He pulled Brody’s t-shirt up, pulling the fabric upward. Brody pulled it off in a single motion, and Ren discovered a torso he had already imagined, but that reality far surpassed. Broad. Hard.
Marked with fine scars that traced a map across the pale skin. Ren ran his fingers over one that crossed his left side, and Brody held his breath.
“What…?”
“Later.”
Brody pulled off his shirt. His pants. Everything. With firm but unhurried hands, stripping Ren of each layer without haste, as if they had all the time in the world. As if the heat weren’t a clock counting down. Every garment that disappeared exposed more burning skin, and Brody traced it with open palms, leaving a trail of calm on every inch he touched.
But not just calm. Recognition, too.
Brody’s hands didn’t move like those of the other alphas who had touched Ren before: fast, utilitarian, treating his body as something to be used and discarded. These hands paused. They learned. The open palm on his hip, memorizing the curve. The thumbs tracing the space between rib and rib as if that detail mattered. As if Ren mattered.
Ren clenched his jaw to keep from saying anything.
When he was naked beneath Brody, Brody stopped. He looked at him. At all of him. With an almost painful attention, as if he were memorizing every detail, every curve, every imperfection.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Ren said, and it slipped out without thinking.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m something.”
“You are everything.”
Ren swallowed. The lump in his throat was too big, too hot, too real.
Then Brody moved down.
Not toward him, not over him. Downward. The deliberate slowness caused Ren to take a second to comprehend what was happening. Brody’s lips traced his sternum, his abdomen, his hipbone. He stopped there. He pressed a long, still kiss against the skin, like a wordless declaration. Ren didn’t know what to make of it. He didn’t know where to look.
“Brody, you don’t have to…”
“I know.”
And he kept going down.
When Brody’s mouth took him, Ren forgot to breathe. It wasn’t the clumsy, mechanical gesture he’d known before—transactional, borrowed. Brody did it slowly. With care. With his tongue learning what drew sounds from him and which were the best, and returning to them, and perfecting them. As if he’d decided that was the only task in the world and intended to do it well. As if Ren’s pleasure were the goal, not the means.
Ren threw his head back. His hands searched for something to hold on to and found Brody’s hair. He didn’t pull. He just held on because he needed an anchor.
The others didn’t do this. The others never did this.
The thought slipped into his mind without permission and got stuck behind his eyes. He remembered hands that opened him without looking at him. Mouths that sought his neck to bite it before asking anything. Alphas who smelled his scent and saw fuel, not him. And now this: Brody, with all the patience in the world between his legs, in no hurry and with no agenda, returned something to Ren that he didn’t know had been stolen from him.He felt the heat behind his eyelids and crushed it before it could amount to anything.
“Stop,” he said, gently tugging at Brody’s hair. “Come here. I need…”
Brody climbed up. Gray eyes met blue ones.
“Tell me.”
“You.” The word came easier than it should have. “I need you.”
He pulled Brody down and kissed him so he wouldn’t have to add anything else.
Brody shed the rest of his clothes. The skin-to-skin contact was like closing an electrical circuit. Ren’s entire body reacted at once, every nerve awakening, every muscle relaxing and tensingat the same time. The heat was still there, but transformed by the alpha’s touch, turned into a dull, pleasurable ache.
Brody traced his lips along Ren’s neck. His collarbone. His sternum. Slowly. Deliberately. Ren dug his fingers into Brody’s back and arched his hips against him.
