No Sacrifice Page 4

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rhys said, but there was something in his voice that made Patrick look up. Rhys didn’t look happy, exactly, but he didn’t look precisely unhappy either. In fact, Patrick couldn’t decipher the expression on his friend’s face because Rhys didn’t seem to be able to look directly at him.

  With a quick glance around to make sure no one was looking, Patrick managed to adjust himself and stand up. “Uh… are you okay, dude?” he asked, though he couldn’t quite meet Rhys’s eyes.

  Rhys nodded. “Yeah, fine. Just… glad that part’s over.”

  “Yeah, me too. Come on, let’s get food. We still have another scene yet….”

  Rhys made a face at the reminder but followed Patrick to the catering tables. “Yeah, yay….”

  Patrick laughed, finally starting to feel a little better. “Come on, it won’t be that bad. At least there’s no kissing involved.”

  “Thank God for small favors,” Rhys muttered, and Patrick laughed again.

  “Indeed.” Patrick gave another chuckle, though this one contained a bit less humor. Why did Rhys’s relief bother him so?

  As they walked away, Chance melted back into the rest of the crew who had been working on the scene. He was… floored. He was having some major trouble processing what he’d just seen. Despite Rhys’s attempts at helping Patrick hide it, Chance hadn’t missed the tent in the front of Patrick’s pants.

  When the call went out for dinner, Chance turned and wandered slowly toward the food. His mind was a mess as he tried to sort through what he’d seen. There’d been nothing but Rhys, nothing but the scene, as far as Chance could tell, to put Patrick in the state he’d been in.

  Was Chance wrong? Was Patrick something other than straight?

  He got into line and continued to turn it over in his mind. Even if Patrick Tearney was bisexual, it wouldn’t make any kind of difference for Chance, and he needed to remember that. Patrick was still married and, to all appearances, happy with his wife—despite the reactions the man was having to the love scenes.

  Chance also forcibly reminded himself he was a sound gopher and nothing more. Patrick was talent—beautiful, talented talent at that. He was not someone for the likes of Chance.

  Chapter 4

  “Oh God,” Patrick breathed, dropping his face onto the back under him. He tried to pull himself back just a little. He didn’t want it over too soon, and if he didn’t manage to get a hold of himself, it would be.

  He dropped a series of kisses across shoulder blades and down spine, sliding his hand up into the long hair. He pushed it aside to give more kisses, this time to ear and neck and shoulder. Finally, he felt like he could handle moving.

  It felt so ridiculously good. The heat, the muscles tightening around his cock, all of it was working against him to drive him completely crazy. Grunts muffled by a pillow floated to him, making things even worse. He loved sound, loved knowing what he was doing for his partner, loved giving to them, and hearing it was one sure-fired way of pushing him quickly toward the peak.

  Nails dug hard into his hip, and that helped a little. He could handle small bits of pain—his hair being pulled, that sort of thing—but too much and it would quickly kill, or at least slow, any pleasure. This seemed to be just enough to help.

  He shifted, dropping more kisses—brushes of lips, really—over each vertebrae. He gripped the hips when the muscles surrounding his cock clenched, and his own groan was loud in the still of the darkness. He knew that any more of that and he’d lose it for sure. He shifted, changing angles to try to give as much pleasure as he was getting, and he was rewarded when the sounds got much louder.

  They seemed… odd… to him somehow, sounded different than he expected, but he figured it had something to do with the muffling of the pillows. Then the muscles clamped down again and the body under him started to shake. It was enough to make his balls tighten, and he could feel the orgasm building quickly.

  “Yes, oh God, yes,” he groaned, finally letting go, letting the pleasure begin to take him and the orgasm approach.

  Then the head lifted and turned, and Rhys looked over one shoulder at him. “Fuck…. Patrick…. Now!” he shouted; then his eyes slammed closed.

  Patrick blinked at Rhys’s face, at the bliss of it in climax as he felt his own orgasm approach. He shifted his gaze down to see his cock buried deeply in Rhys’s ass, and his balls tightened that tiny bit more. Oh fuck!

