Chapter 13 #2
I ground against him again, and pleasure sparked up my spine.
My arm tightened across Lorenzo's chest, and I let my lips rest against the nape of his neck, breathing him in, tasting the salt of his skin.
I wanted to bite down, wanted to mark him the way he'd marked me at the warehouse, wanted proof that this was real and not another fever dream conjured by grief and exhaustion.
Lorenzo stirred slightly, and his voice came rough with sleep. "Rafael?"
My name on his lips sent heat straight to my cock, made something desperate claw its way up my throat, and I made a sound I didn't recognize as I ground harder against him.
My hand splayed across his chest, counting his heartbeats, memorizing the rhythm of him alive and warm and here under my touch.
“Fuck, you’re so hard.” Lorenzo tilted his hips and gave me a better angle, and pleasure crashed through me so hard my vision whited out.
He's letting me, I realized through the haze of want. The relief made me dizzy. I'd been so sure I was broken beyond repair, that whatever capacity I'd had for this kind of connection had died with my mother and been buried deeper with every prayer I'd mouthed in empty chapels.
My hand left his chest and went low, fumbling with the waistband of his sweatpants because I needed more, needed to touch him properly, needed to know if he wanted this as desperately as I did.
I shoved my hand clumsily into his pants and found him hard and hot.
The reality of another man's cock in my hand was nothing like I'd imagined in the dark privacy of my room, where shame always waited on the other side of release. It was so much better.
I wrapped my hand around him, and Lorenzo hissed, and the sound went through me like electricity.
"Let me show you—" His hand moved toward mine.
"No," I snarled and grabbed his wrist, pinning it against his stomach. I didn't want instruction, didn't want guidance, didn't want him to teach me how to do this like it was a skill to be learned rather than a hunger that had been eating me alive for years.
"Shut up." I bit the back of his neck, and he groaned. I need this, the bite said. Please let me have this.
My hand wrapped around him again, too tight at first, so I loosened my grip and tried again. My palm was sweaty, and the angle was all wrong. I was sure I was doing it terribly, but Lorenzo was hard in my hand and making sounds that suggested I wasn't completely failing at this.
I squeezed and pulled his cock in an awkward rhythm, my wrist already starting to ache from the unfamiliar motion. He moaned my name and and was breathing hard, so it must not have been so bad for him.
I rocked my hips forward, thrusting against him until nothing mattered. Not Rome, not Rio, not the noose nine levels beneath the Vatican, not my dead mentor, not my name on all those checks. There was only heat and pressure and need all tangled up until I couldn't tell where I ended and he began.
"That's it," he whispered breathlessly. "Take what you need."
His permission shattered something in me, some last wall I'd been holding up against the flood of want, and I thrust harder, my hand working his cock with no rhythm or skill, just desperate need laid bare.
The concrete bit into my hip, but I didn't care because twenty-nine years of nothing had led to this moment, and I couldn't get enough, would never get enough.
Some distant part of me knew I was crossing a line I could never uncross, but the rest of me was too busy drowning in sensation to care about damnation.
My rhythm turned frantic, and I was rutting against him like an animal, like something feral and desperate. Maybe that's exactly what I was, what I'd always been underneath the cassock and the prayers and the carefully constructed righteousness.
Pressure mounted at the base of my spine, and my whole body went taut with it.
"Christ," I gasped against his neck.
My whole body locked up, and I came hard inside my sweatpants, hips jerking forward as heat spread between us and soaked through fabric. I kept thrusting through it, making the mess worse, chasing every last second of pleasure like a man who'd been starving for it.
When the aftershocks stopped, I collapsed against his back, panting hard. My hand was still wrapped around his cock.
The warmth spreading through my chest terrified me more than the physical release had, because this wasn't just lust. This was want in a way that felt dangerous, that felt like it could unmake everything I'd built myself into, and I wanted more anyway.
I shoved my sweats down my thighs, coated my palm in the mess, and wrapped my hand around Lorenzo's cock again, this time slick with my release. The slide was obscene and wet and filthy, and heat rushed straight back to my cock as I worked him with something closer to desperation than technique.
Lorenzo made a sound low in his throat that went through me like lightning.
I trailed my other hand down his side, and my palm came back smeared with pre-cum. I slid my fingers over the leaking head of his cock and gathered up pre-cum, then dragged my filthy hand up over Lorenzo's chest, leaving wet streaks across his skin, marking him with proof that he wanted this too.
