Page 44 of Frog

“Nothin’ that bears repeatin’,” I assured him, leaning sideways to kiss his cheek. “Help me dry these.”

“I normally hate stubble on a man,” he told me, his voice low and sexy, “but on you it’s so fuckin’ hot.”

“’Cause you like how it feels on your ass,” I told him.

“Jesus,” he gasped, bumping me as he jolted. “Even your voice could make me come.”

I turned off the water, wiped my hands on my jeans, and grabbed him. The second I picked him up, his long legs wrapped around my waist and his arms snaked around my neck.

“How about your full-time job is fucking me?”

I snickered as I carried him toward his bedroom. “I’d be a kept man, would I?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but I squeezed his ass at the same time, and he shuddered instead, head back, breath catching as he clutched at me.

“Cy?” I teased him as I dropped him down onto the bed.

He looked drugged as he lay there, sprawled across the comforter staring up at me. “I like pointing at you in a crowd and saying that he’s with me. I want to keep you and put a ring on your finger and come home every night to your face looking at me like I’m an idiot.”

“I never look at you like you’re an—”

“Yeah, you do. When I’ve done something particularly stupid, you do.”

“Well, of course then.” I squinted at him. “That don’t make no—”

“You’re focusing on one part of what I said to avoid the rest, and I get it, I do. But last time you left, really, Web, my heart barely survived.”

I sighed and sat down on the side of the bed. “Well then for crissakes, Cyrus, why didn’t you just tell me to go on and not stop and see you?”

“Because,” he said, sighing, tilting his head to look at me, “one of these days you are going to let me love you, and you’re going to stay.”

I opened my mouth, but he lifted his hand to hush me.

“Or maybe it’s time I looked for a job in Texas.”

It took a second, but the weight of his words finally sunk in.

“Oh hell no!” I roared at him, getting up, staring down at him. “I gotta look for work in places that don’t got no hospitals or—”

“Fine, a clinic. I could open my own.”

I lifted up my hands. “Your life is here. Your family is here. The hospital where you work, that people know you’re at, is here! You don’t just—”

“You can find work; I can find work.”

“Oh for the love of—”

“No!” he yelled at me, rolling off the bed, pulling off one of his lace-ups, because, of course, the man wore dress shoes on his days off, and flinging it at me.

I leaned out of the trajectory as he came around the bed.

“You’re the thing I don’t have, Weber Yates. You’re what I miss. You’re the part I only have when I know I can wake up in the morning and see your face.” He finished, reaching for me, wanting his hands on me.

“I will not have you hatin’ me because you can’t be a surgeon no more,” I barked back at him, lifting my head away and back so he couldn’t touch me. “Bein’ a country doctor in some clinic in a little Podunk town ain’t gonna make you happy.”

“You make me happy,” he yelled, shoving me back hard, and being that close to the bed, I lost my balance and fell.

He was on me fast, straddling my chest, knees on my arms, pinning me to the bed. And even though we were fighting, the thought crept in that it was hot being manhandled, and his cock was right there, close to my mouth, just beneath a layer of denim and cotton.