Chapter 11 After Hours #3
He worked the lather over his stomach, his hips, down the outside of his thighs and back up the inside, and my grip tightened on the wall because my hands needed something to do that wasn't reaching for him.
The soap ran off him in rivulets, following the same paths the water took, and he was thorough about it, the inside of his elbows, the back of his neck, both arms from shoulder to wrist, with the unhurried patience of a man who had nowhere to be and no intention of rushing anything.
Then he turned.
Not fully, not enough to face me, but enough.
A three-quarter angle that put his profile in my direct line of sight.
His eyes found mine through the steam and the running water and he held the contact, steady and dark and completely unashamed, while his soaped hands continued moving over his body like the eye contact was just another thing happening at the same time, unremarkable, inevitable.
His hands moved lower.
He washed his cock with the same deliberate attention he'd given everything else, lathering it slowly, stroking from base to tip once, twice, three times with a thoroughness that crossed the line between washing and something else so gradually that I couldn't identify the exact moment it changed.
A low sound moved through him, barely audible over the water, and his hips tilted forward slightly into the motion.
His eyes didn't leave mine.
I watched his throat work. Watched the flush deepen across his chest. Watched his lips part around a breath he didn't quite manage to keep steady, and my own breathing had long since stopped being anything I could control.
My cock was hard against my stomach, insistent and aching, and I made no move to do anything about it because I was incapable of moving, incapable of looking anywhere but at him.
He rinsed off.
One hand braced against the tile, head tilted back, letting the spray clear the soap from his chest, his stomach, his cock.
The water cascaded over him and he stood there and let it happen, and when he straightened and looked at me again his expression had shifted into something that made the breath leave my body entirely.
He reached for nothing. He wasn't done.
His eyes held mine while his clean hand wrapped around his cock, and this time there was no performance of hygiene to hide behind.
This was just him, looking at me, starting to stroke himself slowly in the steam-thick air with the unhurried certainty of someone who had made a decision and intended to see it through.
My hand wrapped around my own cock before the thought fully formed. I stroked slowly, matching his pace, and watched his chest rise and fall faster when he registered it.
For a long moment we just looked at each other.
Then his pace changed.
Not faster. Deeper. His grip tightened and his strokes slowed, each one drawn out, his hips rolling forward with a fluid motion that pulled at every muscle in his abdomen.
His free hand moved to his chest, thumb dragging over his nipple, and a broken sound fell from his lips that the tile walls caught and held and gave back to both of us.
I groaned. Low and involuntary, the sound of something that had been held too long finally letting go.
His eyes went darker.
He shifted his stance, planted his feet wider, and the change in angle changed everything about how he looked, more open, more deliberate, his cock thick and flushed in his fist and his body entirely offered up to whatever this was between us.
His other hand moved behind himself, fingers pressing against his own ass with slow exploratory pressure, and the sound he made when he did it went through me like a current.
My grip tightened. My hips rolled forward.
He watched me. I watched him. The steam curled between us and the water ran over both our bodies and neither of us looked away, not when his breathing fell apart, not when mine did, not when the sounds filling the room became something too honest and too specific to pretend weren't happening.
His rhythm was getting ragged, hips jerking forward, thighs starting to shake, his head dropping back on a rough exhale before he dragged his gaze back to mine like breaking eye contact was the one line he'd decided not to cross.
The flush had spread from his chest all the way up his throat.
His lips were parted and wet. He was stunning in a way that made sustained rational thought an abstraction, and I was watching every second of it with my hand moving faster and the pressure at the base of my spine building to something I couldn't hold back much longer.
His free hand moved faster behind himself, and the sound he made was desperate and wrecked and entirely unguarded in the steam-thick air.
My vision blurred at the edges.
I came before I was ready for it, the orgasm slamming through me with a force that knocked the breath from my lungs and buckled my knees.
My hand kept working, drawing it out, while the groan built in my chest and tore out of me low and gutted and entirely beyond my control.
My fist hit the tile wall. I stayed upright through sheer will, shaking, the pleasure crashing through me in waves that left me oversensitive and wrung out and pressing my forehead against the tile while my chest heaved.
The distance between us hadn't been enough.
I registered it slowly, through the static of the aftershocks, the fact that some of it had reached him. A stripe of it across his stomach, just above where his own hand was still working, visible against the wet heat of his skin before the water could take it.
He looked down.
Then he looked up at me.
And without breaking eye contact, without a single beat of hesitation, he dragged two fingers through it and brought them to his mouth.
The sound I made wasn't human. Or it was entirely human, which was worse.
He took his time. Lips closing around his fingers, slow and deliberate, his eyes holding mine with the focused, unblinking attention of someone making a point they intended to land.
His tongue moved against his fingers and a small sound came from his throat that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the fact that he meant it.
He came seconds after, his whole body going rigid, a broken sound punching out of him on a rough exhale that echoed off every hard surface in the room.
His hips stuttered forward and stilled, his hand still working, drawing it out, his head falling back and his throat exposed and his body beautiful and wrecked in the steam and running water.
The sound he made when it crested was the most unguarded thing I'd ever heard from him, stripped entirely of the performance and the armor and the franchise face, and I felt it settle somewhere in my chest that I was going to have serious trouble evicting it from.
For a long moment neither of us moved. The water kept running over him. Our breathing filled the space, gradually slowing, and the room was thick with steam and the particular silence of something that couldn't be taken back.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
Whatever was in his expression, open and undone and carefully watching to see what I would do with it, I couldn't hold it.
Couldn't let myself read it properly, because reading it properly would require me to respond to it, and there was no response available to me that didn't make everything significantly worse.
I turned off my shower.
I didn't look at him while I reached for my towel.
Didn't look at him while I dried off, methodical and mechanical, patting down my arms and my chest and my legs with the focused attention of a man performing a routine rather than a man trying not to fall apart in a team shower at midnight.
I wrapped the towel around my waist and walked to the bench where I'd left my shorts and my practice shirt.
I pulled on my shorts first. Then my socks, sitting on the bench with my back to the shower row, jaw tight, listening to his water still running and the sound of him breathing slowly returning to something steady.
I picked up my practice shirt and pulled it over my head, smoothed it down with both hands, and sat there for a moment with my forearms braced on my knees and my head down.
The cold logic of what I'd just done was settling in now, working its way through me the way cold always did, from the outside in, finding every gap in the insulation.
I'd stood six feet from my player and watched him come apart and hadn't looked away. Had gotten myself off watching him. Had let this happen when I had every reason, every hard-won reason, not to let it happen, and not one of those reasons had become less true in the last forty minutes.
I reached for my shoes. Laced them with the same mechanical focus I'd given the towel, the shorts, the shirt. Each one a small act of reassembly, each one the action of a man trying to locate the version of himself that had professional discipline and understood the consequences of his actions.
That version of me felt very far away right now.
Behind me, his shower was still running, and I heard him exhale, long and slow, the sound of a man pulling himself back together in the privacy of running water, and I was glad for it, glad he had that, glad I wasn't required to look at his face right now because I genuinely didn't know what I would do with whatever I found there.
I picked up my gear bag and walked out.
This can't happen again.