Page 2 of Curious

He had been staring, and Owen knew it. Jeremy had never seen the need to hide his bisexuality from his best friend, though he didn’t throw it in his face either. Finn was a man’s man from a traditional Irish family. He loved sports, worked with his hands and hadn’t lacked for female companionship since he hit puberty. In other words, he was arrow straight.

Maybe straight wasn’t the right word for him, Jeremy thought as he set the box on the coffee table. Owen had more than a few kinks from, what he’d been told, and he was a bit of a player with the ladies, but sex with other men had never been on his agenda.

They didn’t talk much about their individual predilections with each other. Owen knew Jeremy liked men as well as women, and Jeremy knew Owen frequented the same BDSM club that their friend Tasha was a member of. It didn’t have anything to do with their friendship.

Or it hadn’t until Tasha’s party.

He walked over to the fifty-inch flat screen framed by shelves of movies and games. “Sports or swords?”

“Swords,” Owen responded as he threw himself onto the wide leather couch and opened his beer. “I had a long day, and I’m in the mood for a bloody birthday massacre.”

“Should I ask?”

“God, no.”

Jeremy slipped the game into the console and tossed the two controllers on the couch beside his friend. “It’s your birthday. And there will be blood.”

“Blood and pizza. It doesn’t get better.”

They spent the next hour swapping smack talk and grabbing bites of pizza between battles. Jeremy leaned back on the couch, his fingers automatically controlling his character’s movements as his mind drifted.

This was it then—business as usual. Fine. It was better this way. Their friendship was intact. He wouldn’t have to think about his own reactions to the incident at Tasha’s party, or how he’d wished it had been Owen he was with that night instead of the man whose name he hadn’t bothered to remember.

Natasha Rivera had introduced him to the stranger. She was the only friend from high school besides Owen that he was still close to. The three of them had been through a lot together, though their individual relationships with Jeremy couldn’t be more different. Both a voyeur and an exhibitionist, Tasha was also Jeremy’s occasional lover, and that evening she’d had her heart set on watching him fuck another man. One of her favorite requests.

Tasha’s choice for their third, a pretty and unabashedly gay coworker, had shown a flattering fascination with the fit of Jeremy’s jeans and Tasha’s hints about what they were hiding. Against his better judgment, Jeremy had let the two of them drag him into the bedroom and strip off his clothes during the party instead of making them wait until it was over. He’d let them caress his body and measure the length of his erection with their hands, though he could hear the beat of the bass and the murmur of the crowd from the other room.

They’d both knelt at his feet and taken turns sucking on his cock, until eventually he’d stopped trying to remember if they’d locked the door and let his desire take over. He’d been so aroused and distracted by their joint effort he ended up bending that hot twenty-something blond over the bed, sliding on a condom and giving him the fucking he’d been vocally begging for.

That was how Owen found them when he walked in. He’d frozen—a tall, still shadow framed in light and loud music.

Jeremy had been startled too, but when he realized who was in the doorway and what Owen was seeing—him with his pants around his ankles and his dick disappearing into another man’s ass, the voluptuous, caramel-skinned Tasha naked and touching herself beside them as she watched—some inner devil loosed by drink and lust had taken over his body.

He hadn’t stopped. In fact, he’d taken hold of his partner’s shoulder and started slamming into him so hard he was worried the bed or the lean body beneath him would break. And he hadn’t taken his eyes off Owen.

“Fuck,” the man had gasped. “Fuck, yeah. Oh God, give it to me. Pound my ass with that big fat cock!”

Owen had flinched at the graphic demand, his gaze clashing with Jeremy’s for a few devastating heartbeats before he backed out of the room and closed the door.

Turned on as hell, Jeremy had ridden Tasha’s screaming morsel of a coworker without mercy, imagining it was Owen he was fucking instead. Then he’d buried his face between Tasha’s thighs and made her come so violently she swore she saw stars. By the time he finished and came out to look for his friend, Owen had already left the party and Jeremy’s satisfaction had swiftly turned into regret.

“He’s a big boy, honey,” Tasha had assured him later, when everyone else had gone and they were sharing the last of a bottle of Scotch. “He knows you and I like variety. He does too. He’s plowed through so many women in the last year you’d think he was going for a record. Even his brothers have pulled him aside and told him to turn it down a notch.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“It is exactly the same thing. We are consenting adults having a little harmless fun. You should see what Master Finn does to his partners at the club.” She lifted the finely arched eyebrows over her sparkling green eyes. “You’d blush, but none of those little submissives can resist him. Hell, most of the Doms have a difficult time.”

“Yet you do.”

She’d looked away from him, the way she always did when the subject came up. “I resist all Finns. Especially the ones who seem to be working out their personal demons on every warm body that isn’t nailed down.”

Owen’s demons and laundry list of conquests aside, Jeremy couldn’t help but feel the sting of his own shame. Not because Owen had seen them, but because of how he’d felt knowing his oldest, closest and most profoundly heterosexual friend had watched him in action.

It had turned him on. Hell, it was turning him on right now. What the hell kind of a person did that make him?

Owen’s laugh interrupted his morose thoughts. “You are really off your game tonight, aren’t you? Your undefeated champion just got his head lopped off by a tree-dwelling ogre and you didn’t even notice.”

“Sorry.” Jeremy shifted, his controller doing little to hide his erection. He pressed the pause button on the game. “Another beer?”

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