Page 96 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“Does it hurt now?”

“When I cough. Not now.”

He doesn’t say anything else about it. He puts me on my back in the middle of the bed and turns on the lamp in the corner instead of the overhead light. He takes his own clothes off in about nine seconds, the first ungraceful move he makes all night.

Then he goes down and takes his time about all of it—his mouth on my chest, my stomach, the soft places I’ve spent twenty years keeping out of the light. Then my cock, which he takes in his hand first and then his mouth, slowly, as if he’s learning it.

He’s not good at this. I didn’t expect that the first time, and it still undoes me more than skill would. Men have been taking the lead with him since he was twenty-one; he’s almost never been the one doing it. He goes slowly because he doesn’t know. He asks. He watches my face for the answer. When a touch works, he does it again.

He gets the bottle from my drawer. He warms it in his hand first, which nobody has ever done for me in my life.

“Tell me,” he says.

“You’re all right.”

“No. Tell me exactly what you want. That’s condition two, in bed. You tell me what’s happening. I’ll do it.”

I’ve never said it aloud to another person in thirty-eight years, in a house or a hotel or a car or anywhere else.

“Slow,” I say. “And keep your other hand where it is.”

“Here?”

“Yes. Keep it there.”

He pushes one slick finger into me. Then, a long time later, a second. It’s been a very long time since anybody was inside me. My body doesn’t know what to do with it, and then it does.

He keeps it there. His hand stays flat on my sternum while the other one works. I lie on my back under a lamp in my own apartment on Alder Quay and breathe in the small way I’ve learned to. He doesn’t hurry. Every so often he asks, still? I say yes. He goes on.

Twice I get a hand up to cover my face, which I’ve never done, either. Both times he takes it down by the wrist and puts it back on the bed.

“Stop hiding.”

“I’m not.”

“You’ve got your arm over your eyes in your own house.” He puts his mouth against the inside of my knee. “Nobody’s coming in. There’s nothing to file. It’s a Friday.”

The wall four feet outside the window has gone orange with what’s left of the sun, which I’ve watched alone from this bed for eleven years.

It takes a long time, and I don’t want it to take less.

“Now?” he says.

“Yes. Now.”

He comes up over me and pushes my knees up with a hand behind each one. I feel the blunt head of his cock against me. Then he goes in. Slowly. He’s big and it’s not comfortable, a thick, relentless stretch. I make a sound I would be ashamed of in any other room in the world.

He stops dead.

“Keep going,” I say.

“You’re sure?”

“Keep going. I’ll say if we need to stop. That’s the deal we just made, and I’m going to hold to it. You have to believe me.” I get a hand around the back of his neck. “Keep going, Kieran.”

He keeps going.

For twenty years, I arranged sex so it happened to somebody else. Contained. Half an hour. A city I was working in. A shut hotel room door with nothing of mine on the floor. I understood the entire time that it was the safe version.