8. Seth
Seth
Zach passes out as soon as we get back to our room. For once, the sound of his bourbon-fueled chainsaw snoring is music to my ears.
I wait until Orlov shuts off the lights in the crew mess, then I sneak up the stairs.
The door to the captain’s quarters is unlocked when I get there, so I let myself in. Half-hoping Nick is awake so I can have him to myself for a little while, half-hoping he’s asleep because he deserves the rest.
His bedside light is on, casting a yellow glow over his bare chest while he’s propped up in bed. Writing something in his logbook before he sees me come in and throws it on the night table.
“Hey.” He crawls forward, the blanket falling entirely.
Skin, and more skin. Beneath the covers, he’s not wearing a stitch of clothing.
“Hey,” I breathe, stepping to the foot of the bed and cupping his neck.
He closes his eyes, head falling back as he waits for me to kiss him, but instead I take him in. Weaving my fingers through the soft hair at his nape.
Things were frantic yesterday. I didn’t get to appreciate him like this.
He’s a wall of toned muscle from the physical demands of our job. Rugged, unfiltered beauty. The very kind I live for.
The hair on his chest is a shade or two darker than the golden wheat of his beard, another few shades darker than the blond of his hair, and it forms a river down his abs that fans out into a delta across his chest.
There’s a large birthmark on his lower stomach, between the last swell of abdominal muscle and his hip. I didn’t notice it before, because it’s only a few shades darker than the rest of his skin, but with the light shining directly on his body, I can’t stop staring at it.
It’s shaped like Kodiak Island.
I’ve never been a very spiritual man, but something about that gives me a funny feeling. Like he was always meant to be here. Always meant to be with me.
“Wasn’t sure if you’d come,” he murmurs.
I lean in, breathing him in before I kiss him. “Oh, I’m gonna come. But you’re gonna come first.”
Nick strips me out of the cheap sweats I threw on and pulls me down on top of his chest. Running his hands all over me. He cloaks us in a quilt, the cotton worn-soft and warm from his body.
Even though he tastes like toothpaste, his breath smells like the char and oak of bourbon, and the supple, addictively sloppy way he kisses me tells me he’s still feeling the buzz from earlier.
I can’t say a damn thing. I still feel it, too. My head is spinning as he rolls me onto my side, facing him. Pleasure tingles across my scalp as he sifts his fingers through my hair. It swirls in my lungs as he traces my ribcage.
“No. Wanna kiss you. Want you to feel good with me,” he says against my lips, grinding his dick against mine. “Want you to come with me.”
He slides a hand between us, taking us both in his big, rough palm and squeezing until our moans ring out.
“Fuck, baby, I love your hands on me.”
His cock pulses, and he grips us tighter, another duet of a sound filling the air.
“You like that?” I lick his bottom lip, catching it between my teeth. “Baby?”
“I, hmmm—I—like everything you do.” He shivers, a shy little laugh bubbling up. As if I didn’t already know he’s the sweetest man on the damn planet. “I’ve never been anyone’s baby.”
“Mmm. That’s right. ‘Cause you’re mine.” Always were. You just didn’t know it yet.
“You can’t keep saying shit like that, Rit.” He kisses me too feverishly for me to get a word in edgewise. “I’m too into you. Already thought you were the funniest, nicest, hottest guy I’ve ever met. But the way you fucking talk… that’s gonna kill me.”
I know he’s rambling because he’s a little drunk. But I am too.
“You feel alive to me. You feel hot. You feel hard.” I spread a hand over his racing heart. “Feels like you love it when I talk dirty to you. When I call you Nicky, baby.”
“Seth,” he moans.
“And I love that.”
Nick pumps us. Hard and uncontrolled, but I’m fucking living for it.
Harsh callus against soft skin. The friction, the need.
Nothing else in the world exists. His body is the only sensation I know.
Those strong thighs woven with mine and my name on his lips and the taste of his tongue filling my mouth.
His cock thick and needy, rubbing along where I ache for him.
I could handle him like this, happily. He could give it to me even harder. I’m about to bust all over his stomach from finally getting to touch him after a whole night of holding back—but my wince of pleasure must register as pain, because he lets go and curses.
“Fuck, I’m sorry. Forgot.” He outstretches his arm blindly, knocking a few items onto the floor before he comes back with a bottle of oil. So frazzled that his thumb slides all over the lid before he gets it clicked open.
“We had an agreement about apologizing, remember?” I take the bottle from him, drizzling a generous amount over both of us.
I smooth it over his dick first, pulling his foreskin back and massaging his tip with my thumb until he gasps.
“Relax,” I remind him, kissing him as I guide his hand back to us. “And don’t you dare stop touching me.”
He’s as good at taking orders as he is at giving them.
He melts into me, our bodies locked together in a gyrating push and pull. Messy and inebriated, stripped down to something unrefined and natural. Just us, just bare flesh and roving hands and sounds of pleasure as we kiss and thrust and feel each other.
“Is this how you fuck your hand when you need to take the edge off?” I ask, delirious with the thought of him stroking his cock while I cover for him at the helm.
Panting like this while I’m a half-flight of steps away.
Gripping himself with the same pressure he uses to rub us together.
Thrusting into his fist like he’s thrusting against me until he makes a beautiful mess of himself.
“Yeah. ‘S okay?” he slurs.
“I’m gonna come so hard for you,” I say, trembling with the rising swells of pleasure. “Ever think of me? When you touch yourself?”
My eyes drift open, then his. Hooded and glazed over. Watching his arousal build is like watching the ocean get deeper. A lighter gray-blue rapidly transitioning darker.
“Been four years since I haven’t.”
