5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

PISTON

This is a mistake. Milo presses himself closer than necessary on the back of my bike and the way my body reacts to the warmth of his makes that much extremely clear. But what am I supposed to do? I can't let him spend the night curled up on the doorstep of his motel room like a stray dog. Hell, I wouldn't let a stray dog sleep out there if I had anything to say about it.

It'll be fine. It's one night. I can control myself for one night alone with Milo.

The chill of the night air nips at my bare skin as I ride through the quiet streets towards home. Knowing Milo is warm in my jacket is enough for me though. It's a short enough ride that I'm not at risk of hypothermia or frostbite, just some goose bumps and shivers. Paranoid thoughts creep into my head the closer I get to home. It's not abnormal for any of the guys, including Hero, to stop by unannounced whenever they please. How the hell would I explain rolling up with his son wrapped around me?

I've spent my entire life too busy cleaning up other people's messes to ever make any of my own, but now that I've finally gotten around to my very own fuckup, it's definitely a big one, even if it was unintentional. It's like I'm trying to make up for lost time without realizing it. The absurdity of the situation has a laugh rumbling in my chest as I ride around the last corner into my cul-de-sac.

My house isn't anything fancy, but it's nothing to be ashamed of either. I bought the two-bedroom ranch as a fixer upper a few years ago, and with a bit of elbow grease and some help from the guys over at Four Bears Construction, I've gotten it into decent shape. My driveway is my next project, but it's either going to cost me a fortune or require me to rent a jackhammer and a cement truck, so I'm still on the fence about which way I want to go with it. It's passable for now though, albeit with some cracks and potholes that require careful steering as I coast up to the garage.

I pull in and cut the engine. Milo hops off the back with ease.

"You seem pretty comfortable on the back of a Harley." If I'm fishing for information about guys he might have dated in the past, it's only out of concern as a friend of Hero's. If I keep telling myself this shit, will it eventually make it true? Here's hoping.

He hands my helmet back but leaves the jacket on. He grins at my not-quite-a-question and shakes his head to get his shaggy hair out of his face like he's a sheepdog badly in need of grooming.

"I've been on the back of a few," he confirms. "I've got my motorcycle license too. I left a Yamaha back in Colorado, in storage along with the rest of my stuff that I told my mom she could sell if she could be bothered to."

"A Yamaha?" I smirk back, picturing him straddling a sporty bike like that, leaning forward with the wind blowing his t-shirt up in the back as he rides.

"Sure." He ruffles his hair with his hand and his eyes spark with teasing as they meet mine. "I would have considered a Harley, but everyone knows they're for old men."

"Old men?" I gasp, clutching my chest dramatically.

Milo cackles, then heads straight for the door without hesitation, like he's been here a million times and he's totally at home. I hit the button to close the garage door as I follow him. He's already kicking off his shoes and hanging my jacket on the hook right inside the door by the time I step in behind him.

"Do you want anything to drink?" I ask after I take off my boots. "I don't have a ton of options, but I should have a couple of beers in the fridge. Otherwise, I have ginger ale, water…" I head down the hallway towards the kitchen with Milo right behind me, trying to remember what else might be in the refrigerator that I can offer him.

"Coffee?" he asks hopefully.

"At nine o'clock?" I chuckle. "Won't you be wired all night?"

"Nope," he says confidently. "If anything, it helps me fall asleep. It's my ADHD superpower, I guess."

"Alright. Yeah, I'm actually kind of a coffee snob, so I have options." I flip on the kitchen light and go straight for the cupboard where I keep all of my coffee and accessories. "I have a subscription to a monthly ‘coffees of the world' thing and some blends from Africa came yesterday. I also splurged on a fall variety pack from Door County. I highly recommend the bourbon pecan pie flavor. I have some more traditional ones too, Colombian, Arabica…" I trail off seeing the glazed look on Milo's face.

"Uh, just coffee, dude," he says with a laugh. "Whatever is fine. Pick one for me."

I grab the bag of bourbon pecan pie beans and the grinder and set to work making a small pot for him. Coffee sounds like a great way to warm up right now, but I actually will lie awake all night if I drink any this late. Once I have the machine loaded, I press the button to start it brewing and turn back to Milo. He's looking around my small kitchen with interest, and a few beats of silence pass between us.

"Hey, while the coffee brews, do you want to meet Quincy?"

Milo frowns. "Who's Quincy? Your roommate?"

I chuckle and shake my head. "No. Come on."

I put my hands on Milo's shoulders and spin him to point him towards the living room. Could I have directed him into the living room without putting my hands on him? Who's to say?

I don't drop my hands until we reach the large aquarium against the far wall of the living room. I've spent a lot of time setting up the tank, so I'm pleased to see the way Milo's eyes light up when he takes it in. I built a whole underwater city for my little guy, mostly out of clay and a few pre-made fish tank decorations, with plenty of plants for him to use for hiding and duckweed growing on the surface of the tank for added shade and oxygenation. Milo bends down a little to peer inside and gasps when Quincy slinks out of one of the buildings.

"Oh my god, I thought it was going to be a fish." He laughs as my axolotl swims over to ham it up.

