Prologue
Leland Jensen
The past…
There are moments in life that elude adjectives or any attempt at meaningful articulation. Though to be honest, I would have said most guys have a distinct disability garnering substantive words or comments for most situations, and especially for those beyond the usual course of things.
It’s not that males don’t see things or feel them or are unaware of them. It’s that their brains, dismal organs that they are, are too focused on other organs—or should I say limited regions of the body, i.e. the lightning rod between their legs—to bother with putting effort into anything beyond the ever-present demand to fuck.
I was no exception to that rule. In fact, I would argue I was case and point for the maxim. A shining, brilliant example of the overprivileged, over-handsome elitist white male that could be found at any Ivy League University in the country, doing little more than taking up space.
Though in my own defense, being such wasn’t my fault. It was who I was raised to be, bred into my DNA post-birth by the community I grew up in—Montecito, California. Yes, that city on the coast of California—and since the upside of meeting my family’s expectations was to continue a gloriously shallow, libido-driven life, I didn’t see a reason to change any of it.
My own form of repression—don’t hate me for calling it that, because it was a sort of repression since free thought, self-direction, and self-identity were not concepts I’d ever been introduced to. From a very early age, I was aware there was something at war with my parents’ carefully crafted self-identity for Leland the third, but I wasn’t sure what, and it seemed easier not to disturb it.
But here’s the funny thing about truth—especially your own truth—no matter what mental and emotional trickery you engage in to keep it away, it’s going to sneak up on you. You can bet on it every time. Truth is a vicious demon and won’t be denied. Not even by the best liars, and oh, I was that.
Until that morning.
My last day in Princeton, the morning after I walked to receive my overpriced and worthless degree universities gave to guys like me for merely showing up.
The morning that eluded adjectives or meaningful articulation, even for my brilliant gray matter.
The first thing I became aware of—though another man might have locked on other disturbing incongruities—was how awful my luxurious apartment on the edge of Princeton University looked.
I was a bit OCD in those days, not because my father made it a point to drill into my head at regular intervals how much my living situation cost him as he provided me that exceptional opportunity to join his ranks as a Princeton grad, but because order around me was essential to keep checked the ever-present undefined disarray inside me.
Richard Meyers and I had had a party the night before to celebrate our liberation from the world of academia. As I had money and my roomie had popularity, everyone at Princeton worth having showed at my spacious flat I let Richard share with me rent free.
He was the kind of guy who could get that sort of thing from other guys. The living rent-free situation. There was something about his dark good looks, his impressive athletic abilities, his easy wit, and infectious humor that earned him adoration equally from both guys and girls.
From either gender, Richard could get pretty much whatever he wanted—free rides, pricy tickets to events, bar tabs paid, and five-star meals comped—and had an enviable personality where it never came across or felt like he was using anyone.
In truth, I didn’t think he was, not ever. People loved Richard and wanted to give to him. Or maybe it was because any idiot could see he was exceptional, and who doesn’t want to be close to that?
He was the first person I’d ever known on the A-list who was broke. I told myself that was my fascination with him, why I kept him around on a Leland Jensen full college free ride. But I knew it was more and had successfully managed not to admit it through the first four years of friendship.
But truth had been sneaking up on me all along, waiting to pounce, only I hadn’t known it. It’s remarkable the games you can play in your own mind under the guise of tolerance and harmless exploration.
I knew Richard was gay even before he told me, and I was adamantly heterosexual in the college days of our friendship, but I soon started blurring the lines of my truth because of my fascination with him.
One year into our friendship, he’d suggested including him in my nightly maneuvers with my girlfriend, Jena Garret.
I had blinked once, then felt like my lids were nailed open with something sharp like toothpicks. “What? Are you crazy, man? Jena would trip if I asked her to do that. Besides, you’re not into pussy. Why would you want to do a threesome with us?”
Richard’s husky laughter floated around me, mocking both my pretense of confused outrage and our friendship.
“What’s the big deal, Lee? Guys share girls all the time. Most of our friends are into it. It’s not anything to anyone.”
Shaking my head, I focused on grabbing my beer from the coffee table. “No fucking way—”
“Why not? Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted to do a threesome before.”
I took a long pull from my beer and made a face at him. “Yeah, I have. But two women, dude. Having the third be my gay roommate never once played a part in my fantasies.”
His brows shot up in an expression I knew well—the one he made before he said bullshit, Leland—and then his brown gaze darkened. “I won’t touch or participate if you don’t want me to. But fuck, by how hard I get every night listening to the two of you through the wall, I think it’d be off the hook slapping one off watching you fuck Jen-Jen.”
My pulse jumped—both in my throat and my dick—and my windpipe felt as tight as my balls did. My gaze settled on his, and in my pants sprang a full erection. “You want to be a voyeur of Leland’s prowess with the girls?” And yes, I was that kind of stuffy arrogant, the kind that in moments of uncertainty or excitement referred to themselves in the third person. “That’s all? Nothing else? You want to watch me fuck Jena Garret?”
He leaned into me, closing the space between us on the couch and flicking his tongue across his lower lip. My entire body felt like it’d been doused in hot oil as his fingertips landed on my shoulder. I was buzzing from head to toe, and the way he stared at me made my heart slam against my chest.
“Want? No, Lee. That isn’t all that I want. Not even close. I’d suggest more if I thought you were up for it, but I don’t think you are.”
For a fleeting second, I shivered beneath the flutter of his fingers against my flesh, my stomach shimmying with fear and excitement. And then—because nothing else came to me—I chuckled as though he were joking and was relieved when he joined in.
“Jesus Christ, you had me going, man. Very funny. Have a threesome with Jena. You’re fucking hilarious, Meyers.”
