"First floor. Thick walls."
"You asked your landlord about soundproofing?"
"I asked about noise policies. Same thing."
I laugh and he clenches around me and the laugh becomes a sound I don't recognize from my own mouth. He grins, wicked, delighted, the Devin who put cayenne in Melissa's latte, and does it again.
"Found a trick," he says.
"You found a — Dev, if you do that again I'm going to —"
He does it again. I grip his hips, not guiding, just holding on. He's setting the pace, the angle, the rhythm, and everything about this is new. Not the sex, but the confidence. The way he moves like he owns this moment, which he does. His apartment. His mattress. His body. His choice.
"Silas." His voice goes rough, his rhythm stuttering. "I need — can you —"
I sit up. Chest to chest, his legs around my waist. The angle changes and he gasps and his arms come around my neck and we're breathing each other's air.
"Touch me," he says. "Please."
I wrap my hand around him. He moans. No pillow to hide in, no wall to muffle against. Just the sound, filling his apartment, the first intimate sound these walls have heard from us.
"I love you," I say, because I can't not.
"I love you." He's close. I can feel it, the tension building, his body tightening around me. "Silas, I'm —"
"I know. Me too. Come for me."
He comes with my name on his lips and his arms locked around my neck and the sound of it, raw, unfiltered, fully him, pulls me over the edge with him. We hold on through it, forehead to forehead, breathing ragged, the mattress on the floor and the herbs on the sill and the jellyfish still pulsing on the forgotten laptop.
After, we lie on the mattress in his apartment and look at the ceiling. His head on my chest. My hand in his hair. The laptop's gone to the screensaver. Slow-moving colors that drift across the ceiling like aurora borealis.
"First time in my own bed," he says. "My own space."
"How does it feel?"
"Like I'm real." He turns his face into my chest. "Like I exist on paper now. There's a lease with my name on it. There's a kitchen with my herbs. There are walls that just heard me —" He laughs against my skin. "That's embarrassing, actually."
"The walls enjoyed it."
"Stop."
"The walls are very supportive."
"I'm going to evict you from my apartment."
"You can't. I'm your guest."
"Month-to-month guest. Don't get comfortable."
"Too late."
He's quiet for a while. The screensaver colors move. The apartment is warm and dark and smells like new carpet and French press coffee and us.
"Silas?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for asking me to stay with you. Even though I said no."