Middle of Somewhere Series Box Set

by Roan Parrish

  I followed the cut of his abdomen down to the groove of his thigh, hot and salty, and pressed his knees up and apart. I lapped at the base of his cock, holding his hips down when he tried to thrust. He was leaking precome, and I rolled the taste of him around on my tongue. I couldn’t take him all the way into my mouth yet, so I licked every inch, the feel of him straining beneath me exhilarating and intimidating.

  “Fuck, Leo, I’m gonna—”

  I grabbed the base of his dick and shook my head. Will threw his head back and groaned, cursing me again.

  I kissed him as he calmed back down a little bit, loving the feel of his full lips on mine, his needy tongue playing against my own. He wrapped his arms around my neck, pressed tight against me. I hadn’t realized how intoxicating it would be, the power I had to control Will’s pleasure. To watch him made desperate at my hands.

  I moved down his body, licking the cut of his stomach muscles, nipping at a hip bone. I scraped my teeth lightly around the base of his erection and smiled as he hissed, thrusting his hips up and clutching my shoulders. I rubbed up and down his thighs, encouraging his legs farther apart for me, then I rolled his balls in my hand and tugged gently, making him cry out. I kissed beneath them, following the thin skin to his ass. I rolled his hips up and tentatively traced his hole with my tongue.

  “Oh shit, shit, shit,” he groaned, voice gone tight.

  “Is that—do you like that?” I asked. It seemed only polite.

  “Yes,” he said so quickly I almost laughed. But then Will groaned as I increased the pressure and it was anything but funny.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what I was supposed to do, but I figured being thorough was always a good policy? I pressed into the muscle around his hole with my thumbs, massaging it while I licked and sucked.

  “Holy hell, Leo.”

  I made an inquisitive sound and Will made a confirmatory one, and then I lost track of everything but the slick and give of his skin, the muskiness of his scent here, the muscular clutch of his legs around me, everything in his body clenching and quivering as I worked him open with my tongue.

  I loved this. Loved him like this. Loved routing all my attention to the place where I could actually be inside Will, be a part of him. A place where he opened to me. I squeezed his ass and pressed deeper into his hole with my thumbs so I could taste him inside. He relaxed to me and groaned, letting out a shaky laugh.

  “That’s like full-on merit badge material, kid.”

  “Gah! Don’t call me kid when I’m… erm….”

  “When you’re what, Leo?” he purred. “What are you doing? Tell me.”

  “When I’m… you know.”

  Will chuckled and that was not what I wanted to hear from him right now. I wanted him back in the state where he was so desperate his only words were curses and he barely had breath for them anyway.

  “Why don’t you tell me what I’m doing to you since you’re feeling so chatty, and I’ll just keep on doing it,” I said, with far more bravado than I felt. “And,” I added, “if you stop talking, I’ll stop doing it.” I thought Will might tell me to piss off, but he gave a shaky moan and started talking.

  “You’re stretching my hole with your fingers and licking all around—ungh, shit—inside me. Sliding the tip of your tongue in and out of my ass. Licking—fuck…!”

  He went on and on, the filthy narration creating a feedback loop of arousal. I did something to Will, Will described it, and it turned me on even more. Which was sort of a problem since the whole point of this was to get Will so turned-on that I could maximize my, uh, staying power. So I kissed Will’s hole and pulled away, sliding up his body.

  I ran a finger up the length of his erection, smearing precome when I got to the tip. He moaned, words gone, and I did it again. I kept the pressure light as a whisper, tracing patterns on his skin until he was panting and his face and throat were flushed, his lips wet. He had one arm flung over his eyes and he was trembling.

  “Just a little harder, please,” he whispered, but he made no attempt to touch himself. I leaned down and touched my tongue to the tip of his cock, tasting the bead of moisture there, and Will jerked, every muscle tightening, and cried out. I grabbed the root of his cock to make sure he didn’t come, and he whimpered.

