He gazed up at me over his shoulder, his eyes filled with something I couldn’t quite define. I was helpless against this look. I kissed him as I opened him, carefully, languidly, because we had all the time in the world.
Okay, maybe there was a little teasing.
“Please,” he finally said after several long minutes of making out.
I removed my fingers and added slick to my cock, the sound in my throat guttural as I notched against his hole. He whined and pushed back, and I nudged forward, encircling him in my arms. With a grunt, I was inside his willing body, liquefying every moment of the stress and uncertainty of the last six months until they faded like a distant memory. The tension I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding in my body vanished.
“Jesse,” I breathed into his neck. “Jesse,” I repeated, thrusting into the sidelong hug, pulling him impossibly closer to me.
He responded with his body, melting into me, tilting his hips back as I pushed forward, our quiet lovemaking in the sunny room something like hope. Like a future I never dared to dream of.
We moved as one, gripping each other, a differentkind of desperation. Our silence was broken by a stifled sob.
“Are you okay?” I asked, stilling my hips.
“Better than I’ve ever been in my entire life,” he whispered, leaning his head down to press kisses along my arms banded across his chest.
I let one hand drift to his neck, while trailing the other down his belly and into the thatch of hair at the base of his cock. He pressed his neck into my hand, his cock into my other, and I tightened both.
I fucked into him, grasping his throat while not cutting off any air, stroking him with a hand still slick from opening him. As dreamy as everything had been to this moment, his gasping cries and my soft grunts turned heated. I pushed him onto his belly, sliding my hands under his armpits to grip his shoulders as I fucked his pliant body into the mattress.
At first, Jesse was simply a willing fuck toy, but then he leveraged his knees to hunch back against my sharp thrusts, more of those deep, dark animal noises twinning as climax approached. I slid my hand under his raised hip, grasping him, squeezing tight, twisting my hand, stroking him with each hard, deep thrust.
He choked out a grunt, his cock jumping in my hand.
He groaned through his orgasm, his hot body milking mine. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the blue of the ocean, that sense of limitlessness spurring me on, my entire body euphoric, as I peaked, then wenthigher, releasing into him, more free than I’d ever felt in my entire life.
His sheets were a mess, but I didn’t give a shit. I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. I leaned back, pulling his cheek to the side so I could watch my cock exit his well-used hole, followed by my cum.
We separated, laughing and messy, and he dragged me into his shower, into the small stall that made up one side of his bathroom, the tiles ancient, corners rounded with age, the high but narrow window above us scaled over so the light filtered in like cinema. The showerhead, equally ancient, had the water pressure to prove it, and a sprig of lavender and herbs was tied to the gooseneck extension from the wall.
Jesse was in my arms, his chin tilted up, lips expecting to be kissed all over again. I was helpless against him.
16
JESSE
The next morning,after a few more rounds of fucking—lovemaking—Rafferty and I had a leisurely breakfast with Sofija, who was delighted with my large, impressive decko. When I translated that she’d just called him my boyfriend, Rafferty grinned proudly and put his arm around me, kissing my forehead.
He laughed when Sofija pulled out the shiny Rummikub box, one of the few things I had purchased on my travels. He stopped laughing when she kicked both of our asses, but he was good-natured about it.
“Show me Montenegro,” he demanded later, between kisses.
So I did.
I’d spent the last few months just recovering. Trying to come down from feeling like I had to look over my shoulder every minute. No one gave a shit about a probably-dead enforcer for a drug enterprise that no longerexisted. With Rafferty at my side, though, I genuinely felt at peace for the first time in a long time.
Which meant I hadn’t gone much farther than Sofija’s backyard, so he and I would be exploring together. We went up the coast and then farther inland to the mountains. My grasp of the language had been rudimentary, but traveling around the country forced us to use it every day. By the end of our month-long road trip, we’d both improved our language skills by leaps and bounds. Montenegrin declensions still tripped us up, but Rafferty loved a challenge.
Sofija declared our language skills passable when we returned, and she continued to wipe the floor with us on Rummikub nights. We all spoke enough of a common language that she was more clearly able to demonstrate exactly how protective of me she had been these last several months. Rather than taking offense to her mama bear routine, Rafferty thanked her, kissed her cheek, and told her he had no intentions of ever harming me and would protect me with his dying breath.
We’d both admitted to wanting more, but given our history, I wasn’t quite sure what it would look like. What it ended up looking like was Rafferty falling in love with our elderly landlord, just as I had.
And that, almost as much as anything else, made me realize how very much I loved him.
“You look like you’re swimming in deep thoughts,” I said, plying Rafferty with a cup of coffee in the soft early morning sun on our tiny, overgrown patio.
He smiled and pulled me onto his lap. “That’s because I was, in fact, swimming in deep thoughts.”
