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  Donnie

  WHEN Donnie Armstrong was sixteen years old, he helped his sister Michelle move in with her roommate, Alejandro Castellanos, and it sorta kinda changed his life.

  Yandro was a nice guy. He and Michelle were both dance majors at the local college and, more importantly, part of a local professional dance troupe that had been catching some buzz for being “inspirational” and “cutting edge.” Of course, at sixteen, Donnie wasn’t entirely sure anything that wasn’t baseball was really much to get excited about, but then he met Alejandro Castellanos, and suddenly men in tights seemed, well, exciting.

  Alejandro had spent the day bending at the knees and lifting Chelle’s boxes of dance crap out of her bedroom, and with every bend, Donnie could see the muscles under his brown Hispanic skin ripple and flex. Yandro was wearing tight spandex shorts and a tank top, so said muscles rippled and flexed in his narrow ankles, his rock-hard calves, his thickly muscled thighs, his trim waist, and his surprisingly wide shoulders. He also had thick, dark hair, the kind that fell from a widow’s peak over one eye, making him look hot and seductive like some sort of movie star or something.

  At first, as Donnie followed him and Chelle around like a gawky kid, he thought he was just impressed by the muscles because he wanted some of his own. He’d been drinking nothing but protein shakes and working out with the baseball team, and still he was more wrists and ankles and knees and elbows than anything else. But Yandro…. Ooooh…. Yandro’s muscles were… big. And flexible. And ripply. And….

  “Donnie, stop ogling my roommate and help me with this box!” Chelle snapped. She was usually pretty nice, but the move had stressed her out, and there were going to be tears and sadness with Mom and Dad, so she was taking it out on Donnie, which was sort of his job, right?

  Donnie grunted, because his job may have been to take it, but who wanted to be that nice to your sister, right? “Keep your pantyhose on, I’m coming.”

  “Yeah, you keep staring at Yandro’s ass long enough, you will be!”

  “Chelle!” he protested. “I’m not gay!” Except his voice cracked up at the end of the word “gay,” an octave break high enough to make Chelle arch a perfectly sculpted eyebrow up at him.

  “Who said anything about you, dumbass? I was talking about Yandro. And he’s a real manslut, too. He must pick up a different guy a week!”

  Donnie goggled. “Yandro’s gay?” But Yandro was so… so cool. He had that cool Venezuelan accent, and he talked about poetry and dance and passionate music, and… and…. Oh God.

  Donnie fumbled his end of the big box he was helping his sister move, and Chelle swore at him.

  “God, Donnie, you’re practically useless. Nut up and pick this thing up like a man!”

  Donnie did and tried to ignore the fact that Yandro had just doused himself with the hose on his mom and dad’s front lawn, and that his white spandex dance shorts were wet in the front, and the muscles across his back were not the only things that were big and frightening and rippling.

  Oh my God! Alejandro had the biggest fucking cock Donnie had ever seen!

  Donnie tried to control his breathing—and his hard-on, and his hyperbole—as he helped schlep that damned box out to the borrowed truck. Of course Yandro had what appeared to be the biggest cock Donnie had ever seen. It’s wasn’t like Donnie spent his time checking out the other guys in the locker room, right?

  Well, everyone except Chase, because Chase’s cock drooped halfway down his thighs when it was wet from the shower, and what guy didn’t want to see one that did that, right? It didn’t mean he was gay, it just meant he was curious. Everyone wanted to know what other people looked like, right? Because Chase’s cock was long and thick, but Kevin’s was short and thicker, and Donnie had tried to imagine that thing in some guy’s… girl’s mouth. Would soft pink… red lips be able to take it? Would you be able to see Chase’s blond stubble if he was working that thing in his mouth? It wasn’t a gay thing, it was a man thing, right?

  Donnie talked to himself right up until they got the box on the edge of the tailgate, and then he used his hips to thrust the box in and almost doubled up in pain and arousal. His cock was as hard, as painfully swollen, as it had ever gotten.

