It was true. It was so true. The memory of the wet clay squishing through their joined fingers, their bodies pressed together over the wheel, the way the hair on the side of Andy’s head stood up when Leonidas had breathed against it. All some of his favorite memories.
“I still don’t think I like Paris,” Andy mused, picking up the paint brush Leonidas had selected earlier. He dragged his finger across the tip of the bristles, then dipped it into one of the golden yellow paints Leonidas had poured out. “But I liked it with you. Is that weird?”
“No,” Leonidas answered with a small frown. “But I think that means you didn’t like Paris. You just liked me.”
“That’s probably true.” Andy raised the brush and made a small circle on Leonidas’s chest, in the center. The paint was cold and the bristles tickled, but he fought to hold steady. Andy paused when he’d completed the shape, sucking in a small gasp that, to Leonidas’s ears, sounded like surprise. “I get it now.”
“What do you get,agapi mou?” Leonidas closed his eyes and dropped his head backward, every breath hitching in his throat.
“All of it,” Andy said. He pressed the brush back to Leonidas’s skin and painted a long, swooping arc over the top of his pectoral muscle.
He opened his eyes and looked down, then looked up at Andy.
“Kiss me,” he pleaded, his voice cracking. “Please.”
Leonidas didn’t know why it was so important, such a life or death thing in that moment, that Andy’s mouth be on his, but he felt for certain in his chest that he would crumple to the ground if Andy didn’t give him this one thing. Blessedly, Andy stepped closer to him, but instead of the kiss he’d asked for, Andy licked his neck, up his chin, then the corner of his mouth.
“You had some juice,” he whispered, before slanting their mouths together.
Leonidas groaned in thankfulness and pleasure, then opened his mouth, letting Andy kiss him the way he wanted to, the way he knew Leonidas needed. Andy wasn’t gentle and he wasn’t soft. He used his tongue to pillage Leonidas’s mouth, the motion of the kiss rocking his cock through his bound fists. He whimpered against Andy’s lips, the callouses of his palms and the rough knot of the rope grinding against his cock with every press of Andy’s body.
Andy didn’t stop until a cold sweat broke out across Leonidas’s chest, and when he stepped back to put space between them, Andy bent down and shoved his pants off, leaving himself as bare as Leonidas, his cock, just as hard.
“No more requests,” he rasped, giving his cock a long and slow pull downward.
“Yes, Sir,” he agreed.
Andy bent over and pulled the blindfold out of his pocket and came close again. He traced the tips of his fingers along Leonidas’s cheekbones, then over his eyelids and across the shape of his brows. Leonidas closed his eyes again and focused on the pinpoints of heat where Andy’s skin touched his.
“Is this a limit?” Andy asked, resting the blindfold over Leonidas’s closed eyes.
“No.”
Andy’s fingers worked at the back of his head, making a knot that was tight enough to serve as a reminder, but not tight enough to hurt.
Don’t hurt me.
“Alright,” Andy said, stepping away. Leonidas felt the rush of cold air as Andy moved, and he mourned the space between them. “I’m ready to make some art with you.”
27
Andy
Andy hopedLeonidas hadn’t felt the quiver in his hand with the first brush stroke, but he felt steadier now.
You didn’t like Paris, you just like me.
It was such a simple thing, an off-the-cuff statement that hit Andy like a bag of bricks, sucking the breath out of his lungs. He inventoried the other conversations they’d shared, remembered the way Leonidas spoke about traveling and what he hoped to get from his solo excursions around the world. He wanted to be in the places, not with the people, and with those words, Andy could taste the icy banana daquiri he’d dreamt about on the tip of his tongue.
Feeling emboldened, he pressed the pads of his first two fingers against the underside of Leonidas’s chin and tipped it upward, then painted a stripe from the top of his throat to the dip in his collarbone.
“Your cock is hard,” he observed, looking down at the shiny and swollen tip that protruded from Leonidas’s grip.
“For you,” Leonida said, his words sounding like he was singing a hymn.
“Do you want to touch yourself?” Andy curled his free hand around Leonidas’s fingers and made a tight fist around his hands and his cock.
Leonidas’s body was wracked with a tremor. He nodded and swallowed, the thick knot of his Adam’s apple bobbing as he did.
