Chapter 16 Out Loud #2
“Say it again,” he said, against my lips. Rough. Wrecked. “The end part. Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“Again.”
“I love you. I’m in love with you. I have been for longer than I let myself know it.” I had his face in both my hands now, the wet of him, careful of the cut over his eyebrow without deciding to be. “I’m sorry I did it in a shout.”
“Don’t be sorry.” His forehead came down against mine.
His eyes had gone wet, and not from the shower.
“Don’t you dare be sorry. I’ve been standing at the edge of saying that to you since a kitchen floor weeks ago and I couldn’t.
I didn’t think I was allowed the word.” His thumb moved along my jaw. “Say it a third time. I’m greedy.”
“I love you,” I said, a third time, quiet now, the shout all gone out of it, just the true flat fact of it left. “There. It’s yours.”
He kissed me again, slower, and the slow was worse than the fast, the slow undid me completely.
I was soaked through and I didn’t care. He reached past me and turned the water back to warm, and his hands went to my shirt, the buttons, working them loose with fingers that weren’t quite steady.
I stood there and let him, which after the whole speech about letting him in, I understood I was finally doing.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
“I’m aware.”
“Nerves or cold?”
“Both. Mostly the first.” I made myself say the rest, because it was a night for the truth. “Luke. I’ve never done this. With a man. I don’t know the mechanics. Who does what. I don’t want to make a fool of it.”
He stopped with my wet shirt half off my shoulders. Looked at me. And then he smiled, the real one, the rare one, the whole battered length of him easing into it.
“I know,” he said.
He got the rest of my clothes off me in the warm water with no patience left in him and every bit of care, the belt, the button, the sodden drag of my jeans down my thighs, his good hand flat on my stomach to hold me steady while I stepped out of them.
Then I was bare in front of him with the spray coming down and his eyes went the whole length of me, unhurried, taking stock, and I felt my cock throb under nothing but his gaze.
I have never in my life been that exposed and that wanted in the same second and not known what to do with my hands.
He was hard too. I let myself look. I’d never looked at another man like that, never once let the want get as far as my eyes, and now I did.
The water sheeting off the dark hair on his chest. The bruise gone purple-black across his ribs.
The cut line of his stomach, and below it his cock, thick and dark and standing up against his belly, the head flushed and slick where the water ran off it. My mouth went dry in all that wet.
“You can touch me,” he said, low. “You’re allowed.”
I reached down and wrapped my hand around him.
It was strange and not strange at all. The weight of him, the heat, the pulsing hard length under hot skin: I knew the shape of that well enough from my own body.
I’d just never once held it on another man.
That was the whole of the difference, and the difference was everything.
He made a sound low in his chest and his head went back an inch, and the power of it went straight through me, that I’d done that, that I could pull it out of him.
So I worked him slow, learning what he liked rather than what he was, the drag of my fist from root to head, my thumb sliding through the wet at the slit that wasn’t the shower, the catch in his breath when I rubbed just under the ridge.
“Like that,” he said. “You’ve got good hands. I always” his breath caught “I always thought you’d have good hands.”
“Tell me if I’m doing it wrong.”
“There’s no wrong.” His hand closed over mine, slowed me, before I took him too far too fast. “Not yet. I’m not going off in a shower in two minutes like a kid.”
We got out, because a tiny shower is a stupid place for two grown men and he was sore and I was new and neither of those wanted tile and a hard edge.
He shut the water off and we dried each other in the steam, rough towels and rougher hands, and there was something in being dried by him, in dragging the towel careful over the road rash on his back while he hissed and held still for me, that wound the want tighter than the touching had.
His bed. A lamp he turned down low. The window with the city in it.
“Lie down,” he said, and I did, and he came over me, easing off the left side even now, and I got a hand flat on his unmarked shoulder.
“Tell me if it hurts. The ribs, the back. I mean it. I’ll stop. I don’t care how far in we are.”
“I know you will.” He looked at me a beat too long, and the looking went everywhere.
“We’re saying it out loud now.”
