26. Ryan
RYAN
M al shakes the bottle of narcotic pain pills in my face. “You want one?”
“No,” I say firmly because this isn’t the first time he’s asked.
I don’t know what he thinks I’ll say to him that I haven’t already said.
It’s Sunday afternoon, and we both woke up late after six hours in the emergency room.
His left wrist is broken, but doesn’t require surgery, so he’s in a cast that covers half his hand and his entire forearm.
Bailey dropped off Stephanie around ten, and she peeked in on Mal asleep in my bed. “How long?” she’d asked.
“About three weeks,” I told her.
“Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?”
I sighed. “They’re on a break or something.”
“Is it rude that I like him about ten thousand times more now?”
I huffed a laugh. “Me, too.”
“I didn’t know you…”
“It’s him,” I admitted. “It’s kinda always been him.”
She’d looked up at me like she might cry. “That’s so sweet.”
“Is it?” I asked. “Because most days it feels colossally stupid. ”
She left us alone after reassuring me that she approved.
Now, I shove his hand and the pills away. “You get forty-eight hours with those, then you’re weaning.”
“I broke a bone,” he argues.
“You’re suffocating when you’re high.”
“Oh, and you hate that,” he says, rolling on top of me to prove my point, and maybe his, because my dick immediately perks up.
What I do hate is having no self-control around him. I was all over him after he fell. I’m surprised I didn’t start undressing him to check for wounds in front of Miguel and Bailey. Kissing him on the neck once I got him off his back was a moment of pure helplessness. Relief.
“You should eat,” I tell him with his mouth an inch from mine.
“Good idea.” He dives in to kiss my neck and starts working his way down my chest.
I grab him by the hair to stop him. “Deacon made soup.”
“Soup? I’m not sick.”
“You are if you think I’m gonna let you suck me off eight hours after we left an emergency room.”
“You’re not making sense,” he says, his lips wet and red. Tempting. “That’s not a rule.”
“You need to eat.”
“I’ll make you a deal. If I eat, you do whatever I want after.”
“I can’t agree to that,” I tell him.
“If I told you what I want doesn’t require me to use either of my hands, would you agree to it?”
“Maybe…” I say, picturing things. Sucking him…eating him…fucking him.
“I need more than a maybe,” Mal says, those teal-blue eyes arresting mine and holding them hostage.
“Fine. ”
“You can do better,” he taunts.
“I’ll let you do whatever you want. Satisfied?”
He smirks. “I will be.”
I ease out from under him and get out of bed.
I’m surprised to find Deacon didn’t just make soup—he made clam chowder. I’m more surprised when it’s one of the best I’ve ever had. “Deac?” I call out.
I don’t get an answer. I guess he left. I’ll have to save my gratitude and compliments for later. He was really great when we got home in the middle of the night, making sure we had everything we needed and letting me know I could text him if I needed him to run out and grab something else.
But Mal’s fine. His wrist hurts, but there’s nothing more to be done about it. This chowder, however… I can barely work a stove, and Deacon made this .
Norah made a clam chowder once, and I thought it was good, but Deacon’s is the perfect amount of creamy and peppery.
Hers was thinner and not super memorable, so why the fuck am I thinking about that now?
Maybe because I talked to her for an hour yesterday while I was rushing from store to store, picking up groceries and vitamins and lube.
It wasn’t an overly intimate conversation.
It was about work and how things are going with the challenge.
She had a rough week with her assistant, so she vented about that for a while.
It was less flirtatious than some conversations we’ve had, but it did remind me how well we get along.
How what I might have had with her would have been good.
And yes, I’m already thinking of it in the past tense.
It’s not like I can tell Malcolm I’m in love with him and actively picture a future with someone else.
I feel guilty for not talking to him about it, though, which does make me more willing to let him have his way with me once he’s had something to eat.
I bring two large mugs of chowder into the bedroom and hand him his along with a spoon. He’s propped up with some pillows against the headboard. Stephanie and Bud are soaking up the sun in Bud’s bed on the window seat. I sit facing Malcolm to make sure he eats.
“I think I left my work badge at my apartment yesterday,” he says.
“You shouldn’t go in tomorrow. Not if you’re still taking the pills.”
“Twist my arm,” he says around his spoon. “Just not the broken one.”
“You really hate the job?” I ask.
Malcolm avoids the question and says, “This is really fucking good. I think your roommate has a thing for you.”
I laugh, despite the abrupt subject change. “Why do you say that?”
