11. Brody #2
I forget I am supposed to keep my distance. Towels — all of them, the whole rail. I get one over his shoulders and one over his hair and I rub, hard, no ceremony, wringing the cold out of him.
“I’m fine,” he says. His teeth are chattering so hard the words come out in pieces.
“You’re half hypothermic in your own bathroom is what you are. Arms up.”
He actually obeys. He sticks his arms in the air and lets me towel his ribs. That tells me exactly how bad the night has been.
I pick him up. He makes a sound of protest with no force in it at all, and his body does the opposite of protesting — he curls in, face against my neck, nose right over the scent gland like he can’t help it, and breathes in so deep I feel it in my own chest.
I carry him to the bed, kick the wrecked sheets off one-handed, get him into the middle of the mattress and wrap the comforter around him.
He’s still shaking. I pull the window shut, then sit on the edge of the bed and rub his arms through the fabric, his back, and the whole time his scent is doing something I have no defense against: the distress bleeding out of it, and the want soaking back in, orange and honey warming up as he does.
“Better?”
“No.” It comes out muffled. Then his head comes up, and he looks at me, and the fever is in it but he is in it too, right at the front. “I can’t do five days of this.”
“I know.”
Pride is the only thing holding his spine straight, and the next part still comes out steady, which is the bravest thing I’ve ever watched a man do in a blanket. “I need help. Brody. I need help. I’m asking.”
The last thing holding me together lets go.
I get a hand in his wet hair and kiss him the way I’ve been wanting to kiss for a week. He opens for me on a moan, and the blanket stops being relevant very fast.
He’s naked and damp and burning underneath it — the cold gone the second the want has somewhere to go — and when I finally get skin on skin our two scents hit each other and rise, orange and woodsmoke gone thick together, and we both groan at it.
“Tell me what you need,” I say against his jaw. “Fast or slow.”
“Fast.” His nails are already in my back. “You can show me slow when I don’t feel like I’m dying.”
I sit back and strip my shirt off, and his eyes go over me the way they did at the office.
“Off,” he says, at my waistband, imperial as ever.
I have never obeyed an order faster in my life.
He kicks the comforter away, and there he is. Flushed everywhere. Cock hard against his stomach and leaking. Slick to the backs of his knees, hips already moving, and shameless about all of it now, one leg falling open, watching me watch him.
“You’re going to have to be patient with me,” I say, coming down over him, one arm caged over his head. “I spent all night imagining this about a thousand different ways.”
“A thousand?” Even wrecked, the eyebrow still works. “Which stops you talking?”
He’s snarky but he doesn’t seem to hate me right now. Or at least he’s not looking at me like I’m some kind of rabid dog that might bite at any moment. That makes a change.
I go down his body. He’s loud the moment my mouth touches him and when I swallow his cock down he nearly comes off the bed, hands flying to my hair, babbling something with my name in it.
I pull off before he tips over. Not yet. That’s not what he needs. Not in a heat.
When I put my mouth lower, where the slick is — where he’s soaked, sweet, unbelievable — the sound he makes stops being language, and I stay there until he’s grinding down against my tongue with both hands locked in my hair.
“Now,” he says. “Now, now — Brody—”
Two fingers slide into him with no resistance at all. He takes them with a full-body shudder and rides my hand, greedy about it, and I watch his face the whole time so I don’t miss one second of what it does to him. “More.” “I know.” “Then—” “I know, Everett.”
When I finally line up, blunt against him, we both stop breathing. His hands find my shoulders. My forehead comes down to his.
“Yes,” he says, to the question I didn’t get to ask. “Yes.”
I push in slow, and the world drops away.
He’s tight and molten and shaking, his body pulling me in. I bottom out and hold there, buried in him, shaking with the effort of staying still. He wraps all his limbs around me.
And that’s all I need. Fuck being a gentleman. I’m going to fuck him instead.
I give to him deep and hard and relentless, his knee hooked over my arm, the headboard keeping time against the wall. He meets every stroke and demands the next one, louder than I’ve ever heard him.
I want the whole league to hear it and I want nobody on earth to ever hear it but me. When I shift the angle he seizes up and sobs — an actual sob, wrecked and furious about it — so I do it again, and again.
“That’s it.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “I’ve got you. Take it. There you go.”
He comes the moment I get a hand around his cock — comes shouting, clamped down around me so hard my vision whites out at the edges — and it hauls me over with him.
I bury myself deep and spill into him, groaning something that might be his name. The wave of his scent right then is the single best thing that has ever happened to me, every game I’ve ever won included.
And in the middle of it, his throat is right there. The gland, swollen with heat, right under my mouth, and every instinct I own leans toward it with my full weight behind it. Bite. Claim.
But there’s enough of my brain still in action to know that it is a terrible idea right now even as it feels like the best one I’ve ever had.
I put my teeth in the meat of his shoulder instead, hard enough that he gasps, nowhere near the gland.
Then his teeth are on me too. He’s got my shoulder, clamping down hard.
The pain rides through me, sending my orgasm skyrocketing. It’s not a claiming bite. Not close. My orgasm doesn’t care.
We ride it out like that, shaking.
If he notices how close it was, he doesn’t say.
It takes a long time for either of us to move. When I finally lift my head, he’s staring at the ceiling.
“Water,” I say, because that’s neutral. We can’t disagree over water. I bring the cooler in from the hallway, crack a bottle, and watch him drink the whole thing with the blanket pooled in his lap and his hair drying stupid and his scent gone soft and heavy in the warm room.
I wipe him down with a warm washcloth and he allows it, boneless, eyes shut, one arm thrown over his face.
The shaking is gone, both the shaking from the cold and the other. His skin under my hands is warm again, and his scent has stopped spiking and settled into something slow and heavy that fills the room. I could live in it. I don’t say that either.
“The next wave,” he says, not looking at me, “will be inside the hour.”
“I know.”
“We should eat something first.” A pause, and then, with the ghost of the boardroom back in it: “Both of us. You’re going to need it.”
I laugh — the first time in what feels like a month — and go downstairs for the sandwiches I made at two in the morning.