Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

Will listened, beer dangling between two casual fingers and eyes slightly narrowed, but I thought he was intrigued at the very least. He wasn’t doing the impatient thing he does where his jaw and nostrils are tensed as if stuck in a constant inhale trying to draw breath to interrupt something that bored or irritated him. Little by little he started asking questions, leaned forward slightly, and got another beer for him and for Gus without asking if he wanted one.

When he sat back down at the table, he held his beer out for me. I took a sip and passed it back and he barely looked at me, but he’d known. Known that I wouldn’t want another but had wanted me to know he hadn’t forgotten about me.

Will herded Gus out when he’d finished his beer, and cleaned up the empties.

“So, what do you think?”

“You want my opinion?” I asked, startled.

Will didn’t respond, just wiped down the counters.

“Um. Well, I don’t really know much about your business, and… you’re way better at reading people than me….”

“I know that. Just, what did you think?”

“It seemed great. Like, I don’t get why you wouldn’t want to do it, great.”

Will sighed. “Yeah.”

“So… why wouldn’t you?”

Will was staring out the window like maybe the answer was out there.

“It’s a lot,” he said slowly. “To just start over. Start from scratch.”

“Yeah, I know, right?”

He looked over, startled, as if he’d forgotten that starting over from scratch was exactly what I’d done when I moved here.

“JESUS GOD,” Will muttered. Sweat trickled down his chest, and he clawed at the sheets.

For thirty minutes I’d kept him on the edge, touching, licking, biting, kissing, but not letting him come.

I had a theory that Will was secretly a hedonist, but he disguised it as an insistence that he just had good taste. It was little things that’d made me think so. The way he inhaled from his coffee cup before taking the first sip of the morning. He bought beans from a shop on the corner and ground them himself. He boiled water and poured it over the coffee, taking note of the time so he got the extraction right. With most things he was all about convenience, but he liked his coffee this way, and he liked the ritual of making it.

It was other things too, though. How he’d adjust a flower in an arrangement on a restaurant table to make it more pleasing. How he kept the heat turned a few degrees warmer than was practical so that he could sleep naked in the winter because he liked the feel of the sheets on his skin. The way he leaned into my hand if I touched his hair, like a cat deepening a caress. He loved food, too, even though he ate like an animal, his terrible table manners oddly out of step with the rest of his polished persona.

I knew that Will was way more experienced than me, that he’d been with a ton of men who were probably better than I was in bed. But ever since the other night, I couldn’t get this fantasy out of my head. The fantasy where Will came totally undone. Where he dropped his guard and forgot that he was the sexpert and I basically knew jack squat. Where he begged me. Gave himself over to me and showed me something vulnerable. Something real. Something that he didn’t show any of the other men he was with.

Because if I could make sex totally satisfying for him then he wouldn’t need to go sleep with all those other people. Right?

So in pursuit of my fantasy, I’d decided to test the theory. No way was I going to be able to fuck Will as well as those other men with a ton of experience. Not yet, anyway. So I had to use other means at my disposal to get him so wound up that by the time I did fuck him, he was desperate for it. And so far I thought it was going pretty well.

At first he’d been all, “What are you doing, Leo? Quit it and fuck me.” Once he realized that I was committed to driving him out of his mind, though, he’d relaxed a little bit.

Will’s skin was like velvet, his hair like silk, and I could’ve touched him forever, even without the added bonus that it was making him fall apart.

I traced the line of his ribs with my tongue, feeling his heartbeat beneath his flushed skin. Every breath and swallow sank me deeper into the sense that I knew this man whose body I was exploring. I knew him, I saw him, I could touch him however I wanted, and he’d let me. Will, who was usually bossy and impatient and a know-it-all, was lying on the bed, hair clumped with sweat and eyes blazing, completely open to me.