Take This Man

  TAKE THIS MAN

  TAKE THIS MAN

  GAY ROMANCE STORIES

  EDITED BY

  NEIL PLAKCY

  Copyright © 2015 by Neil Plakcy.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 609 Greenwich Street, Sixth Floor, New York, New York 10014.

  Printed in the United States.

  Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink

  Cover photograph: iStockphoto.com

  Text design: Frank Wiedemann

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-62778-085-8

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-100-8

  Contents

  Introduction: To Love and Honor

  A Good Heart Is This Day Found • RHIDIAN BRENIG JONES

  Into the Dark • D. K. JERNIGAN

  My Apologies, Sir • KIWI ROXANNE DUNN

  Strangers for the Night • T. R. VERTEN

  Table for Three • JAMESON DASH

  The Road Trip • KITTEN BOHEME

  Never Too Late • OLEANDER PLUME

  A Riviera Wedding • NEIL PLAKCY

  Homecoming • JUSTIN JOSH

  Late Start • HEIDI CHAMPA

  The Last Romantic Lover • LOGAN ZACHARY

  Ink Stained • KRISTA MERLE

  Blue Heart • MICHAEL BRACKEN

  Unwanted Freedom • P. L. RIPLEY

  A Ride Home • BRENT ARCHER

  Wedding Day Jitters • ROB ROSEN

  About the Authors

  About the Editor

  INTRODUCTION: TO LOVE AND HONOR

  The iconic question “Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?” is engrained in the American psyche as one of the central parts of the wedding ceremony. Yet that phrase—and indeed that ceremony—could not be a part of the gay American dream until very recently. Now individual states have legalized same-sex commitments and marriages, and the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the restrictive Defense of Marriage Act, and men all over the country—and indeed the world—are pledging to love and honor each other in the presence of family and friends, often with the blessings of civil and religious authorities.

  Gay erotica, on the other hand, has always been about the thrill of first contact. Meeting, falling in lust and into bed (or whatever’s handy). Exploring a new lover’s body, learning what turns him on, feeling unfamiliar hands and lips on you.

  How can these two traditions come together? This collection of erotic stories aims to answer that question.

  How much sexier can an encounter be when the two men involved have been together for long enough to make some sort of commitment—formal or not—to each other? When you know what turns your partner on, and vice versa, your encounters can be even hotter. When you are making love to a man, not just having sex. When your pleasure is so much deeper because you’re with him, and you have a connection and a history together.

  I hope you’ll enjoy these stories!

  Neil Plakcy

  Hollywood, Florida

  A GOOD HEART IS THIS DAY FOUND

  Rhidian Brenig Jones

  Eight hours after I’d fixed it in place, Iain bent his head to the rosebud in his lapel. “I can’t believe he did this for us,” he said. “I still can’t believe he actually came.”

  “I knew he would, in the end. All the flowers are his way of saying he’s okay with us now. You know my father, he’d never just come out and say it.” I propped the bottle against my hip and turned it steadily, felt the cork give. “Pass me the glasses. Anyhow, all those posies, whatever they’re called, that he made for the girls gave him a chance to show off.”

  He moved the curtain aside and looked down at the hotel lawn. “Party’s still going strong. You’re sure you didn’t want to stay?”

  “Nah, leave them to it.”

  “Reckon your mother’s stopped crying yet?”

  “Your mother-in-law, you mean? Not if she’s still necking the gin.”

  The curtain swung back into place and he turned to me with a slow grin. “My god, I’ve just realized. I’ve got a mother-in-law.”

  “So have I.” I handed him a glass. “You know what she said when I was dancing with her? ‘You’re my second son, Christian.’ Sweet. So here’s to us, Mr. Leigh-Collier.”

  “Still think Collier-Leigh sounds better.”

  “I won the toss, darling, fair and square.”

  “So you did, so you did.”

  We clinked crystal and sipped, savoring the fresh, mineral edge of the Dom Perignon.

  I asked, “D’you feel different?”

