Page 208 of Ride With Me

Chuckling low, Taz rested a possessive hand on Keely’s thigh and squeezed it. “Yeah, I won’t be letting you go anytime soon.”

“Trying to tie me down already, Taz?” Keely purred, drawing out the z in a way that sent a shiver down Taz spine.

Hell, his cock twitched like it was trying to come back to attention and he could tell that Keely knew just what kind of effect he was having on him because the little shit flicked his tongue out again and teased around the edge of his lip.

“You’ll find that I’ve got a knack for finding innovative things to use as bindings,” Taz warned. “If trussing you up is the only way to keep you by my side, then perhaps you’d like a satin rope corset to wear beneath your shirt.”

When Keely’s jaw dropped and he sat blinking for a moment, Taz feared he’d take it for some creepy kind of threat, like he was about to chain Keely up in his basement somewhere with the bones of his previous victims. He was about to apologize and launch into a rambling explanation when Keely’s eyes darkened with lust as a low, rough exhale escaped him.

“Fuck, I love satin,” Keely groaned. “Especially when it’s wrapped around me.”

“Good to know,” Taz replied as he stroked his chin and pictured Keely with a rope pattern running down his splayed thighs, his hands bound together and suspended over his head.

He must have glanced at theoh shithandle, because Keely’s head jerked up and he smiled when he saw it. Slowly, with that teasing smirk on his face, he lifted his arms over his head, gripped the handle, and cocked his head.

“Too bad you don’t have any way of keeping me like this,” Keely remarked with a wink.

“Don’t bet on it,” Taz warned. “But I wouldn’t dare do it in this kind of weather.”

“Raincheck then,” Keely said, until he realized what he’d said and started laughing. “Okay, that is one of the few time that the irony of it makes the saying useless.”

“Guess you’ll have to think of something for sunny days then.”

“Ech, I’ve got seven miles, I’m sure I’ll come up with something.”

“Oh, I’m looking forward to hearing what it is,” Taz said, turning down the wipers now that the deluge had slowed to a light drizzle.

“Then I guess I’d better come up with something good, huh,” Keely muttered. “Challenge accepted.”

The sight that greeted them when the fog finally cleared from the windows drew a chuckle from Taz, who couldn’t quite believe what was taking place.

“What the fuck, seriously?” Keely muttered, rubbing his eyes, and leaning forward to get a better look.

“Guess the storm got them as horny as it did us,” Taz said at the sight of two ducks fucking like bunnies in a puddle of rainwater. The slightly bigger duck was giving it to the smaller one with so much enthusiasm that he kept driving her head under the water. “Man, he’s gonna drown her if he’s not careful.”

“Can you even drown a duck?” Keely asked.

Taz opened his mouth to retort, then snapped it shut because he really didn’t know the answer to that.

“And how do we know she doesn’t like being drowned?” Keely went on, while Taz blinked and shot him a look he didn’t even notice, he was too busy staring at the ducks. “Maybe that’s part of the thrill, like having your airway restricted only his wingtips aren’t long enough to reach. You hear all that quacking? She’s prolly yellinggive it to me, big pappa and I’ll lay you a clutch of eggs.”

Taz lost it then, collapsing against the steering wheel and laughing until tears leaked from the corners of his eyes and he could hardly draw a breath. Was Keely really sitting there making an autoerotic asphyxiation joke about a pair of ducks? And that crack about the wingtips was genius. There was something about a guy who wasn’t afraid to be completely, unashamedly unfiltered, that pressed every button for Taz. Now that he’d found Keely, he planned to do everything in his power to encourage him to stick around for a while.

“Hey, you owe me an answer,” Taz blurted, as the tail end of one of their previous conversations popped into his head.

The way Keely’s face scrunched up when he was confused was so expressive, Taz couldn’t help but chuckle and take pity on him.

“You promised to tell me what happened to your van.”

“Oh, that,” Keely replied as Taz straightened out the truck and got them pointed pack towards the highway, with one final glance at the ducks to see them still going at it. “It’s not nearly as sorted as yours.”

“Uh-huh, so what happened to it?”

“It was weird,” Keely said. “The lights on the dashboard were being weird, but the damn thing was old, so sometimes shit just went wonky before eventually correcting itself. Then the radio started fading in and out, and I was like, okay, it’s a country road, let me try a different channel, but they were all doing it and eventually I just lost the radio completely. I figureddead zoneand kept on rolling, only then the van started getting hard to steer. It was like someone had drained all the power steering fluid out so the littlest correction required way more effort than it should have. A couple miles later I lost power all together and had to coast it onto the shoulder.”

“You sure it wasn’t haunted?”

“I wish. Poltergeists I might have been able to deal with if I got my hands on some holy water and the right banishing spell,” Keely quipped. “Honestly though, at the time I figured it was the battery. The roads were shitty, the kind with four distinct colors of asphalt from all the patching they’d done instead of smoothing everything over. I grabbed my wrench and got out, intent on tightening it and being on my way, only to see the flash of something in the rearview that I thought was the sunset at first, until I realized it was coming from the wrong direction.”

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