23. Orion #2
What’s more, I’m flirting with him too. My hand is still on his arm.
It’s found its way past his elbow, and I’m groping the swell of his bicep rhythmically.
Like I mean it. Like I can’t get enough.
Not only that, I’m looking at him. Really looking at him.
Looking at him without moderating my gaze.
Without masking it. Without hiding who I am or what I want.
“Okay.” I’m stunned to find I have the audacity to sound sure of myself. “Let’s do this.”
Jordan reacts without hesitation, reaching out and plucking my towel from my waist with a rough tug that jostles me. It falls to the floor in a puddle and leaves me feeling like I’ve been splashed in the face with ice water.
Holy shit. Are we doing this? For real?
I clamp my hands in front of my junk like an idiot, and Jordan throws his head back and laughs. Before his laughter dies completely, he makes a quick, jerky movement that’s designed to ignite an instinctive reaction in me. An instinct to jump back. To run and find cover.
An instinct all prey has when a predator is near.
I take two quick steps to the side, heading toward the safety of my bedroom. He’s quicker, barricading my door with his broad body, leaving me no choice but to dash to his bedroom instead of mine.
Jordan’s bedroom feels like him. A little messy in an appealing way.
There are pens and pebbles he collects wherever he goes laid out on his desk, and a pile of books that haven’t found their way to his bookshelf since we moved in.
He has a little yellow star-shaped trophy on top of a stack of books that has proid of you engraved on it.
It’s an inside joke that arose as the result of a typo in a message he sent me years back.
I had it made for him when he failed the first big assignment he turned in during our freshman year of college. He loves that kind of shit.
His bed is made—smoky sage-green bedsheets and a duvet cover that matches—but it’s rumpled. It’s always rumpled. I’ve seen him make his bed many times. I’ve watched as he shakes the covers out and smooths the sheets down, only for it to look lived-in a minute later.
His bedside light is on. The lampshade is tilted at a rakish angle, casting a warm glow that climbs up the wall.
Now that I’m in his room, stark naked and standing about two feet from his bed, I don’t know what to do.
My thoughts are fried. I’m thinking a million different things, and I’m feeling a million more.
I feel hot but not uncomfortably so. My heart is beating so hard that I can hear my pulse whooshing in my ears and my lungs are working overtime.
I think my natural state right now would be breathing hard and loud, as if I’ve been running, but I’m fighting the urge because I don’t want Jordan to see how affected I am.
I don’t want him to know that I’ve dreamed of this moment. Spent my life thinking about it.
Even though everything’s jumbled and reason is in short supply, I know tonight is going to end. The sun will come up tomorrow, and a reality will exist where this crazy thing has happened between us, and our lives go back to something that resembles normal despite it.
I’m here, and I’m doing this, but I need to hold part of myself back.
I have to. I have to keep what happens tonight in the realm of plausible deniability.
I need to be able to look Jordan in the eye tomorrow and for him not to see the simple, unequivocal truth that in the history of men who love men, no man has ever been down bad worse than I am for him.
Our friendship depends on it.
I glance back at Jordan to try to work out what I should do next, just in time to see him launching himself at me, arms outstretched, lips slashed in a wide grin.
We crash onto the bed in a tangle of arms and legs.
He’s on top of me. Heavy and hot. Hands grasping and groping.
It’s a shock to my system. A sensory overload.
He’s fully clothed, and I’m not. I feel the softness of his T-shirt against my chest, and the texture of his pants against my hip.
I feel naked in a way that doesn’t feel perfunctory like it does when I undress for bed or the shower.
This nakedness feels raw. Bone-deep and charged with electricity.
When I’ve imagined this moment, it’s always been in the context that Jordan and I are together. That a parallel world exists and that we live in it. A world where he loves me back as much as I love him.
I’ve never mentally concocted a scenario like the one that’s playing out.
Where we’re still only friends, but we’re about to fuck.
I think if I had, I’d have thought I’d feel awkward.
That I’d wear my nudity like something I wasn’t proud of.
