Rain Storms Ch. 04

"I said that I'd cook for you," I told him.

"I'll help," he offered.

I chuckled. "You only want to help because you won't have to clean afterwards, Goof."

He shot me a sexy, sly, little grin. "I love you."

"Oh get out of my kitchen, Charmer." I playfully shoved him out of the tiny galley kitchen. He allowed me to move him as far as the entrance before he planted his feet.

"Kiss me," he demanded.

I looped my arms around his neck and stretched up to lock lips with him. He pulled my body flush to his with both hands on my back until he let one slide down to cup my ass.

"Forget the food," he breathed, his eyes heavy with desire, when I tried to break away.

"Food first," I insisted as there was a knock on the door. "Get the door. I'll scrounge up something to eat."

He, not too gently, smacked my ass before he went to answer the door.

I heard Sharon's voice exclaim, "Wow. Am I interrupting?"

"Rain's cooking," Eric replied.

"Oh goody! I brought desert!"

"Come in, Sharon," I called out. "We were just about to start making dinner."

She came into the kitchen with Eric following, his eyes glued to the foil covered platter she set on the kitchen counter.

"Do I want to know?" I smirked at her, indicating the platter.

"Mocha cookies," she volunteered.

Eric moaned loudly and reached over her for the platter. "Holy fucking shit! Are you kidding me?"

"Don't eat them all!" I shouted at his rapidly retreating backside as he scurried off with the entire platter. "I'm cooking real food here!"

Sharon snickered. "What are you making?"

"Something fast, apparently," I chuckled. "Otherwise he'll have them all eaten." I pulled the uneaten casserole from the night before out of the fridge and started it reheating.

"Why is he half naked and wet?" she whispered conspiringly.

"We were in the shower."

"Should I go home?" she asked.

"You're welcome to stay for dinner."

"Do you want me to make drinks?" she offered.

I squinted at her. "Do you think you can make them with less toxicity this time?"

She giggled. "Sure thing, lightweight."

"I'm not a lightweight!" I whined, quietly enough that Eric couldn't overhear above the sound of the TV he'd turned on. She snickered and retrieved the glasses. "I wish I had some wine. Eric prefers wine."

"I have some merlot," she replied with a slight frown. "It's probably not what he's used to."

"Ask him," I suggested.

She got a determined look on her face, like she was shoring up her defenses, and stepped out of the kitchen. I followed behind her.

"Eric?" she started hesitantly. "I have some merlot next door. Rain thought you might prefer it to vodka. It's not anything fancy but it's not in a box or anything. I mean, we're having chicken and all but..."

Eric swallowed the bite of cookie in his mouth. "These are amazing, Sharon," he smiled. "I would love some wine, thank you."

Sharon smiled and bounced out of the apartment.

I strode over to the couch, grabbed Eric by the face, and kissed him hard, tasting the espresso and chocolate on his lips. Sure, Eric had better manners than to turn his nose up at her generous offer just because it wasn't up to his expensive standards, but that wasn't why he was being nice to her. He was doing it for me. He knew how hard it was for me to make friends. I was desperately lonely most of the time we had known each other. I just couldn't connect with people. My life had been so fucked up from birth that I simply had no common ground with normal people. I did fine with the geeks that I worked with, but we shared a love/hate relationship with all things electronic. I found it nearly impossible to bond with average people.

"What was that for?" he smirked. "Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining."

"You're a beautiful man, Eric Unger."

He grinned at me. "You must be rubbing off on me."

"I'd like to rub off on you," I leered suggestively.

"That's not an offer that I'm likely to refuse."

Unfortunately, Sharon came back with the wine so any rubbing would have to wait.

After Sharon left, I cleaned the kitchen while Eric spoke with Sheldon on the phone. I caught enough of the conversation to understand that Eric was still planning on doing the commission for Sheldon. He just wasn't going to work for Dylan's firm. I started the dishwasher and picked Eric's shirt up off the floor, left discarded in the hallway. I was intending to hang it up but I only made it as far as just inside the bedroom. I held the shirt up to my face and inhaled. I couldn't help it. It smelled like him and it was intoxicating. It was a masculine scent, spicy with a slight musk and a hint of sweet. I pulled off my shirt and slipped his on, sniffing the collar. His clothing wasn't as big on me as it had been when we first got together but I still looked like a kid playing dress-up in his clothes. I didn't care. It was soft and finely woven and such a deep dark red that it probably looked black in the right light. I couldn't keep my fingers or my face out of the material.

