Page 57 of Spiced!

Only when my dick surrendered and even his hand on my balls couldn’t keep it erect did he sit upright, wipe the residue from his chin, and stare down at me.

“You taste like the sea,” he said simply.

I shook my head against the bed cover and laughed. “What?”

He cocked his head like Mofongo might. “Your cum. It isn’t just salty. It tastes like . . . I don’t know . . . something new. I like it.”

“I have no idea what that means,” I said, still chuckling through gasps for air. “But that was the best blow job I think I’ve ever had. Sorry it was over so fast. It’s been a while. Want me to—?”

“No,” he said, rolling off me to lie beside me. “If you’ll let me, I’d like to sleep next to you tonight. This is all I want.”

I stopped chuckling.

If you’ll let me, I’d like to sleep next to you tonight.

Nobody had said a thing like that to me in longer than I could remember. It was such a simple sentence. He’d delivered it plainly, the way he said everything, without the little hedge people usually put around wanting something.

I lay there and stared at the ceiling and felt, underneath the pleasant wreckage of the last twenty minutes, a dozen emotions battling for supremacy in my mind.

Because here was the thing I was not going to say out loud, not to him and not really to myself: I had walked into Barbacks weeks ago expecting a fun night and a good show, and I’d enjoyed every second of it and kept it, in my head, exactly that size.

Somewhere in the tidy, well-organized back office of my brain I had filed the whole thing the way I did everything—quickly, confidently, into a box small enough that it couldn’t get any bigger than I’d decided to let it get. Low stakes. Uncomplicated. A bright, easy person I could enjoy from a safe distance and hand back at the end of the night.

And the man in this bed, the one who had just asked to sleep beside me like it was the most natural request in the world, didn’t fit in the box. He was so much larger than the small, safe size I’d tried to keep him.

That should have been a pleasant surprise.

Mostly it was.

But there was a smaller, less-flattering detail tucked in beside the pleasure, and I was honest enough—barely—to notice it was there without being brave enough to take it out and look at it.

Some part of me had wanted this to stay small.

I had come to this—and I was, if nothing else, precise about this—telling myself it would stay light, that a man like Adrian was a bright, easy thing you enjoyed and didn’t build a life around. Those assumptions had just been proven wrong. Completely, cleanly wrong. Instead of feeling glad about that, I felt the uncomfortable warmth of a person caught doing something he shouldn’t, caught by no one at all, which was somehow worse.

I was a man who reorganized supply cabinets when I didn’t want to feel things. I recognized the impulse now, the itch to get up, to do something with my hands, to sort this into a category and close the box and move on.

Fighting against every deeply etched impulse in my brain, I refused to move.

I made myself lie still instead, which was not a thing I was good at.

He does not fit in the small box I tried to keep him in, I thought, and left it there.

It was an unfinished thought, because finishing it would have meant asking why I’d wanted a box in the first place, and I was not going to do that tonight—not with his breath going slow beside me—not when the night had been this good.

I’d sort it later.

I sorted everything later.

He scooted closer to me, pressing his overheated, sweaty body into mine. I had yet to answer him, but his hand was already on my chest, fingers playing with my hair. Without moving the rest of my body, I turned my head and kissed his forehead. It was the only part of him I could reach.

I couldn’t see him smile, but I felt it.

And I was sure he felt mine in return.

Chapter 16

Adrian