  “’Scuse me, Chelle,” he mumbled. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

  He practically ran through the house to lock himself in the bathroom next to his own room. Once he got there, he dropped his pants and thought of Alejandro’s full lips and those brown/black eyes gazing up into his face while those lips, with a little bit of a mustache on the top one, wrapped around Donnie’s cock and sucked.

  Caught up in the vision, Donnie wrapped a trembling fist around himself….

  And came, hot, hard, all over his stomach, chest, and thighs.

  He leaned back against the bathroom door and trembled, rubbing the come into his lower stomach, into his chest, into his thighs, and then, when it started to get hard again, over, around, against his slick and pulsing member.

  His second climax didn’t take much longer than the first, but with his third, he had just enough time to pinch his nipples hard beneath his other hand and then reach down and cup his testicles before he exploded.

  His arms and legs were shaking and his heart was pumping hard in his throat, but still, he jumped into the shower at Mach 5. He was outside and helping to shift the last of the boxes before Chelle and Yandro missed him.

  He made a point to be polite but distant to Alejandro for the rest of the day—to nod and to speak when spoken to and do everything Yandro asked him to do—because he didn’t want to attract the man’s attention, not even a little tiny bit.

  Donnie figured he had enough to think about before he dealt with the way Alejandro’s white smile in that soft, lush mouth made him sweat, or the way a brush from Yandro’s hands on his own, or a shoulder bump, or even a careless laugh made a cock that, by all reports, should be resting, limp and asleep in Donnie’s shorts after a hard day’s work, wake up and start sniffing around Chelle’s roommate with some serious tenacity.

  So for the day, and the day alone, Donnie pretended his cock and his pulse rate and his tightened nipples and the sweat that kept forming on the back of his neck were all rogue body functions. They were functioning outside his control and without his permission, and he would ignore them all until he got them all alone and gave them a stern talking to about what was expected of them and what he should be looking at to provoke those reactions, as opposed to what he was looking at when they decided to go all hyper-sex-drive and adult on him.

  And in the meantime, he’d keep sneaking miserable, covert glances at Alejandro and pretending all of those rogue body functions weren’t totally set on hyperdrive by that brown skin, ripple-y muscles, and the sound of that lilting, accented voice cursing at Donnie’s sister.

  Alejandro

  OH GOD. Who was in his bed again?

  Alejandro rolled over and suppressed a groan. Oh shit—another freshman dance student, Steve something or other, Jesus, when would he learn not to sleep with the new people just because they were hot?

  “Steve” (or whoever) had sandy blond hair and freckles, and sort of the clueless look of a Siamese cat with a butterfly on its nose, and he was looking at Alejandro just like that in the pre-morning dawn.

  “Uhm, Steve?” Alejandro said, hesitating because this next part was going to make him a class-A dick, and as much as he couldn’t stand to have someone in his bed past dark-thirty a.m., he didn’t like being a dick.

  “Yeah, dude, I’m gone!” Steve said, hopping up out of the bed and rolling to his feet with remarkable good nature.

  Alejandro blushed and sat up, the white sheets of his predominately white room wrapped around his hips. “Thank you,” he said politely. “I
appreciate it.”

  Steve’s wide-eyed look was as guileless as a stoned kitten’s. “Dude, no. Totally my pleasure. Man, they all told me you were hot, but if I got a chance to get some, I needed to bug out.”

  Steve came around front, one half of his underwear on, the other half in his left hand. He reached out unselfconsciously with his right and Alejandro took his hand and shook it automatically. “They said…?”

  Steve nodded so hard he lost his balance and had to set his foot down while he was trying to put it through the other leg of the boxer briefs. He got the foot in and the underwear pulled up over his (admirably hung) body, then went rooting around on the floor for the jeans he’d worn to the bar the school dance troupe had ended up at after they’d buggered out of the student union.

