Chapter 15 Miles
Miles
The kiss changes when I decide to change it.
One second it's soft, careful, his forehead against mine and our breath mixing in the dark. The next I have my hands on his chest, pushing him back toward the couch, and the softness is gone. What replaces it has teeth.
"Miles—" Ray's hands come up to my waist, gentle, steadying. "Hey, we don't have to—"
"I want to." I pull at his shirt, untucking it from his pants. "I want this."
"Are you sure? The dinner was a lot and I don't want you to—"
"Ray." I stop and look at him. His expression is open, careful, concerned — so goddamn tender it makes me want to scream. "Stop being careful with me. I'm not fragile."
Something shifts behind his eyes. He nods. His hands stop trying to slow me down.
I undress him. Not the way it happened at the resort — no desperate pulling, no frantic scramble to get skin on skin.
I unbutton his shirt and push it off his shoulders and I look at him.
I take his belt off and pull it through the loops and drop it on my clean hardwood floor.
I unzip his pants and push them down and he steps out of them and he's standing in my living room in his boxers and nothing else and the lamp light is golden on his skin and I take a second to just look.
He's beautiful. I've known that since the day he walked into my office with his wrinkled shirt and his trouble-making grin, but knowing it in the abstract and seeing it in my apartment are different things.
He's here. In my space. The first person to stand in this room and look at me like I'm the only thing worth seeing.
I sink to my knees.
Ray's breath catches. His fingers twitch at his side like he wants to reach for me and stops himself.
I look up at him from the floor of my own living room and it's not submission.
It's a decision, and it's mine, and from down here I have all the power because he's going to stand there and take whatever I give him.
"Miles." His voice is rough. "You don't—"
"I know I don't have to." I hook my fingers in the waistband of his boxers and pull them down.
His cock is hard, thick, flushed dark at the head, and the sight of it makes my mouth water in a way that surprises me.
I've never wanted to do this before. Not really.
The few times I tried in college were mechanical and forgettable.
This isn't that. This is me, on my knees, wanting.
I wrap my hand around him and he exhales hard, his stomach tensing.
He's big. I knew that — I've felt him inside me — but seeing him from this angle, holding him, my fingers not quite meeting around the shaft, it's different.
I stroke him once, slow, learning the weight and the heat against my palm, the way the skin moves over the hardness underneath.
Then I lean in and press my lips to the head of his cock and his whole body goes still.
I take him in. Just the head at first, my lips stretching around him, my tongue pressing flat against the underside.
The taste is salt and skin and precome, bitter and clean.
His thigh tenses under my free hand. Good.
I take him deeper, hollowing my cheeks, and he makes a sound — low, punched-out, like I've knocked the air from his lungs — and I do it again because that sound is exactly what I wanted.
I find a rhythm. Slow, deliberate, taking him a little deeper each time.
My mouth is wet and I let it be — the slicker the better, and the obscene, slick sounds filling the silent apartment should embarrass me and don't. His grip lands on my shoulder, tight, and the effort he's making to hold still and not thrust is visible in every locked muscle.
I don't want him to hold still. Not yet.
But I want to earn the moment when he stops holding back.
I pull off and work the head with my tongue — slow circles, flat pressure, dipping into the slit and tasting the precome that's leaking steadily now.
Then I take just the tip between my lips and suck and his hips jerk forward half an inch before he catches himself.
His palm moves from my shoulder to the back of my head, not pushing, just resting there, and the weight of it on my skull does something to me.
Anchors me. Makes the rest of the world go very far away.
I want to know what wrecks him. I use my tongue on the underside, tracing the vein from base to tip, and his thigh tenses under my hand.
I take him deep and hollow my cheeks and the sound he makes goes straight to my cock.
I wrap my hand around the base and twist while my mouth works the top half, my tongue swirling on every upstroke, and his head drops back against the wall and he says "oh fuck" in a voice I've never heard from him — high and surprised and completely undone.
I do that again. And again. Because the look on his face when I figure out what works is better than any performance review, better than Richard's approval, better than every piece of professional validation I've chased for a decade.
This is a different kind of competence and I am very, very motivated to excel at it.
I pull off and look up at him. Spit connects my lower lip to the head of his cock and I don't wipe it away. "You're shaking," I say. My voice is rougher than I expected.
"Yeah." He's breathing hard. "Your mouth is — fuck, Miles."
"Tell me." I stroke him slow while I talk, my thumb rubbing through the wetness at the tip. "Tell me what my mouth is doing to you."
"It's — I can't think. I can't—" He swallows hard. "You look insane right now. On your knees with your — with your lips all swollen and your — god, I want—"
"What do you want?"
"I want to be inside your mouth when I come," he says, and his voice cracks on it, like the honesty cost him something. "I want to feel your throat."
I take him back in and this time I push past where it's comfortable.
The head of his cock hits the back of my throat and my body rebels — the gag reflex seizes and my eyes flood with tears and my throat constricts and for a second I can't breathe.
I pull back, breathe, and push down again.
The reflex is still there but it's weaker.
I breathe through my nose and relax my jaw and take him deeper and my throat opens around him, tight and hot and stretched, and the moan Ray makes is guttural, desperate — worth every second of discomfort.
"Jesus — Miles — your throat, I can feel — fuck—"
He can't finish a sentence. His fingers tighten in my hair.
