2. Now Freddie
TWO
Now: Freddie
I could pretend this is about the mission. I could say that Director Snow ordered me to keep an eye on him because she, quite rightly, doesn’t trust any man with the last name “Nova.” Not after what his brother did to all those children. Not after what his brother did to her best friend.
But I’ve spent the last few years lying to everyone, including myself, about my feelings for Roux Nova, and I’m sick of it, of how those corrosive lies seep into the muscle hidden beneath my skin, like molten glass. When that shit dries, it’s like I can’t move without shattering the compacted sand and limestone encasing the soft tissue in my joints, exposing those self-deceptions for what they are, the freshly cracked shards cutting into me every time I allow myself the grace to forget.
I can’t reach that pain no matter how I desperate I am to relieve it, no matter how maddening the fierce, clawing urge to rip myself open and dig inside my body, nails scratching through wet flesh until the root of that anguish can be found and torn from me, one bloodied piece at a time.
All I can really do is own the agony he inspires. It’s the one thing he can’t steal from me, because it’s the one thing that belongs to both of us, not just him. He belonged to me once, and in some ways, he still does, though he would spit bile and bare his teeth at me for suggesting it.
When Director Snow told me to watch him, she and I knew it was a test. There could be no other reason for her to give that perilous an opening to me. It’s a risk, trusting that I’ll report back to her with honest intel rather than deceits meant to protect Roux if he does prove himself a traitor to our government. Again.
“I want you to keep an eye on our newest recruit, Agent Steivater, make sure he’s behaving himself,” Director Snow had said, her cool blue eyes raking me from head to foot with undisguised scrutiny. It was clear that she’s as unsure of me as she is of Roux.
“Roux hasn’t behaved for single day in his life,” I’d lied to her. The truth, as with most things when it comes to the Nova men, is murkier. Roux can follow orders but only when he chooses to, and his reasons for doing so vary wildly and without any trackable consistency, which makes him unpredictable at best, a liability to her at worst.
Snow seemed keenly aware that I was lying to her. She knew Roux when he was a child, through his parents, and he was the same then. Mercurial and wilful and too beautiful, always too beautiful for his own good. Not quite as rebellious as his brother, my oldest friend, Maddox, or as ambitious as Alex, their older brother, the Nova who would go on to ruin us all in the name of protecting himself from a loss too impossible for a man like him to accept.
Snow can’t expect me to tell her the truth about Roux. I won’t. Not if he’s pouring gasoline over an orphanage. I betrayed him once, and it almost killed me, and unlike some people, I like to think I can learn from a mistake that was that soul-destroying.
But Snow does expect me to protect Roux, which is the real reason she asked me to watch him. Either way, Roux will hate it. But I don’t care about that nearly as much as a good man would. I’m not good at all, not when it comes to him, and I never have been. Roux saps all that goodness out of me with one cruel twist of his pretty mouth.
Roux has moved himself into a small seaside town called Colbie, which sits right outside the city, close enough that he can commute to work at the agency’s underground base but far enough away to give him the illusion of safety from Director Snow’s prying gaze.
Of all the places for him to go, a weird little town by the ocean would have been the last place I’d have guessed. For one, Roux hates the ocean. He almost drowned, body boarding one summer when he was a kid, and spent fifteen minutes standing at the edge of the sea yelling every obscenity known to a ten-year-old, which was, thanks to Maddox, quite an extensive list. He stood there, furious, his white-blond hair soaking wet, fringe plastered to his forehead, sticking both middle fingers up at the ocean as he accused it of being a “glittering cunt of salty doom.”
One of the worst things about trying to do surveillance in a tiny British town is that it’s fucking tiny. There’s nowhere to stay hidden, no empty buildings or hotels to rent rooms from to use as a base or surveyance point. You just have to rock up with a car, one that’s shit enough not to be noticed but not too shit—otherwise people complain about the sight of it near their pretty little cottages—and a decent amount of resolve to act as if you belong in a place where you’ve never been and had no intention of ever stepping foot in.
Another problem is the residents. It’s bad enough in a city, where people have busy lives and not much patience for curiosity. In a small town where everyone knows everyone and gossip is tantamount to community entertainment, a stranger lurking around with seemingly no purpose is like a homing signal for military-trained pigeons. I might as well have a flashing neon sign over my head.
