Man in the Mirror--A Sexy M/M Sci-Fi Time Travel Short Story from Steam Books Read online

  Table of Contents

  Man in the Mirror Title Page

  About Dara Tulen

  Check out the EXOTIC MAN LOVE compilation!

  BONUS - Preview of THE PRINCE'S BODYGUARD by Bernadette Russo

  MAN

  IN THE MIRROR

  Dara Tulen

  Copyright © 2013 Steam Books Erotica & Romance

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author or publisher except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

  Thirty year-old Dalton Canning woke in an unfamiliar place and had no clue how he'd gotten there. A moment after he realized this, he also realized that he was naked... and not alone. The moment the shadowed figure stepped into the light, everything came crashing back to him.

  TWELVE YEARS LATER

  It was almost done. Dalton smiled as he took a step back from the device. He'd been working on it for over a decade and he'd finally finished.

  He knew that most of his colleagues dismissed this particular venture as a flight of fancy, accepting it as the tolerable eccentricity that went along with the brilliance of Dr. Canning. When you held twelve patents for various scientific inventions, people tended to overlook much in the way of personality quirks. What none of them realized was that Dalton wasn't playing with flights of fancy. He had always intended to make his machine work.

  And now, he had done it.

  Dalton ran a hand through his short hair as he stared down at the machine. He could hardly believe it. He'd been waiting for this moment for so long, and now that it was here, he wasn't sure what to do next.

  After all, there weren't really standard testing procedures for a time machine.

  Dalton reached for the lever, hesitated, and then chuckled at the maddening irony that this, the most sophisticated, complicated device he had ever worked on, ever seen, was going to be activated not by any complex sequence of actions, but by pulling a simple lever.

  Dalton breathed in, breathed out. Braced himself.

  “Here goes nothin’,” Dalton said to himself. “To the future!”

  Finally, Dalton pulled it.

  The device started rumbling, along with a continuous high-frequency hum that ran simultaneously, the noise producing an interesting harmony. A bright LED light came on to indicate that it was functioning properly.

  “Yes!” Dalton hollered into the noise that was growing louder by the second. “Yes! Hahaha!”

  Dalton felt a strange feeling in his gut, like being on a roller coaster that just dropped over a small hill very suddenly, but the feeling was prolonged, not instant. His surroundings blurred, and when he turned his head it was as if he could still see where he originally faced, and the image just smeared in the direction he turned his head in.

  “Oh,” Dalton let out, unsure what was happening to him. “Oooahh!”

  And then, just like that, everything stopped. The feeling, the noise, all of it.

  TWELVE YEARS EARLIER

  There was someone in the room with him. The room itself looked different, too. Was this even the same room? Who was this guy?

  Dalton and the other man looked at each other, their eyes making intense contact, and they both realized they were reacting to each other in near identical ways.

  “Whoa,” both of them said in unison.

  Dalton's jaw dropped, as did his counterpart's.

  The golden waves were longer, shaggier, the face more youthful, but the eyes were still hazel with gold striations, the mouth almost too pretty for a boy. Though a dozen years were between them, Dalton would’ve recognized his eighteen year-old self anywhere. He’d gone the wrong way. His eyes rolled back and darkness claimed him once more.

  ~ ~ ~

  When Dalton came to, he was in a bed. He didn't open his eyes as he began to assess his surroundings. The sheets were scratchy and his feet hung off the end of the thin mattress. At six feet, four inches, he'd always had a hart time finding a bed to fit his long, athletic frame. College had been the worst, even though he hadn't added his last two inches until after graduating.

  College.

  Shit.

  The memory of what, of who, he'd seen just before the darkness had taken him, came back. When he was eighteen, he'd been working on his doctorate in theoretical physics at Stanford... and living in a dorm room with a bed very much like this.

  The way Dalton saw it, he had two options when it came to deciding what was happening. First, his machine could have exploded, rendering him unconscious or even dead, and all of this was just wish fulfillment. The other option was completely ludicrous even though it had been what he'd been working towards for over a decade. His machine had actually worked, but he'd made an error in calculations somewhere and ended up in the past rather than the future. He wasn't sure which scenario he wanted to hope for.

  Either way this went, he needed to open his eyes and see what was going on. He hadn't made it this far in the world by being afraid to take chances. He slowly opened his eyes and looked around.

  White walls. An equally small twin bed on the other side of a fairly small room. A dim overhead light. Yep. This was a college dorm.

  “Who are you?” A low voice came from the desk chair next to the bed.

  Dalton took a deep breath and sat up, catching the sheet as it fell around his waist. He still didn't have clothes.

  “Why do you look like me?”

  Dalton was staring but still couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. He was eighteen and still had that soft look to his face that would stay with him for another half dozen years. Dalton knew that the body underneath those gray sweats and that black t-shirt was leaner and more sculpted than his own.

  “Look, Dal...” he paused. “That's too weird. I'm going to call you DC. Less confusing that way.”

  “There's a way this is less confusing?”

