The moonlight had shifted, or my eyes had adjusted, because I could see more of myself now. The flex of my chest with eachbreath. The way my bicep moved with the rhythm I was working. The thickness of my thighs spread on the floor, the hair on them darker in the low light. I was a man who'd spent twenty-plus years maintaining his body as a machine, and I had not spent much time looking at it like this — like evidence of something, like something worth reading.
I had the strange, half-delirious thought that I understood, suddenly, what Soren had been looking at in that dressing room.
My fist tightened.
I gathered saliva and let it fall onto the head of my cock, spread it with my thumb on the downstroke, and hissed at the ceiling. The wet drag was better. I did it again, deliberately, watched my own thumb move over the head, and bit down on the inside of my cheek at the sight of it. There was something about watching your own hand on your own cock in the dark that stripped away any pretense of being a composed adult. I looked like exactly what I was — a man past the point of talking himself out of anything.
I spat properly into my palm then, a good mouthful, warm and slick, and spread it between both hands before I wrapped them back around myself, one at the base and one working the top half. The wet heat of both hands together at once was enough that my whole body locked up for a second while I adjusted to the sensation, thighs going tight, abs pulling in.
“Fuck,” I breathed, to nobody.
I started moving again. Long, dragging strokes, both hands working different rhythms that found each other after a few seconds and became one thing, and the slick sound of it in the quiet room was obscene and I was past caring. My hips were starting to move with it, rising to meet my own hands, a small helpless roll that I let happen because stopping it required more self-control than I had left.
I pressed my wrist to my nose and breathed in.
The smell hit me low and direct — sweat and skin and the specific warm salt of my own body working hard, and underneath that the faint residue of the night, the bar, the leather of my car. It was an animal thing. Primal and unself-conscious in a way that would have embarrassed me if I'd been thinking clearly enough to be embarrassed by anything.
I wasn't.
I breathed it in again and worked my cock with both hands, and then I thought about Soren.
I let myself do it. Let the thought arrive fully instead of catching it at the edge of my mind and redirecting it somewhere safer. His hands and his mouth and the specific way he'd looked at me on that dance floor like he knew exactly what he was doing even though he hadn't known at all, which was somehow worse and better simultaneously.
My grip tightened.
I thought about his voice.
I've been thinking about kissing you.
“Fuck,” I said quietly, to nobody.
I was stroking myself steadily now, the rhythm finding itself without any real decision from me, my hips rocking up into my own fists in small shallow movements I couldn't entirely control. I thought about the weight of him on that dance floor. The heat of his back against my chest, the way his hips had moved in those slow devastating rolls that my cock had answered without consulting my brain at all. He'd been drunk and loose and completely at home in his own body in a way I'd never been, like he'd made peace with what his body wanted years ago and found the whole enterprise more or less enjoyable.
I'd never been that way. I'd spent twenty years in a body I used rather than inhabited, and right now, on the floor of my own living room with both hands slicked and my hips movingand my chest heaving in the dark, I thought maybe I understood what that felt like.
I thought about him on his knees.
The thought arrived without warning. Unasked for and completely vivid. Soren on the floor in front of me, his hands pressing against the inside of my thighs, spreading them wider, his dark eyes coming up to meet mine with that specific expression he had when he was looking at me like I was worth looking at. His mouth open slightly. His hair a mess. The tattoos on his forearms moving with the shift of his muscles as he settled his weight between my legs like he had nowhere else to be and no particular hurry about any of it.
In the fantasy he looked up at me and didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He just looked, patient and intent, while I sat there trying to remember how to breathe.
My hands moved faster and my thighs tensed and my breath came out ragged against the dark.
I looked at the window.
The glass was doing something strange, or my brain was doing something strange, or both were conspiring together, because I looked at my own reflection in that dark glass with the ocean moving beyond it and for a second — just a second, just long enough for my heart to stop and then kick forward hard — I saw him there.
Soren. Between my knees in the reflection. Head bent, dark hair catching the moonlight, tattoos visible on his forearms where his hands pressed against the inside of my thighs. His mouth open slightly, eyes up, looking at me with an expression that was equal parts invitation and ruin.
“Fucking hell,” I said, through my teeth.
The image didn't leave.
It stayed, steady and detailed and entirely generated by whatever part of my mind had been running this particular filein the background for thirteen years and had finally decided enough was enough. It looked so real that my chest stopped working properly for a full three seconds.
I didn't stop stroking.
My right hand kept moving, slow and deliberate, and I was achingly, furiously hard in a way that had nothing to do with relief and everything to do with the image in the glass and the specific way dream-Soren was looking at me like he'd been waiting for exactly this.
