Page 17 of Original Sins
Then he made a sound—half a word, my no-name, the syllable he didn't have for me—and closed the last of the distance, and the room caught fire.
* * *
It was nothing like the night before.
The night before had been slow and reverent, a sacrament taken in the dark.This was the opposite of reverent.This was hunger.Two men who had run out of words and exits, and what was left was teeth and the wall against my spine.I went into it like a man walking into the ocean surf, willing the wave to take me.Alec kissed me hard enough to split my lip.I tasted copper and desire, his tongue sliding against mine like a sin I’d never confessed.His fingers found my collar and yanked, buttons scattering like shattered commandments across the carpet.One skittered into the dark.Another.The starched shirt—the armor I’d worn since dawn—gave way under his grip, and I arched into the destruction, my breath coming in ragged prayers.
He shoved the fabric off my shoulders, and the cufflinks my mother had given me hit the floor with two sharp, expensive cracks.I didn’t flinch.The tie came next, dragged free with a rough tug that left my throat bare, my pulse hammering under his thumb as he traced it.“Tell me to stop,” he growled, but the words were a lie, because we both knew I wouldn’t.The undershirt followed, the watch worth more than the desk clerk’s yearly salary, each layer peeled away like a skin I’d outgrown.Off, and off, and off, until I was nothing but a naked man in a dark room, trembling not from cold but from the relief of it—the weight lifting, the mask cracking, the truth finally given air.
And then—this was the part I’d never let myself crave—I turned us, pressing my back to the bed and pulled him down over me, underneath him.I, who had spent a lifetime standing above thousands of souls, who’d never bowed to anything but duty and a God I wasn’t sure listened.I spread my thighs for him, let my head fall back, and offered him the one thing I’d hoarded like a thief: my submission.
“I want you to,” I gasped, my voice rough with the filth of it, and the holiness of it.“Like this.I want to be the one who—” The words stuck, thick as sin.“I want to give myself to you.All of me.”
Something in Alec’s face shifted.The anger didn’t vanish—it melted, turned into something darker, sweeter, a flame licking at the edges of his control.He braced a hand beside my head, his body a bowstring pulled taut above me, and looked at me—really looked, like I was the only truth in a world built on his lies.His free hand slid down my chest, fingers circling my nipple, pinching just hard enough to make me hiss.“You’re sure,” he said, not a challenge, but a vow.A door, yes, but one he’d burn the house down to keep open.“You can still tell me no.”
I laughed, breathlessly.“I have never been more sure of anything in my life,” I said, “and I’ve built my whole damn life on certainty I didn’t feel.Please, Alec.Take me.”
And then his mouth was on mine again, slower now, the fury cooling into something hungrier.Alec took his time—teasing, taunting, mapping every inch of me like he was memorizing the territory.His lips traced the shell of my ear, his breath hot as he whispered, “You’re mine, Harrison.Just mine.Not the church’s.Mine.”And then his teeth grazed my throat, and I whimpered, my body arching off the bed like a man possessed.
When he finally touched me—there—his fingers were slick, insistent, stretching me open with a precision that stole my breath away.I moaned, the sound ripped from somewhere deep and untouched.“More,” I begged, and the word tasted like heresy and honey.He added another finger, curling just right, and I came undone, my hips bucking, my nails raking down his back.“God, Alec—”
“Say my name again,” he demanded, his voice a growl.
“Alec.Alec.”It was both a prayer and a curse.
And then he was there, at my entrance, the thick heat of him pressing in, and I broke—my body, my resolve, the last shred of the man I’d pretended to be.He took me with a single, relentless thrust, and I cried out, the sound raw, shameless, human.No scripture.No sermon.Just Harrison—the real one, the one who’d been buried under scripture and rhetoric for decades.
Alec set a rhythm that was punishing, each snap of his hips driving the breath from my lungs, his name from my lips.I wrapped my legs around him, held him, my fingers digging into the hard muscle of his shoulders as he claimed me.The bed creaked beneath us, the sound a metronome to my unraveling.“Harder,” I gasped, and he obeyed, his grip on my hips bruising, his angle changing just enough to make my vision whiten at the edges.
“You’re perfect like this,” he groaned, his voice rough, reverent.“So fucking perfect.Taking me like you were made for it.”
And I was.For the first time in my life, I was exactly where I was meant to be.
Alec bottomed out, his thrusts becoming erratic, his breath ragged, and I felt the moment he shattered—his body tensing, his release spilling inside me as he buried his face against my neck and roared.
“Oh my God, YES!”
The pulse of him, the heat, the intimacy of it sent me crashing over the edge, my own release stripping through me like a wildfire, leaving nothing but ash and truth in its wake.
He collapsed against me, his heart hammering against my chest.He said my name—Harrison, not Pastor Cole, just Harrison, ragged in my ear—and I held onto Alec like he was the last solid thing in a flood.Somewhere far below us, the faithful went on believing in a man who did not exist.
But in that room, in that moment, I did.
* * *
Afterward the room was very quiet.
The heavy drapes had killed the stadium glow and most of the city with it; what light there was came thin and silver around the edges, enough to see by.We lay tangled in the wrecked bed, his head on my chest, my hand moving slow through his hair, and I let my heartbeat come down and waited for the other thing to arrive.
It arrived.
I turned my head, and there it was on the dresser, six feet away in the dark: the black camera body, the long lens, the green lanyard pooled beside it like a snake that had shed its warning.PRESS.The whole apparatus of my destruction, sitting on a hotel dresser, while the man who carried it breathed slow and warm against my sternum.
I made myself look at it for a long moment.This was the part where the rule was supposed to fire into gear.Where thirty-five years of survival stood up in me and said: get dressed.Get out.Delete Grindr.Call your mother's lawyer.Protect the legacy, protect the empire, protect the careful lying life.I’d spent my whole existence learning to leave rooms without being felt to go.The reflex was the deepest thing in me, deeper than faith and fear.
I waited for it.
It didn't come.
