“How about yes as long as nothing is poisonous, or has the ability to eat me?”
“Now, that’s subjective, don’t you think?”
“I think you shouldn’t have been complaining about my use of innocuous if you’re going to turn around and throw out words like subjective.”
Of course Tripp just chuckled and messed his hair up worse than it already was. “Guess that means bending you over a balcony railing twenty-seven feet up is out of the picture.”
Another shiver, stronger than the first. Zakk was glad he was wearing a pair of sweatpants, ‘cause his dick would be rubbing behind the zipper of his jeans right about now.
“Hell no.”
“Hell no to bending you over the balcony, or hell no to it being out of the picture?” Tripp asked, crowding into his space. Prickly scrub brush jutted out on either side of him like spindly tentacles, Tripp’s intense gaze making him wish he didn’t have the very real fear of writhing in the sand in pleasure only to have it all end with a flick of a scorpion’s tail. Licking his lips, Zakk decided that the best way to change things up was to throw some of Tripp’s attitude back his way.
“How about I answer that while fucking you over the railing to the gorge?”
Zakk loved the way Tripp’s eyes got wide, right before he grabbed Zakk’s hand and dragged him past fountains, meditation spaces, and several benches, until they reached the curve in the railing that proved to be the best place to watch the sun come up. While Zakk stood blinking, trying to sort out how everything had shifted left on him, Tripp made short work of stripping off his clothes. Having a pair of boxers land on his head got Zakk moving though. He tossed them to the side and snatched Tripp into a rough kiss before spinning him around and pressing him against the railing.
Part fear, part faith and a whole lot of arousal went in to prepping him quick and rough, the coconut-scented sunscreen he’d taken to carrying in his pocket a huge help. Tripp was the one with the condom though. It was almost funny, how ready they were to fuck like rabbits at the drop of a hat. If this was what it was like to be in a relationship, then how the fuck were Riley and Dez finding so much time to argue with one another?
Thank the gods the railing wasn’t right at the edge. It was close enough to be exhilarating, but not terrifying enough to keep him from performing as he pressed into Tripp, one hand on his hip, the other gripping Tripp’s shoulder.
“Fuck…” Tripp hissed, pressing back to meet him.
They were close enough to the drop-off for him to see the ridges of the watermarks carved in the cliff below them, and the shadowy gray top of one of the few trees that existed out here. It wasn’t twenty-seven stories, more like half that, but he was hard, and Tripp was eager. There was no finesse to the moment, just hard, rough fucking.
Zakk came with slivers of light flashing behind his eyes, but when he opened them, all he saw was moonlight on the tanned skin he’d rested his cheek on, Tripp still bent over the railing and gasping for air.
Movement wasn’t easy, but it was necessary, so Zakk did the best he could to help Tripp stand upright and shamble them both over to the nearest bench. Too bad Tripp decided sprawling full length across it was better than sharing, leaving Zakk to shuffle several feet away and drop on the next closest bench. Okay, so maybe Tripp had a point, flopping was pretty damned comfortable.
It was odd seeing the moon tinged crimson the way it was, or maybe it was just that in the city, the stars were never this bright and the moon always seemed dulled by the glittering neon off too many bars. Might be time to find himself a place away from all those artificial lights. Someplace without so many people, where the roll of waves drowned everything out.
“Ever be a million percent sure you put something somewhere only to find it gone when you go back to get it?”
“I’m never a million percent sure about anything,” Zakk said, though even as the words left his mouth, he realized there was one thing he’d like to be a million percent sure of, and that was that he and Tripp would last once their bands hit the road.
“Well, I am, at least when it comes to things I consider important, like my phone, or the choker my old man gave me.”
“O-kay,” Zakk muttered, confused about the direction the conversation had taken. Unless Tripp was about to tell him things were missing from his room, in which case, they’d have to speak with the manager in the morning, though Zakk couldn’t imagine shit like that taking place in an upscale spot like this. More likely Tripp had misplaced them somewhere, and just needed to look a little harder.
“They were the first things to go missing when our bus was being haunted,” Tripp explained. Zakk’s sex-addled brain needed a few seconds for it to click that he was finally going to hear the rest of the story.
“So the ghost was a klepto.” Zakk mused aloud.
“Pretty much.”
“What else did he take?”
“More like what didn’t he take. For like a week straight shit was constantly going missing. I thought me and Winter were going to come to blows over a stack of missing metal guitar picks, and there was a real live bunkhouse battle royal when Tavis and Shanny got into it over a god damned dragon earring.”
“The fuck?”
“Exactly what I was thinking while I was getting trampled trying to break shit up.”
“So whose earring was it, anyway?”
“They both had one,” Tripp explained. “The problem was, they were each claiming the one they could find, and since they were the exact fuckin’ same, how was anyone supposed to tell the difference?”
“That’s where you go with shared custody and call it a day.”