"God, Mik." His voice was rough. "You are so fucking beautiful."
No one had ever said that to me. Not in any language. The word landed on my skin like a hand and I felt it everywhere.
He kissed down my chest. My sternum, my ribs, the flat plane of my stomach. His mouth was hot and deliberate and I could feel him cataloging my responses the way I cataloged hockey footage, adjusting his approach based on what made me inhale sharply and what made me arch off the mattress. When he reached the waistband of my boxers he looked up at me, asking without words, and I lifted my hips in answer.
He pulled them down. The cool air hit my skin and then his hand was on me and I stopped thinking.
I had been touched before. In dark rooms in cities whose names I didn't bother to learn, by men whose faces I couldn't see. Quick, functional transactions that I endured because my body had needs and ignoring them indefinitely was not sustainable. Those encounters had nothing to do with what was happening now. Those encounters were maintenance. This was Cole Briggs wrapping his hand around me and stroking slowly, watching my face, learning my rhythm with the same intuitive intelligence he brought to reading a hockey play.
"Good?" he said.
The sound I made was answer enough. He smiled and lowered his mouth and I felt the wet heat of his tongue and my hand went to his hair and gripped and I said something in Russian that I would not be translating.
He took his time. He was patient where I needed patience and firm where I needed to be pulled out of my own head, and when the pleasure built to a pitch that made my vision blur, he slowed down and brought me back and then built it again, and the cycle of it was so intense that my whole body was shaking.
"I want to feel you," I said. "All of you. Please."
He pulled off and reached for the nightstand. I heard a drawer open and close. He came back with what he needed and settled between my legs and the look on his face was serious and tender and completely focused on me.
"If anything doesn't feel right, you tell me. We stop. No questions."
"Yes."
"I need to hear you say it."
"If anything doesn't feel right, I will tell you and we stop."
"Good."
What followed was slow. Careful. His fingers first, one and then two, and the stretch was unfamiliar and strange and then suddenly not strange at all but something else entirely, something that sent a pulse of heat through my core that made me gasp. He watched my face the whole time, reading me, and when he found the angle that made my back arch he pressed there again and I heard myself moan and did not care.
"Ready?" he whispered.
"Yes."
He pushed into me and we both went still. The fullness was overwhelming. Not painful but enormous. He held himself there, forehead pressed to mine, breathing hard, giving me time to adjust.
"You feel incredible," he said against my mouth. "You feel like you were made for me."
I pulled him deeper. He took the cue and started to move. Slow at first, a rhythm we had to find together the way we'd found our rhythm on the ice, both of us adjusting, learning, reading each other's signals. When it clicked, when the angle and the pace aligned, the pleasure was so acute that I made a sound that came from somewhere I didn't know I had. Something broken open and raw and honest.
He moved faster. I moved with him. My hands were on his back, his shoulders, pulling him closer, and his mouth was on my neck and his breath was ragged and the sounds he was making were wrecked and beautiful and I was causing them. Iwas the reason Cole Briggs sounded like that and the knowledge was its own kind of ecstasy.
"Mik. God. I'm close."
"Don't stop."
He shifted his weight and wrapped his hand around me and stroked in time with his thrusts and the dual sensation collapsed whatever was left of my composure. I came hard, with his name in my mouth and his body in mine and eleven years of nothing turning into everything in the space of a single, shattering minute.
He followed seconds later. I felt him shudder and press deep and groan against my shoulder and the sound of it, the vulnerability of it, this man coming apart because of me, with me, was the most intimate thing I had ever experienced.
We lay there afterward. Breathing. His weight on me. The amber light making shadows on the ceiling. My heartbeat gradually returning from whatever orbit it had achieved.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I think so."
"You think so?"