Page 52 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say that isn’t either a lie or the sentence I turned face down on the table.

He turns around.

“I want you to do something for me.” He says it standing in my kitchen with his shirt collar still damp and the lamp on behind him.

He says it plainly, like a shot count. He doesn’t soften it or make it a joke. He doesn’t look away while he’s saying it. By the third sentence, there’s a muscle going in his jaw, his hands open at his sides.

“Face down,” he says. “I want you to hold me there. I don’t want to be able to move. I don’t want you asking if I’m all right in the middle of it, because I’ll say the polite thing. We’ll both stop. If I want it to stop, I’ll say Nashville. That’s the only word for stop. Otherwise, you keep going.”

“Nashville?”

“Nashville.”

“And if you can’t say it?”

He’s quiet for a second. He’s driven twenty minutes in the rain thinking about this.

“Then I’ll hit the headboard with my hand. Twice. If you have your hand on my mouth, that’s what you’re watching for.”

I take my glasses off and put them on the counter. “You want my hand on your mouth.”

“Yes.”

“Say the rest of it.”

“I want you to hold my wrists. I want your hand over my mouth. Tell me what I am while you do it.” He says it in the same flat voice he uses whenever he tells me the truth, in a hospital parking lot, on an airplane, in a visitors’ room in Nashville with a trainer’s tape cart four feet away. “I’ve been told what I am six different ways tonight by people who don’t know one thing about me, and I would like to hear it once from the man who does.”

The rain hits the window.

“All right,” I say.

“You’ll do it?”

“I’ll do it. Two things first.” I hold up a finger for each. “If your hip goes, we stop and we don’t negotiate about it. I’ll decide that, not you. And afterward, you’re not going anywhere. You sleep here.”

He looks at me for a while.

“Okay,” he says.

I take his clothes off in my bedroom with the lamp on.

Not slowly. He doesn’t want slowly. Shirt off the shoulders and onto the chair. The undershirt over his head. Belt, pants. I put my hand flat between his shoulder blades and push. He goes down onto the bed on his front without one word of protest and turns his face to the side on the pillow.

There’s a new bruise across his left hip the size of a hand. There’s the old one on the thigh, gone yellow-green at the edges. Down the back of his right calf there’s a line of stitching scars from a skate cut nobody has ever mentioned to me.

I put my hand on the back of his neck and hold it there.

“Nashville,” I say. “Say it once now, so it’s in the room.”

He goes still. Then, into the pillow: “Nashville.”

“Good.”

I get the bottle out of the drawer. I get my shirt off, then my pants. I’m hard enough that it aches. I stay behind him, where he can’t see me. The first thing I do is put my whole weight down across the backs of his thighs, my cock lying heavy along the crease of his ass, so he knows the shape of what’s coming.

He makes a sound into the pillow that isn’t a word.

I slick my fingers and push the first one into his hole. It’s not gentle. He’s tight enough that he goes up onto his elbows on it. I put a hand between his shoulder blades, push him flat again, and keep going. Two, then a third, hard, fast, deep, the lube loud and wet, his rim clenching hot around my knuckles, my thumb pressed into the muscle at the top of his thigh. His back is shaking and he has both fists in the sheet.