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“Until when?”
“Until you have to go.”
He kisses me. A soft one. He pulls me against him and his arm goes around my waist and his nose settles against the back of my neck and his body goes heavy against mine and I close my eyes.
Chapter 10: Damián
The light comes through the window at an angle that turns the wall gold.
I don’t know what time it is. His back is two inches from my chest. He’s breathing in the rhythm of someone still asleep. His shoulder blade rises and falls. The tattoo on his ribs catches the morning light and the Atlanta skyline at the top is the city outside this window and the city on his skin and I am in both of them.
My arm is across his waist. It’s been there all night. I know because I woke up once, around four, and my arm was there, and his hand was on top of mine, his fingers loosely folded over my knuckles.
My body is quiet. That’s the thing I notice first and can’t stop noticing. The part of me that is usually running isn’t running. It’s just my body in a bed in a city that isn’t mine, next to a man who is breathing, and the wall is gold. I have morning-after etiquette for other cities, other beds. The exit was always clean. Shower, dressed, coffee if offered, gone before the morning got complicated. I had a system. The system involved being fullyclothed within twenty minutes of waking up. I’m not wearing anything and I have no interest in finding my clothes and the system appears to have been fired.
He shifts. A small sound, half-asleep, his body pressing back into my chest. My hand tightens on his hip without me telling it to. His skin is warm from sleep and from the sheet and from whatever the morning is doing through this window, and when he shifts again his ass presses against me and my cock responds before any other part of me does. Honest. Immediate. Not interested in a committee meeting about it.
“You’re awake,” he says. His voice is thick with sleep, our native language on his tongue.
“I’ve been awake.”
“How long?”
“Long enough.”
He turns over. His face in the gold light. Brown eyes, slightly swollen from sleep. The freckles across his nose that I noticed three years ago in photos and keep noticing. His hair falling across his forehead. He looks at me with his full open face, and the look is so unguarded my chest tightens.
“You’re still here,” he says.
“I’m still here.”
His hand finds my jaw. His thumb traces the line of it. Unhurried. Not tentative. He knows where he’s going and he’s choosing to take his time getting there.
Last night was not this. Last night was the dam, the rush, the three years of silence crashing through both of us at once. I’m not going to replay it. I’m keeping it.
This feels different. He kisses me. His mouth is warm and tastes like sleep and like him and the kiss is unhurried. I feel it in my whole body. My hands move to his waist and his ribs and the tattoo line under my palm and his breath catches when my thumb traces the small spire near his hip, that I am now seeingfor the first time in the light but felt and touched and kissed in the dark.
“You found that last night,” he says against my mouth.
“I’m finding it again.”
“You’re thorough.”
“I’m a center back. We cover the same ground twice.”
He grins. The grin is so close I feel it against my lips. Then his hand slides down my chest, deliberate, his fingers tracing from my collarbone to my stomach to the line of hair below my navel, and lower, and his hand closes around my cock and my hips push into his grip before I can stop.
“Tell me what you want,” he says quietly, his breath near my ear.
The question is simple and not simple. Nobody has asked me that in bed. What I wanted was never part of the equation.
“This,” I say. “Don’t stop doing this.”
“Specific,” he says, smiling. “Very helpful.”
“I’m working with new information.”
He laughs, and the laugh is warm and close and his body is pressed against mine and I feel him laughing against my chest and the feeling is so good I close my eyes. When I open them his face is right there, the brown eyes with gold in them. I learned three years ago in a bedroom in Brno that his eyes had gold. That knowledge has been quietly rearranging me ever since.
