Chapter 15 #2
I leaned my head against his shoulder. His sweatshirt smelled like the laundry detergent he refused to switch and the rosemary plant on the windowsill he kept brushing past on his way to the kitchen. I closed my eyes.
“She used to braid my hair before church.” My voice came out rough. “When I was small. I had it long. She’d put coconut oil in her hands and warm it up first.”
He didn’t say anything. Just turned his head into my hair and waited.
“She’s not a bad person.”
“I never thought she was.”
“I think she thinks she’s protecting me. From you. From a version of you that doesn’t exist.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s the second-worst thing.”
“The worst is.”
“Disappointing her.”
He nodded against my hair. Held me harder. We sat like that for a long time; the coffee going cold on the side table, the late October light shifting across the rug.
Eventually, I tipped my face up to his.
He kissed me before I asked. Soft. Closed-mouth. The kind of kiss that wasn’t an invitation, just a place to put a feeling.
I kissed him again. Less soft.
“Jett.”
“I’m not running.” My forehead pressed against his. “I want to ask you for something.”
He pulled back enough to read my face. His eyes were the green-brown they went at low light. The careful Ellis tic kicked in. The thumb sweep across his lower lip.
“Tell me.”
I dropped my hand to his thigh.
“I want you to have me.”
His breath hitched. I caught it on my mouth.
“Have you.”
“Inside me.” My voice cracked low on it. “I want you to.”
He went very still.
“Jett, I’ve never. With a guy. Once. A while ago. Before I knew what I was doing.”
“I know.” My forehead stayed pressed to his. “That’s why I want you to be my first, too.”
He went stiller, if that was possible. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened. His thumb stilled mid-sweep.
“Your first?”
My heart was a frantic thing. Loud enough I was sure he’d feel it through my ribs.
“Never let anyone. Couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t?”
“Didn’t trust it.” The words came out small. Smaller than I’d ever let them be. “Didn’t trust them. I trust you.”
His hand came up. Cupped the back of my neck. His thumb pressed a slow circle into the knot at the base of my skull, the one he’d learned was always there.
“Jett.” His voice came rough. “Are you sure tonight is the night?”
“Tonight.” I caught his hand and brought it to my mouth. Kissed his knuckles. “I’ve been holding this since the first time. I don’t want to wait through another mom call.”
He swallowed.
“Okay.” His voice was reverent and rough. “Okay. Tell me what to do.”
I stood. Took his hand. Pulled him off the couch. We crossed the apartment together, his bedroom door already open, his hand warm in mine. The room filled with the scent of sandalwood from the candle.
“Light or dark?”
“Light.”
He clicked the bedside lamp on. The soft yellow bulb caught the duvet and the geometric line of his sleeve. He looked at me the way he looked at code that was about to do something irreversible. Reading every variable.
“Sit with me.”
We sat on the edge of the bed side by side. He turned my face to his with his fingertips, gentle, as though I might bolt.
“At any second,” he said. “If you change your mind. We stop. We do hands. We do mouths. We do nothing. We watch a documentary I won’t pay attention to. Anything.”
I laughed. The laugh broke.
“Same.”
We undressed each other the way we’d learned to in the last few weeks, careful and not careful, the buckles and the buttons.
He kissed every inch he uncovered. The Libre tattoo.
The line of muscle along my hip.. My cock came free hard already, the PA wet at the tip from the last twenty minutes of him kissing me on the couch.
His own came free a beat after, the upward curve more pronounced when he was this hard, the head of him a deep flushed pink.
When we were skin to skin, he held me a long time. Didn’t move. Just held. His chest against my chest. My forehead against his throat. His pulse pounding into my temple.
His nipple barbells warmed between us. Two small points of steel I let myself feel.
His cock was hard against my stomach, leaking already at the tip where the warm wet of him smeared on my skin.
Mine was hard against his hip, the metal at my tip catching the amber light, the brown of my shaft a clear dark line against the pale of him.
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
He eased me back against the pillow. Drew my knees up. Let them fall open. The lamp threw golden hues across my thighs and the inside of my hip.
He moved between my legs, propped himself on one elbow, his free hand slowly moving up my chest. His other hand drifted down between my thighs, palm flat against the soft skin of my inner thigh, not pressing yet, just there.
“Tell me everything. The whole way through.”
“I’ll tell you everything.”
He reached past me to the drawer. Found the lube.
Slicked his fingers slowly, watching me watch him, the bottle clicking once against the wood of the nightstand and his hand shaking only enough that I could see it.
He warmed the slick between his fingers before he came back to me. I caught the click of his swallowing.
His finger pressed against me first. Just the pad.
Circling. Slow. He let me feel him there before he asked anything else of me.
Then he pressed in. Slow. So slow it felt like a question repeated until I was sure of the answer.
The slick of him eased the way. The stretch was the smallest possible.
A breath of pressure where I’d never let anyone be.
I caught his free hand. Pressed it flat against my chest, palm spread over my heart.
“Don’t stop. Just slow.”
“Slow.”
He moved again. Tentative. His eyes never left my face. He was reading me like a text he couldn’t afford to mistranslate. His finger curled, looking for the place he’d been reading about, the place he’d been thinking about, and when he found it my whole body lifted off the mattress.
“Oh.”
He held it. His finger pressed steady on the spot. The heat that climbed up out of my hips was a thing I’d never felt from this angle, and a slow leak of pre-cum ran from the tip of my cock down my own stomach.
“Good?”
“So good.” I rolled my hips down toward his hand, and a sound tore out of my throat I didn’t recognize. High. Unguarded. My thighs fell wider. “Another. When I say.”
He nodded. His free hand stayed on my heartbeat, steadying me as if he was afraid I’d break apart underneath him.
I’d had years to build the story that I was the one who did this to other people. Not the one who got done. Not the one who let himself be so vulnerable. Tonight, Ellis was asking that of me. Without asking. Every breath.
“Another,” I managed.
He added the second finger, and I lifted my head off the pillow, caught his shoulder with my mouth, bit down on his bare skin, just the taste of him.
Just to anchor. The stretch this time was real.
His fingers spread inside me slow, the slick of the lube and the warmth of him filling a place that had been mine alone for my entire life.
He kept his eyes on my face. He moved when I breathed.
“Ellis.” His name cracked in my throat. “Ellis.”
“I’ve got you.” His mouth was at my temple. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
He worked me open like that, patient past anything I deserved, moving his fingers slow, learning the shape of me, his palm slicked and warm against the soft skin of my perineum.
The cock he hadn’t yet put inside me was hard against the inside of my thigh, slick with his own pre-cum, the head of him brushing against the soft skin every time he moved.
The piercing at my tip had been leaking the whole time.
A thin clear line of it had run down the curve of my shaft and pooled at the base.
Until my thighs were shaking on either side of him and my voice had gone ragged, and I was reaching for him without knowing what I was reaching for.
“Three.” My voice barely there. “Please. I want it.”
He gave me three. The stretch this time pulled a sound out of me that wasn’t a word.
His thumb pressed against the soft skin behind my balls and held there while his three fingers worked me open from the inside, the slick wet sound of it loud in the room.
He kept his other hand over my heart. Every time he found the spot I lifted off the mattress.
“Now. Please.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”