Anything but Ordinary. Madelynne Ellis

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      He’d have preferred to do it while naked, because his clothes were damp and uncomfortable, but whatever.

      What he didn’t quite know was how to do all this and reel Ric in at the same time, because Ric isolated himself behind that damn camera. When it sat in his hand he was thinking about angles and refraction. He was cut off from his emotions. But if Zach could somehow get close enough to touch him…

      ‘I want to see you make a mess.’

      ‘I want you to make me make a mess.’

      He didn’t normally add his input while they were working. Zach wasn’t sure why he’d done so this time. The result was that Ric’s spine straightened and he gave his head a curt but very definite shake. Immediately, Zach’s arousal evaporated, leaving his dick limp and curled against his palm as if it needed to hide.

      ‘Brilliant,’ his lover remarked, turning away. He stalked over to the workstation without a single backwards glance and booted up the computer.

      No second chances. No attempt to make this work.

      Ric could be the ultimate fuckwit.

      A reality he kept on proving by studiously ignoring Zach as he buttoned his shorts. There was no point in doing anything else. Zach knew that no amount of squeezing and rubbing was going to get him hard again, unless Ric was the one coaxing him.

      He coughed. ‘I guess I’m going to bed, then.’

      Nothing – the bastard gave him nothing.

      That was what would kill them. Not Kara’s sibling, but Ric’s fucking inability to express himself when it really mattered.

      ‘Night,’ Zach remarked caustically, still half hoping as he hit the spiral staircase that Ric would come pattering after him and shove him hard against the wall. Do him, as he’d once done in anger, against the cold stone steps.

      Even angry sex was sex, and he needed the reassurance of Ric’s body locked tight against his at the moment. Yes, that made him fucking needy, but it had been a weird, weird day. He’d had his libido repeatedly jerked with for over five hours, and no climaxes, leaving him awash with emotions he now had no outlet for.

      He lingered at the bottom of the first bend in the stairwell, pointlessly, he knew, but not entirely without hope.

      Just a goodnight would be nice.

      The silence that echoed both down the stairwell and inside his own head made the centre of Zach’s chest ache. He thought that, when they’d moved in together, they’d moved past this feeling of stalemate.

      Was it really so hard to open your mouth and spit out a platitude?

      The reality was that he simply had to run further to escape it. There was no driving to the mainland any more and cooling off by tearing along country lanes or chilling with his family in front of a giant TV. He couldn’t avoid Ric for days on end until they were both better emotionally equipped to deal with one another, because they were sharing a house, a bed even, on a tiny pile of rocks in the ocean that was cut off when the tide came in.

      You could bet your life the tide was currently in.

      In their shared bedroom, he jerked the pull cord on the bedside lamp.

      ‘All you had to do was touch me,’ he cursed as he curled onto Ric’s side of the empty bed. ‘That’s it. That’s all.’ He’d have done the rest of the work.

      Sighing heavily, he pulled the other pillow over his head. After nine months of living together they were still in the same place they’d been on the day he’d moved in, and he had to wonder if this man would ever let him in enough to find his worm-riddled heart.

       Chapter 7

      Ric didn’t raise his head from the computer screen until long after Zach retired. Frankly, given how unbalanced he felt, concentrating on cycling through hundreds of digital images had seemed the best course of action. He didn’t want to lash out at Zach, who in this instance hadn’t done anything wrong, nor did he want to end up fucking him in a fit of anger, which wasn’t to say he didn’t want to fuck him, because he did. Oh, God, did he. His cock remained as stiff as the rest of him. His shoulders and the back of his neck burned as he tried to straighten up.

      Of course, he could attempt to blame his erection on the photographs he’d been viewing, all of which were erotic in nature, and many of which were of his lovers, but he’d long ago learned to disassociate himself from the media he produced. It rarely affected him now, unless he allowed it to do so. Better to view it rationally, in terms of lighting and composition, than be rendered ineffective by allowing himself an emotional response to it, at least until he reached the mounting stage.

      Mounting…

      His cock bucked at the mere suggestion.

      Damn! This was all the fault of Kara’s brother.

      Chris North’s arrival had ruined everything. Ric had been a hair’s breadth from the most intimate moment of his life. He’d been so in tune with both Zach and Kara that he could feel their orgasms building as if they were his own. He’d wanted his cock bound that closely to Zach’s as he’d climaxed, had wanted the other man’s come on him, like it was a scent marker, or a badge of ownership.

      Instead, he’d had the earth ripped from beneath his feet, and he’d skydived. There was no parachute to slow his descent. At some point he knew he’d hit the ground, but it hadn’t happened yet. He remained in free fall, and the worst part wasn’t knowing he’d crash, it was that careening out of control turned him on.

      Yeah, screw-up that he was, he got a thrill out of having the floor disappear from under him. Yet at the same time he didn’t want to be speeding towards an inevitable pile-up in a car that had no brakes, only an accelerator and a turbo boost.

      Christ, he’d ridden this track before. The only place it ended was heartbreak.

      For days after Scarlett’s death he’d struggled to breathe. Shock, they called it. The medical term for a crippling agony. He’d been a maelstrom of emotions. Too tormented by guilt to articulate what he felt, but desperate to express it. The fact that his veins had been full of drugs and booze at the time had only made the downwards spiral worse.

      You could love somebody too much, until it was toxic. He and Scarlett had been a volatile mix from day one. They should never have been allowed in the same room together. She’d been his whole world, nothing existed outside her. He didn’t want to end up in that space again. But things with Zach and Kara seemed to be forever tugging him along that path, and any form of denial only made it worse.

      He didn’t want them to matter, but they did.

      He wanted to be able to deal with his frustration efficiently, but he couldn’t.

      No strings and no emotions had kept him sane for the best part of seven years; now he felt trapped. There was no option of just going and getting laid any more. Sex was now cocooned within the bounds of a triangular relationship.

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