Chapter 38
Chapter thirty-eight
The Friday after the concert it was movie night again.
After we took the C train to Ellis’ place.
His apartment was dark except for the city bleeding through the windows.
My hand found the small of Ellis’ back as we stepped inside, and the absence of hesitation in the way he leaned into my palm flipped something in my stomach.
We’d been here before. We’d had sex in this apartment on this bed in the version of us that broke. His body knew mine. But that night was different. He moved differently. He looked at me, really looked, not performing, not protecting.
The movie had ended an hour before. We’d been at Calliope’s place, the whole chaotic crew draped across her living room like a Renaissance painting of beautiful disasters.
Sierra had her head on Lauren’s shoulder.
Raven was explaining the lunar cycle to Ellis, who was actually listening instead of performing interest. Calliope was burning sage that smelled like a funeral home had met an incense factory, and when she waved it toward the windows, I caught Ellis’ eye and didn’t look away.
He’d mouthed, “Your friends are insane.”
I’d mouthed back, “I know.”
On the train ride to his place in Fort Greene, he’d held my hand like he’d earned it. His thumb had traced the inside of my wrist. His head had rested against my shoulder at Lafayette Avenue.
Now, in his apartment, his palm warmed through my shirt.
“Hi.” Such a small word, and the way he looked at me made it hard to breathe.
“Hi yourself.”
I didn’t kiss him. Not yet. I stepped back just enough to take in his face, his whole body, reading him like a map.
My hands cupped his cheeks. My thumbs moved across his cheekbones.
This close, his eyes revealed their exact shade, the complicated green-brown that shifted in different light.
In the half-dark of his apartment, they looked almost black.
“I want,” he started, stopped. Started again. “Can I…”
I knew exactly what he was asking. Not with words. With the way his hands shook at my waist, the way he was giving me an exit door I didn’t want to take. Ellis asking to be had. Asking me to hold him the way no one had bothered.
Instead of answering, I pulled his shirt over his head.
He laughed, a real one, the kind that came from his stomach, and the tension broke akin to a held breath released.
My hands found his waist. The bedroom was three steps away, but I took my time walking us there.
Not a performance of slowness. Just an actual pace; we weren’t racing toward something, like the destination wasn’t the point.
The bed displayed the same geometric precision Ellis brought to everything. I remembered all the times we’d crashed here, drunk or desperate or both, falling into each other like we were trying to prove something. This wasn’t that.
He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled me between his thighs. His face level with my chest. He traced a line across my ribs. His mouth followed his fingers. Gentle. Open. Like he was reading me in Braille.
I made a sound that wasn’t controlled or curated.
He looked up at me. Pupils blown. Mouth pink from working at my skin. And because I knew the question he couldn’t quite form, I answered the one he hadn’t voiced.
“I’ve got you, baby. Let me.”
He nodded. Once.
I pushed him back onto the mattress, and the rest of our clothes came off without choreography, without the careful self-editing that used to live in every inch of him when we undressed.
That night he let me see everything. The scar on his hip from some childhood bike accident.
The freckles on his inner thigh. The way his cock curved when it was hard for me, that clean curve upward I’d memorized, the head a deep flushed pink, the slit.
The way his throat went red when I pressed my mouth there.
I took my time mapping him. Knees bracketing his hips. Hands moving like I had nowhere else to be. The curve of his collarbone. The soft place under his jaw. The dip of his sternum. The pale skin across his ribs that turned pink when I dragged my teeth across it.
The barbells.
I gave each one its own slow attention with my mouth.
Tongue first. Slow circles until the nipple pebbled tight against the steel.
The catch of teeth. The gentle tug I knew worked, the one I’d been giving them since the first night I’d seen them.
He arched up off the mattress. His hand fisted in my hair.
The sound he made traveled through my body like lightning.
I worked the second one the same way. Got the rim to match the first. Both nipples pink and tight around the steel.
“You always,” he managed.
“Yeah.”
I stayed there longer than I usually did. Worshipping him. Took my time. I wanted, no needed, him to feel everything. My cock was hard between us, pressed against his thigh. His own cock was wedged between our stomachs, leaking, the curve up bumping the line of his own ribs.
