Play by the Rules Read online

  My jaw was feeling just the slightest ache as I moved up and down, and then I hollowed out my cheeks, suckling on the tip for a few moments before pulling free.

  He tightened his hold on my head, thrusting evenly, but further down into my throat.

  Shit. Doesn’t a guy get lightheaded when you wield something of this size?

  Also, the bigger question in my head was this:

  Holy shit, I actually took all of this into my throat?

  His hand was pushing down on my head, and I sputtered and coughed while his cock slid down to jut and poke right at my gag reflex. It took me a moment to pop free. When I did, I gasped for air. I didn’t realize I’d been breathless.

  He grabbed me and then pressed me up against the glass wall of the shower. It felt cold against my skin, but the hard, muscled surface of Joe’s body felt warm against my back. I could feel the hard pull of his muscles, the way his biceps curled as his palms grasped at my chest and drew me back, taut, to his body. And when he slid his shaft up between the cheeks of my rear and I felt his balls nestle against mine, something clicked in my head, and I turned to look at him.

  “Wait,” I said. “I’m a virgin. You can’t just—“

  “Shh,” he hushed me, leaning forward to capture my lips in a kiss that left me breathless. He gave me one of those cocky, confident smirks. “I’m not doing that to you today. Not yet.”

  I would be lying if I didn’t say a little part of me wasn’t disappointed, while another, bigger part of me was relieved. I wasn’t one of those people who were blinded by fame and attractiveness—at least, I was glad that I wasn’t—in lieu of getting sick or contracting something.

  Not that I thought Joe was diseased or something, but I just wanted to be careful. Proceeding with caution never hurt people, after all.

  But there was a certain excitement to feeling the spongy tip of Joe’s cock press against a place I’d never even had touched before.

  There was some pressure, but he was careful not to put too much pressure. Joe was just sliding his cock up and down the furrow of my ass, making me feel just how harshly he would thrust if he were inside me. God, it was intense—he was pushing my body right up against the glass with every thrust, and my cock was making tiny little squeaking sounds up against the glass.

  Joe was muttering a litany of “oh fuck,” “God, you’re so hot,” and a whole bunch of other cursing and cussing as he slammed up against me. The friction was exquisite, the feeling of his solid flesh sliding up against my rear was something I hadn’t felt before. The tip of it was spongy, and everything else felt hard and engorged, throbbing with veins and heat. I couldn’t help but reciprocate with a soft, guttural moan of my own.

  His hands were clutching my chest, using my upper body as leverage to draw me closer. His balls were smacking right against mine, and all I could do was bite my lower lip and let my brows furrow as I hissed and shivered. Slowly, one of his hands moved down from my chest—just as a pair of fingers began to gently roll one of my nipples, and oh God, did it feel good—and grasped at my cock. He pumped me gently, forward and back, making me rock my hips in unison with his touch.

  “Come with me, Emmett,” Joe whispered in my ear, leaning in close to nibble at the corner and yanking it ever so slightly backward to press my head more closely to his. “I’m close. I’m really close…”

  His breath was harsh. The water pitter-pattered over our bodies, over my head, and down over my shoulders…but the only thing that I could focus on was the feeling of Joe’s stomach pressing into my back, and how good it felt to have his hand wrapped around somewhere so intimate. I bit down on my lower lip and fought off a hiss.

  “Oh fuck,” I whimpered. I couldn’t help but just moan and focus on the moment. My body was reacting of its own volition. I was thrusting forward and back, meeting each of the pumps of Joe’s fist on my cock. Soon, I was heaving and panting just as much as he was.

  Then, he started shivering, jerking almost violently as he pressed the cheeks of my ass together and surged forward. I felt something warm spurt over the small of my back before ultimately being washed away by the shower above us. Joe groaned a long, guttural groan that made his body shake and shiver, pressing himself deeper and more closely against me. As soon as I felt him bucking wildly and the thrusts of his fist became more erratic, I lost my self-control.