  “Yeah, I think I do. It’s as if…ah, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s as if a last piece is in place, everything’s…complete.” He took my hand and slowly rotated the slim platinum band on my finger, the twin of the one I’d given him. “I’ve said it a million times but I want to say it again, I want to say it now.” He raised his face and looked solemnly into my eyes. “I love you, Chris. Whenever you think back to today, remember me telling you this. I love you and I always will.”

  Beautiful hands, my Iain has, strong and well shaped. The last hope for the gasping, blue-lipped babies who are brought to him. Precious hands. I lifted the left and kissed the ring, then pressed my mouth against his palm. “Remember that old Hollywood weepie, How Green Was My Valley, the one about the Welsh village? There’s a cave-in at the mine.”

  “Kind of,” he said, frowning, wondering where I was going with this.

  “The blind boxer. The people try to talk him out of it but he’s determined to go down the mine to rescue his friend. He says, ‘He is the blood of my heart.’ That’s what you are to me, Iain. The blood of my heart.”

  “You’ve been practicing that.” But he flushed with pleasure.

  “I have. I wanted to say it right. Because I mean it.”

  His arms wrapped around me and I cupped his face as we kissed, gently at first, a soft brush to seal what we’d exchanged. But our mouths opened and he pushed against me and I braced my legs for him, my fists in his hair. We broke away to breathe and I kissed his neck and put my hand on his cock and it was full and hard for me.

  “Bed,” he murmured, arching his throat.

  “Bath.” I stepped back to look at him. Iain was tall, too slender, maybe, but it meant that clothes hung beautifully on him; he’d look good in a Mother Goose costume. The restrained formality of the traditional black morning coat somehow emphasized his masculinity, the absolute maleness of him, and it occurred to me that it might be an idea to skip the long soak I’d planned. “You look as sexy as hell in this.”

  “I’ll fuck you with it on if you like.”

  My cock cramped, and for a second I wavered. Forget the bath. Just shove my trousers down and bend over the bed. No foreplay, just get him in me. A wipe of lube, that slight resistance and the long slide in. But I shook my head: your wedding night, you don’t have a quickie. And I’ve always enjoyed the torture of anticipation, of spinning things out.

  He rolled his eyes. “You and your bloody baths. Well, you get the tap end.”

  “They’re in the middle but it doesn’t matter. I want you to lie on me, lie on your back so I can see your cock.”

  He raised an amused eyebrow. “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Why do they float?” I asked.

  “Ask Alastair next time we see him.”

  Iain’s friend, a
consultant urologist. A gay consultant urologist. I reached for the soap and peeled off the wrapper. “I don’t care what you say, cocks up to his elbows, it’s bound to turn him on.”

  He gave an exasperated sigh. “Christ, how many times have we been through this? It doesn’t work like that.”

  “How d’you know? He could be as hard as fuck under his scrubs.”

  “I know. Christian. Hearts are my job, cocks are his. Surgeons don’t get turned on by the job, especially when half the time it’s fixing eighty-year-old dribbles. Geologists don’t get turned on by rocks and shales and, and…sediments, do they?”

  “Course we don’t,” I said loftily, lathering the hair on his chest. I dabbed some on his nose. “But a nice-looking little geode, all sparkly, winking at me…well, that’s a different matter.”

  “Idiot.” He sucked a shivery breath through his teeth as I ran my nails over his midriff and his toes bent reflexively. “Oh, yeah…and here.”

  “The guy I love: part man, part gibbon.” I dug into his armpits, worked the silky fans of hair. Iain loves me to straddle his ass and scratch his back. He hugs the pillow, burying his face and grunting softly as I hash his skin with livid tracks. There’s nothing sexual about it; he just likes the sensation. More often than not, especially when he’s wiped out from work, it sends him to sleep. But sometimes I’ll spread my hands to caress, and my cock gets hard as I sense his response to the change. Down I go, skimming my palms over his sides, the dark puff of hair at the base of his spine, to his buttocks. Kiss him there.

