Chapter 5 #2
Rory stepped aside just enough to let Neil pass, which meant passing close.
The pull again, concentrated in the narrow space between his body and the doorframe.
Neil walked through the gap without breathing and found himself inside a flat that confirmed everything he'd imagined and nothing he'd prepared for.
A sofa, large, low-slung, upholstered in a fabric that had once been charcoal grey and was now a topography of paint marks. A kitchen visible through an arch, a stovetop moka pot on the counter, a half-eaten packet of digestives beside it. Music playing low from speakers behind a stack of canvases.
The contrast with Neil's flat was total. He was entering a different language. Every surface held something. A jacket thrown over a chair. Photos tacked to the wall, a younger guy, Kieran it had to be, at various ages, gap-toothed and growing.
A bottle of red wine on the coffee table.
Two glasses. Still slightly damp.
Waiting.
Placed with a precision that didn't match the rest of the flat. Rory had set it out for him. Had opened the wine, had washed the glasses and placed them on the table. The hope embedded in the clean glasses made his chest contract.
It should have set his teeth on edge. Every instinct he owned, the instinct that aligned cushions and checked desk gaps, should have been screaming. Instead his body loosened. The chaos had a logic. Evidence of energy spent making things rather than tidying them.
‘So, this your flat?’
‘Mine. Bought it after the Whitmore sale. Two years back. Kieran needed somewhere that was ours, not ours-for-now.’
‘And… your brother? Is he…’ Neil heard himself ask.
‘At his girlfriend's. Won't be back till tomorrow.’ Rory closed the front door. The click of the latch was loud. ‘Anything you want.’
Neil's jacket was still on. His keys were still in his hand. He was gripping them hard enough that the teeth dug into his palm.
‘Rory. Listen.’ He turned to face him. Took a breath that stuttered. ‘Before anything… I have to be clear.’
Rory leaned against the closed door. Arms at his sides. Waiting. His face was unreadable, the face unreadable for once. The stillness was a concession: I'm letting you set the terms.
‘Just… sex.’ He said it like a rule. Like it might hold. The words came out hard and flat, exactly as he'd rehearsed them in the car and the shower. ‘Nothing else. No complications. My life… Freddie… comes first. This can't interfere with that. With anything.’
He met Rory's eyes. Tried to project conviction. Managed controlled desperation.
Rory was quiet for a beat. Two. He heard the words and what was underneath them.
He heard, too, the echo of other men in other rooms who'd said versions of the same thing.
Except Neil was standing in his living room with trembling hands and eyes that were terrified and open at the same time, and the one who'd said just sex was the same man who'd said honesty looking at a painting, and Rory couldn't make those two things fit.
His head tilted. A small smile, not the loaded one. His face said: I hear you. I hear the lie. I’ll let you have it.
‘Loud and clear, Neil.’ He pushed off the door.
Took a step. ‘Just sex. No complications.’ Another step.
Close now. Near enough to count the paint flecks on his collarbone, ochre and prussian blue against skin.
‘You came all the way here, on a Friday night, in your good jeans, smelling like you showered twice. Can’t waste that.
’ His voice had dropped. Low and steady and very near. ‘So. How are we doing this?’
He didn't touch him. That was the devastating part. He stood there, six feet one of muscle and confidence, and looked at Neil's mouth and waited. Dared him with nothing but proximity and silence and the absolute certainty that the next move was Neil's.
The keys fell from Neil's hand. Neither of them looked down.
Neil grabbed a fistful of Rory's T-shirt and kissed him.
He had never kissed a man.
He'd had a man's hand on his cock in a car thick with pine freshener.
He'd come in men's hands and in men's mouths and he'd tasted men's skin beneath his tongue.
But he had never put his mouth on a man's mouth.
Never. Because kissing was the act you couldn't file under transaction.
Kissing meant you wanted the person, not just the body.
And Neil had spent years making sure he never wanted the person.
His mouth landed off-centre. Caught the corner of Rory's lips, the soft skin at the edge, and adjusted, and the ring was smooth and Rory's mouth was warm and the collision of the two, metal and heat, stopped his throat from working.
His knees nearly buckled, literally, his legs went liquid, the muscles in his thighs giving way, and he gripped the T-shirt harder to stay upright. A sound came out of him that he would deny under oath.
