"You've thought about my fingers?"
"Every day. Every fucking day. Watching you type, watching you hold a pen, watching you button your cuffs. I've thought about you touching my cock so many times I should be embarrassed about it."
I stroke him the way he's stroking me — slow, tight, thumb over the head on every upstroke — and he shudders against me and makes a sound that I want to record and play back on a loop. We find a rhythm, his fist on me and mine on him, not coordinated or graceful, just two people jerking each other off under a blanket on an airplane. It's messy and desperate and his precome is slick over my fingers and mine over his and the blanket is obvious and I don't care.
"You're so fucking hot," he says into my neck, his voice wrecked. "Walking around in your suits acting like you don't want to be touched, and the whole time you were this. Fuck, Miles."
I'm close and the sounds we're making — wet skin, ragged breathing, the tiny broken noises I can't hold back — are filling the space around us. I stroke him faster and feel him throb in my grip, feel his hips push up off the seat.
"I'm close," he whispers. "Are you?"
"Yes." It's barely a word.
"Come for me," he says, and his fist twists on the upstroke, his thumb pressing against the spot just under the head, and I come so hard my vision whites out. I turn my face into his shoulder and bite down, my whole body jerking, spilling over his fingers in hot pulses while he strokes me through it, slowing but not stopping, pulling every last shudder out of me until I'm shaking and oversensitive and gripping his wrist to make him stop.
He comes a few seconds later, his cock pulsing in my fist, his teeth sinking into the collar of my sweater to muffle the groan. He spills over my fingers, wet and warm, and he grips my thigh while his hips stutter and then go still.
We sit there. His face is in my neck and my fingers are still wrapped around his softening cock and we are both disgusting and covered in each other's come under an airline blanket, and I have never in my life felt this good and this terrified at the same time.
His breath is warm against my throat. I can feel his heartbeat through his chest where it's pressed against my arm, slowing down from whatever insane rate it was at. My own pulse is going and I feel wrung out and shaky and like I might cry, which would be mortifying, so I focus on the physical instead — the sticky mess on my fingers, the soreness in my jaw from clenching it, the dull throb on my shoulder where he bit me.
Ray lifts his head. He grabs a handful of napkins from the seat pocket — Kyle's number is probably in there somewhere, I think, and the absurdity of that almost makes me laugh — and cleans his fingers, then gently, carefully, cleans me up and tucksme back into my boxers and buttons my jeans. He does it like it matters. Like I matter. His touch is steady. Mine is still shaking.
"You okay?" he asks, and his voice is soft in a way that hollows me out.
"Don't," I say. I don't know what I'm telling him not to do. Don't be gentle. Don't ask me if I'm okay. Don't look at me like that, like you just saw something real and you want more of it. Don't make this into something it can't be.
"Okay," he says. He settles back into his seat. He pulls the blanket up. He closes his eyes.
I stare at the ceiling of the cabin and listen to his breathing slow down and try to put myself back together. I can't. The pieces don't fit the way they used to. Something has shifted, and I can feel it in the throb between my legs and the ghost of his touch on my skin and the place on my shoulder where he bit down that's going to bruise under my sweater for days. I'll feel it when I'm giving my presentation. I'll feel it when I'm shaking hands with partners and making small talk at the gala. I'll feel Ray Garcia's teeth on my shoulder while I'm trying to make partner, and the worst part is that right now, with the lights down, with his come drying on my fingers, that thought makes me want to smile.
I don't sleep. I don't think he does either. At some point his fingers find mine between our seats, just resting there, loose against my palm. I let it stay. I let myself have this one thing where nobody can see and it doesn't have to mean anything.
Neither of us says another word for the rest of the flight, and when the cabin lights come back on and the captain announces our descent, Ray pulls away and straightens up and stretches and gives me a perfectly normal smile, like nothing happened. Like he didn't just crack me open and look at everything inside.
I don't smile back. I look out the window at the mountains below us and press my thumbnail into the pad of my index fingeruntil it hurts, and I think about how I'm going to survive three days in a hotel room with a man who just took me apart with one hand.
Miles
We don't talk about it.
We land, we deplane, we collect our bags from the overhead compartment. Ray pulls both of them down before I can reach for mine, and I let him because fighting about luggage would require me to make eye contact, and I'm not ready for that yet. I'm not ready for any of this. I am held together with caffeine and willpower and the faint hope that if I act normal long enough, normal will become true.
The shuttle from the airport to the resort takes forever. We sit on opposite sides of the van. There are other conference attendees between us — two women in blazers discussing appellate procedure, a man on his phone talking too loudly about depositions — and I stare out the window at the mountains and do not think about Ray Garcia's fingers wrapped around my cock. I don't think about the way he saidcome for mein the dark. I don't think about how the spot where he mouthed at my shoulder throbs every time the van hits a bump.
I am here to give a presentation. I am going to make partner. If I repeat it enough times it becomes a mantra, and mantras work. They have to work, because the alternative is sitting in this shuttle with my assistant's come still under my fingernails — I washed twice in the airport bathroom, it doesn't matter, I can still feel it — and accepting that I have made the single worst decision of my professional life.
I glance at Ray. He's looking out his window too, earbuds in, relaxed. Like this is just a normal work trip. Like nothing happened. The ease of it makes me want to shake him.
The resort is gorgeous. I hate it immediately. It's all stone and timber and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at snow-capped peaks, and the lobby smells like cedar and expensive candles, and there's a massive fireplace crackling away in the center of the room. Everything about it is warm and inviting and romantic, and I want to burn it to the ground.
Ray, predictably, loves it. "Holy shit," he says, pulling out his earbuds and looking up at the vaulted ceiling. "This place is insane."
"It's a hotel."
"It's a really nice hotel." He grins at me, and it's the first time he's looked at me directly since the plane, and my stomach flips in a way I refuse to acknowledge. "Come on, even you have to admit this is cool."
"I'll admit it when we're checked in and I've seen the presentation room." I walk to the front desk before he can say anything else, because if I stand next to him in this lobby for one more second I'm going to lose whatever composure I have left.