Page 97 of The Way Back Home

Ryowoon adjusts, pins my hips, and hammers that spot. I’m done for. My hands scramble for purchase on his shoulders, his arms, anything to anchor me as he drives into me over and over, the wet sound of skin filling the room beneath the rain. My cock throbs between us, untouched, leaking against my belly, and every thrust sends a jolt through it. My thighs clench around him, my breathing turns into gasps. I can feel it gathering at the base of my spine, coiling tighter with each snap of his hips.

He grazes his teeth along my throat and thrusts deep and I come apart.

My back arches hard, muscles locking up as I come, my cock pulsing between us, spilling onto my stomach, onto his shirt, untouched. The orgasm ripples through me, my fingers go numb where they dig into Ryowoon’s shoulders, making incoherent sounds.

Ryowoon swears, his thrusts faltering as I clench around him, my body bearing down on his cock. He drops his forehead against my throat, his breathing labored and hot against my skin, he’s driving in again, harder, faster, chasing it. His hands grip my hips tight, pulling me onto him with each thrust, his body slamming into mine with desperation.

He makes a gutted groan against my throat. His hips stutter, lock, and he buries himself deep and I feel him come. The pulse of heat inside me, wet and spreading, filling me up. My eyelids flutter and my lips part. His seed spills into me in waves that match the shuddering of his body, his spine curving over mine, his weight settling against my chest as his arms give out.

I feel everything. The tremble in his shoulders. The stutter of his breathing against my neck. The slowing pound of his heart where his chest is pressed to mine.

My fingers find the back of his neck. I hold him there. My hand, resting against the warm skin, my thumb brushing the short hair at his nape. My other arm drapes over his back, palm flat between his shoulder blades. My legs loosen around his waist but don’t drop, keeping him close, keeping him in me.

I stare up at the ceiling and gradually feel his breathing slow against me, feel the warmth of him everywhere, inside and out, pressed flush to my body from chest to hip.

I don’t let go.

Ryowoon

34 Years Old

The rain hasn’t let up since last night.

I sit on the edge of the sleeping mat with my knees drawn up, listening to it hammer the roof tiles and pour off the gutters into the courtyard below. Gray early morning light fills the room through the window. My shoulders ache from yesterday’s work on the ceiling. My lower back is stiff from the ladder, or maybe from other things. I press my thumb into my left wrist, working at the joint that always slightly aches, the old familiar grind of bone against tendon.

I’m not used to this kind of peace. The rain and the gray light and the stillness. I spent so many years sleeping with one ear tuned to every creak and footstep. Even years later, safe in my own apartment alone, sometimes I’d still wake to the slightest, footsteps in the hall or the closing of a door in the building and spend twice as long trying to get back to sleep. But this morning the only sounds are the rain on the roof and the slow, even sound of breathing beside me.

I let my gaze drop.

Seyeon lies on his stomach, naked, face turned toward the wall with one arm curled beneath the pillow. The blanket’s been kicked off sometime in the night, bunched around his ankles, and there’s nothing to stop me from looking. My eyes move down the line of his shoulders, over the ridge of his spine and the gentle slope where his back dips before the swell of his ass, his legs kicked out at careless angles. His skin pale against the dark fabric of the bedding. A faint pink mark at the base of his neck where my teeth were. Another lower, just above his shoulder blade, the shape of my mouth.

My heart pounds.

I look at the line of his jaw, the curve of his mouth, parted slightly in sleep. His hair, that neat honey brown he’s dyed it now, is messy from my hands, fanned across the pillow in every direction. He looks younger when he sleeps. Closer to the Seyeon I remember, the one whose face I could read without trying, who wore every thought he had across his features without the careful guard he’s built since. I wonder when he learned to do that. When he learned to wall himself off. If I taught him that.

It always felt like holding moonlight, touching Seyeon, having him under my hands. Something luminous that shouldn’t be possible for someone like me to hold. Skin that felt too clean, too unmarked, too good for the rough calluses of my fingers to be dragging across it. I used to think if I touched him long enough I’d leave smudges. Stains. Like the grease that stayed in the creases of my palms from the garage that no amount of scrubbing got out. That some part of me would transfer to him and he’d carry it.

My hands are shaking in my lap. I curl them into fists, then flatten them against my thighs. The urge to reach out and put my palm against the warm plane of his back is so strong it’s almost nauseating. I want to trace the line of his spine. Want to press my mouth to that spot between his shoulder blades where the skin is thinnest and I can see the faintest blue thread of a vein. Want to put my fingers on the small of his back where I know those freckles are.

My eyes slide lower and my throat tightens. I can see the mess between his thighs. The slick evidence of what I did to him still smeared on the inside of his legs, drying on his skin. My cum on his body. Staining him, dirtying a body that’s otherwise so flawless that looking at it feels like staring at something I should’ve been barred from seeing. A museum piece behind glass. A painting with a velvet rope. Things that people like me are supposed to admire from a distance and not put their filthy hands on.

Last night shouldn’t have happened.

I know it the same way I knew the first time we fell into bed together. I knew it when Seyeon kissed me on the back step with rain pouring down behind us, knew it when I kissed him back, knew it when my hands stopped trying to push him away and started pulling instead. Every alarm in my head was blaring and I grabbed him tighter. Every lesson I’ve taught myself over the last ten years about staying away, about keeping distance, about protecting both of us from this, and it took Seyeon one evening of losing his temper and climbing on top of me to burn it all to ash.

But the first time, I could excuse. Seyeon wanted it and I was too weak and too hungry for him to say no. He had his mind set. I’ve known this man since the day we were born, and I’ve yet to see him fail at getting what he wants once he decides on it. I couldn’t have stopped him if I tried, and the pathetic truth is I didn’t try hard enough. So fine, the first time was a loss of control, mutual destruction, an inevitability we’d been hurtling toward since the second he showed up on my doorstep.

But after that.

After that, when I turned him over and pressed his face into the bedding and drove into him from behind until he was moaning into the pillow and coming onto the blankets beneath him and I kept going. When I gripped his hips and fucked him through it, my fingers digging into the hollows above his hipbones, pulling sounds out of him I’ve heard from no one else in ten years. When I felt him clench around me and still didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, rode it out until my head felt light and I spilled inside him again. And then later, the third time, slower, face to face, his legs wrapped around me, my mouth on his tasting him, his fingers gentle on the back of my neck as I moved in him. When I came inside him again like I was trying to fill him with every year I’d been gone. Pour myself back into the space I’d left.

That was my fault. I can’t blame Seyeon for anything past the first round because after that it was me reaching for him, me pulling him back when he tried to shift away, me burying myself in his body because once I started I couldn’t find the bottom of how much I wanted.

I run a hand through my hair and grip the back of my own neck, squeezing. My pulse thuds against my palm.

Now what?

Now that I’ve had him again, now that the muscle memory of his body is back in my hands and the taste of his skin is on my tongue and I can still feel the ghost of him clenched around me when I breathe. Now that I remember. Am I going to be able to let him go?