  He said, “There’s something poking my ass and it’s not soap. It always turns you on, doesn’t it, the thought of Al and all his cocks? It’s why you keep on about it. Perv.”

  I flipped water to wash away the foam. “You turn me on.”

  “Do I? What is it about me that turns you on?”

  The way your semen pumps over the back of my hand when I jerk you off. Your tongue delving into my slit. The sounds you make when you feel me coming in your ass. “Your navel. Nice little outie button.”

  “My navel.”

  “Yup.”

  “Your ears do it for me.”

  “Do they? Hmm. Not much point going to bed if it’s going to be all about ears and navels,” I said.

  “Suppose not…oh, might as well. The water’s getting cold. We can tuck up nice and warm. I’ve got a couple of papers in my bag about atrial fibrillation in children. I’ll read them to you if you like.”

  I’d been keeping my eyes off his cock, the delayed gratification thing again, but finally I let myself look. It lay on his belly, fully erect, as rigid now as mine. I swirled a soapy fingertip around the gorgeous circumcised head. “Or we can make love.”

  He covered my hand and pressed. “Or we can make love.”

  One long leg dropped to the side, he lay on the bed in an elegant sprawl. The light from a single bedside lamp gleamed on the curve of his shoulder, the sweep of his rib cage. His muscled flank led the eye to his thigh, lean, dusted with dark hair. My gaze traveled back to the center of him and I watched the glints dance from his ring as he stroked idly, keeping himself at the simmering point.

  “What?” he asked with a lazy smile.

  “Just you.”

  “Like what you see?”

  I unwound the towel from my waist. “What d’you think?”

  We don’t have to ask or explain, not anymore. A look, a gesture, sometimes not even that, is all it takes. So when he raised his eyes from my cock and slid his heels to his ass, I knew the way it would play out. But I said it anyway because I wanted to try the words for the first time. “You want your husband to fuck you, baby?” A tremor passed over his face and his cock clenched, lifting off his belly. The bottle of lube had rolled next to his hip and he felt around for it. I stroked his instep. “Not yet.”

  “Don’t make me wait, Christian.”

  “Just a little while.”

  I have forty pounds on Iain, hard-packed muscle, the result of lucky genes, my place in a rugby front row and the occasional resented hour in the gym. So when I crawled up between his legs I hovered over him, straight-armed. He ran his hands over my shoulders and biceps as if he’d never felt them before and his need for me throbbed in the blood vessels at his throat.

  “Safe. I’m safe with you.”

  “Always.” I lowered my hips and fitted my cock to his and in the last second before I kissed him, very low, almost under his breath, he whispered, “Beloved.” The thought came to me then with eerie clarity, fully formed. Whatever strength is in me, whatever power I have, it’s for you. I will guard you and protect you. I would kill for you.

  “Let me,” he murmured, breaking away with a gasp.

  “Let you?”

  “Suck.”

  I hesitated. Once his mouth was on me, the way I was feeling I wouldn’t be able to hold back and this night of all nights I needed to be inside him. “Don’t make me come.”

  “I won’t.”

  Up, then, on one elbow, he flattened his palm on my breastbone. “I love your tits. I love it that you’re smooth.”

  “Thought it was my ears.”

  “Those too.”

  Lapping like a cat, he worked back and forth, breathing on the moisture trail he made, rubbing the ball of his thumb, gently flicking my nipples. Iain’s aren’t sensitive but when he settled to suckle mine, each rhythmic tug of his lips sent a hot flare to the mesh of nerves in my cock. Groaning at the sensation, I spread my legs. The first time he’d taken me to bed, he’d hurt me. Just that once, never since. A couple of months earlier he’d ended a going-nowhere relationship with another doctor—hot sex, tepid emotion—and he’d misjudged things with me. Maybe lust had made the deft surgeon clumsy for once or maybe he’d simply been used to a guy who was into rough handling. Whatever the reason, he’d tugged too hard and the gray bolt of pain that had shot through my balls made me nauseous. I’d curled away from him, tucking into myself, hardly able to hear his stammering apologies. We all get it wrong sometimes and I’d already fallen heavily for him, so I stuck with it. It had taken some time and more than one heated conversation before I got to the point where the approach of his hand didn’t make me flinch. But that was then.

