Chapter 12 #2
I worked both at once, the slick friction against my nipple and my fist moving on my cock, and my head dropped back against the couch and my eyes went half-closed and the ceiling held nothing worth looking at so I brought my gaze back to the window.
The moonlight had shifted, or my eyes had adjusted, because I could see more of myself now.
The flex of my chest with each breath. The way my bicep moved with the rhythm I was working.
The thickness of my thighs spread on the floor, the hair on them darker in the low light.
I was a man who'd spent twenty-plus years maintaining his body as a machine, and I had not spent much time looking at it like this — like evidence of something, like something worth reading.
I had the strange, half-delirious thought that I understood, suddenly, what Soren had been looking at in that dressing room.
My fist tightened.
I gathered saliva and let it fall onto the head of my cock, spread it with my thumb on the downstroke, and hissed at the ceiling.
The wet drag was better. I did it again, deliberately, watched my own thumb move over the head, and bit down on the inside of my cheek at the sight of it.
There was something about watching your own hand on your own cock in the dark that stripped away any pretense of being a composed adult.
I looked like exactly what I was — a man past the point of talking himself out of anything.
I spat properly into my palm then, a good mouthful, warm and slick, and spread it between both hands before I wrapped them back around myself, one at the base and one working the top half.
The wet heat of both hands together at once was enough that my whole body locked up for a second while I adjusted to the sensation, thighs going tight, abs pulling in.
“Fuck,” I breathed, to nobody.
I started moving again. Long, dragging strokes, both hands working different rhythms that found each other after a few seconds and became one thing, and the slick sound of it in the quiet room was obscene and I was past caring.
My hips were starting to move with it, rising to meet my own hands, a small helpless roll that I let happen because stopping it required more self-control than I had left.
I pressed my wrist to my nose and breathed in.
The smell hit me low and direct — sweat and skin and the specific warm salt of my own body working hard, and underneath that the faint residue of the night, the bar, the leather of my car.
It was an animal thing. Primal and unself-conscious in a way that would have embarrassed me if I'd been thinking clearly enough to be embarrassed by anything.
I wasn't.
I breathed it in again and worked my cock with both hands, and then I thought about Soren.
I let myself do it. Let the thought arrive fully instead of catching it at the edge of my mind and redirecting it somewhere safer.
His hands and his mouth and the specific way he'd looked at me on that dance floor like he knew exactly what he was doing even though he hadn't known at all, which was somehow worse and better simultaneously.
My grip tightened.
I thought about his voice.
I've been thinking about kissing you.
“Fuck,” I said quietly, to nobody.
I was stroking myself steadily now, the rhythm finding itself without any real decision from me, my hips rocking up into my own fists in small shallow movements I couldn't entirely control.
I thought about the weight of him on that dance floor.
The heat of his back against my chest, the way his hips had moved in those slow devastating rolls that my cock had answered without consulting my brain at all.
He'd been drunk and loose and completely at home in his own body in a way I'd never been, like he'd made peace with what his body wanted years ago and found the whole enterprise more or less enjoyable.
I'd never been that way. I'd spent twenty years in a body I used rather than inhabited, and right now, on the floor of my own living room with both hands slicked and my hips moving and my chest heaving in the dark, I thought maybe I understood what that felt like.
I thought about him on his knees.
The thought arrived without warning. Unasked for and completely vivid.
Soren on the floor in front of me, his hands pressing against the inside of my thighs, spreading them wider, his dark eyes coming up to meet mine with that specific expression he had when he was looking at me like I was worth looking at.
His mouth open slightly. His hair a mess.
The tattoos on his forearms moving with the shift of his muscles as he settled his weight between my legs like he had nowhere else to be and no particular hurry about any of it.
In the fantasy he looked up at me and didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He just looked, patient and intent, while I sat there trying to remember how to breathe.
My hands moved faster and my thighs tensed and my breath came out ragged against the dark.
I looked at the window.
The glass was doing something strange, or my brain was doing something strange, or both were conspiring together, because I looked at my own reflection in that dark glass with the ocean moving beyond it and for a second — just a second, just long enough for my heart to stop and then kick forward hard — I saw him there.
Soren. Between my knees in the reflection. Head bent, dark hair catching the moonlight, tattoos visible on his forearms where his hands pressed against the inside of my thighs. His mouth open slightly, eyes up, looking at me with an expression that was equal parts invitation and ruin.
“Fucking hell,” I said, through my teeth.
The image didn't leave.
It stayed, steady and detailed and entirely generated by whatever part of my mind had been running this particular file in the background for thirteen years and had finally decided enough was enough. It looked so real that my chest stopped working properly for a full three seconds.
I didn't stop stroking.
My right hand kept moving, slow and deliberate, and I was achingly, furiously hard in a way that had nothing to do with relief and everything to do with the image in the glass and the specific way dream-Soren was looking at me like he'd been waiting for exactly this.
