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I raise my hand to the door and pause. Is this what I really want to do? There’s no going back. Am I ready for what could be waiting for me behind this door? I swallow as my stomach does one of those fluttery, flippy things it does before I step onstage only this time it’s not an audience of thousands that’s making my mouth dry.
“Just do it,” I mutter to myself under my breath. Anything’s better than the bullshit I’ve been putting myself through since the beginning of this tour—the “These Days” tour. Yeah, these days that have seen my head so fucked up and turned inside out that I’m not even sure of my own name any more.
What the fuck am I doing here?
Oh, Christ, the door’s opening. Wait! Fuck, I’m not ready! When the hell did I knock?
“David?” His voice is rough with sleep and his eyes only half-open as he looks up at me.
“It was the last time I looked in the mirror.” I can feel my lips curve in a bright smile and hope it doesn’t look as cheesy as I fear I sound.
“The hell time is it?” He scrubs his face with his hands and pushes the door to his room open.
“A little before three.” I watch as he turns back inside, expecting me to follow and I can’t help the small sigh of relief that escapes me. He wouldn’t let me in if he wasn’t alone; at least not without a warning.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” He sinks down on the edge of the bed, reaching for his cigarettes from the nightstand. “Are you coming in or what?”
“Oh, um… yeah.” I clear my throat and step into the room. The snick of the door closing behind me has a sound of finality about it that sets my stomach to fluttering and flipping again.
“Is something wrong?” He lights his cigarette and looks at me as he blows out the smoke, his eyebrows drawn together in a slight frown.
“No. Nothing’s wrong.” I run my hands against my thighs fully aware of how damp my palms are and realising that the image of him sitting there clad only in his short, silky robe is doing nothing to help matters.
“Really?” He scratches absently at his chest through the opening of his robe and my eyes fix on the expanse of skin with its covering of wiry, dark hair. He’s waking up and I don’t think he’s buying my disastrous attempt at nonchalance.
“Um, yeah. I, uh, just… well, I was… hell, I’m sorry I woke you up.” Conversational skills appear to have deserted me for the moment.
“David.” An amused grin creases his cheeks. “Something’s on your mind otherwise you wouldn’t be banging on my door at what-the-fuck o’clock in the morning. Based on past history, it’s one of two things: a woman or Jon.” He pats the mattress next to him. “Come and tell Uncle Teek what’s wrong, now that you’ve disturbed his beauty sleep.”
My stomach gives one huge flip and settles way below my belly button. A woman or Jon? Nothing could be further from the truth. I bite back what threatens to be a bark of hysterical laughter.
“You want something to drink? The hotel keeps the fridge pretty decently stocked.” Bless him, he’s trying to put me at ease, but I’m so wound up by what I’ve decided that no amount of hospitality is going to settle me down.
“No, thanks. Well, maybe a water. Do you think they have water in there?” I make a move towards the small fridge. “Hotels usually have a stock of water along with the booze, don’t they? Water and soft drinks? This is a good hotel, it should have a selection for everyone, teetotalers included. Not that I’m a teetotaler, y’know.” I’m babbling and I sound like an idiot, but I can’t seem to stop myself.
“Hey, man.” He’s off the bed and his hand is on my shoulder. “Look, sit down, okay? I’ll get you your water.” I can hear the concern in his voice. And why shouldn’t he be concerned? I’m prattling on like an anxious teenager about nothing and can’t meet his gaze and my body language is anything but relaxed.
I let him nudge me back towards the bed and as I sink down onto it I’m keenly aware of its unmade and mussed state. Crap. There’s the dent in the pillows where his head laid minutes ago. Jesus, am I imagining it, or is that his scent I can just make out? I’m not ready for this; why the hell did I think I was?
“Here, take a drink of this.” The bed dips as he settles down beside me, pressing a plastic bottle into my hand. His fingers brush mine and I swear that a jolt of electric heat is shooting up my arm and through my chest to settle somewhere in the region of my balls. What the hell am I, a fucking sixteen-year-old girl? Just kill me now and make this all be over.
