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“Tate…” he breathes, choking off when I hook a hand under his right leg and lift it, partly to open him up and partly to help keep him from collapsing.
“I’m right here.” Once I’ve pressed my head against his hole, I lick water off his shoulder until he relaxes. Carefully, I work deeper into his heat, listening to his breathing and feeling him twitch as I fill him for the first time in his life, all the way to the base. “Do you know how good you feel?” When I slip a hand around his hip to check, I find his cock hard again. I squeeze my fingers around it relentlessly, making him squirm. “That’s how tight you are. And now I’m going to show you what you’re good for.”
I start careful, deep enough to bump my hips against his ass with each stroke, then speed up until my head is spinning and my whole body aches to the rhythm of him. If I could, I’d make this moment last for hours, weeks, as long as I could keep him. But it’s hopeless. His perfectly toned, tan body dripping with water, his broken gasps, and just the simple, sweet smell of him, of Darius. Combined with the iron clench of his ass around me, I come before I can even set a pace. I grab the wall and drop my face into his shoulder, blinded for a moment by the devastating shocks of an orgasm that’s been building for days, ever since he first sauntered toward me at the swimming center.
As soon as I can, I lower his leg and turn him around. When I look down at my sticky palm, I realize he came a second time in my hand as I fucked him. The man is smiling, a faint version of that cocky, lopsided grin that breaks hearts. He looks peaceful, like he’s not fighting for once. When I kiss him, he sneaks his tongue in my mouth and trails his fingers all over me. But he’s trembling so much he can barely support his own weight.
“Oh, fucking stop it,” he croaks when I bend and scoop up his rock-solid body, but he wraps his arms around my neck and curls into my chest as I stagger through the bathroom and set him on the edge of the bed.
“Wait there.” Grabbing a blue towel with palm trees on it that he left on the bathroom floor, I dry off his hair and body gently, then see to my own. “You with me?” I brush my thumbs under his exhausted eyes.
He nods, then clears his throat, his voice getting stronger. “Thank you.”
I raise an eyebrow, and his lips twitch. “You do learn, don’t you?”
“Maybe.” When he shivers, I grab the edge of his crumpled duvet and lift it up.
“Lie down. No arguing,” I add when he starts to pull a face.
Once he’s stretched out on his back, still breathing hard, I crawl in to lie on my side next to him, smoothing a comforting hand across his torso and sliding the other under his head. Something sharp jabs me, and when I fish under his pillow, I pull out another one of the sketchbooks he has stashed everywhere. I don’t mean to snoop, but it’s already folded open to a page covered in beautiful, cascading sketches of male bodies in complicated poses.
When he sees what I’m holding, Darius snatches the book so quickly it almost tears, clutching it to his chest. He stares up at me with his eyebrows furrowed, chewing the inside of his lip. “Sorry,” I murmur, brushing fingers through his hair. “I didn’t mean to pry. Go to sleep.” Curling close enough to feel his body heat, I close my eyes.
“Tate.” He clears his throat uneasily. When I open my eyes, he’s watching me. “Do you remember what I said the other night in your room?”
I remember everything about it with perfect clarity. “About wanting to study art? I wasn’t sure I heard you right.”
He nods. “I wanted to go into art, but my family forced me toward swimming and business studies. They wouldn’t help pay for school otherwise. Because doodling animals is cute when you’re little, but once you’re a man, I guess it ‘turns you gay’. And they’ve always been secretly afraid of that.” Tipping his head back, he groans quietly. “I don’t know what to do, Tate. I feel like there’s nothing left inside me but the shit I did to make them happy, and now I’ve lost that too.”
I chuckle in spite of myself. “Believe me, you’ve got more than enough personality inside of you. Maybe too much. And you’ve got time. I could help you–” Cutting myself off, I roll onto my back and look out the window in the hope that he didn’t catch the last part. I don’t know why I can’t learn, after all this time, that just because someone puts up with me doesn’t mean that they want me actively involved in their life.
Darius studies my face, his expression impossible to read. Taking a deep breath, he picks up the sketchpad and flips back to the first page. “I started this book last month.” He smooths long fingers over the smudgy ink rendering of the inside of a coffee shop. “There’s a place down the street I like to draw in when it’s raining. But I need to find somewhere new, because I have every fucking detail of this place memorized.”
He flips slowly through the rest of his complicated, whimsical sketches, explaining what he was trying to learn and pointing out his mistakes in between huge yawns while I stroke his hair and gape in awe at his talent. If I had seen even one of these drawings back when we hated each other, I would have questioned all my assumptions about him.
“You spill a lot of food,” I observe drily when we come across the seventh stain on the pages.
“Do you not enjoy eating?” he snarks sleepily, rubbing his eyes.
“I enjoy keeping my food in my bowl and not all over the table.”
“You must get awfully hungry.” He lets me steal the notebook and set it on the far side of the mattress, then props his head against my chest and closes his eyes. “We should get up and watch a movie or something,” he mumbles, trying to stir, but I hold him still.
“Just sleep, wild thing. You need to start healing.”
“I…fuck.” He rolls over so his back is to me and buries his face in the pillow. “I spend so much time in here, just sleeping to make everything stop. I don’t want to. Please, Tate.”
Instead of arguing, I nestle him against my front, taking care not to jostle his shoulder. “Count backwards from a hundred for me, then we’ll get up.”
“I’m not four, Tate. I know what you’re up to.” But I can hear the slightest smile in his husky voice.
“Sorry for assuming you know any numbers higher than ten.”
That surprises a laugh out of him, warm and indignant. “I know ninety-nine, and ninety-eight, even ninety-seven…”
I close my eyes and relax my head on the pillow, my nose in his hair and his soft skin moving a little under my hands. I grin to myself when he does the sixties twice without realizing it, pauses, then jumps all the way back to eighty-seven, voice so slurred I can barely understand it. Just before he drops off, he hooks one foot back around my leg, spreading his toes against my calf like he’s trying to make sure I’ll never leave.
8
