Ian slipped his hand up from Sam’s neck and covered his mouth.
Sam was pretty sure he thrashed then, and he knew he was yelling against Ian’s palm, feeling Ian’s cock thrusting hard, forcing the intrusion while his hand corkscrewed on Sam’s dick.
Sam let go.Came all over Ian’s hand and his own stomach, elbows giving out, muscles beyond his control, exploding from ass to dick with sensations shooting down his legs.The room went gray, his whole world pooling somewhere in his balls and spilling out.
He collapsed, draped all over Ian, dimly aware Ian had come.He groaned and let his head roll on Ian’s shoulder, twitching occasionally, until Ian forced a hand between their bodies and gripped the base of his dick and, presumably, the condom.Then Sam made himself flip over, off of Ian and onto his stomach on the bed.He twitched on the sheets while his cum soaked into the zillion-thread-count, Egyptian long-staple cotton.“Laundry,” he mumbled.
“’Zat all you can say?”
“Uh-huh.”Sam tried to nod, but it was a no-go.
“Guess I’ll consider it a compliment that I fucked you senseless.”
Sam giggled.Then he dropped right into sleep.
Ian chased him all over the bed during the first half of the night.Sam hadn’t slept more than an hour before Ian was shoving him off the edge.His heart sank at the thought that Ian didn’t want him there, but when he tried to get up to move to the couch, Ian grabbed him and hung on.
“Ian?”
Ian snored in response.He was asleep?Seriously?Sam managed to crank his head around far enough to see.If Ian was faking sleep, he deserved props for the drooling.
After the third time Sam woke up to find Ian squeezing the life out of him, he couldn’t avoid the conclusion that Ian was a sleep cuddler.Crazy.He didn’tlooklike a sleep cuddler; he looked like two weeks was his idea of long-term commitment.
The snuggling wasn’t bad—very nice actually.The problem was the way Ian kept Sam balanced right on the edge of the mattress, in constant danger of going over.The fourth time Sam woke up—when Ian’s hold loosened and he went tumbling off the bed—he crawled around to the other side and got in, scooting up behind Ian and wrapping an arm around him.
He managed to sleep the rest of the night after that.
When Ian woke up in the morning, Sam wasn’t there.It surprised the hell out of him and left him feeling strangely flat.He looked at the pillow Sam had used—on the opposite side from where he’d fallen asleep, but it had a head indent and a straight dirty-blond hair on the white case—and tried to figure out what this meant.
He had no problem understanding why Sam wasn’t there.He was trying to determine why he felt flat inside.Because he’d achieved some of that elusive “emotional connectedness”?If he had, it was overrated.
He heard a sound and rolled onto his back to see Sam standing in the doorway and looking at him.Ian was ridiculously relieved.
“Morning,” Sam said.He didn’t look nervous, exactly; he looked out of place and confused, like a startled fawn.
Maybe he looked more like a newborn calf.It was cute.All big, blinking eyes, long nose, and spindly limbs.Ian stared until Sam turned away, cheeks pinking up.He cleared his throat.“Morning.How long have you been up?”
“An hour.I needed to get some writing in.”Sam seemed mildly out of it still.He wandered into the room, stopping when he met Ian’s eyes in the mirror on the closet door.
“You’re in school, right?”Ian propped his head on his hand, truly, surprisingly curious.
“Yeah,” Sam said.“I’m getting my Master of Fine Arts in writing.”His face in the mirror looked resigned.Hesoundedresigned.
“Isn’t that what Nik has?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound very happy about it.”
Sam grimaced in the mirror.Ian thought he would have to prod him—and just why am I asking him about this?—but Sam said, “I sometimes think I’d rather get a doctorate in literature.”
That right there should have been a conversation killer.Ian didn’t know literature from graffiti, and he’d never found his life lacking because of it.“So get that instead.As far as I can tell, a degree in writing doesn’t make you highly employable.”
Sam snorted softly.“Neither does a doctorate in literature.”
“Life’s too short to get the degree someone else wants you to get, only to hit your thirties and realize you don’t care what they think anymore.Do what you want.You gotta be able to get a decent job with a doctorate.”Hell.Like that wasn’t a revealing thing to say.
Sam turned around to look at him directly.“Is that what you did?’
