His room was identical to mine — standard hotel layout, king bed against the far wall, the city sitting dark and cold outside the window. He closed the door behind us and locked it, and the click of the deadbolt was loud in the quiet.
Then he turned around and looked at me with his back against the door, and for a second neither of us moved.
“Hey.” His voice was different than it had been in the elevator. Softer. More careful. “You can still go.”
“I know,” I said.
“I mean it. If you need to?—”
“Soren.” I crossed the room.
He met me halfway.
The kiss was slower than the elevator, which surprised me. I'd half-expected the urgency of it to carry straight through the door, but he put both hands on my face and kissed me like he had time, like there was no reason to rush through this particular thing, and the patience in it undid something in my chest faster than urgency would have.
He walked me back toward the bed without breaking contact, hands moving from my face to my chest to the buttons of my shirt with a deliberateness that made it clear he knew exactly what he was doing. Which meant one of us did, and I was going to let him lead because that was the only arrangement that made any sense tonight.
My shirt opened. He pushed it off my shoulders and dropped it somewhere behind me, and then his hands were on my chest and his eyes were on his hands and the look on his face made me go still.
“Hi,” he said again, quieter this time, and dragged his palms slowly up my sternum.
“You're looking at me like?—”
“Like what?”
I didn't have a word for it. Like a man who had been thinking about something for a long time and was adjusting to having it finally in front of him. “Never mind.”
He pressed his lips to the center of my chest, right over my heartbeat, and I felt my breath go unsteady.
Then he stepped back and looked at me standing there and his mouth pulled at one corner. “Your turn. Watch.”
He reached for the hem of his own shirt and pulled it over his head, and I was already looking at the tattoos across his ribswhen I registered what was sitting just above the waistband of his jeans.
Lace. Red lace, thin and delicate and sitting low on his hips, the edge of it visible above the denim, and the specific contrast of that — soft and fragile against the ink and the muscle and the man — made my brain take a hard stop.
I was staring. I knew I was staring.
“Still with me?” Soren asked, and there was laughter in his voice but it was warm.
“Yeah.” My voice came out rough. “Yeah, I'm with you.”
He got his jeans undone and pushed them down, and the full picture arrived in increments that my nervous system was completely unprepared for. The thong, red lace and barely functional, sitting low on his hips. Sheer stockings that stopped at mid-thigh, the lace border of them sitting against skin. The contrast of all that delicate fabric against muscle wasn't subtle, and it shouldn't have worked as well as it did, and it absolutely did.
I didn't know what I'd been expecting. I'd thought I'd known what I was walking into.
I'd been wrong about that.
He stood there and let me look, which was its own specific act of trust, and I looked. Not performing composure. Just taking it in. The ink on his ribs, the lean muscle of his stomach, the lace sitting where it sat and leaving nothing ambiguous about the effect this was having on him either. The thin fabric was already strained, the shape of him obvious, and I had to make a conscious decision not to go to my knees right there on the carpet.
“Come here,” I said.
He crossed the room and I got both hands on him — his waist, his sides, his ribs — and walked us back until his knees hit the bed and we both went down. He pulled me down over himand kissed me properly, one hand in my hair and the other at the back of my neck, and I felt the length of him against my thigh and stopped trying to think analytically about anything.
He worked my belt while I tried to focus on kissing him, which was harder than it should have been because his hands were deft and mine were white-knuckled against the mattress and he was apparently doing perfectly fine while I was operating about three seconds behind reality.
“Relax,” he said against my mouth.
“I'm relaxed.”
