The lean muscle I discovered in the gym is warm under my palms. I press my fingers into the definition along his ribs and feel his breath hitch, and the sound of it, the small involuntary response from a man who controls every variable he can reach, sends heat pooling low and liquid between my legs.
"You're shaking," he says.
"I'm not." I am. My hands tremble against his ribs, and the tremor isn't fear or cold. It's the particular vibration of a system running without firewalls for the first time. Every signal unfiltered. Every response unencrypted.
"Liar." His mouth curves against my collarbone. He unclasps my bra with one hand and the competence of the motion shouldn't be as arousing as it is, but Tommy's competence has been the thing undoing me since the day I watched him type.
His mouth finds my breast. Tongue circling my nipple with slow, focused attention, and I arch into him, my hand fisting in his hair, a sound leaving my throat that I don't authorize and can't retrieve. He responds to the sound by sucking harder, his hand finding my other breast, thumb working the peak until both nipples are tight and aching and my hips are pressing up against him in a rhythm I can't control.
I can feel him hard against my thigh. The length of him, the heat of him through two layers of fabric, and the knowledge that Tommy Hale is this hard because of me, because of my body and my sounds and the way I pull his hair. It registers as a data point that short-circuits every analytical function I own.
He kisses down my sternum. My belly. His fingers hook into my shorts and pull them down along with my underwear, and the cool air against how wet I am makes me gasp.
His mouth finds the inside of my thigh. Lingers. The pulse point there is rapid and exposed, and the way he presses his lips against it feels like reading my vital signs through skin.
I am done being read.
I hook my leg around his hip and reverse our positions. The move is inelegant, more wrestling than seduction, and the surprise on his face is worth every graceless second.
"My turn," I say from above him.
His hands find my hips. Bare skin against bare skin, his palms wide and warm, and from this angle I can see his face completely. The hunger in it, unfiltered, unhidden. His eyes track down my body with the focus of a man running diagnostics on something he can't believe is real.
"By all means," he says, and his voice is already rough.
I take my time. Learn the planes of his chest with my mouth the way he learned mine. Trace the ridge of muscle along his abdomen with my tongue and feel his hands fist in the sheets. When I reach the waistband of his jeans, I undo the button with the same efficiency I bring to everything and pull them down, and the briefs follow because patience is a resource I've exhausted.
He's hard and thick and straining, and the sight of him sends a clench through my core that I feel in my teeth. I wrap my hand around him and his hips jerk, a groan tearing out of him that sounds nothing like the man who runs comms for an entire team.
I lower my mouth. Take him in slowly, my tongue tracing the underside, tasting salt and heat, and his hand finds my hair but doesn't push. Just holds. His fingers trembling in my rainbow strands while I learn what makes him fall apart.
"Dar." His voice is wrecked. "Fuck. Your mouth."
I take him deeper. Hollow my cheeks. Find a rhythm that makes his breathing fracture into something ragged and desperate, his hips lifting off the mattress in aborted thrusts he's trying to control and failing. I catalog every response with the same precision I bring to code: the way his thighs tense when I swirl my tongue, the sound he makes when I press the flat of it against the head, the specific rhythm that makes his hand tighten in my hair until the pull stings.
"If you're trying to kill me," he manages, "it's working."
I pull off long enough to look up at him. His face is flushed, his eyes blown dark, his chest heaving. He looks destroyed in the best possible way.
"If I were trying to kill you, you'd be dead. This is research."
"Your research methodology is going to end this before it starts."
"Then tell me to stop."
He doesn't tell me to stop. His head drops back against the pillow and his hand tightens in my hair and I take him deep again, working him with my mouth and my hand together until his breathing is a wreck and his abs are clenched tight and the sounds coming out of him have abandoned language entirely.
When I feel him getting close, the tension in his thighs and the stutter in his hips, he reaches down and pulls me up. The motion is strong enough to surprise me because Tommy is not supposed to be able to maneuver me with casual precision, and the fact that he can makes my breath stutter every time.
He reverses our positions. Settles between my thighs, and the full-body contact, his weight pressing me into the mattress, his cock hard and slick against my inner thigh, makes me whimper. The sound is involuntary and I don't care because caring requires bandwidth I've allocated elsewhere.
His hand slides between my legs. Fingers stroking through the wetness there, and my hips buck at the contact because I've been aching since he took off his glasses and now the ache has a specific, urgent location that his fingers find with devastating accuracy.
"You're soaked," he says against my ear, and the wonder in his voice makes me clench around nothing.
"Observation noted. Are you going to do something about it or compile a report?"
He laughs against my neck, low and warm, and slides two fingers inside me. My back arches. His thumb finds my clit and circles with the same deliberate precision he gives his keyboards, and the combination makes my vision white out at the edges.