I pull back until just the head is in my mouth, catch my breath, then take him deep again, past the resistance and into my throat, and this time I swallow around him.
His whole body jerks. His hips stutter forward.
The grip in my hair goes hard and I moan around his cock because the sting of it shoots straight to my own aching dick and the vibration makes his thighs shake.
I set a new rhythm — deep into my throat, swallow, pull back to breathe, tongue the head, then deep again.
My face is wet — tears from the effort, spit running down my chin, dripping onto my shirt.
My jaw aches. My throat aches. I don't care about any of it.
I care about the sounds he's making above me, the way his grip keeps tightening and loosening in my hair like he's fighting himself.
I pull off again. My lips are swollen and raw and there's a string of spit between us and I look up at him and he looks like he's about to die.
"Is this what you think about at work?" I ask. "When I'm talking about depositions and you're staring at my mouth?"
"Miles—"
"Because I've been thinking about this." I lick a slow stripe from base to tip and he groans. "I've been thinking about what you'd look like when you stopped being so fucking patient and just took what you wanted."
"I'm trying not to—" His hand is shaking against my skull. His jaw is clenched so hard the muscle is jumping. "I don't want to hurt you."
"You won't." I hold his eyes. "Stop holding back, Ray. I can take it."
I take him into my throat again and this time I don't pull back. I hold him there, swallowing around him, breathing through my nose, tears streaming, and I register the exact moment his restraint snaps.
His hips move. Not gentle. Not careful. He thrusts into my mouth and holds my head steady and the careful, considerate alpha I work with is gone.
The first thrust hits my throat and I gag and his grip loosens — the instinct to protect, even now — and I grab his hip and pull him back in.
I put his palm back on my head. I'm telling him with my body: don't stop.
He doesn't stop.
He fucks my mouth with short, hard strokes that push into my throat on every thrust. The sounds are obscene — wet, gagging, his cock sliding through spit and precome, his groans above me that are broken and animal.
My eyes are streaming. Drool is running down my chin and my neck and soaking into my shirt.
My jaw is screaming. My throat is raw. My cock is so hard in my pants that it hurts and nobody is touching it and I don't want anyone to because this, right here, is enough. Making him sound like this is enough.
I look up at him through wet eyelashes and he's looking down at me and his expression is something I've never seen — not tenderness, not lust, something more desperate. Like he's watching something precious break and can't stop it and doesn't want to stop it.
"Miles, I'm going to — I'm close, I'm—"
I take him deep and hold him there and suck and swallow and he yanks my hair hard enough that my eyes water for a different reason and he comes with a shattered groan that I register in my bones.
The pulse of it in my throat, hot and thick, and I swallow around him, all of it, and keep swallowing, and the sound he makes — this wrecked, disbelieving moan — is the best thing I've ever heard.
He sags against the wall. His grip loosens in my hair and becomes something else — shaking fingers, gentle now, moving through my hair like he's sorry and grateful at the same time.
His breathing is ragged and his eyes are closed and his cock is still in my mouth, softening, and I hold him there for a moment longer than I need to because I'm not ready to let go.
I pull off. Sit back on my heels. Wipe my lips with the back of my hand, but it's a lost cause — my chin is wet, my shirt is ruined, my eyes are red and swollen. I look up at what I've done to him and the thing in my chest is dark, satisfied, tangled up in itself.
I made him fall apart. My mouth, my tongue, my throat. My choice. Whatever else I am or am not, whatever my body can't do, it can do this.
It's not enough. I know that. But right now, on my knees on my living room floor with the taste of him still coating my tongue and his wrecked voice still in my ears, it's close.
"Come here," Ray says, his voice destroyed. He reaches for me. I let him pull me up. Then his mouth is on mine, kissing me deep, tasting himself on my tongue. His fingers work my belt open. His hand slides into my pants and wraps around my cock and I press my face into his neck and breathe him in.
"Tell me what you need," he murmurs against my temple.
I cover his hand with mine. I adjust his grip — tighter, slower — and he follows my lead.
Even now, even wrecked, he's paying attention.
He does what my hand tells him to do and I set the pace and he strokes me exactly how I want and I come against his stomach with my face in his neck, quiet, shaking, and it's not the explosive, powerful thing the blowjob was.
It's just release. The tension of the evening and the dinner and the wanting all letting go at once.
We end up in my bed. I don't remember walking there — Ray guided me, or I guided him, or we stumbled down the hall together.
He's lying in my sheets and he doesn't fit.
Not because the bed is too small but because everything in this room is white and gray and precise and he's warm and messy and alive and the contrast is almost funny.
He looks like disorder in a system that's never had any.
I lie next to him. I don't pull away. His hand finds mine on the mattress between us and our fingers lace together and neither of us says anything for a long time.
"Stay," I say eventually. My voice is quiet.
"Yeah." His thumb traces circles on my hand. "I'm not going anywhere."
I lie in my bed and listen to his breathing even out and I look at the ceiling and I wait for the part where I shut down. The part where I turn cold and tell him it was a mistake and build the wall back up and become the version of me that doesn't need anyone.
It doesn't come.
I turn my head and look at Ray asleep in my bed. His face is soft and his mouth is slightly open and his hair is a disaster and one of his feet is sticking out from under the covers. My pillow is going to smell like pepper and ozone tomorrow. I'm going to have to decide whether to wash it.
I close my eyes and press closer to him and I already know the answer.