Barnaby pulled back, dragged his lips up the shaft, and pushed down again. The rhythm was wrong. He knew it was wrong the way he knew when a horse’s canter was unbalanced. Something in the timing was off, the tempo uneven, and he couldn’t find the correction. He tried to match the rhythm he’d seen in the limited and highly curated pornographic material that was his frame of reference, and it was immediately clear that those men had been operating with a set of anatomical advantages, specifically jaw width, that Barnaby did not possess.
Saliva was becoming an issue. It gathered faster than he could swallow, and within a minute it had escaped the seal of his lips and was running down the shaft of Lex’s cock, pooling in the creases of Lex’s foreskin, dripping onto his hand. He could feel it tracking down his chin. The mess of it was appalling. He wasdrooling on Lex Murphy’s cock in his family’s sitting room, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
Lex’s hand came down. His thumb caught the spit at the corner of Barnaby’s mouth and wiped it away, gently, without comment. Then his fingers pushed Barnaby’s hair back from his forehead, in a slow, tender sweep that settled the fringe behind his ear.
Barnaby’s eyes burned. The gesture was so careful, so deliberately kind, that it dismantled something he hadn’t known he was holding in place. He closed his eyes, and his rhythm stuttered. For a moment he just knelt there with Lex’s cock heavy on his tongue, Lex’s hand in his hair, and the quiet of the room around them.
“You’re doing so well,” Lex murmured.
Barnaby wrapped his hand around the base of Lex’s shaft, covering what his mouth couldn’t reach, and found a rhythm that held. It wasn’t elegant. His jaw ached and his wrist was at an awkward angle. The coordination between his mouth and his hand was imperfect, his fist arriving a half-beat behind his lips on every downstroke. But Lex’s breathing had changed. It had gone deep and uneven, punctuated by small sounds that Lex was clearly trying to suppress, and each one sent a pulse of heat through Barnaby’s gut.
He opened his eyes and looked up. Lex was watching him. His dark eyes were half-lidded, his lips parted, and his expression was one that Barnaby had never seen on him: open and raw and stripped of every performance. Lex held the eye contact, and his thumb stroked Barnaby’s cheek, tracing the hollow where it sank inward around the head of his cock.
“Look at you,” Lex said. His voice was thick. “Fucking look at you.”
Barnaby felt his cheeks flush. He kept his eyes on Lex’s and took him deeper, pushing past the point where his jawscreamed and his gag reflex clenched. He pulled back before it overwhelmed him, panting through his nose, spit stringing between his lips and the head of Lex’s cock.
Lex wiped his chin again. Just his thumb, slow and gentle, clearing the mess. Then he cupped Barnaby’s face in both hands, tilting it up.
“You’re perfect,” he said. “You’re fucking perfect, Barnaby.”
Barnaby’s throat ached. He leaned forward and took him back in, and this time the rhythm came easier. His hand worked the shaft in a steady grip while his mouth focused on the head, his tongue pressing against the frenulum, circling the crown, learning through repetition what made Lex’s breath catch and what made his hips shift. He was reading him. Reading the tension in his thighs, the cadence of his breathing, the flex of his abdominal muscles. It was the same skill that let him feel a horse’s stride through his seat bones.
Lex’s hand was still in his hair. Not gripping, but just resting there. His fingers threaded through the strands of his fine hair, and every few seconds he pushed Barnaby’s fringe back from his forehead so tenderly that Barnaby wanted to crawl into his lap and stay there for a very long time.
Lex’s breathing roughened. His hips were moving now in small involuntary rolls that pushed his cock deeper into his throat, and Barnaby could feel him restraining it, holding back the thrust that his body wanted to give.
“Barns.” Lex’s voice was strained. “I’m good. I’m good.”
His hand dropped to Barnaby’s shoulder. He tapped twice, gently, and pushed him back.
Barnaby pulled off. Lex’s cock slid free of his mouth, slick and flushed dark, the head swollen and glistening. Lex wrapped his hand around himself and stroked twice, fast and tight, and came across Barnaby’s chest with a groan that sounded like it had been torn out of him.
His come landed in streaks across Barnaby’s white Oxford shirt. He looked down at it, at the pale ropes of it against the cotton, and he felt no revulsion. He just saw this as confirmation of everything that Lex had said to him as he’d sucked his cock.
Lex’s head was tipped back against the sofa, his chest heaving. His cock was softening in his hand, the flush fading from the head. His face was slack.
Barnaby leaned forward. He pressed his cheek against Lex’s cock, turning his face into it, feeling the hot, damp weight of it against his skin. His jaw ached. His chin was still wet. He could feel come cooling on his shirt and spit drying on his lips, and none of it mattered. He closed his eyes and rubbed his cheek along the length of it, slowly, and Lex’s hand came back to his hair, fingers trembling.
Then he turned his head and laid a kiss on the tip. Soft, close-mouthed and deliberate. It was a kiss that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the fact that this cock had frightened him and hurt him at one time, but he was not going to let it be something he was afraid of any longer.
Lex made a sound above him. A small, wrecked thing, barely a breath. Barnaby pressed his lips to the head once more, tasting salt and come, and stayed there with his eyes closed and Lex’s hand shaking in his hair.
Chapter Fifteen
Thesuit was doing all sorts of things for him. Lex had suspected as much in the fitting room at Gieves & Hawkes, when Harding had pinned the final seam and Barnaby had circled him three times without speaking, which was the Fitznorman-Bicester equivalent of a standing ovation. But suspicion was different from confirmation, which arrived the moment he caught his reflection in the mirrored panels of the Buckingham Palace entrance hall.
The navy suit sat close across his shoulders and tapered to his waist, following the lines that Barnaby had mapped with his hands in the shop. The pinstripe was so fine it was almost invisible, catching the light only when he moved. The trousers broke clean at the ankle, exactly where Barnaby had specified, and the silver knot cufflinks sat neatly at his wrists.
Barnaby was beside him, and Barnaby was not acknowledging how fit he looked. It was making Lex anxious.
“I look good,” Lex said, and waited for the confirmation that by all rights should be forthcoming.
“You look adequate.”
“I look fucking good, Barns, and you dressed me, so technically you’d be complimenting yourself if you just admitted I look fit.”
Barnaby’s jaw tightened. His gaze remained fixed on a point somewhere in the middle distance, where an enormous portrait of an Arundel ancestor glared down at the assembled guests. “I selected appropriate attire for the occasion. You are filling it adequately. That’s the end of it. It’sunseemlyfor you to be so cocky.”
