Page 11 of Pansies

“Don’t go.” There was a pause. “Just…just…”

Alfie rose, and Fen reached out to embrace him, and they fell together onto the bed. It groaned and creaked beneath them, and Alfie winced internally, and maybe a little bit externally, because it was a sex noise. Not necessarily a gay sex noise. But some part of him thought people might instinctively know how to tell the difference.

Then Fen raised his knees to cradle Alfie’s hips, pulling their bodies more tightly together, and Alfie sweetly, helplessly, drowned in skin. Fen’s hands swept over his shoulders, and he felt taken and held and wanted.

“You feel so good.” Fen’s breath was hot against his neck. “So strong.”

His hips writhed under Alfie’s, nudging their cocks together, which was so completely and perfectly the right sort of not enough that Alfie could only groan.

“So safe.”

Alfie kissed him under the chin. Then again at the base of his throat. The tender, beating spot beneath his ear. Everything was heat and sweat and corn-silk secrets.

“Alfie?”

“Yeah?”

“H-hold my hands.”8

“Erm, what?”

“Hold my hands, pin them down.”

Alfie hesitated.

Fen’s eyes fluttered open, caught Alfie with their hunger and their pleading, and would not relinquish him. “Don’t hurt me. Just…just hold me.”

Alfie wasn’t really into what he thought of as kinky stuff, but he was very, very into Fen. And he would have agreed to pretty muchanything when he was asked in a voice so frayed with longing.

“Like this?” He wrapped a hand around one of Fen’s wrists and pressed it tentatively against the bed. Fen arched and whimpered, closed his eyes tight, and nodded. Offered up his other wrist, not like a sacrifice at all, and Alfie kissed it before he claimed it.

He expected Fen to feel fragile beneath his hands, but he didn’t. He didn’t at all. His wrists were slender, yes, but supple, like maybe an artist’s or a musician’s, used to moving and working. The muscles on his forearms stood out so strongly Alfie wanted to lick down the straining ridges of them. Except they were both as good as trapped. His hands holding Fen’s hands. Their bodies locked together.

So Alfie kissed him and kept kissing him until they were both beyond breathless, and everything was wet and hot, and Fen was moving under him, not struggling but clumsily driving their bodies together.

Alfie’s mouth was full of groans, incapable, so he pressed it against Fen’s neck, tasting sweat and fever.

“Yes, oh…oh yes.” Fen’s voice was sweet and wild, heedless, his head thrown back, straining against the hotel pillows.

Their bodies writhed and twisted, rough, uncertain pleasure conjured between them like flame from flint. It was beautiful and maddening, and Alfie never wanted it to stop.

Fen was all in pieces: broken words and fading gasps, touching Alfie everywhere and nowhere in flashes of too-much-too-little sensation, soft and harsh and strong and fragile, all skin and sweat-slick heat. He rolled under Alfie, restless but relentless, a wave with its own currents, its own tides, turning everything to bliss, his cock pressed between them, sliding within and against the constrictions of their pressed together selves. His heart wasbeating so hard and fast that Alfie almost thought he could reach down, gather it into the palm of his hand, and hold it safe against the world.

“God,” he muttered. “Fen.”

Fen’s eyelashes flickered in answer. Sweat gleamed on his brow and his upper lip, made the hair stick to his neck and shoulders like curls of gilt on marble. He was flushed, flushed all over, as if he was some fresh-made creature from a world of silk and fire.

“You’re…so…beautiful like.” Fuck, what was he doing, what was he saying?

But then Fen stiffened, shuddered, and came with a shattered cry that sounded as close to despair as it did to pleasure. He fell back against the pillows, breathless, eyes still pressed tightly closed in stark contrast to the sudden slackness of his body.

Alfie, thrown into uncertainty again, hastily released his wrists and rolled away, landing on his back at Fen’s side.

Fen was still shaking, his hands clenched and abandoned on the pillow where Alfie had left them.

The silence went on forever, and Alfie wasn’t sure what to do about it. He tried to ignore the fact his cock was bouncing in the air like a commuter trying to hail a taxi through rush-hour traffic.

“Uh, look.” When Fen opened a tiny sliver of one eye, Alfie pointed to the twin silver-white smears that crossed their bodies. “Matching.”

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