18
Charm
The first gray light of dawn seeped around the edges of Ryan’s blackout curtains, painting the bedroom in charcoal and slate.
He slept beside me with one arm flung over his head and the other resting heavily across my waist. Sleep had softened the fierce intensity from last night’s argument, but the shadows beneath his eyes remained as evidence of what honesty had cost both of us.
My body hummed with exhausted clarity. The fight had been brutal, and his words still echoed inside the bruised places they had found.
I’ve lost much worse.
The call to my mother had eased some of the fear, but it hadn’t erased it.
It had created enough space for something else to exist beside it.
Hope, maybe. The possibility that she meant what she said and that Thanksgiving didn’t have to become another place where I was forced to choose between the people I loved.
I shifted onto my side to face Ryan. The movement woke him immediately, his eyes opening with the alertness of someone who had spent too much of his life needing to know what was happening around him.
He found my face in the dim light. There was no smile, only a deep, searching look.
We had already made our apologies in the darkness before falling asleep. They had been ragged, imperfect, and real. The quiet left behind felt different from the silence that followed our fight.
Ryan’s hand slid from my waist along my side, his thumb stroking slowly over my ribs. His gaze dropped to my mouth before returning to my eyes, asking something he wasn’t ready to say aloud.
I answered by closing the final inch between us and kissing him.
The kiss was slow and deep, carrying all the tenderness that had survived our anger. Ryan kissed me back with the same deliberate pace, his hand rising to cradle my jaw. When he pulled away, his breath moved warmly across my lips.
“You okay?” he murmured, his voice rough with sleep.
I nodded. “Yeah. Are you?”
He gave a slow shake of his head. “Not yet.”
His fingers brushed a strand of hair away from my cheek before he said, “Show me.”
He didn’t want another explanation or promise. Ryan wanted to feel that I was still here and had heard every word he said.
I rolled onto my back and pulled him with me. He came willingly, settling over my body with a familiar, anchoring weight. Braced on his forearms, he stared down at me while dawn caught the edges of NAVARO across his stomach and the hockey scene inked over his chest.
I reached between us and hooked my fingers into the waistband of his boxers. Ryan lifted his hips enough to help me push them down before kicking them the rest of the way off. He was already hard, thick and heavy against my stomach, and my underwear disappeared into the gray morning a moment later.
Ryan settled between my thighs but didn’t enter me. The head of his cock rested against my entrance in a maddening promise while he lowered his mouth and traced a path from my jaw to my collarbone.
“You love this, don’t you?” he whispered against my skin. “You love this thick Chicano dick. You love when it’s all you can fucking think about.”
I arched beneath him, answering without words.
He pushed the first inch inside me slowly, stretching me until my breath caught.
“You love when I fuck you rough,” he continued, his voice dropping lower as his hips rolled forward another devastating inch. “When I fuck this tight little pussy raw until you forget your own name and all you know is me.”
He gave me another inch, filling me with an aching pressure that made my fingers tighten around his shoulders.
“You want my anger.” Ryan drove the rest of the way inside and held himself there, making me feel every hard inch of him. “You want my softness too. You want every part of me because I’m yours, and you’re fucking mine.”
He began moving with slow, deep rolls of his hips that stole the air from my lungs. Every withdrawal dragged against nerves that had barely recovered from last night, and each thrust drove him back inside until there was no space left between us.
Ryan kept the pace torturously slow while his mouth found my ear.
“Puta madre… me vuelves loco.”
Fuck, you make me crazy.
His Spanish wrapped around me differently from anything he said in English. It was his first language stripped of every defense, intimate enough that even when I couldn’t translate each word, I felt the truth of it.
The slow grind intensified as Ryan’s control frayed. His thrusts became harder, deeper, and more urgent. The bedframe creaked beneath us in time with his hips.
He braced himself on one arm and tangled his other hand in my hair, tipping my head back until he could devour my mouth. The kiss tasted like desperation and everything neither of us had managed to say after the fight.
His pace turned punishing, driven by more than lust. Every hard thrust carried his anger, his fear of losing me, and the terrifying relief of waking to find me still beside him.
Ryan struck a place inside me that sent white-hot pleasure through my body with every slam of his hips. My cries broke against his mouth while my nails dug into the ink covering his shoulders.
