Twenty-Four #3
I hit the wall, breath knocked from my lungs.
His long fingers tangled in my hair and pulled, forcing my chin up again, into a kiss that sought to consume me whole.
His mouth held me captive as he rolled up my shirt, breaking away only to pull it over my head before his lips were swallowing my every protest, the fervour stunning.
My shorts went next. Miles seemed to have little interest in his own clothing, only in stripping me.
In enjoying me. In sliding his hand into my boxers to rub my cock while he licked and sucked his way along my collarbone, leaving my knees buckling.
It was like he’d found keys to whole new locks I hadn’t known I possessed, and I was lost.
At some point, he must have thrown me on the bed because there I lay, his hands everywhere – running over my chest, teasing the soft skin around my hipbones, stroking me while he tasted every part of me with his lips and his tongue.
It was a barrage of sensation and I begged for it all as I drowned.
Every other time, he’d asked for explicit permission to have me.
This time he took the cues from my body and pulled me into his lap, leaving me arched back onto the pillows, wholly exposed as he thrust into me.
I’m sure I moaned, sure I begged him to touch me, sure I cried out his name as he drove his cock into me again and again, but it all became a blur of ecstasy and exhaustion as I lay, arms spread before him.
After the marathon on court, I hadn’t been sure I could come at all when we’d begun, but the sound of his breath hitching in imminent pleasure was the final push I needed and I came with a ragged cry that held his name, the urge to follow it with I’m sorry a wretched thing I swallowed though it cut my throat with its fears.
There would be time for that after. Soon.
When we were done, he pulled out and walked to the bathroom, his face all shadows and silence in the low lamplight.
I knew I ought to follow and clean myself up, but for a moment I closed my eyes instead, the enormity of everything that had happened on that court swamping me like a dark wave.
We needed to talk about it. Needed to work through this.
But lying there on the soft pillows, exhaustion won, and I drifted off to the sound of running water.
I WOKE TO grey morning light and a body full of lead, so heavy I might never move again. A groan escaped before I could stop it, and as memory returned in a flood, I prised open my eyes to see if I’d woken Miles. The bed was empty.
“Miles?”
No reply.
I turned my head to find my phone sitting perfectly square to the corner of the bedside table, and snatched it up. 8:14am. Hardly late, yet the bed beside me was cold. How long had I been alone?
A deep uneasiness welled up and I pushed off the bed. “Miles?” I called again, a glance thrown toward the bathroom before I headed toward the lounge where his suitcases would be lined up against the wall.
Except the room was entirely empty. No bags, no cases, no massage table, no e-reader sitting by the couch – nothing.
I set a hand on the doorframe to steady myself, fighting the urge to be sick. Miles was gone. He had checked out and taken everything with him. Except me.
Still naked and able to feel the ache of him inside me, I slid onto the floor.
A sob escaped my chest. And like that first had been a dam breaking, more followed.
I had never done anything less dignified than sit naked and cry in another man’s hotel room, but what did it matter?
This was my fault. Not because I’d beaten him, but because I should have known better than to let him push us toward sex when we needed to talk.
I’d just been too relieved, too exhausted, too desperate for normality to even think, and he hadn’t given me the space to try.
From the moment I’d walked in, he’d overwhelmed me.
He’d discovered weaknesses I hadn’t known I had and used them against me, because that’s what he did.
This had been the outcome Miles had wanted—had planned—and though he might have lost the match, he’d won the game.
It was a long time before I could move, before the tears and the fury faded enough for me to go back for my phone.
Back to the conversation where his two-word message from the night before stared out like the warning it ought to have been.
My thumbs hovered over the keys, and though it took an effort, I swallowed the urge to tell him that what he’d done had sucked.
That it had hurt. Of course it had. Just like knocking him out of the tournament everyone expected him to win had hurt.
If this was what he’d needed to do, then I would take it if it meant not losing him.
So, instead, I thought of how I should have done better, should have saved him from his self-destructive patterns because he could not yet save himself, and said, I’m sorry.
I half expected no reply, not just now but ever, yet within a few seconds he wrote back. so am i
Then, i need some time
Then, good luck for the rest of the tournament
And then even though I wrote back, he said nothing more.