A Dangerous Game Read Free

thought had come from.
    “Well, yeah. I work out.” Wren grinned, immediately feeling foolish, and lifted the vodka and tonic to his lips with a trembling hand. Dave was making him nervous, he realized, and he didn’t quite understand why. It wasn’t the first time he had been hit on by an older man in Tricks, and he was pretty sure, all vanity aside, that it wouldn’t be the last. Tricks was that kind of place. It had a reputation for younger/older men pairings and an even seedier profile as a place where hustlers met up with clients.
    “That much is obvious. You have excellent muscle tone and definition.”
    Wren took another swallow of his drink and smiled, feeling like he was on a little firmer footing now. He expected Dave, at any moment, to follow up his comment with a squeeze of Wren’s bicep. This was a pickup, right? This guy knows the owner or has some other kind of pull in the bar and thinks he can get away with murder. Well, if he wants to ply me with a free drink or two, maybe I should just play along. He thought of the guy he had winked at earlier, and a small voice inside him admonished him not to play games. That everyone, no matter how old or decidedly unsexy, was worthy of respect.
    Still, Wren didn’t know if he was smart enough to play games with this guy. There was something about him that caught him off guard, that paradoxically made him uneasy yet kept him rooted in place. “Thank you. I have to admit, though, most of the ripped stuff is just genetics. Lucky. I don’t work out that hard.”
    Dave looked off, winsome. “Ah, to be young. To not have to work at it.”
    Dave’s eyes, which Wren noticed for the first time were the palest shade of gray he had ever seen on a human being, focused on him.
    “Enjoy it while it lasts, young man. Gravity and our metabolism catch up with us all too soon.”
    They drank in silence for the next several minutes, and Wren watched as one of his favorite dancers, a blond named Arliss, mounted the stage to begin his set. Arliss was different from the other dancers. Sure, he had the lean, ripped bod and a memorable face, full lips and a mane of untamed pale blond hair, but the sleaze factor evident in most of the other dancers was absent when it came to Arliss. There was a sweetness about him, almost an innocence, despite the stories—stories that he had appeared in porn, that he narrowly escaped being the gangbang bottom in not only a bareback flick but a snuff film as well.
    The story went that his boyfriend, Sean, had donned a leather mask and rescued him from the scene.
    Who knew what was true and what was false at Tricks? Most of the dancers had tales to tell, and it was hard to separate the fabrications for the sake of color from the plain old unvarnished truth.
    But Arliss definitely set himself apart from his fellow dancers. Even now, as he moved sensuously to an old Madonna tune, “Ray of Light,” there was something faraway in his eyes. For a moment Wren forgot himself and simply watched Arliss dance in his black thong, admiring how the muscles rippled up from his legs, through his torso, and on, rising to a magnificent chest and broad shoulders. Most of the guys drooled, Wren knew, over that body, but Wren allowed himself to see where Arliss’s gaze focused. It lit across the bar on a fairly nondescript but cute man in glasses who wore a small smile that conveyed he was somewhere else as he met Arliss’s eyes.
    For the two men, Wren thought, no one else existed. He knew the guy Arliss was looking at was his boyfriend, Sean. If you spent any time in Tricks at all, you knew Sean belonged to Arliss and vice versa. Sean practically never missed a night of Arliss dancing, and the two always went home together after Arliss finished working. They were the proof that, even in an environment like this one, where youth was fleeting, lust dominated, and relationships lasted as long as an orgasm, true love could still be found. Arliss and Sean proved that