I run a tentative finger down his arm. He’s vibrating with anger. Coerced. Yeah, that’s the word I was trying to find earlier to tell Daniel what I thought might have happened the day I found him and Buddy in the alley. But it wasn’t that. Not for him. And I’m glad. Glad the ugliness didn’t touch him.
“And I fucking
hate
that you didn’t tell me about it before,” Rafe says, turning to me, his face fierce and his hand on my hair gentle.
I shake my head, trying to find the words to explain that I wanted things to be different with him. I wanted to start that side of things over, as if shit with Buddy had never happened. That I didn’t want to think of what I did with Rafe as even being in the same category as things with Buddy.
But I don’t come up with any words at all. I just reach for Rafe, wanting the warmth of his skin, his scent, the weight of him. Wanting to be connected with him. It’s not even exactly sex that I need. Just something to let me feel close to him.
“Please,” I hear myself say softly. Rafe lowers his mouth to mine and kisses me, sweet and slow. “Please.”
“Colin.” He moves on top of me, stroking my face and neck.
“Please.”
“Are you sure?”
“You think it’s fucked up?” I say around a lump in my throat.
He shakes his head. “I think it’s fucked up that I want you right now.”
“Why?”
“Because I”—his voice drops to a whisper—“I don’t want to be like them. The men. The ones who hurt people.”
“You’re not.”
“Sometimes I’m not sure,” he says.
“No way.”
“Don’t you get it?” he says finally. “I want to tear the fucking world apart to find the people who hurt you. I want to pull them apart with my bare hands and watch them whimper while I tell them what they’re being punished for.” He’s squeezing my shoulders too tightly and his eyes are focused inward, like he’s not even looking at me.
“’S not the same,” I tell him. But he shakes his head.
I reach up and run my fingers through his hair, untangling every snag I encounter, as he calms down. Gradually, my hands find their way from his hair to his neck, then down the corded muscles of his back to rest on his ass, drawing him against me.
We kiss for a while, moving together slowly. When Rafe leans back to pull his shirt off, he’s looking at me strangely.
I want him to obliterate the past and blot out the future. I want to be so completely full-up with only Rafe that everything else falls away. I want to become the person I feel like when he’s touching me. And I also want to show him that he isn’t those men—the ones who hurt people.
“I want—I…. Listen. I trust you,” I say. Rafe runs his knuckles down my jaw, eyes half closing. “I want you to touch me however you want.” I can see the arousal shoot through Rafe in the tightening of his muscles and it makes my heart beat faster. “I want you to… do whatever you want.”
Rafe bites his lip and frowns but the way he’s looking at me leaves no question that he wants this. His pupils are huge in the warm brown of his eyes and his forehead is damp. “Yeah?”
I nod. He kisses me, and when I reach a hand up to his nipple, he presses my wrist into the pillow above my head. When I reach my other hand down to where his erection is sticking out of the band of his underwear, he presses that wrist to the bed too.
He pauses just before kissing me, lips an inch from mine. “Is that okay?”
I nod, gasping for breath.
“Mmmm. You
can
trust me.” I nod. There’s something almost desperate in his voice. “I won’t hurt you.”
“I know.”
He kisses me again and I go wild beneath him, testing the strength of his hands on my wrists.
“Fuck, you look so beautiful like this.” He rolls my hips up and my wrists slide from his hand. I whimper at the loss, and he rolls my hips up until they come off the bed.
He licks into my hole like a starving man, and I don’t even recognize the sound that comes out of me, part scream and part whimper. A drop of my own precome lands on my chin.
Rafe opens me with his tongue, pressing down even harder on my arms, and groans when my hole relaxes.
“So fucking sweet here,” he mutters against my ass, and then both his hands are spreading my cheeks, practically bending me in half, and I can’t move, can’t do anything except moan as his mouth moves on me.
Rafe grabs one of my hands in each of his and moves them so I’m holding my legs open for him. He sucks on my hole and runs his tongue around it, then licks his way to my balls, taking each one in his mouth. I feel ridiculous. Awkward. Totally at his mercy, my ass and balls and dick exposed for him.
He licks up the length of my erection, swirling his tongue around the tip, where I’m leaking. He sucks me until I’m moaning and trying to thrust deeper into his mouth, but my position won’t let me. He pulls off, presses a kiss to the inside of one thigh, a bite to the other, and moves back to my ass, burying his face there and spearing his tongue into me until I’m a quivering mess.
