Читать книгу Anything but Ordinary - Madelynne Ellis, Madelynne Ellis - Страница 11

Ric’s studio occupied the entire top floor of the fort he called home. There were no dividers in the vault-like room, which had an arched ceiling and only one narrow window, set too high to look from. There wasn’t even a door onto the narrow stairwell. Seating was minimal, other than a small area of squishy leather beanbags, and a couple of spindly prop-type chairs. Lighting was another matter: there were more options than the average regional theatre stage, though only a couple of lamps burned at the moment.

The rest of the space was devoted to photography in the form of screens and cameras, a centrally positioned workstation with state-of-the-art computer editing software and a whole rack of filters and lenses. There was no artwork displayed on any of the walls. Instead, the perimeter was stacked, in some places nine deep, with framed prints. All of them positioned with their backs facing outwards, as if Ric couldn’t bear to look at the art he’d created.

‘Do I need to go and dunk my head in a sink, or are you going to spritz me with water?’ Zach asked, as he positioned himself under the two glowing spotlights.

Ric barely looked up from the camera he was fitting a lens to. ‘I don’t want you wet.’

‘This isn’t for the collection?’

‘It’s for me.’

OK, that wasn’t what they’d agreed outside, but Zach was prepared to roll with it. Likely enough, it would be more fun. Strutting about and posing for publicly displayed material was one thing – a cool thing even – but doing it for his lover’s private collection tickled Zach on an altogether deeper level.

‘Just tell me what you want and I’m game.’

The remark earned him a glance from under Ric’s brows, and the faintest of terse smiles, but no definitive answer. That was unusual; normally Ric barked instructions at him. Another thing that stood out as different from normal was the chug Ric took from a bottle of ice-white liquid that definitely wasn’t water. He dried his lips on the back of his hand and set it aside before pattering forwards barefoot.

Neither of them had bothered to change clothes, so Ric was still wandering around with a broken fly, and Zach was feeling the chill.

‘Where do you want me? Do I just stand here?’

‘Yeah.’

Ric raised the camera and put Zach at the centre of its viewfinder. The mechanical device whirred and clicked as he took static shot after shot. Zach remained poised, ready to perform in whatever way Ric required him to. Sometimes he wanted a show, needed to see movement. Other times, he demanded repose, or subtler gestures. Tonight, he remained uncharacte‌ristically quiet, which could only mean that he wasn’t certain what direction he wanted to explore yet.

Zach’s heart thudded as he waited. Ric might not know where this needed to go, but he did. He didn’t actually want to be at the centre of a camera’s eye, but he hoped one thing would inevitably result in another. Let Ric demand he get sexy. Let his lover work himself into a frenzy while he created his art, and then let him explore the need that heated the air between them. Once they’d ridden one another hard, the worry about Chris North would be reduced to insignificance and forgotten.

He cast a sly glance over his lover’s form. Ric’s jeans hung off his hips, so low now, due to his constant motion and the force of gravity, that they were barely hanging on. Zach knew a blush was streaking across his cheeks when Ric zoomed in on his expression, yet he still couldn’t avert his gaze from Ric’s cock poking obscenely between his busted fly. He wanted to plant his lips against the silky trail of golden hair that marked the centre of Ric’s abs and widened across the top of his groin. He wanted Ric’s cock in his mouth, and to trace his tongue down Ric’s shaft and keep going. Suck his balls. Tease the stretch of skin between them and his arse. There weren’t pictures enough of the two of them fucking.

‘What do you want, Ric?’ he asked, his voice husky because of the sudden tightness in his throat. ‘Do you need me to touch you?’

His lover shook his head.

‘Touch yourself. Show me what you need.’

What he needed was Ric’s hands on him, his lips, his passion lapping at him, swaddling him, fingers making bruises on his skin because the grip was over-tight. Zach needed to know that he was special, and that this wasn’t all some gigantic lie.

