Page 137 of Levi

His strokes grow faster, the spit and precum making every slide slick and filthy. He’s throbbing against me, his cock kicking every time my head drags over his. His breathing turns ragged against my mouth. I lift my hips to meet him, chasing the doubled pressure, and he matches me without missing a beat.

“Come with me,” he says, almost fierce.

He tightens his grip and strokes us hard and fast. The tension snaps first in him, his body goes rigid, a broken groan torn from his throat as he spills over his own fist and across my stomach. The heat of it, the way he keeps stroking through it, drags me under a second later.

I come hard, pulsing against him, while his hand never stops moving, wringing every last pulse from both of us until we’re shaking and oversensitive.

He collapses forward, forehead pressed to my shoulder, still holding us loosely as the last tremors fade. For a long moment neither of us speaks. Then he eases his hand away, and sits up.

“Don’t you dare move,” he tells me. “I’m not done taking care of you.”

I watch him climb off the bed and disappear into the bathroom. The water runs. When he comes back, he’s carrying a warm, damp washcloth. He sits on the edge of the mattress and starts cleaning me with the same careful attention he used earlier, my stomach, my cock, the insides of my thighs.

I’ve always been the one to do this. Always the one who got up, found the cloth, wiped us both down while the other man lay there catching his breath. It’s a small thing, ordinary, but it’s always been mine. Tonight I stay on my back and let him. Because the expression on his face tells me this mattered to him.

I matter to him.

Chapter 53: Levi

The next morning, Little Blondie gets to the beach house behind the cleaners, orchids stacked to his chin, hands me a box through the door, takes it back, sets it down, and squares up to me like a man with an agenda.

“Before anything else,” he says, holding out his hand. “You and I have never been formally introduced, and I’ve decided it’s because Dante keeps us apart on purpose. I’m Benji. The best friend. Forever. The forever part is not negotiable.”

“I know who you are.” I shake the hand he’s holding out like a treaty. “Fair warning, I’ve been calling you Little Blondie in my head all this time. It’s going to be hard getting used to a name.”

“You can call me Blondie if you want. It’s fine. You already did once.” He watches me not remember. “Day one. You called me Blondie to my face and sent me upstairs for your duffel bag like I came with the house.”

“I did not.”

“You did. I ran, too. Took the stairs two at a time to get you out of here. Blondie is fine.”

“No nicknames,” Dante calls from the great room. “That’s the rule. Call him Benji.”

“He has so many rules,” Benji says, at a volume engineered to carry. “You’ll learn.”

Now that we’re formally introduced, he puts me to work. Benji hands me a box of orchids and tells me I’m holding them wrong.

“Like a bouquet, not a six-pack,” he says, already three feet gone, nudging a chair Dante set down a minute ago a half-inch to the left. “White one goes on the console. Gold one goes upstairs to apologize for the master bath.”

I carry the orchids over in both hands, careful as a man who’s never been trusted with anything breakable, and set them where he points.

Dante glances up from the dining table he’s dressing, says, “Other end,” and I move them.

We’re spending a Friday morning making it gorgeous so a woman from Atlanta can fly in tomorrow and decide whether she’d like to wake up looking at it.

“Hold this.” Benji puts a level in my hand, climbs onto a chair he shouldn’t be standing on, and squints at a mirror. “Is it straight? Tell me the truth, I can take it.”

“It’s straight.”

“Liar. You didn’t even look.” He’s right. I didn’t. “Levi. Eyes on the mirror or I tell Dante you don’t respect the work, and he’ll make the face.”

“I have one face,” Dante says from the kitchen.

“It’s true. He only has one face,” Benji agrees, grinning. “His face does a winning offer and a house fire exactly the same. Watch.” He hops down. “Dante, the beach house sold over ask. Big news.”

Dante doesn’t change expression. Benji turns to me like he’s rested his case before a jury. The laugh comes out of me loud, surprising all three of us. One corner of Dante’s mouth lifts, barely, the most he ever gives, and then he goes back to work.

That’s when the questions start. I don’t see it coming, because Benji doesn’t aim straight at me. He just talks, his hands never stopping, and the questions come sideways out of the chatter so I’m still on the first when the third one’s already out.