Luck, Laughter and Love Read online

Harper vaulted to his feet sooner than his equilibrium preferred, staggered, and whacked his elbow on the wall. He didn’t let a minor funny bone crack -- ow, or maybe not so minor -- slow him down. “Rory?” he called. No second blanket by his side. No warm spot on the floor where he recalled his muse falling asleep before him, his head pillowed on Harper’s chest.

  He couldn’t remember dreaming. What if -- “Oh no. No no no. Don’t tell me I dreamed him?” Sourness flooded the back of Harper’s throat, his heart stuttering at the thought.

  “Be real,” he chanted under his breath, hurrying for the kitchen. After a few fumbling steps Harper realized he was starkers, various things that shouldn’t go without protection flapping in the breeze. Though his face heated painfully with embarrassment, he took his cock in hand and checked for signs of, er, recent gainful employment.

  Blast it; he couldn’t tell, and whether dream or reality nothing more than Rory’s nimble tongue had gone near his ass, so he had no proof there either. Harper moaned, swaying on his feet. Rory’s tongue.

  “Please be real,” he prayed as he staggered onward. He scanned the bedroom, the bathroom, and his teeny tiny study as he passed each, hitting the kitchen last.

  Empty.

  “Rory?”

  His voice echoed off the pristine void, spotlessly clean from floor to empty coffeepot to Artemas’s feeder, by which Artemas hunkered, glaring.

  “Cut it out. You’re worse than a cat. Rory?”

  No answer.

  Harper’s shoulders sagged. He caught himself before kicking the wall with his bare toes. “Should’ve known it was a dream.” He covered his groin with his hand, feeling oddly exposed and definitely idiotic given the reality versus his dreams of wearing his ankles for earrings while Rory applied his tongue --

  His cock twitched against his palm, more than interested in replaying the mental footage. Harper pinched a pube to snap himself out of it and turned, hangdog as a basset hound.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” A radio Harper kept nestled over the kitchen sink blared to life. “No way we’re sleeping on the floor again. My neck’s never gonna forgive me.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Harper whirled, caught himself a half second from falling, and gaped at the kitchen. The brightly lit kitchen, reverberating with doo-wop blasting from the radio, the emptiness eradicated by one completely naked muse getting his groove on. “Rory?”

  “Who else were you expecting, Santa Claus?” Rory smirked and blew Harper a kiss over his shoulder. “Hungry?” Coffee began to burble through the decanter, the smells of sizzling butter and toasting bread lovingly assaulted Harper’s nose, and he could have sworn he caught a whiff of sausage.

  Harper sagged against the wall, tasting copper from his heart beating nigh in his throat. “You’re real.”

  “Course I’m real. Thought you were gonna sleep all night. I wore you out good, huh?” Rory reached for a skillet Harper would have sworn resided at the bottom of a cobweb-festooned cabinet and shook it over the burner coils on the stove, sending up a sizzling, intoxicating cloud of sage and onion.

  “Um,” said Harper, cleverly. “I thought you were --”

  Rory wrinkled his nose and cranked up the music. “Not this again. I’m real; I’m not going anywhere, etc. etc. etc. I’ve got promises to make good on and a shitload of pencils all sharpened up. Are you attached to this paint job? No? Good. Lots of room to write on and we’ll need every inch; this is gonna get intricate.”

  Harper couldn’t help himself. He leaned his full weight on the wall in question and laughed, no, whooped, covering his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  “Shake a leg. Our late-night breakfast is almost done.” Rory twisted the radio’s volume knob as high as it would go and began to beat out the percussion with a spoon, a fork, and the countertop. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing.” It’d take too long to explain, and how pathetic would it have sounded anyway? “Turn it down, Rory. I have neighbors.”

  “So what?” Rory protested. “We’re in New York City. Trust me, this ain’t the loudest or weirdest thing they’ve heard tonight and no one’s complained yet.” Rat-a-tat-tat.

  Harper rested his shoulders against the wall and watched Rory go, man, go. “Sleep is our friend.”

  Rory waved his hand dismissively to the left. “Bahhhh. Sleep’s for wusses and ants that go hungry when it snows. Or whatever. Aesop wasn’t my guy. I get fuzzy when it comes to aphorisms anyway. You want toast or bagels?”

