Page 73

“Fine,” he grumbled, and took it. “But no funny business.”

“None.”

“I mean it. I have practice.”

“I shall be a gentleman.”

“You’d better.”

We did not make it to practice on time.

The shower was hot, and the water ran for a very long time. I washed his hair with a great deal of concentration, working the soap through it with my fingertips, and he leaned back into my hands with his eyes shut and a small helpless sound in his throat. When he turned around, water streaming down his chest, and reached for me, I caught his wrists and said, “Not yet. I have not finished taking care of you.”

“Maksim, I’m fine, I—”

“Icing?”

“God, no. “

So I did not stop. I kissed down his wet chest and his stomach, and I knelt on the tile and looked up at him through the steam. He was already hard again, his cock flushed and heavy and curving up toward his stomach, and he stared down at me with his mouth open. I had done this once the night before, in the dark, hastily, with my heart in my throat, and I had thought about doing it properly ever since. I had read about it on page ninety-one, marked in yellow, and I had read it more often than I would ever admit.

“Tell me if it is wrong,” I said.

“It’s not going to be wrong.”

I took him in my mouth.

He shouted. His head hit the tile with a thud, and his hand came down and gripped my hair, not pulling, just holding on, and I felt the muscles of his thighs shake against my shoulders. He tasted of soap and salt and heat. I went slowly, learning him with my tongue, tracing the vein along the underside and flicking the sensitive spot beneath the head, taking a little more of him with every pass until the tip of his cock slid to the back of my throat. I set my hands on his hips to hold him steady, and I hummed, low, and he made a sound like a man falling from a height.

“Yeah, like that,” he gasped. “Christ. Just like that. Don’t stop.”

I did not stop. I looked up at him and watched his face, the water running over his flushed cheeks and his mouth open and his eyes squeezed shut, and I sucked harder and bobbed faster, and one hand slid around to cup his balls and roll them gently. His fingers tightened in my hair. “Maksim, I’m gonna— I can’t— you have to—”

I did not move away. I stayed and held his gaze, and he came with a broken cry, hot and thick down my throat, one hand flat against the wall and the other locked in my hair, his cock pulsing against my tongue. I swallowed every drop and held him upright while his knees gave out.

He slid down the tile until he was sitting in the spray with me, gasping and laughing and wrecked. “Where,” he wheezed, “did you learn that?”

“Page ninety-one.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“I am told it is customary to say thank you.”

He kissed me, wet and clumsy and grinning against my mouth, and tasted himself on me, and groaned. When I would not let him reciprocate, because I did not need it, because the giving had been enough, he glared at me with a flushed and furious tenderness and said, “You are the weirdest person I have ever met,” and I said, “Yes,” and turned off the water.

Afterward, wrapped in towels, he sat on the edge of the bed with his hair dripping and let me dress him.

He resisted, and then he didn’t. I found a pair of black trousers in the closet that were too long for him, and he rolled them at the ankle with a look of grim humor. I fetched a soft gray sweater of my own, pulled it down over his head, and smoothed the neck. My hands lingered on his shoulders, and his skin was warm and pink from the heat.

“You’re doing it slow on purpose,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I cannot stop touching you.”

He looked up at me. The room was very still.