“Si,” he gasped, his voice ragged and pleading. “I can’t….”
“Yeah, you can.”
Jacob clenched his jaw, tilted his head back, and swore quietly at the ceiling as pleasure built ruthlessly. Heneededto come. Simon’s thrusts picked up pace as he buried his cock deeper inside Jacob and his fingers dug into Jacob’s hips hard enough to bruise. The muscles in his thigh clenched, and Simon came with a last jolting thrust and a twisting pulse inside Jacob.
He flopped back onto the bed, licked the sweat off his lips between ragged breaths, and watched Jacob with hooded eyes. Jacob leaned forward, and the pressure against his cock cramped pleasure back to his ass. He kissed the salt off Simon’s lips.
“Suck me off,” he said.
Simon snorted a laugh into his mouth and shoved him off onto the bed. He licked his way down Jacob’s body and chewed marks generously over the ripples of muscle. When he reached Jacob’s hip bone, he lingered to suck a stinging bruise into the tight stretch of skin. Once the red stain was made to his satisfaction, he finally wrapped his lips around Jacob’s cock. His mouth was hot, and his tongue was slick and pushed up firmly against the underside of the shaft as he bobbed his head.
Everything clenched, from his toes to his jaw, and Jacob arched up off the bed as he came, and a ragged groan dragged out of him.
Simon let Jacob’s cock slide out of his mouth and pressed a sticky kiss onto the flat of Jacob’s stomach. Then he rolled off the bed, stood up, and stripped the used condom off his cock. He padded across the dark room, into the bathroom. A trashcan rattled and then the sound of water running.
When he came back and crawled into bed, he was clean and cool, while Jacob was still sweaty and sticky. Not that Jacob moved. He just lay there and waited to see whether he’d fall asleep before guilt outweighed his resentment.
Nope.
“I should go wash,” he said. Not that he moved.
Simon tucked a damp hand behind his neck and stroked his thumb along the sensitive hollow under his ear. “It doesn’t bother me.”
In that case Jacob wasn’t going to bother. He closed his eyes, stretched until the knots in his muscles released with satisfying pops of pleasure, and then grabbed a pillow to fold under his head. After a minute of half dozing, he snorted.
“What?” Simon asked.
“Bad decisions,” he said around a yawn. “This job has been one bad decision after another.”
“Including me.”
“Oh yeah. Caring is the worst decision. Makes you….” He stopped to yawn again and managed to mumble out the final “stupid” before he got dragged down into sleep.
Chapter Sixteen
SIMON LAYin bed and tried to ignore the pulse in his shoulder out of existence. He listened to Jacob move through the apartment. It was stupid. He could just get up and confirm that Jacob wasn’t getting up to anything he shouldn’t—it wasn’t as though Jacob could pretend it was unfounded—but that felt like a step he couldn’t take back.
It felt like he couldn’t step either way—to or from—in case he couldn’t take it back.
So instead he lay in a bed that smelled of sex that shouldn’t have happened and traced Jacob by the disturbances he made to the familiar soundscape of the apartment. The rattle of the pan drawer under the sink—he knew it was that drawer from the catch and jolt caused by a kinked runner he hadn’t gotten around to fixing—and the clink of the glass bottles as the door to the fridge was pulled open. The scrape and clatter of drawers being banged as Jacob looked for something in particular, and the hiss-pop-splutter of the burner catching on the oven. All to a backing track of snatches of Nickelback and Charli XCX lyrics.
There was the sound of something breaking, a wet cracking, and a muttered curse. “Fuck.”
Water gushed and slopped about.
Simon closed his eyes to the view of the ceiling and sighed. It would have been easier if Jacobhadtried to pull something. It turned out he was good at that. Cooking? Not so much. And Simon was probably going to have to eat it.
It wasn’t the biggest concern of the day. That was somewhere between Jacob being convicted of a murder he didn’t commit and Simon letting Jacob make a fool of him again—but maybe that was why he dwelled on it.
The door nudged open, which made Simon open his eyes, and Jacob leaned in around the jamb. He was shirtless and scruffy. The borrowed jeans were low around lean hips. Was it just a coincidence that the lack of shirt showed off lean muscleandthe dapple of bruises over his side?
“Don’t bother pretending to be asleep.”
Simon propped himself up on his elbow. The sheet slid down around his waist and folded over his hip.
“I wasn’t going to.”
Jacob snorted at him and flashed a grin. “I made breakfast.”
