Page 57

Konrad came up behind him and kissed the back of his bare shoulder. “Let me wash the day from myself, I’ll be back shortly.”

Jasper made himself comfortable in Konrad’s absence, padding across the living room in his socked feet to settle on the thick rug in front of the fireplace. He made a fire that had started to crackle and burn by the time Konrad returned. Jasper looked up, silently enjoying how Konrad’s hair hung in his face when he didn’t have it styled, laughing a little when he saw that Konrad had gotten fully dressed in slacks and a button-down. They weren’t going anywhere but that didn’t stop Konrad from dressing for their date.

Konrad joined him on the rug, their backs against the chaise lounge behind them. Konrad’s phone lit up as they watched the fire. The text on the screen was just Emily letting him know she got home safe, but it wasn’t the text that caught Jasper’s attention.

It was Konrad’s lock screen. It was them.

One of the pictures Konrad had taken in Vegas, when they were dancing, both in black because Konrad had seemed to think making himself pretty was as simple as dressing like Jasper. An endearing notion but not nearly as endearing as the sight of them on the screen—Jasper smiling as Konrad kissed his cheek.

Emily had recognized him from his picture. It hadn’t been from his notoriety as an artist, it had been from Konrad’s own phone. Which meant this had been his lock screen even when they weren’t speaking after Vegas.

“You never gave up on us,” Jasper whispered.

Konrad looked over at him. “I never would.”

The air between them was thick with more than just sexual tension. Jasper didn’t know how to describe it, but it made him restless, drawing him to his feet when Konrad got up to answer the door and get their food. Jasper walked over to the piano and hit a few keys. The notes were softer with the lid closed, more muted, and entirely out of place in accompaniment to Bauhaus.

He didn’t hear Konrad come up behind him. The sudden presence of a hand on his back startled him, and he gasped as a finger hooked into the laces going up the back of his shirt and pulled the first one loose.

“Dinner has arrived,” Konrad said, curling his finger around another crisscross of black ribbon. He pulled it open. “Would you like to eat?”

Jasper shivered as his back was slowly exposed to the open air. “Not at this particular moment, no.”

Konrad turned him around and looked down at him, their height once more at a disparity with Jasper’s boots discarded at the door. Konrad’s eyes tracked over his tattooed chest to where his shirt now dipped well below his collarbones, hanging loose from being halfway undone. His eyes went lower and Jasper groaned softly as Konrad reached behind him to unlace another inch of his shirt. It slipped down further, baring his hard nipples and the silver barbells through them. Jasper’s cock began to fill out underneath his skirt.

Konrad lifted him and sat him on the piano, hiking Jasper’s skirt up to his knees so he could stand between them. Jasper kissed him so hard he thought he tasted blood. He bit at Konrad’s lip and Konrad grabbed a handful of his hair tight enough to sting. He made a low, almost threatening sound when Konrad pulled back, daring him to try and leave without finishing what he started.

Konrad smiled at him and sank down to his knees. It must have been uncomfortable as all hell, kneeling on the hardwood, but he disappeared under Jasper’s skirt with a palpable hunger.

He felt as much as he heard Konrad’s deep groan when he discovered the absence of underwear. Jasper held on to the edge of the piano to keep himself upright. “Hiyori said underwear would show lines in the skirt,” he said, weak from the feeling of Konrad’s breath on his cock.

Konrad showed his enthusiasm for Hiyori’s decision by taking Jasper as far into his mouth as he could in one fluid movement.

“Fuck,” Jasper whined, one hand snapping to the top of Konrad’s head, though he could only see the vague shape of it through his skirt. “Don’t stop, don’t stop.” He’d been so stressed, worrying about his appearance, that he’d wound himself up, energy thrumming beneath his skin with nowhere to go.

Konrad sucked his cock with abandon, bobbing his head on an impressive amount of Jasper’s length, licking all over the tip when he had to pull back for air. The wet sounds of his mouth harmonized far better with the heavy drums of Bauhaus far better than the piano had. Jasper wanted to close his eyes to focus on the sensations, but the sight of Konrad between his legs, even obscured, was too tantalizing to look away from. He looked down as often as he could when Konrad’s mouth wasn’t making his head fall back with ecstasy. Konrad moaned around him almost constantly, his hands squeezing Jasper’s thighs.

“Are you wet?” Jasper asked, his voice already wrecked. He grinned at the little noise Konrad made around him. “Yeah, I bet you are. I love how you can’t help but get your nice clothes all messy. Has it soaked through your boxers yet, sweetheart?”

He felt a shudder rack Konrad’s broad shoulders, pinned between his knees.

Konrad emerged from under Jasper’s skirt, his hair a disaster from his efforts, the black in his eyes nearly overtaking all the brown. “Please, Jasper.”

Jasper’s brows pulled together; he knew that expression. He knew what it meant. “You want me to fuck you.” It was a realization as much as a question, and his skirt falling back down to his ankles was as good an illustration as any to why he was surprised. “Looking like this?”

“You look powerful. Like Dionysus, the twice-born god who was a proprietor of ecstasy and madness, draped in his opulent skirts and teaching lesser men of enthusiasmos.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Jasper breathed.

Konrad stood up, and he unbuttoned his own shirt, his eyes on Jasper’s as he let it fall down his arms and drop to the floor. “Having your god inside you.”

“Fuck, Konrad—upstairs.”

eighteen

Their clothes got strewn from the living room all the way upstairs to Konrad’s room. Jasper backed Konrad up the stairs but kept halting his progress to kiss him, working on Konrad’s belt while Konrad finished unlacing his shirt. Jasper whipped the belt out of the loops and let it land wherever it landed. When Konrad finally got him out of his shirt, he was much gentler with it, laying it on the stair below them instead of subjecting it to the same fate as his belt.

They got as far as the closed door of Konrad’s bedroom before Jasper had to get his hands on him again. He pushed Konrad against the door, unclasping his slacks and wrenching the zipper down. Konrad reached to his side to twist the knob, and they stumbled into the room, Jasper pushing insistently at Konrad’s waistband until Konrad was forced to stop and let him divest him of his pants.