"No, I mean--" Noah goes to rub his eyes in frustration and is surprised when he ends up flat on his back.
Anthony laughs softly. "Dear, dear Noah, you are absolutely smashed."
"I'm fucking this all up," Noah moans. "Can we stop and go back to when we were talking about before?"
Anthony finishes unknotting his tie and slides it off. "This is a conversation, not a book," he says, smile still tugging at his mouth. "You can't just go around editing it however you fancy."
"But I want to," Noah says, feeling like he might break apart any minute.
"All right," Anthony says. "Regale me, petal. What would you say differently?"
"I love you," Noah blurts out.
Anthony goes absolutely still.
"I love you," Noah says again, softly. "And I know that you -- I know I'm just your editor, and I'm happy with that, I'm really happy with that, because you're brilliant, have I ever told you? You're so fucking brilliant, and I couldn't help but just - I couldn't help wanting you to write something because of me, and I'm not talking about your porn books, because that's still really not funny, not when I feel like this and you're just, you're just-"
"Noah," Anthony says sharply, and then more gently, "You're the best editor anyone could ask for, but not even your eye catches everything."
"What?"
Anthony kisses him. He has the entire English language at his disposal and uses it magnificently, but nothing could be a more perfect answer than this soft, lingering pressure of lips against lips. And then he pulls back just a little, enough to say, "It was your professional opinion that a love confession wasn't out of the question after a prodigious number of orgasms, and while it pains me to acknowledge that I have yet to make you come even once, I hope you will believe me when I say that I love you madly and it is killing me that you're entirely too drunk for me to rectify the situation."
Noah's brain seizes up at love you madly, and then backtracks. "You have made me come once," he says.
"You're pissed out of your mind, darling, because I promise you that I would remember any such thing. Vividly."
"You wouldn't remember because you were in the shower," Noah says. "I was out here, reading your notes for the next porn novel."
Rather frustratingly, Anthony doesn't look like he's following.
Noah sighs then, and slides his hand up Anthony' shoulder to wrap around his neck. "I was reading it, all those things you wanted to do to Noah, and I had to -- I couldn't stand it, I had to--"
Anthony' eyes are half-lidded and nearly glazed. "That may be the most scorching thing I've ever heard, and I am taking it out of your hide in the morning when you are not drunk."
"You could do it now," Noah suggests hopefully.
"As I do not wish for you to have a change of heart in the morning, or worse yet, forget this all transpired and leave me for Salman Rushdie, I think it's safe to say that no, I cannot," Anthony says, ten kinds of regret vying for a place in his tone. He actually gets up then, and retrieves a glass of water and puts it on the nightstand. "Go to sleep," he says, and crosses the room.
"What are you doing?" Noah asks, his eyes already starting to fall shut.
"What I always do when there's not a chance in hell of me sleeping anytime in the near future," Anthony says, and Noah can hear the click of the laptop opening.
Chapter 11
He wakes once in the night to use the bathroom, drink a lot of water, and swallow two preemptive painkillers. The room is suffused with the glow from Anthony' screen, and he never stops typing. It lulls Noah back to sleep, wondering what Anthony is writing but knowing that he'll see it soon enough.
When he wakes again, it's morning, and he is mercifully, astonishingly not hungover, and Anthony is sitting up in bed next to him and staring at his laptop, or out the window, or possibly both, but not actually typing anything.
Noah tries to think of what to say, his brain helpfully providing all sorts of reminders of what he said last night, and then Anthony says suddenly, "I'm trying to come to grips with the cruel fact that I've been effectively cockblocking myself for years now. It's so perfectly tragic, I wonder that I haven't used it as a plot device before."
"Um," Noah says, and sits up in bed. "Because it's ridiculous?"
"As you are so fond of telling me, I am a ridiculous person," Anthony says. "Also, I wrote thirty pages last night."
Noah stumbles out of bed. "I'll be right back," he says, and shuts himself in the bathroom to use the toilet and brush his teeth. When he reemerges, he nearly flings himself back into bed. "Let me see," he says impatiently.
Anthony gives him a look. "Pet, are you absolutely serious?"
"Of course I am," Noah says, trying to position himself to see Anthony' laptop screen.
"Darling, I am dying here," Anthony says.
Noah just sandwiches himself against Anthony' side and says, almost absently, "Well, don't die yet. You're going to ravish me as soon as I'm done reading this."
