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“Mm.”
“I just wondered what it was supposed to be.”
“Nothing.” I covered his hand with mine, not sure if I intended to check him or not. And in the end, lost track of whether he touched me or I touched myself as we followed the black-ink veins from which colour broke, flowing and swirling across my skin—first seafoam, cerulean, and Tiffany blue, then indigo, iris, and wine, coral, dandelion, and ruby at the farthest edges—as heedless as dancers at midnight. I cleared my throat. “It’s supposed to be nothing. Nothing but beautiful.”
“It is beautiful,” murmured Leo. “Did you design it?”
I nodded.
He moved through my pattern, finding his own. Flowers up my forearms. Feathers upon my shoulders. The outline of a wing across my chest. “I’ve never seen colour like this.”
“It’s a watercolour tattoo. It needs touching up.”
Bringing our still entwined hands to his mouth, he kissed me. “You’re beautiful too.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” he asked.
“Well”—I glanced away—“obviously.”
Laughing, he let me go and rolled his hips under mine. And for someone for whom it “had been a while,” he seemed far more at ease with what was happening between us than I was. I had initiated it—I was in control of it—but I still felt…oddly taken apart.As if I was blurring beneath his hands like clouds before the sun. He, though,hehad never seemed brighter to me nor more solid. As though he had been a mere sketch before. And now I could see him in all the depth and dimension that ink could grant.
“Turn over,” I told him.
And he did, with an ease that flustered me. The moonlight silvered his shoulders. Pooled in the dips of his spine. Reaching forward, I dragged the tie from his hair, and it came spilling down in a flurry of shadow and gold. He was fucking magnificent. A burnished hero from some tale of old. Mine to claim.
He scrabbled at the duvet. Then tossed the lube down to me. A deep shudder rippled the length of his spine.
“Do it hard,” he murmured.
“Condom?”
He shook his head. “Just you.”
The tube was about half-full, the bottom folded neatly over—some insight, perhaps, into his personal habits. Or for all I knew, he might just have been unsticking a zip or getting a label off a jar. I didn’t know why I was so clumsy, why I was trembling, as I slicked us both up. I didn’t know, either, why I leaned over him, fitting myself to the curve of his back, my lips to the nape of his neck, one arm sliding under his body so I could wrap my palm roughly about him. He bucked into me with a sharp gasp, his precome silken against my fingers.23
This wasn’t why I liked casual sex. Or what I looked for in it, when I’d stopped looking for anything that wasn’t Edwin. You could find a kind of purity there sometimes, in the novelty of astranger, nothing shared and no expectations. I’d learned, in other words, to love the liberty of walking away. As well I ought, for I had chosen it above all else.
Leo shifted, half turning, the loose waves of his hair rough against my lips and carrying the crisp grey scent of the river with it. “Marius,” he said. His cock was gorgeously heavy in my hand. “Please.”
And I bit my lip against everything he made me feel. He gave too generously when I didn’t need him to. When I was perfectly capable of taking. Kneeling up, I steadied myself against his hip, the hand that had held him now holding me, the heat of him passed from my palm to my cock to my heart. All we’d done was grind and kiss, and I was in a juvenile fever of longing. Partly, yes, for the simplicity of sexual release and for the satisfaction of having him, this stranger I’d been obliged to be saved by. But mostly I wanted to be inside him. To have him wrapped around me. To know that feeling too. I wanted to press myself against his back again and lick the taste of salt and desire from his moon-washed skin. I wanted to hear my name a second time. My name in his mouth when I made him come.
In the end, I pressed into him slowly. Almost more slowly than I could bear. Perhaps I didn’t need to be so cautious. But he was tight, yielding by inches, so I took him in inches, letting his body pull me in. His garbled groans had a slight edge of discomfort and a sharper edge of hunger. My breaths were shallow, half-dazed, as if I hadn’t done this act enough to banish all the wonder from it.
By the time I was fully sheathed, my hips nestled against him,there was sweat at my hairline and behind my knees, and I was whispering unnecessary nonsense to him. His answers came in small movements, the slide of his shins across the duvet, the needy arch of his spine, the opening and closing of his fingers upon the pillow. When I angled myself to drag against his prostate, he shuddered restlessly, half rising to meet my thrust and then dropping his chest flat to the bed in invitation. The slight change of position drew me even deeper, and I had to close my jaw on some helpless, heedless sound. Seized by an impulse of unalloyed greed, I rested both my hands upon him and pulled him wide, so I could watch the meeting of our bodies in the swirl of uncertain gold.
Balanced on his shoulders, Leo reached back clumsily, his fingers interlocking with mine. I caught the gleam of his eyes through the splayed-out strands of his hair. “Fuck me.”
I’d never quite developed the habit of talking in this context—Edwin certainly hadn’t—though I’d had a few lovers since who’d expected it. Leo, though, seemed neither. Not silent, not effusive. Just expressive in his own way, with his body and the few muttered words that desperation drove from him. ThatIdrove from him. Took from him. Made mine too.
I managed…something, a laugh maybe. “Iamfucking you.”
“More.”
And that was when I lost myself—lost everything—in the wildness of my own passion. It was why I did this. What I sought in the beds and arms of strangers. That atavistic drive towards physical fulfilment narrowing the world to flesh and greed, where all that mattered was the moment. No past or future, or pain or guilt,nothing to question or regret. Only the pleasure you could wrest from each other.
Except I was too aware of him. My pleasure as entwined as our hands. And even as I moved for myself, I knew I was moving for him, and for both of us. Long strokes to stoke the furnace of his need. Rougher ones to make him throw back his head and cry out in startled satisfaction. Whatever it took to bring us together in a collision of frantic belonging. God help me, this was not lost. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been more there.
