12. Ford

CHAPTER 12

FORD

I knew that spending the night in bed with a man was not the next step after naked kissing, but there was no way I was going to let Boston leave unless he requested to go. I'd asked him to not give me the chance to prove to him how bad of a person I was, but every moan and sigh and buck of his hips drove me closer to the point of no return.

Hell, who was I kidding? I'd blown past it the first time he grabbed my leg in his brother's office.

"Ford." My name was a single syllable and it still cracked as he whispered it at me.

"What do you need, sweetheart?"

We'd been lying on our backs for what felt like hours to catch our breath, and at the sound of his voice, I rolled onto my side to watch him instead. He was gorgeous, chest still heaving with every inhale and his cock still jutting proudly out from the dark thatch of hair between his legs.

"Am I allowed to ask for things?" He angled his head toward the side to face me.

"That's how we got here, isn't it? "

Boston made a bemused noise. "I want to come," he whispered, licking his lips and looking back up at my ceiling.

I should have known it was coming. I did know it was coming, no pun intended. Kissing, kissing naked, the next step was going to involve either a hand or mouth around Boston's thick cock, and then…

I couldn't dare think that far ahead, lest I embarrass myself.

"Tonight was supposed to be kissing," I reminded him.

"We have kissed." Boston looped his thumb and finger around the base of his dick. "This is what kissing got me."

It was hard to understand why every step with Boston felt like one more pace toward damnation. Harder even still to understand why I was fighting against him—and myself—so vehemently. That hadn't ever been my style, and it shouldn't have been an exception with Boston. He should have been an absolute dream come true—a handsome man with no experience who only wanted me for my body and sometimes called me Sir? I couldn't have drawn up a more perfect textbook definition of my dream man, though I probably wouldn't have made him my best friend's brother.

"Don't move."

I flung my legs out of bed and walked from the room without looking back. I needed to breathe, I needed a drink, and I found myself in the kitchen, bent over my sink and my stare trained out the window toward my back yard. Even with space between us, my cock still ached for the man in my bed, the man in my heart…

Fumbling for the half-drank glass of wine I abandoned earlier in the night, I poured the room temperature red down my throat with one long swallow. The problem wasn't with Boston. He was as perfect as he could be, as eager and willing as I'd want him to be. The issue sat solely with me and my borderline obsession with him. I could only focus my energy in one place, I realized. I could pretend it was okay for things to just be physical between us, or I could be good and go slow. For some reason, I found myself utterly incapable of managing both. Pacing from one end of my kitchen to the other, with the ever elusive Milo weaving his way between my ankles, I had to decide which was going to win out.

In the end, the decision was an easy one.

When I went back to the bedroom five minutes later, Boston hadn't moved an inch. He still loosely grasped his cock around the base and his eyes were still staring up at my ceiling. At my return, his eyes shifted toward me, but beyond that, the only movement was his chest on every long and drawn out breath.

"We need to talk." I sat down on the edge of the bed, reaching past him for a pillow, which I dropped on his lap.

Boston moved slowly to sit, trying to hold the pillow down over his legs and his cock. He moved into a cross-legged position, and I handed him his glasses from the nightstand next. Carefully, he slid them onto his face, the corner of his mouth flickering into an unsure smile before falling away.

"Did I do something wrong?" he asked softly, gazing down at his lap.

"I don't think you ever could." I covered his nervous hands with my own, lifting his toward my mouth and brushing a kiss over the tops of his knuckles before letting them fall back on top of the pillow.

"What, then?"

"I know you think of me as a tool," I started, scrunching my nose at how unfair the description felt, even though I was at a loss for a better word. "A means to an end."

"Ford, no."

"That's what we agreed, Boston. It's fine. I mean, it's not fine…" I groaned, tilting my head to the side and scratching my temple. "I'm not as capable of fulfilling my half of this agreement as I thought I'd be."

The only sounds in the entire room were Boston's trembling exhale and the rapid heartbeat that echoed in my ears.

"It's so hard for me to control myself around you," I said.

"Then don't."

"You don't know what you're asking."

