He reached for nothing. He wasn't done.
His eyes held mine while his clean hand wrapped around his cock, and this time there was no performance of hygiene to hide behind. This was just him, looking at me, starting to stroke himself slowly in the steam-thick air with the unhurried certainty of someone who had made a decision and intended to see it through.
My hand wrapped around my own cock before the thought fully formed. I stroked slowly, matching his pace, and watched his chest rise and fall faster when he registered it.
For a long moment we just looked at each other.
Then his pace changed.
Not faster. Deeper. His grip tightened and his strokes slowed, each one drawn out, his hips rolling forward with a fluid motion that pulled at every muscle in his abdomen. His free hand moved to his chest, thumb dragging over his nipple, and a broken sound fell from his lips that the tile walls caught and held and gave back to both of us.
I groaned. Low and involuntary, the sound of something that had been held too long finally letting go.
His eyes went darker.
He shifted his stance, planted his feet wider, and the change in angle changed everything about how he looked, more open, more deliberate, his cock thick and flushed in his fist and his body entirely offered up to whatever this was between us. His other hand moved behind himself, fingers pressing against his own ass with slow exploratory pressure, and the sound he made when he did it went through me like a current.
My grip tightened. My hips rolled forward.
He watched me. I watched him. The steam curled between us and the water ran over both our bodies and neither of us looked away, not when his breathing fell apart, not when mine did, not when the sounds filling the room became something too honest and too specific to pretend weren't happening.
His rhythm was getting ragged, hips jerking forward, thighs starting to shake, his head dropping back on a rough exhale before he dragged his gaze back to mine like breaking eye contact was the one line he'd decided not to cross. The flush had spread from his chest all the way up his throat. His lips were parted and wet. He was stunning in a way that made sustained rational thought an abstraction, and I was watching every second of it with my hand moving faster and the pressure at the base of my spine building to something I couldn't hold back much longer.
His free hand moved faster behind himself, and the sound he made was desperate and wrecked and entirely unguarded in the steam-thick air.
My vision blurred at the edges.
I came before I was ready for it, the orgasm slamming through me with a force that knocked the breath from my lungs and buckled my knees. My hand kept working, drawing it out, while the groan built in my chest and tore out of me low and gutted and entirely beyond my control. My fist hit the tile wall. I stayed upright through sheer will, shaking, the pleasure crashing through me in waves that left me oversensitive and wrung out and pressing my forehead against the tile while my chest heaved.
The distance between us hadn't been enough.
I registered it slowly, through the static of the aftershocks, the fact that some of it had reached him. A stripe of it across his stomach, just above where his own hand was still working, visible against the wet heat of his skin before the water could take it.
He looked down.
Then he looked up at me.
And without breaking eye contact, without a single beat of hesitation, he dragged two fingers through it and brought them to his mouth.
The sound I made wasn't human. Or it was entirely human, which was worse.
He took his time. Lips closing around his fingers, slow and deliberate, his eyes holding mine with the focused, unblinking attention of someone making a point they intended to land. His tongue moved against his fingers and a small sound came from his throat that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the fact that he meant it.
He came seconds after, his whole body going rigid, a broken sound punching out of him on a rough exhale that echoed offevery hard surface in the room. His hips stuttered forward and stilled, his hand still working, drawing it out, his head falling back and his throat exposed and his body beautiful and wrecked in the steam and running water. The sound he made when it crested was the most unguarded thing I'd ever heard from him, stripped entirely of the performance and the armor and the franchise face, and I felt it settle somewhere in my chest that I was going to have serious trouble evicting it from.
For a long moment neither of us moved. The water kept running over him. Our breathing filled the space, gradually slowing, and the room was thick with steam and the particular silence of something that couldn't be taken back.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
Whatever was in his expression, open and undone and carefully watching to see what I would do with it, I couldn't hold it. Couldn't let myself read it properly, because reading it properly would require me to respond to it, and there was no response available to me that didn't make everything significantly worse.
I turned off my shower.
I didn't look at him while I reached for my towel. Didn't look at him while I dried off, methodical and mechanical, patting down my arms and my chest and my legs with the focused attention of a man performing a routine rather than a man trying not to fall apart in a team shower at midnight. I wrapped the towel around my waist and walked to the bench where I'd left my shorts and my practice shirt.
I pulled on my shorts first. Then my socks, sitting on the bench with my back to the shower row, jaw tight, listening to his water still running and the sound of him breathing slowly returning to something steady. I picked up my practice shirt and pulled it over my head, smoothed it down with both hands, andsat there for a moment with my forearms braced on my knees and my head down.
