Page 49 of Undefined Terms

We’ve done this, four times, five. The number’s blurred because the surface is different every time, stubble one night, nails another, the texture shifting, but the heat’s the same.

Celyn kisses me, slow. The stubble against my chin. The mouth. No lip tint tonight, just mouth, tea and the faint toast-butter underneath. The hands on my neck, pulling down, and I go because the body goes where Celyn pulls.

I put my hands on the waist. The t-shirt rides up, skin. Warm, pale, the hips under my thumbs. My fingers find the waistband of the jeans and the button and.

‘I’ll do it,’ Celyn says. Steps back. Fast, no ceremony, the same way I’d take off work boots. The jeans go down.

Red.

The. Red, lace, on the hips. The jeans pooled around the ankles and the three-day growth thick on the face and the thighs pale with dark hair and between the two there’s red lace stretched across the hips and the cock pressing against it and the elastic cutting a line across the lower stomach and.

I stop breathing. I don’t decide to stop breathing. The lungs just. Don’t.

‘Problem?’ Celyn says.

‘No.’ The word comes out wrong. Dry. My mouth’s forgotten how vowels work.

Celyn steps out of the jeans. Kicks them somewhere, stands there.

I’m in boxers. Stood at the end of the bed like a spare part. My hands are useless, open, close, nowhere. And I’ve been inside this person and I’ve watched them come apart and right now I can’t move because the lace is red and the stubble is three days and the combination isn’t. It’s not…

‘Ron.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re staring.’

‘Yeah.’

Celyn takes one step and the hand comes up and touches my chin. Tips my face down, the eyes, the grey-green.

‘I’ve got others,’ Celyn says. ‘If you’re curious.’

‘You planned this.’

Not a question. My voice comes out lower than I mean it.

‘I planned everything about tonight.’ Eyes level, no shame. ‘Including you.’

My throat catches. Between the two.

‘That’s a yes,’ Celyn says.

I go to my knees. Gravity. The carpet rough on my kneecaps and my mouth on the hip, on the bone, on the lace. I drag my lips across the elastic line where it cuts into the skin and the skin’s warm and the lace is warm and Celyn’s stomach tightens above me. I can feel the cock through the fabric, hard, the shape pressed sideways against the lace. I mouth at it through the red. Wet the fabric. Celyn’s hips jerk and the sound. Fuck, the sound through lace is different. Muffled. Like Celyn’s trying to hold it in and the lace is helping and I don’t want help. I want the sound.

I push my face into it. Breathe through the fabric, hot, and the cock twitches against my mouth and I can taste it already. The salt through the weave, the precome soaking the red a shade darker. My hands on the thighs. The hair there, fine, dark against the pale. I spread them wider, Celyn lets me.

I reach up with one hand. Find the chin. Three days of stubble under my palm, rough, and my mouth is on lace over cock and my hand is on a neck that hasn’t been shaved since Monday and my brain’s trying to—sort, file, put things in a row like rebar spacing, and it can’t. There’s no row.

I pull the lace to the side. Don’t want it off. Want it bunched against the hip, the elastic digging a line into the skin, the red crumpled. The cock springs free, hard, flushed dark at the head, wet. I know this cock now. The weight when I hold it, the curve, the ridge under the head where Celyn’s most sensitive, how the foreskin pulls back when I stroke down. I wrap my hand around the base. Tight. Celyn’s breath catches.

‘There,’ Celyn says.

I take the head in my mouth. The angle’s wrong, my teeth catch, barely, and Celyn hisses. I pull back. ‘Tip your chin,’ Celyn says, quiet, no judgement. I tip, try again. Better. The jaw knows more than it did the first time, the stretch of it familiar now, wanted. Salt, skin. The taste that’s Celyn and nothing else, the weight pressing my tongue flat, and I go down slow, as far as I can, further than the first time and further than the second. Not all the way. Celyn’s too long for all the way and I’m still learning the back of my own throat. The back of my hand against the lace still bunched at the hip. The rough under my other hand. Both.

Celyn’s thumb hooks behind my ear, the hips rock, shallow, letting me set how deep. I pull back. Tongue on the slit. The taste, sharper now, more. I go back down.

‘Ron. Fuck.’