“You going to do something about it?” I said, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it to. “Or are you just going to?—”
“I'm going to do several things about it.” He looked up at me and the dark heat in his eyes was. “But not yet. You said you trusted me.”
“I do.”
“Then let me take my time.”
He removed his hand from where I desperately needed it and moved up my body instead, and I swallowed back the objection because he was right and I had said that and he was apparently going to hold me to it. His hands replaced his mouth, palming up the outside of my thighs, running through the hair there with a deliberate slowness that shouldn't have been as good as it was. He pressed both hands flat to my stomach, dragged them up through the hair on my abdomen, and the friction of his palms against skin that hadn't been touched like this by anyone in a long time made my cock throb with a sustained heaviness that was going to be a real problem.
He pressed his thumbs into the muscle of my hips. “How long has it been since someone took care of you?”
I thought about that honestly. “Define care.”
He looked at me. “Since someone actually paid attention.”
I didn't answer, which was an answer.
He pressed his lips to my stomach, just below my navel, and the hair there was coarse against his mouth but he didn't pull away from it, just dragged his lips through it slow and deliberate, and I stopped trying to catalogue what was happening and let my eyes fall shut.
He kissed up my stomach, my ribs, the flat of my chest, the hollow of my throat. Not rushing any of it. Going by sound, adjusting when my breathing snagged or my hands went tight in the duvet, learning what I couldn't tell him with words because I didn't have words for most of it. When he pressed his openmouth to the curve of my pectoral, to the hair there, and ran his tongue once against my skin, I felt the sound I made go right through the mattress.
“You're so fucking responsive,” he said against my chest, and it came out warm and a little wondering. “You know that? You're acting like you're holding yourself together and meanwhile your whole body is giving you away.”
“That's—”
“It's good.” He pressed his lips to my sternum. “It's really good, Rook. You don't have to manage it.”
I let out a breath I'd been holding somewhere around my collarbone and felt my shoulders drop an inch toward the mattress.
He moved back up my body and kissed my stomach, my ribs, the flat of my chest, the hollow of my throat. Cataloguing, I realized. Building a map of what made my breathing change. And it was working with an efficiency that should have been embarrassing and somehow wasn't, because he was doing it with so much genuine attention that there was no room to feel anything except the attention itself.
I got my hands into his hair. His eyes came up to mine.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“I don't know what there is.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Then let me pick.”
He kissed me once, thorough and unhurried, and then moved down my body with a clear destination in mind.
He got his fingers into the waistband of my boxer briefs and looked up at me and waited. I lifted my hips and he pulled the fabric down and off and dropped it somewhere, and then the cool air of the room hit me and his eyes moved over me and his jaw worked once.
Not the same as before, when he'd looked at me through the cotton. This was different. This was the full picture,unmediated, and whatever composure he'd been managing with such apparent ease took a visible hit.
He wrapped one hand around the base of me, loose and exploratory, and his throat moved. “You're a lot. I thought I'd clocked that already but I was wrong.”
His hand tightened, and the slow, measuring stroke he gave me pulled a sound out of my chest I hadn't been warned about.
He pressed his lips to my hip instead, the jut of it, and dragged them inward. His stubble caught in the trail of hair running down from my navel and he didn't avoid it, just pressed his mouth through it that made my hand in his hair tighten before I caught myself loosening it.
“Don't,” he said against my skin. “Don't loosen it. I want you to.”
I tightened my hand in his hair and he made an approving sound that vibrated against my thigh and went everywhere at once.
He took his time getting there. That was the thing I hadn't been prepared for. He pressed his lips to the base of me without taking me in, just warmth and pressure and the scrape of his jaw, and the sound I made into the ceiling was not controlled in any way.
“There,” he said against me, and it was soft and pleased. “That's the one.”