  “You're a bright kid, DC, and I should know, so I'm just going to give it to you straight. I'm you, twelve years from now.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Yeah, I figured you'd – I'd – say that.” Dalton grinned. As completely freaked out as she should have been, he was too excited that his machine had worked to be anything else. “I'll prove it.”

  He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and tossed off the sheet.

  “What are you doing?” Younger him – DC – looked nervous.

  “When we were thirteen, we got caught peeking into Simon O'Hara's bedroom window to watch him jack off. Mrs. O'Hara chased us out into that alley and we climbed over a fence.”

  Dalton twisted his hips and ran his finger across the jagged white scar that started just above his right buttocks and ended halfway down the muscular globe.

  “The ER doc was a hot blond that Mom hit on when she took us to get stitches. It took forty-three to close us up.”

  “You've got to be fucking kidding me.” DC looked like someone had punched him in the stomach.

  Dalton chuckled. He could only imagine what he would've done if he'd been in DC's shoes... which, he supposed, he had. Right? The whole space-time continuum thing was the reason he'd decided to go to the future. It seemed a lot less likely he ran the risk of erasing himself or causing a vast disaster by stepping on a cockroach or cricket or whatever the hell bug it was.

  “How…?” DC no longer seemed bothered by Dalton's nudity. He leaned forward, his eyes lighting up with curiosity.

  “Of course, I can't give you the detail
s.” Dalton's brain was racing as he tried to sort out how much to tell himself. “But the simple version is, I built a time machine.”

  “Why would you come back here? You could destroy the future as you know it.”

  Dalton had to give himself credit. No statement of disbelief, just natural scientific logic. “It was an accident. I was supposed to go forward.”

  “Can you get back?”

  Dalton nodded. “Without going into details, the machine pulled me back twenty-four hours after I arrived.” He glanced up at the clock. “Which means I've got about nineteen hours left.”

  “So you're going to be here for a while?” DC crossed his arms. “And since you shouldn't really be out and about, I'm guessing you’re going to be staying right here for the duration.”

  Dalton wasn't sure that was a good idea, either. What if he said something to himself that caused him to make different decisions in the future? He could return home to find himself penniless and ridiculed.

  “...what do we do?”

  Suddenly, Dalton realized that DC was waiting for an answer. “I'm sorry, what?”

  “I said, since you're me from the future, you've already had this conversation with yourself and know what happens next, so what do we do?”

  Dalton blinked. He hadn't thought of it like that. If he'd met himself as an eighteen year-old, shouldn't he, as a thirty year-old, remember it? He looked around the room, trying to find something that would trigger the memory of this encounter. Unless, he thought, his memories wouldn't change until he returned. Or, perhaps, he would remain the same while everything around him changed. Either way, he needed to know what he'd originally done this day so he didn't change anything vital.

  “It's July seventh, right?” Dalton frowned. Why couldn't he remember. “What were you planning on doing today, before you found me?”

  “I was going to stay in.” DC motioned to the top of his desk where he had what looked like a chemistry experiment set up.

  Something clicked in Dalton's mind. He knew that experiment. It was part of something he'd been trying in college to improve memory function, but it hadn't gone well. In fact, he recalled, the weekend he'd tried to test it, he'd lost an entire day and his notes had been destroyed. When he'd tried to reconstruct the formula later, he'd realized that the results had been a way to wipe memory rather than enhance it. What had been left, however, was one simple drawing, done by his own hand, though he had no memory of it.

  The drawing that had become the very machine that brought him here.

  He wasn't going to change the past, because he'd already done whatever it was he was going to do.

  “Are you okay?” DC sounded concerned as he sat down on the edge of the bed next to Dalton. “You're not having some adverse reaction to the time shift, are you?”

  Dalton slowly shook his head, his mind full of the possibilities of his time here. He knew he hadn't done anything drastic simply because he had more sense than that. He needed to see how something small effected the future before he risked trying to make a big change, no matter how tempting it was. He needed a different idea. Something had been hovering at the edge of his thoughts from the moment he'd seen himself in that chair and it pushed its way forward now.

  Like most men who were good-looking and brilliant, he thought of himself as quite the catch, even more so when he was younger. When he saw his past self, he realized that he was even better-looking than he remembered. And he wouldn't remember this, not for twelve years and, by then, he'd make the same decision. Dalton could see it all now, how it all played out.

  He turned towards himself so suddenly that the younger version didn't have a chance to realize what was happening until Dalton's mouth was covering his. Dalton was surprised at how soft DC's lips were. He'd never expected that kissing himself would remind him at all of kissing a girl.

  DC gasped and Dalton took advantage of the moment to thrust his tongue into the young man's mouth. Involuntarily, DC's fingers dug into Dalton's shoulders, pushing and pulling at the same time. Dalton took DC's bottom lip between his teeth, tugging at the plump flesh as he pulled away. He was rewarded with a moan from DC.

  “Wh-what are you doing?” DC's eyes were wide, his breath coming in pants.

  “You were the one who said I already knew what I did. No one said anything about knowing why I did it.” Dalton reached out and twisted a lock of hair between his fingers. He'd forgotten he had grown his hair out a bit back then. “But, to preserve the integrity of the space-time continuum, should we keep doing what I remember us doing?”

