The Road Least Traveled Read online

  “The Road Least Traveled”

  M/M Straight to Gay First Time Romance

  Jerry Cole

  © 2017

  Jerry Cole

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is intended for Adults (ages 18+) only. The contents may be offensive to some readers. It may contain graphic language, explicit sexual content, and adult situations. May contain scenes of unprotected sex. Please do not read this book if you are offended by content as mentioned above or if you are under the age of 18.

  Please educate yourself on safe sex practices before making potentially life-changing decisions about sex in real life. If you’re not sure where to start, see here: http://www.jerrycoleauthor.com/safe-sex-resources/.

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner & are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Products or brand names mentioned are trademarks of their respective holders or companies. The cover uses licensed images & are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any person(s) that may be depicted on the cover are simply models.

  Edition v1.02 (2017.09.09)

  http://www.jerrycoleauthor.com

  Special thanks to the following volunteer readers who helped with proofreading: Ursula at Owl Pro Editing and those who assisted but wished to be anonymous. Thank you so much for your support.

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  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Authors Note

  Books by Jerry Cole

  Chapter One

  Hangovers never feel quite so bad when they occur on a Friday morning. Accepting an invitation to go out for a few beers on a Sunday evening means the drinks themselves have a taste of regret about them. The subconscious pricks at the conscious mind, digging it in the ribs and making such snide statements as “you’ll regret that in the morning!” and “don’t you have to be up at six-thirty to avoid all the traffic?” Once Monday morning inevitably comes along, the “I told you so” headache just makes everything worse.

  There isn’t such regret when the drinks occur on a Thursday evening, however. If anything, Thursday evening beers are carefree and drunk with wild abandon. What’s the worst that can happen? Tomorrow is Friday!

  This was very much Greg Marsh’s attitude. At five-fifteen, he received the call he’d been expecting all day.

  “I take it you’re good for tonight,” came the familiar voice at the other end of the line. It belonged to Henry Berman, Greg’s golfing buddy, work confidant, and as time had gone on, his best friend.

  “Count me in,” said Greg, holding the receiver with his left hand while his right hand continued to guide the cursor over the screen. “Are we going to the clubhouse or that new place we’ve been talking about?”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” said Henry. “Gaby’s off to her mom’s in Jersey for her sister’s graduation and she’s taken the kids with her, so I have a free house, a hidden stash of potato chips and a poker table that’s not been dusted off for a hell of a long time.”

  “This is sounding better every second,” said Greg, his interest piqued enough for him to leave the computer and sit back into the soft leather chair. “What kind of stakes are we talking?”

  “Jesus, I don’t know,” said Henry. “I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. But I had to check with you and make sure you were in first before I asked around.”

  “Well Rodriguez still owes me fifty from last time, so you’d better invite him. That must have been a year ago, at least. Ask Davies, too. I’m sure I’ve worked out his bluff so I’d like a chance to test my theory out.”

  “Rodriguez… Davies. Got it.” Greg envisioned Henry writing the names down on a sticky note on his desk. “I’m thinking maybe my brother-in-law, Miles, too. He’s a good guy. A little shy, but he’s smart. Smart enough not to spill on me to his sister, too, which is all that matters.”

  “That makes five,” said Greg. “I guess that’s enough.”

  “Eight at my place. Let yourself in. We’ll set up in the basement.”

  “Right.”

  “Oh, and one more thing,” added Henry. “I’m thinking it’s time to crack open that single malt from last year’s golf tournament, what do you say?”

  Before Greg could protest, Henry had already hung up. Greg couldn’t help but smile a little. Henry had coveted the bottle of scotch Greg won since he’d laid his puppy-dog eyes on it. Greg wouldn’t have been surprised if this poker tournament was merely a vehicle for the malt itself, a way for Henry to finally get a taste. Greg couldn’t think of a better occasion to enjoy it than at a game of poker with his friends, though, and decided to grant Henry his wish.

  He left work at six-thirty, switching off the lights to his office and popping his head around the door to say goodnight to Patty, who was filing her nails at the reception desk, whittling away the last hour before she clocked off at seven. He left the office and opened the door to his low, sleek Malaro T7, three years old and still the best model made to date. He slung his briefcase onto the back seat and roared out of the parking lot. The silver car glided down the highway with minimal effort, and with the windows down and the sun disappearing down behind the hills of Los Angeles, leaving an orange and purple glow in the sky that never failed to make him smile. Greg Marsh felt that life was pretty much perfect. He turned on the radio just in time to hear the opening bars of one of his favorite songs. It was fate.

