Chapter 4. Chris #3
Mads sucks in a breath. His fingers flex on my ass, his hips pushing into my hand like he can’t help it.
Then he goes still.
His mouth leaves mine, his hand stills on my ass, and he tips his head back just enough for me to see his face. His eyes are dark, his breathing ragged, his lips swollen from kissing, and he looks at me like something important has just caught up with him.
“Wait,” he says, his voice rough. “I need to talk to you about something.”
The shift is so sudden it leaves me dizzy. A second ago, my brain was headed straight for pornographic territory. Now it slams into a wall, and anxiety floods in.
What if he’s having second thoughts?
What if he woke up this morning and realized he’s not into men after all?
What if he’s here to let me down gently, the way guys do when they’ve used you as an experiment and now need to find a polite exit?
My throat tightens. I step back, putting space between us, and pull the robe shut over my chest. “Yeah,” I say. “Of course.”
Mads watches me, his eyes tracking the distance I’ve put between us, and something flickers across his face. I can’t tell what it is. He only nods and moves toward the bed.
The mattress dips under our weight, and suddenly the space between us feels huge. My heart is hammering so hard I’m sure he can hear it. The arousal drains out of me, leaving nothing but the cold weight behind my sternum.
Mads sits there, looking at me like he’s trying to find the right words. For a long moment, he doesn’t speak. The silence stretches, and every second of it feeds the anxiety in my chest.
Then he says, “So, about last night.”
Here it comes.
“I really enjoyed it.” His voice is quiet, careful. “If you couldn’t tell,” he adds with a small smile.
I nod, not trusting myself to speak. Or smile back, for that matter. The anxiety is physical now, something lodged behind my ribs and spreading into my throat until it’s hard to swallow.
He hesitates and takes a breath. “But—”
“But you want this to be a one-time thing?” The words leave my mouth before my brain catches up, brittle and too loud in the quiet room.
Mads stares at me.
His expression changes so fast it would almost be funny if I weren’t sitting there with my heart in my throat. Confusion hits first—his brow furrows, his mouth parts slightly—and then he blinks, looking almost offended.
“What?” he says. “No.”
I blink. “No?”
“No,” Mads says, more firmly. “Of course not.”
Relief hits me so hard I have to breathe through it.
“Okay.”
The anxiety doesn’t vanish. It shifts, reconfiguring itself around this new information, and now I’m just confused, which is arguably worse.
Before I can spiral any further, Mads frowns and says, “I don’t want this to be a one-time thing, Chris. Quite the opposite, actually.”
And I swear his cheeks go a little pink at that.
I sit there, staring at him, waiting for him to continue.
He swallows. “It’s just, you told me you used to have a crush on me, so I didn’t know if this was casual for you or…” He stops, and for a second his confidence wavers. “I know you’re not out, right? So I don’t expect you to hold my hand in public or anything—”
Wait, what?
“—but I’d like to date you.”
I blink.
The word hangs in the air between us.
Date.
Not forget this happened. Not keep it casual. Not figure it out as we go. Not any of the careful little exit ramps I expected.
Date.
My heart does something deeply concerning behind my ribs. A double beat, fast and hard.
“Date me?” I repeat.
He nods, his eyes wide and openly nervous, which is so far from his usual deadpan I almost don’t recognize him.
“Yes,” he says. Then, softer, hesitant: “If that’s what you’d want too.”
He’s blushing. Mads Holm is actually blushing, color creeping across his cheekbones, and I watch it happen in real time like I’m witnessing a natural phenomenon. A solar eclipse. The aurora borealis. Mads Holm, embarrassed.
I blink, still not convinced I haven’t dreamed this up.
“What?”
The word comes out flat. Stupid.
Mads flushes deeper. His eyes drop to the carpet, and his shoulders tense. “I’m sorry if this is too soon—”
“No,” I say quickly. “I mean—you sort of just realized you’re bisexual. So I didn’t expect you to…you know. Take it so seriously.”
I’ve said the wrong thing. I know it the second the words leave my mouth. I hear how it sounds. Like I think this means less because it’s new for him. Like I’m treating whatever he’s feeling as some temporary confusion he’ll grow out of by lunch.
Then Mads’s eyes go glassy, and for one awful second I think he might actually cry. The possibility is so far outside the realm of things I thought I would ever witness that I panic.
Fuck.
I reach for him before I can think about it. I wrap my arms around him, one hand sliding to the back of his neck, and he lets me pull him in. His forehead drops to my shoulder.