“Now, do you want to tell me what’s got you so jumpy or you want me to start guessing?” He leans back, half resting on the pile of pillows as he studies me. I can feel the blush start and know that in a moment my whole damned body is going to be red. Is it that he knows me; knows me even better than Jon, my oldest friend? Or is it that his near-naked state is causing things to get rather tight below my belt? At this moment, my money is on the latter.
It’s not that I’ve never seen the man naked before, sharing dressing rooms for the past twelve years put paid to that long ago, but rather after the past month I’m finding the idea of a naked Tico makes my pulse race and my mouth go dry.
And I don’t do men.
Teek, on the other hand, does. Many and often.
I take a long pull of water, begging myself to get my shit together. I’ve been a total mess for more than four long weeks and it has to stop. The only way it’s going to stop is if I come right out and talk to him about this. About this insane idea I seem to have come up with out of the blue. Well, okay, not out of the blue.
“I found this.” I dig into the pocket of my jeans and my fingers discover exactly why things are so tight down there. I can feel my nostrils flare slightly at the glancing touch of my fingers against my hardening dick as I pull the folded paper out and hold it towards him. “It was just laying there, on an equipment case, before the Tokyo show.”
“I wondered where this had disappeared to.” He sticks his cigarette between his lips and smoothes the paper out along one thigh, those same lips curving in a slight smile. “Damned good likeness, don’t you think?”
“Tico, it’s me.” Didn’t he get it? Didn’t he understand? “It’s me.” I repeat, wanting him to confirm what I saw in every line of the pencil drawing. What Jon had seen instantly the moment I’d shown it to him on the plane out of Tokyo the next day. Even Richie had been able to see the obvious earlier this evening when I finally broke down and confessed all my newfound inner turmoil to him—and he’d been well onto his way into his third sheet into the wind by that time.
“Sure it’s you, David.” Tico looks up from the drawing, his expression slightly bemused. “It’s how I see you.” He stops talking around the cigarette, taking it from his mouth and stubbing it out in the half-full ashtray on the nightstand.
“But…” My mouth is so dry that my tongue can barely move, so I take another large gulp of water and try again. “Tico, it’s….” I’m searching for the right words to explain what I see in the picture, what Jon saw, what even Richie saw; to explain why its very existence has turned me upside down and inside out.
“It’s what?” He looks at the drawing again, his finger tracing along the lines, much as mine has done over the past weeks as I struggled with all the feelings and questions it created within me.
“Teek, it says stuff. It shows things.” My cheeks are hot, my heart thudding almost painfully. “It’s naked, Tico, and, and, what it says… scares me.” My fingers tighten around the plastic bottle and the resulting crackling sound is loud, much louder than my hoarsely uttered words.
“Scares you?” His hand smoothes over the sketch on his thigh almost like a caress it’s so gentle. I can’t look him in the eyes, so I fix on that hand, which is probably a bad idea because the part of my mind that’s not convulsed in hysterics starts wondering what it would be like to have that hand touch me in the same way it’s moving over the paper.
“David, I never want to scare you.” The smile on his lips is wistful and his voice, oh God, his voice is a soft rumble that warms me from the inside out. “If you see things in this picture surely that’s one of them?”
“I think that’s what’s scaring me.” I finally find the courage to look into his eyes and what I think I see there both frightens and emboldens me. “This drawing of me, it’s drawn by someone who cares. Who has feelings. Feelings of more than a brotherly nature, know what I mean?”
My eyes drop again to look at my fingernail as it picks at the label on the water bottle. What if I’m wrong? What if I’m horribly wrong, and Jon’s wrong and Richie’s wrong? What if Tico had just sketched a quick picture of me in a pensive pose and that’s all it was? Just because he likes men doesn’t mean he likes me in that way. God knows I’ve never given him reason to think I might be receptive to anything like that. It never crossed my own mind that I might be.
Until seeing the sketch. Until realising that there was quite possibly something more than a simple close friendship to be had between the two of us. Every line of that drawing announced that the eyes that saw me were seeing me in a different way than I’d thought for so long. It hit me like a ton of bricks and now I had to know if what I thought I saw in the lines of that drawing was true, was real. Because it had become very important that it be so and that scared the shit right out of me.