"You can have the real thing, you know. I'm right here."

I looked up to see Eric leaning one shoulder against the doorframe of the bedroom door with a sexy grin on his gorgeous face.

I smiled at him. "I thought you were on the phone."

"I agreed to meet him for a late lunch tomorrow in order to get off the phone. Sheldon will talk forever if you let him."

"A late lunch, you say?" I smirked. "I guess that means that you're in no hurry to get to bed."

He pushed himself off the doorframe. "Oh no. I'm ready to go to bed right now." Closing the distance between us, he threaded his fingers into the hair at the nape of my neck and yanked my head back with enough force to make me yelp. This was Eric's way of warning me that it was going to get rough. His conversation with Sheldon had brought back his jealously over my affair with Dylan. He needed to claim me as his and he wasn't in the mood to spare me any mercy. The red hot desire that spiked through my system had me panting before he'd even really touched me. "Sleep, on the other hand? I don't see any of that in either one of our foreseeable futures."

He brutally took possession of my lips and I melted into his embrace. The sound that tore from his throat at my submission was more of a triumphant howl than a moan. My responding whimper encouraged him to do exactly what I wanted him to do; rip my clothes off and throw me on the bed.

As soon as he'd yanked off his own jeans, he followed me down onto the mattress. He crawled over my body and captured my mouth again. "You'd better be ready for me, Rain," he husked against my already bruised lips. "Now's the time to speak up if you don't want this."

I almost laughed. I wanted it more than words could ever convey. All the sex that I'd had in the past year, including with Eric, had been gentle and vanilla. I wanted to be plundered, fucked, and wrecked. I wanted the sharp intensity. I wanted to blur the lines between pleasure and pain. I wanted to be held down and pounded until I couldn't think or see or breathe. And I knew that Eric would give me exactly what I needed. Instead of a verbal response, I pulled my knees up to my chest, exposing myself to him in invitation. His equally verbose reply was to slide down my body and bury his tongue in my ass. From that point on, until the sunlight snuck through the bedroom window, a vast majority of our conversation was expressed without words.

I knocked on Sharon's door a little after two the next afternoon. She stuck her nose out the door with her foot slightly raised to block Cujo's escape. She was back in her paint spattered overalls and severe pony tail.

"I'm going shopping," I told her, grinning and bouncing on the balls of my feet. "I thought you might want to come with."

"Did Eric leave?" she asked.

I nodded vigorously. "He had a meeting about a commission piece that he's working on. He'll be back tonight. We're going dancing. We haven't been dancing in ages. I love to dance. Do you dance?"

She smirked. "Jesus, you're hyper today."

I nodded enthusiastically. "Shopping?"

She giggled. "Yeah. Ok. Come on in while I change."

I stepped into her apartment for the first time. She had no furniture in her living room. Our apartments faced east, and hers was on the end, so she had two big windows that faced north. They had the generic, off-white, plastic mini-blinds that were pulled all the way open, and they were covered by thick, black-out shades that were also all the way open. I assumed, so that she could control the light. The beige carpet was covered with a tarp and she had a round dining table, scattered with paint supplies, a wooden, three-footed stool, and a huge easel.

I checked out the canvas while she went to her bedroom to change clothes. It was obviously something she was just starting. There were splotches of greens and browns around the edges and faded charcoal lines on the parts that had no paint on them. I couldn't tell what it would become when it was finished.

She came out of the bedroom looking better than I had ever seen her. She just traded the overalls for jeans and sandals, and put on a man's oxford shirt, but she'd taken her hair down and put on a small amount of makeup.

"Let me take Cujo out before we go. You're driving, right?"

"Yes."

"Ok." She smiled and pocketed her keys, ID, and some cash.

"So tell me about you," I encouraged when we were walking around the mall, window shopping.

"Not much to tell," she shrugged.

"Come on," I urged. "I don't know anything about you except that you never seem to leave the house. Don't you have family? Friends?"

"I leave the house," she argued. "I just do it before you. I work from seven to noon."

"And..." I prodded.

"Ok," she sighed. "I'm an orphan. My parents were killed in a car crash when I was a baby so I never knew them. I was raised by my only living relative, my father's mother. She died when I was twelve."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Don't be," she replied. "She wasn't a very nice woman. She wasn't abusive but she was cold. She did her duty and nothing else. I was shuffled between foster homes until I turned eighteen and then I was set loose on the world."

