I wasn’t sure that me doing it for Cade was going to be perfectly innocent, but I kept that to myself.
“Alright,” Cade said, turning his back towards me and scooting back across his bed. “Go on, then. Show me these magic hands.”
I swallowed and reached out, pressing my thumbs against his shoulder blades and digging my fingers against the other side, getting a feel for how knotty he was. “Oh, yeah, I feel it,” I told him, coming up against resistance immediately. “Hold on.”
I bit my lip as I rubbed his muscles, feeling them flex and move underneath my fingers. This close, I could smell the fruity shampoo he obviously used in his red hair and feel the heat coming off him, separate from the heat of the blankets or the fire.
He moaned slightly as I worked the stiffness out of the muscles at the base of his neck – and I hoped he would let me keep doing this forever.
But then he stiffened up even more and pulled away, jerking out of my grip and making my stomach drop to my feet.
Cade
“Uh,” I stuttered, quickly breaking contact between us and grabbing a pillow to hold in front of myself. “We should take a look at the radio again. See if there’s any way we can tune it in a bit better and get in contact again.”
Aiden cleared his throat and moved from behind me. “Right,” he said. “I left it right up there on the mantlepiece, next to the beacon.”
“Maybe we should separate them, just in case one of them blocks the signal from the other,” I said. I reached forward to grab the radio and rested it on top of the pillow, still hiding my lap.
I couldn’t let him realize exactly what his touch had done to me.
It was too much – too overwhelming.
Cuddling together in bed was one thing, and bad enough. But a massage? I didn’t care how much Aiden protested that he gave his straight friends massages all the time – it set off feelings in me that I couldn’t contain. And I definitely couldn’t stop myself from getting hard.
I wondered whether I would have a chance to sneak off to the bathroom and secretly jerk off to get this out of my system, or whether I was going to spend who knew how many days waiting to be rescued and aching to touch myself and get this over with.
“I’ll get some breakfast together while you do that,” Aiden said, swinging himself out of the bed.
“No, don’t,” I told him. “I can get through until lunch. We don’t want to use up our food too early.”
Aiden seemed to slump a little, but he nodded. Of course, he was going to be hungrier than I was. He was so much bigger. I felt bad that I’d told him not to eat, but he was an adult – he could choose to defy me if he wanted. And anyway, he would thank me in four or five days if we still hadn’t managed to get out.
The thought of still being here by then was, at least, powerful enough to destroy any damning evidence that might have been in my pants. I twisted the dials on the radio a little, switching channels to see if I could get any strong signal, then went back to the one we had been given. There was no noise coming through on any of them. I sighed and put it away – on top of the table that Aiden had carried over while I was playing with it.
“Alright,” he said, clapping his hands decisively. “What do you want to play first?”
I glanced at the board games on the shelf. There were a couple of old-looking ones that I had never heard of. “Let’s start from the bottom and work our way up.”
“Got it,” Aiden said, extracting the lowest box and carrying it over.
The box was so old and faded I could barely make out the picture on the front. Aiden took it off and placed it on the floor and we both began unpacking the contents: a yellowed old game board that unfolded twice to make a flat surface, a number of colored wooden blocks shaped like people, and a set of dice in a leather shaker. The leather crumbled as Aiden picked it up and he swore, brushing his hands off.
“When do you think the last time someone played this was?” I asked, reaching for the instructions booklet.
“A long time ago,” Aiden said, which was a massive understatement. “I guess people who stay in these cabins usually have a lot better things to do than just playing old board games.”
My mind went straight to sex – to the idea of a loved-up couple not bothering to get out of bed all week. Or beds, I guessed – Caleb and Aubrey probably pushed theirs together just like we had. Inevitably, then, I thought about the fact thatwewere sharing a bed and ended up blushing.
“It looks pretty straightforward to play,” I said quickly, trying to distract Aiden from my face. “We choose a color, roll the dice, and we get to move our little guys around the board according to the amount we rolled. The instructions on the board squares tell us what to do next. The winner is the first one to get all his little guys all the way around the board and home.”
“Sounds easy,” Aiden nodded. “You roll first and choose your color.”
I grinned. “Well, I’m red, obviously.”
Aiden laughed. “Okay, Red. Then I’ll take blue.”
Polar opposites?