He’d been allowed to move in. They’d made an exclusive commitment to one another – and to Kara – which he’d never expected to get, but there were times when it was like living in a bubble. Everything was shiny and smooth, but one wrong touch and pop, it would all be gone.

Was that what Ric feared too? Did he somehow imagine that Kara’s brother was the pin that would destroy them? Something about Chris North’s presence had wound him up.

‘Don’t take your clothes off.’ Zach had released his fly and begun to shuck his shorts off, but Ric reached out a hand to stop him. ‘Just pull the T-shirt up so I can see a nipple. Then inch the shorts down. Let me see everything, but don’t let them fall. I want them framing you. Pretend this is five stolen minutes in which you get to ease your desperation. Make every second of them count. Stroke yourself. Do it fast.’

Like he needed instructions on how to masturbate. He knew what he liked, knew where to apply pressure and when to ease off, which bit to cup if he needed to slow it down, and how to sweep his thumb across the eye or dig it into the sensitive spot below the head to give himself the shivers.

He’d have preferred to do it while naked, because his clothes were damp and uncomfortable, but whatever.

What he didn’t quite know was how to do all this and reel Ric in at the same time, because Ric isolated himself behind that damn camera. When it sat in his hand he was thinking about angles and refraction. He was cut off from his emotions. But if Zach could somehow get close enough to touch him…

‘I want to see you make a mess.’

‘I want you to make me make a mess.’

He didn’t normally add his input while they were working. Zach wasn’t sure why he’d done so this time. The result was that Ric’s spine straightened and he gave his head a curt but very definite shake. Immediately, Zach’s arousal evaporated, leaving his dick limp and curled against his palm as if it needed to hide.

‘Brilliant,’ his lover remarked, turning away. He stalked over to the workstation without a single backwards glance and booted up the computer.

No second chances. No attempt to make this work.

Ric could be the ultimate fuckwit.

A reality he kept on proving by studiously ignoring Zach as he buttoned his shorts. There was no point in doing anything else. Zach knew that no amount of squeezing and rubbing was going to get him hard again, unless Ric was the one coaxing him.

He coughed. ‘I guess I’m going to bed, then.’

Nothing – the bastard gave him nothing.

That was what would kill them. Not Kara’s sibling, but Ric’s fucking inability to express himself when it really mattered.

‘Night,’ Zach remarked caustically, still half hoping as he hit the spiral staircase that Ric would come pattering after him and shove him hard against the wall. Do him, as he’d once done in anger, against the cold stone steps.

Even angry sex was sex, and he needed the reassurance of Ric’s body locked tight against his at the moment. Yes, that made him fucking needy, but it had been a weird, weird day. He’d had his libido repeatedly jerked with for over five hours, and no climaxes, leaving him awash with emotions he now had no outlet for.

He lingered at the bottom of the first bend in the stairwell, pointlessly, he knew, but not entirely without hope.

Just a goodnight would be nice.

The silence that echoed both down the stairwell and inside his own head made the centre of Zach’s chest ache. He thought that, when they’d moved in together, they’d moved past this feeling of stalemate.

Was it really so hard to open your mouth and spit out a platitude?

The reality was that he simply had to run further to escape it. There was no driving to the mainland any more and cooling off by tearing along country lanes or chilling with his family in front of a giant TV. He couldn’t avoid Ric for days on end until they were both better emotionally equipped to deal with one another, because they were sharing a house, a bed even, on a tiny pile of rocks in the ocean that was cut off when the tide came in.

You could bet your life the tide was currently in.

In their shared bedroom, he jerked the pull cord on the bedside lamp.

‘All you had to do was touch me,’ he cursed as he curled onto Ric’s side of the empty bed. ‘That’s it. That’s all.’ He’d have done the rest of the work.

Sighing heavily, he pulled the other pillow over his head. After nine months of living together they were still in the same place they’d been on the day he’d moved in, and he had to wonder if this man would ever let him in enough to find his worm-riddled heart.