  Patrick’s eyes flew open, and he stared at the ceiling above his bed, watching the play of shadows. Cars passed on the street, headlights pushing through the trees and his blinds to paint lines across the plaster. As the breeze shifted the leaves, the dance in front of his eyes turned frantic for a moment, much like the thoughts in his head.

  What the fuck had that been?

  He panted hard in the aftermath of the dream and glanced down his body. He was grateful to see there wasn’t a mess—he hadn’t quite gone that far in the dream—but he was still rock hard, the sheet over his sweaty, tense body tenting. Shit. He wasn’t getting back to sleep like this.

  With a groan, he rolled into a sitting position and scrubbed at his face with his palms. He stared at his cock and debated just trying to will it down, but that had never worked before, and he knew it wouldn’t now. He stood up and padded into the kitchen, pulled out the orange juice, and drank straight from the carton. Emily would have killed him for that—one of the few benefits of being alone—but she wasn’t there.

  Apparently, she wasn’t even in his dreams anymore.

  He frowned as he stared off into space. He supposed that, like the night he’d masturbated, it made a sort of sense that he’d dream about Rhys—or Cyrus. He was spending so much of his time and mind space as Nadir, it was bound to leak into other areas of his brain, including his dreams. Not that that had ever happened before, but this was the first time he’d played such a long-term role—and a gay character, at that.

  As the dream came to mind, though, and Rhys’s body became much clearer, Patrick’s cock twitched with interest, and he frowned again. He wasn’t attracted to Rhys. He wasn’t.

  He reminded himself he was straight. That this was all coincidence.

  But then he heard the moans from his dreams, moans very much in Rhys’s voice, and his cock not only twitched, he felt precum bead on the tip. He set the orange juice onto the counter with a thud and banged his head hard against one of the cabinets. It didn’t help. “No,” he grumbled aloud. “I am not gay!”

  His cock and mind disagreed—or at least his cock wasn’t listening. He tried again to think about Emily, but Rhys’s image superseded it. Visions from the dream fought with his attempts to think about his wife—and his wife was losing.

  He growled into the empty room but wrapped his hand around his cock anyway. He groaned wordlessly, then panted hard when pleasure hit, fast and sharp. “Fuck,” he grunted, partly because it felt so fucking good and partly because the image that greeted him when his eyes closed was that of a wet Rhys—the one he’d been treated with the only time he’d seen his friend in the showers at a gym.

  He moved his hand, slowly at first, and the image of Rhys in the shower was quickly replaced with the one of his cock buried in Rhys’s ass from the dream. He tried, almost desperately, to get it out of his head, replace it with something else, but he couldn’t do it. It was Rhys’s voice, Rhys’s face during a scene, in the dream, in the shower, that filled his mind.

  And before he knew it, he was coming, coming hard to all those images, unable to stop it. Unable to stop them. The pleasure shot through him faster than he’d have thought possible, screaming through his nerves, pulling the cum from his balls. He painted the cabinets in it, the climax dragging the orgasm out—intent, it seemed, on pushing him through as many images of his male friend as possible.

  He collapsed back against the counter, panting hard in the aftermath, cum cooling everywhere: on his stomach, the cabinet, his legs, and his hand. He couldn’t move, couldn’t make him
self grab a paper towel to clean up, couldn’t seem to do anything. He was still too far gone for that.

  He had just masturbated, from start to finish, to images of Rhys.

  Yeah, he had some major problems.

  Patrick stepped inside Benny’s and gave his eyes a moment to adjust. The only bar near his apartment looked like a dive from the outside. Patrick hadn’t cared. He wanted to get drunk and try to forget about the dreams, about Rhys, about everything, just for a little while.

  He’d had the day off, so he’d spent some time at the gym, hoping to work his frustrations out through weights or a punching bag. But Rhys had shown up, and instead of getting his mind off it, he and Rhys had ended up spending the better part of the afternoon working out together. So he’d done nothing but stare at Rhys. Sweat rolled over toned muscles that bunched and moved with the workout, and Patrick found himself grateful to be hitting the showers, to get away from those kinds of images. The afternoon had been a complete waste for what he’d wanted to do with it.