"Why can't I ravish you now?"
"Because we can have sex anytime, but you wrote thirty pages and I need to read them immediately," Noah says, already moving on to the second page.
Anthony huffs but lets him read. He does not, however, let him read undisturbed. Noah is on page six when Anthony curls his arm more comfortably around Noah, on page ten when Anthony' fingertips dip below the waist of his pants and stroke against his hip, and on page eighteen when Anthony starts kissing Noah's neck, sucking at his skin and doing maddening things with his tongue and teeth, and when he ducks in to bite at Noah's earlobe, that's when Noah loses all reading comprehension skills and lets his head fall back, giving Anthony better access.
And of course Anthony takes it -- the laptop gets shoved a little carelessly on the nightstand, and then Anthony is planting one knee between Noah's thighs and kissing him, just as dirty and shameless and all-consuming at Noah has imagined, if not more. "I know what you want," Anthony says, and lets his thigh ride up between Noah's leg in one slow, nerve-melting rub.
"Don't get cocky," Noah manages to retort, undoing the buttons of Anthony' shirt while he leans up just enough to capture Anthony' lower lip between his teeth, sucking on it and tracing it gently with his tongue. When he lets go, Anthony just dives back in for another kiss and presses Noah more firmly into the mattress.
"I don't think I am, at all," Anthony says. "I just rewrote that sex scene twelve times until I knew exactly what you wanted."
It takes Noah a second to place what Anthony is talking about, probably because Anthony has Noah's wrists pinned to be the bed as he moves down Noah's body, breathing warm air across his navel. "I---what? I thought you were just being indecisive--" Anthony takes that moment to nose around Noah's erection through his pants -- "and, and making me crazy."
"I dearly hope so," Anthony says, and strips off Noah's pants and underwear all in one go. "Otherwise, this next bit where I roll you over, hold you down, and put my tongue in your arse until you shake is liable to be somewhat awkward."
"What?" Noah says just as Anthony flips him over. "Oh god," he moans as Anthony slides his fingers down his ass to stroke his balls for a few moments, light and teasing before he holds Noah open, breathes warm air across his skin and then licks him so delicately that Noah makes a noise high in his throat. "Aren't you -- going a little fast? Shouldn't we--"
Anthony drags the flat of his tongue against Noah's hole, and then -- oh fuck -- flutters it for one long, shudder-inducing moment before sticking it in, and it's like Noah's spine just liquefies. He fucks Noah with his tongue until Noah's shaking, just as Anthony had promised, and when Noah's moaning and in terrible danger of rubbing off against the bedsheets under him, Anthony says in a roughened voice, "Darling, would you mind if we shelve you coming on my face for later? Because I really have to fuck you right now."
"Then stop talking and do it," Noah groans.
Anthony reaches under his pillow and pulls out lube and condoms, which was either a mark of
foresight or confidence or both, but Noah doesn't care as long as it gets Anthony inside him. He can hear the noise of the condom wrapper and then Anthony is sliding fingers with lube into him, and he was already wet and now he's nearly sloppy with it, and Anthony' fingers are long and so goddamn good. "You don't want me to stop talking," Anthony says, twisting his fingers in Noah's ass even as he bears down with one hand gripping Noah's shoulder, holding him in place. "You want me to tell you that I'm going to shove my prick inside you and you're going to take it, and you're going to ask for harder and more and I'm going to give it to you, darling, I'm going to give it to you so good--"
Noah gasps when Anthony pulls his hips up then, tracing wet fingers down Noah's spine before pushing his cock inside Noah, slow and steady and perfect.
He can't think after that -- everything is a jumble of sensation and Anthony' filthy, filthy words, and Noah swears and tries to push back into it, and he does ask for harder, for more, and Anthony is as good as his word and gives it to him. Toward the end, he thinks he's honest-to-god whimpering and then Anthony closes his hand around Noah's cock for several short strokes, and he comes so hard that he nearly misses the moment when Anthony groans and tightens his hands painfully on Noah's hips.
They collapse on the bed then, and Anthony pets him vaguely, and whispers terribly sentimental things to him, says, "Dear, dear Noah," and "My god, love," and, most egregiously, "I hope it was good for you, darling boy."
