Chapter 10 #3
Asher started slow, drawing nearly all the way out and pressing back in, long and deep, watching Patrick’s face break open on every stroke.
Patrick had stopped trying to be quiet. The sounds came out of him raw, and his hands moved restless over Asher’s back and shoulders, gripping like he needed something to hold on to.
“There you go,” Asher breathed against his mouth. “I’ve got you. God, you feel so good, you have no idea.” He rolled his hips, and Patrick’s whole body answered, his head dropping back against the pillow. “Look at me. Stay right here with me.”
Patrick’s eyes found his, dark and wide open, nothing pulled across them. He hooked a leg higher around Asher’s hip, the angle shifted, and the sound he made came apart in the middle. “There. Right there. Don’t stop—”
“Not going anywhere.” Asher found a rhythm and held it, deep and steady, and Patrick started meeting him, the two of them moving together.
Asher kept up the filthy low murmur he never could hold back.
“That’s it. You’re taking me so well. This is all I’ve wanted.
You have no idea how long—” He lost the words when Patrick clenched around him.
“God, the sounds you make. Give me all of them.”
Patrick gave him everything, the words breaking out of him without his permission, please, Asher, there, begging from the most controlled man Asher had ever met.
Asher dropped his forehead to Patrick’s, both of them breathing the same ragged air, and for a second it was all right there between them, plain on Patrick’s face and heavy in Asher’s chest, the thing neither of them had said aloud yet and both of them already meant.
“Come for me,” Asher said, low, and reached between them, closing his hand around Patrick’s cock, slick and hard, stroking him in time with every thrust. “Let me feel it. I want to watch you go.”
Patrick crashed over the edge. He came with a shout, clenching tight around Asher, spilling hot over Asher’s fist and both their stomachs, his whole body arching up off the bed and his eyes never once leaving Asher’s face.
That look, that sound, the grip of him, was the end of Asher.
He buried himself deep and came hard, shaking apart with his mouth at Patrick’s jaw, on his name, on whatever pieces of words made it out.
After, he held there a moment, both of them wrung out and slick, barely breathing, foreheads together.
He eased out as gently as he could, dealt with the condom, and came right back because Patrick was already reaching for him.
Asher went down onto his chest, and Patrick’s arms came up around his back and held him there like he had no intention of letting go.
The room was still. The hall light cut its diagonal across the bed. They breathed in tandem, slowing.
After, they lay tangled until they caught their breath and the twisted sheets became annoying. Asher got up, came back with a warm cloth, cleaned them both up, and dropped it on the floor.
“You’re leaving that there?” Patrick said.
“I can’t move. You saw to that.” Asher didn’t even open his eyes. “It’s fine where it is.”
“On the floor.”
“Where floors are, traditionally.”
Patrick looked at the cloth, then at Asher, and made a sound closer to a laugh than the exhale Asher usually got out of him. That was progress.
They settled, Asher on his back with an arm behind his head, Patrick on his side facing him, closer than sleeping required.
“I fly out tomorrow,” Patrick said.
“Toronto, right?”
“Toronto. First two games there, then home to Chicago for three and four.” He was quiet a second. “And however far we go after that. Could be a week, could be a month.”
“And I’ve got a game tomorrow night, and seven more after it within nine days.” Asher turned his head on the pillow. Patrick’s face in the half-light was stripped of its public composure, open, the sharp features gone soft with proximity. “We are extremely bad at being in the same place.”
“We’ll get better at it.” Patrick said it like a thing he’d already decided. “People do this. We pick the days we can get, and we make them count. I’m good at scheduling.”
Asher pushed up on an elbow to look at him because that was a lot of words from Patrick, and every one of them sounded like a plan. “Did you just make logistics romantic?”
“I make everything romantic. You’re only now noticing.”
“God, you’re smug when you’re naked.” Asher dropped back down and fit himself along Patrick’s side. “Okay. We’ll figure it out.”
They didn’t sleep for a long time. They talked in low voices, the conversation wandering and slowing by degrees until it trailed off and left only the quiet, Asher’s hand on Patrick’s chest and Patrick’s hand over it.
In the morning, the season would pull them back into their separate lives—the games, the miles, the calendar with no give in it.
Laying there in the dark with Patrick’s heartbeat slow and certain under his palm, Asher couldn’t make any of it feel like a wall.
It felt like something they were going to beat.
He believed it the way he hadn’t let himself believe in anything in a long time, and for once, he fell asleep first, sure all the way down that this was going to work.