Chapter 45 Levi
I wake in the dark needing the bathroom, and for a moment I don’t know the room.
Then I remember where I am. In Dante’s bed with his arm slung heavy across me, his hand open and warm on my stomach.
I lift it off me an inch at a time. He doesn’t stir. I slide out from under the weight of him and stand, letting my eyes adjust. The air conditioning hums somewhere low in the walls and the sheets have gone cool.
In the bathroom, I glance in the mirror. My mouth’s slightly swollen. A mark is coming up on my hip where he sucked at it. I press it with two fingers. It aches, and I want it to.
He marked me.
Dante’s awake when I slide back under the sheet. His hand comes across the bed, closes around my wrist and pulls.
“Where did you go? I missed you.” He’s thick with sleep. He drags me in against him, mouth finding my jaw. “I need you, Levi. Touch me the way you wanted to fight a man over.”
I freeze over that.
All those days of keeping my hands folded up where they didn’t show. Every time I made myself not reach. And here he is handing it over to me.
“You sure you’re not too tired?”
He chuckles low against my ear. “Never too tired for you. I have stamina.”
I get a hand in his hair and roll him under me. He goes over onto his back with me settling down on top of him.
I’ve never been the man on top of anything.
What I’ve had with other men came quick and half-ashamed, a hand or a mouth in the back of a bus with somebody who wanted it done quick and gone before the next stop.
Nobody ever cared enough to hand me their time. He’s under me telling me to take as much as I want and my chest pulls so tight it hurts to breathe around.
I don’t hurry with him. I’ve never been allowed that, and I’m not about to burn through it in the dark like everything else.
I’ve been around Dante many times and never got to look my fill.
In that clean SUV of his I learned to ration it.
One good long look while he pulled out of the drive and his attention was elsewhere, and then I’d turn and stare a hole through the window the rest of the way so he’d never catch me at it.
Never catch me staring at his forearms under a rolled-back polo sleeve, or his hands sitting easy on the wheel, long-fingered and sure, while I sat there with my jaw shut wondering what they’d feel like wrapped around my cock. Now I’ve got time.
He’s long all over, laid out under me. Lean the way a ballplayer runs lean, not built in a gym, all of it strung tight over the muscle, strong through the arms and the shoulders where I’ve got my hands.
His skin’s a beautiful bronze, and there’s not a mark on it anywhere, no ink, nothing to mess it up.
He keeps himself smooth. No hair on his chest, none down the flat of his belly, none lower.
Dante shaves every inch of himself and probably swims in those little cut trunks that leave him nothing to hide behind.
Black hair. Black eyes fixed up at me. A face that belongs in a magazine selling watches and has got no business being under a country boy from Tennessee.
And the smell of him. My God. I caught it the first day and never quit noticing.
A clean expensive scent, warm skin underneath.
His pillows carry it too. I turned my face down into one of them earlier just to breathe him, before I caught myself doing it.
Now it’s coming up off his throat and his chest, and I put my nose to it and pull it in and don’t bother being ashamed.
There’ll never be a time in my life I’ll smell another scent that lights me up like his.
I kiss him slow. His mouth is soft and still a little swollen like mine, and he opens under me without a fight, lets me set the angle and the pace, lets me sink into it.
He tastes faintly like the whiskey from hours back. His jaw’s smooth, clean-shaven even now, and mine drags over it. I take my time learning the shape of his lips.
He makes a sound into my mouth and it runs straight down my spine and pools hot and low in me.
“Levi,” he breathes.
I never thought I’d hear him say my name that way.
My palms are rough with string calluses I’ve worn since I was a kid, and his skin is smooth under them.
I feel every place they catch. I slide one hand down the side of his neck, over the jump of his pulse, out across the round of his shoulder, down that strong arm to his wrist and back.
I take that slow too, because I can, because there’s not one part of this I want to skip over.
He shivers when my thumb crosses his collarbone. I tuck that away.
Then I put my mouth where my hands have been.
First, his jaw and the soft skin under his ear that makes his breath catch.
His throat, where the pulse comes up hard and quick against my lips.
I press my mouth there to just feel it hammer a while.
I’ve wanted my mouth on his pulse since I saw it throbbing when I was standing in a towel in the kitchen.
Now I’ve got it and there’s no clock on it.
