Page 106 of Torch Songs

Guthrie’s orgasm almost ripped his dick off, and still Tad kept pumping, his body racked with completion when his emotions weren’t ready to quit. It wasn’t until Guthrie gave a soft whimper and melted into the bed, sliding to his knees, that Tad’s final thrusts stilled and he fell heavily over Guthrie’s back, landing on his own knees on the hard hotel tile.

His body was clammy with sweat, and so was Guthrie’s, but Guthrie was shuddering so much Tad was afraid to let go. He wrapped his arms around Guthrie’s shoulders and held on, not sure if he was shaking from sobs of rage or joy or grief or a combination of the three, but absolutely refusing to leave him alone, not now, not when he was naked and hurting and raw.

It took an eternity for the aftermath to ease from their skin, and in the end, the only thing that made Tad move was Guthrie’s small voice saying, “I’m freezing.”

“Me too,” Tad grunted and got awkwardly to his feet. He stood and offered Guthrie a hand up, which he took, leaving them bare and close and face-to-face in the ambient light from the street lamp outside.

Guthrie wouldn’t meet his eyes.

Tad hadn’t expected him to.

Instead, he feathered a shaky kiss along Guthrie’s jaw and murmured, “Now? Now can we talk?”

Guthrie still looked away, over his shoulder, into some forbidden part of the room Tad couldn’t see.

But he nodded and said, “Did you bring food? I could eat.”

Tad chuckled weakly and wrapped his arms around Guthrie’s shoulders. “Let’s get dressed, okay? I’m so cold my balls are shrinking.”

Guthrie moved away to put on the sweats and T-shirt and hoodie Tad had provided for him. “The hell they are,” he grumbled to himself, and Tad chuckled as he found his own clothes.

For You I’ll Wait

GUTHRIE HADseen Larx and Aaron’s home when he’d been up to Colton before, but he hadn’t seen it in the morning sunlight, with the morning glories wound about an arbor and cut flowers in vases decorating the aisles of chairs. He hadn’t seen it with Aaron George, tall and blond and hale and hearty and kind, standing in a handsome blue suit, waiting for his husband, smaller, wiry, with dark hair harboring a few strands of silver.

He hadn’t seen Olivia and her sister and stepsister dressed in pale purple, like morning glories themselves, or an entire town full of people watching the two men meet at the altar in front of their respective best friends who were conducting the ceremony.

In short, he’d never seen, nor been part of, anything as bright and shining, as full of sunshine and glory, as the George-Larkin wedding. Even Seth and Kelly’s wedding, as much as he’d loved it, had the roar of the ocean, the fight of the wind in it, and that had suited them, because their lives together hadn’t been easy, and they wouldn’t be, and Seth and Kelly seemed to thrive in the storm.

But Larx and Aaron were working so hard to create a little haven of kindness. Bad things happened there, of course—what happened to Tad had happened to all of them, including to the still thin, healing teenager sitting anxiously in the back near April—but there was hope that the people in the town could make things better.

It was the perfect wedding for two people who were far from perfect, but who wanted to give the world at least one day of sunshine, flowers, and joy.

As Guthrie finished the processional, allowing the last chords to die softly in the early morning August sunshine, he glanced to Larx’s arm, where a determined-looking Olivia was clinging with all the force in her white-knuckled fingers. As Guthrie watched from his discreet little stool to the side of the arbor, he could see what seemed to be a ripple or a faint breeze pass along the ruffled fabric of Olivia’s full, empire-waisted tunic, and his eyebrows rose.

He saw the exact moment Larx realized his oldest daughter was in labor right before his own wedding.

And then he watched as Larx approached his groom with raised eyebrows of his own, and Aaron George’s widened eyes told the same story.

And then they glanced to their two officiates: Yoshi, the diminutive English teacher, and Eamon, Aaron’s former boss, the tall and thickly muscled sheriff.

“For obvious reasons,” Eamon intoned, “We’re going to hurry this up a bit.”

Olivia had been seated when the rest of the wedding party had remained standing, and Guthrie stared at her as her husband moved to her side and allowed her to crush his hand.

The wedding vows were lovely—he assumed—but his eyes were on Olivia the entire time. She saw his gaze and winked, and then took her husband’s hand and panted her way through her next contraction, and Guthrie felt a stupid shaft of disappointment.

He’d wanted so badly to talk to her.

Oddly enough, Olivia had become one of his closest friends in a remarkably short time. He wondered if that was because, in one way or another, they were both… isolated in some ways. Yes, he was surrounded by people who loved him, but he’d spent most of his life on the road and was having a hard time adjusting to the idea that he might not have to live that way anymore.

And Olivia had changed her entire vision of what her life would be in the span of less than a year. They were both getting used to living a life they’d never thought would fit them, and somehow they’d found each other. Guthrie had hoped… oh, he’d hoped for somebody to talk to.

Somebody besides Tad, because he and Tad had a totally intense way of communicating that was frightening and raw and terrifying in its honesty, and Guthrie needed a friend to tell him that was okay.

What had happened in the hotel two nights before had scared him shitless.

Not just the primal, animal-screaming sex, although that had been such a beautiful purge, Guthrie wished he could stop being embarrassed about it. But besides that, there had been the conversation afterward, the two of them on the bed, peeling each other’s hearts open like tangerines.

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