39. Gideon
Chapter 39
Gideon
I had my hand around his throat before I even realized it, his back against the wall before I’d taken a single step. I squeezed, the delicate bones and cartilage of Fletcher’s neck like putty in my hands. He sputtered and gasped, blue eyes going wide, but far from scared. And he didn’t fight me.
He did me a service .
I would wring the breath from his throat and then spit that declaration right back onto his grave.
“I used to wish I was dead,” I said, tightening my fingers around his throat until his face turned red as a strawberry. Spit gathered in the corners of his mouth, he lifted his hands between us. Instead of grabbing for my wrist like I expected, he shoved the heel of his palm forward, connecting hard against the fresh brand in the middle of my chest.
I dropped him back on the floor and fell onto the coffee table, which somehow held my weight. Fletcher bent over at the waist, hands braced against his knees as he sucked in breath after breath after breath.
“That was rude, Gideon.”
I stood from the table. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”
“I’d rather we just fuck and get it over with,” he said, closing the space between us, fisting my shirt into his hands and crashing our mouths together.
It had been years since I’d been caught off-guard, since I’d underestimated someone. The treatment from my father had long ago ensured I was at least a step ahead of most people in most things. Bellamy had been a surprise, with his daring advances that felt far too bold for someone as soft-spoken as he was. Daren and Luca’s secret relationship, another unexpected turn of events, but not entirely a shock.
This, though?
Fletcher’s mouth against mine, his tongue begging permission to slide past my lips?
I hadn’t seen this one coming.
“I hate you,” I said, grabbing his cheeks and puckering his mouth away from me like a fish on a line.
“I deserve it,” he muttered, yanking his face out of my grip. “I fucking deserve it and you can kill me later if you still want to, but not before you fuck me.”
“Sin.”
He reached under my shirt, fingers teasing their way over my ribs to the center of my chest. He went for the brand again, hooking the edge of his fingernail over a sunken piece of flesh in the shape of a rose petal.
“Do I have to make you angry again? Because I can.”
“I’m always angry at you,” I warned.
He pushed against the petal and twisted his finger, bringing our mouths back together, licking his tongue across my lip in a long and sinfully decadent slide.
“I think everything is going to go wrong,” he said, almost like he was thinking out loud, but he was closer to the truth than I think either of us wanted to admit. “I just want this one thing first.”
“This one thing,” I repeated.
“It’s everything.” Fletcher’s mouth fell open and he breathed heavily against my chin, chest heaving with every inhale. His attention flickered up toward the stairs and then back to me. “Why can they have it, but not us?”
“We could have,” I reminded him. “We did.”
“Why are you here?” he asked again, dragging his nails down my chest hard enough to draw four lines of fresh blood from my sternum to my navel. It took all my strength to not cry out in pain, but my father had taught me years ago about the importance of suffering in silence. “Why are you here? What do you want? If you’re not here for this, Gideon, why are you here ?”
He was nearly frantic, eyes wide with my skin and blood beneath his fingernails. And I realized, he was right. There was one thing we both wanted from each other, one thing we’d never been allowed to have. Maybe it was seeing Daren and Luca together that had brought our lives into such sharp focus for the first time, but Fletcher was far from wrong in his assumption. Even if I hadn’t realized it when it happened, my need for him was the one thing that had always kept me going.
“When I thought I was dying,” I said to him, freeing my cock from my pants and giving it a tight stroke. “I saw you.”
“What?” He swallowed and shoved his pants down to his knees, spitting onto his fingers and reaching between his legs.
I pushed him down onto the couch and settled my weight on top of him, between his legs. He was practically bent in half, fingers up his ass like he had any right to put anything up there besides my cock. I swatted his hand away, wondering if I’d always felt this sense of propriety over him and how I’d managed to ignore it for so long.
Spitting into my own hand, I slicked my cock and notched myself against his barely-prepped hole. “In the pool that day, right before I lost consciousness, I saw you. You held out your hand and I took it, and I thought that was the end of everything.”
I pushed my hips forward, easing my cock into him, one agonizingly slow inch at a time. Fletcher whimpered, clenching his jaw and throwing back his head. He reached between his legs and started to stroke himself like mad, far faster than the pace I set on his ass.
“Holy shit, Gideon.”
He whispered my name and I stole it from his mouth with my tongue. I kissed him, pushing him down into the corner of the couch until I felt like I could move without shooting my load into him on the next thrust.
“Hmn?” I hummed into his mouth, deepening the kiss and finding a pace that delivered all of the punishment I knew he deserved. It was, after all, his fault that we hadn’t been doing this for the last six and a half years. His judgement, his decisions, his selfishness.
“You feel so good,” he said, burying his face into the crook of my neck. He sank his teeth into my skin and it hurt more than the brand ever had. It was a different kind of mark, one that I’d wear forever, even after the scar itself faded. “Sin, I’ve…”
“Tell me.” Fletcher took my face into his hands, cradling me while I fucked him. His palm smeared precum across my cheek and I turned to the side, licking him clean.
“I’ve never been with another man before,” I admitted. “I haven’t…haven’t done anything else with anyone that I haven’t done with you.”
His blue eyes went wide, clear as the sky and innocent as they used to be back when we thought we were bigger than we were. He cursed under his breath and grunted, a hot burst of cum streaming out of his cock and splattering against the underside of his chin. Another across his bare chest, his stomach. His hands were still against my face, digging in deeper than before, and I wondered if he’d drawn my blood a second time.
Knowing that he’d just come—untouched—based off my confession alone, unfurled a complicated tangle of emotions in the middle of my chest. It was overwhelming, enough to send my brain to the place it went when I felt like my life was out of my control. Leveraging my weight onto the couch, I pumped into Fletcher so hard, he finally cried out. The couch dragged across the room, and I fucked into him again, again, chasing after the pleasure I’d been deprived of my entire life.
“I’m still…” he trailed off, head thrown back in pleasure as the couch slammed into a cabinet against the wall. Books and vases and trophies all fell out of the case, raining down onto us as my orgasm barreled through us both.
“I’m still coming,” he gasped, and I filled him to leaking. Using my back to shield him from the debris, I dropped my forehead against his when the violent aftershocks of my orgasm finally quieted down.
“Well,” Daren said from somewhere behind us. “That’s quite the development.”