He left Homer Simpson upturned on the draining board and heaved out a deep breath, an exhalation to punctuate the pleasantries of before and move us on to whatever came after. After a moment he looked at me as he leaned on the countertop with both hands, his head turned to the side.
I noticed the quick down-up of his eyes before they met mine. And there it was. The hesitation, the silent wondering, okay, what now? The "what now" was pretty damn obvious; the real question was who would make the first move.
Scarlett Parrish There was no need for either of us to be embarrassed as such, especially with what we'd already been up to that evening, so maybe we were both hesitant to shake off that polite friendliness and move to the good stuff.
God knew why. I'd already acknowledged my fear of damn polite friendliness.
"Here." I whispered the word, and it still managed to sound like a command. Even as I lifted my hand, let it hover in midair, he dipped his head. I thought for a moment he wanted me to stroke his hair, run my hand down the back of his neck, but he'd taken a moment to stare at his feet, brace himself and look up at me again.
James stepped closer and that fleeting thought I'd just had returned.
He suppressed a shudder when I took his earlobe between my finger and thumb, my other fingertips brushing his neck. Barely suppressed, because I still felt something; tightly corded tension under the skin like he was trying not to let go. Or preparing to do so. The softness of his hair surprised me; any cold air from outside which might have settled on him had long since gone and I wanted to know what his skin felt like. On every part of him. For now, though, I settled for curving my palm around his neck, letting the tips of my fingers waver slightly as skin met skin.
Tension bled out of him, like he'd been waiting for me to do that all night, and it was only one hand. My hand.
"So," he began, what I thought was caution making him lower his eyes before looking up at me again through his eyelashes. "Are you gonna kiss me any time tonight, or what?"
We both burst out laughing, a sharp sound against the white noise of the kitchen. In the corner, the fridge hummed, and outside, a car door slammed, its echo muted by distance.
He licked his lips and I didn't notice until the split second before my mouth was on his. It made for an awkward kiss in a way, muffled laughter and his whispered suggestion that we "Try again?"
"I don't have a problem with you licking your lips in the middle of me kissing you." My free hand, the one not on his neck, felt redundant then, like the last thing it should be doing was hanging by my side, not mirroring its opposite number.
"I'm..." James's pause came at the exact moment my other hand came into contact with the curve of his neck. I was glad he had his hair cut short, although it was true longer hair gave one something more substantial to pull.
I'd had mine cut as soon as Sean and I had split. Kept it that way.
There was still enough to pull, though. Just.
"I'm, uh, not the kind of guy to tongue kiss on a first date."
"Damn, well that's no fun." I leaned in to kiss him again, and paused.
Couldn't work out what was wrong. I shrugged, throwing off the words first date, all too suggestive of a second and possibly a third, and immediately felt lighter.
The guy really knew how to kiss. Tentative at first, making my fingers twitch against the side of his neck when he deepened the kiss. I didn't know how to describe the sound that came from the back of his throat. Like the first syllable of something unsaid, before he realized we were in the middle of one of the hottest kisses I'd ever experienced. Not loud enough to be a moan, it wasn't quiet enough to be a simple desire for breath.
Reluctantly, I pulled away. Not far, only enough to allow both of us to catch our breath. "See?" I whispered. "I proved you a liar. Or had you forgotten what happened in the alleyway earlier?"
"Forgotten? Hell no. I'll be storing that one in my special 'gentleman's boner-in-the-bathroom' time spank bank."
I couldn't help it. I snorted with laughter, shaking my head. "Jesus. You really know how to spoil the mood, don't you?"
"I prefer to call it breaking the ice."
"Even when I've already had my cock in your mouth."
James rolled his shoulders, not in a proper shrug, and I got the impression he was trying to convince me of his innocence without throwing my hands off him.
I was more than happy to keep them exactly where they were. For now. Later, on the other hand...
"You're in my home now. Not exactly a level playing field. Non-neutral territory. You're playing an away game."
"This is a soccer reference, right?"
"Football. " He rolled his eyes. "Honestly; don't you Yanks know anything?"
