Chapter 9 The Same Side
Luke
The bedroom door shut behind us, and for the first time all week, both of us were on the same side of it.
In the kitchen the kiss had been all teeth, everything we hadn’t said coming out at once.
It didn’t ease off when the door closed.
It got worse. Ryan had my shirt in both fists, and I had a hand in his hair, and we came into the dark room without either of us reaching for the light.
The lamp on the dresser was enough. It put his face in half-light, and that was all I wanted to look at.
I turned him and put him against the wall.
He went, and then he pushed back into me, and the sound he made was not surprise. His palms came up flat against the plaster on either side of his head. I got in close behind him, my chest against his back, and put my mouth on the side of his neck, and for a second we did nothing but breathe.
“I hated this week,” he said. His voice had gone rough already.
“So did I.”
“I kept lying there wanting to come round that wall, and I wouldn’t do it.”
“I know. I was on the other side of it doing the same thing.”
I worked his jacket off his shoulders and let it drop.
His shirt I pulled loose from his waistband and opened from the bottom up, and got my hands flat on his stomach, his chest, feeling him breathe, feeling his heart still going hard.
Then I put my hips against him and moved, slow, letting him feel through both our clothes how hard I already was.
He swore under his breath and pushed back into it.
I don’t say much. He knows that about me. It’s half of what he complains about. So, when I put my mouth against his ear and started talking, he went still to listen.
“I missed you,” I said. “All week. I missed you like you were on the other side of the country. Lying on the other side of that wall every night.” My hand went down his stomach and opened his belt. “I’m not doing that again. That was hell.”
“Luke.” His head dropped back onto my shoulder.
“I mean it.”
“Yeah.” His breath had gone unsteady.
I got his belt open, and the button, and I pushed his pants down off his hips and everything under them, and took his cock in my hand.
He was hard, and already wet at the tip, and when my fist closed around him the sound that came out of him went straight down my spine.
I stroked him slow, my body holding him against the wall, my mouth working the back of his neck and the top of his shoulder.
He cursed and pushed into my hand and then back against me, caught between the two, and after a second, he stopped trying to choose.
His hand came off the wall and reached back and gripped my hip, holding on, keeping me where I was.
His breath had gone loud in the quiet room.
I kept the pace slow on purpose, my thumb dragging over the wet head of him on the upstroke, and every time I did it his hips jerked and a desperate whine came out of him.
This was still new ground for him. Being handled like this, taken apart standing up with no say in the pace, no room to run the conversation the way he ran every other one.
He’d had a handful of nights with me and none before me with a man, and even now, even hard and leaking in my fist, part of him was deciding whether he was allowed to want it this badly.
The noises he was making answered the question for him.
He was loud when he stopped holding it back.
I could smell him, the day on him, sweat and the last of his cologne and under it just Ryan, the smell I’d been sleeping a wall away from and not allowed to reach.
I put my teeth against the muscle where his neck met his shoulder, and he swore and pushed his ass back into me, and I ground against him through what was left of my clothes and let him feel exactly how much I’d wanted this.
“Christ.” His forehead dropped to the wall. “Luke. Slow down or this is going to be over in a minute.”
“I don’t mind.”
“No way! We just started. Don’t you dare!”
I eased off him, and not because he told me to. Because I wanted the rest of it more than I wanted to win.
He took the pause and turned it against me.
He shoved off the wall and twisted around inside my arms, fast, all of it decided, kicking free of his pants where they’d caught at his ankles, and then he was facing me.
Naked. Flushed all the way down his chest, mouth wet, breathing like he’d run up the stairs.
Whatever had been uncertain in him against the wall was gone.
“My turn,” he said, and put his hands on my clothes.
He went at them without patience. My shirt he shoved up and off, and a button gave somewhere and neither of us looked for it.
He got my belt open with more speed than care and my pants down my hips, and his hands went everywhere he could reach while he did it, my chest, my sides, the muscle of my stomach, rough-palmed and greedy.
