8. Tate

CHAPTER 8

TATE

The only thing that hurt worse than my asshole was my pride, but that was exactly what Brooks had been after. I’d been foolish thinking it was only hands and words that would make me cry. Feelings could make me cry too, and I’d never been more embarrassed in my life than I was in front of the window, fucking myself on that mid-size plastic cock while Brooks watched me and jerked himself off. Thinking about all the miserable sex I’d had over the past six months while watching the one thing I wanted most in the world was torturous and mortifying simultaneously. I wanted to lean into feeling good, because even if it wasn’t Brooks, there was still a cock inside of me. I was still being stretched and filled, but the shame of it all had brought about the exact reaction he’d wanted.

I cried.

Swiping a violent rush of tears out of my eyes, I stepped away from the window and crawled onto the bottom of the bed. Brooks sat against the headboard like a king, like his cock was a scepter that gave him authority to rule the land…to rule me . I figured he wanted me to straddle him and ride him, but as soon as I reached his feet he launched toward me like a cat, flipping me onto my back and using his body weight to press my legs against my chest.

With a clearly practiced motion, he filled my gaping hole with his thick and talented cock, bottoming out with the first snap of his hips. I cried out, the force of it sending me backward so my head hung off the edge of the bed, giving me an unrestricted—if not upside down—view of the city.

“Tell me about the first time you tried to find a man who could fuck you the way I did,” Brooks demanded, the breath rushing out of his lungs with every sharp thrust of his hips. He grabbed me around the waist and hauled me up so my head was flat on the navy blue blanket I’d been admiring earlier, then he set back to work with the same punishing pace he’d started with.

I screwed my eyes shut, shaking my head side to side so fast it made me dizzy.

He collared his hand around my throat, thumb digging into the underside of my chin to stop the movement. Another thrust so extreme I shouted, tears pouring from the corners of my eyes.

“Tell me about the fifth one then,” he offered. “The tenth. How many men would you have fucked to find this feeling again?”

Brooks threw his head back, the corded muscles of his neck tight and bulging beneath his skin. Power rippled through him, from his hard and small nipples to the barely visible ridges of his abs and farther to the tight press of his fingers against the delicate swell of my throat.

The man was a force of nature, taking what he wanted, when he wanted.

“The seventh almost made me cry, but only because he was so bad at it,” I admitted.

The corner of Brooks’ mouth quirked up. “Almost?”

“Almost,” I rasped, eyes rolling back in my head.

“So, you didn’t cry for him?”

“No.”

“Did you cry for any of them?” he asked, hand flexing against my Adam’s apple.

“No.”

Brooks bent forward and licked my face, from the side of my jaw to my lower lashes, his entire body trembling as he erased the tears from my cheek.

“Good,” he growled, pulling out and yanking me onto all fours so fast I barely had time to register the absence before he was back inside of me.

I called out his name, and he grabbed me around the waist, using my body to fuck himself instead of using his body to fuck me. My teeth rattled together from the force of it, an ache blooming from how hard he had his hands on me.

It was perfect.

“Harder,” I begged, burying my face into the sheets to wipe away the tears and snot.

“Gladly.”

And for the first time in six months, I got fucked the way I wanted. Brooks slammed into me with so much force that in under a minute I was off the bed. He was halfway there behind me, one leg flat on the floor, the other still somewhere on the bed, still pounding into me violently. I sucked in a breath that was nowhere near enough to fill my lungs. Every time Brooks thrust into me, he punched the air out of my lungs, and it was impossible to breathe, impossible to speak, to talk…impossible to do anything except be fucked the way I’d been dreaming about for months.

“Tate,” Brooks grunted my name, fucking us all the way off the bed. We fell onto the ground, my legs spreading out and dropping me with a thud against the floor. My cock smashed between both of our weights and the sleek wood planked floors of his penthouse, and even still he didn’t stop.

