“Harder. There, just there. Don’t you dare stop.” Then soft Italian I only half-follow, which lands harder than the filth does. I answer in the third language, the one with no words in it. Hips and hands and mouth. He receives every sentence with his eyes open.
“Say the filthy ones in Czech,” he says. “I want to learn them wrong.”
So I do, against his ear, and his laugh breaks into something else halfway through it.
“That one,” he manages. “What does that one mean?”
“Faster.”
“Then why are you slowing down?”
“Vocabulary lesson.”
When his breathing tips toward the edge, I slow down, all the way down, holding deep. He groans a protest into my mouth.
“Not yet,” I tell him. “Stay here. Stay right here with me.”
“You learned patience.” His nails bite my back. “I hate it. Don’t stop having it.”
“How long can you hold this?”
“Ask me in an hour.”
“Liar.” I smack his ass.
“Two minutes. Ask me again in two minutes.”
“In two minutes you’ll be done.”
“In two minutes we’ll both be done. That’s the design.”
We hang there, sweat-slick and shaking, at the top of it, longer than either of us has any right to manage, trading breath and filth and each other’s names in the wrong languages, and it is the single most honest conversation of my adult life.
“Closer,” he says.
There is no closer. I try anyway.
Then patience runs out. I drive into him the way he asked for at the start, hard and deep, the bedframe keeping our secret badly. He tugs at his own cock between us in short, hard pulls, urging me on in gutter Italian. Everything narrows to heat and grip, and his eyes refusing to close.
“Now,” he says, and tightens around me on purpose, merciless about it. “You first. Give me the show.”
It takes three more strokes. He watches my face the whole way down, greedy, cataloging, and I let him have all of it, every second, nothing filed and nothing withheld, and I’m still shaking when his own control goes. He follows me over with my hand wrapped around him and his teeth in my shoulder to keep the building innocent, hot pulses between our stomachs, his whole body one long shudder against mine.
For a while neither of us moves. His heartbeat argues with mine through two ribcages.
“Your heart is loud,” he says.
“It’s had nothing to say at this volume since last year. Let it.”
After, we lie face to face on the wrecked sheet, breathing each other’s air, his hand flat over my heart like he’s checking the engine is real.
“The corridor,” he says eventually. “I walked away from that sentence this afternoon and it cost me the whole evening, and I want you to know that, because you were about to spend tonightthinking my no came easy, and nothing about my no has ever once come easy with you.”
“I know it wasn’t. I watched you walk and read the weight.”
“Five years of reading me.” His thumb drags once across my chest, absent-minded. “On Wednesday you’ll use all of it to ruin my afternoon.”
“Every gram of it.”