His monster drank it down, drained it into his bones until his whole body hummed with want from his skull to his heels. He could feel his own breath, hot and sticky against his lips as he panted. His cock ached, so stiff it was tender, as every involuntary twitch of his hips rubbed it over the silk sheets. Hunger pulsed with dull, insistent finality in the pit of his stomach, a hollow pressure that tugged at his balls and the clenched muscles in his thighs.
“Say it,” Arkady said as he finally pulled back. “Or I’ll leave you to finish yourself off.”
An uneasy combination of surrender and reluctance made Cash’s mouth go dry. He knew what Arkady wanted him to say, but he’d only ever said it twice and only when he could claim it didn’tcount, that he’d meant it sarcastically or it had been in reference to a specific, limited moment. Exactly like this one right now, when he’d swallowed a hook that was only for the duration of the weekend.
He was a good liar, after all. Good enough that, until this moment, with the words right there on his tongue, he’d actually convinced himself to forget about them. And the fact he’d kinda meant it back then.
But not now, the snide voice in the back of his head said. He could hear it roll its eyes as it drawled,You don’t mean it now, for real.
Cash usually blamed that voice on his monster, but it just sounded an awful lot like him right then.
“I’m yours,” he said… admitted. “Happy now?”
Arkady made a low, pleased sound in his throat and bit Cash on the ass hard enough to make him curse and jerk away. His cock slid over the sheets, the cold stroke of silk almost rough against the hard shaft.
“I already knew that,” Arkady said. He kissed the bite better with a quick graze of soft lips and then crawled up over Cash’s body. The weight of him on top of Cash felt right, the fit of him perfect even where it wasn’t. “I just wanted to make sure you did.”
Under normal circumstances Cash would have snorted at that, but in the naked, sweaty moment it sounded… right. Just like Arkady felt. No matter how hard he ran—and not like he’d gone far or fast, just across the bridge to the city—he couldn’t get away from that.
The blunt pressure of Arkady’s cock against Cash’s slick ass made that train of thought skip the track. He sucked in a breath and pushed back into the pressure as it stretched him open. For a second there was a sharp itch of pain as the warm velvet thickness of Arkady’s cock slowly spread him wide around it. Cash tipped his head down into the cushions, dark curls loose around his face as he waited for the balance to slide back to pleasure.
Arkady wrapped his hands over Cash’s, fingers interlaced, and trailed kisses over Cash’s braced shoulders and up his neck. His voice was strung tight with control as he promised patience and ruin in one breath, as monster and man got their needs tangled up around each other. Each slow roll of his hips worked his cock deeper inside Cash, stretched him out and filled him in.
The dark wash of pleasure felt like the taste of brandy—all rich, brewed sweetness with a sharp bite at its core. It settled in his balls like treacle, heavy and restless, and caught in sharp, sugary threads around his cock. The tug of it was… almost. Cash thrust his hips against the bed to chase the peak of that feeling, but it was pointless. The bed was too soft, the sheets too slick. He could feel the sensation from it, but it teased and tempted instead of satisfied.
Arkady groaned against Cash’s throat, breath hot and sharp with smoke, and tightened his grip.
“Sometimes I wonder why I missed you,” he grumbled. “I’m trying to be… gentle.”
“Why?” Cash asked. He tilted his head back and looked up at Arkady through sweat-tangled curls. “I won’t be when it’s my turn.”
Arkady shifted his weight and freed up one hand to drag Cash’s hair out of his face. He kept it tangled around his fingers and tugged until Cash’s back arched and his breath caught.
“I don’t need you to be,” he said.
Cash swallowed. He could feel the gulp in his throat, like a candy he’d just swallowed whole.
“Please,” he said. “I could hurt you if I wanted.”
Something shuttered dimly over Arkady’s eyes, and he let go of Cash’s hair. It flopped back down, tangled and damp with sweat and lube, so he couldn’t see Arkady’s face when he murmured, “I know.”
Flattering, but they both knew it was a lie. Cash would have pointed that out, but—maybe fed up with the complaints from the gallery—Arkady sheathed himself inside Cash in one long stroke. Long, lean thighs pressed against Cash’s ass, the muscles clenched tight under warm, smooth skin. It made Cash tense, his ass squeezed tightly around the cock that filled it, and squeeze a grunt out through his teeth. He wasn’t sure if the warm throb in his guts was the pulse of Arkady’s cock or his own exaggerated heartbeat.
They lay there for a moment, stretched out on the bed in one long, sweaty line of flesh. Arkady moved first. He shifted his weight to the side and freed up one hand to hook around Cash’s chest. His fist, clenched so tight his knuckles showed through his skin like raw bone, tucked into the hollow of Cash’s collarbone. The bar of his forearm across Cash’s throat tightened with each rough thrust that shoved him down into the bed, the ache of his frustrated cock twisted through every misfired pleasure/pain neuron in his head that got off on the… sharp edge of it.
He wasn’t a masochist. Pain on its own was just unpleasant. It was the adrenaline rush. Fucking Arkady felt precarious, the same dizzy temptation that people on the edge of cliffs must feel. Only Cash had jumped nearly every time, when most people showed better sense.
Arkady shifted again, his knee cocked under him to change the angle of his thrust. This time when he thrust home, thighs pressed tight against the slick curve of Cash’s ass, the head of his cock bruised against his prostate and plucked a hot, stupid jolt of pleasure along his nerve endings. It fried Cash’s brain and made his cock throb.
The second time it knocked the breath out of him and left him boneless, afuckdry and silent on his tongue. The rhythm between them felt clumsy as Cash tried to regain the pace of Arkady’s thrusts, their bodies out of sync as the sheets tangled around them.
Somehow it didn’t matter. It didn’t need to be perfect. Imperfect—the grip of Arkady’s fingers on Cash’s hip as he yanked him up onto his knees and thrust into him, the way Cash’s knees slipped on the silk sheets—didn’t matter when you needed it this much.
Cash clenched one fist in the wet sheets as Arkady thrust roughly into him. His cock bumped against his stomach with each stroke, precome wet against his skin. Cash reached down and wrapped his fingers around himself. Pleasure tugged at him, almost painful as it scraped along strung-tight nerves, and he dragged his hand along the shaft from base to tip. His balls pulsed in rough counterpoint to Arkady’s rhythm as Cash worked his way toward the slick, wet spill of orgasm.
He closed his eyes and bit the inside of his cheek. The tart salt metals of his own blood always helped him make it over the edge. Sweat itched in the small of his back, wet and clammy between his and Arkady’s bodies, as his muscles tightened, ready to come.
“Not,” Arkady said in his ear, “yet.”