"Oh, fuck," he moaned. "That's fucking hot."
I sank my teeth into his shoulder, telling him to be quiet without words.
Mine, I thought, and the possessiveness that came with it was new and fierce and utterly foreign to a man who'd been taught that wanting anything for myself was the ultimate selfishness.
Not the Church's, not my father's legacy, not some vessel for their violence. Mine. My choice.
My hand kept working his cock while my other hand wandered over his skin, spreading pre-cum across every inch I could reach.
Lorenzo's breathing had gone ragged, and his hips were moving now, thrusting into my fist. Watching him come undone because of my touch made something primal wake up in me that I hadn't known existed.
My teeth found his neck, his shoulder, and each bite drew a sound from him that went straight to my cock, and I was getting hard again, which seemed impossible, but my body was making up for lost time with a vengeance.
He bit out a curse, and his whole body went taut as his cock pulsed in my hand.
Cum spilled hot and thick over my fingers, adding to the mess already coating us both.
I kept stroking him through it because I wanted to wring every second of pleasure from him, wanted to be the reason he fell apart like this.
When he finally went limp, I brought my hand up to look at it. My palm was covered in him, in me, in us mixed together. The sight made my throat tight.
I brought my hand to my mouth and tasted us, groaning. The transgression made my cock twitch against his ass.
Lorenzo groaned, and I sank my teeth into the junction of his neck and shoulder, harder this time.
Lorenzo gasped and arched into it, and blood welled hot under my mouth.
I licked it clean, tasting him properly for the first time, and the copper tang mixed with everything else was communion in a way the Eucharist had never been.
The barrier of our sweatpants was suddenly too much. I wanted skin against skin. I yanked his pants down and my cock was hard again, thick and aching and demanding more despite having just come.
"Fuck," Lorenzo managed, reaching back to pull my hips firmer against him. "You're really pent-up."
"Shut up." I bit him again, and he shuddered. "I'm not done with you."
I found more cum coating his stomach and gathered it, bringing it to his mouth and smeared it across his lips.
"Open," I demanded, and when he did, I pushed my fingers into his mouth.
His tongue slid against them and I immediately imagined my cock in their place, wondered what it would be like to feel that wet heat around me.
But I didn't know how to ask for that. I didn't know how any of this worked beyond the desperate need driving me forward.
I pulled my fingers free and used the wetness to mark his face, his throat, claiming him in ways that would have horrified me yesterday but today felt like the only honest thing I'd ever done.
My rhythm turned brutal as I rutted against him, all desperation and hunger, like I could somehow get inside him through pure want. "Say my name," I demanded against his skin because I needed to hear it again, needed proof that this was real.
"Rafael—"
The sound shattered me, and I came with something between a sob and a roar, spilling hot against his ass while my whole body locked up. My teeth sank into his shoulder one more time, and when it was done, I collapsed against his back, panting hard, wrung out and trembling.
We lay there in the wreckage, both of us covered in cum and sweat and blood. The sun was setting, turning everything golden.
My hand moved through the wetness coating his chest. I couldn't stop touching it, couldn't stop touching him, like if I stopped, this moment would evaporate, and I'd be back in that cold cell of a life where I'd existed rather than lived.
"I'm going to hell." The words came out less fearful and more resigned.
"I'll save you a spot," Lorenzo said, voice rough and warm and utterly unafraid.
My hand kept moving through the mess between us. Every touch was proof I'd chosen this, chosen him, and no prayer could wash this away now, even if I wanted it to.
"What's wrong with me?" I asked, and the question came from somewhere deeper than the physical, from the place where twenty-nine years of doctrine was trying to reassert itself against the reality of what I'd just done.
"Nothing's wrong with you," he said. "You're just human."
But he was wrong, and we both knew it, because humans didn't spend their whole lives denying themselves every basic need and calling it holiness.
Humans didn't rut against their father’s murderer on a warehouse floor while the world burned down around them.
Humans had limits, had shame, had some instinct for self-preservation that would have stopped them before they crossed this line.
When I joined the order, I did it because I wanted to mean something, wanted my suffering to matter, wanted the pain to add up to purpose. But lying there covered in evidence of my desire, I couldn't make myself believe any of it had mattered at all.
Somehow, I'd gone from "thou shalt not" to "why the fuck not" in less than twenty-four hours. The ease of that transformation terrified me more than the damnation it promised, because if I could abandon everything I'd built my life on this quickly, what had any of it ever meant?
And now I could never go back.