It doesn’t help that I’m not exactly the most discreet-looking person in the world. My height alone gets me plenty of side-eyes. But if you’re big and blond and built like all agents are required to be for field missions, then you’re going to be noticed in a place like Colbie. Not exactly ideal for an undercover op.
Still, I do the best I can with what I’ve got. I spend most of my time in my car, parking down the street from the cottage Roux is living in with Rex, the infamous nephew, and what seems to be a middle-aged woman with bright-red, curly hair who favours eccentric fashion choices, including a long witch’s cape and fuzzy green dinosaur slippers. I watch them go to and from the house, occasionally following them to their destination, which nine times out of ten is the beach. I’m most interested in the times when Roux goes out alone, but that’s rare, and even then, he doesn’t leave for anything more interesting than the missions Snow sends him on or random walks on the same beach.
He seems stressed and anxious, ringing his hands and tugging at his hair and rambling to himself continuously about, from what I can tell, bizarre bullshit, but that isn’t unusual. Roux was born talking nonsense and hasn’t shut up for more than a handful of minutes since then.
One thing Roux isn’t, is unobservant, however much he might pretend at playing the doe-eyed innocent.
To be honest, I’m proud to make it two weeks before Roux returns the favour by breaking into my flat when I’m not there and writing a message on my bathroom mirror with purple lipstick, which I presume he stole from his new housemate, the cape wearer. The message reads, in bold, angrily scrawled letters, “Piss off, stalker .”
I leave it there on my mirror, stopping to read it over and over again each morning, tracing my fingers along each word as if it’s a love note. In some ways, it is. Every scrap of attention Roux throws at me feels like a horrible, ugly accomplishment, like murder in a colosseum for a screaming crowd, like winning an underground death match when the other person is fighting with a gun to their head. There’s a brutal pleasure in it, knowing that he’s thinking about me, a ruthless and unrefined triumph.
I can’t forget our past, can’t move on or let go or be a better man than the one he tore me apart to create.
Roux lets me watch him for another week before he breaks into my flat again. He scrapes the note off my bathroom mirror, and I’d give half the years left in my life to know exactly what he thought when he saw that I hadn’t wiped it away. He doesn’t leave another message on the mirror, but he does smash every single plate, cup, and glass I own, on my kitchen floor. He must have cut himself on a broken piece of glass because I find a smudge of blood on a single shard. I’m delusional enough to believe he left it for me on purpose, and I keep it locked away in my bedside drawer, along with the picture I took of him the day before when he was alone on Colbie beach, standing near the water’s edge, wearing a blue hoodie much too large for him—one of mine that I hadn’t noticed he’d stolen until then—and his pale, bare feet sinking into the wet sand, ocean water lapping at his toes, the shot catching them mid-curl.
Roux used to hate the beach, would complain about the sand getting lodged in every crevice, called it “nature’s fucking glitter.” There’s a lot this new version of Roux seems to have accepted as his penance—taking a job he never wanted with the agency, raising a kid when he always said he didn’t want them, leaving his oldest brother to rot in the dirt before he had the chance to fix what was broken inside his head—and I can’t help thinking his walks along the beach are just another splinter of that atonement, digging in underneath his fingernails. Roux always liked excessive punishment, that isn’t new.
There’s a shorter gap between the break-in’s the next time, but that’s mostly because Roux is sent away on a long mission by Snow, and he only stops by to leave another note for me before he goes. He’s cute with it. Leaves a small bomb under my bed with a timer on it that gives me just enough time to find the bleeping hunk of metal packed with C-4. There’s a message scratched into the back of the digital clock.
“Stay away from the kid, or I’ll cut your heart out.”
It’s a weak threat because we both know he did that years ago, before he even knew how to hold a knife without slicing himself open.
I cut those wires to save my life, but it feels like killing something too, like severing my connection to him, which is as much like dying as any lack of pulse or decomposition would be. If you murder a soul, what’s left anyway, other than the slab of meat it was unwillingly tethered to? It felt like betrayal not to die when Roux choses it, except he gave me a timer when he didn’t have to, so maybe I don’t have to feel bad about surviving.
