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He groans again, louder this time, but still soft enough to whisper along my jaw, and I remember what he said about shouting. And what he didn’t. “What scares you about raising your voice?”

Slowly, Poet pushes his jeans and underwear over his hips and kicks them aside. The motion takes him away from me, but he comes back, naked, to straddle my sprawled thighs. To grip my wrist and return my hand to his cock.

The contact heavies his eyes. Softens his jaw. I am fascinated. Consumed. I forget my question until he answers it.

“I haven’t heard my own voice since I lost my hearing. After that, I spent years paranoid every word I spoke was decibels too loud. Also, shouting hurts, because I don’t do it enough.”

“What is enough?”

“I don’t know. If I did, I wouldn’t have a throat made of fragile silk.”

“Silk?”

Poet’s thoughtful expression morphs to a smirk. “It’s only my voice that’s delicate, not the rest of me.”

I get the inference. Let it sizzle through me. But I bank what he’s said too—to think about later when my cognitive function is less fried by the fact he’s naked and I’m not, a reality that doesn’t last long.

Poet strips me bare, and as much as the biting urge to throw him down is still there, I like watching him do it. Like the care he takes with me, and that his hand is on my chest every moment his eyes are elsewhere.

It’s sweet from a man I sense is as tough as any I’ve ever known. And so hot another fragment of me awakens and I find myself staring at my own cock as though I have never seen it before.

I am so hard.

Poet strokes my crown with his fingertip. “You’re big.”

“So they say.” I can barely grit the words out. My chest rises and falls with my staggered breath. I don’t know what I want, just that I want it.

Eyes blazing, Poet straddles me again. His cock slides along mine, by accident, I think, but it feels so good my eyes roll, my hips buck, and I dig my teeth into my bottom lip to contain myself.

Or try.

Poet leans forward, swiping my lip free, kissing me, grinding us tighter together. “Can I show you something?”

I wait for him to withdraw enough to see my face. “Taip.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

He leans back enough to grasp my cock and his in one fist. His fist, his clever fingers and work-hardened palm in perfect sync with the silky steel of his length against mine.

We look so good together.

We feel even better.

Poet strokes us both and the careful friction has me bowing from the couch, arching into his grip, chasing more as fresh heat detonates inside me, and sharp need blooms in every nerve.

He makes a rough sound in response. A groan, a bitten-off curse, I am not sure. Just that I hear it and I want to hear it again. I want to learn…what makes him tip his head back, what drives those soft, low moans. What makes him dig his fingers into my flesh as if he’s reaching for part of me to claim as his own.

I want to learn it all, but as Poet finds a rhythm that punches the breath from my lungs, the hands I might’ve wrapped around us fall slack, and I am transfixed by his. Both the one moulding my cock to his and the one sealed to my chest. To my thundering heart and the deepening groans spilling from me as my entire being capitulates, cell by cell, to a pleasure I can hardly believe is real. To the slow pressure that seems to expand and give way at the same time—a wave pulling me under. One I see coming and surrender to as I curse in Lithuanian. As sweat coats my skin and I am torn between watching my cock fuck Poet’s skilled hand and watching him feel every moment of it.

He’s so beautiful.

And he doesn’t miss a beat. Poet plays my body as if I were made for him. But somewhere through the disorienting pleasure of being with a man like this for the first time, through the sheer relief of forgetting how to think and restrain, I see him unravelling. A gradual reveal so subtle I might’ve missed it if I wasn’t so hooked on him.

But I pay attention, and I catch the hitch in his breath. See how his eyes lose focus as tension surges and recedes like incoming waves. Feel the bone-shaking tremble in his thighs before his body seems to fold inwards around it. As though he’s trying to contain every sound he makes, and I don’t understand it. Until I think of what he’s shared with me today, of old fears that still catch him sometimes, and I realise his silence isn’t empty.

I am so ensnared in my own pleasure. My lungs heave and my limbs shake. The hand I flail at his jaw trembles as it makes land. But I hold him there. Put roots down in the grass. “Let it out. You are safe to be heard.”