Chapter 5
Hank had imagined this moment for most of his life.
Not with specifics—he’d never let himself get that far. Never allowed the fantasies to crystalize into actual faces or bodies or scenarios. Just the idea of it. The possibility. Someday, maybe, if circumstances were different, if he were braver, if the world were kinder.
And now it was happening.
Chad was straddling his lap on the couch, kissing him like oxygen was secondary, and Hank’s entire nervous system was staging a mutiny.
The Chopin nocturne—he couldn’t have named it at gunpoint in his current state—drifted from the Google Home in the kitchen, and Hank’s brain supplied the unhelpful observation that Chopin had died at thirty-nine.
He was forty and just getting started. There was probably a metaphor in there, but Chad’s tongue was doing something that made metaphors irrelevant.
Chad’s hands were in his hair, on his face, sliding down his chest. Hank wanted to catalog every detail with the thoroughness of a subcommittee report—the weight of Chad’s body against his, the lingering sweetness of White Russian on Chad’s tongue, the small sounds Chad made when Hank’s lips found his throat.
He was, he realized, making a mental document.
This was who he was. A man who experienced transcendence and immediately wanted to file it.
“Wait,” Hank said, pulling back. “I need to—I should tell you about—”
“Hank.” Chad’s voice was patient but immovable. He pressed a finger to Hank’s lips. “That’s really what you want to talk about right now? Work?” He shifted his weight slightly, deliberately, in Hank’s lap. “I’m sitting on the evidence that says otherwise.”
“Not really, no.”
“I didn’t think so. You said boring government work. Has anything changed since dinner?”
“No. Just you. Us. I—”
“Then let’s concentrate on us.” Chad reached down and worked Hank’s zipper with a competence that suggested this was not his first. Hank’s cock met open air and stood at full, humiliating attention, like a soldier who’d been waiting for orders his entire career.
Which, Hank supposed, it had.
“There he is,” Chad said, wrapping his hand around Hank’s length. His grip was warm and sure. “This guy’s been patient long enough. Yes?”
Hank looked at Chad—blue eyes bright with want, blond hair wrecked, that grin that kept doing something structurally unsound to his chest—and nodded.
Say something. You’re a man who makes speeches for a living.
“Yes.”
Eloquent.
Chad slid from Hank’s lap to the floor in one fluid motion, hands on Hank’s knees, pressing his thighs apart, settling between them. The shift in geometry—Chad below him, looking up—sent a jolt through Hank that had nothing to do with physical contact.
“But—” Hank started. One last attempt. Tell him. You have to tell him.
Chad held up a finger. “No more words.”
Then he leaned forward and took Hank into his mouth.
Hank’s head hit the back of the couch. His eyes found the ceiling—a neutral, inoffensive ceiling that had no opinion about the fact that a United States senator was currently receiving oral sex from a twenty-three-year-old art student on his government-issue-looking sofa.
The ceiling offered no judgment. Hank was grateful for the ceiling.
Then the ceiling ceased to exist.
Chad’s mouth was soft and hot and certain.
The slide of his tongue, the gentle suction that was somehow both too much and not enough.
Hank’s frame of reference was limited and entirely unhelpful, but some clinical corner of his brain noted that this was a different category of experience altogether.
This wasn’t dutiful. This wasn’t performed.
Chad was doing this like he wanted to, like Hank’s pleasure was something he was actively chasing, and that alone nearly finished him.
“Oh my God,” was all he could manage.
He had to look. Not looking felt like a waste of a moment he’d waited four decades for.
Hank lifted his head and watched as Chad pulled back—his cock emerging wet and flushed from Chad’s lips. The visual was so far beyond anything Hank’s imagination had ever produced that his brain briefly offered him a screen of static, then rebooted.
“Can we get that shirt off?” Chad’s voice was rougher now. “You can keep the pants. I just want this.” He pressed his palm flat against Hank’s chest, over the shirt, over the heartbeat that was trying to escape through his sternum.
Hank’s fingers went to his buttons. They were shaking. He’d stood in front of cameras, behind podiums, in rooms where legislation was shaped, and his hands had never once betrayed him. Now they fumbled like he’d never operated buttons before.
Chad reached up before he’d finished, sliding his hands inside the parted shirt, combing through Hank’s chest hair. He gave one nipple a light pinch.
“Ow.”
“You’re a top,” Chad said. Not a question. Almost a question.
