Chapter 46

After a long stretch of silence, broken only by the faint tick of a clock in the kitchen, Jerry stirred. “Not bad for a rookie,” he joked.

Quin snickered as he burrowed back against Jerry. “I have to admit, you still got some moves. I barely even heard your bones creak.”

With a grin, Jerry tweaked Quin’s ear. “All right, already. Truce. We’re not all thatfar apart in age, you know.”

“Thirteen years,” Quin admitted. “When I was born, you were on the cusp of puberty.”

Jerry hugged Quin tight against his chest. “I’ve found the older you get, the more all that evens out. I’m not worried about it if you aren’t?”

Quin shook his head, tickling Jerry’s face with the feathery ends of his hair. “Not at all.”

Another few minutes passed quietly, the two of them content to just cuddle. Quin broke the silence next. “I guess this means I have to pull out of the office pool.”

Jerry kissed Quin’s shoulder. “What pool?”

In his arms, his lover turned, and Jerry saw Quin’s teeth light up the dim room with a quick smile. “The one we have going in IT about how long it’s going to take before you cave in and start using the Mac. If anyone finds out I slept with you, they might think I had an unfair advantage.”

“What?” Jerry laughed, surprised. “I’ll tell you when. Never.”

Quin’s smile flashed again. “Damn, I would’ve won, too.”

Jerry kissed Quin’s cheek, then his earlobe, then behind his ear. His hand smoothed across Quin’s hairless chest, and when he moved his leg, his thigh pressed pleasantly against Quin’s satiny balls. The movement stirred Quin’s dick, and the thought of a repeat performance before calling it a night made Jerry’s cock twitch eagerly.

Then a sobering thought struck him. “Wait. What number am I?”

Quin half-turned in his embrace to look at him. “Number? What do you mean?”

Jerry strummed his hand down Quin’s belly to tug at Quin’s dick. “I mean, how many other guys from work have you done this to? Found incriminating stuff on their computers so you blackmail them into sleeping with you?”

“Did I blackmail you?” Quin asked. “As I recall, it was youwho wanted to know if I had any plans for the night. I didn’t make you ask me out. Or feed me. Or fuck me.”

“Maybe blackmail’s too harsh a word,” Jerry admitted. Hearing the words spoken in Quin’s overly rational, slightly sarcastic tone of voice, it did sound farfetched. Still… “You told me yourself that you’re the one who put the virus on my computer.”

“Company orders,” Quin said. “Do you know how much time people spend at work doing non-work-related things? Posting on Facebook, playing poker, watching porn. I was told to come up with a program to prohibit that, so I did.”

Jerry frowned. Why hadn’t he been told about it? Then again, if the IT department had said anything, it might’ve been couched in a memo full of tech-speak Jerry hadn’t bothered to read. “Back to my original question. How many other guys have you fucked over this?”

“None, honest.” Quin turned onto his back now to be able to look directly at Jerry, and despite the low light, sincerity shone brightly in his large eyes. “Most of the stuff that comes through the filter is straight porn. I tag it, report it, and move onto the next instance. The way the virus works, the end-user isn’t supposed to know it’s installed. It runs silently in the background of the computer, funneling your browsing history to our main database. No one ever knows what we find or what we don’t until we turn it in.”

“But it made my computer stop working,” Jerry reminded him. “How…?”

“I did that.” A faint blush crept into Quin’s cheeks, pinking them and making him look impossibly young. “I’ve had it bad for you for weeks now, I have to admit. Ever since the staff meeting after I was hired. I doubt you remember…”

Jerry wanted to say he did, but the truth was, he usually zoned out at staff meetings. New employees were never introduced, so it wasn’t as if his attention had been called on Quin. Except… “Wait, I doremember. You got up and gave some sort of spiel about why we should ditch Windows in the first place. I thought you maybe worked for Steve Jobs or something.”

“I don’t know what you thought,” Quin admitted, “but the way you looked at me while I was at the front of the room made me think you were interested in something you saw.”

Jerry couldn’t deny it—even if he didn’t remember checking out the new kid, he probably had done so. He never looked at someone, man or woman, without picturing them naked in his bed. Against Quin’s neck, Jerry growled, “Well, it sure as hell wasn’t the Macs, I can tell you that.”

Quin snickered and twisted beneath him, but didn’t pull away. “When the virus went live, I signed up to monitor your feed. I didn’t think I’d find anything, really. I thought you were straight. Until—”

“Until you started seeing the porn sites I frequent,” Jerry finished for him. Quin raised an eyebrow and gave a slight nod that settled his head into the hollow of Jerry’s throat. “So this has all been an elaborate ploy to meet me, is that it?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Quin hedged. “But when I saw you liked gay porn, I hoped maybe the office rumors were wrong and you really wereinto cock. And maybe, by extension, you could get into me.”

“I haven’t been there yet,” Jerry reminded him.