Page 143 of Good Losers (Lochkelvin Academy)

49

The Beaumont stands large and proud and squarish, central to the city, at the corner of one of the busiest thoroughfares. It looks old in a way that rivals Lochkelvin, with hundreds of glittering windowpanes reflecting moonlight and streetlight, and a series of heavy embossed flags fluttering lightly above the entrance in the cool night breeze. A luxurious red carpet leads from the street and into the gleaming revolving door of the hotel, while a formal-looking doorman in a shiny black hat waits to greet us politely to break up his nightshift.

A few yards from the hotel, a dozing homeless man sits cross-legged with a piece of cardboard aloft in his lap, a chipped polystyrene cup in front of his legs.

I notice very little of this on a conscious level, instead flicking a worried glance every so often in the direction of Luke and Danny.

I worry that I’ve fucked everything up.

Playing games in public with the head of the chiefs could have cost me the friendship I hold most dearly. Anyone with a bit of sense would claim they weren’t in the right mind. They’d blame material things: of too much grinding on the dancefloor, of shots and pills and neon lights, of giddy laughter and constant touches. They’d blame Rory’s velvet, suggestive voice, or at the very least the too-lickable beauty of his cock. They’d blame an instinctive urge to pleasure and placate. They’d blame themselves and feel bad.

They’d feel shame.

At least a modicum of it.

At leastsomething.

I turn this over in my mind as I gaze up at the tall, imposing hotel where we plan to spend the night together.

I don’t feel shame.

In my roiling, mixed-up head and heart, shame is an emotion, like much of the others, that’s curiously absent.

No.

Instead, eclipsing every single alternate, is the realization that I’m very, very,veryturned on.

I would suck Rory’s cock in front of everyone in a squalid taxi, over and over again, if it meant making him break beneath me like he did tonight. If it meant making him moan with the kind of explicit eroticism that shoots straight down my belly.

I’m drunk on lust and chemicals, on hormones and something that might just be love. The lack of inhibitions is freeing, but the worry… the worry is an irritating, constant gnaw.

Danny doesn’t meet my eyes. He studiously avoids me, though his jaw has been slack and his mouth softly parted ever since he stepped foot from the taxi. He walks toward the hotel, carrying the birthday balloon, apparently in a daze.

Luke, on the other hand, seems unable to do anything other than stare at me. The dark eyes of his impassive, princely face roam me as though searching for answers, answers that will help make tonight make sense. I give him a small smile, like all is well in the world, and, looking somewhat confused, he returns it.

To no one’s surprise, Rory strides on ahead. He passes the doorman with a brief nod and no comment, swanning into the hotel like it’s his birthright.

Finlay hangs back. “You okay?” he mutters, his fingers grazing mine, almost but not quite catching them. The ink on his forearm is wild and bright, the rainbow scrawl almost professionally pretty, like Finlay had taken an age to design it, to cover his arm in the showstopper ink that would represent tonight.

“Yeah.” It’s not true. I’m fuzzy and warm and flushed all over, and I wish Rory had scooped me into his arms and soothed me, had told me everything was going to be okay, instead of leaving me to contend with the blank bafflement of the others. But as Rory hunts for a place where we can all rest our fried heads for the night in safety and comfort, I know this is his way of making me stronger, of making me stand on my own two feet. Is it any surprise, then, that it’s Finlay who’s left to pick up the pieces? That it’s Finlay who knows exactly what I want without voicing it?

“For whit it’s worth,” Finlay whispers intently, “I thought you were fuckin’ magnificent.”

A tremulous smile splits my face.

“C’mon.” Finlay guides me up into the hotel. As he nods at us in welcome, the doorman’s gaze lingers on us with curiosity. I wonder, with slight paranoia, if he can tell what’s just happened. If he can see the wild, naked lust on my face; if he can see — and here I lick my lips, trying to wipe them clean — the telltale remnants of cum.

I enter the revolving doors, its rotation doing nothing to appease my spinning head, and almost collide straight into Danny.

He gazes up at the hotel lobby in quiet amazement. It’s a luxurious beast of a lobby, with marble mantelpieces and cozy, expensive-looking velvet armchairs. Plants tower from vast decorative pots, trailing upward along the wall. The floor is glossy with polished checkerboard linoleum.

When Danny notices me standing beside him, his face turns tomato-red.

“I, uh…” he begins, in a desperate attempt to fill the silence. “I… uh…”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“You…” he tries, and then bites his lip, thinking better of it. “I don’t know what to say.”

---