He came down the length of me and the warm weight of him settled over my cock and my hips lifted into it before my head had a vote, both of us hard and wet and sliding together, and the friction pulled a sound out of me I didn’t plan and a lower one out of him.
He braced on his good arm and rolled us slow against each other, his cock against mine, the drag of him, and I grabbed his hip and held on and learned that being wanted by him was going to take apart every careful thing I’d ever built.
Then he went down my body.
His mouth at my jaw, my throat, the flat of my chest. He stopped at a nipple and dragged his teeth over it and I jerked and swore and felt him grin against my skin.
Lower. The line of hair under my navel. The crease of my thigh, where he set his mouth and sucked until I knew it would mark, and I didn’t care, I wanted the mark.
And then his breath was on my cock and I came up on my elbows to watch because I couldn’t not.
He looked up the length of me, held my eyes, and took me into his mouth.
The heat of it knocked the air clean out of me.
Wet and tight and his tongue working the underside, taking me deeper than I thought a man could, his hand wrapped round the base of what his mouth couldn’t reach, and I fell back against the pillow with a sound that wasn’t a word.
Nobody had ever done it like that. Like it was the thing he wanted, not a thing he was giving.
He pulled off slow, tongued the head, sank back down, and set a rhythm that had me fisting the sheet and shaking inside a minute.
“Luke. Luke, I’m” I got a hand in his wet hair, not pushing, just holding. “If you keep. I’m going to.”
He pulled off with a slick sound and rested his cheek on my thigh, breathing hard, his lips swollen and dark.
“Not yet you’re not,” he said. “Not the first time. I want you with me for the first one.”
He reached into the drawer by the bed. The cap, a click in the quiet. He warmed the lube between his fingers, which I clocked even then, the small thoughtful thing, and his slick hand came back between my legs.
“Spread for me. There. Knees up. I’ve got you.
” His clean hand spread warm and flat on my belly, anchoring me.
“This is the part you don’t know. So I’m going to tell you all of it.
I’m going to open you up slow. It’s going to feel strange before it feels good.
You let me know the second you want me to stop and I stop. Yes?”
“Yes.” My voice came out wrecked. “God. Yes.”
The first press of his finger had me clenching off the mattress.
“Out,” he said. “Breathe out, slow. There. It’s just me.
Let it be just me.” His finger worked in to the first knuckle, the second, slow, slick, and it burned and then it didn’t, and then there was just the strangeness of it, the fullness, the intimacy of being touched somewhere no one had ever touched me.
He read it all off my breath the way he read everything, easing when I caught, pressing on when I let go.
One finger, then two, a deeper stretch, his thumb stroking the inside of my thigh while he did it, patient past anything I deserved.
And then he crooked his fingers and dragged them over something inside me and the strange turned to a white pull of heat that arched my whole spine off the bed and tore a sound out of me I’d never made.
“There,” he said, rough, watching my face like it was the only thing in the room. “Found you.”
“What...” I couldn’t finish it, he did it again, “what is, oh, fuck, do that, do that again.”
He worked me open on it, three fingers now, that slow merciless drag against the spot inside me until I was rocking down onto his hand without deciding to, my cock leaking against my stomach, swearing in pieces, past anything like shame.
“Look at you. All that wise mouth and charm, and you come apart like this. I’m going to think about this every time you give me that face now. You know that.”
“Luke. I’m ready. I want you. I want” the want was bigger than the words “I want all of it. Please.”
He reached back into the drawer and I heard the foil tear, and watched him roll the condom down over himself with one quick hand.
Then he came up over me, careful, settling between my thighs, slicking himself again over it with a fist, and I felt the blunt heat of him press where his fingers had been and the nerves flared one last time.
“Eyes on me.” His forearms braced either side of my head, the bruised one trembling with his weight and held there anyway.
“All you have to do is breathe and keep your eyes on me. We go as slow as you need. If it’s too much we stop and that’s still a good night.
There’s no version of this where I’m disappointed in you. ”
I got a hand into his wet hair. “I love you. I’ve got weeks of it saved up. I’m going to say it the whole way through.”
