Page 97 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

There’s nothing safe about this. I’m on my back with my knees up, eyes open under a man who owes me nothing. He’s told me exactly what he’ll accept. I’m thirty-eight years old and three days from eighteen months inside.

“Look at me,” he says.

“I am looking at you.”

“Don’t shut your eyes.”

“No.”

He gets a hand between us, takes hold of my cock, and strokes me in the rhythm of his hips. After that, I lose it. His forearm under my hand. The lamp. The drag of him inside me, over and over, hitting something that whites out the back of my eyes. His voice four inches away, saying my name over and over. There’s no question anywhere in it.

I go before he does. I come over his fist and my own stomach, clenching around him, and in the middle of it I say a word that isn’t English or planned.

He keeps hold of me through it. A few strokes later, he goes too, deep, with a sound against my jaw, and I feel it. He doesn’t pull out or get up.

He comes down onto me. One arm goes across my back; the other slides under my shoulder blades. His face presses into the side of my neck. He stays inside me, gives me his whole weight, and holds on without moving. I can feel his breath settle against my neck one exhale at a time. Nothing is being asked of me. For once, being held is the entire event.

“All right?” he says into my neck.

“Yes.”

“I’m not letting go for a bit.”

“Good,” I say. “Don’t.”

Monday morning is bright, and it’s going to be hot by ten.

He drives two hours west in a fifteen-year-old truck with a door that needs a shove. The window stays down because the air conditioning has never worked. He doesn’t put the radio on.

At the last services, he buys two coffees. He adds a bag of the terrible mints his brother likes and puts both in my hand without comment.

The facility is low and beige behind a wire fence. A visitors’ lot. A flagpole. Eleven cars in a line. On the steps is a woman with a boy of about six. He’s been told to be good. He is being good. It’s the worst sight I see all day.

He pulls the truck up in a bay.

I have a clear plastic bag with a court order, an identity document, and eighty dollars in it. I have no wallet, no notebook, no glasses case, no watch.

“Right,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Kieran.”

“Don’t,” he says. “Do it in eighteen months in your own kitchen.”

“All right.”

He doesn’t get out. I asked him not to. He listened. He didn’t argue or decide anything for me.

I open the door, get out, and shut it.

I walk to the steps.

At the top of them, at the door, with the guard already looking at my paperwork through the glass, I turn around.

He’s out of the truck.

He’s standing in the lot beside the driver’s door, arms at his sides in the heat. He doesn’t wave or call out. He stays where I can see him. He’s still there when the door shuts behind me. He’s broken the agreement by getting out of the truck, but not the promise underneath it. He’s not coming after me. He’s only making sure I can look back and find him.