For a second, I just hold him there, my hand moving over the warm skin at the nape of his neck, because whatever I meant to say, he heard rejection. And that is the last thing I want him to hear from me right now.
“Hey,” I say into his hair. “I lied to you last night.”
Mads goes still. Then his head lifts, and his eyes find mine, wary and red-rimmed.
“About what?”
“About the ‘used to’ part.” I smile at him, the words coming easier than I expected. “I still have a crush on you. I just didn’t want to sound pathetic.”
For a beat, he only looks at me, like he’s afraid to believe it too fast. Then something shifts in his face, and I see it.
Hope, careful but unmistakable.
“You do?” he says.
“Yes.” I run my thumb along his jaw, and he leans into the touch like a cat. “And what you just said about wanting to date me—” My face goes hot. “Are you serious?”
He nods. “I am.”
“Oh shit,” I say, and then I laugh.
The sound bursts out of me, bright with shock, because what the fuck is happening? Is this real? Am I, Christopher Rodriguez, professional hockey player and certified overthinker, sitting here, half-naked, while Mads fucking Holm tells me he wants to date me?
Mads watches me laugh, and for a second, he looks worried.
So I say, “I’d love to date you.”
Slowly, his mouth curves into a smile. Not his usual half-smirk. A real smile, soft enough to change his whole face.
Then he pulls me into his lap.
The movement is clumsy. My knee hits the mattress wrong, so I almost jab him in the stomach, and the robe rides up my thighs, but I don’t care.
I straddle him, my legs on either side of his hips, and wrap my arms around his neck.
His hands find my waist automatically, and he looks up at me with an expression I’ve never seen on him before.
Open. Tender, even.
So I kiss him.
My mouth finds his, my tongue tracing the seam of his lips, and when he opens for me, the sound he makes is quiet and wrecked. His hands tighten on my waist, and then he’s kissing me back like he’s finally letting himself believe this is real.
For a few seconds, it’s almost sweet. Then his fingers dig into my waist, my body shifts over his, and whatever gentleness was there catches fire. I grind down into his lap and feel him hardening under me.
Mads curses, and I reach for the hem of his T-shirt, pulling it up. He lifts his arms, letting me tug it over his head, and then his chest is bare, and Jesus Christ.
I’ve seen him shirtless a hundred times in the locker room, but this is different. Here, I get to look. At the width of his shoulders, the hard lines of his chest, the light dusting of blond hair trailing down his stomach and disappearing into his jeans.
This is mine to touch.
I run my hands over him, across his chest and down his stomach, feeling the hard ridges of muscle under my palms. He watches me with that hungry, focused look that makes my skin burn.
His hands are on my thighs, gripping through the robe, and I can feel the tension in him, the way he’s holding himself back like a wild animal on a leash.
“You can touch me,” I say against his mouth. “I won’t break.”
That’s all the permission he needs.
His hands slide under the robe—warm palms on my bare hips. His thumbs trace my hipbones, and I rock against him, my ass dragging over his cock through the rough denim. He groans, and I reach for his belt.
I undo the buckle, the button, the zipper, then slide off his lap and drop to my knees, pushing his jeans down his thighs as I go. He’s wearing gray boxer briefs underneath, and the outline of his cock is obvious through the fabric—hard and straining.
The position hits me before anything else: kneeling between his legs, looking up at him while he sits on the edge of the bed, close enough to touch but waiting for me to decide what happens next. There’s vulnerability in it, but also power, and the combination makes my pulse kick hard.
The look on Mads’s face tells me he feels it too. His eyes darken, his lips part, and he stares at me as if he’s not sure he’s allowed to want this.
So I lean forward and press my mouth to him through the thin cotton.
His hips twitch, a small, involuntary movement, and the sound he makes is barely a breath.
“Fuck, Chris,” he whispers.
The fabric is warm, already damp with precum, and the shape of him against my lips makes me groan. He’s huge. I knew that from last night, but feeling him like this—hard and hot and straining—is something else entirely.
His hand finds my hair then, fingers threading through the damp strands at the nape of my neck. He doesn’t pull me in. He just holds on, like even this is almost too much for him.
I mouth him slowly through the cotton, dragging my lips along the length of him and taking my time over the head, where the gray fabric has turned darker. His fingers flex in my hair, his breath catching when I press my tongue there, and the faint taste of him makes heat curl low in my stomach.
Mads is staring down at me, flushed and wrecked, his jaw tight like he’s fighting the urge to move. For a second, neither of us says anything. Then he reaches down, pushes his boxer briefs just low enough to free himself, and—
Holy shit.