I’m petty, and I miss him, so I go to Colbie and take pictures of his nephew, the monster’s son, as he climbs around the rock pools on the beach wearing his oversized woolly jumper with a jagged-toothed cartoon duck stitched into it with clumsy hands, and a pair of pink, sparkly Wellington boots. Roux’s new roommate follows the boy around like an overzealous nanny, encouraging him to hunt for starfish and baby crabs, her large velvet cape, entirely inappropriate for the beach, or possibly for life in general, billowing in the harsh seaside wind.
When Roux comes home, I print off the pictures, stuff them in a brown envelope, and leave them for him to find under his pillow. I don’t permit myself to spend too much time in his weird little cottage bedroom with its audaciously low ceilings and fairy tale vibes that has me feeling like I’ve just walked into an abandoned hostage situation. It does make me pause long enough to search for a pen so I can write “To Goldilocks” on the envelope.
Roux waits another week before he breaks into my flat for the fourth time, except unlike all the others, he lets himself in whilst I’m asleep. We’re trained by the agency to be light sleepers, able to drop off easily and wake up alert. Roux still manages to catch me off guard. For a man who yaps so fucking much, he can be terrifyingly silent when he has the proper motivation.
I’m yanked into consciousness by Roux jabbing a needle in my neck. Whatever it is, it works fast because I’m dragged down back into darkness before I have the chance to complete a murmur of his name. I get one brief look at Roux’s tragically beautiful face, twisted in rage, so much bitter, useless rage, before the drug snatches that coveted sight away from me.
I wake up some time later, naked except for my underwear, handcuffed to a radiator in an old office building. My mouth feels painfully dry, and it tastes like ash. Roux is sat on a metal fold-out chair in front of me, the pictures I took of his nephew strewn across the floor between us like pieces of evidence in an ongoing investigation.
Roux waits for me to be completely conscious before he takes out a knife and points the shining metal tip at the photo closest to him. It’s one of his nephew squatting down next to a rock pool with a green bucket hanging off one little hand; his face, so familiar, so terrible, so obviously Nova in origin, is screwed up in concentration, like’s he’s studying a very rare artifact in the pool of seawater below him. It’s a good photo if you like photos of children who ruined the lives of everyone you care about. I know that isn’t a fair thought to have; all Roux’s nephew did was dare to live and then have the audacity to try not to, but. That was enough.
“What the fuck are you playing at with this shit?” Roux demands, spitting mad about it, his pale-blue eyes glittering with untethered wrath like the surface of a raging ocean mid-storm, cast in silver, shimmering moonlight.
“Can I have some water?” I ask, a definite croak in my voice as a result of my arid throat. Bloody hell, I hate getting post-drugged dryness. It’s really hard to reverse engineer an interrogation with whoever you’ve been kidnapped by if you sound like a frog with strep.
“You can bite your tongue and drink your own blood,” Roux snarls, upper lip curling backwards over his incisors like a guard dog at the end of his patience. “You uninspired fuck.”
There aren’t any windows in the office, so I can’t see if I’ve been out long enough that anyone at the agency would have noticed. I’m supposed to report in for a briefing early in the morning, but it’s unlikely Roux knows that. It’s not as if anyone will work out where to find me in time if Roux decides to be a little more proactive in slashing a chunk off my lifespan.
“Come on, Ro,” I urge, mostly because it’ll piss him off even more. “Be nice.”
Roux shifts the knife around in his hand, reaffirming his grip on it, and points the thing directly at my face. He’s not close enough for it to be an active threat, but he could move at any time to change that.
“Get fucked, Freddie.” Roux serves me a look of what I’m perfectly aware is genuine disgust. “I hope you bite too hard and choke on your shitty blood.”
Freddie. He still calls me that. Even after everything. Even after. Well … after .
I tug at the handcuffs, the metal digging viciously into my wrist. He’s made them too tight on purpose. Roux, like all the other Novas, is, when it comes right down to it, shamelessly mean. They have a venomous cruelty rooted deep inside them that is only matched by their equally ingrained kindness, a drive to help and to harm, like they have a coin constantly flipping where their conscience should be.
