21. Clayton
Chapter 21
Clayton
Kieran kissed like the most perfect dream. His soft lips chased mine, his tongue teased its way inside to meet mine in the middle. Nothing in my life made sense. Just this. Only Kieran and the way he made me feel. Like a person. Even when he’d hated me. It was almost like his animosity made me real again.
I sighed against him when his arm wrapped around my waist and pulled me close. Fingers threaded into my hair. I needed a fucking haircut, but right now I didn’t care. After an eternity of feeling broken, battered, and lost, I was pulled into Kieran’s arms like he was bringing me home. He kissed me like he’d waited all day to do it.
When he was ignoring me, I’d understood. I hated it. Every second of it burned, but I endured it, hoping that our one night wasn’t our last night. I clung to him now, a little wild and desperate. I wanted to be on the bed, not in front of it. Naked on the outside to match how stripped my insides were feeling.
Kieran’s hands cradled my waist. Thumbs brushed against my bare skin, then he rucked my shirt up and broke our kiss to drag if off over my head. His eyes danced, scanning the ink on my chest. I felt like all my barriers had finally crumbled and he was seeing me for the first time. A lost kid who found art. A floundering man who found tattoos. A broken person who lost everything. But Kieran looked at me like he didn’t see any of that .
He reached out and traced his fingers over my left pec. The corner of his mouth quirked up.
“Stitch? I didn’t take you for a Disney fan.”
“I understand him. I am also ninety-percent bad.”
“Stitch only acted out until he found someone to understand him.”
Well. Fuck my life. If that wasn’t the most perfect thing a man had ever said to me, I didn’t know what was. It would never be topped. My knees quaked and Kieran took pity on me, swooping me up in his arms.
The sudden change in position startled a laugh out of me. “What are you doing?”
“Taking you to bed,” Kieran said simply as he laid me down on top of the covers. “You looked like you were going to collapse.”
I bit my lip and watched him strip out of his shirt too. I didn’t want to wait to be naked next to him. Popping the button on my pants had become a one-handed art form and Kieran’s smile widened when he saw my new trick. I dragged the zipper open and started to wriggle gracelessly and awkwardly out of my jeans.
I didn’t need the boot anymore, but that didn’t mean my leg was entirely back to normal. It still looked thin and wrong, but I hoped that seeing the rest of me would distract Kieran from my imperfections.
Kieran took hold of the leg openings of my jeans and gently divested me of them, tossing them aside. It felt like it took forever for him to get out of his pants, but when he did, I wanted to just stare at him.
“You’re… fuck, look at you.” I could scarcely breathe. Kieran was tall and broad and attractive on a good day, but under his clothes, he was stunning. He looked sturdy and strong, like he could protect me fr om anything. I wanted to rake my fingers through the hair on his chest. There were no words for how beautiful he was.
The bed dipped when he knelt on it and then he was next to me. We were both bare except for our briefs. It was like we both knew it would be over too fast if we got rid of all the layers between us.
Kieran reached for me, grazing his fingers up my bare upper arm and across my chest. His eyes caught sight of the Stitch tattoo again and he smiled at me. Most of the people who had seen it thought it was cute, or they’d laughed at me, a grown man with a tattoo of a cartoon alien on his chest. As if men had to like only the most extreme things like explosions and loud trucks and whatever else toxic masculinity said we had to like.
But Kieran had understood, probably better than I did, why I got that tattoo. It made me want to tell him what the roses on my ribs meant, or about the constellations that I had down low on my torso. They sat mostly hidden by my briefs. Tucked into the crease where thigh becomes body, only the tops of them were currently visible.
Any further thought of what Kieran might think of me faded when he leaned over and kissed me. I hated my cast and how awkward it made things. In my head, when I dreamed about this, there was no clumsy cast. It was just me and him and nothing between us but our skin and sweat.
“Would it be better if I was on your other side?” Kieran asked, kissing the corner of my mouth.
“It would.” I exhaled. “Are you a mind reader?”
“Not really.” Kieran grinned and climbed over me and carefully plopped down on the other side. Now the cast was between us, but that meant my other hand could explore. “But you got all twitchy.”
“I do not get twitchy.”
Kieran kissed the tip of my nose. “He said twitchily. ”
“Is that even a word?”
“My area of expertise is math—and this,” Kieran said before wriggling down to leave a trail of hot, wet, open-mouthed kisses down my chest. He kissed my Stitch tattoo and a flare of affection lit me up inside. I wanted to squirm out of my skin, not because I was uncomfortable. But happy. And happy felt dangerous. It felt wrong somehow to have caused so much hurt and to turn around and be this happy.
Kieran’s mouth kissed away some of my nerves. Right from the beginning, he hadn’t bullshitted me about anything. He’d not hidden his suspicion or his animosity. So now that they were gone, he wasn’t hiding how much he liked me. At least not from me. He was hiding it from everyone else, but I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t admit to being with me either if I were him.
“You think too much.” He kissed a particularly ticklish patch of skin above my bellybutton and I flinched away from the touch. His gaze flicked up to meet mine. “Ticklish in a good way, or in a bad way?”
