Chapter 24
Greg's thoughts scattered.
Points for enthusiasm.
Greg couldn't argue with that. He was being very enthusiastic.
How could he not be?
He had Dustin's mouth on his and Dustin's hand on his neck and—
Oh.
Oh.
Dustin's knee pressed between his legs and Greg made a sound he didn't know he was capable of making — something raw and startled that vibrated against Dustin's lips and made Dustin moan.
That sound.
Greg's hips bucked before he could stop them, grinding up against Dustin's thigh, and the sensation that ripped through him was so foreign and so violently good that his brain stopped functioning.
Heat flooded his face. And his chest. And significantly further south.
What was that? Was he…?
“Oh,” he said out loud, against Dustin's mouth, half-breathless and half-alarmed.
Dustin paused, pulled back half an inch and looked at him.
Then looked down.
A slow wicked grin spread on his face.
“Well,” Dustin said. “Hello.”
“Don't,” Greg pleaded.
“Don't what?”
“Don't look at it.”
“I'm looking at you. There just happens to be more of you than there was five minutes ago.”
“This has never…” Greg struggled for words. “I've never — this didn't—”
“Never?” The teasing slid off Dustin's face. Something softer replaced it. “Not once?”
“There was never a reason.” Greg licked his lips and tasted Dustin and that was not making it easier to articulate his thoughts. “I told you. I'm technically functional. Technically. I didn't know it could just… activate… like—”
Dustin shifted his thigh. Just slightly. A fractional increase in pressure.
Greg's entire body jolted and an embarrassing sound came out of him while more of his blood rushed south.
Dustin laughed. “Relax, sunshine.”
“I don't know what I'm doing,” Greg admitted.
“You don't have to know.” Dustin's mouth found his jaw. His neck. A spot below his ear that made Greg's thoughts stutter. “You only have to feel.”
Greg did feel. Everything — the friction, the heat, the maddening pressure of Dustin's thigh, and his body started to operate on instinct, hips rocking in small, helpless motions that he couldn't control and couldn't stop and didn't want to stop.
His head dropped back against the pillow and his mouth fell open but there were no words.
He'd spent decades cataloguing human language, filling notebooks with phrases from deathbeds, and none of them had prepared him for this. For the hot, urgent, aching need that was rewriting his entire understanding of what his body was for.
He was only a teaspoon of soul stuff.
Dustin was a bonfire.
And Greg wanted to burn with him.
But then Dustin's mouth found his neck and sucked and Greg had to grab at the bedsheet because he needed to hold onto something or he was going to—
He was going to—
His fingertips had gone transparent.
Oh no. No.
Not now. Not when—
He yanked his hands off the sheets and pressed them against his own chest, trying to hold himself together as best he could.
“Greg?” Dustin's weight shifted. “What's wrong?”
“I'm dissolving.” His voice came out small, and when he held up his hands, the bedside lamp shone clean through his fingertips. “My clipboard is on the highway and I don't have an anchor and I'm…”
Not solid enough for you.
He was going to scatter. Right here in this bed.
With Dustin on top of him and his body still yearning.
He was going to dissolve because he'd felt too much, because he'd wanted too much, because he was a teaspoon trying to hold an ocean and the container was cracking and he should have known better than to engage in any of this.
Dustin cupped his face—with both hands. One steady, one trembling from a shoulder that had been wrenched back into its socket two hours ago. He held Greg's jaw and made Greg look at him.
“No,” Dustin said. “You're not going anywhere.”
“You don't understand, I can't control it.”
“Do you want to be here?”
Greg's throat closed. “Yes.”
“Do you want to stay with me?”
“Yes.”
“Then stay with me.”
He kissed him.
Not hard. Not desperate. This was not the frantic collision that had started this. Dustin kissed him like he was something that could shatter, slow and careful, his thumbs stroking Greg's cheekbones, and the gentleness of it cracked Greg open worse than anything else could have.
He braced for the unraveling. For the scattering. For the terrible lightness of coming undone.
Nothing.
Nothing but the warmth of Dustin's lips against his and the feel of Dustin's hands on his face. Dustin's heartbeat was hammering against his chest—or was that his own? He couldn't tell. Couldn't tell where his pulse ended and Dustin's began, and he didn't care, because both of them were real.
He looked down at his hands where they hovered between their chests. They were solid. The light from the lamp hit them and bounced off the way it was supposed to.
He didn't understand why, but he didn't need to understand.
There was no room for thought as he grabbed Dustin by the back of the neck and kissed him back.