"I told you before, I'm not some blushing virgin, Ford."

I brushed the back of my knuckle across his cheek "You're blushing right now."

"I just want to fuck. We agreed, didn't we?" He rolled his eyes like he was disgusted with me. He looked so much like his brother, but also so different at the same time. Boston and Kale were clearly fraternal, but their mannerisms were so similar sometimes. "Your reputation has preceded you for years, so I don't understand why it's such a problem for you to fuck me when you don't have an issue fucking everyone else."

I knew what he was doing. He wouldn't have been the first to try and test me, to push my buttons to get their way. But Boston was coming at it from a place of rejection and not a place of restraint. He didn't understand the war in my head. He couldn't.

"That's not what I'm saying," I corrected.

He rolled his eyes, flinging the pillow to the side. He was still half--hard, even with the argument between us.

"This was a stupid idea," he muttered, shifting to get out of bed, which was the absolute last thing I was going to allow him to do in that moment.

I moved without thinking, flinging one leg over his lap and grabbing his jaw with the other hand. His eyes went wide, and I forced him onto his back, pressing him down hard into the sheets with an extra jerk of my arm.

"You're not listening to me," I warned.

I had to let go of him, flexing my hand into a fist and letting it fall onto the bed beside his head. Dominance was like a second skin to me, something I could never truly separate myself from. Not that I wanted to. But there were circumstances and situations where I found it hard to control. Heat rolled up my spine at Boston's half-hearted protests, and I imagined a hundred different ways to disprove what he'd just accused me of. If he were anyone besides himself, his ass would have already been purple from the spanking.

"I don't want to just fuck you, Boston. I don't want to be a cock you use to learn about how to suck other cocks. Do you understand me?"

My arms trembled from holding me up alongside the weight of my confession. Beneath me, past the clear lenses of his glasses, Boston's pupils were dilated, eyes searching my face for any hint of lie or manipulation in my words.

"I bet this is how you treat everyone," he whispered, lashes fluttering as he gave his head a small shake. "You want everyone to feel special."

"You're wrong." I climbed off of him, getting off the bed to stop myself from using my hands to show him just how wrong he was.

"Ford." The sheets rustled behind me.

"In fact," I went on, turning on my heel to find him kneeling up on the bed. "I'd much rather the men I'm with don't feel special. It makes things easier."

"Does it?"

My mouth was dry as cotton, and I licked my lips, wondering how this virgin of a man—who up until two weeks prior had thought himself straight—was able to unman me with such a natural grace and skill.

"I haven't been able to stop thinking about you," I said, rubbing my hand over my bare thigh, the spot he'd held me in Kale's office when we'd hatched this whole plan in the first place. His stare flickered to the contact point, then back up to my face. "But I can't just fuck you, Boston. It's…it's not possible."

Boston blinked slowly, worrying the corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. Neither of us spoke and the air grew thick with the truth of my confession. He breathed heavily, entire body moving with how much work it took to fill his lungs with air, and I fisted my hands together behind my back.

"What are you asking for then?" he asked softly.

Flashbacks of our conversation in Kale's office bounced around my mind, when I'd forced him to use his words to admit what he wanted from me. Look where that had gotten us. I wasn't delusional enough to think that me leveraging my own confession back at him would make much of a difference. We were already on a crash course for hell.

"I want to fuck you, sweetheart, more than anything, but I don't just want that."

"Are you saying you want to date me?"

When was the last time I'd dated anyone? I couldn't even remember. I doubted my memory went back that far. But dating Boston raised a whole new set of problems, separate from the set that came from taking my best friend's brother to bed. I could hear the hesitation in his voice, though. See it in the way his back bowed and he moved away from me. I needed to do damage control or I was going to lose him entirely, and in all the scenarios of how things played out between us, that wasn't ever an option.

"You said you wanted to know what it was like to be with a man." I cleared my throat, rubbing my clavicle and giving him what I hoped read as a calm and collected smile. I didn't want him to know that inside I was panicking over him slipping through my fingers like sand. I'd done it again, gotten in over my head, and…

"I did," he said softly, interrupting my downward spiral.

