5. What the Lake Kept #2
He leaned in. The first touch of his tongue was cool against the heat of my cock, a single deliberate stripe up the underside that made my thighs lock.
Then he opened for me — careful, precise — and took the fat head past his lips.
The stretch of his mouth around the thickness of me was immediate and filthy.
I felt the resistance of his jaw, the wet heat closing over the sensitive ridge, and I made a sound I didn’t recognize.
He took more. Inch by controlled inch, throat working, eyes watering, never once looking away from my face.
The slick slide of him around my cock was so tight it bordered on painful in the best way — that perfect, greedy pressure of a mouth forced to accommodate something too thick and loving every second of the strain.
Saliva ran down the shaft, dripping onto the rock between us.
I could feel every careful flex of his tongue, the way he hollowed his cheeks on the draw back, the soft choke when the head nudged the back of his throat and he still didn’t pull off.
My hand found the wet hair at the back of his head. Not forcing. Just resting there, feeling the fine tremor running through him as he held still with my cock filling his mouth to the limit of what a human throat should be able to take.
“Hands,” I said, voice wrecked. “On my thighs. You don’t touch yourself.”
His palms settled on my legs, cool and careful.
He started moving then — short, wet strokes that took me deeper on every pass, the fat length of my cock disappearing between his lips until only the base remained, shiny and tight.
The sounds were obscene: the soft wet click of him swallowing around me, the quiet broken noise he made every time I bottomed out, the wet slap of spit and precome against skin.
I fucked his mouth in shallow, deliberate thrusts, watching the way his lips stretched obscenely around the thickest part of me.
The head dragged over his tongue on every withdraw; the next push forced another inch down his throat.
He took it. Shaking. Starving. Completely, precisely obedient.
Never once drifting toward my throat even when I arched it at him on purpose, testing him the way you press a bruise.
He turned his face away from the offered line of my neck and pressed his mouth harder onto my cock instead and made a sound against the root of me like a man grieving something, and obeyed.
The orgasm built low and mean. I warned him with a tight, “fuck, you’re going to make me come,” and he only took me deeper, throat working in long swallows as the first pulse hit.
I came hard — thick, heavy spurts that he swallowed without flinching, the fat head of my cock pulsing against the soft back of his throat while his hands stayed obediently on my thighs.
He kept me there through every aftershock, tongue gentle now, cleaning the last of it from the slit until I was oversensitive and shaking.
Only then did he ease off, lips shiny, chin wet, eyes blown black. He stayed on his knees in the creek water looking up at me like he’d just been given something he hadn’t earned and wanted to keep anyway.
I pulled him up by the hair — not cruel, just clear — and kissed the taste of myself out of his mouth. His cock was still hard, leaking steadily against my hip, but I didn’t touch it. That was the point. He had earned the privilege of restraint. He would keep earning it.
His honesty was garbage. His restraint was absolute. I filed that, gasping, staring up at the pines wheeling slow overhead, as the most important vital sign I’d taken all year.
After — my forehead on his shoulder, both of us wrecked, his heart under my flat palm beating a rhythm that was almost right, almost, like a metronome set two clicks slow by someone who’d once heard music described — he spoke into my hair, quiet and ruined.
“You shouldn’t trust me.”
“I don’t,” I said. “Keep earning it anyway.”
I felt him almost laugh. Felt him decide, instead, to hold the back of my neck in one broad cool hand, carefully, like a man holding something with a use-by date.
And I let him, for a minute, because efficiency has loopholes, and because for the second time in three days this impossible stranger had made the noise in my head go quiet, and I was already dreading how much I was going to want that again.
***
I swam back the long way, cooling off in every sense, staying under where the water was dim and simple. And that’s the only reason I was beneath the floating dock when the sun came through at the right angle.
The dock rode on old steel drums, and under it the light fell in bright moving slats through the gaps in the boards, striping the tea-dark water with gold bars that swayed as the dock rocked.
I hung there in the cool, ten feet down, watching my own air roll silver along the boards above — and one slat of light reached deeper than the rest, down past the cold layer, and snagged on something below me.
Down where a drowned tree raised its black limbs out of the deep like the lake had grown a hand.
A glint. Thin. Gold.
I surface-dove before I decided to. That’s true of half my life.
The water went cold in a hard line at eight feet, spring-fed cold, then colder, the light browning out around me. The drowned root came up out of the tannin dark furred with silt, and wrapped twice around it, swaying gently with the wash of my arrival like it was waving —
a fine gold chain. Two military-style tags, and a small St. Christopher medal, patron of travelers, protector of those who cross dangerous water.
I knew it at four feet. I’d have known it at four hundred, in no light at all, by touch, in my sleep.
Mom gave Nolan that chain at his confirmation.
He wore it every day of his life; it’s in every photograph on seven years of missing-person flyers, listed under DISTINGUISHING ITEMS, second line, right below scar, left eyebrow.
The sheriff’s office dragged this lake in the first week.
State divers did it again in month three, with sonar. Nothing.
I worked the chain free with my lungs going tight and bright, silt smoking up around my hands, and kicked for the surface with it locked in my fist, and broke up into all that ordinary noise — Eli whooping, the drone’s mosquito whine, Beau’s laugh rolling across the water like a felled tree — treading water in the sun with my brother around my knuckles and my heart doing something arrhythmic and huge.
And that was when the cold finished telling me what my hand had known since the root. The fact my brain kept trying to refuse delivery on, returning it, re-receiving it. The small, impossible, world-ending thing I would carry up the trail and into every night after this one.
Seven years. Seven years at the bottom of a spring-fed lake, below the thermocline, in water cold enough to ache your bones at a breath-hold’s depth.
The chain was warm.
Body-warm. Worn-warm — heat still leaving it slowly against my wet palm even now, in the way metal only ever feels at one specific moment of its life: when it has just, only just, within this very hour, come off living skin.