  But the showers proved to be even worse. If Patrick didn’t know better, he would have sworn Rhys purposefully took the stall directly opposite of him and left the curtain partially open. Patrick took as long as he could under the hot water, hoping Rhys would finish and go dress and spare him the temptation to look.

  No, it wouldn’t be that easy. Instead, when Patrick opened his own curtain, there was Rhys, ass in clear view. Then the man had turned around, and Patrick had been treated to a full view—including Rhys’s half-hard cock! Despite himself, despite his best efforts, Patrick couldn’t resist looking. And to his complete mortification, he felt his cock twitch and start to harden.

  He’d bolted—there was nothing else he felt he could do. He’d dressed in record time and managed to leave without seeing Rhys again.

  And now he was standing inside Benny’s, and when his eyes adjusted and he looked around, dive wasn’t entirely accurate. More of a half-step up, it attempted to have a theme, like everything else he’d seen so far in Hollywood.

  This one was sort of an old Egyptian/desert type of thing. Patrick couldn’t quite guess what it was supposed to be at first, but then he figured out the decor was something out of early twentieth-century Egyptian exploration. The bar took up one long wall, had a huge mirror behind it, and around the uppermost bottles of liquor hung a series of necklaces with different religious symbols: the Star of David, the Christian cross, and the Egyptian ankh, among others. A painted sarcophagus and other Egyptian symbols of pyramids and history decorated the opposing wall of the narrow room.

  It took Patrick a full minute to get it, but when he finally did, he actually laughed out loud and immediately felt a little better.

  The rest—reminiscent of a typical bar—boasted small tables, a completely out-of-place jukebox in the corner with rock music wholly incongruous to the theme, and flickering faux-gas lights that barely gave off enough illumination to see. Patrick made his way to the bar anyway, found a spot on the end, and took one of the only two empty seats.

  On one side sat an older person, and Patrick couldn’t quite tell if they were male or female. They wore makeup with jeans and a T-shirt. Their hair was short but curly. And their face… was about as androgynous as it was possible for one to be.

  The man on the other side of Patrick caused him to do a double take. He was nothing short of gorgeous, in Patrick’s opinion. Long blond hair hung down over strong shoulders and framed a face that, Patrick thought, most definitely belonged in front of a camera, though he couldn’t remember ever seeing it on screen anywhere. The slightly cleft chin, straight Roman nose, and five o’clock shadow were more than a little eye catching and put Rhys to shame in looks. The black T-shirt clung to well-defined arm muscles and fit snugly over an equally toned chest.

  Patrick stopped himself from trailing his eyes farther and instead turned to the bartender to order a shot of Jameson whiskey and a Guinness. A holdover from his Irish father, he could put most alcohol away with the best of that side of his family, and he liked his Irish flavors.

  Above the bar, the Lakers and the Kings were silently battling it out on TV, and Patrick, with nothing better to do, followed the action. He was a football fan, even though he’d had no one to root for back in Hawai’i, and didn’t usually get into other sports, but he didn’t mind basketball as much as some of the others.

  But the distraction didn’t last long, and though he’d had two shots of whiskey and half the Guinness, his annoyingly good alcohol tolerance meant he was still way too sober. He signaled for another shot and let his gaze wander around the room. A few couples talked, another made out at a corner table, and a group played some sort of card game at the only four-seat table in the room.

  Patrick resigned himself to paying half attention to the TV and working to ignore the gorgeous man next to him. He didn’t want to think about men, anyway—that was the whole reason for going there in the first place. To get drunk and forget about the strange things that had been happening to him lately with Rhys.

  His battle, such as it was, seemed a vain thing, anyway. Despite it, Patrick looked over at the man, grateful when his attention was still fixed on the television. With a sigh Patrick downed the next shot and finished off his Guinness. He glanced at the clock on the wall, saw just how early it was, and caught the bartender’s attention. It was going to be a long night.

