Chapter 5 #3
Another man's cock against his. In a lit room.
against visible skin, belonging to someone whose name he knew and whose mouth had just been on his.
The hardness of it. The slick bead of precome where the two heads met and smeared together.
He'd had his own cock in his hand ten thousand times and never once had it been a revelation. This was.
Rory spat into his palm. No lube, no elegance.
The sound, wet, blunt, hit Neil somewhere primal.
Rory wrapped his fist around both of them and the grip was tight and rough and the saliva wasn't enough, not nearly, the friction half-dry and almost too much.
Neil's hand came up from the other side.
Two hands, two cocks. Their fingers collided.
Grip shifted. The rhythm stuttered, found itself, stuttered again, Rory's hand sliding when Neil's tightened, the offset clumsy, their knuckles bumping.
‘Here.’ Rory adjusted. Laced his fingers through Neil's so both their hands formed one fist. Tighter now.
Better. The shared grip meant their fingers were interlocked around both cocks and the intimacy of that, the hand-holding embedded in the sex act, was so unexpectedly tender that Neil made a sound that wasn't a word and wasn't a moan and was between the two.
His attention caught on every contact point because cataloguing was what his body did when the world overshot its instructions. The ridge of Rory's foreskin against the underside of his own cock. The specific wet drag where precome had pooled between them, slicker now,
He lost the sentence. Tried again. Couldn't.
Rory's breathing in his ear. Hot. Ragged. The lip ring clicking against Neil's earlobe when Rory's mouth moved.
‘Tighter,’ Rory said. A statement, not a request. He knew what he needed.
Neil did. Rory hissed. The sound hit the base of Neil's spine and stayed there, gathering.
The build was fast. Too fast. Weeks of tension compressed into minutes.
It gathered, a specific, tightening heat that said close, and he didn't fight it because fighting it was what he'd done for years, fighting it was what the marriage had been, fighting it was what the locked bedroom and the cleared browser history and the white wall and the empty bed were all for. He was done fighting.
‘I'm…’ he managed.
‘Yeah.’ Rory's forehead against his. Eyes open. Green, blown wide. ‘Go on.’
He came first, every muscle locking. The orgasm punched through him.
It started in his cock and rolled through his pelvis, his stomach, his chest. The spill of it, hot, copious, wetting both their hands and stomachs, soaking into the fist they still held together, and the clench of his body, the involuntary tightening of his hand around both of them, left Rory still moving.
Neil's body had emptied. Spent, the urgency gone. But Rory was still hard against his hand, still grinding, slower now, the rhythm broken. His breath hot against Neil's shoulder.
‘Don't…’ Rory started.
‘I'm not going anywhere.’
Neil's hand tightened. Found a rhythm. Rory's hips pushed into his fist with a desperation that was different from before, more exposed, less controlled, the vulnerability of needing, after the other has already had.
Rory came with his teeth against Neil's shoulder, not quite biting.
A ragged exhale that vibrated against Neil's skin.
His cock pulsed in Neil's hand, three, four contractions, and the warmth of it spilling across Neil's fingers and stomach.
His hand squeezed Neil's hip once, hard, at the peak, then went slack.
All of him. A grown man collapsing onto Neil's chest with a rough exhale that sounded like a word in a language neither of them spoke.
They lay sprawled on the sofa. Legs tangled. Jeans half-down. The mess cooling between them. The music was still playing. Neither moved.
Neil stared at the ceiling. A crack ran across the plaster from the light to the far wall. He counted the branches, four, five, six, because counting was how he steadied himself when everything had rearranged itself and he needed measurement.
Rory's breathing slowed against his neck.
His weight was still half on Neil, arm draped across his chest, one hand resting on his ribs with a looseness that suggested he had no intention of moving.
The weight of another man's body against his, a body he'd wanted and touched and made come, was both the most natural and most terrifying thing Neil had ever experienced.
This was a sofa in a flat with Rory. This was it couldn't be filed, deleted, or driven away.
Rory shifted. Pressed his mouth briefly to Neil's collarbone, not a kiss, just contact, warm lips against the ridge of bone. Then pulled back enough to look at Neil's face. His eyes were steady. More careful than smug. Reading Neil's surface. Assessing what had just happened.
Whatever he found, he kept to himself. Just looked, and the looking was its own kind of honesty.
Neil moved first.
Sat up. Located his T-shirt on the floor. Pulled it over his head. The cotton stuck to his stomach. He didn't care. Found his jumper. Dressed with mechanical efficiency, hands not quite sure, eyes not meeting Rory's. His belt took three attempts to buckle. The brass tongue kept missing the hole.
Rory didn't move. He lay on the sofa, one arm behind his head, jeans still undone, the mess on his stomach. Watching Neil dress. Relaxed. No compulsion to apologise for anything.
‘Just this, Rory.’ Neil's voice was hoarse. Stripped. The voice of a man trying to pour concrete on a foundation that had already cracked. ‘This was… just this.’
Rory propped himself on an elbow. The lazy smile arrived. The one that said I know you. I know what just happened. And I know you'll be back.
‘Message received, Mr Ashworth.’
The surname. Full circle.
Neil left. The stairs were steeper going down. He pushed through the front door into October air that hit his flushed skin like cold water and walked to his car on legs that didn't feel entirely his own.
He sat behind the wheel. Didn't start the engine. His hands were on his thighs, trembling, and his body was still humming at a frequency that made the steering wheel and the dashboard and the parked cars and the street look like objects from someone else's life.
The anonymous encounters had never done this. He'd driven home from those feeling emptied. Lighter, in the worst way. Less.
He'd left Rory's flat carrying more than he'd arrived with.
A body on his. A voice against his neck.
The knowledge, specific, physical, impossible to unknow, of what Rory's hand felt like around both of them, and what Rory's face looked like when he came, and the dark green of his eyes when they opened afterwards: steady, unashamed.
The release. The contact.
He'd also lost. But the airtight structure of his life had a hole in it now, and no amount of ordering or arranging was going to close it.
He started the engine. The clock on the dashboard said 10:51.
Less than an hour. An hour that had disassembled four years of careful construction.
The ring road was empty. The chippy on the corner was closing, staff carrying in the sandwich board.
The ordinary world continuing its ordinary business was so at odds with what had just happened on a paint-marked sofa that Neil gripped the wheel and laughed.
Once.
Too loud in the quiet car.
He drove home. Showered. Long, hot. Let the water run until the evidence was gone but the memory remained, printed on his nervous system. Rory's mouth. The sound he'd made, that sound, the one that came from somewhere below language.
Bed. The flat was quiet. But tonight the quiet had a different quality. Not emptiness but the ringing that follows an explosion, when the air is still shaking and the dust hasn't settled.
Just this.
He was already lying.