Then I move down to his chest. The heat comes off him like he’s running a fever, the smooth skin gone slick under my mouth, the muscle firm beneath.
I tongue the two hard points of him that draw up tight when my tongue crosses them.
He arches when I do it and lets out a sound he tries to swallow and doesn’t manage.
I do it again just to feel him move under me.
Down lower, his stomach jumps under my mouth, the muscle flinching every place I set my lips like it can’t hold still. I lay my palm flat there to feel it go, and take my time crossing it, all of it warm and smelling like him.
He’s breathing hard now. His hand’s found my hair and it’s just resting there, curled loose, not pushing. He’s letting me get there on my own.
He’s hard under me, has been since he pulled me in. I wrap my hand around him. He sucks a sharp breath in through his teeth and his hips lift up off the bed chasing my grip.
Mine to touch. He said so.
I’ve wanted this all my life and never let myself have it. Now I’ve got him in my hand, heavy and real, and I’m not wasting a second of it.
I go down easy, mouth close, and drag my lips up the side of him first, just to feel him, just to breathe him in, the smell of him all skin and salt. He shakes and that dead stops me. To know I can make Dante tremble with my mouth.
I want more.
I set my tongue to the underside of him and taste him proper, the first bead gone clean and bitter on my tongue, and his body goes tight.
Then I take him in my mouth.
He groans, coming apart for me, and his hand tightens in my hair, still not pushing, just holding on.
The weight of his cock settles on my tongue, thick and hot, the stretch of my jaw around him a good ache.
I go slowly, enjoying the way his stomach draws tight every time I take him deeper, the raw sounds he makes rolling up out of his chest.
His hips try to move. I lay a forearm across them, hold him down and set the pace myself. There’s no rush anywhere in me. I’d stay here sucking on his cock till the sun came up if he let me.
“Levi. Your mouth—” His voice breaks clean in half.
I glance up and he’s watching me, his chest breathing hard. I hold there with him heavy on my tongue and let him see it. How much I want him. That there’s not one place on this earth I’d rather be than right here with my mouth on him and his hand gripping my hair.
I take him deeper and find a rhythm. I figure out the rest of it off the sounds he makes, off the twitch of his thighs.
I use my hand at the base of his cock where my mouth can’t reach and twist it slow the way he did to me.
Spit slick and warm, the wet sound of it loud in the room, his breath going ragged over the top of it.
He’s coming undone under me and I’m the one doing it.
“Levi, I’m close.” His hand tightens and tries to pull me off him. “You don’t have to—”
I don’t stop or slow down. I take him as deep as I can, and that finishes him.
He goes rigid, a cry tearing out of him, and comes hot down my throat with his body bowing up off the bed. I feel every pulse and swallow everything. I keep him in my mouth until he’s shaking and pushing weak at my shoulder because it’s too much now.
I ease off him and drag myself back up his body, mouth wet, jaw aching good, the taste of him still on my tongue. He’s destroyed because of me. Yet another version of Dante that I never dreamed I’d see.
“Come here,” he says, hoarse, reaching for me before I’ve even settled. “Let me—”
He gets a hand around me, and it doesn’t take much. I’m most of the way there already just from having done that to him. From the taste of him and the sounds and the fact of being allowed to put my mouth on him.
A few pulls from his hand and I’m coming too, my face buried in his neck, breathing him in, biting the sound of it back into his shoulder, spilling hot over his fist.
He pulls me down on top of him and wraps both arms around me tight. We’re a mess and neither of us moves to fix it. His skin’s slick against mine, both of us cooling slow in the hum of the air conditioning, his heart going hard under my ear and mine coming down to meet it.
His hand moves up and down my back. Then he says close to my ear, barely more than breath, “Levi. Can you breathe okay in this room?” His hand never stops moving. “We can go out to the living room. I can put the sleeping bags down by the door if you need the air. Whatever you need.”
After all of it, he’s lying there listening to my breaths to hear if I’ve got enough air in me.
“I’m good,” I tell him. And it’s the truth. “I can breathe just fine right here with you. Don’t worry.”
He makes a contented noise like that settles something in him, and pulls me in closer, and I let him.
I don’t know how long I’m down before the bed shifts and the warmth at my back goes.
Some old part of me wants to come up hard after it, hand already moving, but I’m too far under to make it happen.