Page 39 of Tempted By the Safety

We’re loud: the slap of my ass against his pelvis, our ragged breathing, the filthy sound of him moving inside me. He thrusts harder the more I take, and I ride him, leaning down to kiss him open-mouthed.

“So tight,” he mutters against my lips. “Squeezing me so good… You were made to ride my cock, baby.”

“Feels too good,” I gasp. “Spence, I’m close—”

“Don’t hold back. Give it to me, sunshine.”

I come hard, untouched, my cock trapped between our slick stomachs, and Spencer murmurs through it, telling me how good I’m milking him, how he’s about to fill me up.

“Do it,” I beg. “I want your cum in me, Spencer, please—”

He pushes up into me a few more times, hips stuttering, and then he freezes, buried deep, pulsing inside me as he comes, my name breaking apart in his throat.

When we finally come down, I collapse on top of him, my face in his neck, my body limp. He’s still inside me, softening but not gone, and neither of us moves to change that. His hands come up and stroke down my back, my hair, and he murmurs into my sweat-dampened curls about cleaning me up and feeding me, but I can’t move.

I doze off like that, still full of him, his heartbeat slowing under my ear.

15

Spencer

Mrs. Shaw’s kitchen table wobbles a little on one leg, and I’ve been careful not to lean my elbows on it since we sat down, because I watched Milo notice me noticing and go a shade paler, like I’d caught him out. The apartment is small, two bedrooms up a flight of stairs that smell like somebody’s been frying onions for twenty years, and every surface in the kitchen has something on it that means a person actually lives here: a calendar from a church, a jar of pens, a Statue of Liberty snow globe. Milo’s been rigid in the chair beside me since dinner started, his knee bouncing under the table.

“Eat, eat,” Mrs. Shaw says, ladling more of whatever this stew is onto my plate before I’ve made a dent in the first serving. “There’s more in the pot. You should put on more weight, Mr. Rhodes. Isn’t Milo feeding you properly?”

“Call me Spencer, please,” I say. “And don’t worry. Milo feeds me plenty.”

I look over at him and smirk. Milo chokes on his water and starts coughing.

“That’s good to hear,” Mrs. Shaw says, missing my innuendo. “And what do you feed him, Milo?”

“Um. He’s very into protein,” Milo says, glancing sideways at me.

“Protein? What is that, a sports food?” Mrs. Shaw shakes her head like this confirms something she’s always suspected about men. “You need to come around more, then, so I can put some actual food in you.”

I want to tell her I’d come around every week if she’d let me, that I’d fix the wobble in the table with a screwdriver from my trunk before dessert if she said the word, that there’s an apartment three blocks from here with better light and a dishwasher that isn’t held together with a rubber band, and that I could have the lease signed by Friday. I don’t say any of it, because Milo would never let me. So I eat what’s put in front of me and keep my mouth shut.

“So,” Mrs. Shaw says, finally settling into her own chair, “you want to hear about the time Milo decided he was going to be a chef?”

“Ma,” Milo says.

“He was seven when he saw a man on TV making a cake, and he took my good apron and cut it down with the sewing scissors so it would fit him.” She points her fork at Milo. “I still have the apron.”

“You said I could use it.”

“I said you could wear it.”

“That’s a translation problem,” Milo says. “And I was seven.”

Dean’s across the table, quieter than I expected. He catches me looking once and lifts his glass a half inch.

He showed up in court on the ninth and answered when they called his name, and the city sent the ten thousand back to mea few weeks later. Whatever else is true about Dean, he went through with it, though not without Milo getting him there.

Mrs. Shaw clears the plates herself, waving off Milo and me when we move to help, and comes back with a cake she has to carry in both hands. She pours coffee into mugs that don’t match, one of them printed with a faded Yankees logo, the other blank white with a chip out of the rim. She sets the chipped one in front of me without a word, like there’s a hierarchy to the mugs and I’ve just been promoted.

Dean waits until she’s back in her chair, until the cake is cut and passed, before he clears his throat.

“So I’ve been thinking,” he says, turning to Milo. “Not the sneaker thing. Different one. There’s a guy from the old job, he does moving, trucks and everything, and he needs somebody two, three days a week, no experience needed, he’ll train me on the truck.” He says it fast, as if getting it all out at once will keep it from being examined too closely. “It’s steady. Real work. I just need, like, four hundred to get the CDL permit stuff sorted, the class, the fee—”