Perhaps I’m so dulled by arousal that I can’t access my awkwardness.
Or perhaps the part of my brain that controls self-awareness has been overcome by the thick, hard pull currently dragging every thought in my head toward my groin.
Jordan laughs as we wrestle, a soft sound that makes me feel like something warm has been poured down my spinal column.
We’ve wrestled a lot in our lives. Jordan has an excess of energy, and it’s one of the ways he burns it off.
He likes it. I like it too, for a different reason than he does, but still.
It’s fun. It gets the blood pumping and activates something base in me.
There’s something about testing his strength that does it for me. It always has.
This is different from those other times though.
For one thing, we’ve never wrestled on a bed.
Usually, Jordan takes me to the floor wherever we are—the living room, the kitchen, the entrance hall of his house back in Cape Elizabeth.
For another thing, usually, when we wrestle, the point is for one of us to pin the other on his back.
To hold his arms down and make him submit.
This time, I’m not trying to pin Jordan. And he isn’t trying to get me onto my back.
He wrestles me onto my front, smooshing one of my cheeks into the mattress and straddling my lower back to hold me down.
He has my right arm twisted behind my back, and his other hand pinning me by the neck.
I fight just enough to feel his force. To feel muscle engage and hear the little grunt the exertion punches out of him.
He leans over me when I yield, his lips less than a breath from my ear. “I’m going to take care of you, O.” I close my eyes and let his husky voice wash over me. “Real good care, okay?”
“You don’t have to. Y-you can just do it quickly and get it over with.”
He scoffs at that. “But, O. If I do it like that, I’ll be no better than a random dick in the park, and believe me, I’m way better than those guys. Nah.” The rasp in his voice makes my bottom lip tingle. “Imma give you the full service, boy.”
I nod into the mattress, or at least I think I do, and when he lets go of me, I don’t move except to spread my legs when he nudges them open with one knee.
Fabric rustles and a cool breeze caresses my skin as I try to come to grips with the position I’m in.
Laid bare. Legs parted. Ass presented to my lifelong best friend for fucking.
Jordan’s pink T-shirt flies across the room and lands on the floor in the far corner. His pants appear beside it two seconds later.
He strolls to his bedside table, opening the top drawer and tossing lube and a handful of condoms onto the bed next to me.
I don’t move my head, and I can only see a glimpse of him through one eye, but it’s enough.
More than enough. God, he looks good naked.
His arms are shredded, his abs ripped. All of it converges into a hard, tight waist that swells into the most perfect ass I’ve ever seen.
He turns slowly, without a care in the world, and I almost whine at the sight of his cock.
It’s hard. He’s naked in a room with me, and he’s hard. In real life, not in a fantasy.
Fuck me, it’s beautiful. Long and thick with a fat head and a gentle upward curve.
I try not to react, but my insides start quivering in earnest. The want building in me is so big that I’m not even sure want is the right word for it. It’s a heavy, limitless, ravenous thing. A thing with a mind and pulse of its own.
Jordan’s fingers find their way into my hair when he gets back onto the bed, tugging just enough to send a new current of arousal down my body. A current that’s separate from normal arousal. A current that exists for one reason. One person only.
Jordan scoops the sensation when it reaches my lower back, corralling it upward again with a weighty, warm hand. He plays with it, directing it to every inch of my back before he’s done with it.
“I’m gonna take my time, O.” I nod again, quickly and with my eyes wide open. “All night if that’s what it takes. I’m not going to fuck you until you’re so relaxed you can’t blink, okay? I’m going to wait until you’re inside out. Until you can’t speak. Until you can’t think of anything else.”
Okay.
God. I did not think this through.
There’s no way I’m going to be able to hide how much he affects me if he keeps talking like this.
My skin is vibrating with lust already, and he’s hardly gotten started.
Every hair on my head is alive with it. My dick is so hard underneath me that I can feel the humanity I’ve spent years carefully curating draining from my face.
Sinking. Slipping. Working itself downward.
Collecting secret parts of me I’ve hidden in my voice, in my heart, in my eyes, and eroding their shackles.