Page 45 of Unwritten Rules
“I just mean, I can take a lot of stuff, Zach. Just it can’t be likethis, all right?”
“Like what?”
“You know what I mean.” Eugenio’s hands are tense on the bedspread. “We can’t pretend this is how things are. That this is anything more than what it is. It’s not fair to either one of us.”
“I’m sorry.” Zach lies back on the pile of too-soft hotel pillows, looking at the unblinking white of the ceiling. “You’re right.”
“We don’t have to stop. I wouldn’t have come over if I didn’t want to.” And he has that shake in his hands, the one he gets late at night when he can’t sleep or before a game working with a new pitcher. The one that makes Zach reach down, sliding his fingers over Eugenio’s, thumb brushing over the familiar shape of his knuckles.
“Okay,” Zach says. They lie there for a long minute, Zach feeling the rhythm of Eugenio’s breathing at his shoulder, their fingers intertwined.
“Okay,” he says again, “we can do whatever you want, rook.” It startles Eugenio into laughing, hundreds of games into his playing career.
He rolls onto Zach, hands on his shoulders, pinning him. He reaches down and pulls his cock out, smearing the wet head at the skin next to Zach’s navel like he’s just gonna rub himself off that way.
“Oh, it’s gonna be likethat?” Zach laughs and uses his elbows to lever Eugenio off, tossing him back onto the bed with a thump and stripping his boxers down, putting his mouth everywhere but his cock, until Eugenio calls him a few choice names and tells him to fucking get to it already.
From there, it’s loud, mattress frame hitting against the wall, Eugenio laughing when Zach runs his hands up his ribs, to the ticklish spot still below one armpit. When Zach turns him onto his belly and spends time sucking bite marks down the muscles of his back.
“There’s lube in the front pocket of my suitcase,” Zach says.
“Is that a suggestion?” And he gasps when Zach slaps him, open-palmed on the meat of his thigh, pinking the skin up a little. “Fuck. I’m going, I’m going.”
Zach watches him bend down appreciatively, Eugenio rolling his eyes and tossing the lube onto the bed. He allows Zach to encourage him onto his stomach, head turned to the side on one of the pillows. And Zach considers the bottle lying next to him, before leaning in, pressing a kiss to the rise of Eugenio’s ass, then another, then another, before finally committing, tongue against his hole.
Eugenio reaches back, tapping the top of Zach’s head with one hand. “Why’d you make me go get the lube if you were just going to do that?”
“You’re too coherent. It’s kind of insulting.”
“Fix it, then.”
“Believe me, I’m trying to.” He dedicates himself to wringing sounds from Eugenio, as he licks him, getting him wetter, sliding in the tip of his tongue the way Eugenio gave him his fingers to suck in the restaurant bathroom, enough to make him feel it, but not enough to be satisfying.
Eugenio’s hands are gripping the sheets, feet restless against the bedspread, whatever control he’s exercising breaking when Zach adds the tip of his lubed index finger and pushes his knuckles against his perineum. When Eugenio gives up any pretense of doing anything other than hump the bed. When he stutters his hips and demands Zach add another finger and another, and Zach slaps him again, a hit against the skin high on his inner thigh, following it with a sharp dig with the edge of his fingernails, leaving half-moon impressions and soliciting a grunt.
“Please,” Eugenio says, “Zach, please.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to be nice to you.” Though he adds his middle and ring fingers, and Eugenio presses his face into the pillow and pants Zach’s name.
His cock is dripping on the blankets, balls drawing up toward his body. “Hey, what the fuck,” he says, when Zach withdraws his hand.
“You were about to come.”
“Probably.” And he makes a face when Zach reminds him it was his birthday a week ago, making him officially thirty-one. “Well, if you’re not gonna do anything about it.”
He rolls onto his back, reaching for his cock like he’s just going to stroke himself off and go to sleep, and Zach laughs, grabbing at his wrists and pinning them together before taking him into his mouth.
He doesn’t go for real suction, just letting the walls of his cheeks do the work, tongue poking at his foreskin, spit rolling down, his weight on Eugenio so he can’t buck into his mouth, his fingers a tight bruising circle around his wrists.
“Fuck, fuck, okay, fuck,” Eugenio says. “Just fuck me already.”
“Sorry,” Zach jokes, “the people in the next room couldn’t hear you.” And Eugenio says it again, louder, making Zach laugh, though it’s loud enough that there’s a thump on the wall and a muffled request for them to keep it down.
There’s lube. Lube but no condoms, not any in Zach’s suitcase when Eugenio practically turns it inside out looking for one.
“We can stop,” Eugenio says, “or do something else.”
“There wasn’t anyone serious after you. Or really, other than you. Ever.” And something about the way he says it makes Eugenio walk over and kiss him, sweet, like they’re not supposed to be with one another. His hands cup the sides of Zach’s face, and he traces his finger over the skin above Zach’s ear the way he used to.
