Chapter 8 #2
"Breathe." I hold still, fully seated, giving him time. My hands frame his face. Thumbs stroke his cheekbones. "I've got you."
"I know." His voice breaks on it. "I know you do."
I start to move. Slow at first — long, deep strokes that make him gasp every time I bottom out. His legs wrap tighter around my waist, heels digging into my lower back, pulling me deeper.
"Harder," he breathes. "Vaughn, I need — please—"
I give him what he asks for. Snap my hips forward, hard, and hit the spot that made him scream with my fingers. He screams now too — loud, so loud, his nails raking down my back hard enough to draw lines.
"That's it." I set a pace that has the headboard tapping the wall — not slamming, not punishing, but relentless. Steady. The way I do everything. "Let me hear you."
"Can't — be quiet — fuck, Vaughn, right there—"
"Don't be quiet. Let me hear every sound."
He does. Robin is loud in bed the way he's loud everywhere — uninhibited, unfiltered, his whole body a broadcast of what he's feeling.
He moans my name and swears and begs for more and harder and there and his voice goes high and cracked and desperate in a way that I will never, as long as I live, forget.
I shift my angle, hitch his hips higher, and he sobs.
"Close — Vaughn, I'm close, I need—"
I wrap my hand around his cock. He's leaking all over his stomach, twitching in my fist, and I stroke him in time with my thrusts.
"Come for me," I tell him. Not a request. "Robin. Come for me."
He does — clenching hard around my cock, spilling hot and slick over my fist and his stomach, my name tearing out of him like something he couldn't hold back if he tried. His body goes rigid, shaking, every muscle locked, and his eyes are open and on mine the entire time.
The sight of him — the sound of him, the feel of him pulsing around me, the way he says my name like it's the only word he knows — breaks me. I bury myself deep and come so hard my vision goes white, my face pressed against his neck, my teeth biting down on his shoulder.
Not hard enough to break skin. Not claiming. Just — marking. The way my lion needs to. A bruise that says I was here, this was real.
We lie there. Breathing hard. The room smells like sex and sweat and Robin's vanilla scent, sharp with something new underneath — satisfied, spent, almost sweet.
I'm still inside him when the world comes back. When the adrenaline drains and reality settles in and I become aware of things like the fact that his sheets are a mess and my knees are aching and Robin's heart is hammering against my chest.
I pull out carefully. He winces, and I immediately check his face — but he shakes his head. "Good wince. Not bad wince."
I get up to find something to clean us with. His bathroom is across the hall — I grab a washcloth, warm water, come back. He's lying exactly where I left him, staring at the ceiling, and he hasn't moved to curl against the warm spot where I was.
I clean him up. Gentle, thorough, the way you handle something you want to keep. He watches me do it with an expression I can't read — something between wonder and terror.
"Thanks," he says when I'm done. Quiet.
I lie down beside him. Not touching, because he hasn't reached for me and I won't push. A careful inch of space between us, the same inch that's been between us for months — close enough to feel each other's heat, too far to call it anything.
He doesn't curl against me.
Robin — the man who cuddles everyone, who drapes himself over any warm body in reach, who falls asleep on shoulders and curls up between people on couches without a second thought — lies on his back with his hands at his sides and doesn't touch me.
"That was really great," he says to the ceiling. "Thanks for bringing me home."
Thanks. Like I did him a favor. Like this was a service rendered, a transaction completed, and now it's time for me to leave.
My chest goes cold.
"Yeah." I sit up. Start looking for my clothes. "No problem."
"Oh." Something in his voice. Small and startled and hurt. "Okay."
I pull on my jeans. Find my shirt on the floor by the door. My jacket is downstairs somewhere. My helmet is on the lawn.
"I should go," I say, because he's not asking me to stay, and I won't beg.
I won't be the one who makes this into something it's not.
Robin said it himself — I flirt with everyone.
It doesn't mean anything. And tonight was just — the natural conclusion of weeks of tension, a physical release, a thing that happened because his body wanted it.
Not because his heart did.
"See you around," I say from the doorway.
"Yeah." His voice is barely there. "See you."
I'm in the hallway — when I hear him.
His voice, muffled through the bedroom door. On the phone. Shaking.
"Toby, it's me. Call me back."
A breath. Ragged.
"We had sex and I'm such a fucking loser that I don't know how to cuddle after sex.
He was right there. Right there, Toby. Warm and solid and perfect, and I just — lay there.
Like a corpse. Because if I curl against him it means something, and if it means something then it's real, and I don't know how to do real. I don't—"
His voice cracks.
"He left. He's leaving. Because I can't — I don't know how to do any of this. I don't know how to be the kind of person who reaches for someone after. Please call me. Please."
I stand at the bottom of the stairs. My hand is on the doorknob. Every rational part of my brain says walk away. Give him space. He needs to figure this out on his own.
My lion says: Go back.
Robin doesn't know how to cuddle after sex. Not because it doesn't mean anything — because it means everything. He's lying in that bed alone right now, wanting me and not knowing how to say it, because no one ever taught him that reaching for someone is allowed.
I could leave. I should leave. He didn't ask me to stay and I have my pride and my dignity and the very reasonable expectation that if someone wants me in their bed, they'll say so.
But Robin doesn't know how to say so. That's the whole problem. That's what this whole thing has been about — a man who learned love as performance and doesn't know how to do it for real.
I take my hand off the doorknob.
I take my jacket off.
I walk back upstairs, open his bedroom door, and find him curled on his side with his phone clutched to his chest and his eyes red.
"Vaughn?" His voice is small. Scared. "I thought you—"
"Move over."
He stares at me. I pull my shirt off, kick off my jeans, and get back into his bed. He's still frozen, eyes wide, so I do the thing he can't do — I reach for him. Pull him against my chest, wrap my arms around his shoulders, tuck his head under my chin.
He's stiff for five seconds. Ten. His whole body rigid against mine, like he's bracing for the moment I change my mind.
Then something in him breaks.
Not dramatically — not sobbing, not falling apart. Just a slow, total release. Every muscle letting go at once, his body going boneless against mine, his face pressing into my chest. His hands come up — hesitant, shaking — and grip the back of my shoulders.
"I don't know how to do this," he whispers into my skin.
"Yeah, you do." I pull him closer. Press my lips to the top of his head. "You just did it."
His fingers tighten on my shoulders. His breathing stutters, steadies, slows.
"Stay?" he asks, and his voice is so small it barely exists.
"Yeah."
"Vaughn?"
"Yeah?"
"It meant something."
I close my eyes. His heart beats against my chest, fast and fragile. The room smells like vanilla and sex and Robin, and my lion settles for the first time in months — not pacing, not restless, just still. Just home.
"I know," I tell him. "It meant something for me too."
He makes a sound against my chest — not quite a laugh, not quite a sob. His arms wrap tighter around me and his legs tangle with mine and he presses as close as physics allows.
Robin Martinez, who curls up with everyone, who touches shoulders and leans on strangers and falls asleep on any available surface — is holding me like I'm the first person he's ever really held.
Maybe I am.
I don't sleep for a long time. I lie there in the dark, Robin breathing slowly against my chest, his hands still gripping my back like I might disappear, and I think about what I heard through the door. I don't know how to do real.
Neither did I, before tonight.
We'll figure it out.