Chapter 28
RIGGS
Damon was going to have a field day when I told him I’d fallen in love with Smith.
Thankfully, I’d already gotten the best friend stamp of approval, but I also knew my return to romance was something Damon had long hoped for but never expected.
I also hadn’t planned on it. When he was alive, Ev had been it for me, and after he died, I didn’t think anyone would be able to come close enough to make trying again worth my time.
Not that I compared the two men. They were different in nearly every way except for how tight my chest got when I thought about them both.
And in my shower with his still swollen cock and his lust-drunk eyes, my chest was so constricted it was hard to breathe.
“I didn’t know how much I needed that,” Smith muttered, dropping his forehead against my chest and letting the warm water in the shower rain down across his shoulders.
“Needed what?” I pressed a kiss against the side of his head. “An orgasm?”
He lifted his hands and softly bracketed them over my hips, face still pressed against me. Slowly he rolled his forehead across my pec, a no.
“To be seen,” he admitted. “To be treated like a man.”
I reached for the cutout in the shelf that held my loofah and soap. I lathered the former up and wrung it out against the top of Smith’s back, letting the bubbles race down his spine and over the swell of his ass.
“Are you not usually?”
I lifted an arm and washed his pit before running my soapy fingers over the ridges of his ribs.
‘You met my brother,” he grumbled. “They all treat me like I’m still a baby.”
“You are, to them.” I turned Smith until his back aligned with my chest so I could wrap my arms around him to wash his front. “I’m sure they mean well, and you’re lucky to have so many people who care about you.”
“I have Lincoln too,” he rasped, the words catching in his throat when my fingers reached his cock. I made sure to clean him and tease him without deliberately making him hard. Moving on, I soaped his balls, back further to his hole.
“Tell me more about him.”
“My brother Hunter’s boyfriend. My other brother Marshall’s boyfriend’s best friend.”
“That sounds complicated,” I murmured, sinking down into a squat so I could better wash Smith’s legs. “Who is he to you, though?”
Smith was quiet for a moment, so I continued cleaning his calves and feet before standing up and moving him under the water to get rinsed off.
“He’s my friend,” Smith finally said. “Maybe one of the best, but he’s new. He knows me more than Asha, that’s for sure.”
“Asha?”
“Friend from school. She’s the one who took me to Rapture the first time.”
I skated my fingers down the outside of his arms before giving myself a far more mechanical wash and rinse than I’d given him.
“Sounds like I owe her a thank you.”
“Lincoln too,” he said with a sleepy laugh. “He’s the only other man I’ve been with.”
“And he’s the one dating your brother?”
Smith hummed and nodded.
I reached around him to turn off the water, then I left him in the shower. The first one went around my waist, the second, I settled over his shoulders like a cloak, rubbing the water off his shoulders and the front of his chest.
“Does your brother know you’ve slept together?”
“Oh yeah.” Smith took over drying himself and shuffled after me into the living room. “Lincoln makes porn. It’s not like…well, he does solo stuff, but he’s not uptight and apparently Hunter isn’t either.”
“News to you?” I jerked my chin toward the couch and Smith collapsed into the corner of it without needing to be told twice.
“Lincoln brought out a different side of him, but I think it’s good.”
“He’s happy?”
“They both are.” Smith yawned. “They all are.”
I tightened the knot on the towel around my waist. My hair dripped down my back, and I stopped in the kitchen to dig an elastic out of my junk drawer to tie it back.
“And you?”
I opened a cabinet to get a glass for water, blocking Smith’s face from my view. When I closed it, he was staring straight at me. Rather awkwardly, I set the glass down on the counter and waited for his answer.
“I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” he said, squinting like the confession was realer than he’d realized.
“I’m happy too.”
I filled the glass with water and brought it back to him, sitting down beside him and lifting the rim to his mouth.
“I can—”
I cut him off with a sharp look, and Smith dropped his hands back into his lap.
This was something we hadn’t really had time to do together before.
Not that I’d ignored aftercare, but I hadn’t put as much thought into it as Smith deserved.
His wide eyes were like a gut punch as I tipped the glass back and poured some cold water into his mouth, He drank and swallowed, taking another mouthful before I pulled the glass away and set it on the coffee table.
“Do you still feel like a man?” I asked.
He licked his lips and managed a jerky nod.
“Are you sure?”
“Very,” he said, voice a little hoarse.
“And you felt like a man on your knees in my room, humping my leg to get yourself off?”
“Yes,” he said. “Very much.”
I hummed, brushing back a clump of wet hair from his forehead. Neither of us said much after that, but Smith held my stare and it was so nice to just look at him. To be with him like that. It had been so very long since I had allowed myself that kind of intimacy.
“It’s the way you look at me, I think,” he said later. “Can I have some more water, please?”
An unanticipated burst of heat flared somewhere inside of me, and I lifted the glass again to Smith’s mouth for him to drink. He held my stare the whole time, another quick jerk of his chin to let me know he’d had enough. I returned the glass to the table.
“You can have anything you want,” I admitted.
“I just want you.”
