Addicted (18 page)

He’s stuck, I think … until I stroke my tongue one final time, over and around the slippery head of his cock. And then he goes stiff all over, just like I did, for him. He goes rigid, about a second before his thick shaft jerks in my mouth.

This is it, I think, in a rush of pleasure and excitement, but I’m still not quite prepared for it when it happens. He doesn’t make a sound, you see. He doesn’t cry out, the way I expect him to, or maybe pepper me with filthy words. All of his words are still trapped in the back of his throat, as he spurts in thick, prolonged bursts over my tongue.

Then all over my lips, when I pull away – perhaps because I think he’s done. I’m certain of it, in fact, so it’s a shock to hear his sudden groan, and feel that hot liquid coating my face. He doesn’t even let me move back to let me get away from it, which should probably offend me terribly.

And yet all I can think is: I’m glad. I’m glad that he’s this way. I’m glad that he shows me and tells me and puts his hand in my hair. I’m glad that he moans when he sees what he’s done – what a mess he’s made of me!

He sleeps like the dead. Which I suppose is appropriate, after an orgasm like that. For a while I’m sort of concerned that it’s actually killed him, and then I get close and can feel his breath ghosting against my face. I put my hand on his back, which is going up and down, the way some great heavy beast’s would – slow, and ultimately reassuring.

Everything about this is reassuring, even though it probably shouldn’t be. I’m used to being somewhat disappointed by the sudden unconsciousness of my sex partners, and can’t quite pinpoint why I’m not disappointed here.

Because I’ve had around eight thousand orgasms to his one, perhaps? The scoreboard is looking pretty top-heavy in my favour. And besides … it’s sort of nice to just be here with him, in calmness and quiet. It’s nice to look at his face without any self-consciousness – no thoughts about whether he’s noticed me staring, or what he thinks of my probable adoration.

Because I do, of course. Adore him, I mean.

How could I not? Even in sleep, he’s utterly lovely. Those eyelashes of his fan out across his cheeks, soot-black and so soft looking. His mouth has made an inadvertent pout, that lower lip all plump and just ever so slightly glossy. I kind of want to run my finger over it, before other things catch my attention.

Silly things, like the T-shirt he’s still got on. He didn’t take it off during the whole of whatever that was, and it’s the goofiest thing to see him half-dressed like this. His ass is completely bare down below, and the material is far too tight up above. Plus, it’s sort of rucked up a bit – in a way that reminds me of little kids who’ve spent too long playing, and just collapsed without any attention to where they are.

Or what their clothes might reveal. Because that ruffled-up T-shirt – it’s revealed something I’ve not really noticed before. Of course I’ve taken in his tattoos. I know they’re there. Sometimes I know they’re there so hard I have dreams about them peeling off his arms, to swell and settle all over my body. I occasionally imagine his tattoos having sex with me, so it’s not that I haven’t been observant, or appreciative. It’s just that this one is so small, compared to the others. And it lines the base of his spine, so you could almost mistake it for something else – the shadow of his bones, maybe. His backbone has made a dark trail through his skin.

A dark trail of words. They’re words, I think, and then I can’t resist lifting his shirt a little more to see the rest. The only one visible is
OK
, which seems like a mysterious thing for a man to have written on him.

But the other words don’t make it any clearer.

You will be OK
, it says, without explanation or elaboration. There’s no hint about
who
should be OK, or why they need to be. And as I’m in the middle of figuring it out he makes a sound – so I can hardly continue. Just the thought of him waking up and catching me doing this is enough to jolt me. As though I’m spying, instead of innocently looking.

I even brush his T-shirt back down in this hurried, guilty sort of way – but I’ve no real idea why. He doesn’t have the combination to his security deposit box under there. It’s just a tattoo, like all of the rest of the tattoos on his body. I didn’t just steal his soul.

So why does he look kind of unsettled, when I glance up at him? He actually turns over, too, and straightens his T-shirt, in a manner that reminds me too much of myself. It’s a furtive, uncertain sort of gesture, of the kind I would make if I wanted to hide a part of my body. And it’s only after he’s on his back and looking at me full in the face – so easily confident – that I start to doubt this impression.