Then I kissed him hard and deep, and he arched into it like a question, and I answered by sliding a hand between his thighs.
“Jett.”
“I know.”
The lube was in the same place as always.
Top drawer, left side. My hands shook a little when I uncapped it.
Not from nerves. From the weight of what this was.
One finger slow, working him open while I kissed the hollow of his throat.
Two fingers when he was ready for them, and his breath caught.
He’d been thinking about this on the subway, on the couch at Calliope’s, all night. Three when he begged for it.
I curled my fingers against the spot inside him and watched his cock kick against his stomach. A bead of pre-cum welled at his slit and broke and ran slow down the curve of his shaft.
“Look at me.” I needed his eyes on me. “Stay with me.”
He stayed.
I slicked my cock. The brown of my shaft shining with the lube, the head of me already flushed dark from being hard against his thigh for the last twenty minutes.
When I pushed into him, slow, careful, my forehead pressed to his, his hands gripped my shoulders and held on.
The metal pulled the same small breath out of him it always did now, the sound his body gave up without his permission, the shape of a sensation he’d learned to want.
The PA dragged through the tight ring of him and his mouth opened on a soundless O.
I kissed it from his mouth and gave it back to him.
“You feel incredible,” he managed.
I didn’t hold back either. The sounds we made were embarrassing and real, and we matched them, little exhales and groans we used to stifle. We let them go. Our faces revealed everything.
Ellis truly let go. The performance dropped off him. Just us. The way our bodies fit. My hips moving. The way he said my name like it was a question and an answer at once.
“Tell me,” I murmured.
“Tell you what.”
“Anything. Everything. The thing you used to swallow.”
He didn’t answer right away. His head turned into my shoulder. His mouth pressed against the place under my ear. Then:
“I love how you feel inside me. I love the metal. I love that I had to learn it. I love how I’m the only one you’ll ever do this with again.”
That last sentence stirred something behind my sternum. The certainty of it. The way he’d said it like it was already settled.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “Just you. Always just you.”
I shifted my weight onto one forearm. My free hand worked between us, found his cock between our stomachs slick already with his own pre-cum, and started stroking him slow in time with my hips. The wet of him made my hand glide easily. He gasped into my mouth.
“I’m not going to last.”
“Then don’t.”
“Jett…”
“Come for me. I want to feel you.”
He came with my name on his mouth and his hand fisted in my hair and his back arching up off the mattress.
His cock pulsed thick in my fist. The come came hot and white in three thick spills across his stomach and over my fingers, and the way his body tightened around me sent me over a thrust later.
My forehead pressed hard to his. My cock pulsed deep inside him, the come of me filling him in long hot pulses, his name on my mouth, both of us shaking and laughing wet through it like we’d never done this before, like it was new every single time, like it was going to keep being new for as long as we kept doing it.
“I’m here,” I whispered into the damp skin below his ear, the way I’d been whispering it since the first time he’d let me in. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He held me tighter and let me hold him, and Brooklyn quieted down to nothing.
Afterward, we tangled in his sheets. His arm weighed across my stomach. My head rested on his chest, listening to his heartbeat decelerate. The dark apartment had stopped feeling like isolation.
He traced something across my ribs. Drawing invisible patterns.
“I love you.” The words fell out, unadorned. No joke appended. No deflection. “I’m terrified most of the time, but I love you and I want to keep showing up.”
His fingers stilled on my skin.
“That’s not what you’d have said several months ago.” His voice came careful.
“I was still running then. Still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for you to realize you could do better than a chaotic Dominican kid with commitment issues.”
He tilted my chin up. “There’s nothing to realize, Jett, because it’s not true.”
“I know,” I said, and it was strange how easy that was to accept. “I’m starting to know that.”
From the bathroom doorway, Jack watched us with the indifference only a plant could muster. He looked healthier these days. Less like a living rebuke. More like something that required consistent care, and Ellis had been good at that. Was good at that.
I fell asleep wrapped up in someone who stayed, someone who learned how to stay, someone who showed up even when I was too broken to recognize what that looked like.
The city hummed outside. Tomorrow could wait.