Page 40

“No,” he says. “Let me.”

“Preston.”

“You carry everything.” His mouth is at my jaw, my throat, unhurried, thorough. “The bills, the schedules, your sister, my mother, the whole loud lot of us. You’ve been carrying this family and you haven’t put anything down once.” His thumb finds the hinge of my jaw – my move, in his hand, turned around and aimed back – and he tilts my face down to his. “Let me carry something. Lie down.”

I lie down.

He takes me apart with a patience I didn’t teach him and can’t survive. Mouth and hands, unhurried, cataloguing – the scar on my shoulder from some childhood misadventure I barely remember, the spot below my ribs that shorts my circuits, all of it inventoried like he’s planning to be tested. I’m not used to this direction. Receiving is a skill, and it’s never been mine, and he knows it, which is why he goes slow – slow enough that I can’t process it as logistics, slow enough that the only available option is to feel it. My hands find the sheets. He murmurs against my skin the whole way down – gorgeous nonsense, praise I’d contest in any other setting – and I stop contesting.

He works down my chest, my stomach, taking his time at every stop, and then his mouth and lips and tongue and throat are wrapped around me – wet heat, no preamble – and my whole spine reorganises.

I’ve been on the receiving end of Preston’s attention countless times – almost two years of it. It has never been like this. Unhurried. Devastating. He takes me in slow, lips stretching around my thick length, and holds there, letting me feel every inch of the slide, tongue flat and moving, and the groan that comes out of me doesn’t sound like my voice. He pulls back to the tip, takes me deeper – deep enough that his breath stutters through his nose – one hand splayed flat on my stomach to feel it jump, the other wrapped around what his mouth hasn’t claimed, working in slow counterpoint. When I look down, the sight alone nearly finishes me: Preston, cheeks hollowed, lips slick and stretched around me, eyes already up and on mine – entirely in command, enjoying it. My hands go to his hair because they have to go somewhere. He hums around me, pleased, and the vibration runs the full length of my spine, and he keeps his own pace no matter what my hips beg for – slow, thorough, merciless, wet heat and the flat press of his tongue – until my breathing goes to pieces and my grip tightens in his hair and everything in me starts pulling toward the edge–

He pulls off. Deliberate. Grinning, wrecked-mouthed, deeply pleased with himself.

“Not yet,” he says, voice low and rough. “I have plans.”

Then he slicks me with a warm hand – thorough about it, unhurried, watching my face while he works me over – and readies himself, his own fingers, his own pace, kneeling over me in the lamplight, a production I’m not permitted to assist with, which is its own particular torture. I get to watch. That’s all I get. Preston York, opening himself up with his eyes half-closed and his lip caught in his teeth, and me flat on my back beneath him, memorising it.

He swings a leg over my hips. When I reach for his waist he catches both my hands and pins them to the sheets, fingers laced through mine.

“No,” he says, breathless, grinning down at me. “Tonight I drive.”

And then he lines me up and sinks down onto me, slow – the first breach, then the long tight slide of the rest, heat gripping me inch by inch while his breath catches all the way down – and everything stops the way it stopped in the old apartment. His weight settling onto my hips. The clench and flutter of him adjusting around me. The long line of him above me in the lamplight, thighs braced, chest heaving. Except this time I’m the one pinned, and he’s the one setting the pace, and there’s nothing for my hands to do and nothing for my head to run.

“Ready?” he asks, at the point where the question matters.

“Yeah.” My voice comes out in a register I don’t acknowledge. “Yeah.”

He rides me slow. Deep, rolling movements, hips working in a rhythm he sets and adjusts, finding the angle that makes him gasp and then keeping it, selfish and generous at once. Sweat gathers in the dip of his spine where my hands aren’t allowed. He’s hard against his stomach, flushed, ignored – saving it, the way he saves the best line for the exit – and the sight of him taking exactly what he wants at exactly the speed he wants it is the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever been pinned under.

Then, when I ask – and I do ask, out loud, which costs me something and pays him everything – not slow. He releases my hands and plants his own on my chest and moves, really moves, skin and breath and the headboard finding the wall, thighs working, my hands glued to his hips, my own hips finally allowed up to meet him in swift thrusts. He talks the whole time, because he’s Preston – look at me, there you are, God, Luke – and I look up at him and somewhere in it the last three weeks burn off like fog on the water.

I finish first, his name in my mouth, buried as deep inside him as I can get, spilling in long pulses while he grinds down and works me through it. He follows half a breath later, completely untouched – both hands finding mine and lacing tight – spilling hot across my chest and stomach, one stripe reaching as far as my jaw, shaking, gorgeous, saying something that started as my name and ends as nothing.

Then, still catching his breath, he leans down and licks the stripe off my jaw – slow, thorough, utterly shameless – and grins at me from an inch away.

“Missed a spot,” he says.

He lifts off me slow, and settles into my side with my release already leaking out of him – he makes a small, satisfied sound about it, entirely unbothered, a man wearing the evidence on purpose. Wrecked and warm, he starts to reach for my chest and hesitates.

I take his hand and put it there myself. Fingers in, threaded, flat over my heartbeat.

Preston exhales and settles his whole weight against my side. Neither of us says anything.

Tomorrow, I think. Tomorrow we open the trunk.

Tomorrow has other plans, and the plans have rotors.

We’re on the patio at 09:30 with coffee – Section Three, joint and several, honoured even while on the road – when the sound arrives before the machine does. A low thud in the air, felt in the chest first, and I’m on my feet reading the sky for an inbound airlift before my brain catches up to the fact that there’s no pad here, no hospital, nothing to receive.

“Luke,” Preston says, not getting up. “I need you to prepare yourself.”

“For what?”

“I’m almost certain that’s my father’s helicopter. And I guess we’re not packing up and heading home after breakfast.”

It comes in over the treeline like an invasion of one, white with gold trim – gold trim, on an aircraft – flares dramatically over the lawn, and settles onto the grass between the house and the ocean with its blades throwing the last leaves off every tree on the property. The noise is deafening. The coffee ripples in our cups.