“Now,” Adrian said. “Milo, I’m ready. Now.”
Milo slicked himself with shaking fingers. Adrian’s legs came up, knees bent, and Milo lined himself up and Adrian’s hand found his forearm and gripped and Milo pushed in.
Slow. Inch by inch. The tight wet heat of Adrian’s body opening around him and Milo’s arms shook and his breath came out in a ragged exhale and he stopped halfway because the sensation was so intense he was going to come if he didn’t. Adrian’s hand on his forearm was gripping hard enough to leave bruises and Adrian’s face was open, jaw loose, eyes closed, the look of a man being filled and wanting more.
“All of it,” Adrian said. “Give me all of it.”
Milo pushed the rest of the way in and bottomed out and they both groaned, the sound filling the room. He held there, buried, feeling Adrian around him, the grip and the heat and the pulse of Adrian’s body adjusting. Adrian’s eyes opened and found his and Adrian’s hand came to Milo’s face, palm against his cheek, paint-stained thumb at the corner of his mouth.
“There you are,” Adrian said.
Milo pulled back and thrust in and Adrian’s head went back and his legs wrapped around Milo’s waist and his heels dug into Milo’s lower back pulling him deeper. Milo set a rhythm, careful at first, learning the angle, and when he shifted his hips and Adrian cried out and his nails dug into Milo’s shoulders Milo knew he’d found it and he kept that angle and drove into it.
Adrian was loud. Milo hadn’t expected that. Every thrust pulled a sound out of him, low groans building into something higher and more desperate, and Adrian’s hands were everywhere, Milo’s back, his shoulders, his ass, pulling him harder, and Milo gave him harder. He braced his hands on the mattress and fucked into Adrian with everything his body had and the bed slammed against the wall and the headboard knocked in rhythm and Adrian was saying “yes” and “there” and “harder” and “don’t you dare stop” and Milo didn’t stop.
Adrian reached between them and wrapped his hand around his own cock and started stroking, fast, and Milo watched. Adrian’s paint-stained fingers wrapped around himself, his wrist snapping on every upstroke, and the sight of it, Adrian touching himself while Milo was inside him, was the most obscene and beautiful thing Milo had ever seen.
“I’m close,” Milo said, and his voice broke. “Adrian, I’m—”
“Come,” Adrian said. “Let me feel it.”
Milo buried himself deep and came with his forehead pressed to Adrian’s chest and Adrian’s name in his mouth, wrecked, the orgasm ripping through him in waves that shook his arms andhis legs and his jaw and the sound he made was raw and loud and he didn’t hold any of it back. He kept rocking into Adrian through the aftershocks, and Adrian stroked himself faster and then Adrian came with a shout, back arching, cum hitting his stomach and Milo’s chest, his body clenching around Milo’s cock and pulling another groan out of him.
Milo collapsed. Face in Adrian’s neck. Adrian’s arms around him. Both of them covered in sweat and cum and breathing like they’d just played overtime. The narrow bed held them because it had no choice.
The radiator knocked once and went quiet.
Milo lay on his back. Adrian beside him, the narrow bed not allowing distance, which meant Milo didn’t have to decide whether to close the gap because the gap didn’t exist. Adrian’s breathing slowed against his shoulder. The work light in the other room threw a faint warm glow through the doorway, catching the edges of the canvases stacked in the hall.
He looked at the ceiling. A crack in the plaster ran from the light fixture toward the corner. A canvas across the room, blues and ochres working through each other. An art book on the bedside table, face-down, spine cracked, a paint-stained receipt holding the page. A t-shirt on the chair with a handprint of cadmium yellow on the hem. Above the dresser, the print his mother had sent, bright and saturated, and close enough now to read the backing card in a woman’s handwriting:It’s not too much, is it?
Milo’s apartment had none of this. No cracks, no paint on the floor, no art books with stained receipts, no cadmium yellow handprints, no mother’s handwriting asking a question that was really love. His apartment had white walls and a refrigerator that hummed and a bed that was good for recovery and nothing else.
This bed was good for something else.
Adrian’s hand came to rest on Milo’s chest. Palm flat, the weight easy, paint-stained fingers settling over the place where his heartbeat was. Black pigment in the creases, blue under one nail.
He didn’t move it.
He didn’t want to.
Adrian
Adrian woke up knowing someone else was in the bed before he opened his eyes.
Milo’s jacket was on the floor. The mattress dipped on the side that wasn’t Adrian’s, and the room had the sound of two people breathing in it instead of one, and Adrian lay there and let himself have about four seconds of just feeling good before his brain started its morning briefing on all the ways this could go wrong.
He turned his head. Milo was on his back with his forearm over his eyes, jaw unclenched, face holding nothing. Adrian had been watching that jaw clench for months across a bar and he’d never seen it like this. Just a face. Just a person sleeping in his bed. His chest did something warm and inconvenient and he got up before it could get any worse.
Cold floor through his socks. The creak of the board before the bedroom doorway, which he stepped around. He made coffee in the kitchen corner of the studio, the French press and the two-burner, and the smell filled the room and mixed with the turpentine and the linseed oil, which was what his mornings smelled like, except usually without the part where a professional hockey player was asleep in his bed.
He stood with his coffee and looked at the painting on the east wall.
The morning light through the north windows was different from the work lamp. Colder, flatter, no flattering warmth. The painting in this light was just the painting as it was, and the painting was finished, and the man it was a painting of was forty feet away with his forearm over his eyes.
Adrian drank his coffee.
His brain, helpfully, offered him the ex. Not the face. He’d stopped keeping the face. What his brain offered was the morning feel of it. A different apartment, narrower windows, the blinds always drawn. Himself lying rigid in someone else’s bed, calculating the distance to his shoes. Three years of mornings like that, each one teaching him the same lesson, which was that lying frozen in someone’s bed while they figured out how to explain you was not a thing he was built to survive twice.