I stared at her hard for a second and then burst out laughing. Her mouth dropped open in shock. "I'm sorry." I grabbed her and hugged her. "I'm not laughing at you. Really. It's just that I was thinking that I finally made a normal friend and here I find out that you are so not normal."

She still looked off-put by my inappropriate show of mirth so I gave her the Reader's Digest version of my early life's story. She smirked. "I don't know how to make friends," she shot out as a challenge on who was more fucked up.

"Neither do I."

"I can't keep a boyfriend."

"I've only had two, ever," I retorted. "One lasted about a week."

"I use sex as a substitute for love."

I upped the ante. "I was a prostitute."

She gaped at me. "Ok. You win."

I huffed on my fingernails and buffed them on my chest.

She giggled and smacked my arm. I laughed and dragged her into a trendy clothing store to find something to wear to whatever club Eric was taking me to.

As I stripped off my shirt to try on the first thing she'd picked out for me, she got a glimpse of my back and gasped. "What the fuck happened to you?"

I chuckled. "Eric bites."

"Holy crap," she whistled. "You like that?"

"Yeah," I admitted. "Nothing screams gay man like a love bite on the back of your shoulder."

She snorted and giggled. "You're a sick man, Rain."

I sighed wistfully, "I know."

After she'd dressed me up like a Barbie doll for an hour, I picked something and then dragged her into a women's clothing store to return the favor. She objected loudly at first but, eventually, allowed me to buy her something. She only relented because I'd, patiently, explained that I was taking her dancing with us if I had to tie her up and kidnap her.

Eric arrived on my doorstep a little before nine. He was all in black leather, pants, boots, and a vest. He was also wearing that bondage belt that he'd had since we'd first met. Just seeing him made me think two or three times about skipping the dance clubs for a more private sort of tango. There were items in my toy box that hadn't seen the light of day for a very long time and I could almost feel the ghost of the leather restraints around my wrists.

Sharon had chosen a skin tight, candy-apple red, short-sleeved shirt for me and some painted on black pants. The whole thing was spandex-y and put me on display more than I was strictly comfortable with, especially since it made my reaction to Eric in leather much more obvious. However, the appreciative look in his eyes kept me from making a last minute change.

Out of the three of us, Sharon was the standout. I had picked the dress, and had seen it on her, but I was still shocked at her transformation. The dress was shimmery and silver, body hugging with strategic cutouts on the sides and back. She was wearing full makeup for the first time and her long hair was dressed in soft waves down her back. She'd forgone the glasses, and opted for contacts, and she looked stunning.

"I'm too fat for this," she mumbled and fidgeted with the clingy material.

"You're not fat, Girlfriend," I rebuked her. "You're voluptuous. And you look amazing."

She glanced at Eric for his opinion and he grinned and nodded. She smiled.

Eric drove us down to Oak Lawn and circled around the streets looking for a decent parking place. "We should be taking her to a straight bar," I opined. "She looks too hot to not get hit on."

"If we go to a straight club, they will kick us out for getting too touchy-feely on the dance floor," Eric pointed out. "There's no way that I'm not going to have my hands all over you."

"No straight clubs!" Sharon exclaimed from the back seat. "I'll just end up attracting some loser who expects me to dress like this all the time and bring him beer and suck his cock while he watches football!"

Eric and I looked at each other and laughed. "That sounds awesome," Eric teased. "Will you suck my cock while I watch football?"

"You don't like football," I retorted. "Or beer."

I held Sharon's hand and tugged her into the club while Eric paid the cover charge. I was paying attention to a reluctant Sharon and accidently ran smack dab into someone. I turned around to find a very familiar face blinking at me through shaggy black hair tipped with electric blue.

"Well hello," he purred with his hand on my chest.

"Jason?" I stuttered in astonishment.

"Justin," he replied.

At least, I thought that was what he said over the din of the blaring house music. "What?"

"Jus. Tin," he shouted. "Jason's my brother. And who might you be, hot stuff?" he cooed, feeling me up through the thin fabric of my shirt.

"Rain," I replied.

"Rain? Like Jason's boss?" He plastered his inebriated body against mine and snaked his arm around my waist. "Wow. Jase didn't tell me that you were so fucking sexy," he moaned in my ear and kissed the side of my neck.