“They have been.” His voice is barely above a whisper and there’s a hesitancy in it that does more to reassure me than a million words. “My feelings for you have always been, well, more than brotherly.”
“Always?” That comes out as more of a squeak than I would have liked, but there’s something in my throat that’s constricting my vocal chords. I peel a large part of the label off the bottle and roll the paper between my fingertips.
I try to ignore the fact that my hand is trembling by looking at him.
“Yeah, just about.” He’s nodding, his eyes downcast. Cool, suave, in-charge Tico is gone and in his place is a shy, almost-boyish man nibbling nervously on his bottom lip, suddenly seeming to be almost as scared as I am.
“Is that a bad thing?” I bend a little to the side, ducking my head to look into his face. I grin a little, the flipping and flopping of my stomach reaching epic proportions as I wait for his response.
He raises a hand to touch the line of my jaw with his fingertips and before my eyes close I see another of those wistfully shy smiles curve his lips.
“I’ve never thought so.” His fingers slide along my jawline before dropping away. “Unless you do?”
I can still feel his touch on my skin as my eyes open once again. “No, no, it’s not a bad thing at all. It just scares me.”
I reach to put the abused bottle of water on the nightstand, leaning over him in order to do so and I can feel the heat coming from his body. I breathe in the scent of him, all spice and leather, and it calms me while exciting me at the same time.
“Teek, I’ve never even kissed a man.”
“Would you like to?” He raises a hand to tug gently on one of my curls. His voice is soft, warm, inviting and I can’t help but hear the slight note of hopefulness beneath the words.
“I… I think so.”
My stomach is turning somersaults again, but good ones this time. His hand moves to curl lightly around the back of my neck and draw me a little closer. My heart is pounding in my ears as his face nears mine and my eyes close at the very moment his lips brush mine, softly and gently.
Did that little whimpering sound come from me?
“Let me kiss you, David,” he whispers against my still-closed mouth, accompanying the words with a soft nibble on my bottom lip. “Please.”
The second whimpering sound definitely comes from me as my lips slowly and hesitantly part beneath his and I feel the warmth of his tongue tease along them, coaxing them to open further, to let him kiss me.
And at first, that’s exactly what I’m doing; I’m letting him kiss me. Letting him lick his way between my lips, past my teeth to find my tongue and stroke it gently and easily with his own. His hand on the back of my neck holds me in place—as if I would bolt at any minute, but bolting has become the very last thing I want to do. I’m liking how his mouth is fitting mine, how his tongue knows exactly how to curl around mine, enticing me to kiss him back, how his lips begin to go from soft and gentle to more firm and demanding as I begin to respond. I’m even liking the scrape of the whisker stubble around his mouth against my lips as our kiss increases in intensity.
“And so?” His voice is rough, his breathing rapid as he finally pulls slightly away and looks at me, his dark eyes expectant and not a little hopeful.
“And so?” I’m smiling, my breathing as erratic as his. “And so, I think I’d like to do that again.”
His hands cup my face and his handsome, craggy face is so serious as he looks intently at me. God, he’s beautiful!
“David, I’ve wanted this for so long, if we keep this up, I’m not gonna be able to stop.”
I feel his hands tremble against my cheeks and realise that for the first time in weeks I know exactly what I want. Yeah, I’m scared, who the fuck wouldn’t be, but I want this. I want it more than I ever thought I could want anything. I want more of his kisses, more of his hands on me. I want to feel his skin on mine. I want to wrap myself around him and let him wrap himself around me. I want to taste, touch, feel every inch of him. I want him to tell me over and over again that he wants me in that low, smokey voice and I want to tell him how much I want him. I want to feel him move deep within me and I want to sink into him and lose myself.
Right now I’ll settle for another kiss, knowing the rest will follow. Wanting the rest to follow.
“Nobody’s asking you to.” My arms are going around him and pulling him to me. The drawing crinkles, crushed between us.
Yeah, I’m still scared, but it’s a good scared.
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