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Drift went still. His hand kept moving, slow and easy, stroking me while his eyes searched my face, and whatever he found there made his jaw tighten.
“Then settle in,” he said. “Because I’ve got all fucking day.”
He lowered his head and pressed a kiss to my hip bone. Just a kiss, soft and warm, and then another one an inch lower, and another, his beard dragging goosebumps across my skin. His mouth mapped me like territory he planned to live in. The crease of my thigh. The soft skin below my navel. The trembling muscle of my stomach, which jumped under his lips while I tried to remember how oxygen worked.
“Every part of you,” he murmured against my skin, “is fucking gorgeous. You know that, right? These hips.” A kiss. “This stomach.” Another. “These thighs I want wrapped around my head until I can’t hear anything else.” His teeth grazed the meat of my inner thigh, gentle, barely pressure at all, and I made a sound that would haunt me for the rest of my natural life.
“You’re doing the thing again,” I gasped.
He lifted his head. “What thing?”
“The thing where you say nice words and my entire nervous system files for bankruptcy.” My fingers flexed in his hair. “I don’t know what to do with it. I’m used to—” I stopped. Old habits pulled the sentence back behind my teeth.
Drift didn’t push. He just turned his face and kissed my palm where it had slipped from his hair, unhurried, like we had nowhere to be and nothing to prove.
“You don’t have to do anything with it,” he said. “Just take it. Let me tell you what I see.” His hand wrapped around my cock again, stroking slow, keeping me right at the edge of desperate without tipping me over. “I see a man who walked back into my café even though he was scared. I see the sexiest fucking laugh I’ve ever heard. I see freckles right here”—he kissed a spot low on my hip—“that I’m going to count later with my tongue. I see a cock so pretty it’s a crime you’ve been keeping it from me.”
A strangled laugh punched out of me. “You cannot call it pretty.”
“Just did.” He licked a slow stripe over the head, gathering the wetness there, and hummed like he was savoring the taste. “Pretty and leaking for me and mine.”
The word mine landed somewhere deep and stayed there, glowing like a coal. Ben had said mine too, once upon a nightmare, but it had never sounded like this. Ben’s “mine” was a cage door swinging shut. Drift’s “mine” sounded like a door swinging open, like being wanted instead of owned, and the difference cracked me apart so cleanly I had to blink hard at the ceiling fan and pretend the sting in my eyes was just the hangover.
“Drift.” My voice came out small. “Please.”
“Please what, kitten?” His breath ghosted hot over wet skin, and I twitched in his fist. “Use those pretty words. Tell me what you need.”
“Your mouth.” Shame tried to climb up my throat, and I shoved it back down, because the man had literally turned into a wolf in front of me this morning and somehow dirty talk was where my embarrassment drew the line. “I need your mouth on my cock. I need you to—god, I need you to keep going and not stop, because if you stop I might actually die, and I’ve had a very long week.”
His grin flashed, wicked and warm all at once. Then his mouth sank down over my cock, and I stopped being a person with thoughts.
Wet heat swallowed my dick inch by inch, his tongue working the underside, his hand wrapping what his lips hadn’t reached yet. He moved without hurry, without any of the mechanical rhythm I’d learned to expect from physical things, like he was learning me. Every time my breath hitched he did the thing again.
Every time my hips stuttered, he groaned around my cock, low and rumbling, and the vibration traveled straight through my dick and up into my brain stem, where it dismantled whatever was left of higher reasoning.
My hands scrabbled for purchase—his hair, his shoulder, the sheets—and finally settled with one fist in the bedding and one hand cradling the back of his skull, not pushing, just touching, because I needed the contact like I needed air.
“That’s—” I gasped as he pulled up and sucked hard at the crown, cheeks hollowing. “That’s so good, you’re so—your mouth is a public menace. Has anyone told you that? It should require a permit—”
He pulled off with a slick sound and laughed, actually laughed, forehead dropping against my hip while his shoulders shook. “You talk during this. That’s the best thing I’ve ever learned about you.”
“I talk during everything. It’s a defense mechanism. My therapist would have a field day if I had a therapist, which, given this morning, I should probably—oh fuck—”
His mouth was on me again, deeper this time, and the words dissolved into something nonsensical and embarrassing. He set a rhythm, slow and devastating, his hand twisting in counterpoint at the base of my cock, his other palm sliding up my stomach to splay wide and warm over my sternum like he was holding my heartbeat in place. His thumb found my nipple and circled it, and the triple assault of mouth and hands short-circuited every system I had left.
Beneath him, I came apart in slow motion. My thighs shook against his shoulders. My heels dug into the mattress. Sounds kept leaving me—broken, needy, honest sounds I’d trained myself never to make because noise had consequences. Except here, noise made Drift moan around my cock like my pleasure fed his, and so I let them out. All of them. Months of silence spilling out of my mouth in gasps and curses and his name, over and over, like a prayer I’d just learned.
“Drift—Drift, I’m close. I’m really—you should know that, full disclosure, imminent—”
He didn’t pull off. He doubled down, taking my dick deeper, sucking harder, and his eyes dragged up my body to lock with mine. That was it. That was the whole ballgame. Watching this huge, gorgeous, patient man looking up at me from between my thighs like I was something worth worshipping snapped the last thread holding me together.
The orgasm rolled through me from the soles of my feet, pulling every muscle taut, and I came with a shout I felt in my teeth, hips bucking into the wet clutch of his mouth while he swallowed my cum and worked me through my climax with his fist. Pleasure kept pulsing long past the point where I usually shut down, because he didn’t stop, just gentled, easing me down with soft strokes of his tongue until I was twitching and oversensitive and pawing weakly at his shoulder.
“Mercy,” I croaked. “White flag. I surrender all territories.”
Chuckling, he pressed one last kiss to my softening cock, then to my hip, then crawled up the bed to collapse beside me. His arm slid under my shoulders and gathered me against his side like I weighed nothing, which, pressed against all that warm muscle, felt accurate.
For a while, I just breathed. The ceiling fan turned its lazy circles. Sunlight had shifted across the floorboards, and somewhere in the house the puppy barked once at something that probably didn’t deserve it. My heartbeat slowly climbed down from the rafters.