His face tightened above me, and his breath came in ragged bursts. He dropped his forehead against mine, eyes closed as though looking at me would expose more than he could bear to show.
“No me dejes aquí sin ti,” he choked out.
Don’t leave me here without you.
He drove into me again, brutal and deep enough to blur my vision.
“No me hagas perderte, mi amor, mi vida… Tú lo eres todo para mí.”
Don’t make me lose you, my love, my life. You are everything to me.
I couldn’t translate the confession, but something in the broken shape of his voice tore me apart.
My orgasm crashed through me. My back lifted from the mattress as my body clenched around him, a raw cry ripping from my throat while Ryan continued driving into me.
The feel of me gripping his cock shattered whatever control he had left. A guttural sound tore out of him, half roar and half something far more vulnerable, as he thrust one final time and held himself deep inside me.
His release came hot and sudden, pulsing into me while his body shook above mine. Ryan stayed buried as deep as he could, one hand gripping my hip while the other remained tangled in my hair.
He collapsed over me when the last shudder passed, keeping enough of his weight on his arms that I could breathe. His face disappeared into the curve of my neck, his breath hot and ragged against my skin. His heart hammered against my chest, matching the frantic rhythm of mine.
We stayed joined while dawn brightened around us and the world beyond his apartment began to wake. Cars passed outside, and a distant siren cut briefly through the quiet.
Inside his bedroom, our breathing gradually slowed until it found the same rhythm. Sweat cooled between us while his body remained warm and heavy over mine.
Ryan eventually softened and slipped from me. He rolled onto his side, pulled me with him, and tucked my back against his chest. His arms locked around my waist as though I might disappear if he loosened them.
The Spanish confessions remained between us, untranslated but understood enough to leave my chest aching. Ryan pressed a soft kiss against the crown of my head, and I let myself believe we could survive the things waiting for us outside that room.
Neither of us spoke for a while.
Ryan lay with one arm beneath my head and the other draped across my waist, his fingers moving lazily against my skin while the room settled around us.
Rain tapped more quietly against the windows now, and beneath the exhaustion humming through my body lived the awareness that this weekend had become something I hadn’t known I needed.
There were no hotel clocks, bus schedules, or hours spent counting backward from when he had to leave. I had Ryan, warm and solid beside me, without the road already reaching for him.
I turned my face against his chest. His fingers stopped moving.
“You awake?”
“Barely.”
“Good.”
“That sounded threatening.”
His chest shifted beneath my cheek when he laughed. “You’re dramatic after sex.”
“You’re unbearable after sex.”
“I was unbearable before.”
“That is unfortunately true.”
I shifted enough to look at him and found that his expression had changed while I wasn’t paying attention.
Teasing remained around the edges, but he was looking toward the ceiling with the distant concentration he got whenever something sat heavily enough in his head that he hadn’t decided how to explain it.
I traced one finger over the ink near his ribs. “What are you thinking about?”
Ryan looked down at me. “I think occasionally.”
“Not like this.”
His mouth twitched, but I waited.
He exhaled through his nose and rubbed his hand slowly along my back. “The Saturday game after Thanksgiving.”
“The scout game?”
“Yeah.”
I pushed myself higher against the pillow. “What about it?”
Ryan went quiet long enough for me to understand that he hadn’t told me everything.
“You already know scouts are coming,” he said.
“I know it’s important.”
“You don’t know how many organizations are sending people.”
I stopped moving.
Ryan looked away again. “Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Washington, and a couple of AHL guys I know about. There’ll be agents and media too. Frost has been pushing the game hard because Minnesota is the biggest rivalry we have, and apparently everybody decided Saturday is the night they want to watch.”
My heartbeat picked up. “Ryan.”
He shrugged, trying for casual and failing badly enough that I almost smiled. “It could be nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
His eyes returned to mine.
“You tell me not to lie to you,” I reminded him.
“I’m not lying.”
“You’re doing that thing men do when something is terrifyingly important and they call it no big deal so nobody sees how badly they want it.”
His eyebrows lifted. “That sounded specific.”
“I know you.”
Something in his expression softened.
I slid my hand across his chest. “How big is this?”