Chapter 7 Riley - December 2017, Pittsburgh #2
He undid my belt without looking, pushed my pants down my hips, and I stepped out of them while he stayed seated and watched.
I was already hard. He reached out and ran the back of his knuckles along the underside of my cock through the fabric of my briefs, light enough that it was almost nothing and still enough to make my breath catch.
I got him out of the shirt. I got him down. And then I found out something nobody else on this planet knew, which was that Nate Sinclair came apart in stages.
It wasn't all at once. He had layers of it. First the face went, the composed thing, that went early, and what replaced it was so open it was almost hard to look at.
His eyes stayed on mine while I pushed his open shirt off his shoulders and then his undershirt up and off. I put my mouth on the center of his chest the way he had done to me and felt the way his breathing changed.
Then his hands stopped being polite. They slid into my hair and held on, not directing, just anchoring. I kissed lower, across the flat plane of his stomach, and felt the muscles jump under my mouth.
I got his pants open and off. His cock was thick and already leaking against his stomach. I wrapped my hand around it and stroked once, slow, just to feel the weight of him. He made a sound that was almost nothing and then he was looking at me like he had forgotten how to arrange his face.
I climbed onto the bed properly and settled between his legs. I kissed the inside of one thigh and then the other. When I took him into my mouth he exhaled like he had been holding that breath for hours.
I sucked his cock slow. I used my tongue along the underside and took him as deep as I could without choking, learning the exact pressure that made his hips twitch.
His hand stayed in my hair the whole time.
When I pulled off and looked up his mouth was open and his eyes were dark and he looked wrecked already. I reached for the lube.
"Ready?" I asked.
He nodded once.
I coated my fingers. I started with one, pressing carefully against him while I kept my other hand on his cock, stroking in the same rhythm. The first push in was tight. He tensed and I stopped, waiting, kissing the inside of his knee until the muscle eased.
I worked the finger deeper, slow circles, and watched his face for every shift. When he nodded again, I added a second. The stretch made him breathe harder. I found the angle the internet had talked about and pressed upward and the sound he made was sharp and surprised. His cock jumped in my hand.
"There," he said, voice rough. "Do that again."
I did. I kept the two fingers moving, scissoring gently, stretching him while I rubbed that spot in steady strokes.
His thighs opened wider. His head tipped back against the pillow.
I added a third finger when he was ready and the burn of it showed on his face for a few seconds before it melted into something else.
I fucked him with my fingers until he was pushing down to meet them, until the wet sound of the lube was loud in the quiet room, until his cock was dripping onto his stomach and he was breathing like he had just finished a shift.
Then, way down, there was a point where he stopped managing his own voice, and that one took work, that one you had to earn. When I got there the first time he said my name into my shoulder and grabbed a fistful of my hair and I nearly went straight through the ceiling.
"Say it again," I said.
"Don't."
"Say it again, Nate. You said it once. That's precedent. That's binding."
He said it into my mouth, and I kissed it out of him, and kept kissing him through all of it, his jaw and his throat and the corner of his mouth and back to his mouth, because it turns out that once you start you don't get to have a plan.
I pulled my fingers out carefully. I rolled on a condom and slicked myself until everything was shining. I lined up and pressed the head of my cock against his hole. He looked at me the whole time.
I pushed in slow. The heat of him closed around me, tighter than anything I had ever felt, and I had to stop halfway and breathe through the urge to just drive forward.
He was shaking under me. I waited until he nodded again and then I kept going, inch by inch, until my hips were flush against him and I was buried all the way inside.
We stayed like that. I could feel his pulse around me. I could feel the way his body kept adjusting, the small involuntary clenches that made my vision blur.
When I started to move it was shallow at first, just rocking, letting him get used to the slide. Then longer strokes. Then deeper. The sound of it was wet and filthy and perfect. His hands were on my back, then on my ass, pulling me in harder.
I reached between us and wrapped my hand around his cock the way he had shown me earlier with his quiet precise instructions, and I stroked him in time with every thrust.
He told me exactly what to do with it, quiet and precise, like a coach at a whiteboard. I did what he said, and then he couldn't say anything else for a while.
