The Brotherhood Vol. 3
Willa Okati
All rights reserved.
Copyright ©2024 Willa Okati
Excerpt from Under Hill and Over the Bar
This isn’t a dance club -- it’s an insane asylum. You could get arrested for doing that in public in, oh, I don’t know, how many states?
Pressed tightly against the wall of Amour Magique’s dance floor, Laurence couldn’t help admiring the way tight leather trousers were put together on a pair of dancers, lacing up the sides of either leg with long thongs. He watched wide-eyed as the two men, undulating to the driving rhythm of the music, stripped off their pants without once losing the beat, strips of leather now slithering loose like snakes. He also really couldn’t help seeing and admiring the fact that neither dancer wore anything underneath but their bare skin.
So? He was male, and gay. As were they. Very much of the gay persuasion, if the visual was anything to go by. Naked and erect, the two gyrated chest to chest and kissed each other as if they wanted to drink one another’s essence from the mouth down. They were a sight to make any artist weep, both tall and thin, brown as nuts, corded with runner’s muscles, and with nearly identical cocks pressed up against one another’s stomachs.
And no one else around looked like they noticed a damn thing!
Well, no, that wasn’t exactly true. The two got a few looks -- of admiration. Envy. Desire. But no one was jumping in there to tell them to get their pants back on, oh, no.
Laurence felt as though he should look away but couldn’t seem to make himself. If, however, one of those men happened to turn around, and… oh. Oh, wow. Yep, face about and present -- bending over to grasp his bent knees, ass in the air, a look of utter abandon and excitement written across his face. The man’s partner spread those ass cheeks that were already shiny with some sort of lubricant and rubbed deep inside the cleft. The dancer’s mouth fell open with a wanton sort of lust.
So did Laurence’s.
Male! Gay! Free show! Hello?
Leaning down to press a score of kisses to his lover’s bowed spine, the dominant man began to thrust himself inside what must feel like a wet, silken iron fist. Laurence breathed in deeply as the man seated himself with short, sharp thrusts, not stopping until his balls slapped his partner’s thighs. The look on the other man’s face made something twist up and ache in Laurence’s stomach. God, but it had been so long since he’d…
As the two men began to have sex in earnest, Laurence forced himself to look away and walk on, out of earshot of their exclamations of pleasure. Free porn was all well and good, but when it brought home the truth that you weren’t getting any and hadn’t had any for a few years, the feeling of being an outsider cut too sharply.
Yeah, he hadn’t had sex since the nasty breakup with his last partner, a man whom he’d loved not wisely but too well. The bastard hadn’t respected Laurence’s wish to keep their relationship quiet, and he’d gotten Laurence fired from his job. Oh, sure, people said you couldn’t lose your employment for being gay, but it still happened. And then the jerk had had the nerve to blame Laurence for being too uptight! From there, things had only gone further downhill. He would have sued for palimony, but he just wanted to get as far away from a hostile ex-lover as possible. Anyway, once Laurence got to Charleston and had sought legal advice, Simon had advised against it.
He shook his maudlin thoughts away.
All the eye candy aside, he was a man, and he had a mission: get out. Amour Magique was weirder than Liam, and that was saying a lot.
As he walked, Laurence kept his back against and clung tightly to the walls of the dance club, easing his way past the throng of gyrating men on the main floor, feeling behind him with his hands for a way out. Wall, wall, wall, wall -- uh oh, not wall --
“Oh, um, sorry about that. I, uh, I…” Laurence’s voice trailed off as he looked up, then up some more, at the pile of muscles vaguely shaped like a man, dressed up in tusks and a piggish snout as if it were Halloween. He swallowed hard. “What the hell?”
The man’s companion, a slim, almost lissome type, painted a pale blue all over with a head full of quills instead of hair, giggled. He was the one Laurence had groped without meaning to, but he kind of thought Mr. Pig objected more. Quills just giggled and oozed closer to the heaps of man he seemed to be attached to.
