Page 134 of The Fire Line

“Still think you’re running this whole thing?” he asked, his voice nearly gone.

Harris tightened his hold along Jay’s jaw and kissed him again.

“Never thought I was.”

He guided Jay back down, then reached beneath him. Jay was rock hard and sticky from his precum.

“Fucking hell, Jay.”

Harris tried to coordinate his hand with the rhythm of his hips.

Which failed immediately.

Jay caught his wrist and adjusted the angle. “Like this.”

Harris corrected his grip, and Jay’s entire body reacted.

“Yeah. Don’t stop.”

Harris kept the rhythm. His attention narrowed to the man beneath him: Jay tightening around him, the movement of his hand, every rough sound Jay made into the mattress.

He could feel him getting closer. Jay’s hips began losing their steady answer. His breath came apart completely, and his fingers closed hard around the bedding.

Harris bent low, his mouth near Jay’s ear. “Come for me.”

So Jay did.

His body locked around Harris, Harris’s name breaking out of him.

That was enough. Release tore through Harris with the next movement, sudden and overwhelming. His entire body shook with it. He buried his face against Jay’s shoulder and let out a sound he barely recognized as his own.

For several seconds, neither of them moved. Harris remained bent over Jay’s back while they dragged air into their lungs. His heart struck heavily against his ribs, and every useful muscle in his body felt spent.

Eventually Jay shifted beneath him with a strained noise.

“Okay, cowboy. Off.”

Harris lifted his head immediately. “You all right?”

“Need oxygen.”

A laugh escaped Harris. He moved away carefully, dealt with the condom, and collapsed onto the mattress beside him. Jay dropped flat onto his stomach with his face half buried in the pillow while Harris lay on his back and stared at the ceiling.

The room went quiet except for their breathing and the determined rattle of the air conditioning unit.

Sweat cooled slowly over Harris’s skin. His pulse settled.

He waited for something else to arrive with it.

He had expected his first real sex with a man to leave some complication behind. Shame once the wanting had been satisfied, perhaps. Questions. An unmistakable sensation that crossing the line had converted him into somebody different.

Nothing came.

Harris lay there exhausted, wrung out, and entirely himself.

Still forty-three. Still divorced. Still responsible for a length of north fence that needed replacing when he got home.

Still bisexual, whether or not he was ready to say the word where anybody could hear it.