9. Brooks

CHAPTER 9

brOOKS

I sent Tate to bed, naked and flushed, then I dropped both our towels into the hamper and went to the kitchen to get us both some water. Leaning against the counter with both hands, I bent forward and let my head drop down toward the floor. If I closed my eyes and held my breath, I could hear the sheets rustling from upstairs, and knowing Tate was in my bed…that he did what I asked, that he stayed…

I didn’t want to push my luck, so I grabbed two bottles of water from the fridge, a pre-made charcuterie tray my private chef had tucked in the back earlier in the week, and then went back up to my bedroom.

Tate looked like an angel tangled in my sheets, fingers clutched tightly around the top while he struggled to decide whether he should pull them up or leave them around his thighs. I walked in when he had them pulled up over his hips, and when he heard me, he startled, letting them fall to reveal the thick bulge between his legs. He was still half-hard, and I wanted to know why.

“You’re still hard,” I said, crawling into bed beside him. I balanced the food on my lap and twisted the top off one of the bottles of water before passing it to him.

He tapped the edge of his nail against the glass. “This is really bougie.”

I gestured vaguely at the view ahead of us and he grinned, tipping his chin to take a sip while I pulled the plastic wrap off the top of the tray of food.

“Eat too,” I said.

Tate twisted the top back onto the water and picked apart a flower made of salami.

“I’m still hard,” he agreed after chewing and swallowing his first bite. I slid the plate toward him so he would take another.

“Why?”

He snorted, arching a brow at me. “Should I not be?”

“A cock like yours should always be hard,” I assured him, “I just meant…what part of the night is encouraging it to stay that way?”

Tate hummed, picking a pearl of mozzarella next and popping it into his mouth. I was close to begging him to eat a carb, but a cracker was next on his list, so I swallowed the request down.

“All of it,” he finally answered, turning back to the water.

The longer he picked at the plate, the more comfortable he became, his shoulders sinking back against the wall, his hips starting to wiggle when he tasted something he particularly enjoyed.

“I think it’s obvious I like the sex,” he said, finishing off the salami flower and moving on to the prosciutto bundle next. “But the bath was…nice.”

“Nice.”

“No one has ever…” he trailed off.

“I don’t want to say the after is my favorite part, but…two sides of the same coin I think,” I said.

Tate chewed some more, then turned his face toward me, expression earnest.

“Do you always fuck that way?” he asked, scrunching his nose in curiosity, not disgust. “Like…to make someone cry. Do you always need that?”

I swallowed, twisting open my own bottle of water to take a drink. It wasn’t that I was trying to buy myself more time, but it was a question no one had asked me before. Not even when I’d crossed the bridge from hookup to relationship, no one had cared about what I wanted in bed, only what I could give. Some people wanted the roughness and some people tolerated it for the parts that came after. Tate, it seemed, desired them both in equal measure.

Like me.

“I don’t need to make you cry to get off.”

“But you like it.”

“Don’t you?” I asked.

“I wasn’t trying to cry.”

I set my water on the nightstand. Tate had devoured half the charcuterie and he seemed to be slowing down, so I moved the plate to the side as well. He passed me his water, and I added it to the mess.

“It just happens sometimes,” I told him, reaching up toward his face. When he didn’t flinch away, I brushed some of his wet hair back off his forehead. He smiled softly, stare flickering down at his lap. “Doesn’t it feel good? Like its own kind of release?”

That was how it had been described to me years before. Like the stress and tension had grown so strong there was nowhere else for it to go until it burst forth in a fit of tears. I knew men like Alex used physical impact to bring his partners to the same end. And, in a way, I was physical too, though I’d always recognized the differences in our preferences and styles.

It was more than delivering that release for me, though. The tears…they definitely did something for me. Whether it was the power that came from knowing I was the one to unleash all those feelings or recognizing the vulnerability and raw emotion that came with tears. It was a lot to unpack and it was too late to have the whole conversation with Tate.

“Yes,” he agreed with a yawn. “What about the aftercare part?”

“You cried then too.”

“It was different,” he murmured.

“Was it?” I asked.

Tate shifted his weight and I pulled him down flat onto his side, kissing the back of his neck until he moaned and pushed his ass against my still-hard cock.

“It felt different,” he whispered.

“What about it was different?”

I reached behind me to find the lube and another condom, rolling one down my length to be done with it.

“They were softer,” he said, following the statement with a quiet moan when I dragged a lube-slick finger between his ass cheeks.

“They tasted the same to me,” I assured him, pushing inside of him.

Tate was practically panting from the first tease of penetration, and I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from rutting into him like a wild animal. There would be another time for that—I was sure of it. This was the end of the night, but only the beginning of our time together. I saw myself in Tate, and I hoped he saw himself in me, in those puzzle piece kind of ways that people always hoped for but rarely found.

“Oh, God.”