  “Yeah, you know. The other kids in the troupe.” He looked at Alejandro with those wide eyes and licked his parted lips without a trace of suggestiveness. He really was just low-hanging fruit, wasn’t he? “They all said you fucked like a god, but you didn’t do second dates. I was like so game!” He found his jeans and his tight ringer T-shirt in short order, and Alejandro watched in bemusement as he slid into a pair of loafers without socks. It was fall, but it was also the Sacramento valley, and Alejandro wasn’t surprised when Steve didn’t have a sweatshirt. As far as Alejandro remembered, all the guy had brought inside with him was the wallet and the keys stuffed into his pocket.

  Steve smiled sweetly then and walked around the bed completely dressed. He bent down and gave Alejandro a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks, dude! Get some sleep, man. The weekend ain’t long enough, you know what I mean?”

  And then he was gone and Alejandro flopped back into his bed with a groan. He woke up a few hours later to hear Chelle unmercifully banging pans as she cooked breakfast for him.

  He showered and put on some jeans before wandering out to the kitchen for some coffee. The white carpet was thick and luxurious under his feet, and the bright Alfredo de Silva prints winked neatly from his walls. His house was… well, it was damned posh, and he knew it. His family back in Venezuela had been modestly wealthy in the fifties, with plenty of farm property, but after oil was discovered on that farmland they had gone from modestly wealthy to extremely wealthy. The truth was, Alejandro’s setup in his little corner of the world was pretty austere for the standards of his family.

  As long as they left him alone and didn’t come barging in to question his choice of lifestyle or bedmates, Alejandro could stand their idea of “austere.” His mother had an army of domestic help and changed her kitchen as often as she changed her diamonds. Alejandro had a nice house off of Fair Oaks and Arden with a roommate because he didn’t want to live alone.

  Of course, that didn’t mean Chelle didn’t come with her share of “mother” as well.

  “Nice, Yandro,” she said pleasantly as he padded into the kitchen. “Did you at least wait until the condom hit the trash can before you kicked him out of bed?”

  Alejandro sighed, because this part had rankled. “Apparently, he got the company memo,” he said, snagging his customary white ceramic mug and pouring the coffee. He gave Chelle a budget and she shopped… and she bought them the best stuff. Totally worth having a roommate.

  “Which read?” Chelle asked, grinning. She was usually in good spirits, and he liked that too.

  Yandro grunted. It was embarrassing, mostly because it was true and Chelle knew it.

  “Alejandro Castellano, the great gay lay,” Chelle filled in with a wicked smile. “Totally worth the trouble because one night really is enough!”

  Alejandro put his face in his free hand. “I’m a total manslut,” he said miserably.

  “You really are,” she agreed. She set down a plate with one egg, lightly scrambled without butter, half a grapefruit, and dry white toast. Alejandro looked at it a little despondently; it was a dancer’s diet, but seriously. Once, right after his last real breakup, she had made him eggs scrambled with bell peppers, onions, cheese, and sausage, and it had been wonderful.

  Alejandro looked around his plush, white, aesthetically sublime home. Sometimes he felt like this house: he lived his life severely, and his only bright spots of color were the one-offs he brought home.

  Most of his life was as plain as this breakfast, and just as appetizing.

  “It wasn’t like he was horrible,” Yandro muttered glumly, putting his eggs neatly on his toast and taking a bite. “He was actually very sweet.”

  “Then why didn’t you ask him to stay?” Chelle ate oatmeal with cinnamon and a little bit of sugar. The sugar was harder to work off, but she said it was the only way she could eat the oatmeal at all. Chelle’s family—mother, father, little brother—they were all about embracing joy in the same way.

  Alejandro would visit them with Chelle, playing it cool, not saying a lot, pretending to ignore the way Donnie seemed to follow him around like the big brother he had never been, and the entire time he’d be wishing they would show him what it was like to live in a house where there was color around every corner and where the oatmeal had to have cinnamon and sugar in it.

  He visited as little as possible. He was afraid he’d reveal that terrible longing for a house with green wallpaper and ruffles on the rose-colored couches.

  Chelle cleared her throat gently. “Yandro?”

  Alejandro sighed. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I don’t think I know how.”

