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Leo sat down on the edge of the bed where I’d perched while we kissed, his head slightly bowed, his spine the sweep of a treble clef. Maybe he was deciding he didn’t want me. And normally I wouldn’t have cared. Easy come, easy go, etc. Except I didn’t want him not to want me. Or to think—to think—
To judge what made me feel free.
I touched him lightly on the shoulder, ashamed of myself for being so fucking needy. “Do what’s right for you. I’ll shut up about it either way.”
“Look,” he said, still not looking at me. “I should probably tell you I’ve been in prison.”
And now I didn’t know what to do with my hand. If I left it, it would get weird. If I pulled away, it would look bad. “Thanks for indulging my taste for risky sex.”
“I’m not.”
“Then why did you tell me that?”
“Because…” He made a soft, half-despairing sound. “Because I didn’t want you to feel lied to or misled or something.”
Honesty was, if you asked me, infinitely overrated. “Were you innocent?”
“No.”
Well, this was turning out to be a mood killer and a half. “Did you murder someone?”
That made him not quite laugh. “For fuck’s sake. Do you not think if I’d murdered someone, I’d still be inside?”
“I don’t know how it works.”
“The criminal justice system tends to take murder quite seriously.”
“How reassuring.”
“We don’t—you don’t—” Leo passed a hand through the hair I’d already dishevelled for him. “I can sleep on the sofa.”
I wasn’t sure how much difference it would make to staying in the narrowboat of a convicted criminal that the convicted criminal in question was willing to take the couch. “Was it violent or sex related?”
His head whipped around. “No. It was—”
“Don’t tell me.” I pressed my fingers to his mouth. Then my own mouth. “I don’t care.”
“I can’t tell,” he mumbled when I let him speak again, “if I should be flattered or worried by that.”
“Be flattered,” I suggested. Though, truthfully, I couldn’t tell either.
He stripped off the rest of his clothes and climbed onto the bed with me. He wasn’t hard yet—baring your soul could have that effect—but it wasn’t something that concerned me. I liked watching arousal spread through a body, the subtle quickening of breath and blood, the gradual surrender in parting lips and legs. Moving carefully because of my ankle, I covered him and pressedus together. A kiss of skin to skin. And he responded with a deep, beautiful moan, arching into me like I was everything he needed in the world.
“Can I?” he asked, already breathless, his hands hovering.
I nodded and they settled on my flanks. Swept up and down, not possessively—which I would have hated—but with a kind of naked greed. It was…disarming. Pleasurably so but still disarming. And then he wrapped his arms around me, drawing me down and closer, and I continued being disarmed enough to let him do it. His mouth, blindly seeking, grazed the edge of my jaw and then worked its way down the side of my neck, his lips rough with urgency amidst the softness of his beard. It was enough to make me shiver like a virgin.
I reared back and he let me go instantly. Though he looked at me the same way he touched me, and I was still shivering, unsure what to do with a man so full of his own wanting and so careful with mine. Worse, little flames of curiosity were licking at me. About him and the contradictions of him. His history. His choices. God, it was irritating. What was wrong with me? I was here to fuck him, not know him.
“You’re—” he began.
“Yes,” I said. Because I was. Whatever the word.
“This is lovely.” His hand reached up, brushing across my chest and shoulder, then down my arm, idling reverently across my tattoo. Even in this uncertain light, it seemed to glow. Though seeing it against his fingers reminded me how much I had let it fade. “What is it?”
“It’s a tattoo.”
“No?” He pulled a comically shocked expression. “Really?”
