19. Chapter 19

Chapter 19

MILO

I wince as I climb out of Piston's car and my clothes drag against the crusted cum matted into the hair under my belly button with a sharp tug. At least it's a momentary distraction from the thousand and one questions that have been ping-ponging around my head for the last ten minutes since my brain managed to reboot itself after that earth-shattering orgasm.

What the hell did I do to get Piston's hands on me tonight and how can I do it again?

Is he already promising himself that this time was really, really the last time?

Will he be mad if I make a habit of borrowing his underwear? Because I think I might have unlocked a new kink.

I follow him inside, trying to study his body language as he kicks off his boots and shrugs out of his jacket, looking for any clues about how he's feeling. He's stoic. His expression is impassive, and his movements are guarded but not tense. Come on, man, give me something.

Does he regret humping me in his tattoo chair?

Oh, fuck. Is he going to think of tonight every time he's doing a tattoo now? Please, please, please let that one be a ‘yes.'

Questions, questions, questions. I can't ask them though. I may not have much experience with relationships, but I know enough to see how delicate this is. The wrong question, the wrong move, and he'll slam the door shut on this whole thing.

Am I supposed to let him?

Am I pushing too hard?

Fuck, I want this. And I don't just mean the sex stuff. I push my messy hair off my forehead and dig deep for some fucking chill.

"Hey, Piston?" I plop down on the couch and stretch my legs out across the cushions. He arches an eyebrow at me, silently inviting me to go ahead and ask whatever's on my mind. "Do you mind if we order sushi instead of pizza?"

He chuckles, lifting my feet so he can sit down on the other side of the couch then settling them onto his lap. Fuck, why is that so sweet? It feels intimate. Maybe it's just all of these happy, post-sex bonding hormones tricking me. Maybe Piston puts all of his friends' bare feet in his lap when they chill on his couch.

That thought makes me irrationally annoyed. I squirm a little and he squeezes my ankle, silently stilling me.

"There aren't any decent sushi places close enough to deliver. If you're up for a twenty-minute drive, we can go to a sit-down place."

I can tell by the way his voice dips that the last thing he wants to do right now is get back in the car and drive a couple of towns over now we're home and settled in. He doesn't say that though, he just looks at me and waits for me to decide. He doesn't want to go, but he will if I push it. Fucking adorable.

Piston is smitten with me.

He might not know it yet, he might not want to know it, but he likes me.

Oof, I am all over the fucking place right now. I feel like a little kid plucking petals off a flower. He loves me. He loves me not.

He cocks his head. "What?"

"What?" I echo, hearing the singsong tone in my own voice.

"Your face is just all over the place. I'm dying to know what's going on in your head. One second you're scowling, the next you're grinning like an idiot."

I snort. "My mind is a very whiplashy place sometimes."

"Whiplashy?" he echoes teasingly.

I roll my eyes. "Don't tell me you're one of those ‘that's not a word' people. I said it, that makes it a word."

"If you say so." He pats my foot.

I playfully kick him for his patronizing tone, and he wraps his fingers firmly around my ankle to get me to be still again. Fuck, why is that hot? Probably because it's way too easy to imagine him grabbing my ankles like that and hoisting them over his shoulders so he can settle between my legs and…

"What's it going to be? Sushi or pizza?" He interrupts my train of thought just before it can get really good. He waves his phone at me with the pizza app open on the screen.

"Pizza this time, sushi next time."

Piston grunts and puts our usual order in. I've only been living here a couple of weeks, but we have a usual order. That might say more about our need to cut back on ordering pizza than about our level of intimacy or whatever, but I'll still take the win.

When he's done, he leans forward to set his phone down on the coffee table and grabs the remote to restart the episode of Buffy we didn't finish last night.

I should probably hop in the shower while we wait for our food to get here, but I'm too comfortable. Piston's hand rests on my foot, making absent circles with his thumb while I move my attention between watching the show and sneakily looking at him.

"Hey, Piston?"

He huffs a laugh, and I grin again. I keep waiting for him to tell me to knock it off with the questions already, but so far it seems like they amuse him more than they annoy him. As long as I avoid the big, scary questions that will open up the box of shit we're not going to talk about.

I weigh the one that's on my tongue, wondering if it's too close to the line.

Fuck it .

"Why has it been so long since you've hooked up with anyone?"

His thumb stops moving. He grunts again, this one a little lower in his throat.

The flake of nail polish that hits my tongue alerts me to the fact that I'm gnawing on my nails. I try to stop, but I settle for tapping my index nail against the flat surface of my tooth instead while I wait to see if he's going to answer.

"It hasn't been that long."

"How long?" I flex my foot in his lap to release a little of the nervous energy building in my muscles.

It's not like it matters. I guess I'm just curious. I'm greedy for any little nugget of information I can get about Piston, any morsel of who he is underneath his sexy, tattooed biker exterior. I want to get down to his sweet, nougaty center. Yum. Wait, that's weird. I think I'm just hungry.

He rolls his shoulders in a kind of shrug, and for a second, I think he's going to blow off the question and shut down the conversation.

"Maybe a year."

"Why?" If he's going to keep answering, I'm going to keep prying, obviously. Of course, every answer unleashes a thousand more questions to add to my list.

Who was the last guy?

What's his usual type?

How does my bumbling inexperience measure up?

"I don't know, I guess I'm at an age where it just wasn't working anymore."

I frown and arch an eyebrow, pointedly pressing my heel gently into the soft swell of his cock.

"Seems like it works fine from where I've been sitting."

