Chapter 15
LINCOLN
Avoiding Smith made me feel like shit. He’d been texting incessantly about getting me set up with another fish, and I’d been leaving his messages unread because I didn’t think I could see him and not tell him about Hunter, and Hunter had explicitly said he wanted to be the one to tell his youngest brother about us first. I made a mental note about telling Hunter at some point in the night that I needed him to come clean and instead turned my attention to Silas.
I waited until I was on the way to Hunter’s apartment to call Silas, also knowing there was a gap in the night between when Silas got off work and when Marshall got home.
They were both workaholics, but one was far worse than the other.
The phone rang through to voicemail, and I frowned out the windshield.
Thankfully, almost as soon as the call disconnected, my phone rang and a picture of me and Silas lit up the screen.
“Hey,” I answered, rubbing my palms on the steering wheel.
“Sorry I missed you,” he said. “I was in the shower.”
“That’s fine.”
“What’s up?” my best friend in the world asked, and suddenly I felt like shit for telling him this over the phone and not in person.
“Nothing,” I lied. “Just driving around and thinking about you.”
Silas let out a low laugh. “Just cruising the city?”
“You know. I like my apartment, but it gets boring when it’s just me,” I said.
It was a lie wrapped in truth.
“Have you got another fish yet?”
I made a dismissive sound in the back of my throat. “Are you and Smith in cahoots?”
“Me and Smith?”
I could hear Silas’ eyebrows raise into his hairline, and I grimaced. “He’s been on me about a Cassandra replacement too.”
“I didn’t know the two of you were that close.”
We were closer, but I definitely wasn’t going to tell Silas that over the phone.
“We’re friends,” I summarized, pulling my car into the parking garage at Hunter’s apartment building. “Going into a parking garage, might lose you.”
“That’s convenient,” Silas mumbled. “Do you want to go out Friday night? Maybe hit up Rapture?”
“Maybe, yeah.”
The call disconnected before he could question me, and I’d never felt more relieved.
Here I’d spent the last half of the day looking forward to going over to Hunter’s apartment and losing myself in him, but the more time passed, the more shit there was for us to talk about.
I had been so wrapped up in overthinking all of it, I hadn’t even filmed any of the content I’d woken up ready to record.
What the fuck was I doing?
I was an absolute mess of a human, and I shouldn’t take Hunter down with me.
Just because he’d been blind enough to fall for me didn’t mean I needed to let him.
I was on the cusp of devising a way to break up with him when somebody knocked on my window, scaring me enough that I jumped out of my seat and screamed.
I snapped my head toward the left and found Hunter there, hand still lifted and eyebrows raised.
I screwed my eyes closed and cursed under my breath, turning off the engine. Hunter pulled up on the door handle and the rush of cool garage air was almost enough to snap me out of my spiral.
“Good timing,” he said, adjusting a leather strap over his shoulder. “I was running late.”
I let out a weak laugh, scrubbing a hand down my face.
“You okay?” he asked.
I unlatched my seatbelt and moved to get out of the car, instead my feet landed on the concrete and my elbows landed on my knees. Cradling my head in my hands, I took some deep breaths that did little to steady me. I needed…
I needed…
Hunter dropped into a squat in front of me, his fingers raking through my hair over and over again until I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against his shoulder.
This was what I needed.
“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly, breath hot against my ear.
“Nothing.”
Because in that very moment, it was true. Nothing was wrong when I was with Hunter. It was all the hours I wasn’t with him when everything felt unmanageable. Admitting that out loud felt grossly codependent, so I swallowed the thought back into the pit of my stomach.
“This doesn’t seem like nothing.”
“I didn’t film today,” I said.
It was a start.
“That’s okay,” he said, fingers still sliding through strands of my hair before ghosting down the back of my neck. “Let’s talk, Lincoln. But upstairs, okay? More comfortable.”
He stood up and helped me out of the car, pulled my keys out of my hand to lock the door, then walked me to the elevator.
We stood close, shoulders touching, but he didn’t ask me anything else.
I took the short ride to study our reflections in the closed doors of the elevator car.
Hunter in his slacks and shirt and tie, me in my jeans and crop top, my messy hair and my piercings.
There’d never been two people more different, but the elevator doors opened as soon as I thought it, and the mirror images of us were gone.
Still in silence, Hunter walked me to the front door of his apartment and unlocked the door.
We both stepped over the threshold and as soon as the door closed behind us, Hunter was on his knees at my feet.
With a low hum, he rubbed his cheek against the outside of my thigh and started to pluck at the laces of my shoes.
He did look good on his knees.
“What do you need?” he murmured, hands skating up the backs of my thighs once he finished with my shoes.
There wasn’t a single thing I needed more than what I had. Hunter on his knees in front of me, his mouth inches from my cock. This was the only thing I’d ever wanted, and it all made sense when we were together.
“Just you,” I answered. “I need to be able to tell people about you, though. I feel like—”
He cut me off, tipping his head back. Even in the low light of his hallway, I could see the way his pupils had dilated into big, black pools that nearly obscured his irises.
“I told Marshall today. He already knew, but…”
I swallowed hard, understanding there didn’t need to be any further explanation. He knew in the way Silas knew, even if I’d tried to pretend Silas didn’t know.
“When are you going to tell Smith?” I asked.
“Friday,” he said.
“I can’t avoid him for a week,” I said, taking Hunter’s face into my hands.
“Tomorrow,” he corrected, and I wanted to cry for how quickly and simply this man understood me.
“Okay.”
Hunter smiled, nuzzling his cheek into my palm.
“What else do you need?”
I swallowed hard, ignoring the way my throat clicked when I opened my mouth to speak. “I need everything to be as easy without you as it is with you.”