I have a few ‘photo-op' spots I painted onto the tank where Quincy can swim up and put his face for the perfect picture or just to get a reaction from guests. His favorite is the large handlebar mustache, and it's always his go-to. Sure enough, that's exactly where he heads, giving Milo his cutest grin and puffing up his gills. That's all it takes to have Milo eating out of the palm of his hand, cooing and stroking the glass.

"I've never seen a purple one," he says.

"They're rare." I drop a couple of brine shrimp into the tank as a treat for his performance. Quincy swims up to swallow them happily.

Quincy entertains him for a few minutes, posing in the cowboy hat spot and the astronaut helmet. Milo snaps pictures of both and then opens up his Instagram to share them.

"If Hero decides to follow you, he'll know exactly where you took those pictures and there's really no good way to explain why you were at my house." Nerves churn in my stomach. If he really wants to post them, I can't actually stop him. Hell, if he decides to tell Hero about the two of us meeting last night and rolling around in his bed at the motel, I can't stop him from doing that either.

"Oh, right." He grimaces and deletes the unfinished post, stuffing his phone back into his pocket.

I shove my hands into my pockets and look at him. "I wasn't lying about this being complicated. You don't want to sneak around and have to be careful about everything you say or post so you don't tip your dad off about us."

A defiant look flashes in his eyes, and he shrugs. "I've wanted a lot of complicated, stupid things in my life. At least this time there would be mutual orgasms."

My whole body heats and I bite back a groan.

"You promised to behave," I remind him.

He quirks a half-smile, that dimple indenting his cheek, tempting me to drag my tongue over the cute little divot.

"Just being honest," he says.

The coffee machine beeps shrilly, and I let out a relieved breath at the excuse to get space for a second.

"Take a seat, I'll be right back with your coffee."

"Black." He answers the unasked question of how he takes it. I nod, then hustle into the kitchen before I do something supremely stupid, like shove my tongue into his hot mouth.

MILO

I flop down on Piston's couch and put my feet up on the coffee table. I can hear him moving around in the kitchen and a strange sense of nostalgia washes over me. Except, it's not really nostalgia because this doesn't remind me of anything from a happier time or anything like that. It's like… future nostalgia. Is that a thing? It's that same cozy, happy, longing feeling in my chest, but for something I just wish might happen one day.

I huff out a laugh at myself and sink a little lower, feeling the exhausted weight of the day settling into my bones. It feels like Piston is taking forever to just pour a cup of coffee, so I pull out my phone while I wait for him and start doing a deep dive about axolotls, because why not?

"You know, it says you should rehydrate brine shrimp before feeding them to an axolotl. It's easier for them to digest," I say, loudly enough that he should be able to hear me from the other room.

"Those are only for occasional treats." Piston's voice is closer than I expected, startling me out of my Google rabbit hole. I sit up to find him leaning over the back of the couch, holding a steaming coffee mug out to me. "I asked the vet, and he told me it's okay as long as it's not the majority of his diet."

"It says nightcrawlers are the most nutritious food for them, but a varied diet of worms, fish, and crustaceans is best." I take the coffee mug from him and immediately take a sip. I moan quietly when the sweet flavor hits my tongue.

Piston's eyes flash with heat and he quickly looks away from me, his hands braced against the back of the couch like he isn't sure whether he's going to sit down or run to lock himself in his bedroom before he does something very bad and dirty to me. Another moan tightens in my throat. If only .

"He gets a good, nutritious variety of small feeder fish, nightcrawlers, and rehydrated shrimp," he assures me.

I wince and offer an apologetic smile. "Sorry. I have a bad habit of spending five minutes on Google and turning into an insufferable know-it-all. If it makes you feel any better, by tomorrow morning I'm going to have absolutely no idea what axolotls eat again."

He chuckles.

"No, it's fine. I just didn't want you to think I've been winging it with my little buddy all this time. I promise, I'm a good daddy."

I sputter into my next sip of coffee, snorting the hot drink right through my nose.

"Oh shit," he murmurs, hurrying to the kitchen and returning a second later with a hand towel. "Here."

I take it and mop the coffee off my face.

"Please don't talk kinky to me while I'm right in the middle of a sip," I say.

His eyebrows draw together, and I can practically see the instant replay action going on in his head as he runs back through what he just said, looking for his mistake. After a second, he laughs, grimaces, and shakes his head.

"I think jokes about daddy kink might be a little too on the nose for comfort."

"Fair enough." I reach out and pat the empty spot on the couch. "Aren't you going to sit down for a few minutes, at least?"

He rubs his jaw, then nods and takes a seat.

I turn on the couch so I'm facing him, my feet on the cushion between us, studying him silently while I drink my coffee. Seeing him across the bar last night, he was in instant-boner territory, but usually the longer I look at someone the more I start to nitpick their appearance. I'm having a hard time finding a single flaw on Piston, although to be fair, I haven't seen all of him. Maybe I should ask for a more thorough viewing… you know, for science.

He straightens his legs out in front of himself as he relaxes onto the couch. He lets his head loll back and stretches his arms up high, groaning as he works out some obviously tight spots that must have developed over the course of a long workday.

