Chapter 20
Silas
The very second I had him in my house, behind the safety of my dead-bolted and alarmed door, I grabbed him and swung him around, using my hips to back him up until he hit the wall right next to the door.
His responding gasp shot straight down to my cock, as did the fluttering of his lashes over those startling eyes of his.
Convincing him I was taking him back to the hospital had been my own little private gag, but now that I had him where I really wanted him, I had no sense in being able to hold myself back.
Warming him up until he was good and ready, while nice in hindsight, was going to be a measure of control I had no interest in exercising.
Two days was much too long of a stretch to weather when I needed him under me as badly as breathing. Completely dramatic and seeped in nonsense, yet, no matter how much I’d been pretending otherwise, it was glaringly obvious right here and now how ridiculously worked up he got me.
Barely doing much other than simply existing.
How pathetic to be reduced to this over a single man.
I gripped his throat and held him in place, pressing my mouth to his hard enough to bruise both of our lips—another piece to this puzzle I never bothered with. Much too intimate, far too annoying to figure out the proper mechanics to make it good.
Yet, none of that mattered when he melted into it, grabbing at my scrub top to pull me close enough until we were practically forming a single cohesive form.
His hips glided against mine to grind our hard cocks together, his mouth parting the second my tongue swiped at the seam of his lips, letting me in to taste him. Sweet and a little salty, of course.
Much like the rest of him: absolutely perfect.
I was in too deep. Going back to picking up hookups from bars or wherever would never cut it. Not when I’d had my hands on this before that.
Why bother with the B-grade level sex that left me satiated but unsatisfied when I had Terran, who was every little fantasy I’d ever cooked up in my head?
Ripping my mouth away from him before we got too carried away and never made it past the entryway, I fought the urge to force him down onto his knees the second his lashes fluttered open and he hit me with a nearly blissed out look.
How in the world had no one snagged him up before this?
I found it hard to believe no one saw him for the gem he was.
Polished and refined to perfection. Not the kind of diamond in the rough most people were. A brilliant treasure far too many were stupid enough to pass up on, never seeing the real value because the obsession with ‘greener on the other side’ prevailed over everything else.
Or was it on his end—suffering from the same syndrome I did?
Dissatisfaction with every other turn but this one?
Likely.
Hopefully.
That meant his eyes wouldn’t be straying anytime soon.
His lips parted to say something, my name maybe, quickly cut off by me bending just enough to wrap my arms around his lower half and lift him up into my arms. He sputtered and clamored to hook an arm around my neck, another coming around to grab the back of my scrub top while I turned us around and marched through my house.
“You’re such a bastard, I hope you know that.”
I got a clean shot of his ass, slapping it hard and delighting in the feeling of his cock jumping against my pec. “Really, now.”
He let out a quick huff of air. “Yes. Fucking telling on me to my sister. Who does that?”
Oh.
That.
It was a good bit. Funny enough for me to actually go through with doing it.
Though, I’d admit, an impulsive one, at that.
Scolding his coworkers was one thing. Their job was to make sure he didn’t get hurt out in the field and when that inevitable stroke of bad luck did happen, they were supposed to be that first line of defense against not just outside interferences, but with internal ones, too.
Tattling on him to his sister far outreached the scope of what I’d had in mind when making sure he stayed safe. However... it certainly got the job done in ensuring he’d stop being reckless.
As much as I liked seeing him in between our self-imposed, four-day long prohibition, it didn’t need to be at the expense of what I was rapidly realizing was a very finite amount of stress I could handle when it came to him.
Catching him stumbling his way into a grocery store?
That I could forgive.
Tonight, not so much.
“Be mad at me tomorrow,” I replied, kicking the door to my bedroom clear open.
“You’re telling me to table my feelings?”
He bounced when I threw him down on the bed, vibrancy glimmering in his eyes.
He sat back on his elbows, legs already parting to where his very healthy erection was tenting the front of his sweats.
I wasn’t much better, already slightly panting like a dog in heat, my cock straining to rip through my scrubs and bury itself inside him.
“Put them on the back burner. Whatever.” I shook my head. “Hate me tomorrow.”
Tonight, he was mine to take and make a mess of.
Strangely, his gaze softened. “I could never hate you.”
Something thudded in my chest—my heart, I realized, when I grazed a hand over the spot.
Why…
Did he have to say it like that?
Turning away from him quickly, I shrugged out of my scrub top and tossed it onto the floor, heading over to my dresser to retrieve the condoms and lube.
A soft chuckle followed me. “Silas.”
Ignoring him, I hooked my hand under the brass handle, ripping it back on the track and opening it wide enough to retrieve what I needed.
Tonight, he was mine. Tomorrow morning, he’d be mine after I called off work. So much time to keep him here with me.
The only little bump in the road would be getting his sister not to unexpectedly drop in at the hospital looking to visit him. While I hadn’t actually lied to her, bending around the truth in order to get her to believe I was actually taking him there and not my house was...
Maybe a little unethical.
All right, a lot unethical, but whatever. Who fucking cared.
“You’re calling your sister in the morning to tell her not to visit you.” I shoved the dresser closed, lube and half a sleeve of condoms clutched in my hand. “So she doesn’t try and visit you.”
He blinked at me in surprise, his head tilting in an oddly charming way. A small smile crawling across his lips, tugging them up into something that sent another pang echoing through my chest. He reached a hand out to me, giving me a weird look when I handed him the condoms and lube.
“No.” He tossed them, offering me his hand again and making a grabbing motion with it in the same way his niece had earlier. “Come here.”
Confused, I slowly lifted my hand to him.
