Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
unmade
ROOK
“My room,” Soren said, and it wasn't a question.
I followed him down the hallway without saying anything because there was nothing to say that wouldn't make this more complicated than it needed to be right now.
He had his keycard out before we reached the door, which told me he'd been thinking about this since before the elevator, which told me a lot of things I was going to need time to process later.
When I was capable of processing anything at all.
His room was identical to mine — standard hotel layout, king bed against the far wall, the city sitting dark and cold outside the window. He closed the door behind us and locked it, and the click of the deadbolt was loud in the quiet.
Then he turned around and looked at me with his back against the door, and for a second neither of us moved.
“Hey.” His voice was different than it had been in the elevator. Softer. More careful. “You can still go.”
“I know,” I said.
“I mean it. If you need to—”
“Soren.” I crossed the room.
He met me halfway.
The kiss was slower than the elevator, which surprised me.
I'd half-expected the urgency of it to carry straight through the door, but he put both hands on my face and kissed me like he had time, like there was no reason to rush through this particular thing, and the patience in it undid something in my chest faster than urgency would have.
He walked me back toward the bed without breaking contact, hands moving from my face to my chest to the buttons of my shirt with a deliberateness that made it clear he knew exactly what he was doing.
Which meant one of us did, and I was going to let him lead because that was the only arrangement that made any sense tonight.
My shirt opened. He pushed it off my shoulders and dropped it somewhere behind me, and then his hands were on my chest and his eyes were on his hands and the look on his face made me go still.
“Hi,” he said again, quieter this time, and dragged his palms slowly up my sternum.
“You're looking at me like—”
“Like what?”
I didn't have a word for it. Like a man who had been thinking about something for a long time and was adjusting to having it finally in front of him. “Never mind.”
He pressed his lips to the center of my chest, right over my heartbeat, and I felt my breath go unsteady.
Then he stepped back and looked at me standing there and his mouth pulled at one corner. “Your turn. Watch.”
He reached for the hem of his own shirt and pulled it over his head, and I was already looking at the tattoos across his ribs when I registered what was sitting just above the waistband of his jeans.
Lace. Red lace, thin and delicate and sitting low on his hips, the edge of it visible above the denim, and the specific contrast of that — soft and fragile against the ink and the muscle and the man — made my brain take a hard stop.
I was staring. I knew I was staring.
“Still with me?” Soren asked, and there was laughter in his voice but it was warm.
“Yeah.” My voice came out rough. “Yeah, I'm with you.”
He got his jeans undone and pushed them down, and the full picture arrived in increments that my nervous system was completely unprepared for.
The thong, red lace and barely functional, sitting low on his hips.
Sheer stockings that stopped at mid-thigh, the lace border of them sitting against skin.
The contrast of all that delicate fabric against muscle wasn't subtle, and it shouldn't have worked as well as it did, and it absolutely did.
I didn't know what I'd been expecting. I'd thought I'd known what I was walking into.
I'd been wrong about that.
He stood there and let me look, which was its own specific act of trust, and I looked.
Not performing composure. Just taking it in.
The ink on his ribs, the lean muscle of his stomach, the lace sitting where it sat and leaving nothing ambiguous about the effect this was having on him either.
The thin fabric was already strained, the shape of him obvious, and I had to make a conscious decision not to go to my knees right there on the carpet.
“Come here,” I said.
He crossed the room and I got both hands on him — his waist, his sides, his ribs — and walked us back until his knees hit the bed and we both went down.
He pulled me down over him and kissed me properly, one hand in my hair and the other at the back of my neck, and I felt the length of him against my thigh and stopped trying to think analytically about anything.
He worked my belt while I tried to focus on kissing him, which was harder than it should have been because his hands were deft and mine were white-knuckled against the mattress and he was apparently doing perfectly fine while I was operating about three seconds behind reality.
“Relax,” he said against my mouth.
“I'm relaxed.”
“You are the opposite of relaxed. Your whole back is rigid.”
