by Neve Wilder
“Hey.” I called out the brusque alert as I walked toward him, and when he turned back, that smile he’d given me was already gone, like he’d never meant it in the first place. I witnessed his surprise as it was born in the small flinch of muscle that sparked the rise of his brows and twitched along his jaw.
And then I smothered it with my mouth.
I kissed him to answer his unspoken question. I kissed him because he was always right about me. And I kissed him because I couldn’t take one more second of not knowing how the mouth that did such wicked things to me felt under my own. He’d had his fingers and cock in my ass, he’d fucked me sideways and turned me inside out. But the sensation of his lips pressed to mine trumped all that.
I’d never kissed another guy, never done anything besides get off. This was different—a sweet heat, a tang that was distinctly him and so fucking intense. Eric grunted and took a backward step to keep his balance as I barreled into him. Then his hands closed over the collar of my shirt and pulled me deeper into the thrust of his tongue against mine.
I let out a muffled groan because there was so much in that damn kiss—all the pent-up confusion about my feelings for him and, I thought, from him as well—a desperate edge in the way we clung to each other, in the pressure of my body against his. Eric let go of my collar to place his palms on either side of my neck, tensing there to keep me from moving. When I tilted my head aside for a breath, he panted against my chin, his forehead resting against my temple.
“Fuck. Just…fuck.”
And because I thought I knew what he was trying to say, I replied with another kiss, cupping his jaw and tilting his lips back to mine. For this moment right now, in this tiny pocket of space and time, Eric was mine.
Our tongues warred, pushed, teased, tangled. Devoured.
And then, after one last bruising press of his lips, he pushed me roughly away, opened the door, and walked out.
I didn’t get home until a little after three in the morning, exhausted and running on the few beers I’d had while helping with cleanup. Mark and I parted ways at the staircase. He looked half-dead stumbling toward his room.
As I walked up the stairs, I wondered how things had gone for Marty, if he’d ended up with Ashley. I yanked my tie out of my pocket and tossed it and my coat into my bedroom when I passed on the way to the bathroom, then tackled my shirt. After taking a piss and brushing my teeth, I started down the hall again, my steps slowing until I stood in front of Eric’s door.
Maybe he’d locked it. If he’d locked it, I would turn around and go into my room and I would never do this again, never stand here and stare at a piece of painted wood and metal hinges like they were some portal to a different dimension, and never again entertain the crazy notion that had me reaching out a hand to try the knob.
It turned easily and quietly. But I think I’d known it would.
A thin shaft of light pierced through a couple of missing window-blind slats and fell across my legs as I shut the door behind me and locked it.
Eric lay spread out on his stomach, one arm curled around the pillow he’d buried three-quarters of his face in. He didn’t move as I walked to the end of the bed, dropped my pants, and climbed in. I had zero fucking clue what I was doing when I slid beneath the top sheet, but just when I’d convinced myself this was a stupid idea, I felt the soft trip of his fingertips over the top of my ass on their way to anchoring across my lower back, an echo of his touch earlier in the night when I’d been bent over the desk. A quiet demand. I told myself I’d stay for ten minutes, maybe twenty, then go back to my room.
Instead, I fell asleep next to him.
4
Show Me
I woke out of a dead slumber with a jolt, my eyes flying wide and automatically wincing against the assault of morning light. Confused, I fumbled to get my bearings, fingertips brushing against soft cotton and then bumping up against warm skin as my vision adjusted. My heart beat wildly in my chest, and I wasn’t entirely sure why until a knock sounded and I jumped all over again, fight-or-flight instinct lacing my sense of bewilderment.
A warm hand slid over the center of my chest and splayed, pressing me back into the mattress as Eric’s voice came low and soft. “Relax, it’s locked. I made sure earlier when I came back from taking a piss.”
His fingers trailed in a sluggish caress over my skin, a heat he took with him as he slid off the end of the bed and ambled toward the door, shoving one hand lazily in his boxers as he went. In my still half-asleep state, I did the only logical thing I could think of: I flail-rolled myself off the other side of the bed, landing heavily on the floor, out of sight of the door just as I heard the lock pop as Eric opened it. I twisted around and rested my head on my forearm so I could peer around the bottom of the bed like I was back in fucking high school hiding from some girlfriend’s parents. It’d happened a couple of times.
“Why bother with an alarm clock when there’s your ass,” Eric groused, and I had to silently agree with him; why the hell were people in this house such early risers? But when I glanced over my shoulder at the clock on the bedside table, I was surprised to find it read 10:00 a.m.
“You seen Nate?”
I froze, and there was a brief pause before Eric replied, “At the thing last night, yeah. He was still there when I left, though.”
Mark made a disgruntled noise. “Weird. His door’s cracked and—dude, can you leash that thing or something? I feel like I need to salute it back.”
“You interrupted my morning briefing.” Eric laughed, and the husky sound of it slid across the room like a shaft of light and pooled in my stomach. I shifted around as my dick got hard at the mere suggestion that his was, too. Great, my Pavlovian instincts had reached even creepier heights. If Eric popped wood in the middle of a forest and no one was around to see it…
I must have made some noise, because Eric shot a look over his shoulder, and I tried to stave off the snicker that was bubbling up in my chest by pressing my mouth to my forearm.
