Lucky Read online

  I pushed him onto his back and nudged his legs open, spitting on his dick with a long, slow dribble of saliva. In my head, I straddled him and impaled myself on his cock, but my soul craved harder the ecstasy I’d seen in him last time. The blissful agony clenching his whole body as I’d fingered him with his dick in my mouth. “Tell me to stop.”

  His eyes flew open, though the lids were hooded. “Why?”

  “Because I need to know what you want.”

  “You know what I want.”

  And I did. I crawled between his legs and took him in my mouth, kissing up and down his length, taking my time, enjoying the frustrated gasps my feather-light lips earned me. His balls were hot and heavy in my mouth as I tongued and suckled them. He gasped again, spreading his legs wider, and I saw my moment.

  I punctuated my finger pressing inside him by swallowing his cock down my throat. The double-edged sensation drew another strangled cry from him, and fluid wept from his dick, letting me know that we wouldn’t be playing this game long.

  Which was just as well. I ground myself against the mattress as I sucked him, but the friction wasn’t anywhere near enough. I wanted his tongue inside me as I made him come, but I sensed he wasn’t ready for a sixty-nine yet, and settled for latching onto his growing pleasure, absorbing his rising peak as though it was my own.

  He was so wound up. Skin flushed, muscles jumping. His thighs quivered like he was connected to the mains, but somehow it still caught me off guard when he choked out a warning. “Lucky.”

  Or maybe it was the way he said my name…the way he growled it through clenched teeth as he shot hot come down my throat. Either way, him falling apart tipped me over the edge. I swallowed every drop of him, and then reclaimed my finger and scrambled to my knees, my hand blurring over my dick as I chased a release I was pretty fucking sure I’d die without.

  Heat pooled in my groin, spread through my belly, and then out into every nerve. My vision whited-out, and I came hard, spilling all over Dom’s chest without stopping to ask if he was down with that shit.

  “Fuck, I’m sorry.” I lurched forward, sticky hand flailing to somehow wipe him clean, but he caught me before I fell on him.

  “Easy. It’s fine.”

  Panic over, I collapsed in a heap beside him, my chest burning as my lungs fought to catch up. Beside me, he panted too, but when I looked at him, he was far more dignified about it than me, even with bloodshot eyes, flushed skin, and come splattered on his chest. “Wow.”

  Dom graced me with an almost smile. “What?”

  “I thought last time was a fluke, but you make me come so hard.”

  “I didn’t make you come. It was your hand.”

  “Uh-huh. And watching you bust had nothing to do with it.” I closed my eyes and let my body sink into the bed. It was way bigger than Jamila’s, softer too. I pondered if Dom had booked the room for the night—and if I had time to take a nap.

  The bed shifted and I opened my eyes to see Dom wiping down and reaching for his clothes, dashing my hopes of a second round. “Going somewhere?”

  He flicked me a flat glance, the faint good humour from a second ago all but gone. “Home. It’s late.”

  It was barely ten o’clock. Our entire encounter had taken less than an hour. “Have you got an early start?”

  “What?”

  “For work…or something. What do you do, anyway?”

  “What do you care?”

  I sat up on my elbows, sensing the shift in Dom’s mood with every item of clothing he pulled on. “I guess I don’t.”

  He said nothing, just yanked his T-shirt on and turned away to stamp into his pristine Nikes.

  I suddenly felt grubbier than ever, despite raiding Jamila’s Lush stash. Taking my cue from Dom’s stony silence, I rolled off the bed, and retrieved my clothes from the floor. I threw them on and slunk across the room to my boots.

  Dom still wasn’t looking at me. His cap was back on his head, jammed down low, like he could block me out. Ghost me. Fuck that. He might’ve paid me to blow him and stick my finger inside him, but that didn’t give him the right to treat me like crap. He didn’t want a conversation? Fine. I’d say goodbye without words.