“That's just how my back is.”
He laughed, and the sound of it loosened something in my chest enough that I actually did breathe properly for the first time since the elevator.
“Rook.” He pulled back enough to look at me, and his eyes were dark and warm and entirely focused. “You don't have to perform anything in here. There's nobody watching. You can just be.”
I looked at him for a second. “I don't know how to do this.”
“I know. That's why I'm here.” He said it simply, without making it into anything other than what it was. “Let me show you.”
He pressed his palm flat to my chest and pushed me back until I was on my back against the mattress, and then he sat up and finished what he'd started with my belt, trousers following, until I was in my boxer briefs on his bed and he was on his knees above me and he looked completely at home with all of it in a way I envied and was grateful for simultaneously.
Then he sat back on his heels and looked at me properly, and the room felt about ten degrees warmer.
I'd never given a lot of thought to the fact that I was hairy.
It was just how I was built — chest, stomach, thighs, the trail down from my navel to the waistband of my briefs.
On the ice it was irrelevant and in the locker room nobody made a point of it.
But under Soren's eyes it became a specific thing, something he was cataloguing deliberately, his gaze moving over me like he was taking inventory of all the ways I was different than whatever he'd been imagining.
Whatever that inventory concluded, it made his jaw go tight in a way that looked involuntary.
“Do you trust me?” Soren asked.
“Yes.” No hesitation.
He held my eyes for one more second and then he leaned down and pressed his mouth to the inside of my knee.
The breath left me in a rush.
He kissed up the inside of my thigh slowly — no urgency in it, just warmth and the slight scrape of his stubble against skin that had never been paid this much attention — and the hair on my thighs was apparently a point of interest because he pressed his lips through it rather than around it, dragging his mouth up like he had all the time in the world and was going to use it.
I felt every point of contact with a specificity I wasn't used to.
My hands found the duvet without me deciding to grab it.
“Fuck,” he said against my inner thigh, and it sounded involuntary.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He kissed higher. “You're just — you're a lot, Rook.”
I didn't know what to do with that so I filed it away and focused on not making any embarrassing sounds, which was a losing effort because the scrape of his jaw against the sensitive skin high on my thigh sent a hot pull straight up my spine.
He was so close to where I needed him that I could feel his breath through the cotton of my briefs, and the fact that I was already fully hard and had been since approximately the moment he'd taken his shirt off was not something I could do anything about.
He stopped at my hip. Pressed his lips to the jut of bone there, open and warm, and I heard myself make a sound I couldn't have predicted. Something low and caught, pulled out before I could manage it.
“There you go,” he said against my skin, and there was something in his voice that was gentle and pleased all at once. “That's better.”
Then he dragged the flat of his palm slow across the front of my briefs, a single deliberate stroke, and every thought I'd been managing evaporated instantly.
He wrapped his fingers around me through the fabric and went completely still for a moment.
“Rook.” His voice had gone quiet and a little wrecked around the edges.
“What?” My own voice was barely functional.
“I just—” He pressed his palm firmer, felt me pulse against it, and exhaled through his nose. “I knew you were built, but I didn't—” He wrapped his grip around me more firmly and the sound that left me was not quiet. “You're fucking huge.”
It shouldn't have hit me the way it did. It was not a complicated sentence. But the way he said it went straight through me like current.
“Soren—”
“I know. Sorry.” He didn't sound sorry at all. He stroked me once through the cotton, slow and deliberate, and my hips moved up before I could catch them. “I just needed a second. I'm good.”
He was absolutely not good. His hand was still on me and his breathing had gone audibly unsteady and he was staring at the front of my briefs with an expression of concentrated want that made something low in my gut pull tight.
“You going to do something about it?” I said, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it to. “Or are you just going to—”
“I'm going to do several things about it.” He looked up at me and the dark heat in his eyes was. “But not yet. You said you trusted me.”
“I do.”
“Then let me take my time.”