My laughter continued to rumble from my chest until I was safely from the couch and alone in my bedroom. It took more than a few moments to compose myself and identify what I was feeling, though it probably shouldn’t have because there was no missing the aftereffect of Richard’s suggestion. A guy couldn’t ignore a raging boner even if he wanted to. My body was at full attention and not at the thought of Jena.
Convinced I needed to rein in whatever this was Richard stirred inside me, I avoided him for the rest of the day. But that night when I returned to my apartment with Jena, Richard was there, waiting for us—no, even then I knew better. He was waiting for me.
That’s when it happened, my first ménage, and true to his promise, Richard didn’t touch me that night. I think he knew if he had, I would have ended our friendship because I wasn’t ready for where he wanted to take me.
But that didn’t last long and Richard never once intended to be merely a voyeur to my sexual escapades. Looking back I had to admire his control since he was as hot for me as I now admit I was from the very beginning for him, and yet in measured restraint he brought my body to full awakening.
By the end of our fourth year living together, more often than not we made love to each other across Jena’s body. My preppy little rich girl from Nob Hill had a voracious and adventurous sexual appetite and enough vanity to believe me and Richard getting off on each other was for her benefit. It turned her on and she loved it during our special nights, as she called them. It was an accelerant for our alone nights and the threesomes we had apart from Richard with the girls Jena wanted to nail.
Jena Garret was a great fuck, and I loved her back then, but Richard was something more, though the more wasn’t something I was willing to embrace in me.
I told myself my fascination with Richard was only a lark. A sexual adventure of the kind you want to have during your youthful, wild years. That this element of my sexuality wouldn’t last after I left Princeton.
I was expected to return to California to run our family empire side by side with my father. Jena was off to Langley to start training as an analyst for the CIA, and Richard had been recruited by the FBI.
Our life roads would take us in different directions. Commencement meant the end of our trio, and that rationalization was enough to explore with Richard the always lurking and unsatisfied man inside me.
My physical relationship with Richard meant nothing to who I was or what I’d be. College was a place for exploration without judgements, even sexual exploration, and I was committed to living those years to the fullest.
That’s what I told myself in the beginning of Richard and me, though I must have known my own truth long before I was willing to live it.
I don’t think I’ll ever know for sure which answer is correct. I didn’t know it the morning after our graduation party and it would forever remain elusive to me, through good and bad.
Staring at my bedroom, my hangover-burning eyes slowly took note of the shambles around me. There was trash, bottles, half-eaten food on plates, and mess everywhere. From my apartment floated the growling sounds of drunken slumber from Richard’s passed-out friends.
The stench was enough to make my stomach turn. It was so pungent I couldn’t smell the more pleasant fragrance of sex that surely was in my sheets.
My body had a Leland, you’ve fucked all night languidness, though my hangover-lethargic brain couldn’t remember the details, but I could feel the warm limbs of someone else in bed with me.
The party we’d thrown as a finale to our epic adventure at Princeton, by what I was seeing and hearing from the living room beyond, must have been one for the record books.
Waking up fuck-drained and booze numb was nothing new to me—I’d fucked and drunk my way through college more than I’d hit the books—but I could sense this was no normal Leland hangover day even before the body beside me moved.
A hand slipped over my shoulder as a mouth began to kiss the back of my neck. My senses jumped from the power of the touch and the musky scent flooding my nostrils. Flashing snippets of the night before entered the functioning area of my brain, giving way to a flash flood of reactions that converged in my cock.
We’d gone to bed without Jena.
Richard had fucked me.
And I’d wanted him to.
The memories of what he’d done to my body sent hunger through my veins and took possession of my rod.
Hard.
Aware.
Alone in bed with Richard and euphoric wasn’t what I’d expected to face my final day at Princeton. I’ve never been able to fully recall what I’d felt the second the pieces clicked in my head, the flashing memories of how we’d fucked, and knowing how it would be when we fucked again.
Maybe because when I dared to turn my head to look over my shoulder at Richard, what I saw left me incapable of forming or catching thought. His midnight eyes were a lust-heated warning he was ready to pick up where we’d left off before sleep. Even more potent was his annoying smugness that he’d finally brought me to this point: naked together, both alert with erections, him making his move to fuck me again, and me desperate to give my body over to him.
His dark brown eyes shone vibrantly—Richard Meyers was a gorgeous man—and it was like my thoughts were spilling over into his head as his mouth closed in on mine. “A lot has changed since we started rooming together, Lee. I’m relieved you finally realize it.”
I grabbed his cheeks and kissed him hard. “More than you know, baby. Stop talking and let me fuck you.”
His laughter swirled around us as he pushed me flat on the bed. He was larger and stronger than me, and he didn’t need his full body to pin me beneath him, but I reveled in being covered by his flesh and muscles.
Our kisses warred as our hips gyrated and we both wanted to be in control. I’d wanted him. I’d always wanted him, and, fuck, I needed this. Only this time I wanted to be the one fucking him.
Even with him having the upper hand, both in size and knowledge, I managed to get him beneath me with that strange surge of strength that can come in panic or arousal. Or maybe I could overpower him because I was in love with him.
I’d figured out later that love wasn’t really an emotion Richard bothered with. He was driven, intense, and gloriously carnal. His heart was merely a secondary organ inside him.
It was fortuitous I didn’t know that the first time I fucked him. Otherwise the fuckfest in my bed that lasted two days—and made me miss my plane home—I was confident wouldn’t have changed the trajectory of my life.
It was love, not lust, that kept me living on the east coast and taking a job with the CIA. I abandoned everything important to me to stay near him. It was love for Richard that made me turn my back on my family until my father’s death made it necessary to return home. It was love for Richard that had at last made me complete.
But for Richard it had been something else all along.
He’d been the great love of my life—or so I believed before I met Graham—but to this day, I’m unsure what I’d been to Richard.