Chapter 24 #2
His hands moved over me with more confidence than on Saturday.
He’d learned things, like where to touch, how hard, what made me gasp.
He was such a quick study, this man who paid attention to materials and worked with the grain.
He found the spot below my ear and my hips jerked involuntarily. He smiled against my neck.
“Shh,” he murmured. “Thin walls.”
“It’s your fault I’m making noise.”
“Deal with it.”
I kissed his throat, his chest, mapping the scars I’d memorized on Saturday but wanted to learn again.
The terrain of Mac’s body was a landscape I planned to study for a very long time.
He lay back and let me, his hands in my hair, his breathing controlled, like military discipline applied to arousal, which was somehow incredibly hot.
I shimmied lower, between his legs, my face level with the hard line of his cock trapped in navy-blue boxer briefs. I wanted to taste him, to take him in my mouth, but more than that, I wanted to see what happened to Mac’s self-control when I set my mind to breaking it.
I put my mouth on him, the cotton wet with his precum, then curled my fingers under the waistband, slow, giving him a chance, but he didn’t stop me.
He was watching me, eyes dark in the low light, waiting to see what I’d do.
I slid his underwear down, and his cock sprang free, heavy and already smeared at the tip.
Beautiful, honestly, though he’d probably roll his eyes at me for saying so.
I licked a stripe up the underside of his cock and watched his whole body jerk. I did it again, slower, then circled the head with my tongue, tasting him, relishing the little shivers I drew out of him.
His breathing changed—the control cracking, the discipline losing its grip. His fingers tightened in my hair. “Arek.” Low, strained. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to.”
He let me. When I took him into my mouth, Mac made a sound—quiet and wounded and beautiful—that landed somewhere below my sternum and made me harder than I’d ever been in my life.
I started slow, just my tongue and my lips, licking and lapping and testing what he liked.
What set him vibrating was pressure at the head and then a flicker underneath, right at the ridge.
I made a mental note of that. I wanted to catalog every part Mac responded to, that unraveled him, made him give up control.
I wrapped my hand around his cock, firmly, and pressed my mouth down, taking him past my lips and into the heat of my mouth.
He was big enough that I couldn’t quite take him all, but I tried.
Jesus, I tried. His groan was so low it was almost soundless, a thing felt rather than heard.
He bucked up, once, a reflex, and his hips lifted off the bed before he checked himself.
His hand flexed in my hair, but he didn’t force anything, didn’t guide—just held on as if he’d slide off the planet otherwise. I bobbed my head, slow at first, steady rhythm, then picked up speed, swirling my tongue, sucking him hard, wanting to wreck him.
He lasted longer than I expected. Years of discipline, of self-denial, of holding himself back, but the longer I worked his cock, the more that iron self-control started to shake apart.
I could feel the effort it cost him, the control fraying thread by thread, and I wanted to unravel every last bit.
I wanted to take this man who held himself together with granite and discipline and give him permission to let go.
Permission to feel good. Permission to receive without earning it.
I wanted to give him that. I wanted to give him everything.
The thought surfaced, and somewhere beneath the desire and the tenderness, a small, clinical voice I couldn’t silence observed: You’re giving again. You’re always giving. When’s the last time you let someone give to you?
I pushed the thought down and focused on Mac.
His sounds were quiet, controlled, so careful not to be too loud with the boys down the hall.
His hand was in my hair, alternating between gripping and gentling, like he couldn’t decide whether to hold on or let go.
His body tightened under my hands, the tension building toward a crest.
“Mac, let go for me,” I whispered, and he did just that.
He came apart for me with a precision I’d never seen in anyone.
His hips jerked, his body thrummed, and then he snapped so silently that I wasn’t even sure he’d come until I felt it, hot and sharp against my tongue, his whole body locked up for a heartbeat before he relaxed all at once, collapsing back on the bed.
His hand stayed in my hair, loose now, shaking slightly.
I pressed my cheek to his thigh, breathing him in, the salt and skin and the clean sweat of his body, and waited until he threaded his fingers into my hair and tugged me up to him.
He pulled me onto the bed, into the crook of his arm, and kissed me—hard and grateful and hungry, like he could taste himself on my lips and wanted more of it.
His hand moved from my jaw to my chest, then lower, the intent clear.
“Let me,” he said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t.” His hand stilled on my stomach. “I want to. You going to let me?”
The question landed on the exact fault line that ran through my entire life.
Was I going to let someone take care of me?
Was I going to lie still and receive without managing, without performing, without redirecting the attention to someone else?
Saturday, it had been easy, somehow. Today, not so much. “Yeah, okay.”
Mac’s hand moved lower, wrapping around me, and his grip was sure and warm and unhurried, and I closed my eyes and let him. Let him learn me. Let him give. Let myself receive without calculating what I owed in return.
It was harder than I expected, harder than it should’ve been.
The instinct to reciprocate, to redirect, to make it about him pulsed under my skin like a second heartbeat.
But Mac’s mouth was on my neck, his hand was steady, and his body was warm against mine, so I stayed.
He brought me higher and higher, and I received.
When I came, it was with his name in my mouth, his arm around me, and the terrifying, liberating feeling of being held by someone who wanted nothing from me except to make me feel good.
After, I cleaned us quickly, and then we lay tangled together, cooling, breathing. Mac’s arm was heavy across my chest. His face was pressed against my hair, his breath warm and steady.
“You make it hard for yourself, letting someone take care of you,” he said. An observation—factual, direct, with the subtext sitting right there on the surface.
I could’ve deflected. Could’ve made a joke or changed the subject. But it was dark, I was tired, and Mac’s arm was around me, and the truth was right there, simple and undeniable. “Yeah, I know.”
“You’re going to burn out, Arek.”
I stiffened. Not a lot—a degree, maybe two—but Mac felt it. Of course he did.
He held me a little tighter. “We don’t have to talk about it tonight, but I see it. Okay? I see it.”
I lay in the dark and felt the weight of being seen by someone who wouldn’t look away. It was the same weight I’d felt in Fir’s breakroom, the same weight I’d felt on the porch when Mac told me I mattered without being useful. Heavy and light at the same time. A burden that was also a gift. “Okay.”
I blew out a breath and rested my head on his chest, closing my eyes. The house shuddered and sighed as it settled for the night. My boys were asleep, the man I loved was in my bed, and the house held all of us in its old, creaking, patient arms.
Mac’s breathing evened out within minutes, but I lay awake, my mind doing what my mind always did—running the list. Tomorrow’s patients. The referral I still hadn’t sent. The permission slip for the boys’ field trip. The grocery order. The call to the school nurse. The lab results. The lunches.
The list ran and ran and ran, an endless scroll of tasks and obligations and people who needed things from me, and I lay in the dark beside a sleeping man who’d told me I was going to burn out and knew, with the diagnostic certainty of a physician examining his own symptoms, that he was right.
But not tonight. Tonight I had Mac’s arm, Mac’s breath, Mac’s warmth. Tonight, I was not alone in my bed.
I closed my eyes and willed the list to stop.
It didn’t.