*
Amen to that. Coming back to the present, Geoff slowed down for a light. During high school, Chris had figured out that Geoff swung both ways. Geoff had been hesitant to drop those clues at first, but for reasons he didn't examine too closely, he eventually lost that reservation. When he started visiting BDSM clubs on his work trips, Chris knew about that as well. Chris had even visited one or two with him, though he'd get a drink and merely watch what Geoff was doing.
However, awareness wasn't communication. Well, nix that. It was what Sam would call typical male communication--the lack thereof--with a roll of her lovely gray eyes that would make him want to smack her ass, no matter how right she was. They never talked about it. Not directly.
They hadn't been ready to do that, because when they did, the vital current that ran between them, that connected and held their friendship, would be tested and changed. If Sam had never come into their lives, would the catalyst pushing them toward that test ever have occurred? Or would they have been forever content to find sexual release elsewhere and yet remain monogamous emotionally?
No escaping the truth now, because that was exactly what they'd been doing through and past college. It probably helped that neither of them had had trouble finding women for occasional hookups--God bless the sexual empowerment of women.
Yet Geoff was all too aware that the few male hookups he'd had over the years were things he didn't mention to Chris. Not lying, just not talking about them. He expected Chris had guessed about a couple of them, because he was typically a little distant from Geoff a few days after one had happened.
He wasn't sure if Chris had ever had sex with a guy. Even when Chris found a woman, most of the time it took the form of double dates with Geoff. Yet Geoff knew Chris was bisexual, just not as comfortable and open about it as Geoff was. He remembered a time in college when he and Chris were studying for midterms on the bleachers by the track. He'd noticed Chris doing the same thing he was, lazily perusing the fit and form of the male track team. Chris's eyes had come back to Geoff, held there with an unfathomable expression before he'd turned his attention to his studying again.
Always before, Geoff's focus on that memory had been on the pleasing realization that Chris wasn't a hundred percent straight. Now he zeroed in on Chris's expression when he'd looked toward Geoff. Maybe at the time he'd just been too chickenshit to translate it, but the meaning was clear as a mirror right now.
They're not you.
Considering the implications of that, all the possibilities, a picture formed that almost made Geoff miss the next light change. He stomped on the brake and brought his car to an abrupt stop. He stared sightlessly through the red light.
Chris had seemingly limitless patience. He could sit still for an hour, waiting for an injured animal to trust him enough to offer aid. He was loyal, faithful. If he gave his heart to someone, he wouldn't ever fuck around on them.
Geoff swallowed. Shit. Was it possible Chris had never been with a guy because . . . he thought that would betray what he had with Geoff? Yet he'd never come right out with his feelings? What the hell?
That had to be wrong, because Geoff sure as shit knew he wasn't worth that kind of devotion. But if he thought of it that way, the wall he'd kept hitting with Chris these past few days started making more sense.
Chris was patient, but more than that, he was cautious with what he held dear. Hell, he barely let Sam get on a step stool when he was in the house. Maybe he'd settled for a friendship that Geoff himself had valued more than anything, enough that they'd put anything less certain and more volatile on hold. Until Sam came into their lives and showed them that friendship was worth risking . . . if what it could become would expand and surpass it.
Okay, proceeding under the outrageous but strangely fitting hypothesis that Chris had been saving his virgin ass for Geoff, he flipped the mirror on himself. How would he have felt if Chris had ever actually gone after a guy, even for just some down-and-dirty, nasty, pound-him-in-the-ass, no-commitment kind of sex, which was basically all that Geoff had done with a guy? He imagined male hands touching Chris, gripping his fine ass, parting his buttocks to tease him with a tongue, or closing a hot, wet mouth over his cock. Geoff's hackles rose, his lip curling in a near snarl. That answered it, didn't it? Yes. He was a fucking hypocrite, but it didn't change his reaction one bit.
A honk behind him indicated the green light. He lifted a hand in impatient acknowledgment of his distraction and accelerated. Logan had turned him in the right direction. Now he needed to figure out what he was going to do with the information. He'd go home and get some sleep, because he often did his best strategizing when he was under, where his subconscious could toss out the bullshit. He might need a drink to settle his spinning mind, though. Or a whack with the type of blunt object he'd considered using on Chris.