He grabbed onto my wrist to tug me down onto the bed, a surprising show of strength that really shouldn’t come as that big of a shock considering his line of work. Again, treating him softly when he was anything but.
A paradox—seeing him in a way no one else did. Soft and submissive, pliable to whatever whim he offered to cater to. All mine for the taking so long as he let me.
I liked that.
Mine and no one else’s.
He cupped my face with both of his hands, leaning back into the mattress while pulling me with him.
I went without a fight, leaning on my hands to keep from crushing him against the mattress.
There was something in his eyes that was hard to name.
Warm, inviting. A blooming affection I wasn’t at all used to seeing reflecting back at me.
“You’re not very good at this. Are you?” His voice was soft, mimicking the hold he had when cupping my face.
I chased after his lips, needing his taste on my tongue again.
“I didn’t hear you complaining about how I fucked you last time.”
He laughed again, tilting his head just enough for me to miss his mouth and catch the side of it instead. “That’s not what I meant.”
What in the world was he talking about?
My mind was clogged with too much want and lust to properly think, to dissect whatever puzzle he was trying to lay out in front of me, presented on some silver platter trying to be used to gravitate my attention elsewhere. “Then, what?”
“Feelings wise,” he said.
Feelings?
What did that have to do with any of this?
Feelings were useless in the matters of bodies and pleasure. Getting too tangled up in something that fragile would only lead to an unnecessary amount of anguish no one wanted to deal with.
“Never was my strong suit,” I admitted.
He squirmed under me when our hips met, tilting his head back at the same moment that he screwed his eyes shut. Rutting against him still half-clothed was teenaged behavior, yet, the harder I ground myself into him, the more audible those soft little gasps of his got.
Sometimes it was hard to believe in fate.
A divine intervention in everyday life that always seemed to either work out in your favor or not, yet, leading you down a singular path already chosen for you since birth.
Growing up in the mind of family that had a legacy of generations behind it, and the expectation to uphold it weighing on barely developed shoulders, not much of that concept was foreign to me.
In an abstract sense, I could appreciate someone outside of the scope I’d grown up in wanting to believe in having life already decided for them and giving all responsibility over to the powers that be.
After all, I’d done much the same in my young adult life, doing whatever it was my parents told me and molding myself into the kind of child they’d envisioned having the moment my mother’s pregnancy test came back positive in late March thirty-four years ago.
Stepping out of that mold as an adult was a daunting task, not one many wanted to do, regardless of their socioeconomic background. Not when the belief that fate would handle it and reward them for abiding by its whimsical laws without question.
I’d done so, not out of some kind of selfish need to be different or rebel against my parents.
It was never that complicated. Being convinced by my only two friends in the world to be adventurous enough to actually do something outside of my pre-planned life had felt obvious at the time.
Why not follow them to a different country for higher education and major in medicine while they both went into business—the one subject both my parents were banking on.
Money was fleeting, as was life.
Why bother living up to someone else’s predetermined expectations when they wouldn’t be around to deal with the consequences come a few decades from now?
Back in those days, I hardly cared about some invisible tie to the universe, hardly ever believed in anything outside of what I could experience with my own two eyes and hands.
What difference did it make when only I would be the one suffering from the repercussions?
Na?ve, in hindsight.
An intrinsic connection to a person was never at the forefront of my mind. Nor was it ever a possibility I entertained whenever Marlow would wax poetic about it during our nights out, dragging Avery in on his delusions after a few shots and a beer to chase away the burn.
It had no bearing on me then. And stupidly, I thought that would be a forever thing.
Now here, with Terran whispering my name as I peeled him clean of his clothes, leaving him in only a lacy thong that tied at his hips and did little to hide his straining erection, I felt like a fool.
One who had deluded himself into thinking he was above the mere fleeting conflicts that came with getting attached to someone.
I’d had a false narrative in my head about being immune to caring that deeply, to ever opening myself up, dropping my walls, to let someone in long enough for them to burrow in deep into my heart.
Why would I ever when that could lead to something as earth-shattering as heartbreak?
Only fools allowed that to happen. Only fools pretended that the worst thing in the world to die from wasn’t broken bones or a failing organ system—that it was, in fact, a shattered heart.
There were demises far worse than death. A long and excruciatingly painful stretch of time that carried on far longer than the soul could handle once your other half decided to call it quits, moving on from whatever life you built and finding that happiness with someone else.
Absolutely fucking never would I do that to myself—never would I allow myself to fall into that trap, no matter how tempting it seemed from the outside.
Yet, as I pulled at the ties keeping his panties around him and parted Terran’s legs, sinking deep into him and feeling his body and walls wrap tightly around me, until neither of us were separated by anything other than a thin layer of latex, I didn’t know what I believed in anymore.
Too much time had been spent crafting this safeguard around my heart, all for it to come crashing down the moment a cop with too much passion and compulsion for the greater good in his heart was laid on my operating table.
He’d coaxed me in with something so simple, a tease of a fantasy I’d long since given up on finding anybody to share with, and kept me tethered to him with nothing as easy to push away.
When did I become this?
When did I allow myself to want anything more than a quick lay?
His groan against my lips as I sealed my mouth around his, sent my heart pattering in my chest. So foreign and alien-like, I wasn’t sure what to think.
When all of this inevitably ended, how would I be able to pick up the pieces when I was forced to walk away?
My need to keep him, to possess and have him, were far outweighing my better sense to keep things at arm’s length. Yet, no matter what I did, no matter how many times I told myself none of this meant anything, it was all a sham, a lie.
I was never going to be the same after this.
And I wasn’t sure how I was going to survive that fate.