  I stepped into my boots and bent to tie them. In my peripheral vision, I saw him move, and when I looked up, he was by the door, his hand gripping the handle, knuckles white. I traced the tendon up his arms to his stiff shoulders and set jaw, and my irritation with him faded a touch. Dom was the nothing man—the man who didn’t think anything and had nothing to say—but I didn’t believe him. Whatever was going on behind his sealed-off gaze was making him feel like shit, and he’d paid me not to make him feel worse.

  My bag was by his feet. I picked it up and slung it over my shoulder, and then I stepped to him and stretched up to kiss his cheek. My lips brushed skin that smelled of expensive cologne and clean sweat. I expected him to ignore me, or back away, but when he turned his head, his eyes were hungry again—alive, like I perhaps hadn’t seen them before.

  Something inside me shifted. It was infinitesimal, but drove me forward, backing him against the closed door. I kissed him again, on the lips this time, and he responded with the hunger I’d seen in his dark gaze, but he wasn’t rough. Didn’t crush us together or plunder my mouth with his tongue. His kiss was soft and sweet, his hands on my shoulders gentle and light, and even though I was the one who’d started it I was so fucking bewildered.

  This wasn’t how this was supposed to go down. Wanting to see Dom again had fucked with my head all week, but I’d still expected to blow him and leave. That I’d objected to him silently suggesting I do just that didn’t make any sense.

  And nor did the way his kiss was making me feel. I was prepared for the heat that sluiced through me when we were fooling around, but this? The slow-spinning top of warmth spreading through my chest? The tingling and pulsating of every nerve?

  Nah.

  But I didn’t stop kissing him back. My bag slipped to the floor, and my body moulded itself to him, his wider torso the perfect resting place for my scrawny frame. His muscles fit around my sticky-out bones and I could’ve leaned against him, lost in his soft lips, forever.

  The buzz of a phone brought me back to reality—my phone. I ignored it, but the persistent vibration shattered the magic.

  Dom broke away. “You’d better get that.”

  I couldn’t think of a single reason why, but I reached for my phone anyway.

  Jamila’s face flashed up, reminding me that I’d never let her know I was safe. Guilt surged through me, replacing the crazed desire that had led me to pretty much rugby tackle Dom to the door.

  I cancelled the call and tapped out a quick message.

  Lucky: srry. all fine. leaving soon

  Jamila: You’d fucking better be okay.

  Jamila: I saved you some chicken and rice.

  The perfect contradiction in her emotions made me smile, despite the age-old guilt at having a friend who was so fucking good to me.

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Huh?” I glanced up at Dom to find his hand on the door handle again. “Oh, no…she’s my, uh, flatmate. She saved me some dinner.”

  “That’s nice. It’s late, though. Didn’t you eat before you came out?”

  What do you care? But the spiky retort died on my lips as I realised Dom was opening the door to show me out. That he wasn’t leaving with me. “Are you staying here tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Right.” It came together in my head with painful clarity. “You just don’t want to walk out with me?”

  “Walk out where? We’re not going to the same place.”

  With his designer clothes and immaculate shoes next to my deadbeat scrubs, he’d never said a truer word. The high from his kiss evaporated and I forced a nonchalant shrug as I slipped into a nondescript corridor that led to nowhere. “Fair enough. Take care, Dom. See you around.”

  Six

  Dom

  I wish he
hadn’t kissed me. Until then, I’d been able to persuade myself the current between us had been entirely in my imagination—that I’d obsessed over him because he’d made me fly so high after a four-month drought, but the moment his lips had grazed mine, a blast had gone off somewhere inside me, sizzling my synapses, and robbing me of coherent thought.

  I’d kissed him back like a starving man.

  Like a man who’d never had another man’s lips on his.

  Three weeks on, and I still wasn’t over it. My lips still burned and tasted of him, and despite stalking away from me with a scowl marring his delicate face, his smile still haunted my dreams.

  At least, the dreams where I saw his face instead of his cock, ’cause those kind of dreams were haunting me too, night and day when my thoughts got away from me.

