Doyle laughed, easy and carefree.“I feel really good.And I feel even better knowing we’re so sexually compatible.”
Larkin snorted.“I’ve been told I don’t give off top energy.”
Doyle pushed up.He leaned over Larkin and murmured, “Anyone who’s told you that is obviously not a bottom with only a small domination kink.”
“Small domination kink,” Larkin repeated, brows raised.
Doyle nodded, and he slowly drew one leg over Larkin in order to straddle his hips.“I’m not talking whips and chains.But I know what I like.”
Larkin ran his hands up Doyle’s haired thighs.“And what’s that.”
Doyle leaned down, their mouths a breath apart, and he whispered, “Being climbed like a tree.”
“Jesus Christ, Ira.”
Doyle laughed again, louder, and heat and smoke coiled in Larkin’s belly like a live snake.“How’d you figure it out?”
“How did I know you… wanted to be climbed,” Larkin slowly clarified.“When you flirt, you utilize a combination of physical and playful techniques, which are inherently more sexual in nature than what’s seen in the sincere, traditional, or polite methods.But you don’t go on the offense.You flirt to get a rise.”
“You can’t say it didn’t work.”
“Clearly.”Larkin stroked Doyle’s thighs again and said, “But I knew for certain after I mentioned the need to handcuff you when we were at the Property Clerk’s warehouse.”
Doyle’s gaze momentarily rose upward, in a way that was typical of someone trying to recall a memory.He said suddenly, “Wait, that was you flirting back?”
“I wasn’t flirting—I was being serious.You’re very handsy.”
“Oh my God,” Doyle moan-laughed.“I didn’t anticipate you being such a tease.”He took Larkin’s face into both hands and kissed him.Doyle began rolling his hips, nice and slow, breaking the kiss to ask, “This all right?”
“Yeah.”
He kept up the steady friction, the kissing, the touching that made Larkin feel intoxicated—all highs, no lows—before saying, “We really should get some sleep.”
At the suggestion, Larkin opened his eyes, blinked against the glow of the touch lamp, and looked down.Doyle was ready.Him, not so much.
“We don’t have to go again,” Doyle insisted.
But Larkin pushed up and encouraged Doyle onto his back.Leaning over him, Larkin put his weight on his right hand and began stroking himself with the left.The sensory experience of their lovemaking was already stored in his long-term memory—the sharp scent of arousal, the taste of sweat, the glide of fingertips on heated skin, the desperate and delicious half-formed pleas Doyle made in the throes of passion, the way he looked like how having sex was a spiritual awakening—and those sensitive memories broke through Larkin’s initial embarrassment and frustration and instead began to provoke a renewed physical interest.
“My recovery time isn’t quite… what it was.”
“It’ll get better.”
When Larkin was ready, he found the lube from within the folds of sheets, and Doyle—legs around Larkin’s waist, their fingers entwined overhead—easily relented.Remembrance and touch explored, delighted in each other, while the room echoed with cries of “love” and gasps of “you,” and Larkin wasn’t sure—didn’t care—who’d said what.
Only that it’d been said.
“I love you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Larkin hadn’t slept—really slept—for a very long time.
It was always in fits, lasting no more than a few hours, brought about by drug dependency or self-induced physical exhaustion, neither of which presented him with any sort of lasting restfulness.He woke tired, irritated, and since last month’s threat against Doyle, afraid.
Afraid that in the handful of minutes he’d try to fit a full night’s rest, some awful terror would befall his partner—something immediate, something that’d produce no sound, no cry to rouse Larkin to action—and so every morning, he woke with an uncontrollable sense of dread, certain he’d find Doyle dead beside him.It’d begun as an obsessive thought that had since manifested into a physical tic he couldn’t quite contain, like a man forced to witness the same atrocity day in and day out, but each and every time he’d flinch, refusing to be conditioned.
So when Larkin sluggishly came to the next morning, belatedly registering the scratch of chest hair against his back and the weight of an arm draped over him, he lurched violently, turned so quickly that he ended up elbowing Doyle in the face.
