Chapter 18 #2
Rory pushed in. Bare. Skin against skin, his cock entering Neil with nothing between them. Different from every other time. Warmer. The ridge of the head distinct against the internal wall, every texture magnified. Neil's breath left him in a rush.
'Slow,' Neil said. Not because it hurt. Because he wanted to feel every inch.
Rory went slow. All the way in. His forehead dropped against Neil's, their noses touching, breathing each other's air. His hips flush against Neil. Inside him completely.
'I love you,' Neil said.
During. With Rory inside him. With the weight of Rory's body pressing him into the mattress and Rory's cock filling him and the specific, internal heat of skin against skin with nothing between them.
He said it looking at Rory's eyes, close enough to count the darker flecks in the green, and his voice cracked on the second word but he didn't repeat himself.
'I know, love.' Rory's voice broke on the word. 'I know you do.'
Then Rory moved. Drew back and thrust in, slow, deep, the angle finding the prostate on the first stroke because Rory knew.
Eight months of learning this body and he knew where Neil needed him.
The pressure bloomed upward through Neil's pelvis and his legs tightened around Rory's hips and his fingers dug into Rory's shoulders.
The rhythm built. Slow at first, then deeper. Rory's hips driving with a force that pushed Neil up the mattress by inches. Neil's hand gripped the headboard behind him. The wood smooth under his palm. Real.
And then Neil did something he hadn't planned.
He planted his feet on the mattress. Pushed up against Rory's chest. Rory's eyes widened, a flash of confusion, and Neil kept pushing, rolling them, using the leverage of his legs and the momentum of Rory's own weight.
Rory went onto his back. His cock slipped out in the turn and Neil felt the loss like a door slamming.
He didn't wait. He straddled Rory's hips. Reached behind himself, found Rory's cock, hard, slick, wet with lube and with him, and sank down onto it. All the way. The angle was different from below. Deeper. Neil's thighs shook.
Rory stared up at him. Wrecked. His hands went to Neil's hips but they didn't guide. They held on.
'Neil...'
'My turn.'
Neil moved. Rolled his hips, finding the tilt that dragged across the prostate on every stroke. His hands flat on Rory's chest, the heartbeat hammering against his fingers. He lifted and dropped, learning the mechanics, his thighs doing the work.
Rory's head tipped back into the pillow. His mouth fell open. His hands tightened on Neil's hips, fingers digging into the muscle, not controlling the rhythm but surviving it.
'Christ,' Rory said. 'Christ, Neil.'
Neil went faster. He leaned back, one hand braced on Rory's thigh behind him, and his own cock bounced against his stomach, untouched, leaking.
He didn't reach for it. The fullness of Rory bare inside him and the look on Rory's face.
The charm gone. The composure gone. Just Rory.
His hands on Neil's hips asking for nothing and receiving everything.
'Look at me,' Neil said. Rory's own words, given back.
Rory was already looking.
'I love you,' Neil said again. From above. Looking down at the man underneath him. His voice didn't crack this time.
Rory's hand went to Neil's cock. Wrapped around it. Stroked in time with Neil's hips, thumb pressing the underside on every upstroke. Neil stuttered. The bed. The man beneath him.
Neil came first. His cock jerking in Rory's fist, his body clenching around Rory's cock, his thighs locking. He came across Rory's chest, across his stomach. His body tightened in waves and Rory's breathing broke.
'Neil.' Rory's voice was gone. Just the name. His hips drove up from the mattress, once, twice, and he came inside Neil. Bare. Neil felt every throb without barrier. Rory's face buried against the arm Neil braced beside his head, his mouth shaping Neil's name, broken in half.
Neil stayed on top. Rory softening inside him. Both of them breathing like the air had gone thin. Neil's hands on Rory's chest, feeling the heartbeat slow. Rory's come inside him, warm, real, evidence.
He looked down at Rory. The green eyes, the lip ring, the dark curls against the white pillow. Underneath him now. Held.
'Again,' Rory said. Rough.
'I love you.'