  Harper bit his lip to keep from cracking up again. Surreal. “Sleep’s for pansies, huh? I seem to recall someone snoring in my ear around three o’ clock.” And it had really happened. The knowledge warmed Harper deep within. For one, he hadn’t gone crazy. For two… Well.

  “I snore? Huh. Didn’t know that.” Rory spun on his heel, playing air drums now. “Womp-ba-ba-loop-ba-ba-lum-bam-boom! Tutti Frutti --”

  Harper lost it. He cracked up, clutching the doorway to keep from falling. “You’re a lunatic.”

  Rory grinned at him, still grooving.

  “Note to self,” Harper said when he could breathe again, wiping tears of mirth off his cheeks. “Never let Rory near sugar after he’s gotten laid.”

  “Damn right I got laid, and righteously so. You, my friend, could give lessons on how to get maximum value out of a blowjob. And just you try to get between me and my sucrose. You’re a peach of a guy, but that could get ugly. Bomp, bomp, bomp --”

  “Rory?” Harper pushed off the wall. His kitchen wasn’t huge. He crossed it in four steps and caught his muse by the elbow midgyration, pulling Rory to his chest. No hesitation. Wrapping his hand around the back of Rory’s neck, Harper bent and kissed him, stroking his tongue inside. He remembered his “morning” breath too late.

  Rory didn’t seem to mind. He purred and opened for Harper, licking catlike around his lips. “Hello to you too, sunshine. You having a bipolar moment or is this another one of your wake-up quirks?”

  Harper kissed him again. He hadn’t had enough, and with enough effort it might either calm Rory down or rev him up for something besides harmonizing with Little Richard.

  “I should let you sleep on the floor more often,” Rory said, eyes slightly crossed. “And he does this without coffee, ladies and gentlemen. Should I pour it down the drain?”

  “Do, and I’ll slaughter you.” Harper let Rory go. “Gimme.”

  Rory held the coffee pot out of reach. “Uh-uh-uh. Only if you’ve gotten enough rest to pull an all-nighter. You’re relaxed enough to laugh, loosened up enough to smooch. Think you’re ready to write?”

  Harper hesitated. He poked at the mental muscles that’d gone soft and flabby when not tied in knots during the Great Block and found them loose, limber, even agile. “Unreal. I think I am.”

  “That’s my boy.” Rory caught up a pen and tossed it Harper’s way. “You mind if we work naked? I hate clothes.”

  “Naked writing?” Harper asked dubiously.

  “Hell, yeah. Call us trendsetters.”

  “I reserve the right to lay a cloth napkin over my lap while eating toast.”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “I left it in my other wallet.”

  Rory scoffed, though he couldn’t hide the light of approval and teasing in his eyes. “Smart-ass.”

  For you, Harper thought, pouring himself a mug of dark, rich coffee. Rory’s one hell of a muse. And he’s mine. The certainty tasted as sweet as his java. “Naked writing it is.” He wielded his pen and wrote the words In Outré on the wall. “I had a thought yesterday about that whole tarot thing…”

  Chapter Five

  Two weeks later…

  “The human mind’s a weird, weird thing, isn’t it?” Harper flipped through a cockeyed sheaf of loose-leaf pages covered half with his own scrawl and half with Rory’s script. He peered at one line over the rims of his glasses. Roryskrit seemed to be composed of one-part copperplate, one-part LSD-spider web, and one-par
t pictogram, mixed with an occasional tendency to Latinate absence of vowels.

  “Say what, now?” Rory stood with his back to Harper, hands clasped a hair above the top curve of his ass. Deliberately, Harper was sure. Hide his, er, assets beneath a bushel? Not Rory.

  Not that Harper could say he minded. He didn’t mind to the extent that he found himself seriously considering going to his knees behind Rory and taking a bite.

  “Never mind.” Harper crossed his ankles. Rory had relented and allowed him to wear boxers and a T-shirt as long as Rory got to go unrestrictedly naked. Harper guessed maybe there was something about muses, a sixth sense perhaps, which avoided all nut-pinching accidents.

  “No, seriously. What’s going on in your noodle?” Rory grabbed a pen and drew a heavy, crosshatched line through a half-formed plot arc scribbled on the wall at eye level. “We did decide to postpone the subplot with Salma and her affair with the newspaper kiosk slash undercover spy, right?”