I had two fingers inside of him, pumping slow and steady. He was still soft and ready, but I used my hand until he was begging.

“Brooks, please,” he whined.

“Please, what?” I smiled against the back of his ear, dick pulsing at the scent of my own soap and shampoo on that most hidden part of his body. I pulled my fingers out of him and moaned at the way his muscles tried to bear down and hold me in.

“I want you again.”

“I’m here.”

“Your cock.” He groaned, breath dragging out of his lungs in a long exhale.

I curled my arm around his chest and held him against me, nosing the tip of my cock against his hole.

“It’s here too, Tate,” I told him, easing my way back into him. “I’ve got you.”

He pressed against the arm I had banded around his chest, but there wasn’t any real fight in it. A long and low sound escaped him, and he sank into my bed and my arms like he was always meant to be there.

I fucked him for the second time that night with lazy and gentle pumps of my hips. I wasn’t chasing after tears or an orgasm, or any sort of end at all. It was only for pleasure in its most perfect form. I didn’t complain when Tate reached down between his legs and made a loose fist around his cock, content to let the power of my hips fuck his shaft into his hand.

He picked up the gibberish again, and I closed my eyes, kissing the back of his neck and his slowly drying hair. The sheets were wet and our bodies were damp again, but his back burned hot against mine. I fought the urge to move faster, to chase after a release, satisfied instead with the groans and sighs that fell out of Tate’s mouth in a near constant stream.

Time blurred into nothing and everything, and Tate let out a soft cry when he came. I slid my arm down so I could feel the hot and sticky mess he’d shot all over his stomach, tracing it up with my fingers. His entire body shivered and spasmed, and I brought my hand to his mouth. I didn’t need to tell him what to do. He was quick to open his mouth and suck his cum off his fingers and my palm, asshole clenching down around me the whole time.

“You’re a dream,” I whispered into his ear, counting down in my head from one hundred to zero, when I went still, locking him down onto me with one final rut of my hips.

Tate whimpered when I finished, back bowing forward as I buried myself thick and deep inside of him. I pumped my load into the condom, wanting more than anything to tear it off next time and spurt across the small of his back, the gorgeous globes of his ass.

“How do you do that?” he muttered, pressing back against me and his face into the pillows at the same time.

“Hmn?”

“Make it all so good.”

I wanted to fall asleep like this. With Tate in my arms and my cock in his ass, but the condom was sticky and gross, so with all the reluctance in my body, I pulled out of him and rolled onto my back. Tate didn’t go far, doing a complete one-eighty-turn onto his other side and tucking himself against my ribs with a pleased little sigh. I tied off the condom and dropped it onto the floor, reaching my arm around Tate and making a bigger spot for him to cocoon himself into.

“I’m selfish, Tate.” I kissed the top of his head. “I just fuck the way that feels good to me.”

“Well, it feels really good to me too.”

I hoped he couldn’t feel the way my breath hitched in my throat at his simple statement, but that was what I’d always wanted, what I’d silently hoped for. That kind of partnership and connection.

That synchronicity.

“Then I’m the luckiest man in New York,” I said.

“I wish you’d taken me home the first night,” he said next, words almost lost around a long and drawn-out yawn.

“I should have. Would have.”

“Don’t let me leave again,” he whispered.

I pulled my lips between my teeth, staring up at the ceiling instead of looking at him. My brain wanted to argue this was all too good to be true, but I’d watched perfect partners fall into my friends’ laps out of nowhere. Why was it so hard to believe the same could be true for me? Why did they deserve it and not me?

“Don’t say things you don’t really mean, Tate.”

Tate pushed up on a shaky arm until he hovered over me, forcing my stare away from the ceiling and onto him. He was so tired and so beautiful, cheeks permanently flushed and pupils still dark as charcoal. I wanted to give him everything he’d ever wanted and everything I ever wanted, all at the same time. The need to possess him, to cherish him, to spoil him, was a near visceral feeling, and I fisted the sheets with my free hand to try and quiet the urges that threatened to overwhelm me.

“I do mean it.”

Another yawn, and he collapsed back into the crook of my side.

“What does that look like for you?” I asked, relaxed enough to draw spirals down the back of his neck and the top of his spine as he settled into the sheets again.

“I don’t think these are things I should ask for.”

“I asked you to let me make you cry the first night we met because that was what I wanted from you,” I said. “Surely you can ask for what you need now.”

“I want more,” he answered, pressing a kiss against my ribs. “I want everything.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“I’ll learn,” he said. “And you don’t know me either.”

“I’ll learn,” I whispered back to him.

“Then it’s settled?”

I huffed out a breath, closing my eyes and focusing on the way my heart slowed to beat in time with Tate’s.

“I think so,” I finally agreed, a soft smile spreading on my mouth just before sleep was ready to take me under. “Now get some sleep, darling.”