Page 59 of Caught Offside

“Morning,” Asher said, voice wrecked with sleep.

“Morning.”

“You’re staring.”

“I’m allowed.” Patrick’s mouth curved before he could stop it. “Turns out I like having you around.”

“Turns out. Huge shock.” Asher grinned, the real one, the one that took over his whole face, and pushed up onto an elbow, hair a disaster. “Say it again. I want to hear you be sappy on purpose.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Coward.”

“I already said it once. Don’t want you to get spoiled.”

Asher laughed, delighted, and kissed him before he’d even finished the sentence, slow and easy, no urgency in it at all, just two people with nowhere else they needed to be.

The sheets were tangled from the night. Asher’s hands found Patrick’s chest, palms flat, the contact drawing a line of warmth down his sternum. Asher kissed his collarbone, his mouth going back to a place it already knew.

Patrick ran his palm down the length of Asher’s side, hip to ribs, and Asher’s hand mirrored the motion, slower than Asher ever moved anywhere else.

“I want to take my time,” Patrick said.

“Take whatever you want.”

Patrick kissed him long and thorough, no counting seconds, nothing held back at all. His hand moved between them and wrapped around Asher’s cock, and the sound Asher made—a low, ragged exhale that broke against Patrick’s lips—registered in Patrick’s spine.

He stroked Asher with intention, slow and firm, his thumb tracing the head on each upstroke, learning the rhythm that made Asher’s hips press forward and his breath come apart. Here Patrick led because he wanted to give this, wanted Asher to feel it.

Asher’s hand covered his and adjusted the grip—tighter, here, like this. Patrick followed the instructions. Asher’s head fell back, his throat exposed, and Patrick kissed it. The pulse hammered under his mouth, the salt of sweat gathering in the hollow above his collarbone.

“Patrick.” His name came out of Asher, wrecked and open. “I want to ask you for something.”

“Tell me.”

“I want you inside me.”

The words hit Patrick low in his body. His hand stilled. His whole frame recalibrated around the offer. He looked at Asher’s face. The brown eyes were dark, pupils blown, steady. The night before, in the lot, Asher had said leaving was the only thing he knew how to do. He wasn’t leaving now.

“Yeah,” Patrick said. His voice sounded foreign to himself, stripped, unhesitating. “Yeah. I want that.”

Asher reached over to the nightstand, where a condom and a small bottle were sitting out. Patrick had packed them in Chicago, along with everything else he hadn’t let himself think too hard about. Asher pressed both into Patrick’s hand and lay back, eyes staying on Patrick’s face, and the deliberate offering of it was more exposed than the nudity.

Patrick took his time getting there. He kissed Asher’s throat, then the flat of his stomach, and felt the muscles jump under his mouth. By the time he settled between Asher’s thighs, Asher was breathing through his teeth.

“You’re allowed to hurry,” Asher said.

“I know.” Patrick bit the inside of his thigh lightly. “I’m not going to.”

He slicked his fingers and warmed the lube between them first because the bottle had sat out all night in the air conditioning and he wasn’t going to start this by making Asher flinch. Then he put his mouth back on Asher’s hip and slowly circled his hole with one fingertip, no pressure at all.

Asher’s hips lifted. “Patrick.”

“Hm.”

“You gonna make me ask twice?”

“Maybe.” He kept circling, light, watching the muscle in Asher’s thigh twitch. “You talk when you’re worked up. I like it. I’m in no hurry to make it stop.”