  Fuck’s sake. I stopped at a red light and glared down at my tightening jeans as flashbacks of our last encounter took up residence in my apparently sex-crazed brain. I’d managed to resist contacting Lucky again, or even looking at Grindr, but every part of me he’d touched throbbed, and I craved him so badly I totally zoned out, imagining what we would do next time round.

  A car horn blared behind me. I jumped and threw my car into drive, considering flipping a bird to the angry twat in the gaudy white Range Rover before I remembered that I was the one driving a wanky Lexus.

  And it didn’t take long for my thoughts to return to Lucky. He’d seemed different when we’d met at the hotel—less spiky—though his poise when it came to getting off was as enticing as ever. I’d always been kind of frigid. For years, I’d blamed it on people expecting me to like girls, but even with blokes I was fucking lost. The only guy I’d nearly had a relationship with—if you counted screwing him more than once—reckoned it was because I was too messed up by repressing my sexuality to let myself really feel anything, but I’d called him a hippy prick for that shit and sacked him off. The dude had been a yoga teacher, for fuck’s sake. What did he know about being the only queer on a top-flight football team? And I’d never kissed him.

  Disquiet coursed through my veins as my thoughts did their best to return to Lucky, to his silky hair, and mile-long legs. His creamy skin and slender bones. But even recalling his glorious naked form couldn’t ease the shame lacing my blood. My daddy would turn in his grave if he knew, and the scandal would kill my ma if it reached her in the tiny Portuguese village she’d returned to a few years ago. Cruel? Backwards? Yeah. But it was what it was, and no amount of driving my flash car around London while sporting a Lucky-fuelled boner would change anything.

  I shifted in my seat, cursing myself for letting the clawing obsession get a foothold in my soul again. For months at a time, I was able to forget it, convince myself I didn’t have a sexuality at all, but then the voice in my head would grow louder, more insistent, and the desperation to feel whole, if only for a lust-driven moment, would eat away at me until I found myself trawling Grindr or Scruff for a profile I could pay to keep my sordid secrets.

  No one I’d found had affected me the way Lucky had. Every other bloke had scratched the itch and disappeared from my consciousness, but Lucky? Damn. He’d put his lips on mine and ripped a whole new crater in my affection-starved soul. You sad fuck. Twenty-six years old and never been kissed. And now I knew what I’d been missing, I wanted more.

  My phone rang in my gym bag. For a heart-stopping moment, I wondered if Lucky had somehow heard my thoughts, but then I remembered he didn’t have my number, and the only people who did were my employers and Isha.

  I pressed the button on the steering wheel to take the call. “Yeah?”

  Isha laughed. “I swear I could phone you up with a billion-quid deal and you’d still sound like your dog just died.”

  “I don’t have a dog.”

  “Maybe you need one.”

  “Why?”

  “To stop you dying alone.”

  “You think my make-believe dog is going to outlive me?”

  “Yeah, man. Your billy-no-mates-itis is definitely terminal.”

  I let out a long-suffering sigh. “Is that why you called? To heckle me on my bachelor status?”

  “Kind of.” Isha’s tone sobered. “Where are you?”

  “Tottenham. My car needs a service. Why?”

  “I wanted to give you a heads up on the papers before you got to the ground for training this morning.”

  My heart stopped. Vision blacked out. “What?”

  “You made the gossip pages of the Daily Mail.”

  With shaking hands, I turned off the busy Tottenham street and pulled into a dead-end loading bay. “Why?”

  “Because they seem to think you’re shagging some Victoria’s Secret model.”

  Relief and horror warred in my churning stomach. I slapped a hand over my mouth like I could push the dry heave back down. Counted to ten and sucked in a silent, shuddery gasp. “Why the fuck would they think that?”

  “Does it matter? Maybe the club threw them a bone to cover someone else’s mess. Point is, this girl is pretty hot stuff, so there’s gonna be reporters hounding you for a couple of days before they get a new sniff.”

  “Brilliant.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Dom. It’s not that bad. She’s a nice girl by all accounts, and you’re a good guy. It won’t do either of you any harm.”