He got a hand around me once I was free of everything, just once, a slow pull that had me swearing, and then he let go before it could turn into its own thing, saving it, saving me for the rest of what he had in mind.
Then he put both hands flat on my chest and pushed, and I let him walk me backward until the backs of my knees hit the mattress.
He pushed again. I sat, and then I lay back, because that was where he wanted me.
Letting Ryan put me where he wanted me was its own kind of wicked, and I knew it, and I never told him so because he’d be insufferable about it.
Nobody at 51 would have believed how easily I went down for him.
All day I was the steady one, the one people brought the bad news to, and here I was flat on my own bed because the man I loved had a hand on my chest and a look on his face.
I’d have stayed there all night if he asked. I’d have stayed there longer than that.
He climbed onto the bed and straddled me, settling his weight down over my hips, and I got my first full look at him like that.
Hair I’d wrecked. Mouth swollen. His chest working, his cock hard against his stomach, all enhanced in the dim light.
He was solid through the shoulders and softer at the waist where the desk years had gone, and there was a scar on his ribs I’d asked about once and gotten a shrug for, and I wanted all of it, more than I’d wanted anything in a long time.
He looked down at me and took his time about it, the way he hadn’t let himself look across ten feet of squad room.
“You look like a wet dream,” I said.
He huffed something that was almost a laugh. “You should see it from up here.”
“I can see plenty from down here.”
“Then stop narrating it.”
He leaned over to the nightstand and came back with the lube and the strip of condoms. He dropped the condoms on my chest and pressed the bottle into my hand, and then he braced himself over me on one forearm and kissed me while I got my fingers slick.
The kiss stayed hard right up until my hand went behind him and touched him, and then it came apart, and he set his forehead down against mine and breathed through the first of it.
I took my time. I always did, at this part, and he never let me forget it.
“I’m not going to break,” he said, against my mouth.
“I know.”
“You always do this. You act like I’m made of glass.”
“I act like I want it to be good for you.”
“It is good, it is good!” His breath snagged when I pushed the first finger into him, slow, and whatever he’d been building didn’t get finished. I felt him take it, the first resistance and then the give, his forehead pressing harder against mine and a low sound working out of him.
One finger, easy, my other hand spread across his lower back.
He was tight at first, and then he wasn’t, easing as he stopped bracing and started wanting it, and after a minute he was moving on my hand on his own, rocking back, taking it deeper than I was giving it.
His cock dragged against mine every time he rolled his hips, both of us leaking now, neither of us doing a thing about it, because leaving it was better than fixing it.
He kept kissing me in pieces, breaking it every time my hand did something he liked, coming back to it crooked and unfinished.
A second finger, and he made a low rough sound into my jaw and pushed back hard.
“More,” he said. “Come on, Luke, more.”
“You’re rushing me.”
“I have been very patient.” His hips ground down onto my hand, which made a liar of him. “Way too much. Give me the third.”
I gave him the third when his body was ready for it and not a second before, and he swore at me for the wait, and then he swore in a completely different register when I crooked my fingers and found the spot that shut him up.
After that he stopped fighting the pace and started riding my hand in earnest, working himself down onto it, his thighs beginning to shake where they gripped my hips, sweat starting in the hollow of his throat and running.
“Enough.” He reached back and pulled himself off my hand, breathing hard. “Enough. I’m done, I mean it.”
He grabbed the strip off my chest, tore one packet loose, and got it open.
He rolled the condom down onto me himself, both hands, watching my face the whole time, and whatever he found there put a look on his own I’d have done a lot to keep.
He slicked me with what was left on his fingers, tossed the bottle somewhere we’d find in the morning, and rose up on his knees over me.
He reached down and lined me up and held there, just the head of me pressed against him, and looked at me.
“Come home,” he said.
That was going to be my line, some night. He got to it first.
He sank down onto me slow.