  “Do you want me?” I asked, and he nodded immediately, eyes still covered by his arm. “Tell me.” I kissed his mouth.

  “I want you.”

  “Look at me and tell me,” I said against his lips.

  He moved his arm. His eyelashes were clumped together wetly, his lids half lowered. “I want you,” he said, looking at me.

  He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. They were the most beautiful words I’d ever heard.

  I knelt, just looking at him for a moment. He looked like a debauched angel. Like if a classical painter had ever rendered sex scenes. His flushed skin made him look like he glowed from within. His soft mouth was a daub of glistening paint, his blue eyes heated and bright, blond hair mussed and stuck together with sweat like it had been put in with the hard edge of a palette knife. He looked inhuman. But then he smiled, and he was Will. My Will, who I could taste on my tongue.

  “You gonna fuck me finally?” He’d found his attitude again, but his voice was raw.

  “Yeah.” I nodded.

  He flipped the condom at me and lay back, an arm beneath his head like he was sitting on a chaise longue around the pool, his grin a challenge now that he knew he was going to get what he wanted.

  I leaned forward and licked the powdery pale skin on the inside of his arm, the muscle sliding as he tensed. I had the sudden conviction that I had to kiss every inch of his skin. That somewhere on his body lay a place that I hadn’t attended to and that, if I didn’t taste it, I would be leaving something important unfinished. Then his mouth was so close that I couldn’t help but kiss that too.

  I ran my fingertips up and down the tendon at the back of his neck, the skin hot and sweat-damp, and kissed him, wanting to layer every taste of him on my tongue. I handed the condom back to him.

  “Put it on me,” I murmured into his mouth. “So I can keep kissing you.”

  I could feel his intake of breath in the kiss, and then felt the slick touch of the condom.

  “Yeah, come on,” he said against my lips, positioning me where he wanted me, the challenge in his voice replaced by want.

  I tilted his hips up, and slid inside him, the clutch of skin and muscle ripping a groan from my mouth. I sank into him, shaking with the sudden buzz of pressure along my cock.

  “Fuck, fuck,” I muttered into his neck, overcome. With one finger, I traced his opening, felt the place where we were connected. I’d tasted him here. Speared him open with my tongue as he moaned, totally undone.

  I was so turned-on I was shaking. Will started to move his hips but I grabbed them and held them down.

  “Wait, just wait.”

  I tried to slow my breathing so the arousal would recede enough for me to actually… do something.

  “Leo.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Are you doing yoga breathing right now?”

  “Um. Yeah, I’m trying not to come.” It wasn’t working very well. The creep of arousal wasn’t receding. If anything, just the knowledge that I was inside Will’s body got me amped up all over again. “This is basically like plank pose, so.” I nodded to the way my arms were braced on either side of Will’s body.

  “You’d better fucking plank me right now.”

  I started laughing, which helped a little.

  “Come on, Leo, fuck me.” Will was breathless, pressing me deeper inside him.

  I did as he said. “You’re. So. Fucking. Bossy,” I said as I thrust into him.

  “You love it,” he gasped. And it was true. I loved that I didn’t have to guess what Will wanted because he always told me. That I wasn’t left wondering if he was faking his reactions to anything because he would never bother. But that all paled in comparison to how much
I loved, at this moment, the feeling of fucking him. The cling of his skin and the way he clutched my ass to pull me to him were quickly becoming my favorite things in the world.

  Will changed the angle of his hips and started moaning as I slammed into him, tightening his ass around me. I was so turned-on I lost the rhythm completely, almost wincing away from the pleasure skittering up my spine and spreading through my lower belly.

  “Lemme just—” Will pulled off me and flipped onto his hands and knees, reaching a hand back to me. I slid back inside him and froze so I wouldn’t come at the sound of his groan. He dropped down to his forearms, his gorgeous ass in the air, and I fucked down into him as his ass bounced against my hips, his perfect profile like a cameo against the pillow.

  “Will, I’m gonna—”

  He made a broken sound and started jerking himself off.

