For a second, Greg worked his mouth, jaw flexing. “I don’t—”
He cut himself off, and Marsh’s stomach sank. “Fine,” he mumbled. He pressed his forehead to Greg’s collarbone and breathed and breathed. Some guys didn’t like that. Marsh didn’t always like that. It was vulnerability, it was exposure, even with a condom. It hurt sometimes, and with the right man working you open, it could be the best damn feeling in the world.
The thing was, Greg always made the best noises when Marsh got near his ass. He loved to get a throat full of cock, and Marsh had thought he’d be willing to, eventually. That he’d let Marsh inside him. But not today.
“Never mind,” Marsh grit out, because that was fine. “Never mind.” He rasped out a harsh breath and dragged his hand away from Greg’s ass. He lined their cocks up and got a fist around them both, swallowing down the sound that wanted to escape at just that pressure alone.
“I mean—”
“It’s fine. This is good.” He parted his lips and mashed his face into Greg’s chest to keep from showing everything he felt. To help him focus on the pleasure instead of the brush-off. Because this felt amazing, even if it wasn’t exactly what he wanted. Greg was a hot line, all velvet and smoothness, and Marsh stroked, steady and fast at them both, smoothing the fluid from the tips down around their shafts. “Isn’t it good?”
“Yeah.” Greg slipped his hand between their bodies, down into that humid space there, and covered Marsh’s hand with his own. It just made it all better, made Marsh’s sac draw up tight.
And then it was just the pull and push, the shuddering breaths and the subtle motions of hips. The slapping noises as they jerked their arms together. Greg tensed and hooked his calf around Marsh’s thigh, urging him closer.
Marsh dropped his head until his brow pressed to the mattress beside Greg’s ear, and he twisted his neck. Against the sweaty hair at Greg’s temple, he whispered, “You gonna come? Gonna come all over me?”
Greg just keened, scrabbling at Marsh’s back, spine arching, his voice thick as he swore and pulsed. The slide went slick with come as Greg’s cock jerked in his palm. Marsh sped his hand, Greg’s fingers tightening over his, and he bit his tongue as the feeling crested. He spilled across Greg’s skin, all over his abdomen and into the trail of hair there, over their intertwined fists, and it was good. Good enough.
Once his vision cleared, he sagged, shifting his weight so as not to crush the man beneath him, tugging his hand free and flopping it to the side. Every time they did this, the pleasure of it turned him to jelly, turned him inside out, so it wasn’t anything to float away on that knowledge. To lie there and soak up this warmth and this comfort, all of it so close to what he wanted. He was always so close.
Finally, he couldn’t really linger any longer, and it was time. Were this Marsh’s room, Greg would already be getting up and looking for his clothes. Marsh should pull away. Should go.
Greg’s hand came up and settled, warm and tentative at the base of Marsh’s spine, and any will he’d had to leave evaporated.
“You okay?” Greg asked, fingertips tracing an uncertain line up the center of Marsh’s back.
“Fine.” Fine, and yet not. The same discontent from before was a rumbling deep inside him.
Marsh peeled his sweaty skin from Greg’s, wincing at the spatters of cooling come. But Greg didn’t let go. His arm stayed hooked around Marsh’s waist even as he slid off to lie on his side. He placed his own hand on the center of Greg’s chest.
He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to always have to go, to feel so uncertain every time he wanted a fuck or a smile or just to see Greg’s face or kiss his mouth.
And it was so stupid. They were naked, they’d just shot off all over each other, but the question in the back of his throat hurt in a way that made him feel like he was stripped bare in another way entirely.
“Do you wanna—” he started, and the words lodged, hard and impossible to breathe around.
“Hmm?”
“Do you want— I don’t know.” Shit. “To…hang out?”
Greg snickered, and it hurt. “Isn’t that what we just did?”
“Yeah. Right. Sure.” And Marsh felt hollow down to the centers of his bones. “I’ll just go then.”
