He makes a noise, puts one knee back on the bed, but keeps his distance. My fingers skate down, and I know I’m more sensitive than I would be usually—one glancing touch from the soft pad of my index finger and my lower back arches from the bed. Reid sets a big, warm hand on the top of my raised knee, watching me with a hot concentration. God, that stitched-up brow, that bruise. I feel warm and liquid and desperate.

“Do you like being kissed there, too?” he says, after a few seconds.

“Sometimes.” When it’s hungry and unreserved, when it feels less about a technique for me than it is about some urgent, desperate need for him. “When I think . . . when I think the guy is into it.”

“I’m into it,” he says quickly, and I can’t help but smile. I hope it’s a smile of the sultry variety, but it’s probably more the irrepressible joy variety. I close my eyes, picture Reid’s head between my legs, those broad shoulders spreading me apart as he licks and sucks, and my fingers circle that firm nub with a faster, more insistent rhythm. Reid squeezes my knee, and I open my eyes again, stilling my fingers.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so worked up.”

“Don’t be sorry. Don’t—if this is all you want, you showing me what feels good—”

His saying it makes me realize how completely this is not all I want. Doing this—telling him, showing him—all of it has released me from the preoccupation with finishing. I want Reid to touch me; I want Reid inside of me, and I’m past caring if it gets me there. If it doesn’t I’ll happily take this same look in his eyes again as he watches me do it myself; I’ll happily let him practice again and again and again.

“This isn’t all I want.” I remove my hands from my body, prop myself on my elbows to get closer to him. Beneath his gray boxer briefs I can see him, long and hard, stretching the material tight, and I get an entirely new face-pressing instinct when it comes to Reid, but that’s going to have to wait until later, because I feel aching and empty between my legs, wet and worked up and ready.

“I want you. You and me, together.”