  “Oh fuck,” I gasped. “That’s too hot. Shit.”

  I closed my eyes and dropped my forehead down to his spine to try and get myself away from the edge, but it was no good. Even with one sense blocked, the rest were saturated with him. The smell and taste of sweat and precome and Will were in my nose and my mouth and the sounds of his moans and his breathing in my ears, and his skin was slick and hot beneath my mouth and my hands.

  “Oh god,” Will moaned as I thrust into him, holding him at the hip and shoulder. He shook against me, muscles tightening, caught on the edge of his pleasure with his head thrown back and his throat bared.

  I pressed even deeper inside him, pulled almost all the way out, and slammed back in. Will let out a sharp cry and came over his hand and his expensive sheets. As he clenched up, pleasure blasted through me, blackening my vision and making me shudder. I let myself fully focus on the feeling of him still clenching around me, his slick heat pulsing around my dick, the gorgeous curve of ass and thigh slick with sweat. I stayed deep inside him, giving short thrusts and feeling every inch of my dick sliding against muscle and skin. The pleasure skittered down my spine, throbbed in my gut, and exploded from me, my orgasm taking me over completely.

  I collapsed on top of Will, and he clenched his ass around me, shooting a final spark of pleasure up my dick and through my ass and my thighs and my stomach. I held his hips and inched myself forward, tensing every muscle against the last shudders of pleasure. When I slid from him, I was trembly and spent.

  “Mmmmm,” he said, reaching a hand back to pat my flank in a listless attaboy gesture. Then he rolled onto his side, avoiding the wet spot by throwing an arm and a leg over me as he stretched luxuriantly.

  I kissed him, tasting the metal of salt in his mouth until it faded into the heat of his tongue. We were holding each other’s faces as we kissed, inching closer and closer together like the space between us could be obliterated.

  In Zeno’s paradox, halving the distance between you and what you sought meant that you would go on forever, always moving closer but never actually reaching it. But maybe if you set your sights on a thing beyond what you sought then you would eventually find yourself smack in the middle of it, having tricked the universe into rendering up exactly what you really wanted.

  We had fallen asleep tangled up in one another, and I woke during the night to feel fingers in my hair. I made a contented sound and pressed back against Will, but the second he realized I was awake he stopped.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Go back to sleep.” He sounded half-asleep himself. I tilted my chin back, and he pressed a kiss to the side of my neck. I pulled the covers tighter around us, but then he sighed and kissed the back of my neck before rolling away to sit on the side of the bed.

  “Hey, what’s up?” I slid over to him and rested my head on his thigh, looking up at him.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, what’s wrong.”

  He was quiet for a long time, and at first I thought he had fallen asleep sitting up.

  “I’m not used to sharing a bed with anyone,” he said softly. “That’s all.”

  “You never—with the guys you….”

  “Christ, no. Nightmare.”

  “What about with… that TA?”

  “Yeah right, like he would’ve ever let me spend the night,” Will said sharply. I wanted to kill this guy, but I didn’t want to say any more about it and make Will feel bad.

  “But you must have with Rex, right?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. That was a long time ago.”

  “What was the deal with you and Rex, anyway? How’d you guys end up dating?” I was totally awake now and hoped maybe Will was in a sharing mood.

  Will still stared ahead into the dark room, but his hand came down on my head, and he started playing with my hair again, brushing it off my forehead and running his fingers through it.

  “Rex is… you know. Rex-like. When I first saw him, I made certain assumptions.” He said this slyly, as if I knew what he meant, but I didn’t really. “I came on pretty bratty, you know, thinking he’d be into it. When it was clear that wasn’t the right tactic, I was just honest. Basically said, ‘hey, wanna bonk?’ Which he did. It started casual, but you know what a small town Holiday is. There wasn’t anything else to do, so we just kind of kept… doing each other.”

  I sat up and stared at him. “You’re not seriously expecting me to believe that you were with Rex for like a year because Holiday is a boring town. Get real.”

