Page 12 of Deathless
I climbed onto the bed and knelt between his legs. ran my hands up his thighs, and the heat came off him in waves. My hands knew engines. They knew locks and tumblers and the particular tension of a latch about to give. Jasper's skin under my fingers had that same quality, like something about to open, and the mechanic in me wanted to be careful, and the rest of me wanted to feel every single thing that happened when it did.
"You're shaking," I said.
"It's been..." He stopped, then started again. "It's been a long time."
"Yeah?" I leaned down and pressed my mouth to the inside of his thigh. His skin jumped under my lips, and I stayed there, breathing against him, tasting the salt. "How long?"
"Brussels."
Two years. The anger hit before the tenderness did. Two years of this man alone with nothing but his hand and his cigarettes and whatever grim efficiency he brought to taking care of himself. Knowing Jasper, that meant barely at all.
I wrapped my hand around his cock and he gasped, hips jerking up into my grip. He was hard and leaking and when I dragged my thumb over the head, he gasped, and the sound went straight through me, low in the belly, behind the ribs, everywhere.
"Fuck." I dropped my forehead against his hip and just breathed because the sound of Jasper losing control was doing things to me I was not prepared for.
I stroked him slowly, pressed my mouth to the cut of his hip. He made that sound again, quieter this time, like something pulled out of him against his will.
"Two years, guapo." I spoke it against his skin. "That's criminal."
"I didn't exactly have..." He lost the sentence when I twisted my wrist on the upstroke. The moan was low and broken. My grip stuttered because I was trying to take this man apart while my own hands kept forgetting how to work.
I leaned down and licked a stripe up the underside of his cock. He tasted like salt and skin, and I wanted more. I took him into my mouth, just the head, and sucked.
"Fuck!" He grabbed my hair and gripped tight. "Diego, I can't... I'm not going to..."
I pulled off. "Already?"
He nodded, flushed, breathing hard. The sight of him like this, the most dangerous man I'd ever known, desperate and wrecked because of my mouth, scrambled every smooth thing I'd planned to say. I wanted to tell him something filthy and commanding. Instead, I took him deeper, letting him feel the back of my throat. He tightened his grip in my hair and pulled. The groan that came out of me vibrated through him. I was hard against the mattress, grinding down without meaning to, and I couldn't make myself stop because every sound he made wound me tighter.
I pulled off and stroked him with my hand, kept the pace slow, kept him right on that edge.
"Diego... please..."
"Yeah." My voice cracked. "I've got you."
I took him back into my mouth and worked him with my tongue while my hand covered what I couldn't reach. He was babbling now, Russian mixing with English, words I didn't understand, but the meaning carried. My name kept surfacing in the middle of it, and every time he said it my hips jerked against the mattress like my body was answering him without permission from the rest of me.
He came hard down my throat with a shout he tried to muffle with his hand, his whole body going rigid before the shudders took him. I worked him through it, swallowed everything he gave me, kept going until he pushed at my shoulders. I pressed my face into his thigh and breathed through it. I was so hard it hurt, and my whole body pulled toward him, toward friction, toward anything, but this was about him. I stayed where I was and let the ache burn through me until I could think again.
I crawled up his body and settled my weight on him. He was still shaking. His eyes were wet.
"Hey," I said softly. I cupped his face. "You okay?"
He nodded but couldn't seem to find words.
"Good." I kissed him, letting him taste himself on my tongue. "That's good, guapo."
He made a small sound and turned his face into my neck. I held him. His breathing started to even out. The tension finally drained from his spine.
He reached for my cock, but I caught his wrist. The effort it took to say that word nearly broke me. Every nerve I had was screaming yes. My cock pressed against his hip. He was warm and wrecked and willing, and the smart move, the easy move, was to let him touch me, take the relief my whole body was begging for. "Next time. You can return the favor next time."
"Why?"
Because if I let him make this transactional, he'd find a way to turn it into a debt and then a reason to leave. Because he needed to know someone could want him and not take.
"Because I wanted to take care of you," I said. "Let me have that."
He searched my face, looking for the lie, the trap, whatever he'd learned to expect from people who said they cared.
