Page 56 of Take the Fall
“Nerves or cold?”
“Both. Mostly the first.” I made myself say the rest, because it was a night for the truth. “Luke. I’ve never done this. With a man. I don’t know the mechanics. Who does what. I don’t want to make a fool of it.”
He stopped with my wet shirt half off my shoulders. Looked at me. And then he smiled, the real one, the rare one, the whole battered length of him easing into it.
“I know,” he said.
He got the rest of my clothes off me in the warm water with no patience left in him and every bit of care, the belt, the button, the sodden drag of my jeans down my thighs, his good hand flat on my stomach to hold me steady while I stepped out of them. Then I was bare in front of him with the spray coming down and his eyes went the whole length of me, unhurried, taking stock, and I felt my cock throb under nothing but his gaze. I have never in my life been that exposed and that wanted in the same second and not known what to do with my hands.
He was hard too. I let myself look. I’d never looked at another man like that, never once let the want get as far as my eyes, and now I did. The water sheeting off the dark hair on his chest. The bruise gone purple-black across his ribs. The cut line of his stomach, and below it his cock, thick and dark and standing up against his belly, the head flushed and slick where the water ran off it. My mouth went dry in all that wet.
“You can touch me,” he said, low. “You’re allowed.”
I reached down and wrapped my hand around him.
It was strange and not strange at all. The weight of him, the heat, the pulsing hard length under hot skin: I knew the shape of that well enough from my own body. I’d just never once held it on another man. That was the whole of the difference, and the difference was everything. He made a sound low in his chest and his head went back an inch, and the power of it went straight through me, that I’d done that, that I could pull it out of him. So I worked him slow, learning what he liked rather than what he was, the drag of my fist from root to head, my thumb sliding through the wet at the slit that wasn’t the shower, the catch in his breath when I rubbed just under the ridge.
“Like that,” he said. “You’ve got good hands. I always” his breath caught “I always thought you’d have good hands.”
“Tell me if I’m doing it wrong.”
“There’s no wrong.” His hand closed over mine, slowed me, before I took him too far too fast. “Not yet. I’m not going off in a shower in two minutes like a kid.”
We got out, because a tiny shower is a stupid place for two grown men and he was sore and I was new and neither of those wanted tile and a hard edge. He shut the water off and we dried each other in the steam, rough towels and rougher hands, and there was something in being dried by him, in dragging the towel careful over the road rash on his back while he hissed and held still for me, that wound the want tighter than the touching had.
His bed. A lamp he turned down low. The window with the city in it.
“Lie down,” he said, and I did, and he came over me, easing off the left side even now, and I got a hand flat on his unmarked shoulder.
“Tell me if it hurts. The ribs, the back. I mean it. I’ll stop. I don’t care how far in we are.”
“I know you will.” He looked at me a beat too long, and the looking went everywhere.
“We’re saying it out loud now.”
He came down the length of me and the warm weight of him settled over my cock and my hips lifted into it before my head had a vote, both of us hard and wet and sliding together, and the friction pulled a sound out of me I didn’t plan and a lower one out of him. He braced on his good arm and rolled us slow against each other, his cock against mine, the drag of him, and I grabbed his hip and held on and learned that being wanted by him was going to take apart every careful thing I’d ever built.
Then he went down my body.
His mouth at my jaw, my throat, the flat of my chest. He stopped at a nipple and dragged his teeth over it and I jerked and swore and felt him grin against my skin. Lower. The line of hair under my navel. The crease of my thigh, where he set his mouth and sucked until I knew it would mark, and I didn’t care, I wanted the mark. And then his breath was on my cock and I came up on my elbows to watch because I couldn’t not.
He looked up the length of me, held my eyes, and took me into his mouth.
The heat of it knocked the air clean out of me. Wet and tight and his tongue working the underside, taking me deeper than I thought a man could, his hand wrapped round the base of what his mouth couldn’t reach, and I fell back against the pillow with a sound that wasn’t a word. Nobody had ever done it like that. Like it was the thing he wanted, not a thing he was giving. He pulled off slow, tongued the head, sank back down, and set a rhythm that had me fisting the sheet and shaking inside a minute.
“Luke. Luke, I’m” I got a hand in his wet hair, not pushing, just holding. “If you keep. I’m going to.”
He pulled off with a slick sound and rested his cheek on my thigh, breathing hard, his lips swollen and dark.
“Not yet you’re not,” he said. “Not the first time. I want you with me for the first one.”
He reached into the drawer by the bed. The cap, a click in the quiet. He warmed the lube between his fingers, which I clocked even then, the small thoughtful thing, and his slick hand came back between my legs.
“Spread for me. There. Knees up. I’ve got you.” His clean hand spread warm and flat on my belly, anchoring me. “This is the part you don’t know. So I’m going to tell you all of it. I’m going to open you up slow. It’s going to feel strange before it feels good. You let me know the second you want me to stop and I stop. Yes?”
“Yes.” My voice came out wrecked. “God. Yes.”
The first press of his finger had me clenching off the mattress.