“Comfort food like this? Soup? It’s a love language.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Like how Mom always made us soup when we were sick,” he says.
“That’s cause she thinks it’s a cure for everything.”
“She’s a nurse. She knows what cures things.”
I grimace. “Don’t make me have to think about Deacon like that .”
Mal laughs but doesn’t take it back. I don’t let my thoughts go there. “He made this for you, too.”
“Maybe he wants in on the action.”
I nearly spit out my mouthful. “Stop. Jesus, Mal.”
“Doesn’t appeal?” he asks.
“No!”
“That was adamant. You used to be pretty good about sharing.”
“ With you, not… you . ”
His blue-green eyes gleam with satisfaction. “Careful. Sounds like you might want to commit to something.”
“That’s not anywhere close to what I’m saying,” I say, but in terms of holding my ground in this conversation, he’s got me on my heels. I perform an ungraceful turning of the tables. “Besides, your girlfriend is back in two days. You won’t be my problem anymore.”
His mouth drops open, and I swear his skin loses a shade of color. “What?”
“Isn’t she coming home Wednesday?”
“I’m your problem ?”
He’s always been my problem, but in this case I was joking—about that part, at least. “Look, I just needed you to shut up about Deacon?—”
“You think you’re getting rid of me Wednesday?”
“Am I not?” I ask.
“ No . Are you fucking kidding?”
The chowder isn’t settling well. I reach over and put the mug on my nightstand. “It’s hard to imagine you not being with her.”
“It’s impossible to imagine not being with you ,” he says.
My stomach does a one-eighty flip.
“But if that’s some kind of problem for you…”
I take his soup and put it aside, too. Call it a moment of weakness or whatever, but those words, more than anything he’s ever said to me, dissolve my resistance. I put my arms around him and swing my leg over his hips. I pull him close, pressing a kiss to one cheek while I cradle the other.
He takes advantage of my obvious vulnerability and kisses me firmly.
My heart can barely tolerate it. I’m broken open.
Exposed. I’m the same stupid kid with a crazy crush he had no business having.
All that talk about the risks he loves so much slips into the space he opened up, and I’m ready to take one. “I want this,” I tell him .
“Good. Now, tell me how much.”
I put him on his back. “You know how much.”
“You’re not even hard.”
“It’s not always about that, asshole.” I grab his face and kiss him again. “Sometimes it’s not a feeling in my pants, it’s a feeling in my chest.”
“Can you go ahead and take that warm, fuzzy feeling and get hard?”
My dick is already working on it, but I hold his head in place and kiss him again and again.
“Wait—hang on—wait.”
“What?” I groan, pressing my forehead to his in frustration. I don’t want to talk anymore. He fumbles around under the covers next to him. I turn to look at what he’s doing, and my eyes widen at the huge flesh light. “What the fuck?”
“Do you have any of these?” he asks.
“No,” I say, frowning at it.
“But you know what it is, right?”
“Yes, Mal. I’ve been in a sex shop before.”
“This one should fit us both.”
“ What? ”
“Shit, Ry, it’s not that weird. You said anything I want.”
He’s right on both counts. I did say that, and on the spectrum of Mal’s kinks, this is a relatively mild one. “It doesn’t look big enough.”
“It’ll be tight,” he says, his voice low and sexy.
“What does that one do?” I ask. Though I don’t own one, I’m aware that there are different kinds.
“It’s pretty basic,” he says. “It’s got a little suction if you want.”
Ready to be naked with him in any capacity, I reach for the lube and push off my underwear—the only thing I’m wearing. I help him out of his before he holds out the toy for me to squirt lube into.
“Put some on our dicks, too,” he tells me.
I do, getting him ready first while I watch his face. His eyes hood as I stroke him. “It’s gonna be like fucking you,” he says.
“You want that?” I ask.
“I want this.”
“You’re welcome to fuck me,” I tell him.
He shakes his head. “I like how things are with us. Unless you don’t.”
I guess “how things are with us” is still pretty new in the grand scheme of things.
Since we’ve been fucking, I haven’t thought about bottoming for him.
But before—back when I was forced to watch him fuck his girlfriend any chance he could make it happen, I always pictured being on the receiving end of him.
But that wasn’t really him, it turns out.
It was a show he was putting on for me—maybe for himself, too.
“No,” I say. “I do. I fucking love being inside you.”
“You wanna do this with me?” he asks, sounding less than confident for the first time. “This probably wasn’t what you had in mind a second ago. You were being really sweet.”