"We already have our own kind of football, thank you."
"Yeah, a bunch of nancyboys --- "
"You what?"
"Okay, jessies."
"I'll never get used to your Scottishisms."
"Don't worry; I'll write you a dictionary. So anyway, you've got a bunch of wimps dressed up in full body armor in case one of them breaks a nail on the pitch --- "
"Field."
"Yeah, yeah. You ought to try playing rugby. That's a game for real men. You could run over the entire team with a bus and they'd pick themselves up and get on with it. Maybe they wear a gum shield and that's about it."
"Is that in case any dastardly Yanks try to kiss them?" I asked. "No, wait, wait. It'll be because those Brits have to preserve the few teeth they have left. I know how you lot are dentist-phobic."
"Screw you, Texas. Look." He gave me a grin cheesy enough to make the Cheshire Cat jealous. "And they're all still mine. I floss."
"I can't believe I had my cock in there earlier. They're bloody fangs."
"Glad you think so." James's lips were still curved into a smirk as they met mine and the warmth of his laughter huffed into my mouth. "Come on," he murmured, barely pulling back, just an inch of air between us to make the words audible. "Follow me."
"You lead. I'll follow."
"How romantic, Texas. You make it sound like we're dancing --- Bugger."
"Forgoing the obvious punch line...try not to back into the door."
"I was trying to go around it."
"Unsuccessfully," I pointed out. It had been ajar and, distracted, he'd backed onto its edge.
"Yeah, thanks for that, Einstein." James reached around with one hand to rub the small of his back. "I'll live. Might need a lie down, though."
He arched his eyebrows, didn't even need to wink or smirk to convey his meaning.
"Not flat on your back though. Might be a bit sore." I reached for him again, clutching at his shirt this time, fumbling more as arousal kicked in. This was really happening.
He kicked the door out of the way, glaring at it as if daring it to swing back and hit him again. "How about on my knees?" Without missing a beat he pulled me close and dropped a light kiss on my lips as he walked backwards, more tentatively this time.
"Sounds good to me."
"This room here." He used his foot to tap at a door that was already halfway open. "Enter my boudoir."
"Boudoir makes it sound pink. Very girlie." And it wasn't. It screamed bachelor pad. Plain and functional. Wardrobe, chest of drawers, nightstand. No clothes on the floor. But he didn't seem the type to be so careless with any garment. Unless he's tearing them off me, I hope.
"Shag pad?" James suggested, cocking his head and looking at me in a way I assumed was supposed to be demure, but just came off as shamelessly sarcastic. I was good with that.
"I'm surprised by the coordinated bed linen."
"What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing, nothing." The duvet cover and pillowcases were all in a matching shade of blue, smoothed over and tidy. "I was hoping for an X-Men bedcover."
"I could stretch to a Wolverine poster for the wall, but that's it. In fact I wouldn't mind staring at Hugh Jackman...but duvet cover? Nah; I'd be worried about getting suspect stain
s all over Michael Fassbender."
"I'm sure he'd cope."
"A boy can dream." James shrugged. "For now it's just me, a copy of X-Men: First Class and a box of tissues."
"Ugh. Jesus. How about we bring you back in the room. For now it's just you, me, and a --- Fuck." I dropped my hands and for the first time in an absolute age, wasn't touching him.
"That's what I was hoping for --- "
"No, no, I mean..." I bit my lip. Unsure of why I felt reticent, I cleared my throat and said it anyway. "Condoms. I don't have any on me. When I left the house, I..."
"You were still trying to convince yourself you weren't looking for a Scotsman to toss your caber?"
"Yeah, I --- What on Earth does that mean? It sounds painful."
"It is if you do it wrong. Never mind. Highland Games. Scotsmen get drunk and play tug of war then start throwing trees at each other."
"You sure make your countrymen sound like a bunch of weirdoes."
"They are. I mean we are. I'm the Chief Weirdo of the Clan MacWeirdo. Honest. You can check it in Debrett's Peerage. God, I really need to shut up. My sense of humor has a mind of its own, really doesn't know when to stop. Sorry. You were saying?"
