Page 53 of A Friend in the Glass

“Fuck, you’re so hot.” Rufus gave the button of his jeans a rough tug. “Take these off.”

With a mock grimace, Sam leaned back. He undid the button on Rufus’s jeans. The fly was next. Then he grabbed the jeans and pulled them off, exposing gray briefs. Rufus’s dick pressed against the cotton, and the cold air made his skin pebble. He shivered as Sam dragged the briefs down, making Rufus’s dick bob. Then Sam scooted back and rolled onto his back long enough to kick his jeans free. He’d gone commando, like usual, and his dick was hard, jutting out and up, bouncing slightly as Sam straddled Rufus again and bent to take one nipple in his mouth.

Rufus yelped unexpectedly before smacking a hand over his mouth. He snort-laughed. “S-sorry.” He put one arm around Sam’s neck and the other across his muscular back, pressing Sam down so that not even a single atom could exist between their bodies. He whispered Sam’s name, kissed his mouth, urged him closer still, found their rhythm, and it was good.

So good.

Rufus wasn’t even self-conscious anymore about his tendency to finish in record time. He just allowed himself to exist in the moment, to soak up the touch and sweat and affection and burn, and thank himself for hanging on another day when that sometimes felt impossible to do.

Because Sam was always worth one more day.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

By late afternoon the next day, the crowd at the Javits was even smaller. Smartly dressed men and women still filled the convention center, but it was—according to the program—the last day of the conference, and in every face, Sam could see the fatigue of days spent moving from booth to booth, panel to panel, social hour to networking event to keynote speaker, only to have their nights filled up with mandatory dinners and drinks. Not that he’d ever had to do any of it himself, but it didn’t take much of an imagination.

A quick glance at the map led them to the concierge desk on the ground floor. The woman at the desk was probably in her twenties: a blue dress, dark hair in a bob, a name tag that said ANTARA. She smiled as they approached. It was such a good smile, she didn’t even really need to ask, “Welcome to the Javits Center. How can I help you?”

“We need to page someone at the conference. Uh, one of the conferences. The MoDe US Expo.”

She nodded along as he spoke and then said, “I’m so sorry, sir, but we can’t page individual guests.”

“You can’t or you won’t?” Sam asked.

“I’m very sorry. We can provide a visual page on the directories. And you can ask the expo organizers if they have an online guide or similar platform where they might be able to message the attendee.”

“Just to be clear,” Sam said, “you can’t, or you won’t?”

“All right, killer, stand down,” Rufus warned, patting Sam’s chest before giving his arm a tug. “She won’t do it because she can’t.”

Sam let Rufus lead him away. He eyed the woman at the desk, who was—politely—pretending to ignore him. “Who the fuck doesn’t do complimentary guest pages?”

“This is New York, babe. Nothing’s complimentary.”

“What are the chances Lew’s going to see a visual page, whatever the fuck that is? Or that we can get somebody at the expo to try to contact him?”

“Probably not great,” Rufus agreed. He was still holding on to Sam’s arm. “But I do have friends in high-up places.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I can give Erik a call and let him know about Chad dealing coke from inside the offices of Civic Catalyst. I think that might be worth a little favor in return.”

“About time Erik made himself useful.”

It didn’t take long. Rufus got Erik on the phone—Sam refused to think of him as hiscop-daddy, no matter how many times Rufus used the phrase—and after some haggling, he disconnected with a smile. About two minutes later, a page for Lew Frazer blared over the convention center’s speakers. Behind her desk, Antara leveled a death look at Sam. He didn’tthinkshe knew he’d been behind the page, but then again, it sure looked like she did.

“Let’s find somewhere we can wait,” Sam said.

The open floor plan of the convention center didn’t offer a lot of places for concealment, so Sam and Rufus ended up near the doors, where people seemed to cluster. Some of them chatted in loose knots, while others were on their phones, waiting for a friend or an Uber or something. Their voices bounced back from the glass, echoing, and the heat of the bodies, the smell of slush melting into high-traffic mats, it all pressed in on Sam. He took slow, deep breaths through his mouth, phone out in front of him like he was reading something, and scanned the crowd.

After a surprisingly short time, Lew emerged from the crowd. He looked like shit—his face was puffy, his crew cut was in disarray, even though it seemed impossible with hair that short, and his color was bad. He was dressed in rumpled civvies, and he moved, to put it bluntly, with his head on a fucking swivel.

Sam nudged Rufus and started across the lobby. He made for a point on the far side, so that his trajectory wouldn’t put him on a direct course with Lew. People noticed things like that. The animal part of the brain noticed things like that. Sam kept his eyes on his phone, with Lew in his peripheral vision. Lew stood at the desk, arguing with Antara about something in a way that looked like it was going to send the young woman into not-very-concierge-like behavior. Another fifteen feet. All Sam had to do was get close enough to grab Lew before he could run. Then he’d march him—

As Sam glanced up, looking for a convenient place to talk to Lew, movement directly ahead of him caught his eye.

It was hard to tell who looked worse—Chad or Shane. Chad’s arm hung in a sling, and a cast wrapped from his hand to his elbow. He also wore one of those cervical collars, and it made it look like he was stretching his neck out too far; there was no way it was comfortable. Shane’s nose was taped and splinted, andhe had the holy mother of a black eye. Well, two black eyes. To judge from how he was squinting and not too steady, he also had a concussion—another point for Rufus. Like Chad, his gaze was fixed on Lew.

What the fuck, Sam thought, were they doing here?

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