We’d been here before. We’d had sex in this apartment on this bed in the version of us that broke. His body knew mine. But that night was different. He moved differently. He looked at me, really looked, not performing, not protecting.
The movie had ended an hour before. We’d been at Calliope’s place, the whole chaotic crew draped across her living room like a Renaissance painting of beautiful disasters. Sierra had her head on Lauren’s shoulder. Raven was explaining the lunar cycle to Ellis, who was actually listening instead of performing interest. Calliope was burning sage that smelled like a funeral home had met an incense factory, and when she waved it toward the windows, I caught Ellis’ eye and didn’t look away.
He’d mouthed, “Your friends are insane.”
I’d mouthed back, “I know.”
On the train ride to his place in Fort Greene, he’d held my hand like he’d earned it. His thumb had traced the inside of my wrist. His head had rested against my shoulder at Lafayette Avenue.
Now, in his apartment, his palm warmed through my shirt.
“Hi.” Such a small word, and the way he looked at me made it hard to breathe.
“Hi yourself.”
I didn’t kiss him. Not yet. I stepped back just enough to take in his face, his whole body, reading him like a map. My hands cupped his cheeks. My thumbs moved across his cheekbones. This close, his eyes revealed their exact shade, the complicated green-brown that shifted in different light. In the half-dark of his apartment, they looked almost black.
“I want,” he started, stopped. Started again. “Can I…”
I knew exactly what he was asking. Not with words. With the way his hands shook at my waist, the way he was giving me an exit door I didn’t want to take. Ellis asking to be had. Asking me to hold him the way no one had bothered.
Instead of answering, I pulled his shirt over his head.
He laughed, a real one, the kind that came from his stomach, and the tension broke akin to a held breath released. My hands found his waist. The bedroom was three steps away, but I took my time walking us there. Not a performance of slowness. Just an actual pace; we weren’t racing toward something, like the destination wasn’t the point.
The bed displayed the same geometric precision Ellis brought to everything. I remembered all the times we’d crashed here, drunk or desperate or both, falling into each other like we were trying to prove something. This wasn’t that.
He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled me between his thighs. His face level with my chest. He traced a line across my ribs. His mouth followed his fingers. Gentle. Open. Like he was reading me in Braille.
I made a sound that wasn’t controlled or curated.
He looked up at me. Pupils blown. Mouth pink from working at my skin. And because I knew the question he couldn’t quite form, I answered the one he hadn’t voiced.
“I’ve got you, baby. Let me.”
He nodded. Once.
I pushed him back onto the mattress, and the rest of our clothes came off without choreography, without the careful self-editing that used to live in every inch of him when we undressed. That night he let me see everything. The scar on his hip from some childhood bike accident. The freckles on his inner thigh. The way his cock curved when it was hard for me, that clean curve upward I’d memorized, the head a deep flushed pink, the slit. The way his throat went red when I pressed my mouth there.
I took my time mapping him. Knees bracketing his hips. Hands moving like I had nowhere else to be. The curve of his collarbone. The soft place under his jaw. The dip of his sternum. The pale skin across his ribs that turned pink when I dragged my teeth across it.
The barbells.
I gave each one its own slow attention with my mouth. Tongue first. Slow circles until the nipple pebbled tight against the steel. The catch of teeth. The gentle tug I knew worked, the one I’d been giving them since the first night I’d seen them. He arched up off the mattress. His hand fisted in my hair. The sound he made traveled through my body like lightning. I worked the second one the same way. Got the rim to match the first. Both nipples pink and tight around the steel.
“You always,” he managed.
“Yeah.”
I stayed there longer than I usually did. Worshipping him. Took my time. I wanted, no needed, him to feel everything. My cock was hard between us, pressed against his thigh. His own cock was wedged between our stomachs, leaking, the curve up bumping the line of his own ribs.
Then I kissed him hard and deep, and he arched into it like a question, and I answered by sliding a hand between his thighs.
“Jett.”
“I know.”
The lube was in the same place as always. Top drawer, left side. My hands shook a little when I uncapped it. Not from nerves. From the weight of what this was. One finger slow, working him open while I kissed the hollow of his throat. Two fingers when he was ready for them, and his breath caught. He’d been thinking about this on the subway, on the couch at Calliope’s, all night. Three when he begged for it.
