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“It is the most okay thing that has ever happened to me.”

“Then don’t stop.”

I touched him. His cock was hot and heavy in my hand, silk over iron, slick with his own wetness, and when my fingers closed around him he made a sound I felt all the way up my arm. I was clumsy at first, and my hand shook. He laughed softly against my neck and said, “Hey, it’s okay, I’m not fragile,” and covered my hand with his and showed me how: slower, a little tighter, a turn of the wrist at the top. I learned. I learned the pace that made his breath stutter, and the place just under the head that made him swear. I learned that when I dragged my thumb through the wet at the tip he arched clean off the mattress, and that when I stopped altogether and only held him, he begged. “Maksim, come on, please, don’t stop, I’m so close, I’m—”

I did not stop. I bent my head and set my mouth against his throat, on the place where the pulse beat, and I stroked him in the rhythm of that pulse, slowly and then faster, while his fingers knotted in my hair and his hips lifted into my fist in short helpless jerks. I did not bite. Every animal cell in my body wanted to, and I laid my lips against his skin and held them there, perfectly still, and felt the blood beat under them like a bird in a hedge.

“You could,” he said, in a broken whisper. “If you wanted to. Not yet, but someday. I’m thinking about it.”

“You do not have to say that.”

“I know. I’m saying it anyway.”

I closed my eyes. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For thinking.”

He came apart in my arms a little while later with my name in his mouth. He spilled hot and thick across my knuckles and his own stomach, his whole body bowing off the bed in one long shuddering line while his cock pulsed in my fist, and I stroked him through every wave of it until he went limp and gasping. I held him afterward while he lay shaking and boneless and laughing under his breath with his face against my collarbone. I did not know what to do with my own body, which was hard and throbbing and strung as tight as a bowstring, and the front of my trousers was damp. It did not matter. I had never been so warm.

“You didn’t,” he mumbled after a while. His hand slid down my chest, vaguely, blindly, and I caught it and kissed the knuckles.

“Not tonight.”

“But you’re—”

“Yes. I am.”

“Do you want me to—”

“Lex.” I laughed, quietly. “Not tonight. I would like to do this correctly. I would like to do the whole of it correctly, when you are not shaking and I am not in a state of grace. I would like it to be the best night of your life.”

“That’s a lot of pressure.”

“I know. I have researched.”

He lifted his head. “ Researched? “

I had said too much. I closed my mouth.

“Maksim. Researched. Researched what? “

“Books.”

“What books?”

“I have… purchased some… guides.”

He stared at me. I stared back, with the calm of a man about to be hanged.

Then Lex Pendleton put his face in the pillow and began to laugh so hard that the bed shook.

“You bought a sex manual, “ he wheezed. “You’re eleven hundred years old and you bought a how-to book. At a bookstore. Oh my God. Who sold it to you? Did you make eye contact?”

“The clerk was a young woman with a ring in her nose. She said, ‘Good luck, sir.’”

“Oh, no. “