Mark snorted, then continued. “Anyway, he came home with me last night… Guess he could have gotten up really early. Whatever. If you see him, will you remind him that we have chapter today? He’s been flaky as fuck lately, and it’s weirding me out. You think he’s up to something?”
“Like what?” I could hear the skepticism in Eric’s voice and was duly impressed by his acting abilities. I’d have been stuttering.
Mark hedged for a second, trying to come up with something, I guess, and completely clueless that his answer to what I was “up to” was standing in front of him sporting morning wood that I was very interested in giving a happy ending. “I dunno. Maybe banging some chick he doesn’t want us to find out about?”
Eric broke into loud laughter, probably because his thoughts were running along the same track mine were.
Mark joined in. “Like that butterface from Kappa?”
Eric’s laughter trailed off. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, guess you wouldn’t. Speaking of chicks, that redhead you’re always hanging out with, Amelia?”
“Amanda,” Eric corrected.
“You hitting that? Because daaaaamn.”
“Nope.” There was a long pause, and I knew Mark well enough to know he was waiting for more. An offer for a hookup or some further explanation. Eric’s tight-lipped game was stronger, though, and for whatever reason, he apparently didn’t want to give anything else up to Mark. After a moment, Mark must have relented with a gesture or something, because the next thing I heard was a quiet “Yeah, cool. I’m out,” and then Eric shut the door again.
I heard the lock click and dropped my forehead on my arm in relief. I had a singular moment of wondering what the fuck I was even doing—on so many counts—before a billow of air puffed over me when Eric flopped back on the bed and peered down at me as I rolled onto my back to stare up at him. The residual adrenaline running through me made me antsy.
“Don’t need coffee any
more this morning—maybe a tranquilizer instead.”
Eric gave me a tight smile as he eyed me. “This is like a scenario out of a bad after-school special.”
“Jesus, what kind of after-school specials did you watch growing up?”
He flipped some hair from his eyes and folded his forearms over the edge of the bed, resting his chin on top. He looked…nice in the morning. A little softer, and it wasn’t like I was intimidated by him—not physically, at least—but his presence seemed so vivid and commanding in the places we got off together that just the ordinariness of being with him in his room somehow felt weirdly intimate. I kinda wished we hadn’t had such a rude awakening, that…
“None, actually. My parents didn’t believe in TV.”
“How can you not believe in TV?”
“The old ‘it rots your brain’ argument.” He shrugged one shoulder lazily. “So I was left to my own devices.”
“And look how you turned out, getting guys off in libraries and at fund-raisers.”
“I think you were there, too, so not exactly an equal argument in favor of TV either.”
“Point.” I laughed and rubbed a hand over the scruff on my jaw. I ached for a shower, and I really needed to go to the gym, but damn, Eric’s mouth was right there, silently telling me what I needed instead was to fill it with my cock. I licked my lips and pushed the heel of my hand against my boxers as I met his eyes and I saw it, that shadow passing through the olive-green tones, the darkening of want making its presence known.
He took a quiet breath, gaze drifting down to my boxers, then back up again. “You threw me for a loop last night.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve been throwing me for about a month now.” I could have worded it better, but it came out as a blurted confession.
He touched the corner of his mouth with his tongue, gaze raking over my body again. It really was a raking, too, like he had the power to drag furrows down my body, leave welt marks behind, hot and pink. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I nodded and swallowed hard, hoping like fuck I wasn’t blushing, even though I felt the creep of heat over my neck and my cheeks. What was it about the way he looked at me that could turn me from tepid to hellfire blaze in seconds? Eric scraped his teeth over his lower lip, making it pop out all shiny and slick, reminding me what he looked like when he was sucking my dick.
Silence fell, this kind of tension-heavy pause like a finger hovering over a taut rubber band. And I felt like I was waiting for him to snap it against the inside of my wrist. One of us was supposed to fill it, probably with words, probably with conversation about what the fuck we were doing, and it defaulted to him since I’d been the last one to speak, but it was obvious after a handful of seconds that he wasn’t going to.
Instead, Eric pulled himself forward over the edge of the bed, fingers tensing to brace his weight on either side of me as he slid from the mattress and straddled me in one long, sinuous movement that rolled over me like rippling water. That light, that liquid. His breath on my lips was faintly minty; he must have brushed his teeth earlier. I hadn’t, and probably should’ve been more self-conscious, but I wasn’t because his closeness absolutely fucking consumed me like nothing else. My entire body was suddenly on alert, my nerves prickling with awareness and the hairs on my damn forearms lifting as he dipped down and licked my lower lip slowly while the bottom half of his body pressed into mine, everything about him hard and warm.
Fuck, he had a sexy mouth, and his lashes lay dark against his cheek as his tongue made another pass before he opened his eyes to find me watching him. I opened my mouth to him, let his tongue flick lightly over mine. Not exactly a kiss, but a wet, repetitive caress that was strangely fucking hot and exciting in its weirdness.
He rolled his hips once against me and drew back by an inch when I groaned.
“Want me to throw you again right now?”
