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Sweat made everything slippery. Keaton’s hands on my skin as he slid them over my body. His cock riding my taint, the head dragging over my fingered hole. Everywhere we touched.

He came with something close to a roar, spurts of cum going on for some time. It didn’t surprise me that he was one of those people who came with their whole body, aftershocks of pleasure still plaguing him. I let him ride them out before pulling his head down and sealing our mouths together in a hungry kiss that went on for a while.

“I think,” I said when we finally broke apart, “that we need to start again with washing.” Keaton’s answer was in the wet sponge that hit me square in the chest. “Oh, it’s like that, is it?” I teased. “Now you’ve got what you wanted, I have to do it myself.”

He gave me a languorous look from beneath his eyelashes, his broad chest still rising and falling rapidly. “Unless you want to risk us starting all over again and never being clean.”

Chapter Eighteen

Keaton

The last few days had been a million miles away from the way things had started out between August and me. We’d fallen into a companionable relationship that still had us butting heads from time to time, but in a far more teasing way, with very little danger of it blowing up into anything serious. I hated to call it trust lest something made me realize I was still gullible, but that’s how it felt. Like it was me and August against the world, and God help anyone who got in our way.

And of course, there were a lot more benefits to our relationship now. I’d had sexual partners over the years. There was no way you could house thirty men brimming over with testosterone together in a barracks without some of us finding comfort in each other. But most of those interactions had been born out of necessity, and while for me, the same gender had always been my first choice, I was keenly aware that for many that wasn’t the case, that if a tall, leggy blond with big tits had walked in, they wouldn’t have looked twice at me.

With August, it was different. I felt like his first choice. Every time I thought that, I caught myself, examining whether it could be another lie. I hadn’t asked August about previous sexual partners, too afraid of what the answer might be. It was a conversation I needed to have at some point, though. Before I fell too far.

Not today, though. Because today he had something on his mind. We’d stopped for a break, August somehow managing to spy—or perhaps he’d already known it was there—yet another orchard, where we’d gorged ourselves on fruit straight from the trees’ branches. No plums this time, but the peaches, pears, and apples had been an adequate substitute.

August leaned against the bike, the slight breeze picking up strands of hair before letting them drop, his gaze fixed on something only he could see in the distance. He had the best jawline of any man I’d ever known, the slight tilt of his chin showing it off to its best advantage. A perfect-sized nose. A strong brow. Pretty eyes with long lashes. And then my favorite part of his face… his lips. Although there was undoubtedly a sexual element to that preference, linked to the recent memory of seeing them stretched around my cock, and glistening with cum once they’d done their job. August was equally skilled at kissing as well, so those lips were very much a two for one.

I snapped out of my reverie to find his eyes on me. He lifted his chin in a challenge. “What were you thinking about?”

“Kissing,” I answered honestly.

There was a moment when he didn’t seem to know what to make of that before his lips curled into a wide smile. Three things. I liked it when he smiled too. “You’re a strange man, Keaton Levine.”

“Says you.”

August straightened, his movements languid as he worked the kinks out of his shoulders. “We should get going.”

“Get going where?”

“You’ll see.”

“What kind of answer is that?”

August was already straddling his bike. “Get on.”

I got on, wrapping my arms around his middle so I was plastered to him, a position I’d very much grown to enjoy. “Am I allowed to ask how long it takes to get to this mystery location?”

“About an hour.”

“And what am I going to find there?” The wind stole that question as August got us back on the road. I doubted he’d have answered it, anyway.

Our end destination was possibly the most hostile-looking place I’d ever encountered. Not that I could see much of it beyond the corrugated metal fence topped with barbed wire. Signs decorated it with such uplifting messages as ‘Trespassers will be shot’ and ‘Enter at your own risk.’

“Where the fuck have you brought me?”

Something flickered on August’s face, gone so quickly I wondered if I’d imagined it. “Home.”

“Oh.” I studied the metal fencing with fresh eyes. In some places, someone had patched it up, hammering new sheets over thin areas of metal to create a patchwork effect. Had August done that? Or was it someone else? “You live here?”

August shrugged. “I’m on the road a lot, but I always come back.”

We climbed off the bike, and he wheeled it toward what I realized, once we got closer, was a door. The only things that identified it as such were its shape and a slight break in the metal. There was no window to see through, and no handle, so it could only be opened from the inside.

“Close your ears,” August said, before lifting his hand and completing such a complicated pattern of raps that, had I wanted to memorize it, I doubted I would have been capable. “This is the big X,” I said once he’d finished.