He eases my legs down so my feet are flat on the bed and rolls on the condom. He grabs my wrists again and holds them fast over my head. “Put your legs around me,” he says breathlessly.
Rafe sinks into me in one slow, deep thrust and I almost scream. With my legs around him, thighs pressed nearly to my chest, his entire weight is bearing down on me. He’s all around me and inside of me, and any way I move, he’s there.
He catches my scream in his mouth, kissing me, feeding me the taste of myself on his tongue until I have to wrench my face away to gasp in breath. A bite to my throat. His tongue at my pulse. The scrape of teeth along my jaw. Then we lock eyes and he starts to move. In this position, I’m so tight around him that he feels huge, on the edge of painful, like every time he slides out of me it seems impossible he’ll be able to thrust back in. Confused pleasure skitters through my body and lands at the base of my dick, trapped between us. I can feel him in my stomach, my chest, my throat.
I wiggle my hips, desperately trying to get some contact for my erection, and I tighten around Rafe. He roars, slamming into me until we’re locked so tightly together that I can’t move, can only let out a choked moan. He squeezes my wrists and presses his other palm to my cheek, his eyes burning into me.
“The sounds you make fucking kill me, Colin.” His hand ghosts over my face, shakily tracing my lips, by brows, my cheeks. “You—Jesus, you just kill me,” he chokes out. Then he kisses me before I can say anything, the sweetness of his mouth a contrast to his powerful thrusts.
“Rafe, I—oh god! Please!” I’m spewing nonsense and my dick is spewing precome as Rafe takes over my body. Everything is his and I force myself to relax beneath him. To make good on my promise. That I trust him. That I want him like this.
My legs are wrapped around him, and he’s deep inside my ass, one heavy arm trapping my wrists while the other hand maps my face and throat. His hair is in my face, his mouth owns mine with kiss after kiss, controlling even my breath, and his weight presses me into the bed. We’re tangled into a knot so complicated I wouldn’t have the first clue how to undo it.
Still, he won’t touch my dick. I’m so painfully hard that each beat of my heart throbs in my erection.
“Please, Rafe, please, please,” I whine, begging him for just that tiny stroke that I know would bring me over the edge. He shakes his head, buries his face in my neck, and groans. Then kisses his way back to my mouth. As he kisses me, he thrusts deep, and when his balls are snugged up against my skin, he freezes there, pulsing inside me. He licks my mouth like an animal, tasting me while he’s inside.
I’m caught there, speared open on him, held down by him, whimpering.
“You’re fucking mine. Do you hear me?”
I cry out as I feel his dick swell inside me at his words. I nod frantically, not even sure what I’m agreeing to.
“Your body,” he says, rocking against me, his weight pressing him deeper inside me. “Your sweet fucking heart.” He rests his palm against my chest and I feel my eyes fill with tears.
His face softens and he starts to let go of my wrists to wipe at my tears. But that’s the last thing I want. I want to be tucked safely inside the cage of his body, his flesh and taste and scent and the sound of his voice filling every opening.
“Don’t let go!”
He squeezes my wrists. “I won’t.” He leans down, and when his mouth is almost touching mine, he says, “You like this? Us close like this? Me in charge of your body?”
I nod quickly. That’s exactly it. He’s in charge of every inch of me like this.
“Because I fucking love it.” Then he starts thrusting hard and my eyes roll back in my head.
“Look at me,” Rafe says.
I look back at him, and he brings his hand up to my throat.
“I won’t hurt you,” he says, sounding more sure of himself this time. “Tap my shoulder and I’ll stop.”
With each thrust, he tightens his hand on my throat a little more. I can still breathe through my nose, but it’s hard. Pleasure pulses inside me as he thrusts, and as he presses harder and harder on my throat, my dick starts to throb harder.
Then he takes his hand away, and I gasp in a breath and groan my disappointment. He kisses me passionately.
“Okay?”
I nod, but he looks down at my throat and frowns, then drops a kiss there. This time, he brings his hand up and covers my nose and mouth.
