Chapter 301
“I spent Boxing Day with our newly-weds,” Paul told the assembled audience. “And I had the, er, pleasure of watching Lillian trying to teach Ethan to dance. And ladies and gents, this man cannot dance. Slow romantic wedding dances are well beyond his, er, skills.” Ethan hit him, but Paul carried on obliviously. “He could, however, do a very lively dance with his new bride, both in their pyjamas admittedly, to a particular song that came on the radio that gluttonous and hilarious afternoon.”
Lillian suddenly started giggling. “Oh, you didn’t!” she cried, looking delightedly to Darren, whose expression didn’t change.
“So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please proceed to the ballroom for the first dance of this wedding: Ethan and Lillian Summerskill, with Ethan’s only danceable song, performed by Darren Peace and Ruby de Souza.”
Ruby, Paul’s heavily pregnant sister, heaved herself out of her chair and led the charge into the ballroom, a cavernous space beautifully decorated in blue and white, and a dance floor the size of the entire ground floor of Jayden’s house. Another piano—not a grand one, but still a piano—was set up by the as-yet silent DJ’s booth. Darren seated himself without any fanfare, spreading his hands over the keys and waiting, looking over his shoulder.
“Go for it, then, you fucking wanker,” Ethan told him, dragged onto the floor by his new wife, who looked thrilled and wound her arms around his neck, beaming.
Within the first chord, Jayden began to laugh, as did most of the assembled crowd.
A harmonious duet and a hotel piano performed the controversial Christmas classic Fairytale of New York at a summer wedding, and Ethan’s dancing skills were lambasted as passable, but still somewhat poor.
* * * *
Jayden felt itchy, hot with arousal and barely able to keep himself distracted enough to not just get a hard-on in his suit trousers. He was semi-hard already, and as Darren’s playing wound down and the DJ took over, the first ‘dance’ dissolving into a kind of hug-and-sway between the married couple, Jayden leaned against the ballroom door and stared unabashedly at Darren’s lean form as he rose from the piano and straightened his waistcoat. He was utterly beautiful, and Jayden burned with the need to touch him.
He watched, waiting impatiently as Paul clapped hands with Darren and pulled him into a half-hug briefly, offering a glass of wine that was waved away. Darren turned towards the bar, and one of the bridesmaids—a beautiful girl Jayden vaguely remembered to be Lillian’s sister—caught his arm, smiling up at him and raising another glass towards him. Darren smiled down at her, and Jayden’s blood was suddenly too far up to wait any longer.
He pulled himself away from the door, weaving through the abandoned tables towards the dance floor with fierce purpose. Darren glanced up and smiled at him, and Jayden didn’t pause, shouldering the bridesmaid out of the way and seizing Darren’s face in both hands, plundering his mouth in a deep, demanding kiss.
Darren tried to smile against his lips, but Jayden didn’t give him the freedom, pushing into his mouth and only breaking off to breathe, pressing his forehead to Darren’s with his eyes closed and whispering, “Come upstairs.”
He pulled by the lapels; Darren followed, and they stumbled out into the lobby, still kissing almost sporadically, and into the lift, where Jayden fumbled for the buttons on the lift wall and on Darren’s suit jacket at the same time, and blindly. They staggered out with Darren laughing breathlessly, and Jayden opening his jacket to slide his hands over the silk waistcoat and the crisp cotton of the shirt.
“We need a room key,” Darren hissed, and peeled aside Jayden’s shirt collar to suck on his neck while Jayden swore and fumbled for the key card, pushing Darren up against the door and palming his crotch through those sinful trousers.
And paused.
“Wait.”
“You’re kidding,” Darren groaned, dropping his head back against the door with a bang. “Are you fucking serious?”
“Are you…” Jayden squeezed, and Darren bucked his hips and hissed. “You are. You’re not wearing any underwear!”
“You could see the waistband through the fucking trousers, now open the fucking door,” Darren snarled, and Jayden laughed, swiping the card and dropping it the moment they were inside, the door slamming heavily as he pushed Darren towards the bed, still joined to his mouth, and tumbled them down onto it. Jayden tore the belt open and pushed his hands into Darren’s trousers insistently, murmuring a breathless instruction around Darren’s tongue until he lifted his hips and let Jayden pull the suit trousers down and off entirely.
“Where’s your stuff?” Jayden whispered. “Where’s…”
“Waistcoat.”
Jayden fumbled in the pocket, freeing the condom and a tube of lubricant and buried his teeth in Darren’s neck to bite a possessive mark into the exact point where his collar met his skin, even as he pulled at his own trousers. This was not the time for pleasantries and romance and everything: he’d been burning for the entire fucking ceremony, and Darren had looked so stupidly fucking hot in that suit and that waistcoat and playing that church piano and…
It was messy, brutal, intense, and short. There had been too much build-up, too much waiting, and Jayden found himself too impatient to be kind or gentle; foreplay was non-existent, and preparation scant. It was only when Darren bit him harshly on the lip, dangerous and warning, that Jayden paused long enough even for the condom, the intensity of sensation almost too painful to allow it. Once inside, Jayden flattened his palms on Darren’s chest and pinched and rubbed at his nipples through the fabric of the waistcoat, kissing him fiercely around the muted groans and absorbing every shift and flex of Darren’s body. One of Darren’s heels ended up in his lower back, and he tasted slightly unpleasantly of a mixture of champagne and vanilla ice cream from dessert, and even the barrier of the condom between them felt like being too far away, yet this was Darren, and this was Jayden’s doing, and he came with a savage passion that ripped out everything from knees to scalp, and left Jayden gasping almost mutedly into Darren’s cheek, forcing his twitching and shaking hand to bring Darren to an equally vicious completion before collapsing into a breathless, wet sort of kissing, catching his breath from Darren’s mouth.