Page 38 of AJ’s Fire

I’d also never, not once, shared a bed with him. Not when the women had suggested it or outright requested it, not when we were too drunk to leave one another's homes, not even when I’d cried on his shoulder for hours and hours after Anna’s funeral.

The snow continued to pile up outside. We had all night. An entire night all alone, with nowhere to be but in each other's arms. It was all I wanted. I dropped to the edge of the bed again.

“Come. Here,” I said, and I opened my arms and legs for him, exposing myself to him in a way I never had before. He stepped into my space and ran his hand up and down my arms and shoulders. I was looking up at him, but he didn’t make eye contact, his gaze following his fingers instead as they caressed up and down my arms.

“I may have seen your arms first,” he said from above me as he continued to caress me. I slotted my thumbs into the waistband of his underpants and held them there for a beat, waiting for his reaction. He continued to talk. “You were walking across from the Coffee Station, with a tray full of drinks.” His fingertips brushed my biceps, tracing the muscles, causing shivers to run up and down each arm and creating a little twitch in my dick that felt amazing for a split second before it begged for more.

“That fucking T-shirt just hugged every muscle and looked like it wanted to split itself in half. Your T-shirts always look like that. It’s so fucking sexy.” He looked at me for a quick second like he’d gone too far with that last comment. He just as quickly looked away, up and over my shoulder as if monitoring the snowfall out the bedroom windows was of the utmost importance. I dragged my fingers up his sides before finding my way back to his waistband and continuing the motion as I slowly peeled his boxer briefs off. He hitched a breath and threw his head back, still deftly avoiding eye contact. I kept going until he stepped out of the material, and I tossed them aside.

We continued dragging our hands lightly up and down, mine on his sides, his on my arms, both of us nervous, I think. Both of us wondering what to do next.

Chapter Twelve

Jackson

Don’t overthink it, Emily had texted. Don’t get up in your head, AJ had intimated. And yet I had SO MANY THOUGHTS, but I set them all aside and focused on us, AJ and me, face-to-face, well, almost face-to-face. I was standing, and he was sitting. Also, I couldn’t really look at him; my gaze was firmly fixed over his left shoulder, watching the snowfall in the glow of the faint streetlight down the road. We were both gloriously naked and hard.

I was slotted between his legs, and he was trailing his fingertips up and down my sides. Goose bumps popped up all over my body, and the sensation chased itself from the place where his fingers met my sides, traveling throughout my body, landing in a pulsing strain that rippled through my dick, which leaked like a fountain along the crease of my thigh.

His dick twitched again, and I finally found the bravery to stop babbling about his arms and look directly at it. I found him looking up at me.

“Tell me what you want.” He smiled at me with heavy-lidded eyes. I had seen him like this once or twice before, when we’d shared the hot tub downstairs with women. Those times we’d only ever looked at each other long enough for one of us to realize we needed to take our date elsewhere if we didn’t want to have sex in front of each other. Every time, one or the other of us hightailed it out of there to head behind closed doors.

Looking at him in such a state of arousal caused my heart to thump, the feel of it pulsing through my entire body. He looked beautiful in the soft light, gazing up at me with such concern, all of his attention and energy on me. I wanted so much to convince him that he hadn’t made a mistake, chasing me to the cabin, or kissing me, or getting naked with me. Fuck, I was overthinking again, wasn’t I?

I wanted so much to make him feel good. My thoughts focused, and that became all that mattered.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I finally replied as I let out a nervous little chuckle.

He sighed and laughed along with me. “Yeah, neither do I, but we’ve made it this far, and it's not like we’re virgins. We just …” He shrugged, then tugged on my arm. “I think we’ll figure it out.” He kept hold of my hand as he made his way up the bed, and I followed, hovering over him.

I propped my arms on either side of him and stared as he sat up against the headboard, my eyes darting everywhere, attempting to catalog everything about him.

His hands found my arms, rubbing reassuringly as he repeated, “Tell me what you want.” I answered the question by dropping my weight on him and kissing him again, my entire body singing as we touched each other from head to toe. He opened his legs, and I slotted between them, my cock brushing his directly for the first time. We stopped kissing at the same time to gasp at the sensation.

“Yeah, wow,” AJ whispered.

“Wait,” I said, reaching over to the nightstand where I had deposited supplies earlier in anticipation of an encounter very different from the one I was having. AJ’s eyes followed the motion, and he raised an eyebrow when I opened the drawer.

“Safety first,” I muttered as I grabbed the lube but started to shut the drawer on the condoms.

“Wait!” he said. “What. Do. You. Want?”

AJ and I talked about everything, so I knew he had performed anal sex before. Remembering that we used to talk about everything made it easier to say, “I do want to feel what that’s like at some point, but ...”

“Yeah, okay. I want that too.”

My eyes went wide momentarily at his confession. An hour ago, I wouldn’t have believed AJ capable of even kissing another man, yet here he was confessing to wanting to be fucked. I reached in and pulled out the condoms, a nervous, questioning look on my face. AJ seemed to clock my anxiousness and took the condoms from my hands. “And we’ll get there, Jax.”

He placed the box on the nightstand before pulling me back to him. We kissed some more, me lying on top of him, with his hands running up and down my spine until I was a writhing mess. Eventually, he rolled us on our sides.

“Are you ready, cariño?” I thought my heart would explode at the endearment, so I felt the need to play it off.

“You go to one lecture about a Spanish poet at the Y…”

He laughed, but then simply asked again, “Are you ready?” We were lying face-to-face, practically touching in a dozen places but not touching at all except where our hands rested on each other's sides.

I nodded slowly, and he kissed me lightly as he took my hand in his and guided it down to his member. My arousal was right there next to it, and he placed my hand on his cock before grasping mine. We both squeezed and tugged cautiously, and we both hitched a breath at the sensation.