“I don’t want to leave a bruise,” he mutters, kissing my throat again, and I smile against his palm. Lick it. Then he presses his hand tight and starts to move again. The pleasure boils through my groin and stomach and everything in me strains to take a breath. As I try and fail, a new feeling starts in my dick—a buzzing, tingling pleasure, as if someone’s stroking me or licking me with a rough tongue.
Then Rafe moves his hand and I drag in a deep breath, the buzzing receding. I cry out in frustration and Rafe bites his lip.
“So hot—feeling you squirm against me while I’m inside you, fucking you with my cock and my hands and my mouth. I can’t wait to feel you come. Can’t wait to feel you lose it, squeezing me with that tight little ass as you lose yourself. Fuuuck.” He rotates his hips and I clench around him. “Yeah, just like that.”
It happens faster this time. He cuts off my air and I sink into it, the buzzing sensation creeping from my balls to my dick. When Rafe hits my prostate, fireworks shoot through me and his hand muffles my groans. Then something shifts inside me. I try to take a breath but can’t, and instead of fear, what I feel is elation. Instead of air, all I take in is Rafe. The tingling intensifies and my vision goes a little swimmy and then I’m coming, a huge, wracking orgasm that swallows me up in blackness.
My dick is pulsing with pleasure and my stomach and chest are heaving and my ass is spasming around Rafe’s dick. I’m gasping in air and Rafe is moaning into my neck, and then he’s coming so hard I can feel it, and he crushes me to him, the sensation of his body all around me a rush all its own.
My heartbeat slams in my temples. My skin feels exquisitely, almost painfully sensitive, and I’m shivering, but I just want to hang on to the feeling of being completely flayed in Rafe’s arms for one more minute.
I open my eyes to find him looking at me, holding my face in his hands. I nod and there’s relief in his trembling lips when we kiss.
As he pulls out, I groan at how sore I am. Not just my ass and my legs, but my arms and my stomach and even my mouth. I didn’t notice any of it when Rafe was holding me, but now I feel… wrung the fuck out. I wince as I straighten out, irritated that something that could feel so amazingly, transcendentally good one minute can leave me feeling like shit the next.
Rafe lies down next to me and reaches out to help me, but I bat his hand away, grumbling.
He looks a little guilty but also a little pleased with himself, so I slug him in the shoulder.
“Ouch,” I say, and he lets out a relieved laugh, wrapping his arms around me and sliding a leg between mine.
“That was amazing,” Rafe murmurs. He strokes a warm hand up and down my spine. “You okay?”
I nod, shivering just remembering the things he did to me. I stammer, then shake my head, giving up any attempt to explain how he makes me feel.
“What?” he asks softly, stroking my chin so I’ll look at him. I just shake my head, and Rafe huffs and pulls me on top of him, nestling his mouth near my ear. “Tell me.” He squeezes me tight and I shudder and wince, my legs falling open around his hips. I wrap his hair around my fingers and kiss the warm skin below his ear.
“Tell me, Colin. Just say it, whatever it is. Say it quick.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and breathe in the smell of his hair.
“I think… I need you.”
“What?” he asks gently, cupping my face and moving me so he can see me.
I bite my lip, and I’m sure my face is bright red because I can feel the heat there.
“I don’t know what’s fucking wrong with me,” I say, trying to explain, “but you do something to me and I….” I shake my head, the words coming out in a muddle.
Rafe’s hands are warm on my face, his eyes gentle, but he doesn’t bail me out. He just listens.
“Before, I was—before I met you was… terrible. Everything was terrible. I was… terrible. I didn’t mean to be. I just… I couldn’t—and then I met you and now, I can’t—if you weren’t—I don’t… I—”
I’m shaking and Rafe takes pity on me.
“I need you too, doll,” he says, squeezing me tight. “I need you too.”
“WHERE THE
fuck have you been?”
Even though there’s no one else here, Brian is sitting on the floor in front of the television, where he usually sits when Pop or Sam takes the recliner and I take the couch.
His face is puffy and his eyes are vacant and there are beer cans strewn all over the living room. Even through the mustiness, the yeasty metallic smell tells me the cans have been sitting here awhile.
Though I’ve always let myself in to Pop’s house before or come in through the garage after work, it feels weird to just walk in. Like I’m intruding.
“Had to get out of here for a bit,” I say, defensiveness rising immediately, even though the whole reason I came over here was to apologize for disappearing and to make sure he’s okay.