He braced one hand against the top of my spine, hiking my right leg up with the other. I was half on my knees, cheek sliding against the floor, slicked by snot and spit and tears. My cock was still tight against my stomach, the friction of Brooks’ steady and hard thrusts enough to send flares of pain through my whole body.

“Brooks, it hurts. Oh fuck, I’m going to come, ” was the last thing I remembered saying before I shot embarrassingly thick and hot bursts of cum onto the floor. I’d never gotten off from being in pain before, the tears I’d shed for him in the past not quite feeling like the same thing as the physicality of the current moment.

Beneath Brooks’ weight, I thrashed and gasped, crying for more and for less, for air and for him to choke me again. Every muscle in my body went taut, and then relaxed. There wasn’t any fight left in me—no want, no need, just exhaustion and perfect happiness. Brooks slammed into me one final time, leveraging his weight against my back and my waist as he buried himself to the hilt inside of me.

He came so forcefully I could feel his cock swell inside of me and the heat of his cum pooled in the tip of the condom, resting heavy and wet. Even after his orgasm finished, Brooks trembled behind me, sweat falling from his forehead and spattering against my back. With a reluctance so palpable I could taste it, he withdrew from my body with a pained grunt.

My body wasn’t listening to my silent commands to move, so I stayed put with one leg bent and the other stretched out behind me, listening to Brooks tie off the condom and drop it on the floor. He sat down and pulled me half onto his lap, tracing shapes against my back through the sweat he’d left behind. The only sounds in the room were the syncopated beats of us both trying to catch our breaths, and then Brooks let out a quiet chuckle.

“If I leave you alone for two minutes, are you going to run away again?” he asked, trailing his finger down my spine and into the crack of my ass. He swirled his fingertip around my tender entrance, then pushed it inside. I gasped, and there were my muscles, my body instinctively trying to scramble away. He must have expected it, because as soon as I lifted off the floor, he bent forward and banded an arm around my chest, keeping me in place and lodging his finger deep inside of me.

“I won’t run,” I promised.

I couldn’t have run if I tried.

“You won’t crawl?” He tested another finger against my hole, pressing the tip in and then stopping.

“I’m not leaving,” I assured him.

Brooks answered that with a thoughtful sound, and then with a surprising show of strength, he picked us both up off the floor and he sat me down on the bed.

“I’m going to run a bath and come back for you. Don’t get too comfortable.”

“I don’t need a bath,” I whined .

He gave me half of a frown, brushing my sweaty and damp hair back from my forehead. “You don’t even know what you want , Tate. Let alone what you need.”

“I want you,” I said quickly. “I wanted that.”

“If you want that, then you get this.”

Brooks kissed my forehead and padded away from me, naked and covered in a sheen of sweat so shiny I could make out the lights of the city reflecting on his back as he went into the en suite. He didn’t turn on any lights, just the taps, which roared to life out of sight.

I fell back onto the bed and flung my arm over my eyes, taking the momentary reprieve as an opportunity to continue working on catching my breath. Brooks wasn’t gone long, and I hadn’t had nearly enough time to replay through the chain of events that had gotten me to the point where I was sprawled out naked on his bed like a starfish, knowing I could have fucked two hundred more men and none of them would have ever come close to him.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

I snorted a laugh, letting him pull my arm away from my face. When he saw my expression, he rolled his eyes and hoisted me to my feet. It turned out the answer was… no. I couldn’t walk. Brooks took all of my weight against his shoulder and ushered me into the bathroom, which was just one more thing to add to the list I needed to start called Things about Astor Brooks that take my breath away .

His bathroom was unreal, with windows just like the rest of the house in lieu of walls and a giant, white marble soaking tub tucked into the corner, the sprawling view of the city just beyond. The bathroom was one of those wet room deals, with an uncovered shower head beside the tub and a long and sleek counter made of matching white stone. It was elegant and expensive, much like the soft scent of the candle that was lit beside the sink, smelling like linen and lemon. A strong tap ran into the tub and steam had already begun to waft up into the expansive room.

