Topher let Beck's legs fall from his hips.

They came down slow, heels dragging over the sheet, and Beck stayed sprawled against the headboard with the green silk bunched at his waist and his chest still moving too fast. His mouth was red. His hair had gone everywhere. He looked like someone who'd just been knocked sideways and was deciding whether to be annoyed about it, and he watched Topher push up off the mattress and stand.

The room was quiet except for the heater ticking in the wall and, under that, the sound of Beck breathing.

Topher stood at the edge of the bed.

His shirt was already gone — somewhere near the door, in a heap Beck had made of it. The air on his back was cool. His skin felt tight everywhere Beck's hands had been, and he could still feel the shape of Beck's legs locked around him, the pressure of it, the heat. He didn't move for a second. He just let Beck look, because Beck was looking, and Topher had spent five years pretending he didn't want to be looked at like this.

He reached down and unbuttoned his jeans.

One button. He didn't rush it. Beck's eyes tracked his hands and stopped at his belt line, and Topher watched the way his throat moved when he swallowed, and something in his own chest went tight and bright and steady. He hooked his thumbs in the waistband and shoved the denim down his thighs. The phone came out of the pocket on the way and hit the floor with a soft thud against the carpet, muffled, dumb, unimportant. He kicked the jeans away from his ankles. They landed somewhere behind him.

Then his boxers.

He didn't look away from Beck while he did it. It took one second and felt like ten, and when the cotton was off and on the floor with the rest of it, Topher straightened up and let him have it — all of it, the whole thing, standing there in the low lamp-light with nothing on and no excuse left in the room.

Beck's fingers curled into the sheet.

That was the only tell. His face stayed exactly where it had been — that half-cocked, half-ruined grin — but his hands went white-knuckled in the green silk, and his eyes came up Topher's body in one long pass and didn't stop at his face. They got there eventually. They stayed.

"Okay," Beck said. Quiet. Almost to himself. "Okay."

Topher took the two steps.

The mattress dipped under his knee when he climbed on, and dipped again when the second one followed, and the silk slid smooth and cool under his shins as he moved up the bed. Beck didn't move back. He lay there and let Topher come, and when Topher's knees bracketed his hips and settled wide on either side of him, Beck's whole body went still — the way it went still on the ice before a faceoff, coiled and waiting, watching the thing in front of him like it might move first.

Topher didn't give him that.

He lowered his weight, slow, chest to chest — and stopped a half-inch short. Close enough that Beck's breath came warm across his mouth. Close enough that he could feel the heat of Beck's skin coming up through the silk between them, the whole long shape of him, hard and warm and waiting.

"Hey," Beck said. Barely. His hands came up and landed on Topher's waist — both of them, palms flat, fingers spreading and then pressing into the curve of the muscle there like he was checking it was real. "Hey. You're not—"

Topher bent his head and put his mouth at Beck's ear.

"What do you want, gorgeous?"

Low. Deliberate. He felt Beck's whole body react under him — the hips shifting up, the fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, the breath going out of him in one short sound that wasn't a laugh and wasn't a word. Topher stayed where he was, mouth at the shell of Beck's ear, and waited. He could have moved. He didn't. There was a whole night in front of them and he wanted to hear it first, wanted to hear Beck say it in his own voice with Topher's mouth right there, so there'd be no walking it back later, no joke to hide behind in the morning.

Beck turned his head.

Just enough. Just so his jaw dragged along Topher's and his mouth ended up a breath away from Topher's mouth, and when he answered it came out on the exhale, low and cracked at the edges, not a joke at all.

"You."

Topher's hand came up into Beck's hair and closed, and he kissed him.

It wasn't the one from the doorway. That one had been a collision — teeth and surprise and five years of not doing it. This one was slower and deeper and Topher meant every inch of it. He tilted Beck's head back with the fist in his hair and took his mouth open and easy, and Beck made a sound into it and got both arms around Topher's back and hauled him down the last half-inch, chest to chest, silk and skin, no space left anywhere.

On the floor, the phone buzzed.

Neither of them looked.

It buzzed again a few seconds later and then stopped, and the room went back to the heater and the breathing and the wet sound of two mouths that had finally stopped pretending, and Topher didn't so much as lift his head. Beck's hands were moving on his back — up the spine, flat, then down to the dip above his ass and pressing, pulling him in tighter, and Topher let himself be pulled. He rolled his hips down, just once, just to feel it — the drag of his cock against Beck's through the silk — and Beck broke the kiss with a gasp that Topher felt more than heard.

"Jesus," Beck said. "Okay. Okay, that's—"

"That's what?"

