Page 86 of Unstitch

Everything has to come from him.

I won’t have him blaming me for muddying his brain.

‘Fuck,’ he whispers. He sets down his beer bottle with a trembling hand, its base clattering a little on the marble.

‘Dex.’

His eyes are wild and huge and troubled and ravenous. It’s just me and him in the middle of my kitchen in broad daylight. No shower. No locked office door. No Darcy.

‘I haven’t worked out what I ought to want,’ he stammers. ‘I have no fucking clue, in fact.’ He falters, and I wait. ‘But I know what I do want.’

I’d call that progress. ‘Go on.’

‘The other day, after you’d left.’ He takes a hurried gulp of his beer and sets the bottle down again, licking his lips. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about how your hair had got messed up when you… And I wished I’d had the guts to rake it back into place for you.’ He lowers his voice to almost a whisper. ‘And I wished I’d had the guts to ask you to kiss me, too, because it was all I could think about afterwards.’

Something tightens in my chest, a physical memento of how painful it was to keep my emotional distance that day. Having taken something so intimate from him, it felt prudent to stay dispassionate. Stern, almost. He may not be aware of this, but he needed, in that office, to be able to fall apart and know that I had my shit together.

The way he’s looking at me, though.

It’s as though he might die if I touch him, but he’ll definitely die if I don’t. He’s a droplet of water trembling on a wind-teased leaf, so contained, so impossibly pure and undefiled, yet so fragile. So vulnerable.

It seems to me he’s no less conflicted than he’s been any other time I’ve seen him, but there’s a courage there, a sort of moral fortitude that’s determined to seek out the answers he owes himself rather than defaulting to well-trodden lies and endless prevarication.

I’m the cause of all these troubles—of that I have no doubt—and I want so very much not to be. I want to be a channel for them. I want him to unstitch this toxic cloak of godawful religious bullshit and false virtue and throw it to the ground and let me see him. Let me really, truly see him.

Even more than I want to shove him face-down and fuck him into the limestone floor, I want him to lay every last trouble at my feet and let me take them from him, because God knows, I won’t let them weigh me down for a second. Sins lie as weightless as feather-down on me.

I’m a selfish man. I take and I push, without thought or remorse, but he makes me want to be selfless, because in this moment I neither want to take nor push him.

I simply want to free him.

I want him soaring and shameless and unleashed.

It works best for him, it seems, when I tell him exactly what to do. He may not know he likes it, but it’s what he needs. It removes all the doubt, all the responsibility.

It absolves him.

I gaze at his mouth, at the slick of moisture the beer has left on his bottom lip, at the faintest arc its bottle has impressed above his Cupid’s bow, and I marvel that he’s met me in the middle of his own accord. Confessed aloud the kinds of desires he would rather have died than admitted to before now.

‘Well, you’d better get over here, then,’ is all I say.

58

DEX

He’s so still. So entirely sure of himself. So commanding, without raising his voice or a finger. And it makes me want to put myself in his hands. Literally. Metaphorically. Emotionally. Spiritually, because I will give him my fucking soul if he wants it.

There’s a smudge of colour high on his cheekbones, like the sun kissed him very recently, and I wonder how he managed to sunbathe during the work-week.

His forearms are taut, so taut, beneath the rolled-up sleeves of his slubbed linen shirt, and I can’t stop myself from wondering how it would feel to have one of them banded around my throat as he tugged on my cock, laughingly and tauntingly and mercilessly.

His eyes are so blue they terrify me, because they possess none of the molasses-soft subterfuge of dark eyes. There’s nowhere to hide when those eyes are on you.

And they’re on me now, and that stillness is quite extraordinary. I made my move, and he’s made his, and now he’s waiting for me to raise or fold.

Whether walking straight into his arms is raising or folding, I’m unclear, which seems unwise, reckless even, with the stakes this high.

But walk I do, and I take all of one step before he’s rushing forward to meet me, to yank me close, to band that arm around me and plaster me against his hard body, to grip my hair so brutally my eyes prick, and to finally, finally kiss me.

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