He does. He looks at me while I push into him, slow, his body opening around me in degrees. Not all at once. In increments. His breath fractures into short pulls and his hand grips my shoulder, the good one, fingers digging in. The heat of him is devastating. I hold still when I’m all the way in, just breathing, feeling his heartbeat through his chest against mine.
“Move,” he whispers. “Please.”
I move slowly. His leg hooks tight around me, his heel pressing into the small of my back. His hand finds the back of my neck, that same grip, thumb behind my ear, holding me there while I rock into him. In the club he was loud, generous, performing even his pleasure. Here they are quieter. Punched out of him. Each one honest.
I shift the angle. His head drops back, throat exposed, and his whole body clenches around me. I find the spot that makes his breath catches and I stay there, rocking into it, and his breathing goes ragged and his hips start moving with mine, meeting me on every stroke.
“Right there.” His voice barely his. “Don’t stop.”
I don’t stop. I build it slow, keeping the pace when his body is asking for more, because making him wait is doing something for both of us. His body tightens around me on each push, his leg locked around my back, his hand on my neck anchoring me.
He’s hard between us, leaking against his stomach, and I wrap my hand around his cock and stroke him in time with the way I’m moving inside him. His back arches off the bed. I speed up, just enough, tightening my grip, pressing deeper on every thrust.
“Zay, I’m close.”
I press my forehead to his shoulder. “Let go,” I tell him, my mouth against his skin, my hand working him steady, my hips driving deep. His whole body locks around me, pulling me in, a ragged broken sound tearing from his mouth, his fist in my hair pulling hard. I feel him come, hot and pulsing in my hand, his body clenching in waves around my cock, and the way he says my name while he comes, broken into two syllables like it’s the last thing his mouth knows how to do, takes me apart.
I hold on for three more strokes and then I’m gone. My face pressed into his neck, his pulse hammering against my mouth, and the orgasm rolls through me slow and devastating and complete. It empties me out and fills me back up.
Eventually, I come back down. His hand loosens in my hair but doesn’t leave. My room smells different now. Not the warming gel, not the hotel soap.
He runs his palm down my spine, slow, no pressure. Tracing the full length of me from my shoulders to the small of my back and up again. It’s gentle. The way you touch something you intend to keep. Want has a shape I can work around. But his hand on my back, asking for nothing, touching me just to be close. His hand keeps moving. I keep not knowing what to do with it.
I kiss his neck as I pull out of him. “Don’t go anywhere.” He laughs, eyes closed. I clean up in the bathroom and bring a washcloth out for him. I lay down next to him on the bed. He turns to me, throwing his arm over my chest after he wipes himself up.
“I should go,” he says, but not making any movement to go.
“Yeah. You should.”
“Five more minutes.”
I let him have fifteen. Long enough for his breathing to settle and his hand to go heavy against my ribs. Long enough to knowwhat it feels like with someone tracing slow circles on my skin because he can, and because I’m letting him.
Eventually, he leaves the bed and gets dressed in the low light. Shorts, shirt careful over the shoulder. He doesn’t say anything clever. He just looks at me.
“Good night, Zee.”
“Good night, Tee.”
His mouth curves. Not the grin. Something underneath it that the grin has been covering for months.
The door clicks and the room is mine again. My kit on the desk, untouched. My coffee, gone cold. My bed, which smells like him now, which is going to smell like him when I try to sleep tonight.
Chapter 9 — TEO
The door clicks behind me and the hallway is quiet.
My shirt is draped over my shoulders, not pulled on. The shoulder is warm and loose and I didn’t feel like working it through the sleeves. The air out here is cooler than Zay’s room and the carpet swallows my footsteps and the hotel is doing that late-night thing where every small sound exists just to remind you everyone else is asleep.
I press the elevator button and wait. His hands are still with me. Across my ribs, one by one. The base of my spine. My jaw when he said my name and it sounded different in his mouth than it has in anyone else’s.
The elevator opens. I lean against the back wall and close my eyes for the ride up two floors.
The doors open into the wider section near the elevator bank and Fontenot is twenty feet away.
Barefoot. Nothing in his hands. Just Fontenot walking towards me at an hour when this hallway should be empty. His eyes find mine and we both stop. I’m in training shoes and ashirt draped over my shoulder. He’s barefoot on hotel carpet at one in the morning. Neither of us has a good reason to be here.
“Hi,” I say.