  “Well, uh, yeah,” DC blinked rapidly. “I suppose.”

  “Excellent.” Dalton smiled as he gripped the back of DC's neck. He had a couple of skills he wanted to test and the blood rushing south said that his body agreed. He tugged on DC's neck, pulling the younger man to the floor.

  “Because the next thing you do is suck my dick.”

  Dalton really had to admire his dedication to the preservation of the future. DC didn't argue as he bent his head and took the half-hard cock between his lips. Then again, Dalton reasoned, he always had wondered what it would be like to blow himself. Then the wet heat of his younger self's mouth was engulfing his cock and Dalton didn't care about anything else.

  DC ran his hands up over the older man's thighs and then dropped one hand to cup Dalton's balls. DC caressed the velvet sack as he began to suck, the steady, rhythmic pressure on the rapidly swelling muscle causing Dalton to groan. Dalton buried his fingers in DC's hair.

  Damn he was good.

  Dalton felt his balls begin to tighten. He was close. He shoved DC's head down on his cock, forcing every inch down his past self's throat. The young man started to gag but forced himself to relax as Dalton's cock pulsed, emptying itself as he came. Dalton's dick was still spurting as he pulled DC's head off, his fists full of soft waves. Before DC could do more than take two gasping draughts of air, Dalton's mouth was hard on his, tongue roughly forcing its way between his lips to taste himself.

  When the kiss broke, Dalton was breathing just as heavily as DC. “You. Naked. Now.”

  DC scrambled to obey, leaving the clothes where they fell. At Dalton's nod, DC climbed onto the bed, the younger man's cock thick and swollen. Dalton fully intended to take care of that after a bit. Maybe before the day was done, he'd know what it felt like to have his cock in his mouth... which was probably one of the strangest sentences he'd ever thought.

  As an eighteen year-old, he'd had great stamina and recovery time. As a thirty year-old, he had something better: a formula he'd perfected a few years back – or forward, he supposed, depending on how you looked at it. If DC could get hard half a dozen times before his body couldn't muster any more, Dalton had at least twice that.

  “On your stomach,” he ordered.

  As DC moved to do as he'd been told, Dalton remembered something else from the morning after his missing twenty-four hours. His entire body had been sore in that good way, the way one felt after a marathon of particularly physical sex. Every ache had made him wonder how he could have forgotten something that had apparently been so good. It made him a little sad to think that DC wouldn't remember any of this for twelve years. At least, this time, he'd go home with the memory, and he intended to make it a good one.

  Dalton gazed at DC's body, admiring it from an angle he'd never been able to see before. Muscles rippled under his tanned skin as he stretched his arms above his head to grip the headboard. His waist was narrow, his ass perfectly shaped, not too big, not to small. His legs were lean and strong.

  Dalton nudged apart DC's knees and settled between them. The bed was far too small for this, but Dalton was willing to make due. His own legs hung over the edge as he took DC's ass cheeks in hand and pulled them apart, exposing the little pucker. Dalton's cock began to harden again as he realized just how tight DC's ass was going to be. He wasn't a virgin, not since that frat party six months ago, but he'd only had sex with two guys, neither one of them as well-en
dowed as himself.

  There was one thing that neither of those guys had done and it made Dalton's stomach tighten as he realized that he was going to be the first to do this to himself. He leaned forward and teased DC's asshole with the tip of his tongue.

  DC let out a startled yelp but didn't try to move away. Dalton grinned and licked across the opening with the flat of his tongue this time. DC dropped his face into his pillow, muffling the sounds that poured from his lips. Dalton took that as an encouragement and began to work his tongue past that tight ring of muscle. DC's muscles quivered beneath Dalton's hands as he thrust his tongue into the scorching heat of his past self's ass. It was only when DC began to squirm that Dalton pushed a finger in alongside his tongue.

  “Fuck,” DC growled as the digit began to move inside him.

  Dalton applied more weight to DC's hips, holding him more firmly in place as a second finger joined the first. He removed his tongue, giving his fingers room to stretch. He moved slowly, scissoring his fingers with every stroke.

  “Please, Dalton,” DC begged. “Fuck me. Just fuck me.”

  Dalton now understood why his ass had felt like it was on fire that morning. He'd asked for it and who was he to argue with himself, especially when it came to sex.

  He removed his fingers and lined up his cock. DC keened as Dalton began to press inside, the head of his cock popping past the ring of muscle almost too fast. Dalton leaned forward, letting his weight naturally take him down an inch at a time. He could feel DC's entire body shaking as it accepted the intrusion, the muscles in the young man's ass fluttering around his hard length. As he came to rest, fully sheathed inside his own ass, he paused, holding himself up on his arms as he gave DC time to adjust.

  “Don't stop,” DC whimpered. “Please, fuck. Please.” His hands clawed at his cheeks.

  Dalton was only too willing to comply. A nice, leisurely fuck might be in their future, but at this moment, neither of them wanted that. He rotated his hips, letting his cock rub against every spot inside of DC, and then pulled back.