  Easy for him to say. Isha lived in the shadows of other people’s chaos, taking care of everyone else, folding dirty laundry that would never stick to him and ruin him by wrecking a career in the only thing he’d ever been good at. Pressing my fists into my eyes, I growled a goodbye, and hung up on him. I wanted to go home. To hide away in my apartment and stick my head in the top-of-the-range gas oven.

  The faint scar on my wrist, a legacy of a time long ago when thoughts like that had overwhelmed me, tingled. Burned. Singed me from the inside out. I hadn’t even come close to killing myself back then—too young and naive to do the right kind of damage—but things were different now, even if underneath it all I was the same terrified teenage boy.

  I leaned into the passenger footwell and retrieved my phone from my bag. My thumb flew over the screen as I erased my Grindr account without checking for new messages and deleted the app from the phone. My habitual monthly clear out usually granted me a brief solace, like I’d closed a rusty trapdoor on my sexuality, albeit until the next time, but as I backed out of the loading bay and rejoined the Tottenham traffic, the relief in my chest was hollow.

  No Grindr meant no Lucky, and there was nothing comforting about that.

  Lucky

  “No offence, mate. But you don’t look like mechanics are your thing.”

  “Why’s that?”

  The old boy had the good grace to look awkward and offer nothing in return. I sensed a window and pushed on with my pitch. “Listen, I might not be a gym rat covered in bad tats, but I know car engines, okay? I grew up playing in my grandpa’s garage, and I prefer the black on my nails to come from dirty oil.”

  The man’s gaze dropped to my hands, clearly checking for a fucking manicure, and I wondered for the thousandth time why I was putting myself through this. Why I was traipsing around east London’s auto shops, begging for an apprenticeship I could complete with my eyes closed, all the while making excuses for how I carried myself in my own goddamn skin.

  Because you need money, remember? And food, and a place to sleep.

  And to stop blowing Dom for cash, but I let that thought fade to nothing. I’d spent a couple of days hiding out in Jamila’s room, angsting over my enigmatic benefactor, and I was done with it now. Done with him. Had to be. Because for three weeks he’d ignored my messages and ghosted himself from Grindr, so regardless of the fact that I couldn’t get him out of my head, hooking up with him wasn’t a viable plan.

  Not that I wanted it to be.

  Or did I?

  Dom’s overpayment had set me on a hopeful path, fed me, and left me enough to slip some into Jamila’s mum’s purse when she wasn’t looking, but be
yond that, I had become dangerously obsessed with him, scrutinising his Grindr movements—or lack of them—for hours when I should’ve been pounding the pavements, looking for work.

  It wasn’t healthy.

  Then again, healthy wasn’t a word I tended to live by. The fresh needle mark in my arm was evidence of that, as was the lingering high that had carried me this far, despite being awake for two days straight.

  Reflexively, I tugged on my sleeves, checking my arms were still covered. If I scored some work I’d have to cover it with a plaster, or scratch it open to disguise its telltale shape, and shame rippled through me as I pictured myself huddled up behind the kebab shop, slamming just enough bubble to get through the night. I wasn’t proud of it, but I couldn’t bring myself to regret it either.

  Such a fucking white-trash cliché—

  “So,” the garage owner said. “If you can do that for me by the end of the day, I might consider taking you on. What do you say?”

  “Hmm?”

  The old boy stared at me, and then shook his head slightly and pointed beyond me to a shiny gangster SUV. “I said if you finish off that service for me, and valet the interior, then I’ll take you a little more seriously.”

  Jesus. Trust me to zone out on the most constructive conversation I’d had in months.

  I nodded my head like the Churchill dog on meth. “I can do that. When do you close for the day?”

  “Five o’clock,” the man said. “But I’ll give you until half past because the owner won’t be here until six. Don’t fuck up.”

  It was the story of my life, but I liked a challenge when I had the tools to face one, and the swish garage was a petrol-head’s dream.

  I scrounged some overalls and got to work, losing myself in the rhythm of giving an engine a bit of TLC. Under the bonnet, I felt as at home as I did with a fat dick in my mouth, and the smell of fuel and oil was enough to give me a semi.