Maybe he was just sleepy. He
looks
like he was just sleepy. He even yawns, lazily, and says a bunch of stuff that confirms it.

‘Oh, Jeeze. Did I pass out? I committed the ultimate cardinal sin of passing out after sex, didn’t I?’ He covers his face with his hands, and I swear it’s so adorable I almost stick him in a gif and post him to Tumblr. At the very least, I forget my silly angsty feelings, in time for him to add: ‘Did you even get a hug?’

The muffled voice only makes it funnier.

‘I did not get a hug,’ I say, in a mock-grave voice – one that he seems to find so amusing he almost cracks. His hands come down and that spark of laughter flashes across his deep-blue gaze, before he gets it back under control.

‘Seriously, how can you ever forgive me? I should be punished. Deeply, deeply punished.’ He pauses just long enough to catch something, as it flickers its way across my face. Though I’d perjure myself rather than admit what it was. No matter what he thinks, I won’t admit what it was. ‘You kind of like that idea, huh? What was that – chapter seventeen?’

‘There’s no chapter where she punishes him,’ I say, laughing. Inside, however, I’m thinking of how electric it was, having him at my mercy. Seeing him lose it like that, seeing him give up control …

Yeah, I liked that.

It’s almost disappointing, in fact, that he so abruptly changes the subject back to the thing we were talking about before. Disappointing, and a little … something else. A look drifts across his face that I can’t read, but it’s gone so quickly I could almost imagine it wasn’t there at all.

He makes me
believe
it wasn’t there at all.

‘OK, so … hugging. How does that go? You sort of … stretch your arms out …’ He does so too robotically, too broadly. It looks kind of like he’s trying to find a boulder to slot into the space he’s made between his chest and his hands. He looks like Donkey Kong, I think, and then I giggle. ‘What? I’m getting this soooo right. I just have to clamp these things around you, now …’

He gets me in a headlock, one big bicep smothering my face, while his free arm flaps ineffectively somewhere around my stomach. Like he’s searching for the correct hugging position, and completely failing to find it.

This time I squirm as I giggle – and not just because he’s holding me weirdly. There are all of these odd feelings bubbling around inside me, and they turn me into this wriggling mess.

‘Dillon, stop, stop – come on!’

‘What? Am I doing it wrong?’

‘I –’

‘You need more bicep, right? More bicep smushed into your face. I knew it! I’m a hugging genius!’

He’s a genius at making me wet myself – I’ll give him that much.

‘I can’t breathe!’

‘Isn’t that supposed to happen when you hug?’

‘Not unless you’re into necrophilia. I’m turning blue, Dillon!’

‘You are not. You looked beautiful, wedged against my armpit. Aside from the flailing. And the look of distress. And the amount of clothes you have on … my
God
, woman, are you wearing your shoes while in bed with me? You do
not
have your shoes on.’

‘I can’t confirm that fact. I’m being smothered by muscles.’

It’s true. I am. In order to talk, I have to nudge the heavy weight of his right bicep away with my nose, and do my best impression of a ventriloquist: mouth barely moving, sound hardly coming out of me. I’m surprised he hears me well enough to make the following offer:

‘Here then. Here. Rest in this convenient nook I seem to have, right where my shoulder meets my chest.’

Which I accept with far too much gusto. Other people are probably really cool and nonchalant about it, drifting into his arms like a frost-covered flower. They don’t scramble like a maniac for this tiny scrap of human contact.

But I don’t care.

Because he doesn’t, either. In fact, I’d venture to say that he seems quite pleased for a moment. A hint of a smile drifts across his face, before he’s right back to the issue of the day.

‘There. Now you can look down and observe that while I am completely naked from the waist down in a rather alarming fashion, you have on every item of clothing you possess.’

‘I’m definitely not wearing seventeen pairs of shoes.’

‘No, just these little cute ones. Lemme see those,’ he says, all bluster and grabby hands. Funny, then, that he seems surprised when I actually do as he asked. I lift my legs and point my toes at the ceiling, in a way that shows my heeled Mary-Janes to their best advantage. They look almost cute, I think, with my smooth bare legs beneath.

And apparently he agrees.

