5. Fabián #4
Then he kisses me, and this is like the first time all over again.
It’s still hot and still messy but less like a fight.
More like a dare we both survived and decided to repeat.
His hands slide up my bare stomach, and I shudder when he reaches my chest. When he brushes his thumbs over the piercings again—more confident now, more deliberate, rolling them slightly—and I groan into his mouth before I can stop it, the sound is torn out of me, raw and needy and his.
Elías pulls back, eyes wide and dark and pleased. Way too fucking pleased.
“Damn,” he says softly, wonder in his voice. “That works.”
I grab his jaw, thumb pressing into the corner of his mouth. “Don’t get cocky, muneco.”
“I was born cocky.”
My mouth catches his in a bruising kiss. I refuse to let him win every exchange because I need him to feel as unsteady as I do, as desperate, as undone. His hands keep moving, exploring.
Mine do too—over his hips, his waist, the hard muscles of his thighs, and the back of his neck, where I grip him and angle his head to take the kiss deeper. He is solid under my hands, all heat and muscle and restless energy, arching into my touch like he’s starving for it.
Nothing’s soft about him except the little sounds he makes when he forgets to be an asshole for half a second, when my thumb brushes the waistband of his shorts and he whimpers, when I roll my hips against his and he moans, low and broken.
Those sounds are going to ruin me. I want more of them.
I want all of them.
He turns his face, dragging in air like he’s drowning. “We should go back.”
“We need to go back,” I mutter into the crook of his neck, my tongue licking from the base to his earlobe, my teeth tugging on one of the little hoops.
Neither of us stops.
A gentle push moves me backward a fraction, and he stares at my mouth, licking his own lips, swollen and red from mine. “They’re gonna notice.”
“They notice everything already.” I nudge his nose with mine.
“Yeah, but this time I look—”
“Like you’ve been kissed stupid?”
His lips are swollen, bitten, and glistening.
Mine probably are too. His hair is messed up where I touched it.
The glasses still hang from my collar and his silver chain is crooked, caught on the collar of his shirt.
His shorts are twisted slightly from where my hands grabbed him, yanked him against me, and held him there.
The sight hits me so hard I almost kiss him again, almost shove him back against the trailer and keep going until neither of us can walk, until we’re both shaking and spent and marked.
He follows my gaze and looks down at himself, then at me, and his smile comes back—slow and satisfied.
“You proud of yourself?” he says, rolling his eyes.
“A lil bit.” I pull back, and the look on his face has me contemplating patting myself on the back.
He laughs, and I want to swallow that sound, want to feel it vibrate against my tongue. I reach for him again—can’t even help it anymore—and he steps back, just out of reach, grinning, eyes bright and happy.
“Uh uh,” he teases. “We gotta go back.”
“Come here.”
“Make me.”
“Lalito.” His name comes out warning-low again, desperate and hungry, making him shiver at the sound of it.
He steps closer, bold now that he knows what my mouth feels like, now that he knows I want him back just as badly. “Careful, Salcedo. You keep saying my name like that, and I’m gonna think you like me.”
I fix my shirt slowly, fingers trembling, and then I look at him. “I don’t like you.”
His smile does not falter. “No?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“You just make out with all the men you hate behind trailers?”
“Just you, Cárdenas.” I smirk.
“Special treatment again.” He slaps his chest.
“Don’t get used to it.”
He steps in until his chest nearly touches mine, until I can feel the heat radiating off him, until I can smell him—syrup and sweat and want. His voice drops to a whisper, rough and intimate.
“Too late.”
My pulse kicks, hard and fast, and I hate him.
I also want to throw him over my shoulder and walk past the tent, straight to my truck. Drive back to my apartment and see what he sounds like when he’s underneath me.
A golf cart rolls past the far end of the trailer row, and we both step apart like teenagers caught, like we weren’t just grinding against each other in the dark, like our hands weren’t under each other’s clothes.
The security guy doesn’t look our way. Still, reality rushes back in.
The booth.
Our families.
The line.
The fact that I just kissed Elías Cárdenas like I wanted to climb inside his skin and set up utilities. He watches me carefully, chest heaving, lips parted. The jokes are still there in his eyes, but there is something else too.
A question.
Maybe the same one digging through my chest, sharp and insistent and terrifying.
What now?
So I do what I understand. I pick a fight.
“You tell anyone, I’ll deny it,” I say, clearing my throat.
His eyebrows rise, and watch the emotion leave him on an exhale. “Wow.”
“What?” I shrug.
“You really said that with your whole ass chest.”
“It’s a good chest.”
“It is.” His eyes drop, lingering. “Terrible personality though.”
“You weren’t complaining five seconds ago.”
“I wasn’t.” he snatches his glasses from my collar with a shaking hand. “And don’t worry, tough guy. I’m not telling anyone.”
I nod.
Good. Good.
That’s real good.
So why does it feel wrong?
Elías looks toward the market lights, toward the noise and the crowd and the life we have to go back to. “Besides, your face will tell everyone anyway.”
I glare. “The fuck you mean?”
“Your face currently says, ‘I discovered men and I’m mad about it.’“
I choke, and he laughs, dodging when I reach for him, dancing backward, eyes bright.
“Too soon?” he asks.
“Way too soon.”
“But accurate?” he smiles. “Am I right?”
“Keep walking.”
He starts toward the booth, backward, still grinning at me like he knows a secret.
Elías looks wrecked—mouth kissed red and swollen. Glasses not sitting straight on his face. Shorts ridden up, with a hickey blooming on his neck where I put my mouth.
My wreckage.
For now.
For whatever this is.
He points at me, his finger shaking slightly. “Your dick’s still kinda hard.”
“I know.” I reach down to adjust myself as best I can.
He laughs again, bright and absolutely intoxicating.
I lunge, and he turns and runs the last few steps around the trailer, laughing like an idiot, and I follow slower because I refuse to look like I’m chasing him.
I am absolutely chasing him.
When we step back into the market lights, everything feels too bright.
Too loud and normal.
My tía looks up from the register and then freezes.
Her eyes go to me, then drift over to Elías. Then back to me, to Elías’s crooked glasses. Then my mouth.
Oh no.
She says nothing, and I think that might be worse than her just calling me out. Elías’s mother turns from the syrup table and does the same inspection.
She also says nothing.
Junior, who must have shown up when we were MIA, is sitting on a cooler near the back because apparently his ankle injury comes with a lifetime supply of uselessness. He looks between us, and slowly grins.
“No fucking way,” he whispers.
I point at him. “Don’t fucking say anything.”
His grin grows, and Elías steps beside me, shoulder brushing mine like he can’t help it or doesn’t care, like he wants everyone to know. With his voice low enough for only me to hear, warm and intimate and still rough from my mouth, he whispers.
“Subtle,” he whispers. “You know, if you were going for casual and unaffected, maybe don’t make it so fucking obvious.”
I stare at the line of customers forming again.
At the cups and the syrups.
The night market carrying on like my entire life didn’t just get shoved against a trailer and kissed stupidly, like I am not still hard, shaking, and tasting him on my tongue.
“I’m gonna regret this,” I mutter.
Elías smiles beside me, and this time, he doesn’t answer with “probably.”
He just says, “Yeah. But not yet.”
I look at him.
He looks back.
The booth lights catch in his glasses. His mouth is still swollen. My hands remember his hips, the heat of him, the way he said my name.
He’s right.
Not yet.
Definitely not yet.