Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Three dates in nine days. That was the count.
Coffee on Wednesday. Dinner on Saturday. And now this: Tuesday night, takeout containers on my coffee table, some Netflix documentary about octopuses that neither of us had actually been watching.
Ellis sat on the other end of my couch with his legs stretched out, socked feet almost touching my thigh. The remains of pad thai sat between us like a chaperone. His sleeves were pushed up, the black-and-gray tattoo catching the fairy lights every time he moved his arm.
“This octopus is smarter than half my coworkers.” He pointed at the screen with a chopstick.
“That’s a low bar.”
“You haven’t met my coworkers.”
I reached for my water glass and let my knee brush his ankle. An accident that wasn’t. His breath hitched, barely audible, but I caught it.
We’d been doing this for an hour. The almost-touching. The charged silences between jokes. The way his eyes kept drifting from the TV to my mouth and back again, like he thought I wouldn’t notice.
Ellis owned every channel of my attention. That was the problem.
“Hey.” I muted the TV. The octopus froze mid-camouflage. “Can I be honest about something?”
His chopstick paused. “Always.”
“I have no idea what’s happening in this documentary.”
Relief broke across his face, cracking into a laugh. “Oh thank god! I’ve been lost since the second octopus showed up.”
“There’s a second octopus?”
“Apparently.” He set down the chopstick container. His fingers drummed once against his thigh, the way they did when he was working up to something. “I’ve been a little distracted.”
“By what?”
Those hazel eyes found mine. Stayed. “You know by what.”
“You could come closer.” My voice came out lower than I meant. “If you wanted.”
Ellis moved the takeout containers to the coffee table with careful hands. Deliberate. The way he did everything. Then he closed the distance between us, settling into the space beside me until his thigh pressed warm against mine.
This close, his cologne hit different. Cedar and citrus, clean and simple. A faint scar above his left eyebrow I’d missed before. The flecks of gold in his irises that only showed up in low light.
“I’ve been thinking about Saturday night.” His voice dropped. “About that kiss.”
“Yeah?”
“I said I wanted to take this slow.”
“You did.”
“I meant it. At the time.” His hand found my knee. Warm. Heavy. “But I’ve been replaying it for three days and I’m beginning to think slow is overrated.”
My heart hammered. “What happened to doing this right?”
“Maybe doing this right doesn’t have to mean doing this slow.” His thumb traced a circle on my knee. “Maybe it means being honest about what I want.”
“And what do you want?”
Ellis’ hand tightened on my knee. His jaw worked, fighting through the careful to get to the honest.
“You.” Simple. No hedge. “I want you, Jett.”
I kissed him.
Not careful. Not like Saturday outside Prospect Park, where he’d cupped my neck and pulled me close like he was holding himself in check. This time I kissed him like I’d been starving for it, because I had. Three days of replaying that first kiss until the memory wore thin.
His hands came up to my face, both of them, holding me there. I tasted ginger from the pad thai and the lime seltzer he’d been drinking. His mouth opened under mine, and I leaned into him until his back hit the arm of the couch.
“Sorry.” I pulled back an inch. “Too much?”
“Not enough.” He grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me back down.
We kissed until my jaw ached and my breathing went ragged. His hands slid from my face to my shoulders to my back, mapping muscle through the cotton of my t-shirt. I shifted until I was over him, one knee between his thighs, my forearms braced on either side of his head. The couch groaned under us.
“We should move.” I kissed his jaw, the stubble rough against my lips. “Before we break my couch.”
Ellis laughed, the sound vibrating against my mouth. “Lead the way.”
I stood and pulled him up with me. He stumbled forward, off-balance, catching himself against my chest. My hands went to his waist. His went to the back of my neck. We stood there in the blue TV glow for a beat, foreheads touching, neither of us moving.
Then I took his hand and led him to the bedroom.
Light from the living room spilled through the doorway in a warm amber wash. Enough to see by. Enough to hide in.
I pulled my shirt over my head and watched Ellis’ eyes travel across my chest, my arms, the tattoo on my ribs he hadn’t seen yet. His gaze lingered there long enough that I touched the ink.
“What does it say?”
“Libre.” I touched the word along my ribs, the letters small and clean. “Free. My mom’s handwriting. She wrote it the night before my twenty-first birthday and watched the artist transfer it onto my skin without flinching once.”
His face changed. He stepped close and pressed his mouth to the tattoo, soft and unhurried, and the intimacy of that cracked me open in a place I didn’t want to admit had a door.