“I’ve got a lot to do,” Greg said, staring up at the ceiling. Because he couldn’t even look at Marsh.
Marsh pulled away. “Of course.”
Then Greg was turning his head to the side, focusing dark, gorgeous eyes on Marsh. His hand tightened on Marsh’s side. “You don’t have to leave.”
“But you just said—” Marsh felt dizzy.
“I’ve got a lot to do,” Greg repeated, “but you can…stay. If you want to.”
Christ, that was all Marsh wanted to do. But he couldn’t seem to make his throat work. The offer didn’t feel real.
Greg shifted his whole body over, tugging Marsh down and nosing in. Their lips brushed. “You can stay.”
The hollowness seeped away, replaced by something full. Something he hadn’t felt in so long. Maybe ever. He found Greg’s hand in the space between them and intertwined their fingers, the block in his voice box melting away. “That’d be nice.” Because this really wasn’t that much of a stretch, was it? They’d watched a movie together, that once. They’d eaten dinner, and they’d fucked, never the both one after another, but they could do this, too, couldn’t they? The fucking and the dinner? He reached up, nice and slow. Rested his fingers against Greg’s jaw. “Dinner?”
“Takeout?”
“Is there any other kind?”
And Greg laughed, and it was free in a way it hadn’t been. Rich. Greg put his hand over Marsh’s wrist, holding it gently, and it felt like a lifeline. “That sounds nice.”
“Yeah.” Marsh exhaled nice and slow. His own smile felt free, too. “It does.”
The nicest thing he’d heard in a long, long while.
Chapter Eleven
“Hey.”
Greg looked up from his screen, over the rims of his glasses. He had to fight the urge to pull them off his face, and just that had his cheeks warming.
I like the glasses
, Marsh had said, close and soft and warm. He tapped his finger against his mouse to keep his hand from reaching up and fidgeting with the frames.
Marsh stood there in the doorway, nudging it open another couple of inches. Not like when he’d stormed in a week or so ago. Oh, no.
Thing was, though, Greg liked the storming and the stripping and the kisses so deep he hardly knew where his body ended and Marsh’s began, but he kind of liked this better. The quiet knocks and the hovering.
The way Marsh tugged at the strap of his bag as he asked, “Do you mind if I—” He gestured toward the inside of the room.
“No. Not at all.” Because he didn’t just not mind. He loved it.
He loved that possessive, intense sex last week had turned into possessive, intense sex and takeout. And then sex and takeout and studying in the same room together. And now, apparently, to just studying, and how fucked up was it that Greg felt as warmed by that as he had by the rest of it?
Marsh smiled and stepped inside, pushing the door behind him to leave it ajar. Dropping his book bag off his shoulder, he took a couple of steps into the room, eyes wary as he crossed over to Greg. Every motion was forecast, like he thought Greg was going to push him away. Marsh leaned in and pressed a light kiss to the corner of Greg’s mouth. Greg was the one to reel him in, clasping a hand to the side of his neck to give him another, firmer kiss. “Hey.”
“Hi,” Marsh echoed, the one side of his lips twitching up. “Busy?”
“Always.”
“I won’t bother you too much then.”
Greg kind of wanted to protest, to say it was never a bother, but he really did have a lot to do tonight, so he smiled and nodded, letting his hand slip down Marsh’s chest before returning it to his keyboard tray.
Not that he was going to get a lot of work down for the next few minutes, anyway. Unreasonably aware of every movement, Greg watched Marsh in the reflection on his computer monitor as he settled in, sitting cross-legged on the floor, back propped up against Greg’s bed. He pulled out a book and flicked it open, then lifted his head.
“You good?” Greg asked, twisting so he could look at him straight-on.
“Yeah.”
Greg turned to face his desk and all the work spread out across it, but his chest felt full in a way he could scarcely explain—in a way he didn’t dare to even try to explain, worried it would upset this fragile balance.