He feels what that answer does to me. My dick throbs against his. Threads of pre-cum stick to his stomach and his hand.
“What do you think of?” I reach between us, slicking my hand with oil and massaging his balls.
“A lot of things. Everything.” His voice is like a gentle breeze through fishing line.
A barely-there song. “Your hands, your mouth”—he kisses me, his tongue exploring the inside walls of my cheeks—“all over me. My mouth, on you. Gonna think about the way you look when you come… never gonna get it out of my head. So perfect…”
A weak growl rises in the back of my throat. Something belonging to a caged but subdued animal. Wild. Domesticated only by his hand. “Do you ever imagine us fucking?”
“I”—he bites back a brittle sound as my lubed hand slides back to grope his ass—“Yes. Do you?”
“Oh…” I speak barely above the rush of our breathing, lips tethered to the shell of his ear.
“I’m fucking obsessed with your ass, Nicky.
I think about it all the time. I think about grabbing it and taking you balls-deep in my throat.
Spreading it apart and licking you from your cock to your hole. Prying you open with my tongue.”
My hand moves inward, middle finger sliding down his crack and resting against his hole. “Sinking into your ass and feeling you come all over my cock.”
Nick brings his other hand to where the first can’t reach, groping us both as he strokes more frantically. His muscles tremble as our hips push and grind. Our mouths seek each other, seek closeness, seek a hold on this tangible want filling the space between us.
I circle his hole with my finger, cock pulsing and leaking all over his hand. My body begs me to let go, to come, as he groans and bucks his hips.
“I’ve thought about you fucking me, too,” I pant. “However you want it, it doesn’t matter to me. As long as I can make you feel good.”
“Yes.” His breaths pick up, his biceps twitching as he jerks us. “To everything. Want to feel you…”
I nudge my finger inside a little more, and his body eagerly accepts the slow push. First knuckle. Second. All the way.
Who’s undone first is anyone’s guess. Him, by the way I angle my finger to graze his prostate with each movement of his hips, or me, by the way he reacts. The way his ass clenches my finger and he spills his groans into my mouth like he gets off on me swallowing them.
The orgasm sinks its hooks into me and drags me under as his cum paints my stomach, his grip relaxing and my finger withdrawing.
And then we’re back exactly where we began. Unable to stop kissing, touching. Cum and sweat sticking to our skin as we press as close as two people can be. More drunk on each other than we are on whiskey.
I run my fingers through his hair, my lips drifting to his nose, his cheeks, and I pretend for a second that I’m going to fall asleep like this. We’re going to wake up beneath the quilt, still wrapped in each other, and I’m going to kiss him good morning instead of good night.
If tonight’s taught me anything, it’s that four years of building Nick up in my head still didn't do any justice to the way I feel when we’re together.
I want to hold his hand in public. To kiss him when he’s smiling about ruining my reign of terror at darts. I want to brag to everyone I know about how this amazing man thinks I’m the “funniest, nicest, hottest guy” he’s ever met.
But I also know, before he ever told me, that Nick is under enough pressure. The success of this fishing season, the safety of his crew, the standard of perfection he holds himself to.
He needs relief. He needs a place where he doesn’t have to worry about a single goddamned thing, and that place is right here. Because that’s what he’s always been for me. Shelter.
“Rit?” he says, stroking my hip.
“Yeah?”
“I played a lot of fucking darts this summer.”
The admission catches me so off guard, a laugh bursts out of me.
He turns his head, covering half of his smile with a pillow. “I bought a board. Practiced every night.”
“Wanted to win that badly, huh?”
The fabric rustles as he shakes his head. “I thought if I could get good enough, you’d want to play me more often. I’d have an excuse to be around you… Jesus, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. It’s pathetic.”
I press my lips to his. “I’ve never accidentally stolen your crew radio. It was just the easiest excuse to come back and see you. I had a once-per-season limit though, so I wouldn’t do it too much and make you think I was disorganized. How’s that for pathetic?”
He blinks back at me, his smile widening. “Come up with a different excuse next time. That shit’s annoying and a safety hazard.”
“Why do you think I only did it when we were running and the seas were flat?”
A breath whooshes out of him as I roll over on top of him, taking his hands and stretching his arms over his head. Trailing my fingers down the insides of his forearms, his biceps. Brushing my thumbs over his nipples until they harden.
I lean in and kiss him, trying and failing not to let my hips sink into his. “I should get back to my room before Perry notices I’m gone.”
Nick brushes my cheek with his thumb, hesitating. “Wish you could stay.”
I wish he’d tell me to stay, but neither of us are sober enough to make that choice.
“Me too.” I force myself out of his bed, the cold setting in immediately. “Sadly, my roommate calls. If you listen closely, you can hear him from here. That’s not the bilge pump, believe it or not.”
Nick chuckles, sitting up on his elbows as he watches me wash myself off in the sink.
“Repairs should be done tomorrow. You can let the guys know nobody is going out again. Captain’s orders.
We’re running back out to that hotspot and it’s supposed to be rough.
I can’t have my entire crew blowing chunks over the gunwale. ”
“Will do.” I step into my sweatpants. “You made their whole season tonight, you know. Pretty sure there won’t be any complaints.”
“They’d be happy if anyone beat you.”
“True enough. Everyone’s gunning for you when you’re at the top.” I pull my hoodie over my head. “But they’re just happy you were there. I know you don’t think of yourself as Mr. Life-of-the-Party, but you don’t have to be. They like you as you are. They look up to you.”
“You think?”
“I know.” Because I feel the same way. I go to the side of the bed again, bending over to press my lips to his forehead. “Night, Nicky.”
He clasps my arm, holding my eyes for one last moment before he lets go. “Goodnight, Rit.”