Noah can't really find it in him to yell at Anthony for that last part, which Anthony will, of course, take it to mean that he should call Noah "darling boy" more often. And the thing is -- Noah's not sure he would be wrong to do so.
There's a little rearranging, an extremely lazy clean-up, and then Noah is settling his head against Anthony' shoulder. He presses a kiss against a swirl of ink there, and it gets him a surprised, pleased noise from Anthony before he dozes off.
Chapter 12
Anthony is actually sleeping when Noah wakes up again, which stands to reason, since he'd been up for almost twenty-four hours before he fucked Noah's brains out. Noah lets him sleep, and carefully retrieves his laptop from the nightstand, and opens up the draft again.
It's smart, and engrossing, and so tightly paced that Noah gets to the end and wants the next part so badly that he very nearly pokes Anthony in the side to demand that he wake up and write more, this very instant.
But he doesn't, because a few spaces under the last paragraph is a sentence:
i wrote them for you. i wrote them all for you
***
"I have three-quarters of a draft," Noah says dreamily on the phone to Morgan.
"I'm going to assume it's good, because you're sounding pretty post-coital, there," Morgan says.
"He is post-coital, and how," Anthony says, all wrapped around Noah and therefore close enough to the phone to contribute to the conversation.
"Oh for Christ's sake," Morgan says, but he doesn't sound too upset. "I gave you my best, Mr. Anthony -- you'd better return the favor."
"You'll love it," Noah says. "It's a heist novel. About removing people’s memories and travelling through time to save a life.."
There's silence on the other end of the line. "What."
"The middle's a bit weak, and obviously it's not done yet, and there's two chapters that I basically need to rip apart, but I really think it's going to be great," Noah says enthusiastically.
"Hey," Anthony objects, which he shouldn't, he knows the middle is shit because he told Noah he would fix it later if he could just fuck Noah against the bathroom counter right then, and that seemed like a good plan at the time.
"Anyway, we're flying back tomorrow," Noah says, and then yelps when Anthony' hands start to wander.
"I won't expect you in until the day after," Morgan says dryly, and that's when Anthony steals the Blackberry, hangs it up, and optimistically rolls Noah over for round two.
Chapter 13
The most astonishing thing is that nothing really seems to change, aside from the fact that Noah has learned to leverage sex to make Anthony write, which works out pretty well for everyone involved because Anthony finds the promise of doing filthy things to Noah's all-too-willing body a really good motivational tool, and Noah's always been a fan of delayed gratification. Also, he spends the night at Anthony' apartment more often than not, and has reorganized Anthony' closet space accordingly.
But other than that: really, pretty much the same.
Noah goes into the office for a few hours, then comes back to Anthony' apartment with coffee, using the same key he's always had to open the door.
Anthony is sitting on the sofa, computer on his lap. "I'm writing," he says, in response to Noah's suspicious gaze.
"Good," Noah says, putting coffee down on the table in front of the sofa and sitting down next to Anthony. "Wait. What are you writing?"
"Well," Anthony hedges.
"You had goddamn well better be finishing your book, or else," Noah says dangerously, but the brief glance he catches at Anthony' screen contains the following unpromising words: Noah, beg, bareback.
"You shouldn't scold me -- be sensible, darling, I was really on a roll this time, isn't it better that I write something than write nothing?" Anthony pleads.
"That depends on just how badly you want to know what I did while you were in the shower this morning," Noah says coolly, and moves just enough where he sits to feel the plug shift inside him.
Anthony' eyes go hot, then, like he knows perfectly well even though he couldn't -- Noah's taken pains for this to be a surprise. "You're terrible, and you take shameless advantage of the fact that I've been besotted with you for years," he accuses, but obediently closes the porn file and reopens the novel manuscript.
"Only because I want you to win the Booker," Noah says, and sips his coffee companionably.
"I don't even know what I'm writing anymore, this is such shit," Anthony says.
Noah heads that tantrum off at the pass by leaning in for a kiss, and Anthony is more than happy to oblige him. Noah is thinking of everything, their whole future stretched out in front of them when he says, "Trust me, this is going to be good."
Also By Marina Lander
Short Stories:
Hold Me Down
Caught On Camera
Finally Full of You
Soft Kiss
Full-Length Works:
Pushing Boundaries
Coffeeshop Kisses
Finding Truth
The Story Of Us Page 3