4. Dante #3
I move slow at first, then harder because Cole asks for harder by pressing back.
With each withdrawal, the barbells drag backwards along his sensitive channel; with each thrust, they drive forward again, a slow, relentless slide of metal and flesh.
The steel dragging through him curls his toes against the sheets and pulls a continuous, rough sound from my own throat.
He's the only person who's ever felt them, and he's traced them in the dark since the first night he found them, mapping each one until I'm shaking.
My hand leaves his hip and slides around to stroke him in time, and each inward drive makes his cock jump in my hand, his pre-come slicking my palm in pulses.
His breathing fractures, his face presses into the pillow, and my mouth finds his neck again, teeth grazing skin that will be hidden beneath a jersey by morning.
The room fills with the slap of my hips against his, the wet slide of sweat between us, the creak of the bedframe, his choked-off swears, my own ragged sounds.
Sweat drips down my back. Heat builds between us.
His body clenches tight around my cock with every thrust. My balls draw tight, slapping against him with every drive.
"Dante. I'm—"
"Come."
His body breaks apart, shuddering as my name splits in his throat when he comes, hot stripes painting my hand and the sheets beneath him.
The clench of him around my cock pulls me over a second later, a white-hot rush that blots out everything except the press of his back under my chest, the bite of my teeth in his shoulder.
A low, animal sound tears out of me as I empty into him, pulses of release wracking my body until I'm fucking shaking.
For a while we stay there, connected and breathing, the air cold on my sweat-slick back.
Eventually I pull out. I tie off the condom and drop it in the wastebasket Cole keeps tucked beside the nightstand, then lie down on my back beside him.
The ceiling is dark, light off the snow painting the room faint blue.
Cole rolls onto his right side facing me and settles his hand on my chest, palm flat over my sternum, fingers spread.
His skin is still fever-warm against mine.
We lie there listening to the faint scrape of snow against the window: the hallway outside the door, the rest of the house beyond that, the campus beyond the house, all of it stopped at the window glass.
His thumb moves once across my chest, a slow, deliberate stroke.
Then his hand trembles, once, a faint vibration against my skin, before he lifts it entirely and sets it on the mattress between us, palm down.
The withdrawal is quiet and precise, and my chest cools fast where his palm was, the absence cutting.
"You still have her recorder," he says, his voice quiet in the dark.
"She knows where I am."
"You called her a tourist with a borrowed name and then you took her equipment. That's two power plays in one interaction."
"It was one interaction."
"It was a performance. And she clocked every second of it. She's smarter than you think she is."
"I know exactly how smart she is."
His hand stays flat on the mattress. He rolls away from me onto his left side, back toward me, and this time he curls in on himself slightly, shoulders hunched.
The curl isn't one I've ever seen on him in daylight, and something in my chest pulls toward it before I lock it down, a painful tug that catches in my throat.
"You handed her a weapon tonight," he says to the wall. "And you're keeping her recorder like a trophy. Pick one."
The sentence sits in the dark between us, heavy and fucking true.
My hand lifts an inch off the mattress toward the ridge of his spine before I flatten it back down, my fingers curling into the sheet.
Whatever Cole is reading in me tonight, he keeps it behind that turned back. The faint bruise on the side of his neck has already started to darken, the shape of my mouth on his skin visible above the line of his shoulder. The mark is mine. The thoughts behind it aren't.
Cole's hands at his sides in that parking lot.
The grip on my jaw tonight, his thumb on my pulse, yours, always yours, his back to me now in the blue light with my mark still on it.
Across the hall, on my desk, Maya's recorder where she set it this afternoon, then where she didn't reach for it tonight.
The drawer at the Chronicle. The doorway across the hall from this room.
The two places her eyes refused to settle.
And under all of it, Cole's voice in my head, three years of that, you stop planning, you know, delivered to the one person who would hear exactly what it meant.
Maya's hand an inch from mine with the heat crossing the distance, my finger pressing white against the oak.
Cole's back toward me here, her recorder across the hall in my room, the same span of hardwood stretching to both.
I lie there in the dark, the weight of the night pressing down on my chest until I have to force air into my lungs.