It was near eleven when he came back into the house. He locked the door, activated the security panel and dropped his keys in the stupendously ugly, brightly colored fruit bowl in the kitchen. Sam had found it at a yard sale, and it had become the collection point for things needed when walking out the door. Spare change, extra keys to their vehicles, pens picked up here and there, many of them with the logo of Sam's bank. Clothespins clipped on the edges of the bowl held reminder notes, like the one Sam had left before she departed on her trip. "Pick up organic milk. Happy cow logo." Chris had added "oatmeal" in his large scrawl beneath it.
Geoff slipped open the buttons of the shirt he'd donned to meet Logan and loosened the cuffs as he moved down the hallway. Chris's TV was still on that low drone. Either he hadn't hit the sleep setting or he'd woken up again and reset it. Even on weekends, Chris tended to go to bed earlier than Geoff did, since his system was programmed to be up with the sun, the pathological need for coffee to kick-start him notwithstanding. There was very little chance he was still awake.
Even so, Geoff slowed to a stop. Something had changed. The bedroom door was open. Not cracked or closed. The large rectangle of darkness flickered with the blue-gray light of the TV.
He'd told Chris--rather emphatically, with pretty Dom-like panache, if he did say so himself--that he'd wait until Chris came to him. But that had to do with other things, the undefined Dom/sub nuances between them, how that power exchange would play out. His revelation in the car made this a differ
ent kind of moment. You had to learn how to walk before you could run. Or, as the first Master he'd ever met had told him: "Learn how to fuck; then learn how to top."
Chris was the only man who'd ever seen Geoff cry. When Geoff's mother told him she was staying with his father, despite his blatant and continuous infidelity, she'd given her son a look so distant, it was as if she were someone he didn't know, had never known. "If you can't treat your father with respect, Geoff," she'd said stiffly, "you aren't welcome in our home." Geoff had packed and left.
To this day he didn't really remember making a conscious decision to go to Chris's place. He'd just somehow found himself back at college. The guy lived in an eight-hundred-square-foot box with a postage-stamp-sized patio--one step up from a storage building, but it was adjacent to the organic garden the botany students had started. Chris was allowed to room there because he watered the plants.
Chris sat him down on the patio in a sturdy lounge chair next to a huge pot of white, purple and red flowers, then went inside to get him a beer.
Geoff looked past the patio boundary, at rows of some kind of vegetable he didn't know. It didn't matter, because he didn't see them. He was staring at nothing, and it felt like someone had shot him. His heart seized, his throat closed up and his shoulders were hunched against the pain. When Chris came back to the patio door, he could have retreated without being seen, or done the awkward shoulder-pat thing, but he hadn't done any of that.
He'd come out and set the beer down. As the pain got worse and Geoff started shaking, he'd wrapped his big arms around Geoff from behind, leaning over him and pressing his head on top of his, holding Geoff tight while Geoff let his childhood and his family go with those tears.
When he was done, Chris had given him a light pat, a hard squeeze of his shoulder, and said, "Hey, let's splurge on Luigi's. You know their lasagna cures everything. We might get that waitress with the great smile and the double Ds."
Chris was his best friend. The man he loved. Thinking about how quickly they'd integrated Sam into their lives, how easily they'd fallen in love with her, Geoff wasn't as surprised at it as he'd expected to be. They'd shared so much together; why not love for the same woman? Sam said he was a romantic, and he always denied it, but he couldn't help feeling as if another reason he and Chris had waited on what was between them was because she needed to be part of it all coming together. Maybe he and Chris had so quickly recognized her as the missing part of their three-part puzzle because they'd had nearly fifteen years to learn what love truly was--from each other.
When Sam had stood before him the first time naked, her beautiful eyes fixed on him, her expression and soft mouth had told him everything he needed to know. He'd felt her arousal down to his soul, her craving for submission. Submission to him. His heart had locked up, everything good and perfect about the world right there in front of him. People who cherished a once-in-a-lifetime love didn't realize it could be doubly powerful when it was twice in a lifetime. And at the same time and place. What made it even more of a miracle was when there was no choice to be made between the two of them. Only whether or not he would open himself up to love them with everything he had to offer and more.
Thinking about what Logan had said about loving and cherishing, Geoff thought he'd dig down past his soul to China to find whatever Chris or Sam needed from him. And impatience had its place. Sometimes it was needed to get shit done that probably should have been done a long time ago.