping my feet up on our thrifted coffee table, I rested my head against the wall, listening to the gentle lilt of his tenor voice and the way it wrapped around the sounds coming from his guitar. A few minutes later, he finished, softly tapping his palm against the neck before setting the instrument down on the floor.

“Short night?” he asked, reaching for a beer bottle that looked like it had been sitting neglected for well over an hour.

I glanced at the clock on the wall over the stove, a perk of having your kitchen and your living room in the same small box of space, I supposed. The kitchen was also the laundry room, but I’d never complain about all the times we’d drunkenly mistaken the dishwasher for the washing machine, tossing shirts onto the plate rack and glasses into the dryer because I knew how rare it was to have laundry in our unit.

“He wasn’t my type,” I said with a shrug.

“They never are.”

“He’s like a unicorn.” I waved my hand like I could magic Brooks out of the air. “No one will ever believe I saw him, and the longer time goes by, the more I will begin to wonder if he’s real.”

I needed to get used to having boring sex. I knew there was no way around it, but I couldn’t bring myself to do the mental gymnastics required to get there. Every week The Black Door sent me an email with an unchanged update to my position on the waitlist.

“I believe you saw him.” Dylan traded his beer for his guitar and he strummed a chord, batting his eyelashes at me as he started to sing. “Tate found himself a unicorn, a man who liked to fuck.”

I reached behind me and grabbed a throw pillow to fling at his face. He used his shoulder to deflect, standing with his guitar in hand and heading toward his bedroom near the front door.

“He got himself fucked through the floor, since then he’s been out of luck!”

I crawled over the couch and snatched the pillow again, lobbing it down the hallway at him. It bounced off the back of his head and he played some dramatic noise on his guitar before setting it on the stand in his bedroom and coming back to join me in the living room. He kicked the pillow in my direction and got us fresh beers out of the fridge before sitting back down on the couch .

“Besides the bad sex,” he said, twisting off the bottle cap, “how was your night.”

“My night was bad sex,” I lamented, taking a swig of the IPA Dylan had brought home from work the night before. “How was your night?”

“Good,” he said with a nod and a grin. “I actually picked up a second bartending gig that I started tonight. The tips are way better than at Tryst, so I might have to switch my hours out.”

Tryst was a bar in Manhattan that Dylan had been working at for two years. The owner, Marigold, was a sweet little hippie chick with bleached hair and a heavy pour. She had been great to Dylan from the start, always flexible with his schedule if a music gig came up, and that was worth more to him than any paycheck would ever be. He loved it there, and I loved that he loved it there too. Marigold let him bring home beer and liquor almost every night, which didn’t seem like a good business model to me, but it was definitely a perk that kept her turnover rate near zero.

“I can’t believe I’m hearing you right,” I said, pressing at my ear like I was trying to pop it. “Tell me about this new spot.”

Dylan pushed a breath out of his nose, his cheeks turning a little dark and he picked mindlessly at the label on his beer. If I didn’t know better, I would have said he was embarrassed, but there wasn’t anything embarrassing about slinging drinks.

“It’s not too far from Tryst.” Dylan worked his jaw a little, one of his eyes squinting a bit in the corner.

“Why are you being so weird?” I asked, leaning in toward him, elbows resting on my knees. “Is it a strip club or something?”

Dylan groaned, scrubbing a hand down his face and falling sideways onto the couch with this head in my lap and his arm outstretched, beer still in hand.

“Not exactly.”

I arched a brow.

“It’s a sex club,” he stage-whispered, scrunching his nose. “It’s called The Black Door.”