"Fucking is only part of that." I wanted to drive the point home, make sure he understood what I was trying to sell him on. What it meant for us both.

"You're not wrong." His shoulders relaxed, and he sank down, dropping his ass onto his heels.

"And maybe I want to know what it's like too."

"What what's like?"

"Being with someone for more than sex,"

Boston inhaled sharply, lifting his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. It had to be a nervous habit, a tired one. He shifted, landing on the bed and straightening his legs out in front of him with a sigh. He looked a little less likely to leave, and I dared a step closer.

"When was the last time you did that?" he asked.

"I can't remember."

"Why me?" Boston dropped his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. "How do I know you're being for real with me right now?"

"Believe me, sweetheart, it would be plenty easier for us both if I just took you to bed and washed my hands of the whole thing after."

He winced at the dismissive way I talked about our arrangement, and I closed more of the space between us, hating to see the look on his face but desperate for him to understand how what we'd agreed to before was different from what I was asking for now.

"But I'm not interested in that," I said. "In fact, the idea of you being intimate with another man makes my skin crawl."

He swallowed.

I sat down beside him on the bed, both of us still naked like our plan to only kiss on top of the sheets had ever been within the realm of possibility for a man like me. The outside of our thighs brushed together, and I relished how warm and soft his skin was against mine.

"And what about the idea of me dating another man?"

"Please don't ask me that," I whispered.

"Be honest with me."

"I don't think there's a man on this planet who's good enough for you, Boston, least of all me," I said.

Boston threaded our fingers together, looking down at the places his fingers settled between the swell of my knuckles. I turned our hands over, squeezing him tightly and appreciating the feel of his hand in mine. I couldn't remember the last time I'd dated anyone, let alone the last time I'd held someone's hand.

Fuck Boston Sheffield for bringing these feelings out in me. He was too good and too innocent to be with a man like me, but I was too horrible and selfish to let him walk away. I was no longer interested in admiring him from afar. I wanted to own him entirely, and when the time came for him to walk away from me, I wanted it to hurt. I promised myself in that moment that I would bear the brunt of any pain I brought him for the rest of my life. This was something a man like me shouldn't have wanted, but the idea of being intimate with Boston, of having a relationship with him, it sounded like a reprieve from the loneliness that had shaped my life up to that point…and the sorrow that would come after he left me.

"Okay." Boston had been quiet for so long, the gentle cadence of his voice startled me.

"Pardon?"

"I've never thought about being with a man before," he said. "Not physically and definitely not as a boyfriend or anything like that."

At his use of the word boyfriend, the skin on the back of my neck stood up, but I shook my head to clear it off. This was what I wanted. This was the best case scenario. This was what I'd come in here to ask him for, so why did it feel so wrong now that he was leaning toward agreement?

"But I've thought about both with you," he went on. "So, as long as you're willing, I'd like to try."

"I don't think I have a choice in the matter," I told him. "I don't know why , but I need to have this with you."

"Have you ever dated a man before, Ford?" He brought our hands—still joined—to his mouth and kissed them the way I had earlier.

"Not with the intent that I have for you." I licked my lips, entranced by the way his dusted across the tops of my knuckles .

"So, you're my first and I'm yours?" He lowered our hands to his lap, the hard, searing heat of his cock burning the top of my wrist.

God, he was perfect. So innocent and unsuspecting, but so capable of speaking up for the things he wanted and needed. At every turn, Boston surprised me, and this conversation wasn't proving to be an exception to that rule. He was going to be my undoing either way; there was no point in fighting my demise any longer.

"Yes," I rasped, untangling my hand from his and pushing him down onto his back. "I'll be your first, sweetheart."

"Will you be gentle?" He pulled his glasses off and tossed them back toward the nightstand, arching his neck to bring our mouths closer together.

"I'm not fucking you tonight, sweetheart."

"Of course not. Just naked kissing, right?" Boston lifted a brow and I leaned down, kissing the smug arrogance right off his face.

"Just naked kissing."

And dating.

And trusting.

And sharing.

And owning .

And also, probably…falling in love.