Roux rolls his eyes when I hiss at the pain in my wrist. He leans back in his chair as if his physical proximity to me has just skipped over to the wrong side of bearable. He’s dressed all in tight, black clothing, and I take a moment to admire how the stretched fabric clings to his lithe body, a body I once spent hours tracing over with gun-callused fingers and an eager tongue. Roux notices me gazing at him, remembering how he gasped my name when I licked at the crevice between his thigh and groin, how he screamed like a banshee when I fucked into him with minimal prep, which had been his preference from the beginning. It wasn’t so much that he liked to be hurt, it was more that he enjoyed the struggle, as if the pleasure meant more when he had to earn it first.
“Stop looking at me like that, or I’ll cut your eyes out,” he threatens gruffly, his attention flickering between my face and the knife.
I stare back at him, brazen and foolish and weak as I use my free hand to palm my cock. With just my underwear to conceal me, it would be impossible for him not to realise that I’m getting hard. I stroke myself slowly through the black fabric, breathing deeply through my nose to maintain some control of myself at the manic euphoria that comes from watching Roux watch me.
“Come over here, Ro,” I say, voice still scratchy although that might be partially from lust now. “I wanna feel your soft little arse rubbing against my cock.”
Roux sucks in a dramatic breath, a mix of fury and unwanted arousal. He doesn’t look any less disgusted, but he does what I tell him, shifting out of his seat and settling himself on my lap, thighs splayed on either side of mine. He brings the knife with him too and holds it against my neck, right underneath my jaw.
I grasp Roux’s hip with my free hand and yank uselessly at the cuffed one. Roux’s face is too far away for a kiss, but that’s probably just as well. I don’t trust him not to bite my tongue for me. He digs his fingers into the hair at the back of my head, fisting it, and tugs harshly, tipping my chin up to bare more of my throat to him.
“Uncuff me, baby,” I murmur hoarsely, wanting it so fiercely I can taste how good it would feel to get him under some kind of control. “Let me hold you down how you like and fuck your tight hole raw.”
Roux grinds down on my fully hard cock in answer, nicking me with his blade at the same time.
I groan at the pleasure that coils inside me, like a corkscrew twisting up the nerves at the base of my spine. My fingers grip his bony hip with too much force, but Roux doesn’t make a sound over it, clamping down on any outward noise of pain. He doesn’t try to yank himself away, instead leaning in close to whisper in my ear as he grinds down against my cock again.
“Who says it’s tight, you arrogant piece of shit?” he scoffs derisively, like he’s disappointed but not surprised. “You’re a worse stalker than you were a boyfriend if you think I haven’t been fucking anyone else.”
It’s a lie. If I’m good at anything, it’s my job. I’ve had eyes on him everywhere but his missions for the agency, and the kind of missions he’s been sent on wouldn’t leave space for sex, however fast or casual. But the fact that he would lie just because he knows it would enrage me, cause me pain, is enough to have the same effect regardless of the truth.
Warm blood trails down my neck from the fresh cut under my jaw, and I wish he’d press in harder, slice his blade in until he hits artery or bone. We’ve given each other plenty of scars, but it’s not enough, never enough. No number of marks on my skin could compete with the strips of soul-flesh he’s torn from me again and again without mercy for years.
“You’re still mine, Ro,” I promise him because he needs it, that reassurance, even if he thinks he doesn’t. “You could spread your legs for the entire English football team, and you’d still belong to me in every way that counts.”
Roux’s fist tightens in my hair like a vice and gives it a vengeful jerk, yanking my head back further so he can run his cold nose and soft mouth up my throat. He speaks against my Adam’s apple in a threatening vibration of sound.
“Like fuck I do. Stop embarrassing yourself. I don’t want you. I’ll never want you again.”
“Sticks and stones, baby. No one will ever be as good to you as me. No one will ever make you feel like I can.”
Roux digs his knife into my neck again, deeper this time, like he’s hacking away at a tree trunk because all that anguish and rage has to go somewhere, and he doesn’t want it to be accidentally unleashed on the people he actually cares about protecting from his worst self.
“We’ll see about that, huh.” He leans back to look me in the eye again, his beautiful face set in stone-cold fury. “I’ll let you know after I’ve fucked the entire English football team. Or the Spanish team if I’m feeling like I wanna fuck a winner for a change.”
