Leigh turned out to be a source of food as well as gossip, not someone Damien wanted to piss off, especially since she seemed determined to fatten him up like he was a little boy who’d nibbled on her gingerbread house. She rambled on about a lot of things, moving from politics to the state of lettuce, but most of all, she seemed to always come back to one thing… Sionn Murphy.
He’d learned Sionn had come over from Ireland when he was a teen to live with his maternal grandmother and that the man had an aunt living nearby who was getting pissed off that he didn’t come over for dinner. He’d also found out the man had a sweet baritone and knew all the words to “Greensleeves.”
Leigh also felt the need to tell Damien Sionn liked men for more than just a night of drinking and watching the telly.
That gleeful whisper into Damien’s ear seemed to lodge there, worming through the clouds in his memory and spreading its invasive tendrils into the recesses of his foggy mind.
“Guy is hot,” he acknowledged, wrapping the quilt even tighter around his cold shoulders. “Fuck, that damned mouth.”
He’d also found himself staring at the man’s hands, enraptured by Sionn’s strong fingers and broad palms, especially when he raked through his mink-brown hair, disheveling the longer strands so they fell forward onto his face. Trapped in the corner of the patio, he’d drift off in his playing, finding himself drawn more and more to Sionn’s wide shoulders and long legs. The man’s deep gray eyes caught his own stare once, and Sionn’s wicked mouth crooked a smile in Damien’s direction, leaving him flushed and hot beneath his cowboy hat.
Thank fucking God for that hat.
It kept the rain out and his blushes hidden. Most of all, it allowed him to sneak peeks at Sionn’s ass when he leaned over to clean a table. He was the kind of guy someone would buy a house with, argue over what color to paint the kitchen, then grumble good-naturedly when he lost. Sionn Murphy would be the man to climb a tree to rescue a kitten, say it could only stay one night before off to the pound it went, then spend the next twenty years coaxing it to let him give it belly rubs.
He was the kind of man someone would keep, holding him close until death came for one of them, and Damie’s heart twisted at the idea someone else—not him—would have Sionn Murphy’s final kiss.
“Holy shit.” Damien didn’t need to cup himself to know his cock was thickening. Its head pushed against the seam of his sweats, rubbing at the stitching along the crotch. A tingle fluttered in his ball sac, and Damien leaned back against the wall, unsure of what to do with his body’s reactions to his memories of Sionn’s toned body.
Suddenly the beatings made sense. Something… everything… made sense. His father… still faceless but brimming with hate… dug deep down into him, trying to unmake the man Damien was determined to become. The wrongness of it all struck him hard, leaving Damie sick to his stomach.
“I’ll be fucking damned. Guess my father was right.” Exhaling hard, he dug the heels of his hands into his stinging eyes and muttered, “I am fucking gay.”
“NOT a lot of people out today.”
There it was again, the rolling dash of Ireland in the man’s deep voice, and Damien’s cock perked up like a dog sniffing out a piece of chicken. He’d become accustomed to his dick responding when Sionn Murphy walked by, but its intense interest became painfully obvious whenever the man came out with a couple cups of coffee and sat down with him.
Then Damie wished he’d worn looser jeans, or at the very least, tighter underwear to keep his perky cock contained.
It’d become a ritual between them. Damien would set up early and begin playing. Depending on the weather, which mostly had been shitty of late, Sionn would saunter out an hour or so later with coffee, and they would sit together, waiting for the day to warm up and the crowds to hit.
After setting his acoustic down carefully, Damie reached for the coffee, grateful for its warmth when he closed his cold fingers over the hot mug. To describe the fog as pea soup would have been too thin of an image. He’d almost walked off the pier heading to the pub, the sidewalk suddenly blocked by a chain and tar-dappled wood juts warning him away from the cement edge.
If he’d been smart, he would have found someplace warmer or with actual people around to busk for the day, but no, his feet led him to Finnegan’s, then he pissed around a bit until the pub’s doors opened up and Sionn brought the sun with him.
And if he hadn’t been so ashamed of cruising the Irish-born man, he’d have puked at the honey-sick sweetness his brain gurgled up every time he so much as saw Sionn Murphy.
Instead, Damie found himself giggling like a unicorn-loving teenaged girl and saying lame shit like, “Yeah, not a lot of people today.”
God, he was reduced to repeating what another man said. If anything was proof he wasn’t a rock star, it was his lack of smooth when it came to talking a guy up.