He made a sound at the word that went through me like voltage and pressed his legs harder against my shoulders and arched his back off the mattress to meet the next thrust.
I reached down and wrapped my hand around his cock and stroked once and felt him convulse.
“Rook—”
“I've got you.” I set a rhythm, hand and hips in counterpoint, and watched his face come completely undone beneath me. “I've got you. Give it to me.”
Every thrust drove a new sound out of him, each one rawer than the last.
I kept my hand on him and my hips moving and watched his face like it was the only thing in the room.
“Rook.” Cracked open. “I'm going to come. I'm so close. Don't stop, please don't stop?—”
“Not stopping.” I drove in deeper and felt him clench around me, tight and urgent and pulling at what little control I had left. “Come on. I've got you. Give it to me.”
He came with a sound that went through the walls.
His cock pulsed in my grip, spilling hot across his stomach and my fist, his back arching clean off the mattress and his thighs pressing hard against my shoulders and his whole body shaking with the force of it. I worked him through every second, hand and hips both, feeling him flutter and clench around me in waves that stripped the last of my restraint down to nothing.
I reached down and got my fingers around the cock ring and pulled it free.
The rush of sensation was immediate and obliterating, like a dam giving way all at once, and I pressed in as deep as I could go and groaned against the side of his knee and came so hard my vision went white at the edges. I felt myself pulse inside him in long, rolling waves, felt him tighten around me like he was trying to hold every drop.
“Yes,” he breathed. “Fuck. Yes. I feel you. All of you.”
I stayed there. Forehead pressed to his ankle where it rested against my shoulder, both hands gripping his hips, breathing through the aftershocks in long controlled exhales that weren't quite working. His body was still trembling slightly beneath mine, small involuntary pulses, and I could feel his heartbeat through the places where our skin was pressed together.
Gradually the room came back.
He lowered his legs from my shoulders slowly, and I let him, easing out of him carefully and settling onto the mattress beside him, and for a long moment neither of us said anything. We just lay there and breathed.
Then he shifted. He pressed his lips once to the inside of my thigh, warm and brief, and then he got his mouth on me and cleaned me up slowly.
When he finished he pressed one last kiss to the top of my thigh and moved back up alongside me and got his chin propped on my chest and looked at me.
His eyes were warm and a little serious and very close.
We lay there afterward, the late afternoon light shifting toward evening through the windows, the ocean doing what it always did outside.
Soren's head was on my chest, one arm thrown across my waist, and I could feel his heartbeat gradually slowing against my ribs.
“Hey,” he said eventually, to the air above my head.
“Hey,” I said back.
We stayed like that for a while. The room had gone dark except for the light coming off the water, and his weight against my chest was the most settled I'd felt in weeks. Maybe longer. I didn't want to break it. But I'd been carrying this for a long time, and he deserved to know why I'd run when he'd needed me most.
I cleared my throat.
“I need to tell you something,” I said. “About Montreal. The real reason I pulled away.”
He lifted his head slightly, just enough to look at me, and then he settled back down against my chest without a word. Waiting. Giving me the room to do it at my own pace, which was so specifically him that it made my throat tighten.
I took a breath and let it out slow, trying to find the right words in the right order. “I had a girlfriend a few years back. Her name was Claire. We dated for about eight months, and for most of that time I thought it was fine. Normal. But she wasn't.”
He went still but didn't pull back. Just listened.
“She was controlling. Manipulative. She'd get angry if I didn't text back fast enough, or if I spent time with teammates instead of her, or if I did basically anything that wasn't exactly what she wanted. And when she got angry, she'd—” I stopped, swallowed. “She'd hit me. Not all the time. Just when she thought I deserved it.”