  Patrick Tearney is sitting next to me. It took everything Chance had to keep from staring. He’d never in his life thought he’d be sitting next to the man at a bar.

  The thought was ridiculous, of course. Patrick went to bars just like anyone else. They both worked at the same studio. And if the man didn’t stay at a hotel, it was even likely they both lived in the general area.

  So it stood to reason that, eventually, they might end up at the same bar or club. But Chance figured at best he’d watch Patrick from across a room, like he did during filming. He’d certainly never expected to sit next to the man.

  It was exceedingly difficult for him to keep his eyes on the TV or the other patrons and not on Patrick. But even without looking, Chance could tell something was wrong. Patrick was putting away enough alcohol to flatten a lot of men. That in itself, of course, wasn’t that big of an issue. Many men drank and could drink a lot. But there was something in the facial expression he saw through the mirror, in the frown that marred the handsome face. No, something was wrong.

  He’d seen Patrick smile and laugh often on set. In fact, that seemed to be the default for the man. So to see the frowns and the sadness in the dark eyes made Chance quite sure something was up.

  And then there was the fact that Patrick had looked at him. Something else he caught in the mirror—he’d thought he was imagining it at first, but no. Patrick’s head had turned and Patrick had looked him over.

  Chance wanted to say something, to ask if he was okay, but they weren’t friends. They weren’t even passing acquaintances, as much as Chance would have liked to be. And it wasn’t up to him to offer anything. Then, of course, there was the fact that he was so attracted to Patrick, which was bound to come out and be obvious if they started talking.

  No, the best thing Chance could do was to keep to himself. But it was so difficult not to at least say hi. He frowned into his shot of Jack, then downed it before going back to his beer.

  He wouldn’t say hi, but he’d buy the man a drink. Patrick looked like he could use it. So when Benny came back and he got his own new round, he tilted his head toward Patrick, then nodded toward Patrick’s glasses. Benny nodded and left, and Chance did his damnedest to focus on the boring-as-shit basketball game.

  “I didn’t order this,” Patrick said with a frown.

  The bartender smiled. “It’s paid for.”

  “Uh… who?” he asked, blinking at the fresh Guinness and shot he was about to ask for.

  The bartender’s smile widened, and he tilted his head toward the gorgeous man Patrick had been doing his best to try to ignore all night.
And failing. Shit. I hope he didn’t see me looking at him. He’ll think I’m gay. He probably bought me the drinks to say no thanks, could you keep your thoughts to yourself….

  He turned on his barstool and offered a smile at the man. “Uh, thank you,” he started, not really knowing what else to say.

  The man smiled, and the already-handsome face now made Patrick’s breath stop.

  Oh fuck, he thought when his cock twitched in his jeans.

  “You’re welcome,” the man said, and Patrick heard the slightest twang in the voice. He also got his first glimpse of gorgeous deep blue eyes that crinkled at the corners with the smile.

  Patrick forcibly pulled himself together and offered his hand. “Patrick Tearney,” he said and tried not to react when the other man took his hand and shook. Because it felt… good. Almost like there was some kind of connection—which was, of course, ludicrous.

  “Chance Dillon,” the man said. “How do you do?”

  “It’s a pleasure,” Patrick managed and hoped he hid the tiny note of disappointment when Chance let go of his hand.

  “Thanks, Benny,” Chance said to the bartender, who nodded and moved toward a couple on the other end.

  “That’s Benny?” Patrick asked, looking over at the man in question.

  Chance laughed. “Yeah, he’s run this place for a number of years. Hasn’t always looked like this,” he said, waving a hand, “but it’s been here for a while.”

  “It’s… interesting,” Patrick said diplomatically.

  With another laugh, Chance nodded. “Sure is.”

  They fell into an uncomfortable silence for a moment, and Patrick drank the Jameson. “Um… what are you drinking? Can I return the favor?” he asked, turning back to Chance.