“Soren—”
“Don't stop.” Raw and demanding. “Don't you dare stop.”
I didn't stop.
I felt myself pulse inside him, felt him clench tight around me like he was trying to hold all of it, and the sound he made in response was soft and broken and unbearably satisfied.
“Yes,” he breathed. “Fuck— yes?—”
I kept my hand moving on him through it, working him through the clench and shudder of his own building edge, and he spilled into my fist thirty seconds later with a low, sustained moan that vibrated against my chest.
I stayed inside him. Kept my hand wrapped around him. Let both of us come back to the room in our own time.
Then he reached back and found my wrist.
Lifted my hand.
Brought it to his mouth.
He took my fingers in and licked them clean.
I stayed there afterward without moving. His chest was heaving. My face was pressed into the side of his neck and I could feel his heartbeat gradually slowing against my lips.
He pressed his lips to my temple. Stayed there.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
Then he shifted enough to look at me, and his eyes were warm and a little serious and very close.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” My voice was wrecked.
“You okay?”
I thought about it honestly. “I don't know what I am. But yeah. I'm okay.”
He nodded, like that was a sufficient answer. Like he understood exactly what I meant and wasn't going to push me to parse it further.
I rolled onto my back and he settled beside me, one arm thrown across my waist, and I stared at the ceiling and tried to take stock. The city was still dark outside. The room was warmand quiet. My body felt like it had been taken apart at the seams and put back in a slightly different order.
I was going to need to think about this.
Not right now. Right now what I needed was exactly what I had — this room, this man, the weight of his arm across my waist telling me I was here and this had happened and it was real.
“For someone who's never been with a guy before,” Soren said eventually, and his voice had gone dry around the edges in the way it did when he was covering real feeling with comedy, “you picked things up concerningly fast.”
“I've always been a quick learner.”
“You were just lying there in a state of religious experience five minutes ago.”
“And now I'm fine.”
He lifted his head and looked at me with an expression of elaborate disbelief. I kept my face neutral. He dropped his head back down onto the pillow.
“You're unbelievable,” he said, but there was warmth under it that gave him away.
I put my hand over his where it rested on my waist. He turned his palm up and I held it.
