He clicked the bedside lamp on. The soft yellow bulb caught the duvet and the geometric line of his sleeve. He looked at me the way he looked at code that was about to do something irreversible. Reading every variable.
“Sit with me.”
We sat on the edge of the bed side by side. He turned my face to his with his fingertips, gentle, as though I might bolt.
“At any second,” he said. “If you change your mind. We stop. We do hands. We do mouths. We do nothing. We watch a documentary I won’t pay attention to. Anything.”
I laughed. The laugh broke.
“Same.”
We undressed each other the way we’d learned to in the last few weeks, careful and not careful, the buckles and the buttons. He kissed every inch he uncovered. The Libre tattoo. The line of muscle along my hip.. My cock came free hard already, the PA wet at the tip from the last twenty minutes of him kissing me on the couch. His own came free a beat after, the upwardcurve more pronounced when he was this hard, the head of him a deep flushed pink.
When we were skin to skin, he held me a long time. Didn’t move. Just held. His chest against my chest. My forehead against his throat. His pulse pounding into my temple.
His nipple barbells warmed between us. Two small points of steel I let myself feel. His cock was hard against my stomach, leaking already at the tip where the warm wet of him smeared on my skin. Mine was hard against his hip, the metal at my tip catching the amber light, the brown of my shaft a clear dark line against the pale of him.
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
He eased me back against the pillow. Drew my knees up. Let them fall open. The lamp threw golden hues across my thighs and the inside of my hip.
He moved between my legs, propped himself on one elbow, his free hand slowly moving up my chest. His other hand drifted down between my thighs, palm flat against the soft skin of my inner thigh, not pressing yet, just there.
“Tell me everything. The whole way through.”
“I’ll tell you everything.”
He reached past me to the drawer. Found the lube. Slicked his fingers slowly, watching me watch him, the bottle clicking once against the wood of the nightstand and his hand shaking only enough that I could see it. He warmed the slick between his fingers before he came back to me. I caught the click of his swallowing.
His finger pressed against me first. Just the pad. Circling. Slow. He let me feel him there before he asked anything else of me. Then he pressed in. Slow. So slow it felt like a question repeated until I was sure of the answer. The slick of him eased the way. The stretch was the smallest possible. A breath of pressure where I’d never let anyone be.
I caught his free hand. Pressed it flat against my chest, palm spread over my heart.
“Don’t stop. Just slow.”
“Slow.”
He moved again. Tentative. His eyes never left my face. He was reading me like a text he couldn’t afford to mistranslate. His finger curled, looking for the place he’d been reading about, the place he’d been thinking about, and when he found it my whole body lifted off the mattress.
“Oh.”
He held it. His finger pressed steady on the spot. The heat that climbed up out of my hips was a thing I’d never felt from this angle, and a slow leak of pre-cum ran from the tip of my cock down my own stomach.
“Good?”
“So good.” I rolled my hips down toward his hand, and a sound tore out of my throat I didn’t recognize. High. Unguarded. My thighs fell wider. “Another. When I say.”
He nodded. His free hand stayed on my heartbeat, steadying me as if he was afraid I’d break apart underneath him.
I’d had years to build the story that I was the one who did this to other people. Not the one who got done. Not the one who let himself be so vulnerable. Tonight, Ellis was asking that of me. Without asking. Every breath.
“Another,” I managed.
He added the second finger, and I lifted my head off the pillow, caught his shoulder with my mouth, bit down on his bare skin, just the taste of him. Just to anchor. The stretch this time was real. His fingers spread inside me slow, the slick of the lube and the warmth of him filling a place that had been mine alone for my entire life. He kept his eyes on my face. He moved when I breathed.
“Ellis.” His name cracked in mythroat. “Ellis.”
