10
Milo
My head is doing an impression of a washing machine on spin cycle when I surface, and for a few seconds I just lie there, blinking at a ceiling that is not the ceiling of my studio, remembering, in pieces, that I don’t have a studio anymore.
Spencer’s guest room. Right.
My mouth tastes like a wine bar, which, I suppose, is accurate.
I lie very still and let the last twelve hours drift back to me.
Emily’s face across the table, delighted and horrified in equal measure.
A guy at the bar I have no actual memory of talking to, only a sense that I mentioned him to somebody. Maybe in a text?
Spencer showing up. That part I’ve got, at least the shape of it: a big shadow crossing the bar, a cap pulled low that hid nothing. Because nothing on this earth is built to disguise him.
I remember his steady hand on my elbow, but after that, the memory goes even fuzzier. I remember the car, the buckle sliding against my hip, and Spencer leaning across me to click it into place himself when my hands wouldn’t cooperate. I remember thinking that he smelled unfairly good.
Then nothing. A gap, like someone cut the reel.
I don’t remember getting inside. I don’t remember getting up the stairs, or into this bed.
I look down at myself.
I’m in a plain gray t-shirt, soft, worn thin at the collar, and it is not mine. It’s enormous on me, swallowing my shoulders, the hem falling past my hips. Underneath it, just my boxer briefs.
Did Spencer undress me?
My brain produces several unhelpful images in response to that question, all of them involving his hands, and I have to press the heels of my palms into my eyes and breathe through it because my head is killing me.
I fumble for my phone on the nightstand, and the second the screen lights up I sit bolt upright so fast the room tips sideways.
10:14.
“Oh, no. No, no, no.” I’m out of bed before I’ve fully processed standing as a concept, feet hitting the floor, stomach rolling once before it settles.
It’s Sunday, technically, but Sunday with a list: groceries, the good coffee beans he likes, the dry cleaning drop-off, and I’ve blown past the start time by two hours because I was busy being unconscious.
I brush my teeth so fast I nearly gag myself, shower in what has to be a new land-speed record, and stand dripping in front of the mirror for exactly four seconds, deciding what kind of person I’m going to be today.
Given the current state of my dignity, I go with cute.
Cropped top, soft yellow, and the tiny shorts, because if I’m going to face Spencer after last night, I’d like to at least look good doing it.
Armor comes in a lot of shapes. Mine happens to show a lot of thigh.
I feel marginally more human by the time I hit the stairs, and then I round the corner to the kitchen and stop dead on the second-to-last step.
Spencer is at the stove, sleeves pushed up, flipping something in a pan, and the smell hits me before my brain catches up to what I’m looking at: butter, vanilla, sugar going brown.
He glances over at the noise of my feet on the stairs, and his eyes do one slow pass, chin to bare thighs and back up, the same unreadable once-over he gave me the first morning I made him breakfast. Except this time his mouth is looser when it lands back on mine.
“Sit,” he says. “Coffee’s fresh.”
I sit because my body still takes orders from that voice even when my brain has several unresolved questions about it.
He sets a mug in front of me without asking how I take it, which he learned somewhere in week one and never had to ask again, and I wrap both hands around it and drink like it’s medicine, because it basically is.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like somebody replaced my skull with a maraca,” I say. “But I’ll live.”
He puts two Advil and a glass of water next to my coffee. I take them and drink half the glass.
I brace for the lecture, but none comes. Instead, he turns back to the stove, humming, flipping a pancake with a flick of the wrist. If anything, he looks lighter than I’ve seen him look since I moved in.
A plate lands in front of me a minute later, three pancakes stacked, edges golden, and he sets butter and a bottle of maple syrup down beside it before he goes back for his own plate.
I look at the food. Then at him. Then at the food again.
“How did you make this?” I ask slowly. “We needed groceries. I was supposed to buy them this morning.”
“I went early,” he says, plating his own stack.
“You went grocery shopping?”
“Yeah. Around eight.” He rounds the island and sits across from me. “Eat before they get cold. Unless you don’t like them. I can make something else, though I’m not as good at this as you are.”
“They’re fine,” I say, picking up my fork and cutting into the stack.
I put a bite in my mouth mostly so I don’t have to figure out what my face is doing.
They’re really good, better than they have any right to be from a man who eats chicken and rice five days out of seven. I chew, swallow, and throw him a look.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“What happened last night?” I ask instead of answering.
He studies me for a second. “How much do you remember?”
“Up until the car, when you buckled my seatbelt. After that it’s just static.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” I set my fork down. “That’s it? Aren’t you pissed at me? I ruined your date.”
“It wasn’t going well anyway.”
I blink. “It wasn’t?”
“No.” He goes back to his pancakes, unbothered, as if he’s discussing the weather. “I was distracted the whole time.”
“Distracted.” I turn the word over. “By what?”
He sets his fork down and looks at his plate instead of me. “I’m sorry I asked you to buy the condoms yesterday. That was…” He exhales through his nose, a short, frustrated sound. “I don’t know. Some kind of power move. Reestablishing control, or trying to. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t make me uncomfortable,” I say, which is true, technically. There’s a different word, but I don’t hand it over.
“So,” I say instead, aiming for light, “are you gonna reschedule the date?”