He didn't possess Dustin's finesse. His kiss was hard and graceless.
His teeth scraped against Dustin's lip ring, and Dustin made a rough sound against his mouth, relief and want clearly tangling together as he pulled Greg closer.
Greg's hands landed on Dustin's bare sides, more solid than anything.
He was touching warm skin and hard muscle and he was here.
Still here. Still here. Still—
Dustin's hips rolled against his and Greg whimpered and the sound should have been humiliating but he couldn't bring himself to care because Dustin responded by doing it again, slower this time, a deliberate grind that sent Greg's vision white at the edges.
But he didn't dissolve.
He wasn't going to leave while Dustin was warm and heavy and wanting him.
While Dustin's towel slowly slipped from his waist.
Greg had been trying not to think about it. He'd been valiantly, heroically keeping his gaze away from Dustin's groin.
But now Dustin flung the towel aside, revealing warm skin and colorful ink that Greg suddenly wanted to trace with his tongue.
Greg's hand was on Dustin's hip. His fingers were on bare skin that hadn't been bare a second ago. He looked down between them before his brain could advise against it.
Dustin's cock was hard and slightly curved and… it was pierced.
Two silver barbells sitting along the ridge of his cock, catching the light from the bedside lamp like they'd been designed specifically to short-circuit Greg's cognitive function.
“You—” Greg's voice sounded like it was coming from another room. “Did that hurt?”
“Like hell.”
“Why would you do that to yourself.”
“Trust me, it was worth it.” Dustin's voice went low. “Want to touch?”
There was something challenging in Dustin's gaze. Something that invited Greg to challenge himself.
Greg swallowed hard and slid his hand from Dustin's hip.
Lower.
His fingers found warm metal and his brain short-circuited all over again because he was touching them now, not just seeing them — two small smooth bars against hard, hot skin, and Dustin's breath hitched and Greg felt like lava ran through his own veins.
“Keep touching,” Dustin said, and then he was kissing Greg again and Greg… kept touching. His hand was shaking, but his fingers were mapping the shape of Dustin. Tracing. Examining the barbells.
Dustin made a low sound in his throat and shifted his hips into Greg's hand. “Yeah,” Dustin breathed against his jaw. “Like that.”
Greg tightened his grip and dragged his thumb across one barbell and Dustin groaned, open and unashamed, his hips rocking forward.
God. God.
Greg wanted to hear that sound again, wanted it more than anything, so he kept fumbling.
He didn't know what was good, what was right.
But he noticed what made Dustin's breath catch and what made his hips stutter and what made his fingers dig into Greg's hair hard enough to sting.
So he did more of those things. And when he accidentally found a motion that made Dustin's whole body jerk against him, he repeated it.
“Fuck—” Dustin's forehead dropped to Greg's shoulder, his breath ragged and hot through the fabric of Greg's shirt. “Fuck, Greg—”
Greg shuddered from scalp to spine. His own name in that voice — wrecked, desperate, the cocky drawl completely gone — did something to him that should not have been physically possible.
His hips were moving in helpless little stutters against Dustin's thigh because he couldn't keep still, couldn't think, couldn't do anything except keep his hand moving and listen to the sounds Dustin was making against his neck.
Then Dustin's hand found the hem of Greg's shirt and tugged.
“Off,” Dustin said. “This needs to be off.”
Greg let go of him long enough to yank the shirt over his head — or try to. It got stuck on his glasses and he had to wrestle with it, tangled in fabric, and Dustin laughed against his collarbone and helped with his good hand, pulling the shirt free and tossing it somewhere behind them.
Dustin took Greg's glasses too.
“I need those,” Greg protested.
“Do you really?”
“They make me relatable.”
“Seriously, you're the oddest person I've ever met,” Dustin said, but he said it in a fond tone of voice, and then his mouth was on Greg's chest, trailing down, and Greg's objection about the glasses dissolved into a sharp intake of breath.
Dustin's lips moved to his sternum and his hand lay flat on Greg's stomach and his fingers were toying with the waistband of Greg's pants.
“Can I?” Dustin's fingers hooked into the fabric. His breath was warm against Greg's ribs.
Greg nodded. He didn't trust his voice.
Dustin pulled Greg's pants down—underwear and all.
Cool air hit Greg.
He felt… exposed didn't begin to cover it. He didn't have Dustin's tattoos, his scars, the lived-in skin that told stories. Greg's body was plain and unremarkable.
And Dustin was looking at him.