Because he could drown in this. In quiet companionship, in the knowledge that Marsh was there in the background, turning pages and scribbling notes. It eased the tension in Greg’s shoulders, leaving him less overwhelmed, less distraught. Less alone.
Even as Greg fought down his smile over that, he couldn’t help feeling a little twitchy. Maybe it was
too
quiet? He tapped his finger against his mouse. “You want any music or anything?”
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
Music would be good. Only… “Anything in particular you like?”
“Whatever.”
Not helpful. Greg brought up his MP3 collection and skimmed through it, and his heart sank. He never should have asked. He’d heard pop and R&B coming from Marsh’s room often enough, and he didn’t have anything like that. “Um. How do you feel about…jazz?” It was good studying music, no distracting lyrics or anything. And it was hopelessly, painfully dweeby. Greg cringed in anticipation of Marsh’s answer.
“Seriously, anything is fine.”
“Okay.” Still feeling a little squirmy about the whole thing, he brought up a quartet he liked for when he was really trying to concentrate and set the volume on his speakers to something sort of medium-low. And it sounded like a pretentious coffee shop, the kind intellectual douchebags went to.
You
are
an intellectual douchebag.
Marsh didn’t respond except to turn his page, and Greg forced himself to breathe past the knot in his throat. There wasn’t any reason to be self-conscious. Marsh had said anything was fine, and the things Greg liked were
fine
. It didn’t ease the stricture in his chest, but he could work with that. He
had
to work with that.
Refocusing, he brought up his calendar and wished he could go back to worrying about Marsh and what kind of music he preferred. The countdown was on now—just two days until the symposium started and only three until he was scheduled to present. His commitments were blocked out in blue and yellow and green. Double shifts at the helpdesk and classes to teach, the sessions his friends and colleagues were speaking at that he needed to attend. On top of that, he hadn’t been able to wriggle his way out of hosting duties for the symposium in spite of how hard he’d tried, and he was stuck manning the registration desk for a few hours the first day and escorting bigwigs to sessions the day after that. Oh, and picking his parents up at the airport and taking them to dinner.
No problem. No reason to panic at all.
He snuck a glance over his shoulder at Marsh. He seemed absorbed in the notes he was taking, the cap of his pen between his teeth, hard blue plastic against the soft plump of his lips. And it was so tempting to put all this off and stalk over there instead and remind himself how soft those lips could be. God, he wished he had time for that tonight. Greg looked away again and minimized the calendar, then scanned the rest of the programs running in his taskbar. It was probably time to give up on lost causes and ignore his research for the next few days. He had everything prepped for the class he had to teach first thing in the morning, so that left just the presentation he
had
to get squared away tonight.
He pulled up PowerPoint and started scrolling through the slides. Just looking at them made his stomach roil. Being asked to present was an honor, he reminded himself. It would look good on his CV, and it would put him in front of the people he’d be applying to for post-docs in another year or two. It was important.
And just the idea of getting up in front of all those important people made him want to break out in hives.
At least the slides themselves were more or less set to go at this point. He clicked back up to the beginning and made himself page through more slowly, practicing in his head what he would say. The bullet points would keep him from getting too lost, even if he had a fit of nerves, but he really wanted to be able to do the majority of the talk without looking.
He didn’t want to fuck this up.
“You want to give it to me?”
Greg whipped around at the sound of Marsh’s voice. He’d been so obsessed with Marsh’s presence, yet somehow, as soon as he’d started thinking about talking in front of a few hundred people, he’d forgotten all about it. “Excuse me?”
Marsh pointed at the computer screen. “Is that your presentation? For the…thing? Symposium? Thing?”
“What do you know about that?”
Marsh’s expression flickered, something hurt and foreign passing across his face before smoothing out. “Ronnie mentioned it, I think. Said it was what you were so busy with.” His gaze darted off to the side and back again. “I mean—”
“Yeah, that’s what it is.”
“How long is it supposed to be? Your talk?”
“Twenty minutes, plus questions. No big.” Greg’s pulse sped just thinking about it.