Chapter 24 #2
That sound does something cruel to my nerves.
I want more. Not just his mouth. Not just his body. I want the parts he keeps behind his teeth. The parts Liv reaches with one look and a badly timed joke. The parts of him that stand beside mine and hers and somehow make a life I never had the courage to imagine.
That is what they do to me.
Hal and Liv.
They don’t fix me. I’m not a project, not a wound, not a problem for either of them to solve. They make me want to stay inside my own life. They give me somewhere to put all this love before it turns destructive in my hands.
Hal takes me deeper, and I stop thinking in sentences. I stop being the man with the Cup, the stats, the cameras, the last name everyone keeps shouting.
For one breath, I am only his.
And somehow, impossibly, still mine.
I’m loud.
I let myself be loud because he likes that too.
He told me once that hearing me moan was better than any crowd’s noise. I didn’t believe him then. Now, with his cheeks hollowing and his lashes lowered and his body angled over mine like this is the only task he intends to complete today, I think he might have been telling the truth.
He pulls off, lips wet, eyes darker than before.
“Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“Don’t,” I say, and it comes out too close to begging. “Don’t you dare.”
His mouth curves. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
Then he goes down again.
Deeper this time.
My hips move without permission. My hands shake in his hair.
The ceiling blurs because the room is too bright and the pleasure is too much.
I haven’t had to hold myself together for anyone since I opened my eyes.
His finger trails lower, slick from his mouth, teasing the rim of me, and my whole body reacts.
I lose the breath I was pretending to manage.
Halston looks up from my cock with me still in his mouth.
That image is going to ruin me.
He keeps me pinned with one hand on my thigh as his finger circles, barely pressing. My body tenses around the promise of it. I want to tell him how good he is. How much I need this. How terrifying it is to be wanted by someone who notices everything and still chooses to stay.
All I can do is groan his name.
He understands.
He always understands.
When I get close, I warn him, because if I don’t, I am going to come in his mouth and he told me he wants something else.
“Halston, I’m—”
He stops.
The loss is immediate and brutal.
I swear under my breath, and he gives me a look that says he heard every syllable and will be remembering them for later.
He reaches into the drawer beside the bed.
Of course, the drawer is organized. Lube.
Condoms. Wipes. Everything placed with obscene practicality.
For over a year and a half, Halston has stocked this drawer the way he organizes everything—efficiently, without comment, with a clear sense of what belongs where and what needs replacing.
I have stopped asking how he knows. He just knows.
Liv doesn’t understand how he can be so organized in that drawer and forget to stock the refrigerator.
That’s our guy, and we love him no matter what.
Halston comes back with the lube in one hand.
The sight of it makes my stomach dip.
He sees that too.
He kisses my hip once, then moves up over me. His mouth finds mine. I taste myself on him, and possession rushes through me so fast I have to grip the sheet. He kisses my forehead after, which should not hit me harder than his mouth on my dick, but it does.
It feels like being chosen after the hunger.
Like he wants all of me, not just what I can give back.
“Tell me if I’m going too fast,” he says.
“Hal.”
“I know.” His voice is rough. “Tell me anyway.”
“I’ll tell you.”
He nods, but he doesn’t move right away.
He studies my face first.
That is the part that always gets me. The check. The pause. The refusal to take what I have already offered until he’s sure I’m still offering it. It should make me impatient. Instead, it makes my eyes burn, which is inconvenient and frankly disrespectful to my image as a newly crowned champion.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I mutter.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m not allowed to be an asshole right now.”
“You’re always allowed to be an asshole.” His fingers brush my jaw. “I’m just not letting you hide there.”
I hate him a little for knowing me.
I love him worse for the same reason.
He shifts between my thighs and slicks his fingers. The sound is small. Almost nothing. Still, it changes the room. My body recognizes it before I can talk myself into being casual. Heat spreads low through me, mixed with nerves, desire, memory.
Halston’s hand settles on my thigh.
“Breathe,” he says.
“I am breathing.”
“No, you’re performing respiration.”
I laugh, and the laugh breaks on a gasp when his slick finger circles me.
He goes slowly.
The first press is almost nothing, light enough that my body has time to decide. I force my legs not to tense. He feels it anyway, because of course he does, and bends to kiss my stomach. My ribs. The bruise above my sternum again.
“I’ve got you,” he says.
Three words.
He works one finger in, patient, pausing every few seconds to watch my face.
