Chapter 28 #2
Dawson lined up. Leo wrapped his legs around Dawson’s waist and pulled him forward, and Dawson pushed in slowly, inch by inch.
The heat and the pressure and the slow give of Leo’s body around him were almost too much.
Leo held his gaze the entire time. Present.
His jaw was set, his breathing controlled, and his hands gripped Dawson’s forearms hard enough to leave marks.
Dawson bottomed out and stopped. His forehead came to rest against Leo’s. Their breath mixed. Leo’s hand settled on the back of Dawson’s neck and held him there.
“Move,” Leo said.
Dawson moved. Slowly. Long strokes, drawing out, pressing back in, a rhythm that built like a current pulling them both. Leo’s body rose to meet him, matched him. This was different from the first time. Not urgent. Not desperate. Both of them looking each other in the face and choosing this.
Leo’s legs tightened around his waist, changing the angle, and the noise he made was ragged. “Right there. Dawson, right there, don’t change anything.”
Dawson didn’t change anything. He held the angle, the pace, and Leo’s head tipped back, exposing his throat, and Dawson put his mouth against it, felt the moan vibrate under his lips.
He braced on one arm, got his hand between them, and wrapped it around Leo’s cock, stroking in time with his thrusts. Leo’s whole body tightened. Dawson’s name came out of Leo, broken in the middle, repeated, a word that only meant this.
“Look at me,” Dawson said.
Leo’s eyes opened. Dark. Wide. Full of everything they’d broken and rebuilt. Dawson held his gaze and kept moving, kept his hand working, and Dawson felt every second of it, the way Leo’s breath caught when their eyes met, the way Leo wouldn’t let him look away.
“Close,” Leo managed. “Dawson, I’m close.”
“I’ve got you.”
Leo came with his eyes on Dawson’s, clenching tight around him, his cock pulsing hot in Dawson’s fist, a cry tearing out of him that was open, raw, and unguarded.
The clench of Leo’s body pulled Dawson over.
He came deep inside him with his eyes open, Leo’s name in his mouth, and his arms shaking with the effort of staying present for every second of it.
He lowered himself onto Leo, who took him, arms coming around his back, legs loosening, his breathing ragged against Dawson’s shoulder. They lay like that while the room ticked with heat through the baseboards and their breathing slowed together.
Dawson pulled out carefully and dealt with the condom. He grabbed the T-shirt from the floor and cleaned them both up, and Leo lay there and let him, watching with an expression that was soft, satisfied, knowing.
Dawson lay beside him and Leo rolled in, head on Dawson’s chest, one hand flat over his heart. The building creaked. Outside, a car passed on the street below, the engine fading into the night.
“Dawson.”
“Yeah.”
Leo’s finger traced a slow circle on Dawson’s sternum. “My contract’s up in April. It might get renewed. It might not.”
Dawson’s hand stilled on Leo’s shoulder. He’d known this. Had known it since before they’d started, since Leo had first mentioned the agent and the phone calls and the word temporary. He’d filed it in the part of his brain that handled problems he couldn’t solve yet.
“Trades happen,” Leo said. “I could end up somewhere else. Somewhere not here.”
Dawson looked at the ceiling. The crack that ran from the light fixture to the corner was familiar now.
The shelf with Leo’s books. The blanket at the foot of the bed, handmade, shipped from Orlando.
All the small, chosen things that said a man had decided to live here, even knowing he might have to leave.
“We’ll cross that bridge if we get to it,” Dawson said.
“And if it’s a long bridge?”
“Then we find a way over it.”
Leo didn’t say anything for a while. His finger had stopped tracing. “Yeah?”
“Of course. I love you, Leo.” He swallowed around the lump in his throat.
He hadn’t planned on confessing tonight, but having the words out there felt right.
“I know I have a lot of work to do to regain your trust, but from now on we figure shit out together. I have no clue what that’d look like if you’re traded, but I have faith in us. ”
“I love you, too. So damned much.” Leo pressed his mouth against Dawson’s ribs. Not a kiss. A seal. The same gesture from the first night on the couch, repeated now because it was theirs. “Stay.”
Dawson pulled the blanket up over both of them. Leo pressed warm against his side, the heat clicked off, and the room went still.
He thought about The Penalty Box in August. His stool, his book, his beer with the label picked at. Gunnar and Wes behind the bar, close enough to touch, not touching, and Dawson watching them from the corner and telling himself that was enough. That watching was its own kind of life.
He wasn’t watching anymore.
Leo’s breathing slowed. Evened. His body went heavy against Dawson, slack with sleep, and Dawson’s arm tightened around him on instinct. Leo’s hand was still on his heart. Even in sleep, he hadn’t moved it.
Dawson lay there and listened to him breathe.
In April, the contract would come up for renewal.
Trades would happen or they wouldn’t. Wyatt would have questions.
His mother would have opinions. There would be rooms he’d have to walk into with Leo beside him and faces he’d have to meet without flinching, and some of those faces would be hard and some of them wouldn’t, and none of it would be the thing that made him let go of this man.
He pressed his mouth to Leo’s hair. Leo stirred, mumbled something that wasn’t a word, and burrowed closer.
Dawson closed his eyes.
He wasn’t going anywhere.