Chapter 6
A week later, I come back without an appointment.
The nurse isn’t there this time, just Garrett, alone at his desk with the door propped, and he looks up when I walk in like he’s not remotely surprised to see me. Like some part of him has been expecting exactly this since the moment I walked out of his office shaking a week ago.
“Tyler.” He sets down his pen. “No appointment on the books.”
“I’m not here for an appointment.”
I don’t let myself think too hard about it. I cross the room and drop to my knees in front of his chair, and his eyebrows go up just slightly, the most surprised I’ve seen him yet.
“You don’t have to,” he starts.
“I want to.”
“Tyler.” He sets a hand lightly on my shoulder, not pulling me back, just steadying. “I need you to actually want this because you want it. Not because you think it’s owed, or because you’re trying to prove something to yourself.”
“I know the difference.” I hold his gaze, steadier than I feel. “I’ve thought about this all week. Not the exam. This. You. I want to.”
Something in his face softens at that, relief loosening the careful control he’s kept all evening, and he lets his hand drop from my shoulder, permission granted without another word needed.
I reach for his belt before I can talk myself out of it.
My hands are shaking, and I’ve never done this before, never even thought about wanting to do this before a month ago, and none of that stops me from working his jeans open and freeing his cock, hard already, heavier in my hand than I expected.
“Slow,” Garrett says, guiding without pushing, one hand settling gentle in my hair. “Like that. You don’t need to prove anything.”
I learn by feel, the weight of him on my tongue, the salt of him, the way his hips shift just slightly when I do something that works. He doesn’t correct me harshly, just talks me through it in that same unbothered voice, patient in a way I’ve come to recognize as entirely his own.
“Use your hand too, whatever your mouth can’t take,” he says, guiding without forcing, his fingers threading gentle through my hair. “Good. That’s good, Tyler.”
I like hearing that more than I expect to. I work him slower, deliberately this time, trying whatever draws that hitch out of his breathing again, and when I find it, a slow drag with my tongue right under the head, his whole body goes tight above me.
“Right there,” he manages, his voice cracking wide open for the first time all week. “God, right there.”
Somewhere in the middle of it his voice finally stops sounding completely controlled, the first crack in it all week.
“Fuck, Tyler.” It comes out rough, his hand tightening slightly in my hair. “Just like that.”
I take him deeper, sloppy, inexperienced, and he doesn’t seem to care, his breath going ragged above me, his hips twitching up just slightly into my mouth like he’s trying not to and losing that fight a little.
“I’m close,” he warns, voice cracking on the words in a way I’ve never heard from him.
I don’t pull back. I want to see this, want to be the reason his control finally slips even a little after two weeks of him staying maddeningly composed through everything I’ve done in front of him.
He comes with a low groan, one hand fisting gently in my hair, my name breaking on his lips, and I swallow around him, working him through every aftershock the way he did for me last week.
His breathing takes a while to even back out, his hand still resting loose in my hair, and when I finally sit back on my heels he’s watching me with an expression I haven’t seen on him before, a dazed look underneath the usual calm.
“You’re something else,” he says, quiet, more to himself than to me.
“Good something else?”
“The best kind.” His hand tightens gentle in my hair, unhurried even now.
When I finally pull back, I press a kiss to the inside of his thigh, pleased with myself in a way I don’t have a name for yet.
He pulls me up off the floor and onto his lap in the desk chair, careless of how it looks, a grown man with a twenty-two-year-old straddling him in an office that’s technically still a medical practice. His hand smooths slow along my spine, at his own pace, the way he does everything.
“I keep waiting for you to change your mind,” he admits, quiet, the words costing him something. “About all of this. About me.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I’m twice your age and you got dumped for being passionless three months ago and none of this makes any sense on paper.
” He says it plainly, no self-pity in it, just fact laid bare the way he lays everything bare.
“I’ve had enough time on this earth to know things that don’t make sense on paper have a way of falling apart anyway. ”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him, and I mean it more than I’ve meant almost anything in my whole life. “I don’t care what it looks like on paper.”
Something in his face eases, relief plain in it, the closest thing to uncertain I’ve ever seen him look.
“Can I ask you something,” I say, still perched on his lap, his hand still slow along my spine.
“Anything.”
“How long have you known? That you, that this was something you wanted. With a patient, I mean. With me specifically.”
He’s quiet for a moment, thinking it over honestly instead of giving me some smooth answer he’s clearly rehearsed.
“Not before you sat on that table the first day. I want to be clear about that. I’m not in the habit of looking at patients that way, and I never have been.
” He pauses, considering. “But somewhere in that first exam, watching you try so hard to hold yourself together, something in me sat up and took notice. I told myself it was nothing. I kept telling myself that straight through your follow-up, right up until you kissed me.”
“And after that?”
“After that I stopped lying to myself about it.” He says it plainly, no shame in the admission at all. “I don’t do anything halfway, Tyler. Once I let myself want something, I don’t talk myself back out of it.”
Garrett reaches down and cups my jaw, tilting my face up to his, and doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Just looks at me like he’s recalibrating something, some private math he’s been running since the day I walked in with a discomfort he can’t write a prescription for anymore.
“You’re going to be the end of me,” he finally says, and it doesn’t sound like a complaint at all.