"Erg," I replied, intelligibly. I hadn't been in the door for thirty seconds and this carbon copy of my co-worker was so far past hitting on me he'd entered another dimension entirely.

"Mine," Eric snarled. He reached over my shoulder and pushed Justin's lips off of me with a hand on the top of Justin's head. Then he grabbed me by the waist and jerked me out of Justin's grasp and backwards into his own. "Don't make me fuck you up, boy."

"Oh shit! James! Get your drunk ass boyfriend before he slobbers on my boss some more!"

I turned at the shouting voice to see the real Jason accompanied by a very buff blonde dude with the air of a Viking about him. The Norseman protectively wrapped his arms around Justin and led him off while whispering in his ear. Justin shot me one last lustful look over his shoulder and blew me a kiss.

"Jason?" I shouted over the thundering music. "What are you doing here?"

"Gay brother. Saturday night," he replied and shrugged.

I chuckled. I had definitely picked the right person at work to come out to. I introduced the group to each other and dragged Eric out to the dance floor, leaving Sharon with Jason. I kept a watchful eye on Sharon but she and Jason seemed to be getting along. I even saw them dancing a few times and I hoped that Jason did not like beer and football.

We closed the place down and took Sharon home. I really expected Jason to go home with her but he didn't. I didn't understand why but I didn't ask either. I blew it off to the probability that my expectations were skewed by my history or sexuality. From the way they hit it off, if they had been gay guys they probably would have been fucking in the bathroom.

All three of us plopped down on my couch, side by side. Two of us were more than a little intoxicated. Eric was completely sober. I snuggled up against his side and slid my hand into his open vest, rubbing his firm stomach muscles. At some point at the club, he'd lost his shirt but managed to keep the vest. Now he really was clad in nothing but leather and it was fucking sexy as hell.

"I'm hungry," I purred.

"We could go to Denny's," Eric suggested.

I sat up and swiveled around, straddling his thighs, facing him. "No," I husked. "I'm hungry," I repeated suggestively and kissed him. He slid one hand up my back and the other into my hair, engaging immediately.

I moaned into his mouth and sucked on his tongue.

Sharon giggled, "That's so hot."

I broke the kiss and pulled back. "Yeah he is."

I yanked off my sweaty, sticky shirt and dropped it on the floor then attacked his belt and the button on the front of his leather pants.

"What are you doing, Baby?" he chuckled.

I glanced up from my task, making eye contact, and arched my eyebrow at him.

"We have company," he added.

"She doesn't care," I said. "She'd love to have some video to go with the audio. Wouldn't you, Shar?"

"Hmm," she responded.

I finally got his fly open and stuck my hand down the front of his pants. He wasn't fully erect but his cock was hot in my hand. He grabbed my wrist before I could pull it out of its leather prison.

"Baby. Stop," he said softly.

I squinted at him. "What happened to the man who always threatened to fuck me in public?"

He stared into my eyes. "Are you doing this because you're drunk, Rain? Are you going to regret this come morning?"

"I want to suck your cock, Eric," I replied. "If she wants to watch then she can. If not, she knows how to get home from here. I think she'll be safe walking the fifteen feet to her own apartment."

He stared into my eyes, evaluating me.

"Unless you don't want my mouth on you..." I added in the sultriest voice I could manage.

With his free hand, he pulled my head forward and kissed me passionately. He broke the kiss and whispered in my ear, "Don't hate me for this, Baby." Then he let go of my wrist and draped his arms over the backrest of the couch.

"Fuck yes," I moaned and scooted backwards off his lap. I shoved the coffee table out of my way and knelt on the floor in front of him. I reached up for the waistband of his pants and he raised up to let me slide them down his legs. He was commando and I couldn't stop the moan that vibrated through my chest as his body was revealed.

"Holy shit!" Sharon gasped. We both ignored her.

I was too anxious to fuck with his boots so I left the pants at his ankles. He slumped down a little, scooting his ass to the edge of the cushion to give me better access. I shimmied between his knees and gripped the base of his semi. Circling my tongue around his cockhead, I tasted his sweat and musk. I moaned loudly and my eyes rolled back in my head. Fuck, he smelled and tasted so incredible. There was nothing better than the sight, scent, and flavor of Eric invading my senses. Ryan was sweet but Eric tasted like man. Like my man.