In my head he leaned forward. Pressed his mouth to the inside of my knee, dry and warm, barely a touch, and the phantom sensation of it moved up the inside of my thigh like current.
I felt my own muscles lock against it, felt the involuntary flex of my legs spreading wider against the floor, and my hands faltered for a second before I got them back under control.
“You said you wanted me,” I said, low and rough, to the reflection. “Back then and still now.”
My thumb dragged across the head on the upstroke and I hissed between my teeth, hips jerking up before I could stop them.
Dream-Soren's mouth curved. His chin lifted. He shifted his weight between my knees like he had all the time in the world and absolutely no intention of being rushed, and the specific unhurried quality of it was so precisely him that my grip tightened involuntarily.
In the fantasy he pressed his lips to my inner thigh, higher now, and I felt the scrape of stubble against the skin there and my whole leg shuddered.
He turned his head and looked up at me without moving away, mouth still pressed to my thigh, and the dark eyes in the glass were watching me with an expression so close to the real thing that my chest ached with it.
“Stop fucking teasing me,” I said, rough and uneven, my voice gone lower than usual. “You've been doing it all night and you know exactly what it does.”
The reflection didn't speak. Dream-Soren looked at me with those dark eyes and pressed his palms flat against my inner thighs and I felt the phantom warmth of it like actual pressure against actual skin.
In my head his mouth moved higher, unhurried, along the crease where my thigh met my hip, and my hips rolled up hard into my own grip and the sound that came out of me was not quiet.
I thought about his mouth on my cock.
The thought landed with the precision of a blade.
His lips parting, the warmth of his breath, the particular way his eyes would have stayed on mine even while he took me in, watching my face with that focused attentive look he had when he was paying close attention to something he cared about.
I thought about the sounds he'd make, low and unself-conscious, and the thought of that alone was almost enough.
My right hand was working in earnest now, short fast strokes at the top while the left held steady below, the dual friction of both hands something my body recognised and was leaning into hard.
My abs had gone rigid and my thighs were shaking slightly and my cock was flushed dark and slick in both fists and I was fully inside it now, past the part where I was supposed to be watching this from some dignified remove, down on my living room floor with both hands on my cock and Soren's reflection between my knees looking up at me like everything I'd ever wanted and hadn't known how to ask for.
I gathered more spit and let it fall from my lips directly onto the head of my cock and watched it run down over my knuckles and felt the drag change, wetter and filthier, and the groan that tore out of my chest was raw and real and had no polish left in it whatsoever.
I worked both hands faster. The slick obscene sound of it filled the quiet room and I let it, let all of it, my hips moving freely now in short sharp thrusts up into my own grip like my body had stopped asking permission for anything.
The sensation was building from the base of my spine outward in a slow unstoppable pull and there was nothing left between me and it.
“Soren.” His name came out on a breath. Rough and private and specific, not a word so much as a sound — the specific sound of something that had been held back for too long finally getting out. “Soren, I swear to god—”
My left hand held tight at the base and my right moved faster and the image in the glass held steady, dark eyes and dark hair and phantom hands warm against my thighs, and I came so hard my vision went white at the edges and both my fists locked up and my whole body went rigid for one suspended second before the wave broke and released and came through me in long rolling pulses that wrung sounds out of my chest I couldn't have stopped if I'd tried.
My cock pulsed hard in both hands, the orgasm moving through me in waves that left me shaking, both palms slicked and warm, my thighs trembling against the cold floor, my chest heaving with each breath like I'd taken a hit I hadn't seen coming.
I sat there for a long time.
The house was quiet. The ocean moved.
I became aware, slowly, of the mess. Got up and dealt with it. Washed my hands at the kitchen sink in the dark. Came back and picked up the wine bottle and finished what was left in two long swallows and set it on the counter.
Then I stood in the middle of my living room in my boxer briefs and stared at the ocean through the glass and tried to figure out what the fuck I was supposed to do with all of this.
I'd just come in my own hand thinking about a man.
Not abstractly. Not in some generalized blur of bodies and sensation where I could walk it back in the morning and tell myself it didn't mean anything. Specifically. With his name in my mouth at the end like a confession I hadn't meant to make out loud.
The ocean moved. The moon did its job. The house stayed quiet around me in the particular way of a house that had only ever had one person in it.
I stood there until the cold started coming through the glass, and then I went to bed, and I lay in the dark with my eyes open for a long time before sleep finally decided to take pity on me.
I didn't dream about anything.
But when I woke up at seven with the light coming through the curtains and my phone on the nightstand and the whole previous night sitting right there at the front of my consciousness exactly where I'd left it, the first thing I did was reach for my phone.
And the first name I looked at in my contacts was his.