"Are you..." I swallowed. Gulped back the air, even. "Are you nervous?"
"Me? Nervous? God, that's just..." He waved a dismissive hand, made a face as if the idea was ridiculous. "I mean, I'm twenty-six years old; you're accusing me of...?" A pause, of no more than two seconds. "Yeah, actually. I am." He bit his lip to underline his confession, but his gaze held mine bravely.
I realized he was waiting for me to say something and let out a breath I hadn't even known I'd been holding. "Thank God for that. So am I."
"You're nervous? Why are you nervous?" James cocked his head, looked at me so intensely I felt studied. "I mean, look at you."
"I'm a nerd."
"A nerd?" He made a pfft sound through pursed lips. "If that's what a nerd looks like, I should have taken that computer tech job I was offered back home and stayed there. I would never have wanted for cock. Or arse. I don't mind a bit of arse as well. You don't have a problem with that, do you? No, of course you don't. Anyway." He paused to run a finger round the inside of his collar. "Is it hot in here or is it just me? So, nerd, eh? Huh. How 'bout that?"
"I mean I recently had my hair cut and I've got contacts in, so --- "
"You usually wear glasses? Tell me you wear glasses. No, never mind. Have you ever dressed up in a tank top and --- No, no, forget I ever said that. Anyway. Where were we?"
"I'm with a guy who has a geek fetish."
"Shut up."
"You have a geek fetish. No wonder you went red when I mentioned an X-Men duvet cover. I'm sure there's a punch line in there about playing with your joystick."
"Can we please get off the subject of nerd fetishes and geek porn?"
"And simply get off?"
"That's more like it."
"I won't bother texting you a photo of me in my Superman pajamas then."
"That's just going too far."
"Okay, in a paisley sweater, surrounded by motherboards and drive casings from the computer I'm building at home."
"You --- ?"
"No. No I'm not building a computer and if I owned anything in paisley I'd toss it on the nearest bonfire. Look, how did we get into this anyway?"
"Me, saying I was nervous. You know..." James cleared his throat and looked away for a moment. "Someone new." He pointed to himself, then at me, his jittery actions signing the unspoken "us."
"Yeah." I swallowed back the knot of nerves that had suddenly appeared in the back of my throat. "Know that feeling." Nodding, I let my gaze wander round the room. Awkward. How do we move on from this?
"So, you have...?" Nice one, Lombard. Get down to business.
He frowned, looking confused, then enlightenment spread over his face along with his wide grin. "Oh, you mean a condom? Yeah. Fuck, I've got more than one. I've got condoms coming out of my ears, quite frankly."
"I think they'd do more good on your cock to be honest."
"So, you..." We were both doing a lot of nervous coughing then. "I wondered about that. You know, if you had a problem with it."
"With you fucking me?" I nearly reached for him again, but my hands were shaking and the only way to steady them was to re-establish contact.
Break the ice again. Pretend this nervous episode hadn't happened. "Not a problem."
"Oh. " The monosyllable came out in a rush of breath and he smiled, managing to turn the sound into a burst of laughter. "Oh. Right."
"Hope you've got plenty of lube."
"Gallons of the stuff."
"Thank fuck for that. I'd hate to run out of it and have to dig into your lard supplies. I know you Jocks prefer to keep it for deep-frying your breakfast sausages."
"Shut up, Texas. That's just..." He grimaced. "Are you sure you're not part Scottish?"
"You missed a prime chance to ask if I had any Scots in me, there."
"Give it time."
"You've got less than five minutes." I pushed him towards the bed, bold now. Strange. I switched between nervous and confident so rapidly.
Nervous because he was someone new, confident because he felt the same.
We were in this together. I just wished I could decide on one emotion and settle there.
"Sorry it's not an X-Men duvet cover."
"I'll just have to deal with it."
The back of James's legs hit the side of the bed and we toppled over; I landed on my side, legs tangled round his, and he groaned in pain.
"Back still sore?"
