“I get the picture.” I don’t mean to growl at him, but his answering smirk adds more fuel to the fire, and I’m on him again before I can contemplate if manhandling him this way is a good idea. Because it doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea. For this—foranything—to work between us, I have to trust that Ludo will tell me if he doesn’t like something. And I do trust him. I trust him almost as much as I want him.
I strip him naked. Then I sit back on my heels as he peels my T-shirt away and runs his thumb over the inch-long scar on my ribs from the chest tube. He frowns, like he always does, and I don’t know if he knows he’s doing it. Or why. Then I catch sight of the marks on his body; my fingers itch to trace them too. I can’t heal him, and I don’t want to, but I’d do anything to take away his pain.
“Aidan.”
Ludo’s whisper startles me. I meet his gaze to find it heated. Hungry. “Yeah?”
“What do you want?”
“What doyouwant?”
He licks his lips. “Everything, but I don’t want you to be careful. I don’tneedit. Do you believe me?”
“I believe you.”
Ludo grins, but it’s more than a smile. It’s a smirk that blasts through any imaginary barriers we have left. I stop thinking and shuffle out of my shorts, sending them and my boxers somewhere behind me. A thunk sounds. I’ve knocked something over, but I don’t give a fuck. I’ll fix Ludo’s place later. Right now, I’m so lost in him the ground could open and I wouldn’t notice.
We roll around, fighting for dominance until we realise fucking on the floor isn’t going to work.
Ludo leads me upstairs and I tumble him onto his bed. We roll again, and he straddles me, grinding down hard enough to make my vision blur.
“Fuck.”
He stops. “Am I hurting you?”
“No, god no. It’s not that. It’s the fucking opposite.”
Ludo presses his palm over my heart, as though he can push the feverish beats back in. He leans down, his mouth so close I can taste his lips without touching him. “Are you sure? Because I’m easy, Aidan. We can do this however you want.”
Nothing about my life, including him, has ever been easy, but as I consider his words and what they could mean, I’m happy with that. I hook a hand around the back of his neck and draw him in for a kiss.I love you.
He kisses me back.I love you too.
At least, that’s what he says in my head, and that’s how I interpret his every touch as he moves down my body, kissing every mark and scar until he returns to my dick. I wait for him to suck me down, but he doesn’t, and I open my eyes to find him leaning over the bed, rummaging in the bedside table.
The arch of his body is so beautiful I don’t wonder what he’s looking for. His elegant neck and artful spine. His long limbs and slender hips. I try to picture how this might’ve played out if we met in different circumstances... before my accident and the multiple traumas he’s been through, but my imagination fails me, cos there’s nothing I want more than him as he is right now.
A bottle of lube lands on the bed. Ludo lies down beside me and places it on my chest. “I don’t have any condoms, but I got tested a while back, and I haven’t been with anyone since.”
“I’ve never had unprotected sex, so I’m probably okay too.” The matter-of-factness to my tone makes my words sound far away, as though they belong to someone else, but there’s no escaping the renewed tattoo of my pounding heart and the tremble in my hands as I reach for the lube.
Jesus, we’re really doing this.
My nerves are amplified by Ludo’s silence. But what he doesn’t say out loud, he says with his wandering hands. A soft trail of fingertips down my belly, a rough squeeze where I want him most. He brings his lips to my neck and kisses my brain silent again. My body thrums beneath him, and far from overthinking, I can only feel.
We kiss and kiss and kiss, our lips fused as every other muscle and nerve strains to do the same. Ludo rubs lube between us, on me and on him, then he rolls onto his side. His beautiful back calls to me once more, and I fit myself against him. How he knew this would hurt me the least, I have no clue, but as I ease inside him, I feel no pain, only a tight, wet heat that blows my fucking mind.
I knock my forehead between Ludo’s shoulder blades and groan. “So good.”
He exhales shakily and grips my hand so tight my knuckles crack. “I knew it would be. God, Aidan, I’ve wanted this for so long.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. I-I don’t know when it changed.”
His answer is the same as mine, and I remember the first time I saw him—reallysaw him, staring at me from across the hospital ward. Despite the mess I was in, fascination hit me like a lightning bolt, building with affection and attraction to where we are now. I can’t track the pace. All I truly know is that I’m going to fucking combust if we stay still much longer.
As though he can hear my desperate thoughts, Ludo flexes his hips. The movement is tiny, but it’s all the encouragement I need. With the hand he’s not clutching in a death grip, I grasp his shoulder and thrust into him. He gasps an unintelligible sound that might be my name, and pleasure rockets through me. The primal need to claim him returns and I dig my nails into the soft juncture of his neck.
