Brian "Beef" Carroway thinks he's gay. No, he knows he is. He's gruff, buff, and overcompensating for his big size and soft heart. Brian's the badass bouncer at Mosh rock club where Cajun singer Jack Cotille moonlights for the month of December.
With a voice like sin, Jack is walking, talking, sexy temptation in the flesh. He's also fly-by-night, possibly homeless, and chancing everything on a wing and a prayer. Just about the only thing Brian is sure of is traveling man Jack belts out dirty rock lyrics while promising the kind of pornographic sex he's only fantasized about.
He's definitely gay for Jack.
One Christmas kiss leads to a night of heaven, a morning of hell. The holiday week leaves Brian aching for more than his wanderer singer can give as the New Year's Eve countdown begins.
1
Christmas Eve Hustler
I strode inside, the last of the partiers' IDs checked and the club at full capacity. Steam rose off my leather jacket and I stomped my feet, heavy as glaciers with wet snow the icing on top. It'd been a rare cold snap in Charleston, sleet slaking off me like a second skin. I slid out of the jacket and handed it off to Jane so she could stow it behind the bar.
Jane was the owner of Mosh, one of the most popular live music rock clubs in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. It went with her downhome, family style eatery next door: Nosh. An odd combo for the stunning late thirties-something entrepreneur but it worked.
As usual, Mosh had brought in a big Christmas Eve crowd even though it was a weekday night. The vaulted room of the refurbed cathedral busted at the seams like a pair of leather-laced pants too tight for their owner. The usual mix 'n' match hoard of customers drank, danced, and did a lot of groping in dark corners that weren't nearly dark enough. Black, deep blood red, and almost violent purple completed the color scheme. The bar was a glossy midnight color, the lights--dimmed to pinpoints set into the ceiling--looked like stars. The massive stage took up half the place and it was swarmed by a neverending wave of writhing dancers.
Jane said hi, which consisted of her bobbing the bright blond spikes of her short hair in my direction and giving a meaning-filled glance at the singer headlining the band. She kept it silent because I wouldn't have heard her over the reverberating noise of the southern rockers lighting up the stage or the roar of the fist-pumping, hip-grinding groupies on the floor.
I rolled my eyes and ignored my boss. The one who had almost the same haircut as mine, although my crew cut was more about easy maintenance and hers was about badass-bitch style. In fact, Jane and I were often mistaken for brother and sister. Same golden complexion, same brown eyes remarked upon as unusual in fair-haired folks. Of course whereas she was slender, I was a bulky mass of muscle topping out at six-foot-three, which made me an excellent resource as Mosh's one and only bouncer.
The fact I scowled more often than smiled was a bonus for the job too.
Yeah, she was totally feminine, I was completely masculine. One hundred percent man. Macho through and through. And finding out I was increasingly attracted to other men. Or man. Specifically, the one up on stage Jane had so unsubtly pointed out to me. The gruff scowl-frown expression I usually worked slid away in favor of a rare smile as I settled an elbow on the bar and enjoyed a little session of listening and staring.
In shirtsleeves and leathers, I should've still been shivering with cold. The thing that warmed me to the bone was Jack Cotille. He jammed with Cotille and the Crazy Boys, sweat slicking his shirt to his skin. Skin flushed with heat, strained by muscle as he stroked his guitar. Belting out dirty rock lyrics, Jack stoked a raging blaze in my groin.
I pounded the one beer due to me during my shift and sat my ass on a stool.
I stared at Jack as I had all month and the one before too. A moth to flame and wings incinerated by fire.
At one a.m. their session ended, the club closed an hour later, and I was free to go home. Except I kept seeing visions of Jack strumming his guitar—strong forearms clenching and relaxing, wide wrists turning and tensing. Jack, pulling up his T-shirt to wipe the sweat from his face, revealing a sectioned abdomen and a trail of dark hair from his belly button to the top of his faded, holey jeans. And sweet Christ, his bragging-rights biceps, twin tantalizing mounds of muscle I wanted to sink my teeth into. The way he'd always blow a kiss out to the crowd at the end of a set. His red mouth plump. I thought about those pursed pouty lips wrapped around the head of my cock.
****
It was the tail end of Christmas Eve. Maybe he could be my Christmas Steve.
When I laughed at myself, it was so cold at stupid o'clock on the morning of the twenty-fifth of December, the air froze in front of me in 'ha ha' puffs of breath. This time I wasn't gonna walk by Jack as I ambled along Market Street. I wasn't gonna watch him from across the road as he stood beneath the wreath-wrapped lamppost, plucking his acoustic, busking for spare change from the last of the holiday revelers winding their way home. All around, the marketplace was festively decorated, bright with colored lights, done up like a high-classed whore putting on her best finery.
But Jack's black hair and his deep blue eyes shined brighter than any Christmas decoration ever could. I wanted him off the streets and in my bed. In my arms.
Every night I'd followed him, pretending I wasn't stalking him but rather investing a healthy interest in his welfare, I'd never seen him leave in the same direction twice and I drew the line at following him home. Mainly because I didn't think he had a home and that would just break my fucking heart.
And it was Christmas.
Okay, not that the holiday had anything to do with it. I wanted Jack period, any way I could get him, and had done so since the second I'd seen him on stage at Mosh last month. He made my cock ache. He made my fists clench because I wanted to touch him so much. Goddamn, he made my guts twist with need.
Flatpicking the strings of his Hagstrom Siljan guitar with one of the picks he stowed in his back pocket or flipped between his fingers like lucky poker chips, he looked up when I approached him.
The undeviating eye contact shivered up the base of my spine.
His fingers stilled on the guitar and his voice—low and rich—melted into the air mid-riff. If he pawned that damn guitar he'd probably make enough money to quit with the busking for extra cash. Another case of beauty over brains. And had I just called the man beautiful? Yeah . . . yeah I had.
Little strummer boy.
A dash of black hair met the high slope of his cheeks, pink from the cold. The unearthly blue eyes, which always twinkled or teased, got straight inside my gonads. Innocence and sin combined in one talented package destined for fame or self-destruction. Goddamn Jack Cotille had interrupted my regimented black and white and boring life in a major way.
Every night he worked at Mosh I watched him barge out the alley door. Two guitar cases slung over his shoulders, picks in his loose back pocket, his lips tilted in an easy grin even when he huddled inside his beaten-to-hell-and-back leather jacket.
"Need a lift home?" I'd call out to him. Those four words formed the sum total of my stellar conversational skills when it came to him. What I always intended to say was:
Come back to my place so I can find out how warm and delicious your mouth is, so I can find out what it feels like to touch and suck and fuck another guy's cock.
His reply was always the same too. Devil-angel-temptation. "Not unless you're ready to hit this."
And I'd stare at his ass-on-offer, the perfect curve of it cupped inside his worn jeans, so ready
hit that
my mind raced with the image of fucking him against a brick wall. But I never answered, my brain having decided fun fantasies were all the action I was gonna get. He'd chuckle then start to sing as he strolled off into the dark beyond the streetlights. I'd cling to the last notes of his voice. Jack's guttural Cajun accent dissolved into sexual grittiness when he sang, making every single song sound like a hot, rough, sweaty ride between the sheets. Or raw fucking in a dark alley with jeans shoved down to our thighs.
I glanced into the alley behind Jack, breaking contact with his seductive eyes before mine gave away my raunchy thoughts . . . although I supposed the substantial bulge in my pants was doing that for me. That and the rough swallow I forced down my throat.