He hummed, kissing the heel of my hand. “When are you without me?”
“Earlier today.”
Hunter frowned, almost a parody.
“Are we together, Lincoln?” he asked, jaw working back and forth. “Should I call you Sir when I’m down here?”
“Definitely not.”
“Are we together?” he asked again. “Just us?”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek but managed to answer him with a tight nod.
“That doesn’t feel like we’re ever without each other then.”
I wanted to be angry because the comment felt so dismissive of the way it actually did feel to be without him, but it was impossible to muster the necessary rage to do so when I stared down at Hunter’s wide and earnest eyes.
“That’s fair,” I agreed.
“It’ll be easier once it’s in the open,” he promised, fingers flexing against his legs. “And it’ll be in the open tomorrow.”
“Will Smith be mad I haven’t told him?”
“I’ll take the blame,” he said so quickly, so simply.
“I don’t—”
“It’s my fault,” Hunter interrupted me again. “I asked to be the one.”
Pulling my lips together between my teeth, I slid both of my hands into his hair, working my fingers through the still-styled strands.
His hair product stuck to my fingers, but I carefully worked my way toward the back of his head, even as he grunted and groaned through it all.
Every happy sigh that left Hunter’s mouth also unwound the tension in my own shoulders, and I could have stood in the entryway there for the rest of the night and died a happy man.
“Is it okay to ask you for something?” he finally asked, voice so quiet I almost missed him over the rapid beating of my own heart.
“Always.”
I wanted to call him Sir. It felt right to call him Sir.
“Would you spank me?”
Of all the things I’d expected him to say, that was nowhere on the list, and I took a quick step backward. Hunter’s entire body swayed forward, but he didn’t fall. Instead, he rebalanced himself on his knees and threaded his fingers together behind his head like I’d shown him.
“Say that again,” I croaked.
“Would you spank me?”
“Are you asking because you want to be spanked or because you think I want to spank you?”
He swayed a little, like he was drunk.
“Can’t it be both?”
“Yes.”
“Would it make you hard to spank me?” he asked.
I forced out another nod.
“I want you to spank me,” he said then, telling instead of asking, and heat flared like a volcanic explosion between my legs. “And then I want to film you jerking off for your website.”
“Jesus.”
The corner of Hunter’s lip twitched. “I have to admit, I do like Sir better.”
The air left my lungs in one, long, whooshing exhale, and I flexed my hands at my sides, feeling so certain of what to do and also so confused by it at the same time.
Hunter stayed on his knees in front of me, still dressed for work, tie still knotted around his neck and feet still crammed into shiny black dress shoes that I very desperately wanted to grind my balls all over.
“Crawl then, Sir,” I murmured, taking another step back and another. “Crawl to your bedroom and let me watch you go.”
Hunter’s cheeks burned a violent shade of red, his chest heaving as he fell forward onto his hands and knees.
I followed him through the apartment, down the long hallway to his bedroom, appreciating the way his ass filled out his slacks.
It was an indecent thing, a man dressed like him, with as much money and class as him, crawling with his ass in the air begging for a spanking from a man who barely had his life together. It was all right…we could pretend.
Together, we reached his bedroom, and Hunter rocked back onto his heels again, immediately clasping his fingers together at the back of his head without being told. I closed the space between us and covered his fingers with my hand, tilting his head back until his throat strained.
“You look so fucking hot like this,” I told him, licking my lips.
His chin quivered, lips parted. “I feel so fucking hot like this,” he whispered back.
“I know we said spanking then filming, but I think I want to do it the other way around.”
Hunter groaned, and I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. I swiped through to my camera app and adjusted the settings to accommodate the low light in Hunter’s bedroom, then I held the device out for him to take.
“You film it,” I told him, plucking open the button on my jeans.
They were skinny and torn, and there was no sexy way to get out of them, so I was glad Hunter didn’t start recording until I’d stripped down to my crop top and my black briefs.
“Do you still want to see my face?” I asked, trying to see him from around the phone. “I’ll edit your voice out, don’t worry.”
“I want to see everything.”
The toe of his shoes squeaked on the floor, and I thought about exactly what position I wanted to put him in to spank him. I imagined how hot his cock would burn against my leg as I did it.
Hunter stared hard at the screen of my phone, and I knocked the damn thing out of the way enough so I could get to his throat. He made a very desperate noise as I undid the knot of his tie, and an even more agonized one when he realized what I was about to do with it.
I wound the length of his tie around my hand, curling my covered fingers around the quickly growing length of my cock.
I liked to use lube, but silk would have to do in this case.
Taking a step back, still stroking myself, I crawled up onto the bed.
I knew my body well enough to know what Hunter was recording.
The backs of my thighs, the pucker of my asshole when my ass cheeks spread apart, the low hang of my balls, and the dark blue of the tie that wrapped around my shaft.
“I want to see your face,” he murmured, shifting on the floor.
I threw him a look over my shoulder and then stroked my dick until my entire body trembled.
“What else do you want?”
“I want to fuck you,” he rasped.
“What else?” I asked, flattening myself against his sheets before turning onto my back, arching my hips off the bed and spreading my legs.
For a while, Hunter didn’t answer. He also didn’t move.
Still filming.
I kept stroking my cock, dragging my other hand up the swell of my chest to toy with my nipple piercings.
The friction between my legs was agony, and I’d never wanted anyone more than I wanted him.
I wanted to come, I wanted to spank Hunter, and then I wanted him to fuck me until he burst. After that, I wanted to close my eyes and pretend we never had to leave his apartment, never had to leave his bed.
“Everything,” he finally answered. “I want everything.”