  His forearm brushed my shaft as he reached down and found that sweet spot behind my sac, pressing just firmly enough so he didn’t tickle. His hand cupping, fingers lightly drumming, he manipulated my balls the way only he can, watching my face, the quivering of my cock. But when he lowered his head and mouthed my glans, I clutched his hip. “Don’t make me come, Iain.”

  “Sure?” He held my shaft at the base and painted the tip wetly over his lips. “You’re sure?” A swift duck of his head and I was engulfed in heat, the bed of his tongue soft, the roof of his mouth hard. Up in a spiraling suck. Down. Up, the maddening drag of his lips. Down. Up, a sly little finger stretching to my hole—

  I pushed at his forehead and eased out, my heart hammering. I sank back on the pillows and dropped my arm over my eyes as I fought back the rise. “Fuck.” He started to kiss up the side of my shaft. “Don’t!” I let out a shaky breath. “Don’t. Christ.”

  He reached down over the side of the bed and picked up the towel. “Do it then. Now, Chris. I mean it. Now.”

  That moment. The man you adore on his back, his hands clasped behind his knees, holding them to his shoulders. His cock engorged, southpaw balls drawn up high at its base. Naked in its ruff of fur, his anus cramps with desire, the sweet pink corona pouting. He’s fractionally dilated and you press a fingertip against the rim to get a glimpse of glistening, rose-red membrane. He smiles at you, he’s waiting for you, and the world is reduced to your own aching cock and this little pursed mouth and your man’s hoarse pleading.

  Mouth to mouth…I kissed him hungrily, my lips soft but the scrape of my stubbled jaw harsh on his perineum and the under curve of his sac. I nuzzled into him, rasping delicate flesh. He’d be sore in the morning, the way he likes. I held his balls
away and slid my tongue into him, easy, easy through the relaxed muscle. Only with him: Iain is clean and wholesome and whatever we do together is an expression of love.

  It takes time to learn a man’s body, to move with him far beyond the default jerk and suck that’ll get anyone off. Iain likes to fuck me belly down, claiming it’s so he can rock on the cushion of my ass rather than grind his bony pelvis against bone, but I think it’s more my submissiveness in that position that excites him. As it does me. But this night I wanted him on his back. I wanted to kiss the taste and smell of his ass onto his face. I wanted to look at him when his orgasm hit. I squirted a coil of gel and began to massage his perineum, up toward his cock, following the thick ridge as it bisected his sac. His balls separated, hanging on either side, dense and heavy. I swept my hand from the root of his shaft to a slithering stop just short of his hole and with the other I grasped him, pulling it gently upward, feeling the responsive ripple as I squeezed and released, squeezed and released.

  “Oh, fuck…”

  My mouth was bone dry. I cleared my throat, swallowed hard. “What, babe?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t. Tell me.”

  His head rolled on the pillow, tossing in frustration. He knew I’d make him say it. “Inside me. Finger me.”

  “Like this?” Just a fingertip at first, teasing dips hardly penetrating the supple ring. “Or this?” All the way in until my palm was splayed against his buttocks and I heard his sharp, gasping cries. His rectum sucked at me, slippery with lube and his own sweet fluid; I could feel a pulse, the frantic beat of his heart. And there…I swept my finger over the plump bulb, caressing, caressing, and watched his cock grow limp: when I do this to him, the sensations in his ass are so overwhelming, he occasionally loses his erection. Sometimes I can make him come, soft as he is, with just my fingers. I looked up along the length of his body, from the wiry bush at his groin to his lovely face, dark eyes heavy lidded, his mouth slack. There was no love in the look we exchanged; there was only the hard light of lust, the primal glare of two men in rut.