His eyes snap open. Dark and blown and wet at the edges, fixed on mine with an intensity that nearly breaks my composure entirely.
The sound he makes is not performance. It's not the breathy, exaggerated moan he'd use at the bar to make someone blush. It's a raw, punched-out thing — half gasp, half sob — and his hands fly to my arms, gripping hard enough to bruise.
I push in slow. So slow. Watching every shift of his expression, reading him the way I read an engine — every sound, every tension, every tell. He's tight around me, impossibly tight and hot and perfect, and it takes everything I have not to bury myself in one thrust.
"Oh god." His eyes are wide, locked on mine, and his lips are parted and his chest is heaving. "Vaughn, you're — fuck, you're big—"
"Breathe." I hold still, fully seated, giving him time. My hands frame his face. Thumbs stroke his cheekbones. "I've got you."
"I know." His voice breaks on it. "I know you do."
I start to move. Slow at first — long, deep strokes that make him gasp every time I bottom out. His legs wrap tighter around my waist, heels digging into my lower back, pulling me deeper.
"Harder," he breathes. "Vaughn, I need — please—"
I give him what he asks for. Snap my hips forward, hard, and hit the spot that made him scream with my fingers. He screams now too — loud, so loud, his nails raking down my back hard enough to draw lines.
"That's it." I set a pace that has the headboard tapping the wall — not slamming, not punishing, but relentless. Steady. The way I do everything. "Let me hear you."
"Can't — be quiet — fuck, Vaughn, right there—"
"Don't be quiet. Let me hear every sound."
He does. Robin is loud in bed the way he's loud everywhere — uninhibited, unfiltered, his whole body a broadcast of what he's feeling. He moans my name and swears and begs for more and harder and there and his voice goes high and cracked and desperate in a way that I will never, as long as I live, forget.
I shift my angle, hitch his hips higher, and he sobs.
"Close — Vaughn, I'm close, I need—"
I wrap my hand around his cock. He's leaking all over his stomach, twitching in my fist, and I stroke him in time with my thrusts.
"Come for me," I tell him. Not a request. "Robin. Come for me."
He does — clenching hard around my cock, spilling hot and slick over my fist and his stomach, my name tearing out of him like something he couldn't hold back if he tried. His body goes rigid, shaking, every muscle locked, and his eyes are open and on mine the entire time.
The sight of him — the sound of him, the feel of him pulsing around me, the way he says my name like it's the only word he knows — breaks me. I bury myself deep and come so hard my vision goes white, my face pressed against his neck, my teeth biting down on his shoulder.
Not hard enough to break skin. Not claiming. Just — marking. The way my lion needs to. A bruise that saysI was here, this was real.
We lie there. Breathing hard. The room smells like sex and sweat and Robin's vanilla scent, sharp with something new underneath — satisfied, spent, almost sweet.
I'm still inside him when the world comes back. When the adrenaline drains and reality settles in and I become aware of things like the fact that his sheets are a mess and my knees are aching and Robin's heart is hammering against my chest.
I pull out carefully. He winces, and I immediately check his face — but he shakes his head. "Good wince. Not bad wince."
I get up to find something to clean us with. His bathroom is across the hall — I grab a washcloth, warm water, come back. He's lying exactly where I left him, staring at the ceiling, and he hasn't moved to curl against the warm spot where I was.
I clean him up. Gentle, thorough, the way you handle something you want to keep. He watches me do it with an expression I can't read — something between wonder and terror.
"Thanks," he says when I'm done. Quiet.
I lie down beside him. Not touching, because he hasn't reached for me and I won't push. A careful inch of space between us, the same inch that's been between us for months — close enough to feel each other's heat, too far to call it anything.
He doesn't curl against me.
Robin — the man who cuddles everyone, who drapes himself over any warm body in reach, who falls asleep on shoulders and curls up between people on couches without a second thought — lies on his back with his hands at his sides and doesn't touch me.
"That was really great," he says to the ceiling. "Thanks for bringing me home."