  “I’d just graduated,” he said slowly, and I tugged him back into bed, pressing him down. “I had no clue what I was doing. I had no money. And Claire….” He shook his head. “Things weren’t… okay for her. Nathan was five and Sarah was three and she was fucking up bad. Sarah’s father was kind of around, but he was a sociopath. Just completely morally bankrupt, seriously. And when Claire was with him, she was just as bad. They brought out the worst in each other, really.”

  I threw an arm over his waist and put my head on his shoulder, close enough to his chest that I could feel the reassuring thump of his heart against my ear.

  “I was scared of what she’d do, scared of what would happen to the kids, scared of what Darren might do to Claire. Just fucking scared of everything. So I went back to Michigan. And it was a shit show. She didn’t want me there, and then me being there was the only thing that would help. She wanted my opinion on everything, from what kind of bread to get at the grocery store to what color she should paint her nails, and then if I tried to tell her my opinion on something she’d scream at me that I was trying to control her life. She wanted me to watch the kids twenty-four-seven so she could go out with Darren or her friends, and then she didn’t want me anywhere near them because she was their parent, not me, and she was convinced I was going to turn them against her.

  “I helped as much as I could when she let me. Or I left her alone when she asked. Sometimes. Sometimes I couldn’t, and then she’d just hate me for doing what needed to be done. Rex—” He lingered over the name. “Rex was calm. Predictable. Consistent. He didn’t play games, and he didn’t fuck with my head. He didn’t stop me from leaving whenever I wanted because he never expected anything of me in the first place. Around him I was….” He shrugged like the memory embarrassed him.

  “I was shallow and capricious. And I couldn’t fucking believe this good person wanted to spend even one second around me. Couldn’t believe he thought I was funny, or fun. Couldn’t believe he just accepted it when I told him I had to take off and then disappeared for a week without a word, taking care of stuff at Claire’s. And after a little while I got used to him, I guess. We got along really well. Rex is smart, you know, even if he’s not smart like your friend Daniel.”

  “I know he is,” I confirmed, and Will hesitated before nodding, like he’d been prepared for a disagreement.

  “You know the way he and Daniel are,” Will said, “where they’re just kind of… attuned to each other? Like, they aren’t close together but if you were standing far enough back to see them both you would see that they were moving in relation to one an
other?”

  “Oh my god, yes.” I didn’t want to admit how often I’d noticed that and wished that I could have something like it. It was basically the most romantic thing I’d ever seen. Like even through space, even separated, their bodies or spirits or whatever it was, could sense each other and move accordingly.

  “Rex wasn’t like that with me. We weren’t like that. And we never would’ve been. It just wasn’t that kind of thing. It was a good fit at the moment. He got a little infusion of fun in his life, and I… was looking for a wall I could keep running into. Anyway, we’d never have actually fit into each other’s lives. But I was on pause, and he was kinda locked away. I felt like the girl in that book… what’s it? The Secret Garden.” He looked embarrassed and when he spoke again it was as if he was mocking himself.

  “I got to skip into Rex’s little garden, and I shook things up for him—he was so damned serious; even worse than he is now, for real—and at the same time I got a place to hide away for a while. A place I could relax, I guess. But yeah.” He snorted. “It would never have worked long term. Rex needed a safe space, and I… definitely wasn’t. Never would’ve been for him.”

  “Wow, and you think of Daniel as a safe space? I more saw Rex as a safe space for him, I guess.”

  Will bent his head awkwardly to look at me, his stubble catching my hair.

  “Everyone’s safe space looks different, kiddo. For some people, like messy, messy Daniel, it’s someone who takes care of them, sure. But for others it’s someone who they can act out certain parts of their personalities with. Or all of their personalities.”

  Maybe he was half-asleep, but this didn’t sound quite like the cynical description of a relationship made of self-annihilating compromise I’d heard from him before.

  He rearranged us so his back was to my chest, pulling my arm around his stomach, and smashed his face into the pillow, clearly done with the subject.