“Quigley,” the gropee crooned, “aren’t you going to do something? Defend my honor?”
Quigley -- and wasn’t that a cute name for someone who could bench-press The Rock? -- growled around his tusks and took a step toward Laurence, balling his hands into fists.
Laurence had never been one to pick a fight where the odds were better than even that he’d end up a greasy stain on the carpet rather than the winner. He backed up, shaking his head. “Sorry, guys, sorry. Didn’t mean any hassle. I’m harmless, see? You two go back to… whatever it was you were doing. I’ll just be on my way.”
“Hmm.” Quills tossed his head with a slightly clashing sound, like window blinds coming together. “He doesn’t seem properly sorry, Quiggy. Hit him one for me. One good punch for your little prickly-bear?”
Quiggy let loose with another ominous rumble.
Laurence panicked. “Holy shit, it’s Batman!” he blurted, pointing over the couple’s shoulders. When, of all things, they actually turned to look, Laurence took the low road out and rushed past another crowd of dancers. Once he had cleared them, he looked back but couldn’t see the pair.
Letting out a huge breath of relief, Laurence leaned against a patch of wall he was sure was wall, and wiped a hand across his forehead. Like I said, insane asylum. From the moment he’d stepped through the door, he had pegged Amour Magique as a nuthouse, and he wasn’t inclined to change his mind now that he’d gotten close to yet another pair of its more colorful clubbies.
Of course, seeing his friends, Liam included, seemingly vanish in puffs of smoke the moment they walked inside hadn’t helped. As Laurence had stood by himself on the edge of a dance floor he could have sworn hadn’t been there a few moments before, staring at it owlishly, he’d received his first threat from an absurdly tall, thin man with really big fists who’d asked what he thought he was looking at.
Damn Liam for not telling him this was masquerade night, or whatever. Everywhere Laurence turned, he saw strange thing after stranger thing, most of them on two legs, sometimes three, acting as if they were having the time of their lives. Most of them bristled when they caught Laurence staring and made various threats, most of which he’d been able to talk his way out of… though his ear still rang from where a beefy type had smacked him upside the head.
He’d been against the idea of coming to Amour Magique from the beginning. No way could Laurence afford to be outed -- again -- not when he taught elementary school. As it was already, rumors were bad enough; being spotted here would kill his teaching career.
Running one hand over the goatee and mustache he’d grown at David’s suggestion to disguise himself a little, Laurence shook his head. A Darth Vader mask would have done the job better in a crowd like this.
Getting the hell out of Dodge would have been ideal, but for some reason, Laurence couldn’t seem to find the exit -- and he’d circled the dance floor three times. If he were superstitious, he’d swear the club wanted to keep him there. If he were claustrophobic, he’d have begun to panic about the walls closing in. Being Laurence, he was becoming desperate for a bar and a drink. Away from the madding crowd, if at all possible.
And there, like a beacon of light out of the darkness, a way opened up and shone before him. A short hallway. Didn’t look to be an exit from the club itself, but any port in a freak-show storm was a welcome sight. Laurence made as quick a beeline for the warmly lit corridor as he could, narrowly missing another couple of bizarre types and bypassing, with effort, one man down on his knees, eagerly swallowing a tall blond’s cock while kneading his lover’s thighs like a giant cat.
Laurence might even have looked twice at them.
Then, he was out of the crush, in the hallway and, oh, yes, blessed be, there looked to be a bar at the end of it. He could smell the beer. Sweet beer!
Laurence all but raced to get there and didn’t give a damn about how desperate he must look. If the shoe fit, right?
One, two, buckle my…
Purchase at Changeling Press
Willa Okati (AKA Will) is made of many things: imagination, coffee, stray cat hairs, daydreams, more coffee, kitchen experimentation, a passion for winter weather, a little more coffee, a whole lot of flowering plants and a lifelong love of storytelling. Will's definitely one of the quiet ones you have to watch out for, though he -- not she anymore -- is a lot less quiet these days.
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