  There was a sense of nirvana, a sense of peace, that suddenly overcame my being. It was like an electric shock that brought peace to my entire system, flowing through my body, and pushing my body backward into Joe’s. We were pressed together so firmly that the only way we would have been more stuck together was if he were balls-deep inside me.

  Which, well, I was beginning to think was becoming a better and better proposition with each moment I spent pressed up against the wall of Joe’s shower.

  My fingers ran lines down the steamy surface of the glass shower stall and I sighed. I looked down to see a trickle of my own seed flowing down in rivulets to the tiles underneath us. Behind me, Joe pulled away…and pressed a kiss against the crook of my neck. It made me shiver and bite down on my lower lip. Fuck, that felt good.

  Why was he so into me? I didn’t understand. I couldn’t, really.

  But the proof was in how he touched me, how my body reacted to him, and how he was kissing my neck like I mattered. Here I thought this was just a booty call. Maybe it was. Hell if I knew…but to do this with someone like Joe Kaminski? My first time was with a freaking all-star football player and I didn’t know how to handle that. I couldn’t think about more than just what was in front of me at that moment.

  “We should do this again sometime, yeah?” Joe said.

  I didn’t respond. I was too winded. I offered a smile and a nod.

  Yup, I guess. Just a booty call.

  Chapter Seven

  “You what?”

  “What did you do with Joe Kaminski?”

  “Holy shit. What the fuck, Emmett.”

  “Go, Emmett! Let your inner slut free!”

  I put my face into my hands in disappointment. I told everyone not to react so…violently, to say the least! The excitement was proving to be a bit much for me. I was halfway between laughing and burying myself under a rock somewhere.

  Chase and Rye were sitting in one end of my apartment while our other friends were here too. In total, there were about six of us, including me. The cacophony of different voices—both masculine and feminine—seemed to fill the air. There was screaming at one point, but not screaming out of frustration, more out of a sense of excitement.

  I turned my head to Talia, Camille, and Ysa, our three lady friends. The six of us didn’t usually get together like this. Talia was never usually here because she was a flight attendant and had an amazing, jetsetter lifestyle. Camille was a doctor, a resident at a local hospital, and she usually spent most of her time sleeping and resting before going back to work. Ysa, on the other hand, was a researcher—a psychological and neuroscientific researcher—and it was a wonder how she was even friends with us artsy types with our head in the clouds and our feet…nowhere near the ground.

  I also wondered why my little studio was the designated hangout place, when Talia had an apartment she never came home to which was much more spacious than this. Flight attendant money was no joke, especially because she was working for a Middle Eastern airline. It was luxurious, and pristine, and all of these high-achieving ladies looked so out of place in my little shanty of a studio.

  Not that it was actually a shanty, but it certainly felt as cramped as one with so many people in one small little living space.

  “Please tell me this is all real,” Talia said as she lifted the long-stemmed glass of her drink—a drink she made herself, but she looked like she was a model holding it up for some kind of fine clubbing experience that had recently opened up—and took a sip. “This isn’t some kind of fever dream, right? This isn’t in one of the manuscripts you’re editing, or one of the stories you’re writing
yourself?”

  “No, why would it be?” I asked. “Why would I be that specific as to name a football player when you know I don’t even watch the sport?”

  Talia shrugged. She turned to Ysa. “Tell me, Miss Ysabel Montenegro, PhD Candidate, is his brain okay?”

  “I won’t know until I run a couple of tests, Miss Talia Vidal, if we’re going for full names now,” Ysa replied just as she sipped her coffee. “He doesn’t seem to be suffering from a delusional episode though. An official schizophrenia diagnosis isn’t out of the question just yet.”

  “Okay, I’m a writer, there’s a difference between schizophrenia and having character voices talk in your head!” I explained.

  All five of them stared at me.

  I slunk back into my chair and frowned. They just didn’t get it.

  “Still, we said to put yourself out there. I didn’t think you would go and fuck a recently-out-of-the-closet football player,” Chase said. They all nodded in agreement.