He shines so brightly when he’s like this. I’m captivated by it, by all this emotion he can barely restrain, the blatant need to transform his pain into rupturing violence.
“We will see.” I nudge at him just a little to bring out the creature waiting, hostile and ravenous, below his skin. “One day you’ll come crawling back to me, Roux. I promise. And I’ll make it right when you do, I swear.”
Roux releases a ferocious noise, like an animal clawing uselessly at a bear trap clenched around its leg. He presses in closer, desperate and hopeless, letting go of my hair to bring my face down so he can rest his forehead against mine. His eyes are closed, like he can’t stand to look at me anymore. I could never stand to look away from him.
“You’re not even sorry,” he whispers, his voice brittle and serrated along the edges. “I hate you, and you’re not even sorry.”
“I’m not,” I say, and it isn’t an apology, because he would despise me for that even more. “I’d do it all again. A thousand times over.”
Roux screws his eyes shut tighter, denying it, denying the horrible truth of it, and grasps my jaw between his fingers and thumb, forcefully manoeuvring both of us so his lips can brush mine with each ragged inhale and exhale.
“I hate you,” he snarls against my mouth.
“Good,” I say just to feel the pressure of his lips again. “As long you care enough to hate me, I won’t give up on us, not ever.”
Roux hangs there for a second longer, holding us together as we breath in tandem, harsh and angry and lost. Then he draws back, opening his eyes and repositioning his knife against my throat, holding it there in blatant warning.
“Stay the fuck away from me and my family, Freddie,” he says, low and brutal, “or I swear on my life that I will kill you.” There’s enough grit behind the promise, in the electric blue of his eyes, to let me know he means it. If it came down to it, Roux would choose the boy.
That shouldn’t hurt as much as it does, not when I’ve always known that Roux’s loyalty lies with his family, first his brother and now his brother’s son.
It shouldn’t hurt, but it does, more than Roux will ever understand because the only family I’ve ever cared enough about to kill for is the one that I built with him.
Roux moves his knife away from my throat, and I take the loss like a punch to the gut. It ravages the air from my chest, scraping my lungs raw, like I’m breathing in particles of sandpaper and broken glass. He doesn’t get off me, staying put in my lap, staring me down like he’s still trying to decide how to end this, with my blood or his regrets.
In the end, it’s me who closes the distance first, crossing over enemy lines without a thought for the potential land mines I could be trampling on in the process.
I move in fast, raising my free hand to grip the back of his neck and yanking him in close to steal a kiss, pressing my mouth to his so hard it hurts, prying his lips open and spearing my tongue into his mouth. I’m pushing my luck, taking what I want and hoping for the best because that’s all I have to bargain with, the masochistic belief that he’ll give in if it’s already too late.
Roux goes rigid against me, hot skin solidifying into burning stone. We hang there, suspended in the moment. Roux doesn’t kiss back, but he doesn’t try to bite and claw his way free either. I can’t take that as a good sign, because nothing about this is pure enough to be considered good. We’re spilled blood on white wood, dark-red liquid seeping into the timber, the surface forever stained by one terrible choice made during terrible times.
When I pull back, Roux makes a noise of agony, high and keening, like a wounded animal crying out for relief from its torment. He throws the knife aside as if an electric current ran through it and shocked his palm.
I tug on the handcuffs again, rattling them against the radiator, like a metal cup clanging along the bars of a prison cell. Roux drops his head to my shoulder and inhales deeply, ignoring my silent plea for release. But he doesn’t stop me when I start searching through his pockets for the key, or when I find it and unlock the handcuff from my wrist, or when I grasp hold of him with both hands, one on his hip and other on his arse, and lift him up so I can press his back into the floor. I grasp feverishly at his clothes, practically ripping them off his body in my haste to see him laid bare beneath me.
Roux doesn’t protest, allows all of it. When I’m done stripping him, I take a moment to rake my gaze over every naked inch of him. There’s a new scar, about the length of a biro and faded to a pale diagonal line, that cuts across his slim torso. I hate that I have no fucking idea where it came from. There was a time, before, when I could map each of his scars with my fingers and tongue. I could do it in the pitch black of our bedroom at night, under the covers, my hands and mouth roving over him, committing the damage to memory, like I was going to be interrogated about it later. Roux’s body has become a mystery to me, my memories of it warped and distorted more and more the longer we’ve been apart. It makes me want to tear a hole in his torso, to rip the white pen line away and let that flesh heal into something that I’ve put there instead.