“I don’t—I think I know what you mean, but I’m not sure what I am.” He was, he realized, answering a sexual taxonomy question with the same careful phrasing he used in committee hearings. “I don’t have enough data to—”
“I think you’re a top.” Chad’s grin was knowing, infuriatingly confident. “It might be wishful thinking. But I told you—I sense these things.” He held Hank’s gaze. “What do you want to do?”
“Everything.” The word came out before Hank’s internal editor could reach it. “I’m sorry, that’s—I mean, anything. Whatever you—”
“Everything works. But I want to finish this first.” Chad gestured at Hank’s bare torso like he was framing a composition. “In front of that canvas.”
The word—canvas—from a painter. Hank filed it away.
“I’d like that. But can we lose the pants? I feel like I’m at a very uneven disadvantage.”
“Sure thing.”
Hank stood and stripped—loafers, jeans, boxers. He reached for the shirt.
“You can leave that on if you’re feeling modest,” Chad offered. “Like one of those paper gowns at the doctor’s office.”
Hank considered it for one second, then pulled the oxford over his head and tossed it. “Modesty has left the building.”
He sat back down, fully naked, in his own living room, with a beautiful man kneeling between his legs, and experienced a brief, vertiginous moment of who is this person and what has he done with Henry Fortner?
Then Chad’s mouth closed around him again, and the question became academic.
Chad took him deep—lips tight at the base, tongue working the underside—and Hank felt the brush against the back of Chad’s throat and made a sound he would later pretend he hadn’t made.
His hands went to Chad’s head. Reflexive, not planned. He held it as it moved, learning the rhythm, adding the slightest pressure downward before catching himself.
“Is that all right? I don’t want to—”
“Mm-hmm.” Chad nodded without breaking stride.
A few more strokes—agonizing, thorough—and Hank found himself holding Chad there. Just holding. Keeping him in place while the pressure built to something unbearable, then easing off. He did it again. And again.
Chad pulled back and looked up at him. Lips swollen, eyes bright. “You know exactly what you want.”
“I’m not hurting you?”
“Not even close.”
Chad squeezed him, and they both watched a bead of clear fluid well up and spill over.
“Can’t get enough of this,” Chad murmured, and licked it clean.
“I think there’s more where that came from.” Who was this person? The Georgia boy who’d spent twenty years performing heterosexuality was suddenly producing lines, and the terrifying part was that he meant every word.
“Are you teasing me, Mr. Fortner?”
“No. Take whatever you need.”
Chad’s eyes went dark. “Yes, sir.”
He went down again—once, twice—and Hank’s hands gripped his head, holding him. The primal override was finally winning out over the part of his brain that composed press releases.
“You want to make me come,” Hank heard himself say. Not a question.
Chad moaned agreement, and the vibration traveled through Hank’s entire infrastructure.
On his next upstroke, Chad fisted the base so only the head remained in his mouth—concentrated suction, devastating focus—while his free hand rolled Hank’s balls with exactly the right pressure, and Hank lost language. Just sound. Guttural, graceless, honest sound.
Then something else. Chad’s middle finger sliding between Hank’s body and the cushion. Searching. Finding. The slightest circling pressure.
“Oh, God—”
The orgasm hit with a violence that caught him off guard—not just release but something giving way, years of suppression letting go all at once. He heard Chad moan as he pulsed into his mouth, felt Chad swallowing, unhurried, steady.
When the aftershocks subsided, Hank was staring at the ceiling again. Sweating. Wrecked. The Chopin had moved on to something else, or maybe it was the same piece. He had no idea. He wasn’t even sure he knew his middle name.
He looked down. Chad was grinning up at him with an expression that said, very clearly: Look what I did.
“Are you okay?” Hank asked.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I just—I may have been—” Aggressive? Loud? Unrecognizable to himself? “—enthusiastic.”
“I noticed. I liked it.”
“I don’t think Shelby ever liked the—she always went straight for the mouthwash.”
“I’m not Shelby.” Something in Chad’s voice—not sharp, but definite. A line drawn.
“No. You’re not. I’m sorry.”
“And for the record, I love the way you taste.”
“What’s it taste like?”
“Come here and find out.”
Chad crawled back into his lap, and Hank cradled him—this lean, warm weight against his bare skin—and they kissed. Hank tasted himself on Chad’s tongue and was surprised to find it sweet. Not cloying.
“Wow,” he said. “I taste pretty good.”
“You do.”
Hank held Chad against him—clothed torso against bare chest—and felt his breathing slow for the first time in what might have been hours.
“And now that you’ve robbed me of my virginity—” he began.
“Oh, that was just the opening act.” Chad stood, pulling Hank to his feet. “Where’s the bedroom?”