Chapter 20 What He Did in the Dark #3
He was a beautiful man. I’d known it the flat way you know a fact about somebody you live with, filed and set aside, for months, and then I’d had one night allowed to look and six days of an empty bed, and now here he was, on my sheets, mine.
Lean and built long, the good stretch of his shoulders, the flat of his stomach with the dark trail running down it, the cut of his hips that his tailored suits only ever hinted at and the bare man paid off in full.
That handsome face gone open and wanting, none of the charm running on it now.
And his cock, already hard, lying heavy against his thigh and thickening while I watched, the head flushed dark and slick at the tip.
Just looking at him pulled the want up through me, hot and low and stupid with it, my own cock gone hard and aching.
Six days I’d spent sure I’d thrown this away, and it was right here on my bed, looking back at me like it wanted me to come and take it.
“What,” he said. Self-conscious under it, even now.
“Nothing. You. Lie back.”
He lay back. I shed my own clothes without grace, and his eyes went over what was left of my week, the bruises yellowed at the edges, the rib mark faded to the color of old weather, the scab flaking on my shoulder, and his face did a complicated thing.
“That’s from him,” he said quietly. “From them. For me.”
“Don’t. Not tonight.” I came down over him, careful of nothing of mine and everything of his, and felt his cock drag hot against my stomach, both of us bare and pressed the whole length for the first time in too long. “Tonight that’s just an old bruise. Tonight nobody owns either of us but us.”
Then I stopped talking and kissed him, and it went rough almost at once, six days of nothing turning it into something with teeth. He dragged me down by the back of the neck and bit at my mouth, and I felt the careful plan I’d had, the take-my-time plan, go straight out of my head.
“I was going to be gentle with you,” I got out against his jaw.
“Don’t you dare.” His hand was already shoving between us, closing around my cock, working me rough and sure, nothing like the unsure hand he’d had the first time. “I spent days thinking I’d never get to do this again. I don’t want gentle. Get on the bed.”
He shoved at my shoulder and I let him put me on my back, and he went down my body fast, no map and no patience in it, his mouth dragging hot down my chest and my stomach, and then his hand was around the root of me and his mouth was on my cock and the heat of it punched the air out of my lungs.
He’d learned. That was the thing that nearly ended me on the spot.
The first time he’d never done this, hadn’t known what to do with his hands.
Now he took me deep and worked the head with his tongue and hollowed his cheeks and looked up the length of me while he did it, filthy and pleased with himself with his mouth full of me.
“Christ.” My hand found his hair and fisted in it, not pushing, just holding on. “Where did you learn that.”
He pulled off with a wet sound, lips swollen and shining. “Motivated study.” And took me back down before I could answer, deeper, until my restraint started to go, and I had to haul him off by the hair before it ended too soon.
“Enough. Up.” My voice had gone to gravel. “I’m not finishing in your mouth. Turn over.”
Something flared in his face at the order, red on his cheeks but bright eyes.
He went up onto his hands and knees in the middle of the bed, the long fit line of his back and the curve of his ass and his head dropped between his shoulders, and I took myself in hand and breathed, the sight of him laid out like that almost too much.
It was easier this way too, easier on the ribs than having him under me, but that wasn’t the reason. I wanted him like this.
I got the lube off the nightstand and slicked my fingers and pushed two into him with none of the long careful build I’d given him the first time, because he was already shoving back onto my hand and swearing at me to get on with it.
“Easy,” I said.
“I don’t want easy. I’m not going to break.” He bit off the rest of it when I crooked my fingers and dragged them over the spot inside him. “There. God. Will you just.”
“Patience.”
“Fuck patience. Fuck...”
“That’s the plan.”
I opened him faster than I’d done anything to him before, two fingers to three, until he was loose and rocking and cursing into the mattress, and then I pulled my hand free and got the condom off the nightstand, tore the foil and rolled it on, fumbling it once because my hands had quit being steady, and slicked myself over it.
Then I lined the head of my cock up where he was slick and stretched and pushed into him in one long hard stroke that bottomed me out and tore a sound out of both of us.
There was no slow build this time. He didn’t want it and I couldn’t have managed it if he’d begged.
I got one hand hard on his hip and the other flat between his shoulder blades, holding him down, and drove into him, the slap of my hips against his ass loud in the room, the headboard knocking the wall, his knuckles white where he’d grabbed it.
He shoved back to meet every stroke, taking it, asking for it in a wrecked voice with none of the charm left in it.
“Mine,” I said into the back of his neck, the word out before I’d decided to let it. “You vanished on me. You don’t get to do that. Say it.”
“Yours.” He got it out in pieces, rocking back onto me. “I’m yours. Harder. Luke, harder.”
I gave it to him harder, deeper, the angle dragging over the spot inside him until he swore and shook on every drive, and the want of him after a week without it had no grace in it at all.
I drank the look of him down, the long fit back arched for me, the muscle working in his shoulders, the way he took everything I gave him and pushed for more.
The best-looking man I’d ever had under my hands, wrecked and saying my name into the sheets.
My ribs were nothing. There was nothing in the room but the drive of me into him and the heat and the smell of the both of us and his voice gone to ruin.
I got my hand around his cock, slick and leaking, and stroked him fast in time with my hips.
He didn’t last. He drove back onto me once more and locked up and spilled over my fist and onto the sheet with a sound that cracked in the middle, and the clench of him around me pulled me right after.
I shoved deep and held there and came, buried in him to the root, shaking, folded down over the warm length of his back, my mouth open against his spine, wrung out to nothing.
For a while neither of us moved. Me folded down over the back of him, both of us wrecked, my heart slamming against his spine and then slowing.
He turned his head on the pillow and reached a hand back and found my hip and held it there, keeping me where I was.
The smell of sex and sweat thick in the room. The city in the window.
“Your ribs,” he said eventually, the same words he’d said to me the first night, and I felt the smile in it, muffled into the pillow.
“They’re not so bad anymore,” I said.
I eased out of him careful, both of us catching a breath at the loss of it, and stripped the condom off and knotted it and dropped it in the bin, and reached for the towel and wiped up the mess he’d spilled on the sheet, the small practical mercy of it while he lay there boneless and let me.
Then I rolled him into me, this man who’d given up a kingdom and come home to make a joke about rent, and let myself have it.
The weight of him. The warmth. The fact of him staying.
He tucked his head under my jaw. I could feel his pulse coming back down.
“Stay,” I said, into his hair. Which was a foolish thing to say to a man who’d just signed his whole life away to be able to.
“I live here now,” he said. “Apparently. I hear the tenant’s a catch.”
“Go to sleep, Ryan.”
He did, eventually, gone heavy and warm and finally still against me.
I lay there in the dark of a room that had stopped being only mine, and I thought about Voss’s shaking hand on the cup, and the two men at the top we’d never been able to reach, and the air I kept turning to find him in all week, and how it wasn’t empty anymore.
It came apart clean, I thought. The whole machine. That almost never happens.
And then the better thought, the one I let myself have last, with him breathing slow against my heart: it had come apart clean, and he had come home, and for the first time in longer than I could name, there was nothing left in the dark for either of us to go and do.
I held on, and I slept.