  But fate could also be pretty damned irritating, if
not completely cruel. The track faded out and was replaced by a crude ringing sound. His cell phone had paired itself with the Bluetooth and broken his reverie. The sophisticated system even flashed up with the name of the caller. And Greg was not in the mood to speak with the caller. However, given that he and the caller had a somewhat lifelong responsibility that bound them together, he reached forward and pressed the button to take the call.

  “Hey, Sarah,” he said. “I’m in the car. Can you hear me okay or do you want me to wait until I get home and call you from there?”

  “She’s chosen NYU, Greg,” came the response. “Could she be any more obvious with her middle finger to us?”

  Greg winced as he checked his mirrors and pulled out from behind a slow-moving white truck which had been braking for no reason for the last two miles.

  “Did she tell you that herself?”

  “Of course not,” snapped Sarah. “She doesn’t tell me anything. I had to open her mail. And there it was in black and white. ‘Thank you for choosing NYU, Molly, and welcome to the beginning of a world of opportunity!’ What a fucking joke. I need you to have a word with her.”

  “Sarah,” Greg said firmly, “I don’t think it’s a great idea for me to call her and tell her that I’ve heard about her college choice either from her snooping mother or from the psychic powers I’ve suddenly developed.”

  “True,” his ex-wife conceded. “But you didn’t see her last weekend, so why don’t you invite her over to your house this weekend instead? Take her to that restaurant she likes. Get her to open up to you.”

  “Because she would see through that,” replied Greg, making no attempt to hide his sarcasm. “You forget that NYU doesn’t enroll dummies.”

  Sarah sighed.

  “I feel like we’re never going to see her again,” she said in a small voice. “Our little girl is literally moving to the other side of the country and there’s nothing we can do.”

  “Except pay for the move,” said Greg, realizing he’d made two wry comments in the space of twenty seconds, and noticing that Sarah was clearly less angry than she was upset, he took a breath and thought about his next words.

  “Look, I’ll come and see you guys this weekend, and we’ll all talk together,” he said. “Or, how about we all go to that restaurant and be as adult as we’d like our daughter to be?”

  “All right,” Sarah said. “I have to go reseal this envelope and put it in her room before she gets home. Talk to you later.”

  She clicked off and the track he’d been enjoying earlier returned through the speakers, but Greg could not get back the relaxed feeling that had been pleasantly coursing through his soul before the phone call. He turned the music down and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. His jaw was clenched as the news Sarah had given him sank in a little and he thought of Molly in New York. Alone. Well, without her parents at least. She’d been away on school trips before, and with her friends. She’d skied in Europe two years ago with her best friend Ashleigh and Ashleigh’s folks, but that was different. She was only gone for two weeks. School was different. She’d be gone for months on end. Greg was a great believer in travel broadening the mind and life experiences teaching a person more than school ever could, but he was willing to make an exception in the case of his daughter.

  Greg and Sarah’s relationship was ancient history. Nineteen years ago, they were wed before either of them had turned twenty. The marriage lasted all of six months. It was the night the divorce was finalized that they had one last drunken night together. Molly had been the result. Over the years, Greg thought more and more that maybe Sarah had only ever wanted a baby from him. That final night, it was her idea to open the bottle of wine as they agreed to an amicable parting and congratulated each other on handling the divorce so well. A second bottle quickly followed the first, and Greg still had only the vaguest of memories of that night, not least his knees rubbing into the carpet as he fucked his now ex-wife on the expensive living room rug. He mostly recalled he was still wearing his socks, something Sarah detested during their short union, but that night she had made no protests. A month later, now dating a blonde named Cindy who liked to scratch his back until it bled, Greg received the call that changed his life. At twenty, he felt he could take it all in stride and so for the following eight months calmly accompanied Sarah to all her OB-GYN appointments, bought a large crib for the house and a smaller one for his apartment. He was the epitome of a young but maturing man, and was about to become the world’s greatest father.

  But nothing could have prepared him for how ignorant and altogether useless he felt when the squawking bundle was placed into his arms that fall. Molly was barely the length of the bottle of wine that had been responsible for her existence, but she commanded the whole room. He couldn’t gaze lovingly into her eyes because they were clamped shut with the effort of her screaming. But when he reached into the folds of the blanket with a trembling hand, Molly gripped his index finger and held on tight. It didn’t stop her bellows of indignation, of course, but she held her daddy’s finger until Greg reluctantly passed her back to her mother. His heart was already a puddle, and very little had changed in the subsequent eighteen years, despite both parents never quite managing to work well enough together to be together again.