The stretch burns at first, familiar and private, my body opening around him in increments.
Pain and pleasure braid together until I can’t separate them, and I don’t want to.
The burn makes me present. It drags me back into a body that spent the playoffs being used as a tool.
“Hurts?” he asks.
“Not—” I can’t finish because his finger moves, crooks, and hits the spot that makes my legs jerk. My hand flies to his wrist, not to stop him. To hold on. “Keep going.”
He works me open with one finger until my body stops fighting him, then adds a second. My muscles clamp down, instinctive, and he stills immediately. His free hand rubs slow circles on my thigh until I let go by degrees.
The room feels warmer now. The curtains barely stir from the air-conditioning. Sweat gathers at my temples. My mouth is dry. I can hear every breath I take and every quiet sound he makes, every slick movement of his fingers, every shift of sheets beneath my hips.
“You’re doing so fucking good, babe,” he murmurs, almost like the words were dragged out of him. “So good for me. You’re opening up so beautifully.”
My whole body reacts before my pride can stop it.
Praise does things to me that I refuse to examine in daylight.
I turn my face into my arm, hiding the heat in my eyes.
Halston stops.
“Don’t.”
I laugh once, breathless and embarrassed. “Don’t what?”
“Disappear on me.”
I lower my arm.
He is looking at me like he knows exactly what I almost did. Like he saw me trying to leave the moment while staying in the bed. Like, he will follow me anywhere I retreat and drag me back by name.
“I’m here,” I say.
His thumb strokes my thigh once. “I know.”
He adds more lube.
Then a third finger.
The stretch is fuller, hotter, enough to make my back lift off the mattress. I hiss through my teeth, and Halston leans over me, kissing the sound from my mouth. He keeps his fingers still until I kiss him back. Until my body catches up with my want.
When he moves again, slow and deep, I shudder so hard he groans.
“Still good?” he asks against my mouth.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“That is the truth.”
“Creed.”
I open my eyes.
He is close enough that I can see the small line between his brows. Worry, not doubt. Care, disguised as control.
I touch his face.
“I want this,” I say. “Even if it takes us a while. Even if I shake through it all. I want you inside me, taking me apart slowly, as if you already know I’m still yours when I come undone.”
His eyes shut for one second.
Then he nods.
He keeps stretching me, adding more lube, more patience, more time than my pride wants to admit I need. When he works a fourth finger in, my hands fist in the sheet and a sound leaves me that doesn't belong in any arena, interview, or room with my last name on a contract.
Halston’s jaw tightens.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay.” My voice sounds ruined. “You’re just—fuck.”
“I know.”
“Arrogant answer.”
“Accurate answer.”
I would laugh if I had air.
He slowly pulls his fingers free, and I feel empty so fast it makes me reach for him. He catches my hand, kisses my knuckles, then reaches for the condom.
I watch him roll it on.
His hands shake.
That is what undoes me.
Not his mouth. Not his fingers. Not even the sight of him when he slicking himself with more lube—thick in his own hand, flushed and veined, precum pearled at the tip like his body has been telling the truth longer than either of us has.
Not the way my body remembers taking him and wants it again, even as fear sparks through my nerves.
It’s his hands shaking.
Halston’s hands.
The same hands that can wield a legal argument like a weapon. The same hands that held my phone last night so Liv could watch me win. The same hands that know every bruise on my body and touch around them like care is not weakness but proof.
He is shaking because this matters.
Because I matter.
And somehow, that scares me more than his size. More than the stretch waiting for me. More than wanting him so badly that my whole body has gone quiet with it.
He lines himself up, one hand braced beside my hip, the other on my thigh.
“Ready?” he asks.
I nod.
His gaze narrows.
“Words.”
I swallow. “Yes. Just go slow.”
“I will, babe.”
He pushes in, just the head, and waits.
The stretch steals the air from me. My hand clamps around his forearm. Halston stops instantly, eyes locked on my face, his whole body held in check above me.
“Breathe,” he says.
I inhale.
He doesn’t move until I exhale.
Only then does he press in another inch.
Slowly.
So fucking slowly, I feel every second of him entering me. The fullness is intense, bordering on too much, but his hand stays on my thigh and his eyes stay on mine, and there is something almost unbearable about the restraint. Halston could take. He never does. He makes me give.
Another inch.
My head falls back.
“Creed.”
“I’m okay.”
“Look at me.”
I do.
That is when it changes.