‘Oh, I like that,’ he says, in a voice that shades just a touch too husky. It makes me glance down his body, checking for something I’m sort of sure won’t be there, until my eyes reach their destination and it actually is.

‘I can see that. Good God, man! Does it ever go down?’

‘Not after head like that it doesn’t. Not after waiting for it for that long. I mean, you understand that one orgasm was just, like, the appetiser.’

‘I understand that you’re crazy. Not yet, OK – we can’t do sex things again yet,’ I say, and I guess I expect him to argue here. So it’s kind of weird that he doesn’t.

‘No,’ he says. ‘You’re right. Post-coital holding, first. And talking! Let’s do some talking.’

Which sounds a little like a joke, I think … but a little like he’s not joking at all, at the same time. I think of the pizza and the conversation he wanted to have, and how eager he’d seemed for both … and then of course that just leads me to the one thing I’ve wanted to ask for a thousand years. Because if he wants to talk so badly, why did he suddenly stop?

I have to know. I have to.

‘Are you sure?’ I ask, in as light a voice as I can manage. ‘You sort of seemed to lose your train of thought last time.’

‘I did?’ he asks, and I know he’s being as falsely casual as I am. I suspect it may be catching –
get inoculated now against fake flippancy, before you too fall victim
.

‘Yeah. I’ve been meaning to ask you about it, actually.’ Boy, have I ever. ‘You just seemed to go a little blank when I asked you about yourself, and I wondered if –’

‘Oh. Oh! You mean when the pizza came? Yeah, food can distract me from anything,’ he says, laughing – but there’s an obvious problem with that. He did the blank thing
before
the pizza came. It was way before, and I think he’s aware of it. He’s so aware of it that I can feel his body tensing just a little, and I’m afraid to look at his face – but about a second later he smoothes it over. ‘I was thinking about it five minutes before the guy got to the door. Just zoned out, I guess – kind of like you do.’

It’s a good patch job. I can almost overlook the cracks.

‘I don’t do it as badly as you did!’

‘Kit. You’re like JD from
Scrubs
.’

I give him a facepalm for that. He’s earned it. He’s working so hard to make what he’s saying the truth that I want to give him something – something that says I believe, even if I don’t exactly. I think there was a problem when he considered sharing. He ran into an issue of some kind, a memory maybe, and just wanted to leap right over it.

And that’s OK.

We’ve only known each other for a week or so, after all. I can wait, I think. I can wait, as long as it’s not
possibly
murdered somebody
. Which I don’t think it is, if the rest of him is anything to go by.

‘But I like that about you,’ he says, because apparently he’s so awesome he can overlook my slight resemblance to Zach Braff.

I mean, come on. That’s pretty amazing of him.

‘You’re so sweet,’ I say, and then I give it one last go. You know, just to be sure he understands where we’re at. ‘But if there was something … if there was ever something you wanted to tell me … you could. Even if you don’t think we’re in that place, you could tell me.’

I can feel him looking at me, and it’s making my face go all hot. But I won’t take it back. Not even if he laughs, I won’t take it back.

‘You think we’re in that place?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Awesome. I’ll take maybe.’

Now I have to look at him. I want to see what level of joking he’s at, and am shocked to find it’s a minus seventeen. His expression is all sort of … warm and fuzzy around the edges, with just a hint of surprise.

Whereas my surprise is a dump truck’s worth, all over my face.

‘You will?’

‘Hell, yeah.’

‘And you’d tell me, if there was something.’

‘Kit … I hate to break this to you but …’

I hold my breath. I’m holding my breath so much, in fact, that when I exhale I practically punch him in the face. He finishes with this:

‘… I’m just not that deep.’

Goddamn him and his face and his eyes and his everything. I give him a whack, when breathing out doesn’t finish him off – but that just leads to him moaning and complaining in a way that doesn’t sound like moaning and complaining at all. It sounds more like he’s really enjoying me cracking my hand against his massive bicep.

‘I’m as shallow as a puddle,’ he insists, as I move down to other bits of him. I really want to see what happens when you slap your palm against one of his big, broad, sort of … cushiony pectoral muscles, and it doesn’t disappoint. The flesh is so firm and taut, and he looks so shocked once I’ve done it.

Shocked and kind of … something else.