This kiss had decided.
Sterling kissed like a man who had been arguing with himself for months and had finally, irrevocably, lost: thorough, unhurried, consuming.
His mouth was hot, his stubble rough against my jaw, and one hand slid into my hair and gripped, fingers threading through the damp strands with a certainty that made my knees do something they hadn’t planned on.
I made a sound. Short, involuntary, the kind of noise that comes from somewhere behind your sternum when you’ve stopped censoring yourself, and Sterling swallowed it and kissed me harder.
His tongue found mine, slow and deliberate, and the taste of him—coffee and something darker, something that was just Sterling—hit the back of my throat and stayed there.
My hands found his chest. The scars, the tattoos, the hard planes of muscle I’d been thinking about with embarrassing frequency since approximately the first week, when I’d walked past the bathroom and caught him shirtless and hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it for three consecutive days. The heat of him came through the thin cotton of his Henley, and I grabbed the hem and pulled.
Sterling broke the kiss just long enough to let me drag the shirt over his head, one arm, then the other, the fabric catching on his shoulders and then releasing. My shirt was next, and then we were skin to skin at the chest, my palms flat against the warm map of him—the eight-pack, the slick muscle, the occasional scar that had a story attached to it that he would never tell and I had stopped asking about.
He looked down at me. Really looked. His eyes dark in the low light, the green nearly black, and something in his face was not the careful blankness he carried through the world.
It was the thing underneath the blankness, open and a little wrecked, like a door that had been kept shut for so long the hinges had rusted, and now it was open and the draft was colder than he’d expected.
“You can touch me,” I said.
“I know,” Sterling said.
Then his hands were everywhere. Sterling mapped me the way he mapped topographic terrain—focused, methodical, with the specific attention of a man who intended to remember every detail. His thumbs dragged across my nipples, rough calluses against sensitive skin, and my breath hitched before I could stop it.
He did it again. Deliberate. Watching my face with those dark green eyes that registered everything and gave back nothing except the quiet satisfaction of a man who had just confirmed a hypothesis.
“There,” Sterling said. Quiet. Like he was filing it away.
“You’re going to be insufferable about this,” I said.
“Probably,” he said, and kissed me before I could respond, his mouth warm and certain against mine, one hand still on my chest, thumb circling with a precision that made my hips shift without permission.
He walked me backward to the bed. Not rushed. Not hurried. Sterling didn’t hurry; he moved with the long, unhurried stride that covered ground at a pace that still surprised me, and now that stride was directed at getting me horizontal, and I was entirely on board with the plan. His hands on my shoulders were firm, guiding, the care in them not softening the intent behind them one bit.
He laid me down. The sheets were cool against my back, the mattress firm underneath—Sterling’s bed, built for one person who didn’t believe in luxury, and now holding two, which was exactly the kind of arithmetic I’d been hoping for.
Sterling stood at the edge of the mattress and looked at me. Just looked me, slim and slight against the sheets, flannel shirt open, skin warm in the lamplight.
Sterling Callahan, six-three and broad-shouldered and scarred, standing perfectly still, was looking at me like I was the only thing in the room. Like he had been looking at this room for a long time and had only just been allowed inside.
“You’re allowed to keep going,” I said.
“I’m aware,” Sterling said.
He didn’t move for three full seconds. Pure Sterling—operating on his own timeline, always, demonstrating that the timeline belonged to him and not to the man currently lying on his bed with his heart doing something complicated behind his ribs.
Then he got his hands on my jeans and stripped them off in one smooth motion, the fabric sliding down my thighs, andthe cool air hit my skin and then Sterling’s hand was wrapping around my cock and—
“Holy shit,” I said, or something like it. My hips came off the mattress before my brain caught up to what was happening, and Sterling’s grip was firm and warm and exactly the right amount of pressure, and he stroked once, slow, from base to tip, and my entire nervous system short-circuited.
“Easy,” Sterling said. It came out rough. His voice had dropped that particular half-octave that meant he was working harder than he wanted to admit.
“You’re telling me to be easy,” I said, breathless. “You. Sterling Callahan. The man who once stared at a fence post for forty-five minutes because it was two degrees off plumb.”
The corner of his mouth did the thing. That small, stubborn warmth I’d been collecting since week two, spreading from the crease beside his left eye to the whole left side of his face, and it landed in my chest with the clean, tactical certainty of something I had wanted for a very long time.
He did it again. Slow. His thumb dragging over the head of my cock, spreading the wetness there, and I grabbed his wrist, not to stop him, just to hold on to something solid while the room did that thing where it tilted slightly to the left and stayed there.
Sterling watched my face the whole time. Cataloguing.
