Chapter 31
Aaron
The room is different with him in it.
All of it, the same. And none of it, the same. Because Sasha is standing in the middle of it.
He hasn’t moved since I let go of his hand.
He’s looking at the dormer windows, the desk, the neatly made bed, the single framed photo on the nightstand.
His head turns slowly. I watch him take in each piece of my life, and my skin prickles — the same exposed feeling I get stepping out of the shower into cold air.
Every surface he looks at becomes something he knows about me.
“This is where you sleep.” His voice is quiet. Not a question.
“Yeah.”
He crosses to the desk. His fingers brush the edge of it — just the tips, trailing across the wood — and then he’s looking at the photo. My family at Sean’s wedding. Everyone smiling. Me in the middle, performing.
He doesn’t comment on it. He sets it face-down.
My whole chest loosens.
I cross the room in two steps and put my hands on his face.
His skin is warm under my palms. The stubble along his jaw catches against my thumbs. His eyes — vivid, intent — find mine, and whatever he sees there makes his breath hitch.
“Aaron—”
I kiss him.
His mouth opens under mine and the taste of him — champagne, something warm underneath — floods my senses.
I kiss him harder, deeper, my fingers pressing into the angles of his jaw, tilting his head so I can get closer.
My tongue slides against his and he makes a sound into my mouth, low and broken, and I swallow it.
Take it. Keep it. My teeth catch his lower lip and pull, and the noise he makes in response vibrates through my hands and down my arms.
His hands come up to my waist. His fingers spread wide across my ribs, and the heat of his palms burns through my dress shirt. I press closer, closer, and a sound comes out of me that I’ve never heard before — raw, unguarded, not mine.
He pulls back just enough to breathe. His forehead against mine, his thumbs tracing the lowest edges of my ribs.
“Tell me what you want.”
“You.” The word comes out cracked. “I just want you.”
“You have me.”
His mouth finds the hinge of my jaw. Then lower — the side of my neck, the spot below my ear that he discovered months ago and has been using against me ever since.
His lips are warm, and when his teeth graze the tendon in my throat I feel it in my spine.
My head falls back. My hands slide from his face into his hair — the dark gold strands tangling between my fingers, still slightly cool from the air outside.
He works my tie loose without looking. Pulls it free and drops it.
His fingers move to the buttons of my shirt, and he’s slow about it — deliberate, each button a decision, his knuckles brushing skin as he goes.
Collar. Sternum. The space between my ribs.
My stomach muscles contract when he reaches the last one.
He pushes the shirt off my shoulders. It falls.
The air in the attic room is cold — old house, the radiator clanking its unreliable heat — and I shiver. Sasha’s hands cover the goosebumps on my arms, his palms sliding up from my wrists to my shoulders, warming me by contact.
“Come here,” I say, and pull at his shirt.
He lets me undress him. I undo his buttons the way he undid mine, and my hands are shaking and he can see them shaking and he doesn’t pretend not to notice.
He just waits. Lets me work through it. His chest appears inch by inch — the broad plane of his collarbone, the definition of muscle underneath, the hard definition of muscle I can feel under my fingertips.
His shirt drops. We’re standing in the center of my room, shirtless, the streetlight through the dormers cutting across his chest.
My mouth goes dry. My hands hang at my sides and I just — look. The width of his shoulders. The cut of muscle along his ribs. The trail of fine hair below his navel. I’ve imagined him standing in my room like this. The reality is so much more intense.
I put my mouth on his collarbone. Feel the vibration of the sound he makes — low, barely there, My tongue traces the ridge of bone, tasting salt and cologne and the faintest trace of sweat.
He tips his head back. His hands find my hips, pulling me forward until there’s no space between us — chest to chest, skin to skin, the heat of him seeping into me.
We move toward the bed. I don’t know who walks first — our legs are tangled in the same direction, his hand at the small of my back, mine at his waist, and then my calves hit the mattress and I sit and he follows me down.
The bed is narrow for two people this size. The ceiling slopes low on one side — Sasha has to angle his shoulders to avoid it, duck his head, fold six-two of hockey player into a twin bed pushed against the wall. My throat closes. My eyes burn.
