I do want. But I can’t contemplate it, not yet. “Maybe. Will you fuck me again? Not now, but soon?”
Joss hums in the dark. He kisses my temple. “Don’t think I could stop myself. I was messed up about a lot of things today, but I was right about that.”
“About what?”
“Aboutthis.” Joss leans down to kiss me. “It’s why I never fucked anyone I really care about before. Cos I knew it would do something to me I couldn’t control.”
A lick of fear threatens the cocoon we’ve built around us. I chase it away, just for tonight, rolling us so he’s beneath me. I’m sore and tired, but I still want him so fuckin’ much. “I hear you, but I’m not ready to contemplate it yet. Can we let it go, just for a little while? Live in the moment and just be?”
Joss reaches between us, his hand closing around my hardening length. He palms it against his and pulls me down for a blood-searing kiss.
He whispers a heartbeat before our lips make contact. “For you, right now, anything.”
24
KAI
We’re living in the moment. I’m not sure how it happened, but here we are, sleeping together in every sense of the words and not contemplating the ticking time bomb beneath us.
I never knew my body could contort into so many different shapes for sex. Or that I’d like it.
Joss has my leg curved back and draped over his hip. He’s driving into me from behind and I’m about to fuckin’ explode.
“Fuck.” I grit my teeth so hard my jaw aches, but it’s all good.Sogood. With Joss wrapped around me like this, I can barely remember what it’s like to be on the edge of a different cliff. The one where there’s no soaring into the clouds. Where it’s all down down down. Right now, with him, I can only feel the symphony he’s playing with my nerves and wonder how it took me near on thirty years to figure out I like this shit.
More than like, I loveit.
Maybe I love him.
Not a new thought, but it catches me off guard, just not enough to derail the blistering climax headed my way. I come hard, my whole body jolting as if Joss has a hundred fuckin’ volts lighting up his dick. His deep groan rattles through me, his shudder, his teeth sinking into my neck. Then there’s just sweat and loose limbs. Labored breaths and the boneless energy I’ve only ever felt with him.
I love him.
I take a sharp inhale. Joss hasn’t mentioned that I said shit out loud that first time in my creekside house. Maybe he didn’t hear me. Or maybe he doesn’t remember.
Either way, I’m glad of his silence. Not talking about it doesn’t make it less true, but I asked for this—a period of sex-fueled denial. Can’t complain that he’s, uh, giving it to me.
“You okay down there?” Joss eases me onto my back and peers down at me through his messy hair. For once, it’s not tied up, because I stole his hair tie and slipped it over my wrist before we got into it.
“I’m good. You?”
Joss makes a sound I can’t be sure is actually him. Non-verbal Tourette’s doesn’t mean silent, and I’m seeing that more and more. “I think I might die from fucking you,” he says eventually, eyes dancing in his otherwise serious face.
“Is that a thing with man sex? Danger of death?”
“Only with you.” He flops down beside me, doing something with the condom that I don’t pay much attention to. At some point, we’ll need to clean up the mess we’ve made, but I’m not moving yet. It’s early. I need to take a trip to the hardware store and do a billion other things today, but all that seems as distant as the elephant in the room.
Joss’s phone buzzes. He sits up, rooting around for it.
I point at the floor. “Over there.”
Buck naked, he makes a graceful leap for it, but the call cuts off before he gets there.
He squints at the screen, frowning.
“Was it Tanner?”
“No. It was Jake Thompson, my old boss from Camden.”
