“What’s in it for me?”
“Let me show you,” Leo says, but he hardly needs to, because Oliver doesn’t want to playact anymore and is pulling him in by the collar, grinning.
For a moment it’s just like that first night, kissing in the foyer,and it feels good in the same way it always does, Leo smudging his top lip with the tip of his tongue, Oliver pressing into the gentle rasp of Leo’s stubble against his cheek.
“There’s so much I want to say to you,” Leo whispers, up on his tiptoes, into Oliver’s ear like he’s telling a secret. They’re giving their weight to each other and swaying with it, holding each other up. “But I don’t think I can do it in English. I’m…well, Garcia was pouring my drinks.”
“It’ll keep,” Oliver says, intimately familiar with what that means, but Leo buries his face in Oliver, hooking his chin over his shoulder and holding on tight, and keeps talking.
“Siempre quiero estar aquí, contigo,” he says quietly, muffled into the warm skin over Oliver’s scapula. Oliver can’t understand what he’s saying, but the words sound so sweet. “Cuando me tocas, es diferente a todo lo que conocía antes. Te quiero. Sigo amándote más.”
Me too,he thinks.Whatever you feel, I feel it too.Oliver wraps his arms around his waist and Leo follows his line of thinking instinctively, letting himself be lifted and twining his legs around Oliver’s hips. Anna said not to run, she never said Oliver couldn’t lift anything, so he carries Leo up the first flight of stairs.
He presses them against the wall in the hallway, halfway to the sitting room, but as far as Oliver can go without having Leo. Flush together like this, he can feel every inch of Leo, all of their similarities mirrored against each other, muscle for muscle. He wants to stay like this forever, or at least until it’s time to play football with him again.
Leo turns around, palms flat to the wall, hips angled outward, like he’s offering himself, and Oliver wants to look at him, but maybe not quite as much as he wants to touch him, plastered along his back and kissing Leo’s neck. Leo fumbles for his jeansand Oliver follows suit, slipping out of his pajamas and palming himself once, then tucking his leg between Leo’s, pushing into the hot, warm skin between his thighs.
“Ah,” Leo groans, touching himself in time with Oliver’s rhythm. “God, I don’t want to wait. Please, I want to feel you come.”
That’s about all it takes, hearing the low rumble of desire in Leo’s voice, knowing that Oliver’s pleasure makes Leo feel good. He gasps and gives himself over to it, riding the hard, pulsating sensation until he’s spent with it. Beneath him, Leo moves for a moment more, then whimpers and goes still.
“Every time we’ve done this,” Leo says, panting, “I thought it would be the last one. Maybe someday I’ll get used to it, but—I just kept hoping it was real.”
“It was, Leo,” Oliver tells him, squeezing one hand at his hip. He leans forward and kisses the first part of Leo he can reach: the side of his temple. “It is real.”
Everything is still so very real in the morning, miraculously so. Leo followed him into the shower, naked and smiley, and Oliver’s been luxuriating in the steamy feeling of holding his damp body up against the tiled wall. He ignores a persistent buzz of his phone on the countertop, dedicating all his focus to tonguing at Leo’s collarbone and feeling the resounding, gratifying tremors along his upper thigh in response. All the congratulations and schemes for day drinking can wait until he’s done with this, the single most urgent thing in the universe.
Another ring joins the echoes, Leo’s phone lighting up as if in response to Oliver’s. Leo looks distracted from his kissing, looking over his shoulder to try to spot the screen.
“I’m doing some of my best work here,” Oliver sighs.
“They both keep ringing!” Leo protests. “We’re going to miss the party.”
“Thisis the party,” Oliver sighs, but releases Leo so he can tiptoe, dripping water everywhere, to the edge of the bath mat and check on the missed calls. “Huh. It’s my agent.”
“Mine too,” Leo says. “Think they want us to sign lifetime contracts?”
Oliver rolls his eyes and hits return call.
“Hello?” a harried voice answers. “Oliver? Hold on a second, let me patch in the others.”
“The others?” he asks, but the line turns to jazzy hold music. Next to him, Leo’s phone vibrates once more and he makes to pick up his own call.
“Diga?” Leo says to whoever’s on the line, while he gives Oliver one confused purse of his lips.
“I have Nina Clarke, Willem de Boer, and James Finch,” Leo’s agent says over speakerphone. “Hold for Oliver Harris and team.”
“Oliver?” the first voice says over his own phone. “We have the whole group now.”
“Hi,” he replies nervously, taking one reflexive step away from Leo so the acoustic feedback doesn’t give them away. “What can we—I, I mean—do for you?”
“Well,” Nina says, sounding exhausted. “I’m sure you’ve seen the news. We’re sorry to bother you with this today, but after talking with your management and leadership at Camden, we do think it might be necessary to make a statement, just to head things off before there’s any more speculation or press.”
“The news?” Leo breaks in, shaking water out of his ear like he’s misheard her.
“Have you not seen?” a tinny, faraway-sounding version of Willem asks. “Leonardo, Google yourself and call us back on this line.”
“Harris, you too,” Finch’s thundering voice adds.
