Chapter 15 Nate - December 2018, Pittsburgh #3
I told him so, quiet and rough. I told him how good he felt inside me, how perfect the stretch was, how I could stay like this for hours if he let me. Every word made him tighter under me, made his hands flex harder on my skin.
The pleasure built slow and heavy. I could feel it gathering, the kind of orgasm that starts deep and spreads.
I sped up, using my thighs to lift and drop in a steady rhythm that made the bedframe creak.
His hips started to meet mine on every downstroke, short sharp thrusts that drove him even deeper. The wet sound of it filled the room.
I stroked myself faster, matching the pace, and when the edge finally hit it was with almost no warning. I came hard, pulsing over my fist and onto his chest in long stripes, my body clamping down around his cock so tightly that he swore and thrust up hard enough to lift my knees off the mattress.
I kept moving through it, riding him in short, stuttering rolls of my hips while the aftershocks ran through me.
The sight of my come on his chest, the way it caught the light, the way his eyes stayed locked on mine even while his own orgasm was clearly building, was enough to keep me hard for a few more seconds.
Then he grabbed my hips tighter and fucked up into me with short, desperate strokes, chasing his own finish. I leaned forward again, braced my hands on either side of his head, and clenched around him deliberately. That was all it took.
He came inside me with a broken sound, burying himself as deep as he could while his cock pulsed and spilled heat that I could feel in every nerve. His hands stayed locked on my ass the whole time, holding me down.
I stayed seated on him until the last tremor left both of us. When I finally lifted off, his cock slipped free with a wet sound and a trickle of come followed it down the inside of my thigh. I did not clean it up yet. I just collapsed forward onto his chest, and let him take my weight.
Afterward he lay flat on his back with his arm over his eyes, breathing like the end of a shift. I stayed half on top of him, one leg still thrown across his hips, and listened to the way his heart gradually slowed under my ear.
"Diagrams," he said, to the ceiling.
"No. Get the paper off the floor."
"You're a coward and a snob and you've got a filing system where a heart goes."
The schedule gave us a day, which almost never happened, and the next night at one in the morning I drove out to Stan's with him in front of me the whole way, doing well under the limit, which is how Riley drove when he was thinking.
Stan pushed the notebook across with the pen tied to it with string, and did not look up. Riley signed, I signed under it, we paid cash.
Fresh sheet, nobody in the building, the number three still dead on the scoreboard a year later.
We didn't bet on anything. In that building, of all of them, which was where we had invented betting on things, and neither of us remarked on that either.
Gloves off, sticks on the bench, an hour of laps with the echo doing what it does.
At one point he skated backward in front of me for half a lap.
"You're going to hit the net."
"I know exactly where the net is. I've got a map of this building in my head and the net is on it."
"You said that last time."
"And I was right last time. The net moved. There were witnesses, Sinclair, there was a man with a wrench." He hit the net. He went down flat and lay there with his arms out. "It moved again."
"It's bolted down."
"Then somebody's unbolting it between periods of a game that isn't happening, and when I find him you're going to feel very stupid about tonight, and I'm going to want an apology in writing, and you're going to want to have a pen."
I skated over and stood above him and looked down at him lying on the ice under half the lights, laughing at nothing.
Back in Philadelphia on the Thursday I sat down at the kitchen island with the laptop open and booked a hotel in Chicago for the 22nd through the 26th of January.
I considered the alias. A false name on a card with my name on it was a story, and a false name flagged at check-in in January was a bigger one, so I typed my own name.
Then I sat back and looked at my hands. Dry, steady, the hands of a man ordering a rental car.
In February, filling in that same form for a Courtyard off exit fourteen, they had been wet and my heart had been going like the last minute of a one-goal game, and I'd thought at the time that it was a bad sign.
It was not. The shaking had been an objection, and the objection had been withdrawn.
The confirmation came in about a minute. Five nights, king room, high floor, cancellation permitted until the 20th. I read it twice.
Then the rest of the month came at me. A media availability had it, where a man asked about our penalty kill and I answered correctly and thought about a hotel in Chicago the entire time.
I counted the days down. I'd counted days before, on a plane out of Las Vegas, but that count had a game at the end of it, and a game was a reason I could say out loud to my own uncle. There was nothing at the end of this one except five days and a man who ate other people's desserts.