Splayed out on the floor, it’s easy to see that he’s noticeably smaller than me, but that doesn’t make him weak. There are defined muscles in his limbs and stomach, finely honed and fit for purpose. Roux has never been big on exercise as a general rule, which just shows how doggedly determined he is to have built a body like this anyway.
Roux opens his legs for me, and I settle myself between them, looming over him with my arms blocking him in on either side of his head. Roux gazes up at me with those same sky-blue eyes I fell in love with when we were kids, except they’re filled with so much more pain, hard-edged too, flint and rage that translate into a freezing-cold grief. Grief that I caused and couldn’t—wouldn’t—take back.
Roux’s mouth seems too high-risk when everything else between us is in flux already, so I start at his collarbone instead, pressing a kiss between his shoulder and chest, letting my tongue drag over the warm skin there. Roux holds himself still at first, but at the swipe of my tongue, he releases a full-body shudder that only serves to stoke the fire spitting and raging away inside my gut.
He tastes vaguely of salt, a possible mix of sweat and the ocean spray from walking on Colbie beach. This close up, I can smell the softer scents of his hair and skin, citrus and lime, more likely shampoo or body wash. I didn’t see any cologne in his room or bathroom back when I searched his house, and Roux hasn’t ever been the type for it. I’m glad because the other scents are faint enough that when I drag my nose up and inhale at the crook of his neck, I can smell the distinct bite of him, the thing that is pure Roux, an innate sweetness but slightly sharp too, like burnt sugar.
I resist the impulse to sink my teeth into his throat, aching with the need to sink in deep, down through muscle and sinew, to scrape against his jugular. It should concern me how badly I want it, to tear into Roux, to consume him piece by piece until I’m sated. But I know, somewhere burrowed inside the dark depths of my heart, that nothing I could ever steal from Roux would be enough, so there’s no point. You can’t own stolen things, and that’s what I want. I want him to be mine, completely, if only for a moment.
Roux has to give it, himself, his desire to me, or nothing else matters.
He gasps when I breathe him in, his body instinctively bowing backwards, his neck and spine arching. His chest pushes up against mine, and the heat in my gut flares to a bone-scorching degree, a jolt of want sparking lower.
Emboldened by Roux’s response, I grasp his hip and shove him down to lie flat on his back again, holding him there like I can somehow keep him pinned in place under me, where he belongs, forever. Roux hooks his hands around my biceps and grips the meat and solid muscle there with unambiguous intent, digging his nails into my skin hard enough to leave behind indentations and bruises that won’t last as long as I wish they would.
Taking the hint, I grab his thighs and hike them up, encouraging him to wrap his legs around my waist, which he does, allowing me to bring my crotch into alignment with his, our thin underwear the only barrier between us. I splay a hand over his chest, more forcefully pinning his shoulders and upper back to the floor. Then I rove the fingers of my other hand across the expanse of naked skin bared from his navel and along his rib cage to just below his tits. I palm one of them, knowing he likes to be grabbed and squeezed like that, and carefully rub my thumb over his nipple. It hardens under my touch, and Roux gasps again, back attempting to arch like before, but with my other hand holding him down, he can’t do anything but take what I give him.
I bend over at the waist, still rubbing his nipple just to feel how he trembles beneath me at even that small amount of pressure. Bringing my face close to his again, I ask the question that needs to be asked before we go any further.
“Is this okay?” I murmur against his mouth, our lips brushing lightly with every word. “Do you want this?” “Me,” I don’t ask. Do you want me . I’m afraid that would be too much, too immense a question for the moment. I’m genuinely terrified of what any form of rejection from him right now would do to me.
In answer, Roux moves his hands to my torso and clamps down hard, holding me in place against him at the same time he rolls his hips up. The first roll elicits a sharp whipcord of pleasure that does little more than bait the beast that growls ferociously inside my abdomen. On the second roll, I grind down to meet him, rubbing my hard cock against his through our underwear.
