Chapter Twenty-Two
Now
The mews ran behind the terrace in a cobbled dogleg, and the unmarked car Benton had arranged for him idled at the mouth of it with its lights off until James was through the gate. He found the back door unlatched, as promised, and let himself in.
The flat was scrubbed of any trace of personality, an obvious luxury rental for the globally mobile. Then Tristan came out of the far room, and the flat itself stopped mattering.
For six months he’d been reduced to just a saved number and a voice down the line, and here he was made solid again, leaning in the doorway in grey joggers and a jumper gone soft at the cuffs.
James had spent a good portion of the drive getting himself together.
It held for as long as it took for him to clap eyes on Tristan.
“Hello, Jams,” Tristan said, still keeping the distance between them.
“You look good, Tris. Really good.” He heard himself a half-second too late: breathless, besotted, like a boy working up the nerve to ask his crush to a house social. He could have died.
Tristan grinned. “I’ve been working out.” He planted his feet wide and threw both arms up into a bodybuilder’s pose, fists clenched at his ears, holding it for a panel of judges that wasn’t there.
“It shows,” James said.
“I’ve put days of dedication into it.”
James folded a palm round one flexed arm to give it a testing squeeze. “Terrifying. Even Lex wouldn’t stand a chance against you in an arm-wrestling match, now that you’re in this state.”
“I’m a serious physical specimen, James.”
Tristan struck another pose, hip cocked, chin over his shoulder. James was near enough now to feel the heat coming off him.
This off-duty Tristan was James’s favourite version of him, because the James this Tristan had met was equally off-duty.
They’d shared a bathroom of a morning, Tristan on the loo while James showered, the two of them talking rubbish through the steam.
Tristan had watched him pick a fallen crumb of scone off the front of his cardigan and eat it with no shame whatsoever.
It was a stupid thing to be moved by, sentimental and possibly deranged, that of everything he might have wanted back, the thing that had him by the throat was how easy it had all been with Tristan when it was just the two of them.
He went in to kiss him.
Tristan turned at the last second. James’s mouth landed at the corner of his jaw instead, and there was a moment in which he could have made it nothing, pulled away and let them both pretend that it hadn’t happened.
Instead, James committed. He kissed the warm skin under Tristan’s ear and worked his way down his throat.
Tristan shivered. His breath came out long and unsteady, and then both his hands fisted in James’s hair, holding him exactly where he was.
“We’re supposed to be talking,” Tristan said, the last word coming apart as James bit down lightly on the tendon below his ear.
James didn’t stop. He dragged his mouth lower and found the old spot under the hinge of Tristan’s jaw that had always undone him.
“I just need your answer, Tris.” He brought his head up and captured Tristan’s mouth, his teeth closing over his bottom lip and giving it a gentle tug before he let it go.
“What would you have done? If you’d heard everything that night, like you were meant to? ”
Instead of answering, Tristan pulled James’s head down and deepened the kiss. His mouth opened soft and warm beneath James’s, his tongue lapping against it, coaxing. James pressed into the heat of him, his palm sliding up to cradle the base of his skull.
He’d asked something real and been handed a body in place of an answer, but he was past the point of caring about the principle of things.
Tristan was the slighter of the two of them by a clear margin, and James lifted him off his feet with one hand spread under his arse and the other splayed at his spine.
Tristan’s legs came up round his waist on instinct.
James carried him through to what he took to be the master bedroom, and laid him down on the bed.
Tristan looked up at him from the covers, his chest rising and falling fast, and James moved before either of them could think better of it.
He hooked his fingers into the waistband of Tristan’s joggers and dragged them off in one pull, underwear and all, then made short work of getting his jumper over his head. Getting his own jeans off was a graceless business, James’s hands unsteady and fumbling.
There was a bottle of lotion on the bedside table. James thumbed the cap off and slicked himself rough and quick, hooked both of Tristan’s knees up towards his chest, and pushed in. Tristan’s whole body drew tight and his fingers dug into James’s forearm.
“Easy.” James held still, buried halfway, and made himself wait it out. “Breathe out for me. There. Let me have the rest of you.”
Tristan breathed out, and the give of his body let James press the rest of the way home. The heat closed around him so tightly that it pulled a low sound up out of his chest. He stayed there, seated to the root, feeling Tristan clench around him.
He took hold of the curve of Tristan’s arse, kneading deep and steady, easing the first ache of entry the way he’d learned to do early on.
Tristan always needed a bit of babying before he could take a proper fucking.
A few unhurried minutes of being stroked and gentled, told how good he was being, until the flinch left his body and the wanting settled in.
James knew the exact moment it turned by the way Tristan let go of his held breath, and the way his hips tilted up to ask for more.