“Then say it while I” and he pushed.
The stretch of him was nothing my body had a name for, far more than his fingers, a burn and a pressure and the slow impossible give of being opened by the man I’d have walked into traffic for, and I said it broken in half, I love you, and he sank in by degrees, watching every inch land on my face, stopping when I gripped, easing on when I breathed, until he was seated all the way in me with his jaw clenched white against the want of holding still.
“You’re all right,” he breathed. “You feel” his control cracked on it “you have no idea what you feel like. Tell me when.”
I shifted under him, testing it, the fullness turning over into something deep and good, and I tilted my hips and felt him move against that place inside me and gasped.
“Now,” I said. “Move. I want you to move.”
And he moved.
It was nothing I had words for. I’d had sex I thought I understood.
This rewrote it. The slow drag of him out and the push back in, the angle he hunted and found that lit me up from the inside and had me clawing at his shoulders before I remembered the bruises, and he grunted and I gasped sorry and he laughed, breathless, ragged, “don’t you dare stop touching me,” and we found a rhythm that was clumsy and then wasn’t, my hips learning his, his good hand sliding under the small of my back to tilt me up into every stroke so it dragged over that spot each time and turned my spine.
The sounds of it filled the room. The slick catch of him moving in me.
His breath gone harsh, mine gone to pieces.
The wet slap where our bodies met. The bed.
My own voice saying his name and the three words tangled up senseless.
He was sweating now despite the shower, the salt smell of him, the heat, a drop of it falling off his jaw onto my chest, and I had never been so far inside a moment in my life, so completely unable to hide in it, his eyes on mine the whole time, refusing to let me look away.
“Stay with me,” he got out. “Right here. I want your eyes when you go.”
“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
He got his slick hand around my cock, finally, stroking me in time with the drive of his hips, and it was too much and exactly enough, the two sensations braiding into one unbearable pull, and I felt it gather low and tight and inevitable.
“That’s it.” His voice had gone to gravel. “Let me feel it. Come for me. I’ve got you.”
I went. It wrenched up through me and locked my whole body around him and I spilled hot over his fist and my own stomach in pulses that emptied me out, his name and I love you breaking apart in my mouth.
He fucked me through it, the clench of me dragging at him, and three, four strokes later he buried himself deep and shuddered and came with my name low and wrecked against my ear, his arms finally giving out so the full warm weight of him came down on me, both of us slick and spent and breathing like we’d run somewhere far.
For a while neither of us said anything.
His heart slammed against my chest and slowed.
The city hummed in the window. He softened and eased out of me slow, and I felt the loss of it and the strange new tenderness left behind.
He stripped the condom off and knotted it and dropped it in the bin by the bed, and reached down without a word and cleaned us both with the towel he’d left there, the practical small mercy of it, before he settled back down and pulled me in.
“Your ribs,” I said eventually, into his hair.
“Worth it.”
“That’s not a medical opinion.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got tonight.” He lifted his head and kissed my brow.
The split lip, the dark eyebrow, the whole battered face, and under it something I’d never seen on him, something young, unguarded all the way down.
“You said it first,” he said. “I want that on the record. The great closed-off detective, and you’re the one who said it first. In a shout. Soaking wet. With your shoes on.”
“I’ll deny it under oath.”
“You won’t.” He tucked me in against his good side, the way a man does a thing he means to do for years, like the body that had spent so long measuring the distance between us had simply stopped. “You’re a terrible liar. It’s my favorite thing about you. I’ll know every time.”
I lay there in the lamplight with a battered man going heavy against me, his breath slowing toward sleep, and I stared at the ceiling of a room whose door used to close on me, and I thought about the seam in the night I still couldn’t see the shape of.
The fog Murphy had handed me. The thing past the edge of my sight.
It was still there. It hadn’t gone anywhere.
But it could wait until morning. Everything could wait until morning. For tonight I had him, warm and breathing and here, and I had finally, finally said the loud part out loud, and he had pulled me into the water rather than let me drown on the step.
I turned the lamp off with my free hand and held on.