He sits up. The duvet falls to his waist and keeps going, and I see the scratches on his left arm, mine, and his cock half-hard against his thigh because panic doesn’t reach below the waist at this hour.
I look.
He follows my gaze and grabs the duvet.
Too late, mate.
‘This. We can’t. I should have?—’
‘But you didn’t.’ I stay where I am. Legs crossed, calm, wearing borrowed calm like I’m wearing his boxers. ‘And neither did I.’
I lean forward and kiss him. Slow, soft. Nothing like the hallway. A question where last night was a statement.
He doesn’t pull back. He brings his hand up—reflex, not decision—and cups the back of my head, and the gentleness of the kiss is worse than everything that came before it. The violence I have a category for. The tenderness is?—
My hand is under the duvet. He’s still half-hard, and when I close my fingers around him, the sound he makes into my mouth is not a protest, no matter how many syllables he gives it afterwards.
‘Shower,’ I say against his lips. ‘Come on.’
His shower is narrow, the spray too hot, the steam thick enough to blur the edges of everything. The closeness of him when he reaches for the soap. My hip against his when I turn. Nothing accidental.
I kneel.
The tile is hard, and the water hits my back, and his cock is in my mouth, the taste of his skin sharper through the steam. He has one hand on the wall, the other in my hair, not pushing, just there, the touch of a man too wrecked to guide and too far gone to let go.
He comes, I swallow. Stand. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.
Laurence doesn’t reach for the towel.
He finds my eyes through the steam. ‘My turn,’ he says. Then he goes down.
I, what?
A man with a PhD. Thirteen years on me. On his knees on the wet tile of his own bathroom, with the water running over both of us.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know.’
The feel of him.
Every blowjob I’ve had has been from lads my age. Functional. Enthusiastic like PornHub teaches: teeth first, no patience. This is different. Slow and then not slow. His hands are on my hips, not grabbing. Holding. The thumbs tracing the bones like he’s reading me. The angle deepens, and he does something with his throat that makes my palm crack against the tile.
Nobody does this.
Nobody stays after. Nobody kneels when it’s already over for them.
This man is on his knees, anchored on my hip, warmth unhurried, and I have no place in this geography except to receive. Looking would shatter it. Closing my eyes would waste it. I have no reference for generosity like this.
I come. My knees go. He catches me, both hands, hip bones, holding me upright through it. When it’s over, he stands and holds me under the water, and I’m shaking, and nothing makes sense.
He holds me. Again.
Kitchen. Coffee. I’m sitting at the table in his joggers and a t-shirt that hangs loose on me. The fabric smells like him, the real him, the soap-and-cotton, and my brain wants to catalogue it, treasure it, which I’m not allowing.
He puts a mug in front of me. Sits down opposite, the coffee goes untouched.
This has to break in the next sixty seconds. I feel it like a lecture hall about to end, the chair backs already shifting, the room preparing to let you back out into the corridor. This is the moment where blokes sayright well, cheers then, and I say,yeah, cheers, and somebody hands somebody a jacket, and the door does the thing doors do.
