He followed a beat slower, and I caught the way his eyes dropped, just for a second, to the front of my shorts.
This time when we came together there was less pretense about what we were doing. My hand landed on his hip, ostensibly to check his movement. His palm flattened againstmy bare chest, pushing back. We were both slick with sweat and the contact was starting to register as something other than athletic, something I couldn't afford to register but couldn't seem to stop.
I was fully hard now, my cock straining against my shorts, impossible to ignore, and every point of contact with his body made it worse. The friction. The heat. The way he moved against me.
On pure autopilot, I adjusted his shoulders and felt him stiffen under my hands.
He didn't let the space open between us. He moved with me, staying close, and then we were grappling again, harder this time, less controlled. His arm hooked around my neck in an attempted headlock. I ducked out of it and caught him around the waist, driving forward with my legs.
We went down in a tangle of limbs, rolling once, twice, each of us fighting for position. I ended up on my back with Jace straddling my hips, his thighs locked around my waist, both his hands pinning my wrists to the mat above my head. We were both panting, chests heaving, and the weight of him registered in ways that had nothing to do with wrestling technique.
The pressure of his body against mine. The heat. The friction.
And the unmistakable hardness pressed against my stomach.
He was hard too. Just as hard as I was, his cock a solid line of heat between us, trapped between our bodies, and there was no way he couldn't feel mine pressed up against him. His face was flushed, hair falling into his eyes, lips parted around harsh breaths. Every point of contact felt like a live wire with no insulation left.
Neither of us moved. The moment stretched out, pulled taut, a string about to snap.
Then Jace started laughing.
It broke the tension like a cracked window in a pressurized room—sudden and complete and probably the only thing that saved us from crossing a line we couldn't uncross. Not yet. Not like this. The laugh was breathless and shaky and entirely real, and I felt it move through both of us where our bodies were pressed together.
I laughed too, just as breathless, just as shaky, and relieved in a way that made no sense because we were both still hard, still pressed together, still nowhere near solving the actual problem.
He released my wrists and rolled off me, and we both ended up flat on our backs on the mat, side by side, staring up at the ceiling while our breathing gradually slowed. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, indifferent.
I sat up first, running a hand through my sweat-damp hair. My heart was still hammering too hard, and I was still half-hard in my shorts, a persistent ache that had no intention of resolving itself through willpower alone.
Jace pushed himself up too, and we ended up sitting cross-legged on the mat facing each other, close enough that our knees were almost touching. He reached for his water bottle. I reached for mine.
I unscrewed the cap and took a long drink, using the motion as an excuse to look at anything other than him. It didn't work. My eyes had stopped taking instructions.
They traveled over him slowly—his bare chest, the sweat still gleaming on his skin, the hard lines of his abdomen—and dropped lower. The grey sweats were doing nothing to hide the fact that he was still more than half hard, his cock creating a thick, unmistakable ridge down his left thigh, the fabric clinging to him in a way that made looking away a genuine physical effort.
I looked away anyway. Found his face. Found him already watching me, his expression saying clearly that he'd seen exactlywhere my gaze had been and what it had done to my own breathing.
He lifted his water bottle to his mouth.
I watched his lips close around the opening. Watched his throat work as he swallowed, the bob of his Adam's apple, the small rivulet that escaped and ran down his chin to his neck. He drank slowly, and I couldn't look away from his mouth—from the way his tongue darted out to catch the water at the corner of his lips.
My cock throbbed.
He lowered the bottle and met my eyes. Then his gaze started traveling over me the way mine had traveled over him—over my bare chest, my shoulders, my arms, down to the front of my shorts where the evidence of my arousal was just as obvious as his. He let his eyes rest there for several long seconds and I watched his chest rise and fall faster, watched him bite his lower lip.
When he looked back up, his pupils were blown wide.
Neither of us spoke. The gym was so quiet I could hear everything—my own pulse, our breathing still uneven, the hum of the lights. I took another drink of water just to have something to do with my mouth, and watched him watch my mouth the same way I'd watched his. Saw him shift slightly where he sat, adjusting himself in his sweats.
The moment stretched between us, heavy and charged, a question neither of us was putting into words.
I knew I should break it. Should say something that would re-establish the distance between us, restore the proper order of things. Coach. Player. Line. All the reasons this couldn't happen.
Instead I stood up, picked up my practice shirt from where I'd thrown it, and walked toward the locker room without a word.
I didn't look back to see if he followed.
I didn't need to. I could hear his footsteps behind me before I'd made it ten feet.
