Page 12 of Christmas Miracle
SEVEN
In a lot of ways, it was like kneading a block of granite. Brett had dealt with tight muscles before, but these barely seemed to have any give at all. The people who came into see him were, by definition, the sort of people who sought out help for their sore, tense muscles, whereas it didn’t seem to Brett like John had at all. Ever.
But that was fine. It just made it more satisfying when those knots started to melt away, and his fingers could start to dig into the muscles just a little. His fingers ached, and his wrists, too, and all the way up into his forearms, but he didn’t care, barely even noticed.
The scars, he did notice. They were faded into a silvery-purple, a lacing of tissue over John’s torso, hinting at some great trauma. But John had never told Brett anything about what had happened to him, why he had been discharged. He had come home with a broken back, but John never spoke about his time in the military at all.
It made no difference to Brett, the scars. They were sort of pretty in their own way, although he got the sense that John had expected him to be horrified by them. Brett didn’t treat John any differently where he was marked since the scars were clearly old and the damage healed.
The whole time he worked, Brett was very aware of the sound of John’s breathing, the feel of his smooth, warm skin and bunched muscles. Aware of it to the exclusion of everything else. It was necessary. He needed to be in tune with him as much as possible. With anyone he was working with.
Somehow, it was so much easier with John. So deeply satisfying to hear his soft gasps of pain, the tiny noises of relief as the knots loosened, because John was usually so stoic and reserved. Brett had heard people be much louder, but those people honestly didn’t mean much to Brett, and this was someone that he loved. Each tiny noise was a sign of victory to him.
It was so intimate, in a way that it hadn’t ever been before for him. He had always tried his best to help the people who came to him, to give them relief, but it was completely different when it was someone he cared about. He felt connected to John, almost at one with him, and a completely inappropriate thought came into his mind as his fingers probed at the swollen ball of muscle at the base of John’s back.
Was this what sex was like?
He had fooled around, a little. But nothing that he had ever done had felt anything like this. It felt like there was a link between them, or rather, like there always had been, and it was just that neither of them was denying it right now.
And that was before the noise, the slow, soft, deeply sensual, moan, that changed everything.
Brett had never heard John make a sound like that. He was actually fairly certain that he had never heard anything like it. It was a sound of pleasure, of relaxation, and that, he was used to.
But the deeply erotic tone to it, the way the muscles of John’s back, recently soothed, flexed under his skin, that was new. New and way more intriguing than it should have been, given that John was forbidden. His best friend, and his, as far as he could tell, straight best friend at that. Not worth it to push past that, to try to build something deeper when he could lose everything.
He had thought about it, though. So many times, before he caught himself, he had imagined making John lose control, and the noises, the facial expressions, that John might make when he came. That noise that moan, and the slight flex of the hips downward it was so much better than anything he could have imagined.
John’s skin was hot. Hotter even than usual. And the muscles of his ass bunched, obvious even in his jeans, flexing as he rocked his hips toward the bed.
As in tune with John as he was, Brett noticed it all. Every noise, every movement, even the way that John’s ears were flushed and red, he noticed. It wasn’t the first time, he suspected, that he had aroused a client, but it was the first time he had been completely sure, and the first time that it had been John.
For a moment, Brett closed his eyes and allowed himself to have an incredibly vivid, wild fantasy where he went for it. Where he shifted down onto the bed, maybe moved his hands down to cup that ass or pulled John on top of him, so that he could rub against Brett’s willing body instead of against the bed.
But he had never done anything so unprofessional, had never even considered it. John had put himself in Brett’s hands, and Brett wouldn’t betray that trust. He just wasn’t going to do it, no matter how sorely tempted he might be.
God, though, he would love to whisper to John, to tell him how beautiful he was. To see that face and body transfixed not with the pain that was so often gnawing at him, but with pleasure, an intense sensation that Brett would love to try to give him. He was hardly schooled at it, but he had ideas, and he could try.
No. He couldn’t.
He slid his hands smoothly once more down John’s back, and even if part of him, the sex part, the animal part, screamed at him that he was making a mistake, he knew what the right thing was to do, and he was going to do it.
“I’ll be back, I think I heard my phone ring,” he invented. His phone was in his jacket pocket, and his jacket was still in the living room. It would get him out of the bedroom, which was, by far, the most important thing right at the moment.
Just standing by the couch and gripping the back of it, it took him longer than he thought to calm himself down. Every time his heart started to slow, he thought of the smooth movements of that strong body, that sexy groan. His cock throbbed, and though he had never had much of a problem with ignoring it before, he was finding that so much more difficult this time.
He had turned John on. Aroused him. Maybe even made him hard, made him hump against the bed. Slowly, slowly, over the course of more minutes than he would have thought, he managed to bring his treacherous body under control again.
Brett had a massage to finish. The tension in that thick body had been more than he had experienced before, and even with the strangeness that had just happened between them, Brett wanted to help. He wanted this to happen again which meant that he had to learn to deal with this without freaking John out too much.
John’s eyes were closed when Brett came back. He slid the door open and peeked inside, only to be met with a sight that he knew would be burned into his mind for the rest of time. John, spread out on the bed, face both relaxed and oddly intent, eyes squeezed shut, lying on his back.
Pants open.
It was just a split second, but Brett couldn’t make himself look away, couldn’t do anything but just watch, frozen in place. John had eased his cock out, and of course, Brett had wondered what his best friend would look like, but he hadn’t even dreamed that he would be so thick, that the head of his dick would shimmer in the light, drenched with his precum. John’s hand was around his erection, stroking furiously, jerking himself off right there on the bed.
His brain didn’t know what to do with that, how to deal with the surge of bright, red-hot arousal that slammed through his body, making any gains that he had made toward keeping himself under control utterly meaningless.
“John,” he dimly heard himself say, saw the flash of dark eyelashes as John’s eyes opened, a haze of pleasure in them that was quickly replaced by wariness. Like John was worried, of all things, about what Brett was going to do when Brett was already feeling guilty about witnessing this in the first place.
