Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 8

girlfriend with an apartment out of romance or practicality.
    But it had been a long time since he'd needed to work through a dream like that. It had started innocently enough as a dream about Stefan giving him a blowjob. Stefan had been very talented and in the dream, Josh had been massively aroused by the wet touch of lips and tongue. He'd wrapped his hands in Stefan's hair and looked down, seeing without surprise in the way of dreams that Stefan's hazel eyes had become chocolate brown. Stefan's mouth became Trey's, that hair between his fingers thickened and softened. Josh moaned in astonished pleasure at the rightness of this. And then something had banged on their door. He'd pulled out of Trey's mouth, startled and suddenly afraid. Trey seemed oblivious of the noise, trying to recapture Josh's dick, Trey's hands reaching for him.
    Louder banging, and dream-Josh had grabbed Trey's wrists and pulled him up, pulled him out of what apparently was a classroom and down a hallway, their sneakers squeaking on the polished floor. They had to hide. He was coming. At the end of the hall, a door stood ajar. Josh dragged Trey inside and under the big wooden desk. They huddled together in the knee-hole, panting from their flight, trying to muffle the sound.
    Then slow footsteps approached. Josh grabbed dream-Trey, who was now inexplicably younger, the slender, shy Trey of their early friendship, even though Josh was still an adult. He pushed Trey deeper into the desk space, trying to put his body between Trey and the approaching sound.
    Suddenly Josh felt all his muscles freeze up. He couldn't move, wasn't sure he was breathing. The footsteps came nearer erratically, as if the walker was searching for them, stopping and looking now here, now there. Then their pursuer approached the other side of the desk. Under the knee-shield Josh spotted a pair of adult male feet, banally clad in black Nikes. The feet stopped in front of the desk. For a long moment there was silence, broken only by the pounding of Josh's pulse in his own ears.
    Then Trey, beautiful Trey of sixteen or seventeen, with his hair cropped short and his dark eyes intense, kissed Josh under the desk. It was a long, deep kiss that started out so hot Josh saw stars. His flagging erection was suddenly rock-hard despite the looming man on the other side of a quarter-inch of veneer panel. And then for a just moment the kiss changed, became poignant and sweet, before Trey slid back, and without another look stood up out of the knee-hole and walked around the desk to that waiting man. Josh huddled, paralyzed, unable to cry out, as Trey's familiar Reeboks moved into his line of sight, paused and then silently followed the black Nikes out of the room. Josh had woken himself in a panic shouting, "No!"
    He lay in bed, wondering if he'd said anything else out loud before he was aware. Had he called Trey's name? He wasn't going to try to psychoanalyze himself, but that dream echoed so many of his past fears, where it was Trey and not Felix or even himself who was taken and abused and changed. He'd tried and failed to protect his brother Felix in a dozen different dreams over the years. He'd failed to protect Trey in hundreds. He'd always told himself that it was because Trey wasn't around anymore that he seemed more at risk. The pattern had been set in that senior year of school when he saw Felix daily and Trey never. But now, shaking, oscillating between the fear and the kiss, he had to admit that there was a completely different reason.
    Josh slammed a fist into his pillow. He was an idiot. A futile, deluded, pathetic idiot. He was never going to look down and see Trey with his mouth stretched around Josh's erection, never going to look into Trey's eyes and find that kind of heat echoed back. The most Josh could hope for was for Trey to slowly lose his prejudices and become tolerant. So that someday, in the far future, when Josh found a guy who was enough like Trey, or maybe enough different from Trey to love for himself, the three of them could be friends.
    Trey would need that tolerance, because even two days of reacting to Trey's hard, muscular presence made Josh realize he'd never felt arousal like this before. And somehow he suspected that if he ever did again, it would be with a man and not a woman. Unfortunately not this man. Josh yanked his pillow out from under his head, wrapped it over his ears, and tried to find sleep again.
    Late that afternoon, Josh straightened