“Yeah, all right, then,” he replies, dusting his fingernails off on the lining of his towel like Oliver’s just asked him how his day is going. “Give us a minute, I’ll put on a shirt.”
Waste of time,Oliver thinks, wickedly.It’s coming back off.
His bravado dries up when he takes the right turn instead of left coming out of the stadium, announcing to the traffic and to Leo in the passenger seat beside him that they’re headed north, away from Marylebone. Leo clears his throat, looking down andsaying nothing. Oliver simultaneously longs to offer him an out and dreads the idea of him taking it.No pressure,he wants to assure him, even as he cracks under the weight of it, the thought of what they might be about to do rattling him inside and out.
As they cross the little bridge over the canal, Oliver’s house coming into view, Leo inhales sharply as the situation finally makes itself unequivocally clear. Oliver pulls over the second he hears that, swerving toward the curb, but when he shuts the car off and turns to face Leo, he’s already unbuckled and reaching for the door, stepping out onto the street and not looking back at the driver’s seat.
It’s not where Oliver had planned to actually park for the evening, but he follows Leo’s lead, tiptoeing on his own street corner, fumbling with the keys. In any imaginings he’s ever allowed about bringing someone home, having someone in his actual house, he’s always played it much more suave. When the front door shuts behind them, Oliver is sweating more than he did in the match, damp and nervy with it.
“Make yourself at h—” he starts, trying to put them back to baseline, but the sentence doesn’t get out, since Leo has, maybe even predictably at this point, launched himself at him. “Mmmph,” Oliver gets out, wrenching himself free from the kiss. Leo is quaking in front of him like a spooked horse; he palms Leo’s sweet, soft head, trying to gentle him and also wanting, more than anything, to keep touching him. “Easy, tiger. We don’t have anywhere to be. Let’s take it slow.”
Leo shakes his head, dislodging Oliver’s hand, and comes up on the balls of his feet, smacking one more kiss to his shocked mouth.
“I don’t want to go slow,” Leo tells him matter-of-factly. “I know you, Harris. I give you time to think and you might change your mind again, which would, frankly, kill me dead.”
“Oh, perish the thought,” Oliver murmurs, laying his palm over Leo’s heart to check it’s still beating, thinking,Hey, now that’s closer to suave.
Leo raises his eyebrows challengingly, so he dives back in, slower in pace but deeper in intent this time. They find that same rhythm Oliver’s felt with a ball between them sometimes, both anticipatory and reciprocal. Their breaths are slow and gasps between each other’s mouths. The smooth backs of Leo’s teeth are slick under Oliver’s tongue and he chases the taste and the feeling, swallowing every perfect noise that comes out of Leo. It’s unlike any kiss between them that’s come before, must be unlike any kiss between anyone in the history of time, really, for how good it feels to Oliver. He’s distantly aware of them both grasping and pulling, trying to get closer, trying to put this feeling in every one of their limbs.
It occurs to Oliver that the only thing that could be better than this is doing it horizontally. Carefully, so it doesn’t disrupt anything, because he doesn’t want to stop, not for anything, he starts to guide them toward the stairs, leading Leo backward. A few steps up, he realizes Leo is taller than him like this. He leans into it, straining on his tiptoes to keep the kiss how he wants it: brazen and admittedly kind of sloppy. Leo pulls away, taking three tries to get fully clear because Oliver follows through over and over, chasing him down like a counterattack.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he breathes into Leo’s waiting, open mouth.
“To your bed, Oliver,” Leo replies. “If you’ll have me.” Then he takes off running like he did that night in the park after losing to Chelsea, scrambling up the stairs a million miles an hour. Oliver wants him, madly, immediately, and now the only thing between himself and getting him is the time it takes to catch up.
Leo freezes on the landing, looking down the hallway at the cluster of doors, and Oliver overtakes him, yanking them up tothe third level by the elbow. He pulls them both through the doorframe to his bedroom, one little leap of faith, then keeps going all the way across the room until he’s pushed Leo flat on his back at the edge of the mattress. When Oliver strips off his sweater, Leo’s eyes go glassy, tracing the lines of his body with blown pupils.
“My word, man,” Leo says, making a vile wolf-whistling noise.
“Give it a rest,” Oliver begs. “You’ve seen it all before.”
“Not like this, I haven’t,” Leo says fairly, running his fingertips across Oliver’s waistline carefully, like he’s not quite sure how to touch him, but when Oliver presses into it Leo grabs for him with both hands, pulling him up and over, guiding lower until Oliver is cradling his body over Leo’s. He responds in kind, one hand under the curve of Leo’s ass, pulling his hips off the mattress and toward his own, the other braced on the firm muscle of Leo’s bicep. They’re kissing again, Oliver losing track of the number he started cataloging in his head in March, as they rapidly approach triple digits. The air is thick with the sensation, trickling like honey all down his body, bordering on an intensity that makes him unsure if he should move toward it or lean away.
Oliver can’t, or won’t, go anywhere: Leo has him firmly by the back of the thighs, notching them together at the hinges. He slips one finger around the outline of Leo’s lips, mapping the cartography of his mouth, and when Leo tongues at his knuckle Oliver sputters out a groan, feeling it in strange, unconnected parts of his body.
“Are we going to do this?” Leo asks.
“What, exactly, do you think is happening right now?” Oliver laughs.
“I mean the rest of it.”
Oliver’s body is moving of its own accord now, followingLeo’s steady, rhythmic heartbeat. He wants to do this right, he wants to make it good, make it worth it, but he’s bricking it, terrified as soon as his brain has half a second to catch up with itself.
“Have you ever?” he manages to ask.
“No. I’m a virgin,” Leo says, but the punchline is ruined by blending into the rounded edges of a moan when Oliver circles his hips again. “I’ve had sex, Oliver,” he clarifies, more seriously. Leo’s eyes are closed, but Oliver gets the sense he’s rolling them anyway.
“With another man?”
“It doesn’tmatter,can you please get on with it,” Leo demands.
“Not even in the academy? No handies with the lads?” Oliver presses, encircling his own hand around Leo lightly now, just to get the feel of him through his trackies. An image sparks to life in his mind, erotic but unwelcome, a possessive streak surging at the idea that anyone else might have touched Leo like this.
“Fuck,” Leo replies, arching parenthetically, throwing his whole body after it. “No, never. Did you? That’s so hot.”
“It wasn’t,” Oliver laughs, only a little ruefully. “I couldn’t very well have a convenient hookup just to get off during a long tournament away from the girlfriends, no homo like. First because of Maggie, then because the stakes were too high. Someone might have noticed how much I liked it, and then where would we be?”
“Right here, probably,” Leo says, clutching at the back of Oliver’s neck, pulling him close and kissing him hard.
