I moved in him slow. Long deep strokes. The slick on my cock made me slide easy. His own cock was hard against his stomach. I reached around and got my hand on him, slick from the lube on my fingers, and worked him in time with my hips.
“Tell me when,” Imurmured at his ear.
“Not yet. I want to.”
“Switch?”
“Yeah. Don’t come yet. I want you to.”
“Yeah.”
I pulled out of him slow. The slip of me pulling free pulled a small sound out of both of us. He turned in my arms, kissed me hard, tasted himself and me on each other’s mouths.
We rolled when he asked for it. He moved over me. The streetlight caught the geometric line of his sleeve. He took his time.
I watched him slick his cock above me, the curve up wet and shining in the streetlight, the head a deep flushed pink. He pressed my knees back and lined up. The blunt head of him pressed against me. The slick of him meeting the slick of me. The stretch when he pushed in slow was the familiar one now, his cock filling me the way it had been filling me for months, his curve up hitting that spot inside me on every retreat.
He bottomed out. His hips against me. His cock buried deep. His palm spread over my heart the way it always did.
The slow drag of every push. The hot wet of every retreat. The way the curve of his cock found that spot inside me on every thrust. The way his free hand wrapped around me, slick from lube and my own pre-cum, and worked me in time with his hips. My cock leaking onto my own stomach, my breath broken open in his apartment that was our apartment.
He came with my hand on him, and I followed him over a beat after. His cock pulsed thick inside me. The come of him filled me in long warm pulses that rolled all the way through my body. Mine pulsed thick in his fist, the come spilling hot across my stomach and onto his fingers, the metal at my tip catching the streetlight in a bright wet flash. We stayed tangled on the floor mattress for a long time after, breathing each other in. The streetlight moved across the ceiling as a car passed. The come of both of us pooled where my hip met the sheet. The wet of him slowly leaking out of me down my thigh. The apartment was a ridiculous mess of boxes, someone’s sage, and our love.
Eventually, he laughed.
“What?”
“There’s no towel for cleanup. I packed them in the bathroom box.”
“The bathroom box?”
“I didn’t put a towel in the bedroom essentials box.”
“Ellis.”
He stumbled out to the kitchen wrapped in the duvet. I lay there on the floor mattress in the streetlight in the apartment we’d chosen and watched the doorway he disappeared through. The Jack Jr. cutting Ellis had given me earlier sat on the windowsill of the kitchen, a small terracotta pot the size of my fist, the cutting still pathetic, still doing its thing.
I stared at it through the doorway and thought: chosen.
Twice now.
He came back with a towel, a glass of water, and a grin and crawled back onto the mattress next to me. Pressed his forehead to mine. Didn’t say anything at all.
He didn’t need to.
Chapter forty-three
One Year Later
Foundation Fitness smelled like rubber, sweat, and the particular hope that came from people trying to be better versions of themselves. Ellis was on the bench press, form still slightly off despite a year of my unsolicited commentary.
“Your elbows are doing that thing,” I said, sitting on the adjacent bench with my water bottle. “That aggressive thing. You’re bench pressing like you’re trying to prove something.”
He racked the weights. “I’m just trying to press, Jett.”
“Sure, but you’re doing it like the weights personally insulted your family.”
He laughed. It came easy now. Everything came easy, or at least easier. The year sat differently when someone carried it with you.
