Page 28 of After Hours

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“My grandma invited you to Thanksgiving.” Zane washed his plate and slid it onto the drying rack as he glanced over to where I sat at the kitchen island. “Wyatt and I go every year, and I guess I’ve been talking about you so much she can’t wait to meet you.”

Thanksgiving was a pretty huge deal at the O’Donnell house. Not as big as Christmas or Easter, of course, but an opportunity to get everyone together. Besides all my siblings and their families, aunts, uncles, and cousins came in from all over to feast, watch football, and visit. I wondered if Finn and Carter did anything special at the inn but hadn’t heard a word.

“You told your grandma about me?”

Zane finished rinsing the last fork before turning around to smile at me. “Of course I did. You’re not a secret or anything. Grandma calls me every Thursday, you know.”

“Well, I didn’t know. I mean, sometimes older people are…” Judging Zane’s grandmother by the standards of my family wasn’t fair, but I had no other frame of reference.

He came around the island and wrapped his arms around me. “Baby, she’s known I was gay since I came out to my parents at fourteen. They told her I started wearing nail polish, and she showed up to family dinner with a gift-wrapped bottle of her favorite peachy pink shade. Said it looked good with our skin tone. My usual shades at the time were black, dark blue, and purple, but I wore that Sunrise Peach the next time I saw her. Of course, I told her about you.”

I squeezed him back and rested my head on the perfect spot on his shoulder. “I’d love to go to Thanksgiving with you. Is it a huge family thing? Am I going to meet your parents?”

“No, not yet. They stay in Florida and host a bunch of friends down there.” He pulled back to give me a bittersweet smile. “Dad can’t travel well, and they say their liberal friends need them since there are so many idiots around. We’ll go down there together in the spring maybe, yeah?”

The overwhelming normality of it all made the corners of my eyes burn. Family dinners with my boyfriend. Flying to Florida to meet his parents in spring. Those were long-term relationship plans. Not that I thought Zane was going to dump me anytime soon, but…

The memory of those two men walking hand-in-hand outside the Halcyon Inn the day I arrived came to mind. I had wanted to be like them so badly, and now that dream was coming true. Thanks to Zane, all my dreams were coming true. I shook my head, which earned me an odd glance from my boyfriend. Yes, Zane was a dream, but it was really thanks to me that the new, wonderful, free life was possible.

“I love you, Zane.” The words popped out with no planning or thought.

His hazel eyes flew wide, and his hands tightened on my hips. “Oscar, I… Fucking hell, I love you too, baby. So much.”

We crashed together in the hottest, most intense kiss of my life, and that was saying a lot after all the times I’d kissed Zane in the past few months. I got hard so fast I gasped into his mouth. He tasted like coffee and syrup and everything I’d always wanted.

Zane shifted his hold, drawing me even tighter against his body, and it was obvious he was right there on the edge with me. “Oscar.” His breath ghosted over my ear as he shifted from mouth to neck and downward. He knew every hotspot, and his lips paused on one right at the juncture of my neck and shoulder.

My first attempt at speech came out as nothing but a low moan. I tried again. “Zane, I want you. Can we… bedroom… please.”

He pulled back just enough to meet my eyes. “What do you want, Oscar? Anything.”

“Everything.”

Fingers left impressions of heat and pleasure on my jaw, my neck, my back as we somehow made our way down the short hall to Zane’s bedroom. The door thumped hard against the wall, but we didn’t pause on our journey to the bed. My shirt disappeared, and his followed after it. Firm muscles covered every inch of his torso, a secret just for me usually hidden under baggy hoodies.

Something possessive rose in me, a totally unfamiliar feeling, but one I discovered I liked. I liked a lot what was happening right then. When Zane’s mouth landed on my chest, his tongue flicking over my nipple, I cried out and collapsed on the bed.

His chuckle broke through the lust, and I smiled up at the man I loved. His chest against mine and his hands on my skin were hotter than anything, but the fact that I had his heart and not just his body made it everything.

“Zane, I want everything,” I repeated, and something blazed in his amber-flecked eyes.

I’d never done this before. I never even unwrapped the dildo I ordered from the online shop and hid at the very bottom of a locked box deep in my closet. My hands didn’t tremble when I reached for Zane’s waistband, and I shifted to give his own fingers room to shove my pants down. That I knew. We’d stroked, sucked, frotted, and rubbed off against each other enough times to chuck any claim to ‘virgin’ out the window for good.

“Are you nervous, baby? You know we don’t have to—”

His cock lay hard and heavy against my hip, and I reached down to grab it before he could get another word out. Zane’s mouth shot open, and he bucked against me.

“I want this in me. I wantyouin me. You already fill my heart, but I want more.”

“Fuck, Oscar. You are unbelievable.”

Words became useless as we moved together in all the ways that we knew were best. Hands and mouths took turns exploring every inch of each other’s bodies. I never knew before Zane that a quick suck of a nipple could make my cock throb and leak. His eyes widened every time my palm rolled gently over his balls.

One finger slipped behind them to the smooth stretch of skin I’d never touched before. “Do you ever bottom?” I knew I wanted to, and Zane was totally on board with that. I stroked harder on that secret place, and he cried out and bit my shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m versatile.” He leaned up to look at me when he caught his breath again. “Do you want to fuck me? I thought… I’m good either way. Any way I can get you, Oscar.”

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