Page 46 of Bounced!

Dante

The next day, I came in braced for Mark to pretend last night hadn’t happened. That was the story I’d told myself on the drive over, because it was the safest story, the one that couldn’t hurt me if I got there first.

He’d been half drunk.

It had been a strange night.

A man says things at midnight in a leather bar while wearing another man’s harness. In the daylight, he finds the thinkable version of it, the one where it was nothing.

Everything in me worried that I’d walk in to find Mark doing the books with his coffee. He’d say, “Morning,” the way he always said, “Morning,” and his wall would go back up, and I’d help him hold it, because that was what I did. I made things comfortable, even when doing so broke my own heart.

I had a whole speech ready. I’d rehearsed being fine.

I got three steps into the empty bar before Mark stepped out from behind the taps, took one look at me, set his coffee down, and said, “Nope.”

“Morning.”

“Nope. I know that face. That’s the face of a man who spent his whole drive into work deciding he’d changed his mind.” He came around the bar. “I didn’t change my mind, and I don’t believe you did either. Now, get over here.”

“Mark, the others’ll—”

“Benji won’t be here for another twenty minutes, Rod’s at the market, and Finn’s doing a delivery. Besides, I own this damn place. I can do what I want in my own bar. Right now, it’s just you, me, and a very expensive ice machine.” He got a hand in my shirt, right at the collar, and there was that grin, the one that tore through my wall like it was one of those Japanese paper screens. “Now get your sexy ass back here.”

And that was the end of my rehearsed speech, the end of my “fine,” and the end, apparently, of thirty-nine years of dignity, because I let that man drag me into the kitchen by my tank top.

I would like to report that we conducted ourselves like adults, but we didn’t.

Last night, on that sidewalk, we’d been careful and measured, two grown men choosing to be wise. None of that survived contact with an empty kitchen and a locked front door. Mark backed me in past the prep counter. I got my hands inside his shirt. He got his all over my bald head. Then we were just gone, both of us, two middle-aged men with a combined near-ninety years of hard-won composure kissing like a couple of teenagers who’d heard a car pull out of the driveway.

It wasn’t smooth. I’d spent the whole book of my life being smooth, being contained, being the one who never fumbled; and yet, there I was fumbling everything.

Too many arms.

I had, it turned out, too many arms. I didn’t know where to put my hands, and then I knew exactly where to put my hands, and then I forgot again.

Our teeth clanked together so painfully I felt my skull vibrate.

Neither of us cared.

We kissed and groped and tongued, and, fuck, I couldn’t get enough.

Mark laughed into my mouth. I felt it in my chest. I laughed back, and neither of us could stop. We kept breaking apart to grin at each other like idiots and then diving back in because we couldn’t not.

It was clumsy and giddy and undignified—and it was the single best thing that had ever happened to me in a commercial kitchen.

“I’ve wanted—” he got out, between kisses and gasped breaths, “—two years, you’ve been standing at that door—”

“I know—”

“—looking like that—”

“I know, Mark—”

“—and I was on Grindr—”

“Don’t,” I said, “don’t say that word with your mouth that close to mine.”

He laughed again and kissed the laugh right off his own face and into mine. I got him by the waist and turned us. That was when the backs of my thighs hit steel.