Brushing my fingers against Smith’s cheek, I leaned in close enough that our noses brushed, our breath mixed. His lashes fluttered and he angled himself toward me, his entire body coming closer to mine with every exhale.
“I’m yours,” I told him and I meant it.
Smith, bless him, didn’t try to kiss me.
He sat in that comfortable—if not complicated—space where we existed together with nothing more.
I knew it was him being respectful of my asexuality, but I never wanted him to feel like he couldn’t ask for the things he wanted with me—or the things he needed.
Our physical preferences might not always align, but there was no world where I would ever deprive Smith Covington of his pleasure.
“I like kissing you,” I told him, our lips so close that I spoke the words right into his mouth.
“Is that you asking to be kissed?” Smith grinned, eyes hooded.
“It’s me telling you that you don’t have to ask. It’s not a limit for me.”
He licked his lips, tongue dragging across mine as he did.
I made a soft sound at the tease, and Smith didn’t hesitate after that.
He took the invitation at face value, crashing his mouth against mine with so much force it knocked me over completely.
Smith licked into my mouth, kissing me like he was hungry and desperate for it, like he hadn’t just come all over my leg in the bedroom with an inflatable plug shoved up his ass.
I settled my hands over his hips, moving him into a better position and chuckling as he groaned and ground his body down against mine.
“Do you have limits?”
Smith sat up straight, fingers steepled against my stomach.
“I don’t bottom,” I told him with a crooked smile.
His nostrils flared. “Do you top?”
“Are you asking if I’ll fuck you with my cock?”
Smith’s jaw went slack, his cheeks burning a very endearing shade of pink. “I mean…”
“I haven’t in a very long time,” I admitted. “I’m not repulsed or averse to it, but there’s other ways I prefer to pleasure you.”
“I noticed.” He blinked slowly, tired. One of his hands left my stomach and moved to his, a soft dusting of his own knuckles against his skin before he let his hand fall to his half-hard cock.
“Is that okay?”
“More than.”
“Do you need to come again, baby?” I lifted my body from the couch, pressed into him.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to?” I asked.
“Not necessarily.” He stroked himself slowly, a loose and lazy overhanded grip.
“Good.”
The conversation died again as Smith touched himself.
I folded one arm back behind my head, content to watch him bring himself pleasure.
I studied him, rapt as he brought himself near the edge without ever getting close enough for an orgasm to be on the table.
It must have been a slow kind of torture, judging by the sweat beading on his temples and the tremor in his legs.
“You’re so gorgeous like this,” I whispered, sliding my hands up his thighs. “So perfect.”
He grimaced at the compliment, throwing his head back and releasing his cock. He grabbed my wrist and whimpered, hips chasing after the touch he’d deprived himself of.
“Really?” Smith’s voice quivered with the ask.
Suddenly, I never wanted to meet his brothers. I didn’t want to come face to face with any man who shared his last name that had ever done anything to make Smith feel like less than he was…less than he could be.
“Smith, I…” My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, swallowing the confession back into my throat.
It was too soon, the relationship too new for me to be that forthcoming with him.
But that couldn’t be right. Since the first night Smith and I had met, I’d been nothing but honest with him.
I’d laid the most important parts of myself at his feet and still he’d gone to his knees for me.
“I love you,” he blurted before I could fight my way through the words. “Maybe that’s too much. Maybe I’m—”
“Don’t you dare say you’re too much.”
He swallowed hard. “I think I need a lot of attention.”
“You have all of mine.”
Smith’s mouth twitched.
“Say it again,” I whispered.
“I love you,” he said softly. “I’m in love with you.”
I grabbed Smith around the waist and shoved myself into a seated position. The knot on my towel came undone, falling open. Smith curled his hands over my shoulders to regain his balance. In the very low light of my living room, his eyes looked glassy, but fuck, he looked happy.
I slid my hands up, cradled his face and stroked my thumbs across his cheeks, searching for any indication of uncertainty over the confession.
But all I saw reflected back at me was the pure and unadulterated happiness of a man who deserved the whole world and for the first time, felt like he had it in his grasp.
Reaching between our stomachs, I made a tight fist around his cock, using the copious amounts of precum from his earlier attention to slick my way. Smith dug his fingernails into my shoulders, thrusting up into my fist, riding me to chase after his own pleasure. It was everything I wanted for him.
For myself.
This quiet slice of perfection where nothing else mattered.
No friends, no family, no jobs. Just two men who were…
“I love you too,” I told him, whispering the promise against the corner of his mouth.
Smith cried out, his entire body seizing as hot ropes of cum splattered across my knuckles. On my lap, Smith jerked and fucked himself harder, his dick hot and hard and twitching against my palm as I stroked him through the tail end of his release.
“Holy shit, Riggs. Oh, my God.” Smith flung his head back, the curve of his throat making the most perfect arch I’d ever seen. “Oh, God, it’s too much. Do you really? Do you?”
I waited until he dropped his chin back to his chest, until he blinked my face into awareness, letting me stare at the flush on his cheeks and the dark clumps of his eyelashes before I answered.
“Yeah, baby. I really do.”