I fucked him steady and deep. Every time I angled up he made a broken sound that went straight down my spine.
His legs wrapped around my waist. His mouth found my shoulder and stayed there, open, breathing hard against my skin.
I could feel him getting closer in the way his body tightened around me, in the way his cock swelled in my fist.
I kept the rhythm exact, the way he liked it, and when he came it was with my name again, raw and loud, spilling hot over my hand and his stomach while his body clamped down around my cock so hard I almost lost it right then.
I kept moving through it, slower now, riding the aftershocks with him until he was soft and sensitive and still holding on.
Then I let myself go. I buried my cock deep and came with my face pressed to his neck, the orgasm pulling everything out of me in long pulses while he stroked the back of my head and let me shake apart on top of him.
I've won a national championship. I've scored on the road in front of a building full of people who wanted me dead. None of that was in the same room as being the only person alive who got to watch that man let go of himself.
It wasn't a win. A win was a thing you took off somebody. This was something he handed me.
I stayed inside him until I softened. When I pulled out carefully he made a small sound and I kissed the corner of his mouth to quiet it. I cleaned us both up with the wipes I had bought for exactly this reason. The condom went into the trash. The sheets were a mess. Neither of us cared.
Afterward neither of us said anything for a long time, which for the two of us was the loudest either of us has ever been.
I lay on my back and he lay half on top of me with his head on my chest and one arm thrown across my stomach.
I could feel his heartbeat against my side.
I could feel the slow cooling of sweat on both of us.
Around one thirty he ordered coffee, because he was a lunatic.
"You can't have coffee at one thirty in the morning."
"I'm not sleeping anyway."
"That is not the reason you're not sleeping, Nate."
It came up on a tray with a little silver pot and two cups and a bowl of sugar packets. I did mine at the desk. Three sugars, then cream until it went the color of a hockey sock, then I tasted it and put in another half sugar.
I turned around and he was sitting up against the headboard with the sheet across his hips, watching me like I'd committed something.
"What?" I said. "You've got a face on. Say the thing. You've been sitting there drafting it for a minute and a half, Sinclair, I can see the revisions."
"It's not coffee anymore," he said. "That's a dessert. You've made a dessert and now you're going to drink it in front of me."
"It's an improved product."
"It's a crime scene."
"You're a snob."
"I'm a person with taste," he said, and took a sip of his own, which was black, and he did not stop watching me.
The morning was where the whole thing got built.
Neither of us could sit in silence and neither of us could do sincerity in daylight, and at nine in the morning those were the only two doors available. So we found a third one.
It started over the garbage.
"Room service tray goes out," he said.
"So put it out."
"I put it out in October. It’s your turn this time."
"There was no tray in October. There was a pizza box, and you didn't take it down. You left it in the hall like an animal."
"I'm not walking a tray to the service elevator at nine in the morning in this hotel. Somebody will see me, and it will become a thing, and my uncle will hear about it by lunch."
"So we flip for it."
He looked up from tying his shoe. "Flip for it. With what?"
"With this." I dug a quarter out of my jeans. "Loser hauls."
"Fine."
He called tails. It was tails.
“The coin was compromised,” I said.
“You flipped it.”
“That’s exactly the problem. I demand a real event, something athletic, something with integrity.”
Which is how, that morning, two professional hockey players raced the two elevators of a Pittsburgh hotel from the fourteenth floor down to the lobby.
I lost. He came out of his car half a step ahead of me and turned around and put both arms up in an empty lobby.
"Don't," I said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You put your arms up in a lobby, in front of a man with a luggage cart."
By eleven we'd done coin flips, Hart Trophy winners named backward from the present until I got stuck somewhere in the nineties and he did not, and a stops-and-starts race across four empty rows of a parking garage that nearly killed us both and which I won by half a stride.
We stood there breathing hard, coats open, steam coming off both of us.
"This is stupid," he said.
"This is the best thing that has ever happened to me and I've been to a Frozen Four."
"It's a parking garage."
"It's a venue." I put my hands on my knees and let my heart come down. "But you're right. We've outgrown it. I know a place."