"That's a lot." Beck's eyes were open and very blue and a little wild, and he was grinning even with his chest heaving, even with Topher's weight on him and his hands full of Topher's back. "You've been holding out on me, Jacobes."

"You've been watching me for five years."

"So have you."

Topher's mouth curved against Beck's jaw. "Yeah."

He kissed the corner of it, then the line of his jaw, then down — and Beck tipped his head back into the pillow and gave him the whole throat, and Topher took it, mouth open, teeth just grazing the tendon there, feeling Beck's pulse jump under his tongue. Beck's hand came up into his hair and held, not steering, just holding, and his hips shifted up again, restless, and Topher felt the hard line of him press into his stomach through the silk and felt his own cock twitch in answer, hot and heavy and starting to ache.

He pulled back an inch.

Beck made a noise of protest and tried to haul him back down; Topher caught his wrists and pinned them to the mattress on either side of his head, and Beck's breath stopped.

"Huh," Beck said. His voice had gone rough. His eyes had gone dark. He tested the grip — not really, just enough to feel it — and Topher's hands didn't move, and something crossed Beck's face that Topher had never seen there before, not in five years of locker rooms and road trips and chirping each other across the bench. It looked like relief. It looked like being handed something he'd been reaching for in the dark.

"You gonna tell me," Beck said, "or am I supposed to guess?"

Topher lowered his mouth back to Beck's ear.

"I'm going to ask you a question," he said. "And you're going to answer it."

"Am I."

"Yes."

Beck's hips shifted under him, an involuntary little roll, and Topher felt it all the way up his own spine. His grip on Beck's wrists tightened. He was so hard it hurt. He'd been hard since the doorway and now it was a low steady throb between his legs and he could feel the wet at the tip of his cock smearing against Beck's stomach through the green silk, and he didn't care, and he didn't move, because the whole point was that he wasn't going to move until Beck told him what he wanted. He'd spent five years not asking. He was going to ask now.

"How do you want me," Topher said.

Beck's throat worked.

"Hm?" Topher's mouth brushed the shell of his ear. "Say it."

"You're a bastard."

"Yeah." He waited. His thumb moved over the inside of Beck's wrist, slow, over the pulse there, and he felt it hammering. "Do you want to ride me." Beck's whole body flinched — not away, toward, a full-body twitch like Topher had touched a live wire. "Or do you want me to fuck you."

"Topher—"

"Rough or sweet." He said it low and even, right against Beck's ear, and he kept his hips still, kept his hands still, gave him nothing to hide behind. "Tell me. I'll give you what you want."

The heater ticked. The blind let in its one crooked bar of streetlight and laid it across the far wall. Beck lay under him with his wrists pinned and his chest heaving and his mouth open, and for a second — one second — he looked like he might make a joke. Topher watched him decide not to. He watched the grin fall off Beck's face and something underneath it come up raw and honest and a little bit scared, and he watched Beck's tongue come out to wet his lip.

"Rough," Beck said.

The word came out wrecked. Quiet. Like it cost him something to hand over.

Then, before Topher could answer, Beck's hands twisted in his grip and got loose — Topher let him, he'd let him have that — and Beck grabbed two fistfuls of Topher's ass and pulled him down hard and said it again, right into his mouth, teeth and breath and no grin left anywhere in it.

"Rough. And fast. Now."

Topher's breath went out of him like he'd been hit.

"Yeah," he said. His voice didn't sound like his own. "Okay."

He got one hand into Beck's hair and the other braced on the headboard and he kissed him again — hard this time, no patience left in it, all the held-back weight of the last twenty minutes going into Beck's mouth — and Beck kissed him back with his hands full of him and his hips rolling up, and somewhere under the two of them the green silk went loose and slid away, and Topher felt the first bare press of Beck's cock against his own stomach, skin to skin, and made a sound into Beck's mouth that he'd have been embarrassed about if he'd had any room left in his head for embarrassment.

On the floor, the phone buzzed one more time.

Topher put a hand flat on the mattress beside Beck's head and pushed himself up, looking down at him — flushed, sprawled, wrecked, gorgeous, his for the night and maybe longer than that — and Beck looked back up at him with his mouth still open and his hands sliding up Topher's sides, and didn't say anything, and didn't have to.

"Tell me if it's too much," Topher said.

Beck's grin came back, smaller than before, realer. "It won't be."

Topher reached over him to the nightstand drawer, and Beck's hand caught his wrist on the way, and for a second they just looked at each other across the half-inch of dark between their faces, both of them breathing hard, neither of them saying the thing that was sitting right there in the middle of the bed.

Then Beck let go, and Topher opened the drawer.