'I love you. I'll say it every day if you want.'
'I want.'
'Then I will.'
Neil lifted off. The absence registered for both of them. He lay down beside Rory. Then on top of him, because he could, because the weight went both ways now. Rory's arms came around his back.
After a while Rory shifted him off. Gently. Got up, padded to the bathroom, came back with a flannel. Warm. Wiped Neil's stomach, between his legs, careful with the cloth. Wiped his own chest. Dropped the flannel on the floor. Lay back down.
Neil pulled him close. Rory's head on his chest. The lip ring cool against the skin above his heart. His breath slowing to sleep-rhythm.
The lamp lit the room in warm gold. The curtain was open to the street. A fox passed under the window, visible for a second, gone.
\ \ \*
In the morning, Neil opened the sketchbook.
He'd brought it. In his bag, under his jacket, Rory didn't know.
Had carried it to the gallery and carried it back and now he sat on the edge of Rory's bed in the early light with the leather cover open and the first page blank and a charcoal pencil, also brought, also not mentioned, between his fingers.
The blank page looked at him. White. Empty. Terrifying.
He didn't look away. Eighteen years. The last drawing, Adam Kershaw's shoulders in a bedroom thick with adolescence, had gone into a drawer and the drawer had closed and the closing had been so total that the hand had forgotten it could do this.
You forgot the permission. The feeling that looking at someone and translating the looking into marks on a surface was an acceptable thing to do.
Malcolm had closed the permission. This isn't serious, Neil. And the sketchbook had closed with it.
Rory had given the permission back. The inscription on the inside cover: Start again.
Rory was asleep. On his stomach, one arm hanging off the mattress, the sheet at his waist. The tree tattoo on his ribs rising and falling with each breath, the roots expanding, the branches contracting, the tree breathing.
His hair across the pillow, dark against the white cotton.
His face in profile, the jaw, the broken nose, the ring catching the first light through the curtain gap.
Neil looked at him. Really looked. How he used to look at things before the looking stopped. The eye measuring distance, proportion, angle. He selected what mattered. The shoulder's curve. Shadow beneath the scapula. The sheet pooled at the hip.
He put charcoal to paper.
The line was uncertain. Unsteady. The hand remembered the impulse but not the fluency. The first stroke was wrong, the angle of the shoulder too sharp, the proportion off.
Too dark.
He smudged it with his thumb. Tried again.
The charcoal caught the paper's grain and the mark was better, not right, but closer.
He drew another line. Another. Another. The shoulder taking shape through accumulation, mark by mark, the same way Rory built his paintings, layers, corrections, the truth emerging through the process of getting it wrong.
He drew for twenty minutes. The charcoal wore down to a stub.
His fingers blackened, the charcoal dust deep in the lines of his hands, the same place the paint lived in Rory's.
The drawing filled the page: a shoulder, a back, the line of the spine, the suggestion of a face in profile.
Technically rough. The proportions approximate, the work of a fifteen-year-old trapped in a thirty-three-year-old's hand.
But the attention was there. The careful, devoted attention of someone looking at a body and finding it worth recording.
When Rory woke, he found Neil sitting on the edge of the bed with charcoal on his fingers and the sketchbook open on his knee.
He looked at the drawing, at Neil, at the drawing again. His face cracked. Somewhere between tears and laughter. A man seeing what he'd hoped for.
'You opened it,' he said. Rough.
'I opened it.'
'You drew me.'
'I drew your shoulder.'
'From behind.'
'Old habits.'
'Will you draw my face?'
The sketch. The shoulder. The turned head. Eighteen years ended on a Monday morning in a flat of oil paint and sex.
'Next time,' he said. 'I'm working up to it.'
'Take your time.'
'You know me, I always do.'
Rory pulled him back into bed. The sketchbook fell between them, charcoal smudging the sheet, the drawing face-up on the pillow. Morning coming in. City outside.
The drawing would get better. His hand would remember. And one morning, not today, not tomorrow, but soon, Neil would draw the face.
And not look away.