Chapter 25 — ZAY #2
“I said I’m fine.” But my voice breaks on the second word and he doesn’t push. He just kisses the corner of my eye, feather-light, and moves his mouth down my jaw. My throat. My sternum.
He moves down my body without rush. His mouth on the cut of muscle at my hip. His lips pressing along the crease of my thigh, breath hot against my cock without touching it, and I remember doing this to him on a Tuesday in his apartment and the memory overlaps with the present and both are real.
“You’re teasing.”
“I learned from the best.” His mouth closes around the head and my back arches. Hot and wet and sure, his tongue working the spot underneath that he knows, that he has known since Charlotte, and I let my head drop back and stop trying to hold any of it.
He takes me deeper. His hand wrapping the base, his mouth working a rhythm that fractures my breathing into pieces. My fingers find his hair. My grip tightens and he takes me deeper and the sound I make is open and undefended and the openness is not a decision. It’s what’s left.
“Teo.” My voice doesn’t sound like me. “Come back up.”
He pulls off slow, deliberate, his lips dragging the way he knows I feel all the way down my spine. He crawls back up and I pull him down and kiss him with my own taste on his mouth and reach for the nightstand.
“I want you,” I say.
“You have me.”
“No.” I press the bottle into his hand. “I want to feel you inside me.”
His breath catches. He looks at me. “You sure?”
“I just said I want you. How many times do I need to say it?”
“Once is enough.” He kisses me. His slick fingers find me and circle slow and my breath goes tight. He presses one finger inside and my body opens and the sound I make is quiet and honest and I don’t catch it or kill it or file it away.
“Talk to me,” he says. His finger moving slow.
“It’s good.”
“Good is vague. I need specifics. My ego requires data.”
I almost laugh. Almost. “More.”
He adds a second finger and the stretch pulls a sound from my chest. He curls and finds the spot and my hips jolt and my hand grips his shoulder.
“There?”
“You know where.” My voice is wrecked and he hasn’t even started.
He works me open with the same patience he gave me on the couch, unhurried, deliberate, and I feel my body letting him in by degrees.
Not guarding. Not bracing. Just opening, because the man inside me asked first and waited and was quiet for a week.
He slicks himself and I watch his hand on his cock and the sight of him over me, patient and wrecked simultaneously, does what it always does. He settles between my thighs.
“Look at me,” he says.
I look at him. He pushes in slow and my breath fractures. His hands grip my thighs, holding me open, and the stretch is full and good. When he’s all the way in he holds still, his forehead against mine, breathing.
“Good?”
“Good.” And my voice doesn’t shake.
He starts to move. Slow. Each thrust full and deliberate. My leg hooks around his back and I pull him deeper and his rhythm builds. His mouth finds my neck and my hand finds the back of his head and I hold him there and feel his breath against my pulse.
He shifts the angle and I make a sound that fills the room. His mouth curves against my neck.
“Don’t be smug.”
“I’m not smug. I’m attentive.” He does it again and my spine arches and the sound is louder and I don’t try to swallow it. I am lying under this man with nothing between us, no register, no mask, no clinical distance, and every sound I make is a sound I’m choosing to let him hear.
His hand finds my cock between us. Strokes me in rhythm with the way he’s moving inside me and the two sensations together pull a moan out of me that I feel in my chest.
“Zay.” My name. Not Brooks. The name my people use. He’s saying it with his eyes open, his hand on me, his hips driving deep, and the honesty in his face is the most undone I’ve ever seen him.
“I’m close,” I tell him.
“Me too.” His forehead pressed to mine. His grip tightening on my cock, his pace building, and I feel the wave approaching, feel my body climbing toward it without resistance, without calculation, without the part of me that usually files the feeling away for later analysis.
There is no later. There is his hand and his body inside me and his eyes and I come with his name pressed between my teeth, the orgasm rolling through me slow and devastating, my hand gripping his shoulder, pulling him deep.
He follows. His hips stutter and his face drops against my neck and the sound he makes is quiet and broken and private, pressed into my skin, and I hold him through it until his body goes heavy against mine.
We breathe. His weight settles on me and I let it. His hand loosens on my hip but doesn’t leave. My fingers are still in his hair. The room is quiet except for us.
He pulls out careful. Handles the cleanup the way he handles everything, thorough and warm. Comes back with a washcloth. Wipes me down and I let him because letting him is part of what tonight is.
He lies down. I press into his side. His arm settles around me without negotiation, his body already knowing where mine goes.
Parker jumps onto the bed. Investigates the new geography. Settles between our knees with the certainty of a creature who has no concept of timing.
“Your cat has no boundaries,” he says into my hair.
“Your cat.”
“Our cat.” He says it without thinking, the way he says everything. I let the word sit.
His thumb traces my chest. Once. Twice. His breathing slows. His hand presses flat against my chest, over my heart, and holds.
“You’re still shaking,” he says.
“Different kind.”
He presses his mouth to the top of my head. Doesn’t say anything else. Doesn’t need to. His hand stays on my chest and I put my hand over his and press down and feel my own heartbeat against his palm.
We are bruised. We are not finished. Tomorrow we go back to a building where two men who look like us don’t get to be what we are in this bed. The math hasn’t changed. But we are in the room. Both of us. Neither of us leaving.
?