Page 25 of Bare
A sound between a gasp and a groan, dragged up from below his ribs, the sound of fifteen years of kissing women and kissing a man for the first time at thirty-three and his body was saying this, this is what it was supposed to feel like, this is what you were missing, this is why it never worked before, and he kissed harder.
Rory's hand came to the back of his neck. Fast, firm. Fingers closing on the short hair at his nape with a grip that saidI've got youanddon't fallandI know what's happening right now.
His other hand gripped Neil's hip and pulled him in. The kiss realigned. Deepened. Rory's tongue against his, another first,another detonation, the intimate wet fact of a man's tongue in his mouth and his tongue in a man's mouth and the mutuality of it, which was what the car parks had never had because the car parks were service and this was conversation.
Rory kissed with his whole body. Mouth and hands and the press of his chest and a thigh sliding between Neil's legs, the denim rough against the inside of Neil's thigh. Neil was hard and Rory was hard too, the thick press through jeans, and the mutual evidence was so direct and impossible to ignore that the kiss turned desperate. Nothing cinematic about it. Two men's mouths on each other in a hallway thick with oil paint and someone's dinner downstairs.
Rory broke it. Pulled back an inch. Breathing hard. His lower lip glistening, the ring catching light. He held Neil's face between both hands, paint-stained fingers on jaw, thumbs on cheekbones, and looked at him. Reading, not asking permission. The face of a painter studying a surface that had just revealed what lay under the paint.
Whatever it was, it made him careful.
‘Yeah?’ One word. A door held open.
Neil couldn't speak. His mouth had done a thing it had never done and the recalibration was physical, cellular. The nerve endings in his lips being rewritten. The ghost of the ring stayed cool against the corner of his mouth. Rory on his tongue. It would last for days.
‘Yeah,’ he managed. His voice didn't sound like his own.
They staggered towards the sofa. Neil walking backwards. Rory guiding with a hand on his hip and his mouth at the tendon of Neil's neck, the underside of his ear, the tendon at the side of his neck. Stubble on skin. Neil's knees hit the sofa and Rory broke contact long enough to pull his own T-shirt off in one movement.
Bare chest. The dark hair that covered it, trailing to a narrowing line at his stomach. A tree tattoo on his left ribs, roots reaching towards his hip, branches curving over his side. And a silver hoop at his left nipple.
Then Rory's hands were on his jumper, pulling it up, and Neil raised his arms and it was gone. T-shirt next, yanked, less patient, and the air hit his bare skin and he shivered, though not from cold.
‘Down.’ A suggestion, not a command, delivered at a frequency that made Neil's knees give way.
He sat. Then Rory was over him, one knee between his thighs, the other braced on the cushion, and the weight of him pressing Neil back into the paint-marked fabric was the realest thing Neil had ever felt. Solid. Warm. Heavier than he'd imagined. Chest hair rough against Neil's smoother skin, abrasion at the nipples, across the ribs, everywhere the two surfaces met. His hips jerked involuntarily, grinding up, seeking friction, and Rory groaned against his neck and ground down to meet him.
They moved together. Hips rolling. The friction of cotton on cotton, boxers beneath unbuttoned jeans. Every ridge of Rory's cock pressed against his own through the cloth. The twitch when he shifted angle. A raw sound tore through his throat without permission, bypassing every filter he'd built in thirty-three years.
His own voice didn't sound like his.
‘Fuck,’ Rory breathed against his ear. His hand found Neil's waistband, already unbuttoned, when had that happened, and tugged. The jeans caught at the hips.
Rory pulled harder and the denim bunched at mid-thigh, boxers dragged half-down with them, and the logistics of two men trying to get undressed on a sofa without separating meant Rory's elbow caught the arm rest and Neil's knee hit the backcushion and none of it mattered because Rory's hand was on his bare hip and the touch, skin on skin, a man's calloused palm on the hollow above his hip bone, sent a contraction through the muscle in Neil's stomach that was closer to a recoil than pleasure.
Rory shoved his own jeans down. One-handed. Graceless. His cock sprang free and pressed hot against Neil's thigh before Rory shifted and lined them up, his cock against Neil's, and the contact made Neil's vision white out.
Another man's cock against his. In a lit room. against visible skin, belonging to someone whose name he knew and whose mouth had just been on his. The hardness of it. The slick bead of precome where the two heads met and smeared together. He'd had his own cock in his hand ten thousand times and never once had it been a revelation. This was.
Rory spat into his palm. No lube, no elegance. The sound, wet, blunt, hit Neil somewhere primal. Rory wrapped his fist around both of them and the grip was tight and rough and the saliva wasn't enough, not nearly, the friction half-dry and almost too much. Neil's hand came up from the other side. Two hands, two cocks. Their fingers collided. Grip shifted. The rhythm stuttered, found itself, stuttered again, Rory's hand sliding when Neil's tightened, the offset clumsy, their knuckles bumping.
‘Here.’ Rory adjusted. Laced his fingers through Neil's so both their hands formed one fist. Tighter now. Better. The shared grip meant their fingers were interlocked around both cocks and the intimacy of that, the hand-holding embedded in the sex act, was so unexpectedly tender that Neil made a sound that wasn't a word and wasn't a moan and was between the two.
His attention caught on every contact point because cataloguing was what his body did when the world overshot its instructions. The ridge of Rory's foreskin against the undersideof his own cock. The specific wet drag where precome had pooled between them, slicker now,
He lost the sentence. Tried again. Couldn't.
Rory's breathing in his ear. Hot. Ragged. The lip ring clicking against Neil's earlobe when Rory's mouth moved.
‘Tighter,’ Rory said. A statement, not a request. He knew what he needed.
Neil did. Rory hissed. The sound hit the base of Neil's spine and stayed there, gathering.
The build was fast. Too fast. Weeks of tension compressed into minutes. It gathered, a specific, tightening heat that said close, and he didn't fight it because fighting it was what he'd done for years, fighting it was what the marriage had been, fighting it was what the locked bedroom and the cleared browser history and the white wall and the empty bed were all for. He was done fighting.
‘I'm…’ he managed.
‘Yeah.’ Rory's forehead against his. Eyes open. Green, blown wide. ‘Go on.’