Brooks helped me into the tub, which was an immediate balm on my weakened muscles. I lowered myself under the water and scooted forward when he gestured that he planned to join me. He settled himself with his back against the edge of the tub and arranged my body between his spread legs, fussing over me until I sighed softly and let my weight lean against him entirely.

“There,” he whispered, pressing a kiss against the top of my temple.

When the water neared the top, the tap shut off automatically, which had to be some kind of sorcery I’d never be able to afford, let alone understand. The room went silent, save for our hushed breathing and the soothing lap of water against the edges of the tub.

“What now?” I asked, eyes closing.

“This.” He gently looped his hands around my thighs, fingers dancing nimbly across my still shaking muscles.

“What is this?”

“Aftercare,” he murmured, digging his fingers in, not to hurt, but to soften the tension that my thighs carried from the position he’d had me in earlier.

“I don’t need aftercare.” It was a lie, but…

“I do,” he said simply, and I snapped my mouth closed, not interested in arguing the point with him.

Instead, I leaned against him the way he wanted and let him knead his way across every muscle he could reach. When he’d run out of body parts, he switched from using his hands to using a soaped-up washcloth, taking extra time between my legs and between my ass cheeks. The way Brooks cleaned me up was far from clinical, but it was hardly sexual. He tended me like his only goal was to care for me, and that was a whole new level of attention I didn’t know how to deal with.

Unexpected tears sprang into the corners of my eyes, and I moved so fast to swipe them away I accidentally splashed water over the edge of the tub and onto the floor.

“Sorry,” I muttered, letting him push my hands back beneath the surface.

“Don’t apologize.” His voice was so soft, so contrary to how it had been in the bedroom. And he turned my head to the side and gently kissed the tears off of my cheekbones, the fringe of my eyelashes. The actions were so tender, I sniffled, unable to stop more tears from falling free.

Brooks hummed quietly, content to catch them with his lips and his tongue, not even bothering to reach between my legs with his hand to find out if I was hard or not. His own cock sat hot and heavy against the small of my back, very hard and very ready, but he ignored it, seemingly satisfied to manhandle me with tenderness until the tears ran dry.

“Better?” he asked long after I’d finished, his fingertips tracing wet swirls across the front of my chest and the bottom of my throat.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, remembering his accusations earlier in the night about not being able to trust me.

I wanted him to trust me. I needed it almost as much as I needed him .

“Thank you for being honest.” He let out a quiet groan, then reached out of the tub toward a white cylindrical container I hadn’t noticed before. “Up you go.”

With an unhappy grunt, I shifted forward, giving him room to stand. Brooks climbed out of the tub, looking every inch like a God carved from marble himself, then reached into the white container and pulled out one of the thickest and softest-looking towels I’d ever seen. Heat rolled off of it, and I stood as quickly as my legs would allow. Brooks helped me out of the tub, then he wrapped me up in the warm and soft terrycloth, making sure I was well on my way to dry before he bothered to throw one around his own waist.

“I’m not through yet, but…will you stay the night?” he asked, staring at a point on my face that wasn’t quite my eyes. It was the first glimpse of insecurity I’d seen from him, and I wanted to wrap it up and seal it tight…save it forever, this gorgeous slice of vulnerability that I knew he didn’t mean to share.

I blinked, scrunching my nose and letting the towel fall to the floor.

I was nowhere near done with Astor Brooks, and I didn’t think I ever would be.

“Will you fuck me again?” I asked.

Brooks licked his lips, tilting his head to the side as he took in the sight of me, freshly rubbed and washed, my skin pink from the water and the pressure of his hands.

“Eventually,” he murmured, stare flickering up to my face. “When I’m good and ready.”

“Then, yes.” I swallowed nervously, all signs of Brooks’ earlier hesitance gone. “I’ll stay the night.”