A sound between a gasp and a groan, dragged up from below his ribs, the sound of fifteen years of kissing women and kissing a man for the first time at thirty-three and his body was saying this, this is what it was supposed to feel like, this is what you were missing, this is why it never worked before, and he kissed harder.
Rory's hand came to the back of his neck. Fast, firm. Fingers closing on the short hair at his nape with a grip that said I've got you and don't fall and I know what's happening right now.
His other hand gripped Neil's hip and pulled him in.
The kiss realigned. Deepened. Rory's tongue against his, another first, another detonation, the intimate wet fact of a man's tongue in his mouth and his tongue in a man's mouth and the mutuality of it, which was what the car parks had never had because the car parks were service and this was conversation.
Rory kissed with his whole body. Mouth and hands and the press of his chest and a thigh sliding between Neil's legs, the denim rough against the inside of Neil's thigh.
Neil was hard and Rory was hard too, the thick press through jeans, and the mutual evidence was so direct and impossible to ignore that the kiss turned desperate.
Nothing cinematic about it. Two men's mouths on each other in a hallway thick with oil paint and someone's dinner downstairs.
Rory broke it. Pulled back an inch. Breathing hard.
His lower lip glistening, the ring catching light.
He held Neil's face between both hands, paint-stained fingers on jaw, thumbs on cheekbones, and looked at him.
Reading, not asking permission. The face of a painter studying a surface that had just revealed what lay under the paint.
Whatever it was, it made him careful.
‘Yeah?’ One word. A door held open.
Neil couldn't speak. His mouth had done a thing it had never done and the recalibration was physical, cellular. The nerve endings in his lips being rewritten. The ghost of the ring stayed cool against the corner of his mouth. Rory on his tongue. It would last for days.
‘Yeah,’ he managed. His voice didn't sound like his own.
They staggered towards the sofa. Neil walking backwards.
Rory guiding with a hand on his hip and his mouth at the tendon of Neil's neck, the underside of his ear, the tendon at the side of his neck.
Stubble on skin. Neil's knees hit the sofa and Rory broke contact long enough to pull his own T-shirt off in one movement.
Bare chest. The dark hair that covered it, trailing to a narrowing line at his stomach. A tree tattoo on his left ribs, roots reaching towards his hip, branches curving over his side. And a silver hoop at his left nipple.
Then Rory's hands were on his jumper, pulling it up, and Neil raised his arms and it was gone. T-shirt next, yanked, less patient, and the air hit his bare skin and he shivered, though not from cold.
‘Down.’ A suggestion, not a command, delivered at a frequency that made Neil's knees give way.
He sat. Then Rory was over him, one knee between his thighs, the other braced on the cushion, and the weight of him pressing Neil back into the paint-marked fabric was the realest thing Neil had ever felt.
Solid. Warm. Heavier than he'd imagined.
Chest hair rough against Neil's smoother skin, abrasion at the nipples, across the ribs, everywhere the two surfaces met.
His hips jerked involuntarily, grinding up, seeking friction, and Rory groaned against his neck and ground down to meet him.
They moved together. Hips rolling. The friction of cotton on cotton, boxers beneath unbuttoned jeans.
Every ridge of Rory's cock pressed against his own through the cloth.
The twitch when he shifted angle. A raw sound tore through his throat without permission, bypassing every filter he'd built in thirty-three years.
His own voice didn't sound like his.
‘Fuck,’ Rory breathed against his ear. His hand found Neil's waistband, already unbuttoned, when had that happened, and tugged. The jeans caught at the hips.
Rory pulled harder and the denim bunched at mid-thigh, boxers dragged half-down with them, and the logistics of two men trying to get undressed on a sofa without separating meant Rory's elbow caught the arm rest and Neil's knee hit the back cushion and none of it mattered because Rory's hand was on his bare hip and the touch, skin on skin, a man's calloused palm on the hollow above his hip bone, sent a contraction through the muscle in Neil's stomach that was closer to a recoil than pleasure.
Rory shoved his own jeans down. One-handed. Graceless. His cock sprang free and pressed hot against Neil's thigh before Rory shifted and lined them up, his cock against Neil's, and the contact made Neil's vision white out.