James caught one of Tristan’s thighs and pushed it up and wide, then looked down to where they were joined.
The sight of himself sunk into Tristan, the slick-shined rim dragging at him each time he drew out, spurred him on.
He eased almost all the way out just to watch Tristan’s body cling and try to keep him, then fed himself in on one slow press.
Tristan moaned, and let his knees fall open, putting himself on display with no shyness in it, because he’d clocked precisely what the sight of it was doing to James. He stroked himself, root to tip.
“You’re such a perv,” Tristan breathed out.
James didn’t deny it. He drew out, his eyes fixed where Tristan’s body clung to him. “I could watch myself fucking into you all night, baby.”
“I know,” Tristan said, holding James’s gaze and never letting the movement of his hand on his cock falter.
James watched the skin of that lovely cock slide silken over the shaft on every pull, up to the flushed head and back down, a bead of wetness welling at the slit each time his thumb crossed it.
“You’ve done it before. With your cock.” Tristan let the pause stretch. “With the handle of your riding crop.”
Then he reached down to where James was sliding out of him and wrapped his fingers around the wet length of James’s hardness that wasn’t already buried inside him, stroking it in time with the drag of James’s withdrawal.
The shameless filth of it was more than James had a hope of resisting.
He drove into him hard, in long, brutal strokes that shoved Tristan bodily up the bed, the slap of skin on skin filling the room. Tristan lost his grip on James and got both hands on himself, working fast and frantic, rocking with every one of James’s thrusts.
James leaned down over him, his hips slowing. “Baby. My Tris. I’ve missed you. God, I’ve missed you.”
Tristan kissed him back and went pliant under him. “I know,” he breathed against James’s lips. “C’mon. Don’t stop.”
James got an arm under the small of Tristan’s back and tilted him up into the next stroke, hunting the angle that broke Tristan’s breath in half. He held it there, deep and relentless. “No one gets me going like you do, baby,” he said, his mouth at Tristan’s cheek.
Tristan worked himself faster. Everything in him pulled taut, and then he was coming, spilling hot over his knuckles and onto his belly, clenching around James in long pulses.
James didn’t pull out, and he didn’t chase his own finish. He slowed right down, easing Tristan through the aftershocks while Tristan twitched and shivered around him.
He let his weight down onto him then, and Tristan went boneless under it, his face turning to tuck into the side of James’s neck. His heels came up and dug into the base of James’s spine, pressing the length of them together, holding him in as deep as he would go.
James rolled his hips and let his own finish build. It came gently, in a slow pulse, with him still buried inside the man he’d waited six months for.
Tristan sighed, and didn’t pull away. He clenched around him in deliberate squeezes, working James’s softening cock just to feel him twitch and hiss into the side of his neck.
“Behave.” James was oversensitive now, his cock giving one last interested flicker before it settled.
Tristan laughed and clenched once more, out of pure devilment, before he relented. He reached for James’s hip and eased him back until he slipped free, the mess coming with him.
James pushed up onto an elbow and drew his fingers through the come, enjoying the feel and look of it glistening on Tristan’s pale skin.
“James.”
“Mm.” He gathered more of the come on his fingertips and painted a circle around Tristan’s navel.
“What are you doing?”
“Territorial marking.” James brought his fingers to his mouth and sucked them clean, holding Tristan’s gaze throughout. “Perfectly natural behaviour. David Attenborough would approve.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“I’m the King. It’s not disgusting when I do it.
It’s an anointment.” James leaned down and licked the wet streak he’d left across Tristan’s hip, one slow pass that made Tristan’s breath hitch.
Then he pulled tissues loose from the box on the bedside table, and set about cleaning them both up properly.
Tristan first, always, blotting at what remained.
“You know,” James said, “I’d forgotten how good you are at attending to His Royal Hardness.
” James balled the used tissues in his fist and reached for fresh ones.
“Six months, and not a step lost. Top-notch cock attendance, Tristan. HRH is most delighted to have his most cherished cock warmer in post once more.”
Tristan was still laughing when James finished with him and dropped the tissues over the side of the bed. He gathered Tristan in, and Tristan let himself be held.
He could have let the night close over the both of them and said nothing at all. But that’s how he’d lost Tristan in the first place: by moving too late.
“I still want to talk, Tris,” he said. “Really talk. That’s why I came tonight, but as usual, I let myself get distracted by your arse.”
Tristan turned his face further into James’s neck, burrowing in where he didn’t have to be looked at. “In the morning, James,” he said.
And James hadn’t the heart to press it. He pulled Tristan in closer, settled his chin over the crown of his head, and let the talk keep till Tristan was ready to pick things up again.