I cried.
Not dramatically. Not with sound. Just tears, running down my face in the fluorescent light of the equipment room, while Luca Moretti held my hands against his mouth and kissed them and I fell apart in the quiet, efficient way that a structure collapses when the load-bearing wall is removed. Not an explosion. An exhalation. Everything I had been holding up for eleven years settling gently to the ground.
He pulled me against him. My face in his neck. His arms around my shoulders. The equipment room was cold and smelled like rubber and cleaning solvent and it was the most sacred space I had ever stood in.
"I've got you," he said. "I've got you."
He did. He had me. And the having was so total and so unfamiliar that my body didn't know what to do with it except shake, and then stop shaking, and then be still in a way I had not been still since before I could remember.
We stood there for a long time. Minutes. I don't know how many. The tears stopped and the trembling stopped and what remained was exhaustion and a specific, hollowed-out clarity that comes after crying when you haven't cried in years. The world looked different. Sharper. Lighter.
"Take me home," I said.
He drove. My truck stayed at the facility. I sat in his passenger seat with my hands in my lap, palms up, the places where his mouth had been still warm. The drive to Midtown was fifteen minutes and we spent it in silence, the good silence, the silence that holds instead of separates.
His apartment. The door. The small, cluttered, personality-drenched space that smelled like laundry and coffee and him.
I kissed him inside the door. Not gently. The gentleness had served its purpose in the equipment room. What I needed now was something else. Something that matched the raw, scraped-open feeling of having cried in front of another person for the first time in my adult life. I needed contact that was real and physical and present tense, contact that proved I was alive and capable of feeling something other than the aftershock of violence.
He responded immediately. His hands in my hair, pulling me closer, his mouth opening under mine. The kiss was deep and desperate and tasted like the salt from my tears and the heat from his mouth and the specific urgency of two people who had been circling each other for weeks and had finally run out of patience.
"Tell me what you need," he said against my mouth.
"You. All of you. I want to feel something other than shaking."
He pulled my shirt over my head. I pulled his. We stood in his hallway, skin to skin, and the contact was electric. His chest against mine. His hands running down my sides, over my ribs where the bruises had faded, across my stomach. My hands on him, learning the planes and angles of a body I had studied from a distance and was now allowed to touch.
He led me to the bedroom. Small, warm, unmade. A reading lamp on the nightstand casting amber light. He pushed me gently onto the bed and climbed over me and the weight of him settled onto my hips and I felt myself harden against him and the response was so immediate and so intense that I groaned.
"Still okay?" he asked.
"Do I sound like a man who is not okay?"
"You sound like a man who needs to use his words."
"I am okay. I am extremely, aggressively okay. Please continue doing whatever you were about to do."
He grinned. The full Luca grin, the one that made rooms warmer, deployed at close range directly onto my face. Then he kissed down my neck, my chest, the line of my sternum. Histongue traced the scar on my lower ribs, the one he'd seen for three seconds in the locker room weeks ago, and I arched into the contact.
He undid my belt. Pulled my jeans down. His mouth followed the line of my hip, hot and deliberate, and when he took me in his mouth I said his name in a voice I didn't recognize. A voice that was not controlled or measured or quiet. A voice that came from the same place the tears had come from. Somewhere underneath the enforcer. Somewhere real.
He was thorough. Attentive. He used his hands and his mouth and the specific expertise of a man who paid attention to responses and treated the body underneath him like something worth studying. When I got close he slowed down and when I pulled his hair he sped up and the feedback loop between us was so intuitive that it felt less like a new thing and more like a remembered thing, as if our bodies had been doing this in some parallel life and were simply picking up where they left off.
"I want to touch you," I managed. "At the same time. I need to feel you."
He shifted. Repositioned. The geometry of two bodies on a bed rearranging until we were side by side, facing each other, our hands between us. He guided my hand the way he had the first time, patient and warm, and when I wrapped my fingers around him he made a sound that I would have paid money to hear again. A low, broken sound. His forehead dropped to mine.
"Your hands," he whispered. "God, Wes. Your hands."
We moved together. Slow, then faster. His grip on me was firm and knowing and his rhythm matched mine and the synchronicity of it, the give and take, the mutual escalation, was so intimate that the physical pleasure became almost secondary to the emotional. Almost. The physical pleasure was considerable.
He came first. I felt his body tense, felt the pulse of it against my palm, heard my name on his lips in a voice that sounded like falling. I followed him seconds later, with his hand still on me and his breath on my face and his eyes open and looking directly into mine as I unraveled.
The eye contact during the finish was the most vulnerable thing I had ever experienced. More than the tears. More than the knuckle-kissing. More than any of it. Because the eyes are the last defense, the final wall, and keeping them open while your body does the most uncontrolled thing it can do is an act of trust so profound that it rewrites your understanding of what trust means.
Afterward. His bed. His sheets. The amber light. Our bodies close and cooling and resonating.
"Your hands aren't shaking," he said.