Page 172 of These Secret Years

I start with a slow suck down, down, down, licking him and wetting him from his head nearly all the way to his base.

“Fuck,” he cries, his hips shifting slightly beneath me, his hand tightening in my hair.

It’s a good sign, all good signs as I hollow my cheeks and give him a few, bobbing sucks.

“Christ, baby, that feels so fucking good. I miss you so much.”

I wish he hadn’t said that. Fuck me, I wish his lust-drenched brain hadn’t poked at my deepest insecurity just when I was beginning to feel like we were approaching something like an equilibrium. Like normalcy. Like us. In the back of a pickup truck. In a stranger’s house. Now, here in our bed, I feel like I have to prove so much that it feels overwhelming and impossible.

But I don’t stop sucking his dick.

I do, however, close my eyes.

The sounds he makes when I swallow him down, the bursts of salty precum on my tongue are reminders of what we used to be. But as he’s clenching his thighs and warning me in a low rumbling groan, “Baby, I’m gonna come. I’m—fuck, I’m coming,” there it is—my right hand squeezed firmly around his pec, planted once again on his chest like I can’t not try to push him away even when I have him finally back inside me.

“Unnnhhh…oh shit…”

He spills down my throat with a series of grunts and gasps and a lot—a lot of cum. His hand is tight around my wrist, the one attached to my hand on his chest, and I can’t remember if it was there the whole time—if he was the one who put my hand there like it was his way of protecting me from myself.

I don’t ask. I swallow and slide my lips off him, sitting back on my heels to stare down at him.

“What?” he asks, half breathless, as though he’s not loving what he’s seeing on my face.

“We can do more, you know? I don’t need you to always be so careful with me.”

He blinks several times, and then his brow creases at the center. “Are you upset with me?”

Not with him. Never with him, but yes. I am upset. I could have been blowing him this whole time. We could have had something resembling a real relationship, so maybe I’m upset with myself. “It can’t be like this forever. I want to be your fucking boyfriend.”

“You are.”

“Yeah, a shitty one⁠—”

“Sullivan—”

“Knight, if we’re gonna stay together⁠—”

“Wait—if? What are you saying, are you⁠—”

I cut him off, needing to get this off my chest. “If we’re gonna stay together, you’re gonna have to deal with all of me, the same way I need to deal with all of you.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means you might have to try and do this my way.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

KNIGHT

Sullivan is angry again, and I’d say he has every right to be, but I’m angry, too. What he asked me to do tonight was not okay. For the last three months we’ve been doing better, and it should be making me happy, on top of the world with how well I’ve been playing. But Sullivan is increasingly not happy, and no matter what I try to do to fix it, we’ll have a few good days, but we always end up right back here.

“It’s not like I’m asking you to fucking choke me,” he says, when I’ve finally dragged myself off the bed to find him. He’s in one of my t-shirts, too big for him, and the pair of pants he was wearing earlier when it felt like all we were gonna do was kiss and maybe work some dick sucking into it because we’ve been doing a lot more of that lately. Hand jobs, blow jobs, salacious kisses.

But tonight, he held my dick against his in the grip of one of his elegant hands and stroked us together, his mouth hot on mine while he said things like “More. I want you. Please.”

It’s fall break, and tomorrow we’re leaving for home—on a plane this time. I don’t particularly want to know what it’s like to spend my first Thanksgiving without my dad, but at least I won’t be the only one missing him at the table. Sullivan will be staying with his mom, so after tonight we won’t be spending the night together again until Saturday at the earliest, and I’m at the point where I barely remember what it’s like not having him in bed with me, so yeah—when he got a little needy, it matched how I was feeling inside really well, and I leaned in.

Sex was the last thing on my mind, though. It’s not really something we’ve talked about, and besides, we’ve been doing okay without it. Or I have been.