"Twelve feet away. I heard you." He pulls me closer by the wrist. "Then you'd better give me something to bite."
My entire body responds to that and I stop talking.
I push him down onto the mattress. He goes easily — Nico, who controls everything, who manages his own heartbeat, who has never let a situation happen to him that he didn't plan for. He lies back and lets me settle over him and his hands find my hips and I feel the exact moment he stops thinking and startsfeeling, because his whole body softens.
I kiss his neck. The spot below his ear that I found at the hotel and filed away for future reference. He inhales sharply — not a gasp, not yet, the precursor to a gasp. The sound of a man holding something back. "Let go."
"If I let go I won't be quiet."
"Then I'll help."
I kiss down his throat. His pulse is fast under my lips — not the survival sprint from Ash's dinner table, not thecontrolled rhythm of professional Nico. This is something raw, something his body is doing without his permission, and he can't regulate it. I feel him try. Feel the breath he takes, measured, deliberate, the technique of a man who manages everything.
I bite the junction of his neck and shoulder and the breath shatters.
"Fuck—" He clamps his mouth shut. His hand flies to his face, pressing his knuckles against his lips. Muffling himself.
"That's a start," I say against his skin. "But you're going to need a pillow."
"I am not putting a pillow over my face."
"You will when I get your clothes off."
His hips jerk up against mine — uncontrolled, the first truly graceless thing I've ever seen Nico do. I grin against his collarbone and he must feel it because he says, with tremendous dignity: "Don't be smug."
"I'm not smug. I'm observational."
"You'resmugand your eyes are gold and it's — very distracting."
I pull back enough to look at him. He's right — I can feel the shift, the gold bleeding in, my lion rising to the surface without my permission. It happens around Nico now. Around the warmth of his skin and the sound of his breathing and the way he looks at me like I'm a problem he wants to solve with his entire body.
"Is it too much?" I ask. Because I need to. Because the gold eyes are the lion, and the lion is the part that could scare him, and two weeks ago he was counting exits every twelve minutes.
Nico reaches up. Touches the skin beside my eye, tracing the edge where brown meets gold. His expression is focused, intent — the same look he gets when he's reading a financial report, except directed at my face.
"No," he says. "It's not too much."
Permission.
I pull his shirt off. He lifts to help — efficient even in this, even half-wrecked on a garage-sale mattress. His chest is lean, defined, the body of a man who runs and eats nachos and has spent two years in hotel gyms. I put my mouth on his sternum and work my way down, slow, tasting him. Salt and soap and the warmth that pools in the hollow of his ribs.
His hands are in my hair. Gripping, then releasing, then gripping again — the struggle of a man who wants to grab on and knows that grabbing on means making sounds and making sounds means Knox hears.
I pull my own shirt off because his hands need somewhere to go and I want them on me. He takes the invitation — palms flat on my chest, then my shoulders, then down my arms, mapping me the way he maps everything. Thorough. His fingertips trace the muscle definition with the same precision he uses on spreadsheets and it makes me want to wreck him.
I get his boxers off. He lifts his hips and I pull them down and his cock is hard against his stomach, flushed, leaking. I wrap my hand around him and his whole body bows off the mattress and the sound he makes is — not quiet.
"Pillow," I say.
"I'mfine—"
I stroke him once, slow, root to tip, twisting at the head. He grabs the pillow and shoves it over his face.
"That's what I thought."
"I hate you," he says, muffled.
"No, you don't." I stroke him again. His hips chase my hand, his stomach muscles clenching, the pillow pressed tight over his mouth. I can hear the sounds he's making through it — broken, desperate, the noises of a man who is extremely controlled in every other context and has no control here.