“I don’t think so.” He picks his fork back up, cuts a bite, eats it before he finishes the thought. “Paige and I have always been casual. But I don’t think that’s going to work anymore.”
“Oh?” I wait for more, but he doesn’t give it to me.
He finishes what’s left on his plate in a few efficient bites, stands, and carries our plates to the sink. I watch the muscles in his forearms work and hate how much I like watching.
“What were you distracted with?” I ask his back.
He stops and sets the dish towel aside, folding it once over the oven handle, and then he turns around and leans against the counter, arms crossing.
“I was distracted by a certain infuriating and bratty PA.” He’s moving before I can find a single word to put after that, coming around the island without hurrying.
He stops right in front of me, so close my knees have nowhere to go but apart, and he steps into the space I make for him.
I can feel my own pulse in my throat as he leans down, one hand braced on the island behind my back. His mouth comes level with my ear, his breath warm against my skin.
“Tell me the truth, Milo,” he says patiently, as if he already knows the answer and just needs to hear me say it out loud. “Did you really finish yourself off with your hand covered in my cum?”
For a second I forget how lungs work.
“H-how do you even know that?” I manage.
“You told me yourself.” Spencer doesn’t move back an inch. “Last night in the driveway.”
I search the wreckage of last night for that particular memory and come up with nothing but a vague, horrifying sense that my mouth has been operating without my permission.
Drunk Milo, you absolute menace. You had one job, which was to survive the night, and instead you handed him a confession on a silver platter.
None of that reaches my face, though. I lift my chin instead. “So what if I did?”
Spencer’s jaw sets as he steps in, closing the last of the space I thought was still mine, my back against the island, his body crowding in.
“So next time,” he says right against my ear, “you should let me watch.”
I push up off the stool and get my mouth on his, and it’s not gentle, not for one second.
His hand comes up and fists in my hair, and I taste vanilla and maple syrup.
Our teeth clash before we figure out the angle, and neither of us cares.
His tongue meets mine and I moan, helpless, both hands knotting in the front of his sweats like I need something to hold on to or I’ll come apart right here. He groans against my mouth.
I pull back, and my gaze flicks down. The front of his gray sweats is tented out, the fabric doing nothing to hide what I already knew was generous.
Spencer catches where I’m looking and reaches down, grabbing himself through the fabric.
“You see what you’re doing to me?” he asks.
“I thought you were straight.” It comes out breathless, and only half a joke.
“Apparently, my dick didn’t get the memo.”
I kiss him again, and my hands find the drawstring at his waist and work it loose while his tongue works against mine. I push the sweats down along with his underwear in one motion, and his cock springs free, hard and flushed dark at the head, curving up toward his stomach.
I wrap my hand around him, and Spencer groans, his hips twitching forward into my grip.
“Holy shit, you’re huge,” I breathe, stroking him slow, watching his face for every flicker. “And I’m not being nice, I’m being accurate. I’ve held a lot of dicks, Spencer, and this is the one.”
He laughs. Then his cock twitches hard in my hand, and his breath goes ragged.
“Milo.”
I tighten my grip a fraction, drag my palm up over the head where he’s already slick, and his eyes fall shut, jaw dropping open on a silent curse.
I keep stroking him, cataloging every twitch and shudder I can pull out of him.
His eyes are still closed when his hand finds the waistband of my shorts and yanks, dragging them and the briefs underneath down my thighs in one motion.
I’m still perched half on the stool, one foot on the floor for balance, and now I’m bare from the waist down.
His hand closes around me like he’s been waiting to do this.
I whimper, and my own hand on him falters, losing rhythm entirely.
“Spencer—”
He presses his cock flush against mine and reaches down to adjust my grip so my fingers wrap around both of us at once. The head of his cock slides against mine, precum smearing between us until there’s nothing but a slow, easy glide.
He covers my hand with his, engulfing it completely, and we both groan.
We start moving together, his hand guiding mine, slow drags up and over both our heads and back down. I’m not going to last very long like this, not with his cock pressed hot against mine and the sound he’s making low in his throat.
His other hand lands on my hip, steadying me, keeping me from sliding right off the stool, and I grab his bicep with my free hand, fingers digging into muscle that doesn’t give an inch under the grip.
“You’re so hard for me,” I babble, because apparently I never learned when to shut up, drunk or sober. “Wanna make you come all over me—”
“Jesus, Milo.” His voice is wrecked. “That dirty mouth’s gonna finish me off before your hand does.”
“Mm, I’d love to put it to better use,” I say, picturing exactly how he’d taste, how he’d sound with my mouth wrapped around him instead of just my hand. “I’ve wanted to get on my knees for you since the dressing room—”
He curses, and a few thick drops of precum spill from his crown. His hips start to stutter against mine, the rhythm gone.
“That’s it,” I gasp, hand moving faster, both of us chasing it. “I want you to fuck me, Spencer. Want you inside me. Want to feel how big you are—”
His whole body goes rigid against mine, a broken sound tearing out of his chest, and he comes hard, spilling hot over our joined hands, his forehead dropping to my shoulder as his hips jerk through it.
“Spencer!” I cry out, the sight of it wrecking whatever control I had left, and then I follow him over.