Page 67 of Ransom
"Ransom—"
"Say it back, Ranger."
"You're my man."
He growled against my throat again, and his hand tightened in my hair. Then he kissed me, hard and desperate, with his tongue in my mouth. I kissed him back like I was trying to crawl inside him. Someone else in the bar laughed, and I did not give a single shit. I did not give one solitary shit about anything except the taste of him, the heat of him, the weight of his voice when he said my name.
I don't know how long we stayed like that. Long enough that my eyes closed, and the world went soft. Long enough that the only things holding me up were his arms and the wall he'd backed me into. Long enough that when I said "we need a bed" against his ear, he just nodded.
We paid the tab. I think we paid the tab. Eduardo said something on the way out that I didn't catch, and Ransom waved a hand at him in answer, and then we were out in the cold air with the sign flickering A ROSA in the dark behind us.
I put my hand on his back and steered him across the lot to a squat building with VACANCY in red letters above the door. It was a shit motel, but we were too drunk to drive anywhere else.
Ransom leaned against the wall outside while I went in and got us a room. I could see him through the glass with his head tipped back, eyes closed, throat long and pale under the sign. The neon painted half his face red.
The woman behind the desk took my card without looking at me and slid a key across the counter on a plastic fob.
I took him by the arm and walked him down the row. The lock fought me. I cussed at it under my breath until he laughed into the side of my neck, a stupid drunk laugh that hit me hard right between the ribs, and the key turned the second after that.
The room had the smell every cheap motel in the world has when the door first cracks, industrial cleaner laid on top of a generation of cigarettes, and underneath both the faint wet smell of a window AC that had been running for somebody else an hour ago. I steered him toward the bed. His knees met the edge, and he went down face-first into the comforter.
I worked his boots off and set them by the bed where he could find them in the morning if either of us could stand up by then. His belt slid free easily. He lifted his hips when I tugged at his jeans without me having to say a word, and I pulled the denim down past his knees and dropped it on the floor. He shivered once as the air found the back of his thighs and stopped fighting it.
I shucked my own boots and jeans at the foot of the bed and climbed in behind him. The mattress dipped under my weight, and the warm line of his back pressed against my chest. I thought, for one long second before he moved, that this was going to be the end of it. That he was already gone. That my job was to hold him through the night and let him sleep off whatever the hospital had done to him.
Before I'd settled, he rolled over under me. His hand fisted the front of my shirt and pulled me down on top of him, my hips between his thighs, his face tipped up to mine. His eyes were half open and his mouth was open, the tequila on his breath sharp enough to taste.
I leaned in to kiss him, but he turned his face away.
I kissed his cheekbone instead. I kissed the line of his jaw. I kissed the soft place under his ear where his hair'd started to curl from sweat at the bar, and his hand fisted tighter in my shirt. Hisbreath came rough against the side of my face. I worked down his throat, kissing and tasting what he offered until his hands came up and gripped my ass and pulled me down hard against him.
He shoved my shirt up and my boxers down, his grip drunk-clumsy and too hard as he closed it around us. I hissed, but didn't fight him. I needed this. He needed this.
He worked us slowly while I rocked into his fist. Each time he pushed up to meet me, the headboard tapped the wall in a steady, dull rhythm. His teeth caught my shoulder and bit down, harder than the dance floor, and I gasped against his neck. Then he eased off and licked over the place where his teeth had been. It felt like an apology he was too drunk to put into words.
His other hand let go of my hair and slid down my back and raked.
My back arched and a sound tore out of my throat that I was glad nobody was around to hear, and his hand came back up and did it again, and I bit my lip and rocked harder against his fist.
The hand in my hair tightened. He hauled my head up by it. My face came up over his, and I looked down at him: eyes half open, lips wet, jaw tight. I waited for him to look back.
But he didn't. Ransom was somewhere else. His body was in the room with me, but his mind was back in that hospital room with his brother.
I kept moving, hoping maybe he'd come back. Or maybe he wouldn't. Either way, I was selfish enough not to stop.
His hand came off my jaw, slid down between us, past where his other hand was working us both, and cupped my balls.
I froze.
He didn't say anything. His drunk fingers closed around me and squeezed, and the pain shot up into my stomach and stopped my hips mid-motion. I let out a whimper.
He squeezed harder.
I dropped my forehead against his collarbone and breathed through it, and his hand around our cocks kept stroking. I rocked into it because I couldn't stop, even with the pain. His other hand pulled down on my balls in a steady, mean grip that took the climb right out from under me.
"Ransom—"
He didn't answer. His grip tightened.