  Co-parenting, while not easy, had come naturally to the arrangement, and at the risk of sounding like a man thirty years older, the years had raced with a speed Greg could barely fathom. It seemed only months since Molly’s first day in kindergarten and now she was headed for college. Greg shook his head at the thought, then pressed his foot a little harder on the gas. He needed to get home, get a shower, get to Henry’s and get some of that scotch inside him.

  Chapter Two

  As the car swung into the driveway, the sensors picked up its presence and the door to the garage lifted with a clean swoosh. Greg parked and shut off the engine, leaving the windows down in the coolness of the dark garage. He’d be back behind the wheel again in just over an hour.

  He climbed out, closed the door and let himself into the kitchen through the adjoining door. As always, the house was quiet. He noted that Rosa had been there. The place smelled fresh and the money he’d left on the counter was gone. He loved the days his cleaner visited. She did a great job. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her, their arrangement worked so well. She came once a week, took care of the house, laundered any clothes and linens in the basket, changed the beds, pressed the clean laundry and put everything back in the closet. In exchange, he paid her in cash which he left on the counter, with a little extra for the holiday season or for the days her brother came to look after the garden. They did not communicate but the deal suited both parties extremely well. The best part of the deal was that Rosa’s work was flawless.

  Greg inhaled the scent of her labor as he walked through the house. He left his bag underneath the table in the hallway and climbed the cream-carpeted stairs. In the bedroom, he opened the door to his large closet and walked inside, where he kicked off his shoes and pulled off his tie. He unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it into the now-empty laundry basket, then did the same with his gray trousers and socks.

  He padded through his bedroom, past the large bed, on which were fresh sheets whose lure Greg managed to avoid. He loved the feeling of a newly-changed bed, but he knew that if he lay down, there was a very good chance that he would not get back up again until the following morning. Besides, he was very much up for the poker game.

  In the bathroom, he flicked on the shower, and waited for the gushing water to heat up. Then he removed his boxers and stepped under the jets. He simply stood, arms by his sides, allowing the water to wash the day off his body. At six-foot one, his head was only inches away from the nozzle. Without opening his eyes, he reached forward for the bottle of shampoo, and popped open the cap, squeezing some of the contents into his hand. He massaged the shampoo into his thick hair. At thirty-eight, he was already almost completely gray. His jet-black hair had
begun to exhibit silver streaks when he was in his mid-twenties, but he removed them hastily whenever one would appear. Eventually, he lost the battle, as by the age of thirty, the gray had triumphed. Now, he was lucky if he found the odd streak of black in among the strands. Despite having been incredibly self-conscious about it at one time, he had grown used to it, and had even embraced his locks. Women complimented him without end. He’d been called a “silver fox” more times than he could count, and even his buddies told him it gave him a distinguished air. Henry would have traded places with him in a heartbeat. His own sandy hair was thinning at a rate of knots and Greg noticed that in the last few months he’d even begun to sport the beginnings of a combover.

  On the rest of Greg’s body, however, there wasn’t a single fleck of gray. Instead the hair on his arms and legs was thick and black, and his chest sported a thick dark thatch, that ran across his chest and down over his abdominal muscles. His mom, Italian by heritage, had handed down her hairy genes, and from his Irish father Greg had inherited blue eyes and a love of fine whiskey.

  The water, hot and plentiful, coursed down Greg’s body and splattered onto the charcoal tiles of the bathroom floor, running into the dip in the center of the floor, where it disappeared down the drain. Once his hair was washed, Greg flipped open the cap of another bottle, squirting shower gel onto his chest, which he then rubbed all over his body. Like all men, he concentrated more time than was probably necessary on his long, slim cock, running it through his hands, ensuring it was completely clean. He turned around and the powerful water pummeled his back, massaging his shoulders and he gave a deep-throated gurgle of pleasure.

  By the time he switched off the water, the room was immersed in a fog of steam, and Greg turned on the exhaust fan. He could not see himself in the mirror as the glass was so clouded. He grabbed a towel from the rail and, dripping wet, rubbed his hair as he walked back into the bedroom. He checked the clock by the bed. It was already seven-thirty and Henry’s was on the other side of town. Greg returned to the closet and took out a pair of pale blue jeans. He reached up and picked up a black leather belt, and threaded it through the loops. He noticed in the closet that Rosa had pressed his lucky t-shirt. It was fifteen years old, soft with years of wear and washing. It had won him more of Henry Berman’s tournaments than Henry himself was willing to admit, and on the few occasions Greg had thrown caution to the wind and worn another shirt, he’d lost miserably.