Page 24 of Power Play
“I do. I want you to say it anyway.” Shane’s mouth was at the crease of him now, breath hot on his dick, not landing. “Evidence is over, baby. This is the part where you want things out loud.”
And Theo, who never asked, who had filed every want under does it work, said it in his flat unraveling voice: “Your mouth. I want your mouth on my cock. Please.”
“Yeah,” Shane said. “Yeah, you do.”
So Shane gave it to him. Took the head of him past his lips slow, tongue dragging the underside, and pulled off to lick a long stripe up the shaft, root to tip, then took him again and slid down until Theo was deep in the wet heat of his throat, and Theo’s good hand tightened in his hair and his braced arm stayed where Shane had placed it, on the pillow, safe, held still by trust instead of a strap, and the sensation had no math. His whole life he’d had math for everything, and this was the first variable he couldn’t solve: Shane’s mouth working him in a long unhurried rhythm, hollow-cheeked, sloppy on purpose, spit running down to where his fist was wrapped around the base, the other hand splayed warm on Theo’s stomach to feel the muscle jump, takinghim in and dragging back to the head and going down again, patient, no place to be but here. Shane pulled off to breathe and kept his fist moving and looked up the length of him, mouth wet, and said, “You should hear yourself. You’re making sounds, big man. Little ones. I’m collecting them.”
“Shane.”
And he went back down, deeper, swallowing around him, and Theo’s hips came up off the bed and Shane rode it, hand pinning his good hip, letting him have an inch of thrust and no more, controlling it, controlling him, and Theo heard himself say it, the word he never used, flat and wrecked and in English:
“Fuck.”
Shane pulled off. Grinned up at him, wet-mouthed and delighted. “Say that again.”
“Do not stop and I will say anything you like.”
Down again, and now Shane went after it, the rhythm tightening, fist and mouth in sync, and Theo said Shane’s name once more, just the name, the flat voice gone, no wall, and the sound of it went through both of them, and he gritted out close, Shane, I am close, the consent and the warning the same sentence, and Shane hummed yes around him and stayed. He came in Shane’s mouth with his good hand locked in Shane’s hair and his bad arm obedient on the pillow and his whole careful catalogued body finally, briefly, off the ledger, pulsing onto Shane’s tongue, and Shane took it, stayed down through the aftershocks until Theo’s hand went slack.
“Okay,” Shane said, coming up, voice shot, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, pleased beyond all decency about it. “Okay. That’s the new best thing I’ve ever done with my mouth and I once did anthem trivia on local radio.”
“Come here.”
Then Shane’s turn, and Theo would not be argued out of it. He got Shane onto his back and worked one-handed,determined about it, learning what his left hand could do when his right couldn’t help. He took his time getting Shane’s clothes off, one-handed, refusing help, and Shane lay there hard and leaking, saying “I almost came in my jeans listening to you say fuck,” and Theo said, in the treatment-room voice, the one that ran the morning, “Be quiet and open your legs.”
Shane shut up. Shane opened his legs.
Theo slicked his palm and closed it around Shane’s dick and found the pace off the stutter of Shane’s breath, thumb sliding over the wet head on the upstroke, the grip and the twist of it, and then lower, easing back to cup his balls, rolling them, while his fist kept the rhythm, and the quiet lasted eleven seconds before Shane started talking again, breathless half-sentences that were directions and confessions, there, like that, Jesus, your hands, tighter, don’t stop, I’ll do anything, I’ll do the dishes your way, oh my God, Theo. His hips chased the stroke. His hand came up to grip Theo’s good forearm, not to stop him, to hold on.
“Faster?” Theo asked, clinical, merciless, slowing instead, and Shane’s breath broke open.
“You’re evil, you know that, I’m so close, I’ve been close since Chicago, you can’t slow down now, you can’t—”
“Ask properly.”
“Make me come,” Shane said, and it cracked down the middle, the joke falling out of it, just the want left. “Please. Theo. Your hand. I want to come in your hand.”
So Theo gave him that, fist tightening, the rhythm Shane’s breath had been begging for, and watched his face come apart, watched the kinetic loud body go still and then break, Shane fucking up into his grip with his head thrown back and his throat working, and brought him over the edge with his hand still moving, slow, through the spill of it across Shane’s stomach, hot over Theo’s knuckles, working him gentle until Shane caught his wrist and breathed don’t, too much, and laughed wrecked intothe dark. They lay in the dark after, the sling back on because Theo was careful about it even wrecked, and Shane’s head was on his good shoulder, and the quiet was the full kind.
“Not evidence,” Shane said, drowsy.
“Not evidence,” Theo agreed.
“Just us.”
“Just us.”
And it was, and the season clock was still running but the room was warm enough for once, sixty-three degrees that registered warmer than it had any right to, and Theo lay there cataloguing the weight of Shane’s head on his shoulder and did not do any math at all.
* * *
The Gitta call happened that night, and Shane wasn’t supposed to be in it.
They’d never quite talked about Theo’s mother, beyond the interview facts: fifty-three, Gothenburg, blunt and warm. Theo called her on Sundays, in Swedish, in the bedroom with the door shut, and Shane had learned not to ask, just as Theo never asked about the days Shane went quiet after a call with Marion. They had their separate rooms in each other’s grief. It was part of how they fit.
But this Sunday Theo couldn’t shut the door, because Theo couldn’t really do anything one-handed. He was set up at the kitchen table with the laptop and the sling. Shane was making dinner (Shane could almost cook now, Theo had taught him, the plain Swedish things) and so Shane was just there, in the background, in his own home, when the call connected. A woman’s face filled the screen, Theo’s pale eyes exactly and a wide warm mouth that Theo had not inherited, and she spoke infast bright Swedish, and Theo answered, and then she saw Shane over his shoulder.
She went quiet. Said a word. Theo answered, short, and Shane caught his own name in it, just “Shane,” and a phrase he didn’t know, and Gitta Lindgren’s whole face changed, and then, in careful accented English, she said, “So. This is him.”