  I shrugged. “Well, you know me. When I go, I go hard,” I said, barely containing the sarcasm oozing off of every syllable of my sentence. “No, but seriously. It just kind of happened. I don’t even remember what flimsy excuse he made to get me in the shower.”

  “Shower sex for your first time? Dude. That’s awesome,” Chase said.

  Camille raised her eyebrow at me. “Just remember to use protection. Don’t be stupid, okay? I know you told us how you’ve always wanted to bottom, but being the recipient of oral and anal sex is a recipe for a sexually-transmitted infection or HIV. Don’t take risks with your health.”

  “Of course not. Besides, his semen tasted fine,” I replied.

  There was yet another a beat of silence that filled the room.

  “What?” I asked. “If he had shitty health, that would show up in his spunk, right?”

  This time, it was Ysa who stared at me like I’d just grown another head. “You know that doesn’t mean anything, right? A guy’s load could taste like a fucking chocolate fountain but if he has the clap, you’re gonna get it too.”

  “But wouldn’t that be awesome,” Chase suddenly piped up. “If a guy’s semen tasted like chocolate.”

  “It would bring a whole new meaning to the phrase cum-guzzling, that’s for sure,” Rye muttered. He turned to look at me, pursed his lips and clasped his hands together. “But seriously, good for you for putting yourself out there, Emmett!”

  “Did I? Or did I just get caught up in the moment?” I asked.

  “Why can’t it be both?” Ysa asked. “Just because you got caught up in the moment doesn’t mean you weren’t putting yourself out there. You and I are both chronic overthinkers. Freud would have told us that we let our superegos do most of our thinking for us, maybe to such a point that it weighs us down.”

  “Yes, that’s why Ysa hasn’t had a boyfriend since she was born,” Rye said, jabbing at our independent, no-nonsense friend playfully. Ysa scoffed.

  Ysa scoffed once again in quick succession and sipped her coffee. These little “lady’s nights” were slowly killing all of us, but we needed each other. Who else could we vent to? “My value in life isn’t determined by what kind of man I trick into a monogamous relationship. What kind of patriarchal bullshit is that?”

  “Okay, calm down, Miss de Beauvoir, you have a point,” I said. “But really, I just felt like I got caught up in the moment. Being around Joe is dangerous, you guys. He can make you do things…it’s almost like I was in a trance the entire time after the interview. He was plying me with compliments, and then there was the frittata-omelet-thing, and then one thing led to another and soon he was grinding up against me in the shower. Not even in the bedroom, guys. Why the fucking shower?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question, but God did I want the answer.

  “Maybe you said something about not being clean and he offered to help clean up with you,” Rye said, waggling his eyebrows and smiling.

  Talia chuckled. “Or maybe he knew you were finding ways to get out of it, so he rushed in to make sure you didn’t have any second thoughts!”

  Ysa squinted. “That has a little bit of a non-consensual vibe to me. Might be a little rape-y, if you ask me.”

  “Or it could be self-assured self-confidence,” Camille helpfully chimed in. “You should know, Ysa. This guy is a football player. Wasn’t he a quarterback for the home team here or something? He was one of the first picks—consistently—while he was playing. He’s probably got confidence in spades. The only question is, why is he attracted to our lovable lump of neuroticism and self-doubt over here?”

  Ysa nodded. “I guess that’s true. Professional athletes aren’t known for their crippling self-doubt. A certain amount is healthy, to be sure, especially because of the pressure to succeed with so many eyes looking at you, and that’s probably why a lot of them remain closeted until such a time when it becomes easier for them to come out.”

  I nodded. “And see, I know all that. My problem is that it happened in the first place. I kind of feel…dirty.”

  “Why would you feel that way? So many people would have killed to be in your position,” Talia said, sipping her drink once more.

  “One of the things Joe told me as to the reason why he was so nice to me was that he has kind of a fetish for chubby guys?” I said.

