Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 74298 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74298 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
Now the airy, grey-blue morning light had just started to filter into the tent, but Jack finally seemed to be snoozing peacefully, warm and cozy and curled against me.
Which was awkward, because I was currently hard as fucking hell, with the most intense morning wood I’d had in a long time.
Maybe I was more of an early riser than I’d realized.
I bit my bottom lip, my cock aching a little as I tried desperately not to reach down and stroke it. I wanted to, more than anything—I’d never really been good at ignoring a hard-on, and honestly, I’d wanted to come since late last night. But no matter how much I joked about stuff with Jack, I had just enough common decency not to go and jerk myself off while my sweet best friend was asleep up against me.
Not that Jack would mind, probably. But it was a better idea to slowly slip away. Maybe I could go find a secluded thicket of trees to go get behind and take care of myself.
I tried to move, millimeters at a time, slowly and carefully so that Jack could get as much shut-eye as he needed. But right as I was about to slip out of the tent, his phone started ringing a jangly tune. For a moment I thought he might sleep right through it, but after a few rings, he groaned, reaching over to the phone.
“Just keep sleeping, Blue, you don’t have to get that right now—”
“Hello?” he mumbled into the phone, already pressing it up to his ear.
Because Jack Damien always answered his phone. He was always there for people. Always reliable. And even though I’d been telling him to find some work-life balance for years, some part of me also admired how devoted he was to his general contracting work.
I relaxed and sat at the front of the tent, my boner already going away.
“Yes. Absolutely. We always want to go with the quarter-inch,” Jack was saying into the phone. His sandy-blonde hair was a total bedhead mess, and he still had a little pink line on his face from where his head had rested on his pillow.
I didn’t care if I’d always been a straight guy. My best friend was a sexy motherfucker, and some guy was going to be real lucky to have him, one day.
“No problem. Thanks for calling to ask. We’ll see you again tomorrow. Sure. Anytime.”
He hung up the phone, groaning again as he propped himself up on his elbows, squinting over at me. He was wearing a fitted white T-shirt, his standard uniform that he rocked every day and that always made his biceps look killer. Some people probably would have said that Jack looked a little intimidating, especially when he had a toolbelt slung around his waist and was focusing hard on a job. But I knew him differently. In little moments like these, when he had a sleepy look on his face, I knew that the man who took care of everything was nothing but a sweetheart on the inside.
“You’re up early,” he said, his voice still a little gravelly with sleep.
“Okay, full disclosure, One-Hundo Policy,” I said, “I was absolutely about to sneak out of this tent and find somewhere to go jerk off.”
Jack puffed out a laugh, relaxing back onto his pillow and rubbing at his eyes. “You are one of a kind, Tristan Wood.”
Jack’s phone suddenly beeped again, another series of messages pouring in.
“Man of the hour,” I said.
He just groaned again, turning over on his sleeping bag. “Can you tell me if those are anything important?”
I reached over to grab his phone. It was something we did a lot for each other, especially when one of us was elbow-deep in some construction work and we couldn’t look at our phones. One part of being totally open with each other was that we’d read each other all sorts of strange, flirty, or even saucy text messages from each other’s phones over the years, as well as standard, boring work texts.
Jack had been very embarrassed one time when he accidentally saw a picture of my bulge on my phone—I’d taken a picture of the outline of my hard-on behind a pair of my light grey boxer-briefs once, complete with a wet spot at the tip from my precum. Jack had seen it while reading me a text from a woman I’d been hooking up with. I’d never seen his cheeks get so red, ever before or ever since.
“Let’s see,” I told him now. “A message from Steve saying they finally got the shipment of subway tile for the Henderson kitchen renovation.”
“Thank the Lord for that,” Jack mumbled. “Helen Henderson was about to kill me.”
“Another message from Vincent Price, asking if it might just be cheaper to go with bamboo flooring. Should I just reply with ‘yes, fuck yes, bamboo is always the cheapest?’”