"What do your knuckles say?" I ask, scooting forward a few inches so I can get a better look at some of his ink. It's all black, lightly shaded without any color, and none of it is cohesive, just random tattoos covering his arms from his neck all the way down to his knuckles.

He flexes his hands into fists and holds them up so I can read the words ‘Drop Dead' inked across his knuckles, then, with a lopsided grin he uncurls his fists, and I see the word ‘Gorgeous' tattooed along the lower set of knuckles.

I laugh and reach out without thinking to drag my fingertip over the shape of each letter.

"Do you have a favorite tattoo?"

He shrugs. "It's kind of hard to pick. I like something different about each of them, I think." Piston looks down at his own arms then back at me. "There's such a weird pressure for tattoos to mean something all the time, and I think it's cool if they do, but it gets in my head sometimes, so I've never gotten around to picking any tattoos for myself. I've just kind of offered myself up as a free workspace for the other guys whenever they need it, if they want to try out a new technique or they just have an idea for a cool design and no one to ink it on."

"Hmm." I drag my fingertips up from his knuckles to the different images sketched permanently over his forearm. "So the answer to my question earlier, if you're always so self-sacrificing, would be a yes?"

He chuckles but doesn't go as far as to confirm my suspicion. I tilt my mug to my lips and gulp down the rest of my coffee, unbothered by the way it scalds my tongue and throat on the way down. No big deal. I cauterized all the nerve endings in my mouth ages ago. Who the hell has the patience to wait for anything to actually cool before eating or drinking it?

"What about you?" Piston asks.

"What about me?" I set my empty mug down on the coffee table and scoot another inch closer to him.

"You made that consult appointment as an excuse to meet Hero, I get that. But have you ever thought about getting any ink done?" He drags his gaze over my unmarred skin with hunger in his eyes.

"Are you horny for me or just horny to tattoo me?"

He meets my gaze, and my stomach dances and my lips tingle with the memory of that hot as fuck makeout session we had last night.

"I might want a tattoo," I confess. "There are lots of things I haven't done yet that I'm dying to do." Fuck, what am I doing? Fluttering my eyelashes and smiling at him suggestively, obviously. But beyond that, why the hell am I tiptoeing around telling him the truth? The embarrassing, humiliating truth that's only going to ensure that he'll never lay a hand on me again.

Piston quirks up one eyebrow. "Such as?"

I follow the lines that make up the image of a Russian nesting doll on his forearm with my finger, feeling the way the hairs on his arm stand up and his skin warms under my touch.

"Such as…sex." I rush the word out and then risk a glance at his face again to see his reaction.

His second eyebrow has joined the first, halfway to his hairline, but the horror I expected to see in his expression isn't there. If anything, his eyes are smoldering even more intensely at me than they were before, and the muscle in his jaw is working like he's fighting the urge to say a hundred things at once. Relatable, honestly.

"Jesus, Mi, please tell me your plan last night wasn't to pick up some random guy at a bar to lose your virginity to." His voice is low and gruff now, and it fucking does things to my insides, making them all molten hot and electric.

I hum noncommittally. "Turns out you weren't that random though," I joke, then drop my smile when he doesn't laugh. "I chickened out anyway, didn't I?"

He huffs, his nostrils flaring.

"Your first time shouldn't be like that. It should be special. It should at least be with someone you know."

I roll my eyes. "Yeah, yeah." I wave dismissively. "I'm just sick of being the only twenty-eight-year-old gay dude alive who's never even sucked a dick."

Piston's face twitches and twists like his expression can't quite decide between pained and amused before he groans.

"You're killing me right now."

"What? Why?" I cock my head, no longer tracing his tattoos, now just fully holding on to his arm.

He laughs weakly. "You're not the only twenty-eight-year-old virgin alive, first of all."

I make a vague noise in my throat, not agreeing with him, but not exactly arguing either. When he doesn't say anything else, I ask, "Is there a second of all?"

"Yeah. Second of all, I'm pretty sure you're Satan himself, sent to tempt me to do some very, very bad things." His voice gets husky again, and my cock twitches eagerly at the implied promise.

"Are you a religious man?" I ask with a smirk.

"No."

"Then I must not be Satan." I drop my gaze to his lips. Does he want to kiss me again as badly as I want to kiss him? My heart pounds and I swear everything inside of me is vibrating and buzzing like a hive of bees.

Piston's throat bobs as he swallows heavily, and then in a blink, he's off the couch.

"Right, so I'm going to take the coldest shower of my life, and you're going to be good and go sleep in the guest room." He drags his hands over his face, then crosses his arms like he's doing everything he can to hold himself back from reaching for me again. "It's the first door on the left. I'll see you in the morning."

"Hey, Piston?" He stops in the mouth of the hallway, bracing his hand against the wall. I can see his knuckles whiten with his grip. "Was your first time special?"

He looks at me over his shoulder with a flicker of a smile. "It was fine, but no, it wasn't anything special." Then he disappears down the hallway without another word.

It's only another minute before the sound of the shower hisses through the quiet house. I slump on the couch with a quiet chuckle.

Fuck. I really want him.