  Chelle hmm’d in her throat and patted his hand where it sat next to his plate, but didn’t say anything. What was there to say? He was stupid—rock stupid—when it came to relationships. He had the pretty house, the pretty furnishings, and even the pretty life at school and in the troupe—but even with all of that pretty white life, it still felt like he needed a rainbow bucket and a brush set on spatter.

  “Maybe I should get a dog,” he said out of nowhere, and Chelle brightened.

  “Absolutely! Can we pick one out today? Donnie said he wanted to talk to me about something—we could bring him!”

  Alejandro grunted and took a bite of his grapefruit, enjoying the splash of color on his tongue if not his life. “Your little brother looks at me weird,” he grumbled. “Makes me want to check the fly of my jeans.”

  Chelle stuck her tongue out at him. “He’s got a terrible crush on you,” she said, and her reproof was clear. She could be sharp when she needed to, and she did seem to have a soft spot for her blonde-haired, blue-eyed, admittedly yummy little twink of a brother.

  “I didn’t know he swung that way,” Yandro said mildly, and Chelle rolled her eyes.

  “If he’s not, he probably just wants to ask you for your workout regimen,” she retorted tartly. “But I’d give him more credit than that.”

  Alejandro thought about his own family, just as glad he took his unhealthy desires and effete lifestyle far, far away from them. It was probably better for Donnie if he was looking for a way to work out.

  “Would your family freak?” he asked, hoping against hope. Chelle’s mother was comfortably plump and had a habit of losing her car keys before she had to leave for anywhere. Her father was one of those laughing, jovial men who always remembered a joke and actually had the timing to tell them and make you laugh.

  Chelle shrugged. “Probably not. There will be drama, I’m sure. Mom’d cry, Dad would pretend it doesn’t bother him and then come home with every gay joke he’s ever heard and start asking Donnie if he finds them offensive—you know, your garden-variety my-parents nightmare—but nothing that’s going to scar him for life.”

  Alejandro nodded and resigned himself to the boy going with them to pick out the suddenly desirable dog.

  “How lucky for him,” he said drily. Only Alejandro knew how much he really meant that.

  Donnie

  OH GOD, who would abandon this dog? A full-blooded Samoyed puppy—oh geez, she was cute. And she liked to lick!

  Donnie sat on his knees on the small piece of carpet over the concrete at the rescue shelter.

 
; “She’s an awesome dog,” said the volunteer at the shelter. She was sweet, a college student getting over the acne years, who had responded to Donnie’s big smile and open enthusiasm like a flower to a soak in the sun. Donnie wouldn’t kill that by telling her the truth. For one thing, he’d discovered that actually trying to get a guy to like you was a lot harder than smiling at a nice girl because she was nice and you were getting her to help you out. Donnie was willing to take some pleasant company and a little bit of flirting simply because he knew nothing would come of it but watching another person smile.

  “Why is she here?” Donnie asked, acutely aware of Alejandro regarding him like some sort of indulgent uncle.

  The volunteer’s face (Chelsea—her nametag said Chelsea) fell a little. “Her owners were a really nice middle-aged couple, but the wife got sick, and she was the one who would have cared for her. Her husband was really upset about giving her to the shelter; I promised we’d find a really good home. She’s not great with kids right now, you know? She’s sweet as anything, but she needs a lot of exercise. She might be better in a few years, but right now, she needs to be someone’s baby.”

  “Will she get along with other animals?” Donnie asked seriously. Chelle had asked him to come pick out a dog for Alejandro, but he knew for a fact she liked cats. Hopefully he could talk her roommate into getting a cat too.

  Chelsea shrugged. “I think so. After a good workout in the yard, she’s really quite a cuddler. When Samoyeds are taken care of and run out and babied a little, they can be surprisingly accommodating.”

  Alejandro made a little sound, and Chelle echoed it. Donnie looked over his shoulder at them and saw a reluctant “no” in their body posture.

  “What?” he asked anxiously. This dog loved him, and Alejandro, who had treated Donnie with nothing but politeness since that day spent moving two years before, had actually unbent a little around her and crooned low words in Spanish that had made her tail wag. (They’d made something else in Donnie wag, but he was getting better at hiding that sort of thing.)