“Trick question.” I knew the second I said yes, he’d take me all the way to the edge, then leave me hanging. And besides, the loop throwing was already well in progress. A foregone conclusion. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, I’d crawled into his bed last night like some desperado. In the light of day, it was more than a little embarrassing. I’d never really been the kind of guy to give chase. Could I blame it on those last several beers?
I rolled upright and intercepted him, pushing him onto his back and catching his startled expression a second before I straddled his knees and yanked the band of his boxers down, exposing the thick cock lying along his thigh. By the time I looked back up, he’d regained his composure, and that smooth amber chuckle came out to spur me on as I lowered my mouth and licked up the length of his thigh, dark hairs tickling the tip of my tongue until I reached his crown and circled it. With a groan, his hands flew to my hair and he arched into me.
“All of it, Sanders, don’t be a tease.”
I played along, wrapping my lips around him, filling my mouth with his cock, and there was something insanely sexy and gratifying about feeling him get hard in my mouth, about all that soft skin tightening and stretching just for me when I bathed it with my tongue. Maybe this was exactly why he liked fucking around with me so much. The sense of control was as much an aphrodisiac as the awareness that it could shift any moment.
And it did, because a second later, Eric anchored his fist tight in my hair, holding me still while he fucked my mouth, drawing back just enough for me to catch my breath when I choked before plunging in again, hard and fast, the muscles in his stomach strained and defined, his thighs like granite underneath me. The scattershot roughness of his exhales urged me on as he propped himself up on one elbow, kept the other hand tight in my hair, and dug his nails almost painfully into my scalp.
“Look at me,” he demanded. “Yeah, just like that.”
I felt my moan vibrating against his cockhead as I met his eyes. What a fucking way to start the morning.
I tasted his precome, lapped the saltiness from his slit as he hissed, his eyes shuttering closed like a cat blinking in the sunlight, and just as soon opening again, because he was a greedy bastard and liked to see his dick between my lips. I kept my gaze locked on his and, just for his benefit, opened my mouth and let him watch the flat of my tongue running up and down his glistening shaft.
He snapped out a curse, and when I felt a telltale quiver of his thighs beneath me, I closed my mouth over him again, gave him one last hard suck, and popped free, leaning back on his shins.
I half expected him not to let me go, to drag me back down onto his dick and fill my mouth with his release. If he had, I’d have finished him, would’ve been helpless not to. Instead, there was a flare of frustration in his eyes, then dawning understanding and amusement.
“That’s how you’re gonna play it, huh? A little tit for tat?”
“That’s about the size of it, yeah.” I licked my lips clean and wiped my chin with my hand. “You could always ask me nicely to finish you off.” I arched a brow, and he rolled his lips inward to fight off a smile. “But that ain’t happening, is it?”
His eyelids drooped to half-mast, all confident ease as he gave his cock a few light strokes. “Nope. I’d tell you to. And you would, wouldn’t you, frat boy? You’d come right back and open that sexy mouth for me and let me blow my load all over your face.”
“Probably.” Yes. No point in trying to deny it when my dick presented all the evidence in the wet patch that had darkened the front of my boxers. Asshole. He could twist something in a second, and it was crazy how addicted I was to it, how much I looked forward to it, even when I tried to test the invisible boundary lines we danced around.
I was so hard it fucking hurt, and I wasn’t even sure why I felt the need to challenge him. He was underneath me, ready to give me exactly what we both knew I wanted, but there was something about the unspoken stalemate and constant anticipation between us that stoked my arousal. I knew I’d spend the rest of the day—hell, whatever amount of time elapsed between now and when we next hooked up—thinkin
g about it, wanting it, playing it in my head, aching for it.
Eric pumped his cock a few more times, so fucking stiff, the crown plump and leaking. I could practically feel his jizz ready to pop off. And goddamn I wanted it. My palms were getting the tops of my thighs wet where I clutched them in an effort to keep from touching myself, determined to carry this out. Not that Eric was making it easy, of course. He never did.
And he didn’t now.
He rolled upright, unseating me from his legs and wrestling me onto my back where he hovered over me and rubbed his cock against mine in one long, serpentine, nerve-spiking thrust. “You’d let me fill you with my fingers. My tongue. My dick. Whatever I wanted. Wherever I wanted. However I wanted.” Each word spilled like an incantation, a primal rhythm to it that had me spreading my legs wider, only half realizing that I was opening myself up to him. I swear the fucker could cast spells talking like that. He reached down and pinched the head of my cock until I winced, then let go. Blood rushed back in, bringing with it a tingle that made me light-headed. “Wouldn’t you?”
Check. Check. Check. Check. My dick twitched and leaked. I balled my hands into fists to keep from reaching for it or for him. I knew what he was doing. He wanted to see if I’d beg without asking or being prompted, without telling me to do it explicitly. And damn, I was close, feeling his dick hard against mine, his body surrounding me, overtaking me, the hard rise and fall of his chest, and that crazy penetrating, unflinching stare of his, like he’d never been ashamed in his life, like he’d always been perfectly, incautiously fucking filthy and relentless about what he wanted.
I didn’t even have the instinct to try to wriggle free.