Free Nexus by Mary Calmes

late that I was playing with fire.
    “Marcus.” He moaned my name, arms lifting, wrapping around my neck, pulling me down to him.
    “Joey,” I sighed, trying to lift up off him.
    “No,” he whispered, swallowing hard, wetting his lips, his breath warm on my face. “I missed you. You need to fuck me now.”
    And the way he said it left no doubt in my mind that he needed me just as badly as I needed him. We were locked into the same mindset, had been for years, so I didn’t have to guess what felt good or where to touch him. Words were unnecessary.
    I lifted myself up, loosened the towel around my hips, and tossed it at the chair by the desk. He rolled over under me, passed me a tube of lube from under the pillow that would have been mine—I slept closest to the door wherever we were—and I watched as he hurriedly stripped out of his jeans and briefs and climbed back onto the bed.
    His beautiful ass, so taut and round, beckoned me. I couldn’t help bending to take a bite out of it.
    “Oh please,” he whimpered, pushing back against my mouth.
    He was gorgeous on his hands and knees in the middle of the bed. Head back, eyes closed, waiting, trembling, spreading his legs apart so his pink hole was there, ready for me…. I could not even imagine anything more bewitching than my man.
    “Jesus, Joe,” I groaned, leaning forward, my tongue gliding over his puckered entrance.
    “No,” he hissed. “I don’t want you to lick me or suck me or do anything else but fuck me. I want you inside me now.”
    “I don’t want to hurt—”
    “Marcus Roth, when have you ever hurt me?”
    Never was the answer. Not once.
    “You’re the only man who has never hurt me in any way.”
    Which basically answered any question I’d ever had about Shane Harris.
    “I’ll tell you if you want me to,” Joe asked, because he knew what I was thinking. He always knew.
    “Please.”
    “We hid things in high school,” he told me as I opened the flip-top lid of the lube. “And then the summer before college, he told me he couldn’t see me anymore. He didn’t want me to get hurt.”
    I understood why and now so did Joe.
    “So he became a warder then, Marcus, and he—oh!” Joe’s voice cracked as I slid a slippery finger inside him. “Figured that because I was blind that I wasn’t strong enough to be the hearth of a warder.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “The fuck I don’t. What else could it be? He looked at me, just like everyone has done my whole life except you, and saw someone that had to be taken care of, not the other way around.”
    But why? “He knew you guys could go to bed together,” I said as I added a finger inside him, scissoring them apart slowly and gently, stroking at the same time, pushing in, easing out, back and forth, over and over, going deeper with each press, finally reaching his gland.
    “How would he know that? All we ever did was suck each other off.”
    “But even that would have told him you were strong enough to be a hearth.”
    “Oh, fuck, Marcus!” He gasped, his body going rigid for a second. “He didn’t think I could be the hearth of a warder. All he saw was my blindness, not the home I could make, not the partner I could be. You’re the only one who ever saw an equal.”
    It wasn’t true. I had met Joe’s exes at the supermarket, at restaurants, at concerts, out at clubs. There had been a lot of them, the man having been a serial dater before me. Joe bored easily, and because he was blind, most men felt like they had to take care of him, and Joe would simply not have it.
    He kept his own apartment for a year after we got together because he didn’t want me to think he needed me. He wanted me, but I wasn’t necessary—until I was.
    “Do you remember what you said when I invited you to move in?” I asked, adding a third finger, spreading them, stretching him.
    “Yes,” he replied, his voice barely above a whisper, pushing back, wanting me deeper. “I said I didn’t need