He lays me back against the pillows. Settles his weight over me — careful, controlled, his forearms braced on either side of my head — and the full press of his body against mine pulls a groan from both of us.
Skin on skin. The heat of his chest against mine, his stomach flat against my stomach, the hard ridge of him pressing through his dress pants against my thigh.
I can feel every breath he takes through his ribs.
Can feel his heart slamming against my sternum like it’s trying to get to mine.
He’s heavy. Solid. Every solid, muscular inch of him pinning me to my own bed, and instead of feeling trapped I feel held. Covered. Safe in a way that makes no sense because nothing about this is safe.
His hips press into mine and I can feel how hard he is through the fabric still between us — thick, straining, the heat of him almost shocking through the layer of wool — and I arch up into the contact before I can stop myself. The friction drags a sound from the back of his throat.
“I’ve thought about this,” he says against my mouth. “You. Here. In your bed.”
“So have I.”
“Every time you sent a text late at night.” He kisses the corner of my mouth. “I’d picture this room.” My jaw. “Picture your bed.” The hollow of my throat. “Wonder what you looked like lying in the dark, reading my messages.”
My hands tighten on his back. His muscles shift beneath my fingers — all that power, held in check, moving slow on purpose.
His mouth drags along my collarbone and his hips grind down against mine, his cock pressing hard against my hip, and the friction through the fabric is maddening — too much and not enough at the same time.
“Sasha — faster—”
“No.” His mouth moves lower. “Not tonight.”
I reach between us and work his belt open. The buckle clinks — too loud in the quiet room. He lifts his hips so I can push the fabric down, and then my hand is on him — hot, hard, straining against my palm — and his breath breaks against my neck.
The sound he makes — low, bitten-off, desperate — goes straight through me. His hips push into my grip, wanting more, and the heat of him against my skin is real and mine.
I stroke him slowly, learning the weight of him in my hand again, the way his hips roll when I twist at the head, the way his breathing fractures when I tighten my grip.
His cock is thick and heavy in my palm, the skin impossibly soft over the hardness underneath, and I can feel him pulsing with every heartbeat.
“Aaron.” My name in his accent — the slight flattening of the first syllable, the way the second one softens — undoes me every time.
He strips me of the rest, efficient and tender.
His mouth follows his hands — the jut of my hip, the crease of my thigh, the inside of my knee where the skin is thin and no one has ever thought to put their mouth before him.
My legs shake. His lips trail back up, pressing into the hollow below my hipbone, his breath hot against the crease where my thigh meets my body, and my hips lift off the bed.
He pauses there. Looks up at me through his lashes — dark gold hair falling across his forehead, his lips swollen, his eyes asking. Even after everything, he still asks.
“Please,” I say, and his mouth closes over me.
The heat is devastating. Wet, tight, the slow drag of his tongue along the underside as he takes me deeper.
My hand tangles in his hair and grips, and the sound he makes around me — a vibration, a hum of want that runs straight through my core — makes my vision blur.
He knows exactly where to press, exactly how deep, his hand working what his mouth doesn’t reach, and I have to tug his hair to pull him off before it ends too soon.
He comes back up my body, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I want you inside me.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. Wrecked. Open. “I need—”
“I know.” He reaches for his pants on the floor, finds what he needs, comes back. “I know what you need.”
I pull him down and wrap my legs around him and hold on.
His fingers find me first — slick, careful, pressing in slow.
One, then two, stretching, and my breath stutters out in a rush.
My body opens for him — no resistance, no tension, just the familiar give of muscle that knows his hands, knows his patience, knows exactly how this goes.
He curls his fingers and my back lifts off the mattress.
“There?”
“There — God, yes—”
He works me until I’m shaking, until I’m gripping the sheets with both hands, until the sounds I’m making have lost any resemblance to language.
Then his fingers withdraw and the blunt head of his cock presses against me — hot, thick, the stretch wider than his fingers — and the first full push drives the air from my lungs.