  “Right.” What’s going on in my head is I still can’t believe you’re real, sometimes. Harper carefully smoothed out thirty-odd pages of proofs, tamping down wrinkles in the paper. “I didn’t know I had all these ideas until you dug them out,” he answered Rory’s first question. “I don’t think I had them at all. I think they’re all you.”

  “Pfft.” Rory clearly didn’t buy that for a second. Uncharacteristically for him, he let it go, more focused on a set of notes on his favorite player. “You good to go with Mikhael listening from the shadows in episode six?”

  Harper considered Rory’s suggestion with due respect. He wasn’t sure what he thought of Mikhael, actually. The youngest and only remaining living son of a formerly powerful family, a man with too many secrets for his own good, he raised Harper’s hackles for reasons he couldn’t put his finger on. Probably just one of those weird mental quirks that were all part of the writing process and Rory loved the guy, so…

  “Yeah,” he judged, no more able to damp the hopeful light in his muse than he’d have managed stomping on a kitten. “Wrap that one up.”

  “Woo-hoo!” Rory fist-pumped the air. “See? Told you we could do it. Six scripts down, done, sealed, signed, and on their way to being delivered tomorrow. Hell of a lot better now I’ve come on board, yeah?”

  “My fingers will never forgive me.” Harper pretended to complain, shaking out his hand. The bandages had come off and, aside from redness, he’d be good as new soon.

  “How about I let you wrap them around something that’ll make you forget all your woes?” Rory wiggled his hips, daring Harper to react.

  “How about we get started on that right now?” Harper leaned back in the kitchen chair he’d adopted as his own, the cushion nigh-permanently contoured to the shape of his ass, and his legs spread wide just to get a rise out of Rory. Pun fully intended.

  “No kidding?” Rory jettisoned his pencil, missing Artemas by inches. The turtle snapped halfheartedly at his toes and was soundly ignored. “Hot damn!”

  “If you think you can focus,” Harper challenged, stroking the inside of his thigh.

  “Success makes you bold. And horny. I like it.”

  “Going to keep your eyes on the prize this time?” While they’d never forgotten to eat or coffee up during the marathon writing session that had, so far, lasted two weeks, Harper’s newfound sex life had suffered. Kind of difficult to keep the mood when either he or Rory pulled off halfway through a suckjob to blurt out a character factoid.

  “I already am,” Rory replied, and in truth, he had Harper’s groin fixed with the sort of laser intensity that would, in other circumstances, make Harper more than a little nervous.

  As it was, he slipped his hand down the front of his boxers and gave himself a couple of lazy pulls, teasing Rory and humming at the pleasure of the shaft hardening in his grip.

  “The hell you say.” Rory blinked out across the room and blinked in skidding to his knees between Harper’s legs. He batted Harper’s hand away and helped him hitch up, drawing his boxers down. Rory gazed at Harper’s swelling cock as a zealot would the Grail, licked his lips, and reached. He wrapped his fist around the girth and leaned in, breath hot on the head, tongue ready to pop the obscene bubble of precum, and…

  Harper’s cell phone rang.

  He’d never heard some of those cusswords before. Most were nowhere close to English. “Don’t even think about answering,” Rory warned him with a death glare.

  Harper fidgeted. Hard-wired into his brain, as with most other Americans, was the inability not to at least check the caller ID when his cell went off. It was the same lack of restraint that made it nearly impossible not to respond to the siren song of “You’ve got mail.”

  “You answer, you’re gonna pay for it.” Rory trailed his tongue over the thick vein on the underside of Harper’s cock. Harper squeaked and dropped his phone. It landed caller ID side up, a name in block lettering blazing out at him: JANIE.

  Rory growled and thumped his forehead against Harper’s knee. “Fine,” he mumbled, muffled by flesh. “Answer. Hell if I’m stopping, though. Either make it quick or she gets to listen to you come. Your choice.”

  Harper’s heart stopped. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Watch me.” Rory applied himself to a long, smooth lick.

  JANIE, the cell insisted. “She could be calling about the network’s offer -- or about the script progress -- oh, fuck!”

  Rory didn’t reply, his mouth far too occupied with other affairs.

  Harper bit his lip, thrust his fingers through Rory’s hair to steady himself -- oops, that didn’t help -- and thumbed the green light on his phone. “Hi. Oh! Um, hi.”

