Page 4 of Finding Jeremy
“I’m out now,” Gray growled, the vibration rippling through the beads of water all along Jeremy’s skin. “That makes you mine. My boy. No one else touches you from here on out. Whatever you were doing while you were waiting on me ends today; is that understood?”
“Gaaaa,” Jeremy groaned, everything feeling so damned good it was difficult to think, let alone make himself form words.
“Asked you a question, boy,” Gray snapped, nipping the skin below Jeremy’s ear. “Are you gonna give me an answer? Are you gonna tell me you still wanna be my boy? Or have you changed your mind about wanting me? I gotta warn you now that I don’tshare, so if you’re having second thoughts, you’d better tell me now so we can stop this before it goes any further.”
“I’m your boy!” Jeremy said, surging up on tiptoes to kiss him fiercely. “And only yours!”
Gray stroked him faster as they started making out again, even as the water went from hot to warm and Jeremy’s knees started trembling and threatening to give out on him. He came pressed to the wall, whining against Gray’s lips, keening as Gray kept right on kissing him and stroking him through it while Jeremy lost sight of which way was up. Everything was hazy when he blinked and tried to focus, the water dripping into his eyes making it much more difficult. Jeremy’s heart hammering in his ears had reduced the sound in the shower to a muffled downpour, muting the pounding of the water against the plastic curtain as he struggled to catch his breath.
He was still blinking and trying to work out which way was up when he felt a soapy cloth glide across his chest as Gray started cleaning him up in between stolen kisses and the gentle sweep of his fingertips against Jeremy’s face each time he tried to brush Jeremy’s hair out of his eyes.
It wouldn’t be an issue soon. He’d already made an appointment at Shear Bliss to have it cut after the way it had nearly blinded him during last weekend’s race, after he’d accidentally broken the elastic putting his helmet on. It had tumbled into his eyes, forcing him to have to yank the helmet off to brush it back and clear his vision, but it hadn’t stayed that way throughout the ride. Old shocks failing to absorb much of the bouncing in the rhythm section and sweaty hair in his eyes had contributed to him going into the drop wrong, but there had been no way in hell he’d have ever given an excuse like that to his old man.
He had way too much pride for that.
He’d miss his long hair though, and the way Gray’s fingers felt gliding through it, even as the water started getting cold and Gray’s movements went from slow, gentle rubbing with the cloth, to fast motions designed to get Jeremy clean so they could both get out of there. It shook Jeremy out of the afterglow when icy water pelted him, and he started shivering before Gray abruptly shut the water off.
“Talk about a mood killer,” Gray chuckled as he shoved the shower curtain aside and reached for the towels Jeremy had left on the counter for him.
“No shit,” Jeremy squeaked, grimacing as cold water slithered down his back. “Might need you to warm me up again.”
“That can be arranged.”
“Wanna put a movie on in my room and just chill for the rest of the afternoon?” Jeremy asked.
Nodding, Gray wrapped one of the large towels around his waist, grateful to see that Chaos had stocked the place with towels a big man could actually wrap all the way around himself without a gap in the front that left his junk flopping around in the cold.
“Sounds like the best idea in the world,” Gray admitted. “I haven’t slept worth a damn in weeks, so if I pass out on you, I hope you won’t be offended.”
“Long as you don’t mind me drawing you while you sleep or braiding your hair for you.”
“Shit, you can brush it out too if you want; trust me when I say you won’t wake me.”
“Bet,” Jeremy said. “Pops said he’s making a pot of meatballs tonight and picked up a couple bags of hoagie rolls and shredded cheese so we could help ourselves when we got hungry. Otherwise, he’s gonna be out back working on the base for the fountain pond he’s been dying to install now that he finally found the perfect statue for the center.”
“Oh yeah, what did he pick up?”
“Something deadass amazing and completely one of a kind,” Jeremy admitted. “It’s half wild mustang stallion and half Harley Davidson. Like one is morphing into the other but hasn’t finished the full transition yet. It’s seriously sick. I wish I’d been the one to dream it up, though I wouldn’t have had a clue about how to actually create it.”
“That might be something I can help you with,” Gray admitted. “You just keep on drawing, and if you have things you’d like to see brought to life, think about how you’d want to display them and the kind of materials you’d like to have them composed out of. Didn’t you say that River works with clay to make unique incense burners for the dispensary so he’s not carrying the same things every other smoke shop has?”
“Yeah, he’s always sketching stuff and coming up with new ideas.”
“There ya go. There’s no reason you can’t do the same.”
A warm, fluttery feeling started tickling around in Jeremy’s belly that had nothing to do with sex, though he couldn’t wait to finally be under Gray, or even better, straddling him and staring down into Gray’s eyes as he rode him. There had been few people in his life to ever look at his drawings as anything more than a distraction that pulled his focus away from the tasks he’d been assigned.
Back when he’d still been in school, Jeremy had several teachers snatch them off his desk when they’d caught him drawing instead of doing classwork. While a few had placed them on the edge of their desks for him to collect on the way out of their classroom, others had balled them up and thrown them in the trash with a stern warning to stop wasting his time on them and focus on his lessons. A few had been downright nasty enough to loudly point out in front of the entire class that maybe Jeremy wouldn’t have failed the last test or quiz ifhe'd spent more time paying attention and less time scribbling in his notebooks. Graduating and getting the hell out of that environment had been one of the best days of his life.
As he stood there drying himself off, he couldn’t stop thinking about how much fun it would be to discover just how much more he could do with his artwork, beyond the comic panels he drew but rarely showed anyone besides Haven and his old man, usually one of them, and something that had happened around the house or the repair shop, were oftentimes the focus of the comic strips he drew.
He’d done several of Loki-Bear and the Notorious SOX back when the kitty had still been living in the shop, including one of him standing on Haven’s back, licking a paw like he was about to settle in for a nap while Haven was still bent over an engine. Haven had loved it so much when Jeremy had shown him that he’d insisted on framing it and hanging it up in the office, along with the one Jeremy had drawn of Loki-Bear and SOX seated beside Haven on a tarp as he worked on a motorcycle, the critters staring at the bike like they were giving him advice on how to fix it.
“Good, you’re thinking about it,” Gray said, hands firm on Jeremy’s shoulders, kneading lightly as he drew him out of his thoughts. “Don’t ever stop. There are too many talented people in the world who let others tell them that their talents are nothing more than hobbies to be explored in whatever free time they have. That’s such bullshit. Parents and the school system need to stop brainwashing kids into thinking that the only acceptable means of supporting themselves are the ones that involve working for others or worse, nameless, faceless corporations that only exist to make the top 1% rich. That isn’t living; that’s existing in the same state as a worker ant.”
Blinking, Jeremy took a moment to really let the words sink in because that was exactly what his school experienceshad taught him. The only person who’d ever sought to balance those lessons out was his father, in that gruff, no bullshit nature of his that started with him referring to those people as twits and ended with him losing his temper and having some loud conversations up at the school when he’d learned about them destroying Jeremy’s artwork. It was enough to leave him curious too, wanting to learn more about Gray than the things he’d been willing to share through the bulletproof glass at the prison.
“Who taught you that?” Jeremy asked.
