Chapter 11 Wes #2
"You sound like a man who needs to use his words."
"I am okay. I am extremely, aggressively okay. Please continue doing whatever you were about to do."
He grinned. The full Luca grin, the one that made rooms warmer, deployed at close range directly onto my face.
Then he kissed down my neck, my chest, the line of my sternum.
His tongue traced the scar on my lower ribs, the one he'd seen for three seconds in the locker room weeks ago, and I arched into the contact.
He undid my belt. Pulled my jeans down. His mouth followed the line of my hip, hot and deliberate, and when he took me in his mouth I said his name in a voice I didn't recognize.
A voice that was not controlled or measured or quiet.
A voice that came from the same place the tears had come from.
Somewhere underneath the enforcer. Somewhere real.
He was thorough. Attentive. He used his hands and his mouth and the specific expertise of a man who paid attention to responses and treated the body underneath him like something worth studying.
When I got close he slowed down and when I pulled his hair he sped up and the feedback loop between us was so intuitive that it felt less like a new thing and more like a remembered thing, as if our bodies had been doing this in some parallel life and were simply picking up where they left off.
"I want to touch you," I managed. "At the same time. I need to feel you."
He shifted. Repositioned. The geometry of two bodies on a bed rearranging until we were side by side, facing each other, our hands between us.
He guided my hand the way he had the first time, patient and warm, and when I wrapped my fingers around him he made a sound that I would have paid money to hear again.
A low, broken sound. His forehead dropped to mine.
"Your hands," he whispered. "God, Wes. Your hands."
We moved together. Slow, then faster. His grip on me was firm and knowing and his rhythm matched mine and the synchronicity of it, the give and take, the mutual escalation, was so intimate that the physical pleasure became almost secondary to the emotional.
Almost. The physical pleasure was considerable.
He came first. I felt his body tense, felt the pulse of it against my palm, heard my name on his lips in a voice that sounded like falling. I followed him seconds later, with his hand still on me and his breath on my face and his eyes open and looking directly into mine as I unraveled.
The eye contact during the finish was the most vulnerable thing I had ever experienced.
More than the tears. More than the knuckle-kissing.
More than any of it. Because the eyes are the last defense, the final wall, and keeping them open while your body does the most uncontrolled thing it can do is an act of trust so profound that it rewrites your understanding of what trust means.
Afterward. His bed. His sheets. The amber light. Our bodies close and cooling and resonating.
"Your hands aren't shaking," he said.
I looked at them. He was right. They were resting on his hip, loose and open, and they were perfectly still. Not controlled still. Not forced still. Genuinely, naturally, peacefully still.
"No," I said. "They're not."
"That's not the bread."
"No. That's not the bread."
He kissed my knuckles one more time. Soft. A callback to the equipment room, the gesture that had started everything, transposed into a different key.
"You don't have to fight anymore," he said.
"Fighting is my job."
"Your job can change. You can change. The roster spot is not worth your hands. Your hands are not worth less than your job. Your hands bake bread and hold mine and just made me come so hard I saw colors, and I refuse to accept that they exist primarily to punch people."
I laughed. The sound was watery and unexpected and real. Luca's face lit up the way it always did when I laughed, as if the sound was a gift he hadn't expected to receive and was going to treasure disproportionately.
"Colors?" I said.
"Shut up. It's a compliment."
"Which colors?"
"I'm not telling you which colors. The point is that your hands are capable of a wide range of activities and fighting should be the least of them."
I pulled him closer. He came willingly, tucking himself against my chest, his face in the hollow of my throat. His breathing slowed. His body softened. The warmth of him against me was specific and total and necessary.
"Luca."
"Mm."
"I'm going to talk to Coach."
"About what?"
"About transitioning out of the enforcer role. About playing actual hockey."
He lifted his head. His eyes were bright and wet and the gold flecks were catching the lamplight.
"Really?"
"You said my hands are worth more than a roster spot. I'd like to find out if that's true."
"It's true."
"Then I'd like to prove it. On the ice. With actual hockey instead of fighting."
He kissed me. Hard and quick and full of something that was not just attraction or affection but pride, which was an emotion I had not frequently been the recipient of and which landed in my chest like a stone thrown into still water, sending ripples in every direction.
"I'm proud of you," he said.
"You're crying."
"I'm not crying. I'm expressing moisture."
"Expressing moisture is crying."
"It's a different category. Ask my nonna. She has a taxonomy."
I held him. The equipment room and the shaking and the tears and the bed and the stillness of my hands. All of it. A single evening that had contained the worst and the best of me, and the man in my arms had seen both and had not flinched from either.
The bread starter at home would need feeding. Tomorrow. For now, the only thing that needed tending was this.
This was enough.
This was everything.
-e