  “Oh, you mean he’s a chubby chaser?” Chase asked. “I mean, yeah, that’s a fetish, but for a lot of people it’s also just a preference. Bigger guys cuddle nicer, they’re often much more polite people in general, too. Attractive people tend to be really bitchy.”

  “And chubby or fat people aren’t?” Ysa asked, raising a single eyebrow. She was chubby, like me, although I still probably beat her by a couple of pounds just on account of our gender difference. “That’s armchair psychology. I’ll have to ask you to cite your sources.”

  Chase shrugged. “No, but when you guys are angry it’s a lot more justifiable. It’s probably because someone was mean to you right back, or someone was being a huge douche canoe.”

  “Somehow, there’s a double standard at work there,” Ysa muttered underneath her breath. “I just need to find out what.”

  “Yes, Ysa, there’s something afoot here, and it isn’t just that we haven’t been concentrating on the very important fact that Emmett just fucked a person on earth who probably has more people lusting after them than all of us combined,” Talia deadpanned. “Maybe we should focus on that, before we get our jimmies rustled over something else?”

  Ysa nodded. “You’re right, and though I don’t quite approve or agree, our friend, Emmett, has done something quite extraordinary.”

  “Maybe don’t talk about me like I’m not here?” I said. “Besides, I don’t know if anything’s happened other than a booty call.”

  Talia smirked. “Well, booty call or not, you have accomplished something none of us have ever done.”

  “Yes, by its own metric, it’s quite the accomplishment,” Ysa admitted. “Impressive in a sense that you’re being with someone more people have actively lusted over than many of our hottest bed-partners, combined.”

  “That’s a bit of an understatement,” Rye added. “But Ysa is right, and so is everyone else. Booty call or not, you got yours. What’s more, you got yours and the guy is a major hottie. Some might even say he’s numbered in one of those magazine’s “eligible bachelors” lists. Pat yourself on the back and treat it as a good experience, if nothing else.”

  “And here,” Camille suddenly chimed in. I hadn’t even realized she was writing until she ripped a sheet off of her medical prescription pad. “Go get a physical and take these tests just so you know you have a clean bill of health. Infections can lurk off of any and every corner.”

  I stared down at the many, many things on Camille’s prescription and offered a smile. Well, I offered one as best as I could. I didn’t want to think of Joe Kaminski as this disease-riddled flesh-eating-bacteria-wielding monster, but maybe all doctors thought the same way. Humans could be ve
ry disgusting creatures.

  “You think Emmett should get a pap smear with all of that?” Talia deadpanned, sipping her drink. Apparently, there was at least one of us who thought similarly as I did.

  Camille adjusted her glasses and smiled. “It’s better to be safe than sorry. Also, you should be one to talk. You need updated vaccines considering your jet-setting lifestyle. God forbid you have to go to a country with a different strain of flies and you contract malaria or dysentery because you didn’t get your vaccines.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Everyone was showing their concern in such different ways, but this was exactly what I’d needed. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a prickle of negativity. “I do appreciate all the support, guys, but I really think this was just a one-time thing. I’ll get tested and get my health sorted out, but I honestly think that this was nothing.”

  “You’re probably like, the only gay guy I know who’s against flings and one-night stands,” Talia said.

  “That’s stereotyping,” Ysa called out. “Sex is a biological function but it has such a strong emotional component. I agree with your decision to make this a one-time thing, Emmett. Learn and move on.”

  Talia rolled her eyes. “Before Ysa goes off into a tangent, I was just saying that it doesn’t matter what you do from here, it only matters that it happened.”

  I nodded. I guess I could agree. She was right. It doesn’t matter so much that it wasn’t going to happen again, but that it happened, and that fact led me to this decision. Even for one, magical moment, I was in the arms of a man who actually lusted over me.

  That was still an eye-opening experience, if there ever was one.

  “But man, I can’t believe that Joe Kaminski is a chubby chaser. Who would have thought?” Chase asked. The question was rhetorical. I couldn’t provide an answer.

  It was still a mystery all on its own.