He finally turns away from the TV to give me a dry look.

"Not my dick." He chuckles and shakes his head. "Just, you know, the whole thing. Dating is exhausting, and casual sex isn't as exciting as it was in my twenties and thirties." He waves his hand dismissively and looks back at the TV again. I don't think he's actually watching it; I think looking at me while we talk about this is too much.

I watch his throat bob as he swallows, and my eyes linger on the way the muscles in his jaw tense and relax like he's grinding his teeth.

"That makes sense." I drag the finger with the already chipped nail polish along the bulging vein in the back of his hand, following it until it disappears deeper beneath his skin, hidden by the ink and muscles. "It didn't really take a whole lot of convincing to get you back to my motel room that first night though."

His jaw ticks again and his fingers tighten on my foot. He shifts, and I can feel the bunch and flex of his muscles and the soft bulge of his cock get just a little fuller. Maybe all the sex stuff really is making me delusional and a little stupid, but I swear if he wasn't trying to behave, reminding himself he's not supposed to want me, he would tell me that the reason he wasn't hard to convince is because he wanted me as soon as I sat down on the bar stool next to his.

As much as I want to keep pushing, I can tell I'm right at the line, so I back off and turn my attention to the show for now while we wait for the pizza.

PISTON

"Shut up, there were not goats inside the shop." Milo cackles, sitting with his legs pretzeled, facing me on the couch with the open box between us.

"And an alpaca." I grab another slice of pizza and reach for my phone to show him the pictures of the impromptu petting zoo we ended up having in the parking lot to make the most of the situation.

He thumbs through the pictures, lingering noticeably longer on one Jag took of me after I took my shirt off when the alpaca spat all over it. Milo grins and laughs at each one and then hands the phone back to me.

"So, wait, how did they get them into the shop in the first place?"

"Fuck if I know." I chuckle. "It's equally possible that Stone knows how to pick locks or that they got lucky and one of us forgot to lock up the night before. It's not like Fall Crosse is a hotbed of crime, so getting lazy about locking the doors from time to time happens."

"Except for the kind of crime where randos break in and put goats in your shop."

We both laugh again, and Milo snags the last slice of pizza from the box.

He does this subtle bouncy sway in his seat while he chews, sticking his tongue out to catch a stray bit of sauce that smears along the corner of his lip. He catches me watching him and stops fidgeting, reaching for a napkin to wipe his already clean face.

"Sorry," he mutters behind the napkin.

"For what?"

"Just the…" He flaps the hand holding the slice of pizza, sending a dollop of sauce flying. It lands on the couch cushion between us. "Fucking hell. I'm sorry."

I grab another napkin and wipe it off. I've spilled enough shit on this couch to know that whatever microfiber fabric it's made out of is easy to clean.

"It's no big deal," I assure him.

He's quiet while he finishes his slice of pizza. The chaotic, excited energy he was buzzing with before seems to have simmered. He tosses the wadded-up napkin onto the coffee table next to the empty pizza box and tilts his head against the back of the couch, his eyes still fixed on me.

"I know I'm a lot sometimes, especially when I'm all…" He waves his now-empty hands again. I'm not exactly sure what word the gesture is supposed to be replacing, but I think I get the spirit of it.

"Mi, if I can handle two decades of friendship with a chaos gremlin like Jag, I think I can handle a little bit of bouncing and messiness from you."

"You say that now." His lips twitch with an almost-smile that fades back into a more somber expression as quickly as it appears. "It's hard to keep people around sometimes when you're all squirrel brained. When I was young and we moved around a lot, I figured that was why I didn't have friends, you know? You can't really keep friends when you don't go to the same school two years in a row. But then I started living with my grandparents and I got to stay in one place for all of high school and it turned out that I'm just a lot for most people."

"Hey." I reach across the space between us to tilt his chin up. I want him to look at me so I know he hears what I'm about to say. "It's their problem if they can't handle you, not yours. You're sunshine."

His expression softens and my heart stutters. Then he snorts.

"You're so cheesy." He bites his lip, and it takes everything in me not to move my hand half an inch and replace his lip with my thumb, to feel his teeth sinking into my flesh instead of his own. "But thank you."

I grunt and lean forward, brushing a kiss to his forehead. That's innocent enough, right? It's something a friend would do.

A little voice in the back of my head reminds me how far past that line I already blew tonight. Friends don't hump friends at work. I'm glad Milo still hasn't asked where we go from here, because I don't have the first fucking clue.

Our conversation fades and we watch one more episode of Buffy before he stands up. He yawns and stretches. The motion tugs his shirt up enough that I can see a brief flash of his stomach and the lingering evidence of what we did earlier. He notices my look and gives me a crooked smirk.

"Yeah, I clearly need to shower."

Fuck. I want to offer to go with him. I want to kiss him under the hot water and get him messy all over again before I take my time cleaning him up with my soapy hands. I want to suck his collarbone and swallow his moans. I want to drag him into my bed and keep him there. I fucking want him to not be related to Hero so this whole thing won't be so complicated.

That last thought is a bucket of cold water. I slump back on the couch and send him a twitchy half-smile that I'm sure doesn't reach my eyes.

"I'll see you in the morning," I say gruffly.

I fucking hate the resigned disappointment in his eyes right before he turns to go. I hate that this can't be simple. I hate that the part of me that's okay with hurting Hero if it means being selfish and keeping Milo is getting bigger every day.

I sigh and rub my hands over my face, waiting until I hear the shower running to drag myself off the couch and down the hallway to my bedroom. Alone.