IT STARTED with a day so perfectly hot that even the thought of pickpocketing a rent boy in an igloo couldn’t cool their skin, and doing Danny’s regular hustle in the tourist quarter was unbearable.
They went up into the hills to a swimming hole Danny’s friend Berto had shown him. The trek along the small footpaths that led there was exhausting, and Danny and Felix had been the only ones braving the savagery of the midday sun. They swam naked until they cooled off enough to rest in the shade.
To make love in the shade.
Was it the coolness of the water after the hotness of the sun that made Felix’s mouth so exquisite on his skin? They’d spent the past months learning everything they could about each other’s bodies. Felix loved to top, but he loved to rim too, and having his face buried between Danny’s asscheeks while Danny moaned and pounded the ground beneath them with his fist was one of Danny’s favorite things.
Followed by Felix, coated in olive oil, thrusting into him, taking his body over from the inside out. Danny’s restless brain, the constant processing of angles, of ways to take advantage, ways to be had, found rest when Felix possessed him. It was over; he was taken, abandoned to the dark pleasure, the high, of giving himself to someone else and letting them take charge.
It was a high he’d only had with Felix, a need he didn’t like to admit consumed him.
He thought about those moments, Felix’s cock thrusting into his asshole, nearly every waking moment of every day, but he only yielded once in a while because Danny didn’t like to be weak.
Today the heat, the cool, the decadence of lounging naked in the shade, even the taste of the apples and bread they’d lugged up into the hills with them—all of it spoke to the abandonment of the careful habits of guarding his heart Danny had learned in order to survive.
Danny lay on his back, the better to see Felix, spine arched, face turned toward the sun, thrusting hard enough that their flesh smacked together like clapping hands. White light, tinged with the red of dark pleasure, consumed his body, and his orgasm rolled over him like the bright sky—inevitable, powerful, beautiful. His back arched, and his cry of climax echoed over the hills as Felix pumped inside him, come scalding across his belly, his chest, inside his clenched ass.
The final convulsion rocked him, and he fell back against the blanket, unable to see, unable to breathe. His body felt captured in that moment of sunshine and savage completion, and to his shame, his eyes burned.
Oh God, Felix was looking at him, watching him come completely undone. Danny turned his head, more afraid of being raw and vulnerable in that moment than he’d been afraid of anything since he was fifteen.
“Hey,” Felix said gently, fingers grasping his chin. “Don’t hide from me. That was beautiful.” He slid out and stretched gracefully on his side, his arm under his head. With gentle fingers he traced the line of Danny’s jaw and the curve of his ear. “That… us. We just get better every time.”
Danny closed his eyes, enjoying the touch. “We do. You sound surprised.”
Felix leaned close enough to lick a trail of sweat down Danny’s neck. “Everything about you surprises me. What’s our next adventure?”
Danny loved the way he called them “adventures,” not “cons” or “jobs.” When Danny taught him the finer points of pickpocketing, Felix thought of it as an adventure. When Danny taught him the basic lost tourist panhandle, Felix thought of it as an adventure. By now they were both pros at spotting someone who needed a ride to the bus station or train depot, and Danny had actually bought a Vespa with a cart on the back so they could take turns ferrying tourists to their destinations in a hurry—either accepting a tip or helping themselves to one when they got their passenger where they wanted to go.
And Felix had watched Danny help genuinely lost people—secretaries or poor students who’d saved their pennies and slept in hostels so they could see a little bit of the world, or natives who needed a break, please God, a ride to work, just this once—when he felt called to give them a hand.
Felix neither judged him a bad con man when he chose not to fleece people, nor as a bad man when he targeted a mark. And Felix’s kindness—as awkward as it could be—was incredibly endearing.
THEY HAD talked about doing some longer cons with bigger payouts. When he’d first met Felix, Danny had spent a few hours each week writing to “pen pals” he’d met in the city who wanted to “keep in touch” after they went home. These people—mostly rich young men who went to Europe to play away from their parents’ eyes and wanted the promise of a playmate next time they had a chance to return—were willing to send Danny an astonishing amount of cash to keep him from being evicted.
He didn’t tell any of them when he moved into a better apartment than the shithole they’d seen, which he could afford to do because Felix had arrived to help with the rent. Danny and Felix moved out of that original garret and into a townhouse a little closer to the tourist center. Together, they were unstoppable.
They were still flush after Felix made him break it off with his pen pals because, in Felix’s words, “That’s not a game you run when you’re with someone for real.” Felix kept reminding him of that: no matter how many games they ran, this thing between them, this was for real. And as much as Felix seemed to enjoy grifting, there was something about him that screamed solid. Real. Responsible. Something Danny couldn’t help but crave in his bones.
The interlude that day by the swimming hole made it even more so, and Danny was… terrified. He’d had so very little in his life that was real. His mother had tried. She’d loved him, but she’d struggled with money, with her health. She’d been hospitalized when he was twelve, and he’d spent the next three years in foster care. When she finally died, on his fifteenth birthday, he ran away for the first time. By the time he was seventeen, he’d learned enough about lying, running, hiding, hustling, and stealing to be okay on his own. He’d caught a bus from Des Moines to the Jersey shore and got into the game for real. He’d lucked out two years before he met Felix and found a much older sugar daddy who’d wanted to take Danny to Europe with him.
After three days on the streets of Rome, with its different smells, different foods, and different people, Danny had gathered his possessions—and the gentleman’s spare cash—and slipped away. The man hadn’t been awful. Not cruel, just… proprietary. Danny had been his whore and his property, and he’d needed to know his place.
Because he hadn’t been cruel, Danny had left him his passport and two credit cards.
Because he’d been sort of a dick, Danny drained one of his bank accounts before he’d even awakened the morning Danny left and had spent a good three months living off that money while he taught himself the finer points of his trade.
To have Felix here, touching him, sexing him, making love to him, willing to follow wherever Danny led, that was a kind of fear Danny had never known.
Which was probably why he hadn’t shut down what Felix said next.
“I think we should do that long con,” he said. “The one you were talking about. The old guy with the daughter.”
Danny caught his breath and turned to meet Felix’s eyes. Not much put the sky in Italy to shame, but those blue, blue eyes did it.