What if… whatif… ithadactually been sexual attraction that had gotten me aroused? Occam’s Razor, right? Shortest distance between two points was a straight line?
Except…ha… did that mean my line actuallywasn’tso straight?
It didn’t seem possible.
Incontrovertible personal fact: I knew and loved dozens of gay and bisexual people, ownbrotheramong them. I had a Human Rights Campaign shirt stuffed in one of my suitcases that said Proud Ally. I was not a late bloomer. I was not stuck in a closet. I didn’t live a life where I’d never examined my sexuality.
Hell, I snorted to myself. My first kiss, back in high school?With. A. Guy. And the earth had not moved even a centimeter.
If I were bisexual, that kiss back in high school would have felt like puzzle pieces clicking together, the way Micah said his first kiss with a guy had felt. Or like the answer to a question I hadn’t known to ask, as my friend Toby put it. I liked to imagine it would have felt like all the heavenly angels singing a hosanna as a light from heaven burst down. Something completely unsubtle like that. It definitely wouldnothave felt fuckingweirdand unpleasant, which was how ithadfelt.
If Fenn had stuck around, I would have explained all this to him. I’d have told him that I’d run the tests years and years ago and the diagnosis was really fucking obvious: I was straight.
At least, I had been… until I’d landed on the Island of Misfit Toys, where bread burned calories, and snakes lived in clothes dryers, and straight people suddenly found they weren’t.
And even now, when I thought about any other guy I knew, I gotzerotingles. The thought of swapping saliva with Toby?Blech. The thought of fucking around with Constantine, even aside from the fact that Micah would beat me senseless if he knew I’d ever let the thought flash across my brain?Gross. The thought of Chris Pratt, who Victoria had always assured me was the hottest guy in Hollywood, doing anything on, around, or near my person? The thought of the muscle-bound guy from the Shake Weight infomercial right now on my television bringing his leering grin anywhere in my vicinity?Distasteful in the extreme.
But the thought of putting my lips near Fenn Reardon, with his knowing looks, and his busted eye, and hischildishinsistence on not calling me by my real name was… was…
I swallowed thickly, suddenly sucked into an image of me, rubbing my lips against Fenn’s jaw, my cheek against his rough beard. My cock stirred in my underwear.
This was simply not right.
What was wrong with me?
Who the hell got all up in their feelings for someone not justdespitethe way they drove you crazy, but possiblybecauseof it? Or possibly because there was honesty in their reactions, and they’d seen you at your worst, and you’d put zero effort into impressing them, but strangely enough, they’d seemed to like you anyway, for one brief, shining moment, even though you weren’t the sort of person who inspired true passion in others.
I grabbed a pillow and pounded it several times before shoving it beneath my head.
Fenn and I had nothing in common. We were completely incompatible. He obviously had anger issues. He worecheap, plastic flip-flops.
“Goddamn it!” I told the ceiling. “This is unacceptable!”
The ceiling remained impassively silent.
Maybe there was a third possibility. A possibility somewhere in between the two. I hadn’t had sex with anyone since Victoria left over four months ago, and maybe I was suffering from some kind of sexual frustration that made my animal urges that much harder to ignore?
In layman’s terms… I washorny. And lonely, too.
And it didn’t take a medical degree to understand that the comorbidity of lonely and horny was only gonna make each condition worse, right?
Duh.
I closed my eyes and brushed a hand down my chest, toying with my nipple, and nearly snorted at the way bloodrushedto my cock. One tiny motion and I was half-hard and tenting the front of my boxer briefs like I was sixteen again. Horny forreal.
I spread my legs further, gliding my fingers along the edge of my waistband, letting the anticipation build, before I dragged them lower and gripped myself through the thin cotton.
Fuck. It had been too long since I’d done this. If two jerks through cloth got me fully hard, it was no wonder I was on a hair trigger and primed foranystimulus, no matter how ordinarily un-stimulating it might have been.
I slipped my free hand under my waistband to cup my balls and let my mind wander, enjoying the sensation, letting the moment spiral out, pondering abdominal muscles and tanned smooth skin, a challenging smile and eyes like deep water and…
Fuck.
I opened my eyes with a gasp and sat up.
This was ridiculous. When you tried too hard not to think of elephants, all you could think of was elephants, right? So, when I told myself not to think of Fenn Reardon, was it really so surprising that his naked chest sprang to mind?
I flipped the pillow over to find a cool spot, grabbed my phone, opened a private browser, typed in a random porn site, and immediately felt much,muchbetter.
