“Maybe. But we can’t know for sure.”
“Putain.” He dropped his head into his hands. “I’ve got to start playing better.”
“It would help our case,” I said gently. “A lot.” The weight of it all pressed down on me, suffocating. “I don’t see a solution,” I admitted. “I want what you described. Want it so badly I can barely breathe when I think about it. But I don’t know how we get there without losing everything else.”
“Maybe we can’t.” Étienne reached for my hand. “Maybe there’s no way to have both. To be together and keep everyone else happy.”
“So, what do we do?”
“I don’t know.” He squeezed my hand. “But I know I’m not ready to give you up. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
“Even if it means hiding forever?”
“I don’t want to hide forever. But I’ll hide for now. Because losing you would be worse than anything else.”
I pulled him closer, kissed him hard. Tried to convey everything I couldn’t say. The fear and the want and the desperate hope that somehow we’d find a way.
We cleaned up dinner in silence, both lost in our own thoughts.
That night in bed, we didn’t talk about the future. Didn’t talk about families, hiding, or the trade.
We just touched.
Étienne’s hands were bolder than the night before. More confident. They roamed across my shoulders, down my back, over my sides with a purpose that made my skin feel too tight. He explored my body like he was trying to memorize it—the dip of my collarbone, the curve of my hip, the sensitive spot just below my ribs that made me jerk and laugh breathlessly. He palmed my ass and discovered what made me grip the sheets and beg without words for more.
I did the same, mapping the topography of him with desperate hands. The hard planes of his shoulder blades. The peaks of his nipples, down his ridged abs, to the valley of his belly button. The divot at the base of his spine. The spot on his neck just below his ear that made him shudder. He pressed into me with a groan that vibrated through both our bodies. Made his breath hitch and stutter. Made him say my name like a question and an answer all at once.
His hands found the hem of my T-shirt and pushed it up, the fabric dragging across my over-sensitized skin. I sat up to help, and he stripped it off in one fluid motion before his mouth found my collarbone, my chest, trailing heateverywhere he kissed. The feeling of his bare chest finally pressed against mine—skin to skin, heart to heart—knocked the air from my lungs. I could feel every inhale he took, every exhale that ghosted warmth across my neck.
We fumbled with each other’s sleep pants and boxer briefs, clumsy with want and shaking hands, until they landed somewhere on the floor, forgotten. Nothing between us now. No clothes, no barriers, no distance. Just skin and heat and the terrifying, exhilarating vulnerability of being completely exposed to each other. Of being seen and touched and wanted exactly as we were.
I could feel the length of him pressed against my thigh, hard and insistent and already a little wet. The knowledge that he wanted me this much—that his body was responding to mine with the same desperate need I felt—made my head spin. Made everything sharper, brighter, more real. His leg slid between mine and the friction made us both groan, made my hips rock forward, seeking more contact, more pressure, more everything.
“Marco,” he breathed against my mouth, and the sound of my name on his lips—rough and reverent—nearly undid me.
Étienne raised up to his knees, his arms shaking with what looked like anticipation and something deeper—fear, maybe, or wonder. He moved to straddle me, hovering over me for one suspended breath. I watched him, my heart pounding, taking in his dark, dilated pupils, the rapid rise and fall of his chest, his parted lips as he waited for… something. Permission, maybe. Reassurance. Then he lowered himself slowly, settling his weight onto me, and the world narrowed to the points where our bodies met.
Chest to chest, the coarse hair on my pecs rasping against his smoother skin. Stomach to stomach, our abs flexing andreleasing with each ragged breath. Hip to hip, groin to groin, the insistent pressure of him against me making stars burst in my vision.
I shivered—a full-body tremor I couldn’t suppress—and groaned, the sound torn from somewhere deep and primal and completely beyond my control. I was overwhelmed by the bulk of him, the heat of him, the reality of him, all of him pressed against me with nothing between us. No barriers, no distance, no pretending.
The man I’d wanted for years. The man I’d tried not to want, tried to keep at arm’s length, tried to hide from. The man who’d broken through every defense I’d ever built.
His mouth followed a burning path down my neck and across my shoulder, raising goosebumps, drawing sounds from me I couldn’t control. He rocked against me and the friction, the heat, the reality of it—I lit up inside like arena spotlights had been turned on, everything bright and exposed and impossibly right.
I slid my hand down to his ass. “Raise up a bit,” I whispered.
He levered onto his elbows without hesitation, his trust in me complete. I reached between us and gripped our cocks together, my large hand barely encompassing us both. “This okay?”
He gasped and only nodded.
Still, I didn’t move. “I need the word, babe.”
“Yes.” It was a plea.
I slicked my palm with precum from the heads of our cocks and then stroked. Another groan escaped from deep within my chest. The need, the want, the emotions were intense, and I was going to shoot like a teenager having sex for the first time. I gritted my teeth to hold back, my molars grinding. I wanted this to last, but the hard, hot length of hisdick against mine nearly overwhelmed me. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced with anyone else, and desire swamped me. Unable to hold back, I set up a desperate, urgent rhythm.
French curses exploded from Étienne’s mouth, which just spurred me on.
