The Tight End (Red's Tavern 6)

And I just about could have died and gone to heaven. I was surrounded by his scent. His sheets managed to smell perfectly clean and also so much like him, all at once. I was surrounded by Brody, and every cell in my body felt attuned to it, like I was somehow made to respond to him.

“Mmm,” he hummed happily, pulling in a long breath. “You always smell so good.”

Christ. If he had any idea just how good he smelled.

If it felt this good just to have Brody pulling me in close, how good would it feel to actually have sex with him? To feel his hands wrapped around me, or his lips around my aching cock? I couldn’t process it. In fact, if I even tried to think about that right now, I was pretty sure I’d combust into open flames.

I had to focus my mind on something else.

“So what’s the story? Your terrible first time story,” I said, settling in and feeling the warmth from his chest on my back.

“Mhm,” he said, breathing deeply again. “Right. Well, the truth of the matter is that my first time was with a girl.”

“Really?”

“Yup,” he said. “I knew I was gay. I mean, I think I’ve known that forever, really. But I was fifteen, and something inside me just wanted to make sure. I’d been friends with a girl on my street named Jessica for many years, and one day when we were hanging out late at night… one thing led to another.”

“You pulled her into bed?”

“The opposite,” Brody said. “She apparently liked me, which I’d never known. She dragged me to her bed. It was this crazy canopied thing. I felt like I was in a movie. And when she told me she wanted to have sex, I said yes because I liked her too, just… not in the same way.”

“You had pity sex for your first time?” I asked, incredulous.

Brody squeezed me, laughing softly. “Not pity sex, at all,” he said. “I wasn’t just doing it to be nice. I was also curious, in a way. Like a scientific experiment. I ended up being inside her only for a few thrusts before we stopped.”

“Oh, God,” I groaned.

“Yeah. Pretty pathetic,” Brody admitted. “I told her right then and there. In the bed. Admitted I was gay, because I knew anything else would hurt her so much worse.”

“How’d she take it?”

“A lot better than I expected,” he said. “She said it was a little weird that I didn’t tell her beforehand, and I agreed. But I was just scared, back then, too. It wasn’t her first time having sex, so she wasn’t robbed of a good experience or anything. But I still felt awful. I basically apologized for the rest of the night.”

“That does sound pretty embarrassing,” I said.

“We were still good friends throughout high school. She’s very happy now. Went to freaking Harvard and has an incredible humanitarian boyfriend. She was another person who was about a billion times smarter than me.”

“Hey,” I said. “You’re very smart, Brody.”

He hummed. “Nothing compared to you.”

My heart was finally falling into a slower rhythm. I was still lying on my back with Brody’s arm draped heavy across my chest.

It seemed like Brody still harbored insecurity for one thing and one thing only: his intelligence. I knew he hadn’t ever really gotten good grades in school, but there were so many other forms of intelligence other than book smarts. And I was still convinced that he’d do great on exams if he just learned how to study a little more efficiently.

“I promise I’ll help you do better on your exams,” I said softly. “You’ve got this.”

He pressed a small kiss to the top of my shoulder which sent radiating warmth throughout my whole body. His fingertips were lightly stroking back and forth across the top of my chest as he held me close. I was glad for his embarrassing first-time story, because I was pretty sure nothing else in the world could have made me feel comfortable otherwise.

I loved this. I loved being in bed with him, pressed so close to him, more than most things I’d felt in recent memory.

I was hyper-aware of every little micromovement I made. Now that Brody had been vulnerable with his story, I was disarmed. And more than ever, I wanted to turn around and straddle him again. I wanted to fucking beg him to have sex with me.

But maybe he was right. Maybe I didn’t want to have sex for the first time based only on pure impulse. Even if something told me it would be amazing anyway.

“Do you want to know something even more embarrassing than that?” I asked, a small smile on my face.

“Of course I do,” he said from behind me, his velvety voice so close to my ear. “Tell me.”