"Just a bit. An ache more than anything. Nothing serious." He wriggled, then kicked off his shoes. "Be gentle with me."
"Shouldn't that be my line? I mean if you're gonna ---" Just say it, Austin. " --- be inside me."
I could have sworn he shuddered when I said that.
With a bit of struggling, I toed my shoes off and they hit the floor with twin thuds. My hands shook when I reached for his belt and I wished I didn't look like such a fucking amateur. I was far from a virgin, had had a few, okay, more than a few, one night stands, and one would have thought the one-off nature of this night would kill off any butterflies. I mean, it wasn't like I was ever going to see him again, right?
I caught James's eye and there was a brief pause, a held breath, while we decided --- laughter or something more serious? A smile, then. An easy compromise. "I'm not normally this shaky."
"Let me just kid myself I'm making the nerd so horny he can't control himself." He kissed me before I could protest and mentally I shrugged.
If he got turned on by geeks, who was I to argue? My cropped hair still had a way of doing as it pleased and most of the time I wore glasses rather than contacts --- not that he'd ever see me out of carefully styled, avec contact lenses mode of course --- so if that image worked for him? Good.
Pulling at each other's clothes wasn't romantic; it didn't flow. Belts refused to behave, buttons just wouldn't come undone and at one point I even managed to fuck up pulling his T-shirt over his head. He got tangled, I got scared to risk pulling at a seam. It was a damn mess. A hilarious mess.
"You don't look too much like a geek with your clothes off," James panted in between kisses.
"You're not even looking at me." But his hands were all over me, though. It was like he was trying to touch every inch of skin at once.
Just like I'd thought of doing to him earlier.
"You must work out." The tip of his finger traced the groove down the middle of my very modest, barely-there-but-slowly-emerging abs.
"Now and again. Not as often as I should." I didn't think I'd ever tasted anything as delicious as the side of his neck, and I loved the way he wriggled as I did so.
"See, now I'm thinking of you getting sweaty in the gym."
"Or Jim getting sweaty in me?"
He groaned, but his reluctant smile belied this pseudo-criticism.
"Hone
stly, Texas, your puns are getting nearly as bad as mine."
"That's something to be proud of." I ran the tip of my tongue along his collarbone. Imagined myself doing that to every ridge of his spine.
Every ridge on the underside of his cock. But that would be for later. For now, I had other priorities. "Where's the condoms?"
"Bedside table," he blurted out, then seemed to come to life. "I'll get them. It, I mean."
"Them, plural, sounds all right to me." It amazed me how easy it was to make his color rise --- among other things. Flattering, too.
James reached into the drawer of his nightstand and tossed a few foil packets onto it. "Just in case. You can never be too careful," he added with a wink. Covering over his holy shit, we're actually going to do this nerves, if I knew anything about him at all by now. Yes, we both wanted this, but it didn't stop the feeling of reality having tilted a few degrees now we were naked and lying on his bed, and he was trying to get one of those foil packets open.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, I feel like I'm wearing bloody oven gloves. My hands won't do as they're told," he muttered and put the edge of the packet between his teeth.
"Wait." It wasn't something for my list --- I'd put a condom on another man before of course, after practicing on myself --- but not for the first time I felt apart from my own body, watching it take over. The hand that took the packet from him before I leaned in for another kiss had a mind of its own. "Allow me."
"Steady." He tensed as soon as I started to roll the condom on him.
"You're not going to ask me to be gentle with you, are you?"
"No, just..." He shifted from side to side and I kept both hands on his cock, waiting for him to speak again. "Don't squeeze the little man like that."
"Far from little."
"You flatter me."
"You know what they say, everything's bigger in Texas."
"I won't even get that far if you --- Stop. Just stop." He slowly, slowly, let out a breath as I lifted my hands away from him. "What are you trying to do to --- No, don't answer that. You'd only come up with something filthy in reply."
"You must be rubbing off on me."
He tilted his head and glared, looking about as threatening as a bowl of Jell-O. "I nearly was ten seconds ago when you had your hand on my cock."
Burn Page 4