  The dryness in Janie’s tone would have shriveled a man without a muse slurping between his legs. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “Yeff,” Rory verbalized around his mouthful of cock. “G’fffay.”

  “We’re kind of in the middle of something,” Harper extemporized. “Rory.”

  “I see.”

  Harper could have dry-roasted peanuts on Janie’s tone. “Go… go ahead.” Changing tactics, he tried to push Rory off. Without success. “What’s up?”

  Rory sniggered filthily as he reached for Harper’s balls, the persistent bastard.

  “I’ve got the first three scripts you sent my way last weekend.” He caught the sound of paper riffling. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”

  Harper slumped in utter relief. Rory took immediate advantage, deep throating him. The sound Harper made, he hoped, could be passed off as a gleeful exultation of a different kind.

  Rory drew off, a string of mixed saliva and precum connecting his swollen lips to Harper’s cock. He reached between his legs and pumped his own cock, the dark purple length sliding slickly through his grip.

  “Did you just whimper?” Janie demanded. “This news isn’t good enough for you?”

  “No?” Harper tried to lower his pitch. “No. It’s fantastic. I’ve worked my ass off” -- Rory chortled -- “on this. Think we’ll be ready to float it past the execs soon?”

  “Soon? I’ve already e-mailed them to Rialto and asked for a meet.” Janie’s voice sharpened. “These had better be the final drafts, Harper. If they aren’t and you didn’t tell me --”

  “Final. Oh, yes. Entirely final.” Harper gave up, let his legs go slack, and guided Rory’s bobbing head. He knotted one fist in Rory’s hair and breathed slowly through his nose, keeping his cool. Barely.

  “Hmph.” Janie sighed. He could see her rubbing her forehead, frowning at the worry line that’d cropped up perpendicular to her eyes. “I’ll take your word for it, but if you’re not on the level with me --”

  “Straight, uh, level.”

  She snorted without pretense to ladylike manners. “I’ll call you when I hear from Rialto. Keep working. And for God’s sake, keep that Rory around. You write better when you’re getting fucked on a regular basis.”

  Harper’s jaw dropped. “You --”

  “I’m not dumb, Harpe
r. I know a BJ when I hear one. Hang up and let him finish before I overdose on the sex noises. Or better yet --” Janie disconnected.

  Rory snagged the phone out of Harper’s slack grip and winged it across the room, fortunately away from the trudging path of any rogue turtles. The clatter coincided perfectly with his renewed assault on Harper’s cock, slurping his way up and down, meaning business this time. Muffled grunts vibrated through Harper’s flesh, reverberating down his balls and drawing them tightly wrinkled.

  “Wait --” Harper tugged uselessly at Rory’s hair. “Make it… make it last --”

  “Uh-uh.” Rory rocked back on his heels, eyes closed, lips slack. He fisted his cock. “Too worked up. Thirsty for it.”

  “Yeah? What if I am, too?” Harper tilted forward, trusting his muse to catch him. He tumbled to the floor, twisting about and manhandling Rory along the way. The two ended up nose to groin. Perfect. Harper dove for Rory’s darkened hard-on and let his tongue glide, velvet smooth and flat, until short hairs the shade of tarnished silver tickled his nose.

  Rory squawked. “Oh, you son of a --”

  Harper arched, back curving. “You’re… you’ll pay for --” He shook off the desire to speak. Words were overrated sometimes, particularly in the face of a thick, turgid cock leaking salty bitterness and within range of Rory’s desperate, swallowed-back moans.

  He kneaded Rory’s hip as he bobbed his head. Come on, he urged, coating Rory’s cock with his saliva, hot and messy. Come on, give me what I want.

  Rory stiffened and shuddered. Cum flooded Harper’s mouth, startling him into a near-cough. He spluttered and attempted to swallow as much as he could.

  To prove that muses did not play fair, even in midorgasm Rory had the presence of mind to thrust his forefinger against Harper’s nether hole and stroke. Harper shattered, hips jerking in rapid thrusts, and lost the rest of his control along with his payload. Which unfortunately meant he retained no ability to concentrate on swallowing his mouthful of salty cum, and --

  Before then, Harper had never known what it was like to snort semen out of his nose. It was an experience he could have lived without.