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He kissed me, smiling against my mouth. I caught both ass cheeks and pulled him closer. The shirt could wait.

Naked, I lay back against the pillows. Trier knelt between my knees with his big hands on my thighs.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Your mouth.”

“Slow?”

“Yes.”

He took me in slowly, his stubble scraping the inside of my thigh. He spread his tongue flat along the underside, with one hand at the base of my cock and the other spread across my stomach, holding me down. A minute later I pushed up against his palm.

“Faster,” I said. “I changed my mind.”

He didn’t make me ask twice. He took me deeper and began to stroke the base of my cock, his hand twisting on every upstroke, until I swore at the ceiling. Trier brought me close, then eased off until my breathing settled, and lifted his head. His mouth was wet, his face flushed.

“I want you to fuck me,” Trier said.

“Come here.”

He handed me lube and a condom from the nightstand and lay back with one knee drawn up, watching. I opened him with one finger, then two. His breath caught when I curled them slightly, and he wrapped a hand around my wrist to hold on.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m ready.”

He hooked a leg over my hip, and I pushed into him a little at a time until I was all the way in and his heel was pressed to the back of my thigh. He was hot and tight around me. His muscular chest rose and fell as he breathed hard.

I started slow, drawing almost all the way out and sinking back in. He exhaled through his nose on every stroke, and his fingers dug into the backs of my hips. The headboard bumped the wall. I slid my palm under the small of his back to brace him and lifted an inch.

His heel kicked the mattress. He swore, loud and surprised, and clamped a hand on my shoulder. We both froze.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know.” He laughed, breathless, with his stomach shaking under me. “Do it again.”

“Which part?”

“All of it. Exactly.”

I put my forehead on his chest until I could breathe. Then I slid my hand back into place and did it again, deliberately, the same inch at the same angle. He made the same sound, and his eyes closed.

“There. Don’t you dare change it.”

I didn’t. I kept him tilted up on my hand and fucked him steady and deep until his fingers left marks on my shoulder. He stroked himself in time with me, and I watched his face go slack and open. He came across his abs, clenching tight around me, while his back arched off the bed.

“You,” he said. “Come on. I want you to come.”

I pulled out, and after a few strokes, I came, my face against his neck and his hand on the back of my head, holding me there.

Afterward he came back with a warm washcloth, and I lay on the flat pillow he’d put on my side of the bed in October and never moved. A glass of water stood beside my watch. I drank half and passed it to him.

Trier’s phone buzzed. He held it up over us. Russ had sent a photo of Josh’s latest marble run. It now went down the bookcase, across the top of an upright piano, and into a laundry basket, by way of paper towel tubes, cereal boxes, a length of plastic gutter, and an entire roll of masking tape.

“How does anybody reach the books?”

He enlarged it. “I can’t tell. There’s something blue behind the funnel. It might be a dictionary. It might be holding something up.”

“Then it’s load-bearing now.”