Page 97 of The Associate
It was too much. Not enough.
Samuel’s hips began to move beneath him, a frantic, uncoordinated counter-rhythm, seeking more pressure, more heat. His moans became a continuous, desperate melody against Gael’s mouth. The feel of that eager, naked body moving under his, the sounds of his pleasure, the complete surrender; it was unraveling Gael at the seams.
He needed to feel him. He needed skin on skin. He needed to cum, now, with a desperation that was a physical ache in his balls. He’d been holding back all day, playing the careful Dominant, the patient teacher. The facade shattered.
He tore his mouth from Samuel’s, both of them gasping for air. Samuel’s eyes were glazed, his lips swollen and wet. Gael didn’t give him time to think. He reared back just enough to fumble with the button and zip of his trousers. His movements were jerky, uncharacteristically clumsy. He shoved the fabric down over his hips just enough to free his own aching cock, thick and heavy, the tip already wet.
He fell back onto Samuel, their bodies colliding. The feel of his own naked cock against Samuel’s was a blinding relief. He kissed him again, a messy, open-mouthed clash of lips and tongue, as his hand slid between them.
He wrapped his fist around them both.
The sensation was obscenely good. His own thick length pressed alongside Samuel’s slimmer, silken one. He could feel the frantic pulse of his heartbeat in the rigid flesh. A ragged cry was tornfrom Samuel’s throat, his hips jerking helplessly into the tight, hot tunnel of Gael’s grip.
“Gael...” Samuel gasped, the name a broken prayer.
Hearing his name on those lips, in that voice, was the final thread snapping. Gael began to move his hand. A slow, tight stroke from root to tip, squeezing them together, his own pre-come slicking the way. It was filthy. It was perfect. The slide was hot and smooth, the pressure incredible. He set a punishing rhythm, his hips driving in time with his fist, grinding their cocks together in a wet, frantic symphony of need.
Samuel was lost beneath him. His head was thrown back, tendons standing out in his neck, a beautiful, wrecked canvas of pleasure. Every stroke pulled another whimper, another sob, another gasped “please” from his lips. His body was a taut bowstring, trembling on the edge.
Gael watched his face, mesmerized. He saw the exact moment it happened. Samuel’s eyes flew open, blind and unseeing. His mouth formed a perfect, silent ‘O’. His entire body seized, arching violently off the bed as a hoarse, shattered cry was ripped from the depths of him.
Heat flooded Gael’s fist, pulse after pulse of it, slick and hot as Samuel came, his release striping his own stomach and Gael’s hand. The sight of it, the utter abandon, the complete loss of control, the evidence of the pleasure he’d wrung from him, was cataclysmic.
It pushed Gael over the edge.
A deep, guttural groan was torn from his chest, a sound he didn’t recognize as his own. His own orgasm crashed over him, violent and total, white-hot pleasure erupting from his core. He came, long and hard, his seed mixing with Samuel’s, his body shakingwith the force of it, his forehead dropping to Samuel’s shoulder as the waves wracked him.
It was a surprise. The intensity, the sheer physical release. He hadn’t cum like that in years; not with a partner, not alone.
As the last tremors subsided, leaving him breathless and spent, he lifted his head. Samuel was beneath him, panting, eyes closed, utterly spent and beautiful. Gael leaned down and kissed him again.
Chapter 25
Samuel
The office on Monday was the same, and yet it was an entirely different planet.
The same hushed murmur of keyboards, the same scent of expensive coffee and lemon-scented cleaner, the same panoramic view of a city that seemed to operate on gears and pulleys Samuel understood perfectly. But the air he moved through felt ionized, charged with a secret current that only he could feel. Every step down the corridor toward his pod was a step across a fault line. Every glance toward the corner office was a glance into the sun; blinding, dangerous, and the source of all warmth.
Their first weekend together; a phrase his mind still shied away from, had changed the gravity in the room. Gael was no longer just a powerful, distant star exerting a passive pull. He was a presence with a specific, intimate mass, and Samuel orbited him now in a new, elliptical pattern, one that felt both terrifyingly unstable and more right than anything ever had.
He saw it in the glances. Now, when Gael’s gaze found him across the open-plan sea of desks, it held a different weight. Itwas a look that remembered. It remembered the taste of his mouth, the sound of his whimpers, the feel of his skin. It was a look that stripped away the crisp dress shirt and tie and saw the man who had trembled and come apart in his bed. Samuel felt its brand, a flush of awareness that started at the nape of his neck and traveled south every single time.
He tried to focus on the dense contract language glowing on his screen. He tried to be the efficient, invisible Ruiz. But his body was a traitor. His skin was hypersensitive, remembering the exact pressure of a hand. His ears strained for the particular cadence of a certain footstep. When Gael’s door opened and he emerged to speak with a paralegal, Samuel’s entire being went on alert. He didn’t look up, but his peripheral vision tracked the man’s movement like a sunflower tracking the sun, absorbing the shift of his shoulders in the impeccable suit, the way his hair fell just so against his collar.
A single, murmured “Ruiz, the Henderson file,” delivered as Gael passed his pod without breaking stride, was enough to make Samuel’s fingers freeze over the keyboard, a jolt of pure electricity arcing down his spine.
The morning passed in this state of heightened, exquisite tension. By the time Alina appeared at the opening of his pod, a bright smile on her face, he felt both strung taut and oddly, deliriously alive.
“Lunch?” she asked, tilting her head. “I’m starving, and I need to vent about George’s latest attempt to claim credit for my research.”
The normalcy of it was an anchor. “Yeah,” Samuel said, his voice sounding almost normal. “Yeah, sounds good.”
They went to their usual spot, a quiet salad place around the corner. Over bowls of kale and quinoa, Alina launched into her tirade about George, her hands waving expressively. Samuel listened, nodding in the right places, offering a sympathetic grimace.
Then, as she speared a cherry tomato, her eyes sparkled with mischief. “So,” she said, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “Something’s different.”
Samuel’s fork stilled. “What?”
