“There’s a word for what I am. Demisexual. I’ve had it for years. My therapist didn’t hand it to me like a diagnosis. I found it and it fit, the way a piece of equipment fits when it’s been cut for your hand and nobody else’s. The attraction wasn’t missing and it wasn’t locked and I wasn’t saving it. It just doesn’t start until someone gets all the way in, and nobody ever got all the way in.”
I don’t look away.
“Then it was you. I’ve never wanted anyone before. I want you.”
He’s done this before. He carries a whole framework for it. A man who has wanted and been wanted and learned the steps cold.
I watch the framework set itself down between us. No one has ever handed him a first one. A first one has no steps.
His thumb drags slow across my cheekbone. When he answers, his voice has gone to gravel.
“Okay,” he says. Same word he used for the name, except nothing easy in it now. It lands weighted.
A man who knows exactly what he’s being trusted with.
“Jules. Come here.”
The bed is four steps and my hands aren’t steady, which is new information, because my hands hold under a hundred miles an hour of vulcanized rubber and they don’t shake, and they’re shaking now reaching for the hem of his shirt. He notices. Of course he notices.
“We can slow down,” he says.
“I don’t want slow. I want to stop being nervous and I can’t, so I’d rather just be nervous and have you anyway.”
He gets his shirt over his head and then mine, unhurried, giving my hands something to do that isn’t trembling, and then it’s skin against skin for the first time and the nerves go sideways into something with more current in it. The lamp stays on because I want to see. He stretches back against the pillows and lets me look, lets me take inventory the way I take inventory of everything. The breadth of his shoulders. The cut of his hips. The hard line of his cock flushed dark against his stomach, already wet at the slit, already like that because of me. I made that happen. I’ve spent my whole life certain the part of me that could want this was simply absent, and there’s the proof I was wrong, straining toward me in the lamplight.
“You’re staring,” he says, and his voice isn’t steady either.
“I’m reading.”
“Read with your hands. Please.”
So I do. I put my palm flat on his stomach and feel it jump, and I drag it down through the trail of hair and wrap my fist around his cock and he makes a sound like it’s been pulled out of the bottom of him. I learn him the way I learn everything, bytotal attention, by watching what catches his breath and doing it again to confirm the read. A slow stroke to the head and back. The drag of my thumb through the slick gathering at the tip, spreading it down, and his hips lifting off the bed to chase my hand.
“Like that?”
“Tighter. God, Jules, just like that, where did you.”
“From you. Ten seconds ago. I’m a fast study and you’re easy to read.”
“I’m not usually.” He laughs, ragged, undone already. “You’re going to ruin me, you know that. You’re already ruining me and you’ve barely.”
I want more than my hand on him. The want arrives complete and certain, same engine as my reads, no hesitation once I see it, and I slide down the bed before I can let the nervous part of me build a case against it. He gets a hand in my hair, not pushing, just there.
“You don’t have to,” he says. “I mean it. Don’t do anything to prove something.”
“I’m not proving anything. I want to know what you taste like.” It comes out flat and certain, flat and unsanded, how the true things always leave me, and I watch it land on him like a hit.
And then I take him in my mouth, and the first thing is the heat of him, the weight of him on my tongue, the salt of him at the tip, and the second thing is the sound Lundy makes, low and broken, my name in it. I understand all at once that the focus I’m running right now isn’t the loop, not the counting, not the pattern that dogs me. This is appetite, finally lit. Orientation in motion. The same faculty, maybe, but aimed by want instead of driven by alarm, and the difference is total. I’m not nervous anymore. I’m the most certain I’ve ever been off a sheet of ice. I take him deeper and learn the limit and work back from it,listening with my whole body to what makes his breath stutter, building the read in real time and giving it back to him better.
“Look at you,” he breathes, watching me with his control already coming apart at the seams. “Look at you, you’re, fuck, Jules, you’re a natural, of course you are. You’re thorough at everything.”
I hum around him because I can’t answer with my mouth full and because I want to feel him jerk when I do, and he does, and his hand fists tighter in my hair without pulling, and the noises he’s making are the least managed thing I’ve ever heard from him. Then he’s tugging me up, gentle and insistent.
“Come here, come up here, I want, I need to do you too, I’m not finishing without my mouth on you.”
He rolls us so I’m under him, his weight settling down the whole length of me, and he braces on a forearm and looks at me until I can’t look away.
“Nobody’s ever gotten to do this for you,” he says, and it isn’t a question, it’s a thing he’s holding carefully. “Let me be the one nobody. Let me make your first one good.”