“What’s the bad way?” I asked, genuinely confused.
“Good ticklish makes your dick hard. Bad ticklish doesn’t.”
“Kieran, I’ve been jerking with my left hand. I am not left-handed. At this point, everything makes me hard. But if it’s all the same to you, we can put tickling in the not-sexy column.”
“Are you going to tell me about this left-handed jerking?” Kieran tugged at the waist of my briefs.
I lifted my hips, allowing him to pull them off. My dick was already hard and leaking and Kieran’s breath ghosting across it made it twitch. He glanced up at me and smiled. “You know, I’ll admit that I half expected a tattoo to be here.”
“Absolutely not.” I cringed at the thought of it. “ You’re insane.”
Kieran shrugged and then bent and trailed kisses down the crease of my thigh, following one of the constellations. Most of the time I didn’t think of my tattoos. They were part of me. But every now and then I wondered what others might think of them.
He kissed every star before making his way to my aching dick. At this point, I felt like a gentle breeze might set me off, but Kieran wrapped a hand around the base of my dick and squeezed. A deep breath rushed into my lungs and I held it there, my body rigid as Kieran helped to quell my arousal.
When I finally managed to exhale, his tongue met the head of my leaking cock. The sound that came out of me was inhuman. A broken wail, a mournful keen, the sound of me knowing nothing and no one would feel as good as Kieran.
Then he opened wide and took the head of my cock and slid it across his tongue, then down into his mouth until it disappeared. Wet heat enveloped me and I pressed my eyes shut and focused on breathing. On feeling the way Kieran’s tongue flattened underneath my cock. On how his cheeks hollowed as he sucked me deeper. Whenever he’d pull back, his tongue would flutter around the head of my cock, teasing and tormenting me. I was powerless to do anything but lie there and be taken apart by him.
“If you keep doing that, I’m going to come.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. It was breathier, tighter, filled with ecstasy and wonder.
Kieran released the suction on my cock and it made a lewd sound. His gaze flicked up to mine and he grinned. “That’s sort of the idea.”
“But I want you to fuck me.” I bit my lip after the admission, as if it wasn’t painfully obvious what I wanted.
“Oh, I will.” He kissed the base of my cock. “I want to make you come, then I want to kiss you and touch you and make you wild, Clay. ”
I already felt wild, but I wanted, more than anything, to have what he’d described.
My eyes nearly rolled into the back of my head when he used his mouth to toy with my balls. Sucking on one, then the other. He licked and kissed and caressed them and when I was so strung out on the lust that was building in me, Kieran pinned my hips to the bed and took my cock down his throat in one long, impressive slide.
I reached for him, sinking my good hand into his hair as I tried in vain to arch up into him, as if I could go any deeper than I was.
Arousal was a chain around my chest, pulling tighter with every twitch of Kieran’s mouth, every beat of my heart. “Kieran—close. I’m close.”
He kept going. My warning didn’t stop him or slow him, or deter him from humming, sending vibrations through me. I came so hard it felt like something in me shattered and broke. The universe went white and my hips thrust ineffectively as I spilled down Kieran’s throat.
He kept going until I wriggled under him, whimpering when my cock went from eager to be pleased to too sensitive to touch. Kieran made his way back up to my mouth, leaving no patch of skin unkissed on his way.
By the time he made it back to me, my dick was already wanting to get hard again. Kissing Kieran made my blood sing. It made me want things I had no business wanting. Things like this. Like him. Like more nights at his mom’s with people he called family. I wanted more laughter. More aimless drives in his car. Road trips. A life.
I wanted to wrap myself up in Kieran and never let go. More than anything, I wanted to deserve it. Deserve him. And I knew I didn’t. Not yet .
Deserving or not, I still wanted to touch him, so I dragged my good hand over his body, roaming his skin. Kieran’s breathing changed when I reached between us and cupped him through the fabric of his briefs. I held him in my hand, enjoying the heat and the heft of him.
Kieran deepened the kiss and rutted against my hand. “I could come like this,” he said against my mouth.
He kissed me again and thrust into my hand like he’d meant it when he said he could come.
I let go of him. “You better not come unless it’s in me,” I told him. My cheeks felt like twin infernos, but it earned me a smile from Kieran. It was soft around the edges, but his eyes remained filled with heat and lust.
“Tell me how you want it,” Kieran said.
I wanted to look at him the whole time. To have him take me and own me and let me drown in his eyes when he did it. If I never got here again, I wanted to pretend I knew what it was like to be loved.
“Don’t make me choose,” I told him. I didn’t feel strong enough to ask for what I wanted and I believed that Kieran would know anyway. Sometimes I thought he might know me better than I knew myself.
He pressed his lips to mine and eased his tongue inside again. We kissed. We breathed. We touched. And for a few minutes, we just existed in this bubble of perfection where desire and need took a back seat to affection. Kieran kissed me like I meant something to him so it shouldn’t have been a surprise when he told me he wanted me just like this.
“So I can look at you,” he said, eyes heavy with emotion.
I pulled him down into another kiss so I wouldn’t say anything stupid… like how much I loved him.