“You are the opposite of relaxed. Your whole back is rigid.”
“That's just how my back is.”
He laughed, and the sound of it loosened something in my chest enough that I actually did breathe properly for the first time since the elevator.
“Rook.” He pulled back enough to look at me, and his eyes were dark and warm and entirely focused. “You don't have to perform anything in here. There's nobody watching. You can just be.”
I looked at him for a second. “I don't know how to do this.”
“I know. That's why I'm here.” He said it simply, without making it into anything other than what it was. “Let me show you.”
He pressed his palm flat to my chest and pushed me back until I was on my back against the mattress, and then he sat up and finished what he'd started with my belt, trousers following, until I was in my boxer briefs on his bed and he was on his knees above me and he looked completely at home with all of it in a way I envied and was grateful for simultaneously.
Then he sat back on his heels and looked at me properly, and the room felt about ten degrees warmer.
I'd never given a lot of thought to the fact that I was hairy. It was just how I was built — chest, stomach, thighs, the trail downfrom my navel to the waistband of my briefs. On the ice it was irrelevant and in the locker room nobody made a point of it. But under Soren's eyes it became a specific thing, something he was cataloguing deliberately, his gaze moving over me like he was taking inventory of all the ways I was different than whatever he'd been imagining.
Whatever that inventory concluded, it made his jaw go tight in a way that looked involuntary.
“Do you trust me?” Soren asked.
“Yes.” No hesitation.
He held my eyes for one more second and then he leaned down and pressed his mouth to the inside of my knee.
The breath left me in a rush.
He kissed up the inside of my thigh slowly — no urgency in it, just warmth and the slight scrape of his stubble against skin that had never been paid this much attention — and the hair on my thighs was apparently a point of interest because he pressed his lips through it rather than around it, dragging his mouth up like he had all the time in the world and was going to use it. I felt every point of contact with a specificity I wasn't used to. My hands found the duvet without me deciding to grab it.
“Fuck,” he said against my inner thigh, and it sounded involuntary.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He kissed higher. “You're just — you're a lot, Rook.”
I didn't know what to do with that so I filed it away and focused on not making any embarrassing sounds, which was a losing effort because the scrape of his jaw against the sensitive skin high on my thigh sent a hot pull straight up my spine. He was so close to where I needed him that I could feel his breath through the cotton of my briefs, and the fact that I was alreadyfully hard and had been since approximately the moment he'd taken his shirt off was not something I could do anything about.
He stopped at my hip. Pressed his lips to the jut of bone there, open and warm, and I heard myself make a sound I couldn't have predicted. Something low and caught, pulled out before I could manage it.
“There you go,” he said against my skin, and there was something in his voice that was gentle and pleased all at once. “That's better.”
Then he dragged the flat of his palm slow across the front of my briefs, a single deliberate stroke, and every thought I'd been managing evaporated instantly.
He wrapped his fingers around me through the fabric and went completely still for a moment.
“Rook.” His voice had gone quiet and a little wrecked around the edges.
“What?” My own voice was barely functional.
“I just—” He pressed his palm firmer, felt me pulse against it, and exhaled through his nose. “I knew you were built, but I didn't—” He wrapped his grip around me more firmly and the sound that left me was not quiet. “You're fucking huge.”
It shouldn't have hit me the way it did. It was not a complicated sentence. But the way he said it went straight through me like current.
“Soren—”
“I know. Sorry.” He didn't sound sorry at all. He stroked me once through the cotton, slow and deliberate, and my hips moved up before I could catch them. “I just needed a second. I'm good.”
He was absolutely not good. His hand was still on me and his breathing had gone audibly unsteady and he was staring at the front of my briefs with an expression of concentrated want that made something low in my gut pull tight.