I pulled at his shirt and he let me take it off. Lean muscle underneath, earned, not sculpted.
Then I saw them.
Two small silver barbells, one through each nipple, catching the low light. I didn’t move. Just looked. Took them in.
“Yeah?” His voice was soft. Like he’d clocked me clocking them and was waiting on the verdict.
I lifted my eyes. Held his.
“Yeah.”
I leaned in and put my mouth on him before I could overthink it. Tongue first, slow, against the cool metal and the warm skin around it. He made a sound I’d been hoping for since the first time I’d watched him squat too much weight at the gym.
“Jesus.”
I caught the barbell gently between my teeth. Tugged. He swore again, hand coming up to my hair, not pushing me off, holding me there.
“You’ve been hiding these,” I murmured against his chest.
“They aren’t hidden.”
“They’re hidden from me.” I switched to the other one, gave it the same attention, watched his abs flex under my mouth. “Was I supposed to know?”
“I was waiting for you to find them.”
That hit somewhere low in my gut. The patience of him. Of letting me take him in piece by piece at my own pace.
His tattoo sleeve started at his shoulder and wound down to his wrist, all that geometric precision bleeding into organic shapes, architecture dissolving into something rougher. I traced the line of it with my fingertips. He shivered.
Above the sleeve, a small constellation rode his shoulder. Five points of ink. I’d ask what it meant another night.
“Cold?”
“No.” His stomach tensed under my hand. “Opposite.”
I kissed him again, deeper this time, and let my hand drift to the button of his jeans. He inhaled against my mouth. Steady, then unsteady. His own hands found my belt buckle and stalled there, asking.
“Yeah.” My voice rough against his ear. “Yeah, all of it.”
We undid each other slowly, the buckles and the buttons, the careful work of two people taking their time. His jeans came off in a rumpled puddle. Mine joined them. The boxers went last.
His eyes traveled down. Caught. Held.
“Wait.” His voice came hoarse. “Is that…”
“Prince Albert.”
“How long?”
“Since I was twenty-three.”
He stared at it the way he stared at code with a syntax he’d never seen. Running the new variable. Adjusting his model.
“Will it… hurt?”
“Not for tonight.” I tipped his chin up, brushed my thumb across his lower lip. “Different night, you and I’ll have a longer conversation. Not tonight.”
“Different night.” He repeated it like a small promise.
“One thing at a time.”
He nodded. Pulled me closer. The press of him against my hip, hot and bare, was the most honest thing about him so far.
I pinned him against the hallway wall. His back hit the plaster, soft, and his hands gripped my hips and tugged me in.
Skin to skin. The barbells pressed warm into my chest. My forehead found his.
“Hi.” Quiet.
“Hi.” His voice cracked on the second letter.
I kissed him again, and the kiss kept going. His hands learned the shape of my back, the dip of my spine, the place where my ass met my thigh. Mine learned him in return. The geometric line of his sleeve. The soft place at the base of his throat. The slope from his ribs to his hip.
When my hand finally moved between us, I went slow. He was already hard, already wet at the tip, already shaking a little against the wall. The press of my palm against him pulled a small sound out of his throat I tucked into a quiet place behind my ribs.
“Tell me,” I said against his mouth, “if anything’s too much.”
“Nothing’s too much.”
I closed my hand around him. Slow stroke. Watched his face. He bit down on his lower lip and closed his eyes for half a beat before opening them again, finding me, holding him.
“I don’t have lube out here.” My voice rough. “Bedroom.”
“Bedroom.”
I took his hand and led him to the edge of the mattress, and we sat down side by side, like a couple of teenagers who’d only just figured out what they were allowed to do. We both laughed. The laugh was the relief of all the holding back.
He stretched out on his back. I followed him down, half over him, my hip against his. The fairy lights I’d strung along the headboard three years ago threw amber across the wall.
I reached for the drawer. The bottle was where it always lived. I slicked my own palm slowly, watching him watch me, and his breath hitched at the small click of the cap, the wet sound of my hand.
“Yours first.” I tipped some onto his palm. Closed his fingers around it. “Or mine.”
“Both.” His voice was wrecked. “Together.”
I rolled half onto my side. He mirrored me without being asked. Knee to knee, hip to hip, and his slicked hand moved to me at the same moment my slicked hand moved to him. Mirror image. The first stroke was a question. The second was an answer.
His hand was unsure on the first pass, careful, learning. The pressure right, the rhythm wrong. I stilled my own hand on him long enough to murmur into his ear.
“Slower at the head. Yeah. There. Like that.”