Roux releases a short cry when I pinch his nipple cruelly as we grind together, our hips moving faster and shallower now as the desperation and heat grows between us. Roux’s hands tighten even more on my torso, to the point where it’s genuinely painful, but I don’t want him to stop, the pain and pleasure mixing to create a more visceral sensation, something that is both different and better.
It’s not nearly enough, and yet it already might be too much. The feel and sound of him as he moves frantically against me—want transforming into need—pulses through my cock, and the urge to reach down so I can hurry along our joint release is more intense than I expected.
Naked emotion, raw and exposed, plays out across Roux’s face. He doesn’t try to hide any of it from me, and the brutal honestly of his desire makes me so hot for him that I feel like I could combust, split apart into atoms, like an exploding star in the deep recesses of space.
Roux’s underwear is soaked through with pre-cum, and so is mine; the smell of us mixing together reaches my nose, and it’s such a primal thing that a guttural moan explodes from my throat in a violent rush. I don’t know quite how to ask for what I need from him without it sounding like a deranged set of demands, so I just tell him instead, all civility abandoned.
“I want to bury my face between your thighs and suck your cock, take it down my fucking throat,” I growl, shoving down on his chest a little harder and pinching his nipple again for emphasis. “I want to push myself inside you and feel all that fucking wondrous heat around my cock as I stretch your tight little hole like you deserve.”
Roux tips his head back as far as he’s able to and groans something unintelligible, voice as saturated in lust as his underwear.
“Touch me, Freddie, please, please, touch me,” Roux manages to get out the second time he tries to speak. It still sounds more like an animalistic whine than words, but I understand it well enough to act on the request.
I tear myself free from the ironclad grip of hands and thighs, creating space between us again so that Roux’s next grind meets nothing but empty air, which Roux vehemently protests until I take my hand from his chest and move it down, shoving inside his underwear to fist his stiff cock and pump it, slicking myself up with spit and pre-cum first to allow for an easier glide.
Roux releases a strangled noise, and I catch the tail end of it with my mouth, taking him with a filthy, open-mouthed kiss, licking into him with my tongue, mimicking how I would fuck his burning hot hole.
I keep up a steady rhythm of jerking his cock and pinching his nipple, a little harder now that he has the extreme contrast to balance out the pain-pleasure responses.
One of Roux’s hands shifts to grasp the back of my neck in a possessive hold. He tugs me in a little roughly and kisses me back with twice the fervour. His other hand slips inside my underwear to wrap his slimmer fingers around my aching cock. He rubs his thumb over the slick head, turning my brain inside out, and then starts working my dick with a precision and skill that makes me feel wildly jealous at the thought of anyone else ever getting to have his hands on them like this. He strokes me at varying speeds and tightness, squeezing my balls and rubbing a hooked finger over my taint, playing with me until I’m almost incoherent with the immense amount of pleasure rocketing through every electrified nerve in my cock.
With the benefit of dual stimulation, Roux comes first, arching up against me with a cry torn from somewhere deep inside his chest, his hand stilling on me whilst his orgasm rips through him in torrents.
Once he’s able to move again, he goes back to working on me, pressing dirty, tender kisses to every patch of skin he can reach as he draws an intense answering orgasm out of me. He murmurs words of encouragement into my skin, telling me, “Come on, babe, let go, it’s okay, Freddie, just let go, I’ve got you.”
My thighs shake with the power of my orgasm, my cock stripping cum so scorching hot it feels like there should be heat waves coming off it. I’m like a new fawn, unable to hold myself up. I collapse on top of Roux, and he takes my weight without hesitation. He wraps his legs and arms around me as I bury my face against his throat, still resisting the urge to sink my teeth into his sweat-soaked skin.
For a while, we just cling to each other in the dark. Roux strokes my back, trailing his fingers over my skin and shoulder blades, soothing me until I can breathe easily again, and my body stops feeling like it’s been reduced to melted goo.
I shift myself off Roux and roll over, tugging on him until he curls up against me, his head on my shoulder and his legs tangled with mine.
We’re both sweaty and loose-limbed, and for the first time in what seems like years, I feel like maybe I could sleep without the nightmares of everything I’ve lost ravaging my mind.