“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, and he wasn’t expecting the way his voice broke in the middle of the last word. But Noah didn’t make fun of him for it like he knew that Ken would have. He just looked faintly stunned, like he wasn’t used to being spoken to that way, and then a hesitant smile broke out on his face like the sun coming out from behind a thick gray cloud.
 
 “Come here. Stop hovering. Please?” Noah whispered out the words, and Darien couldn’t resist him. He lay down on his side, his cock tight against Noah’s hip, and he turned the other man’s head with a gentle hand so that he could kiss him again.
 
 Every moment, every movement of their bodies, was them drawing closer together. Darien kept expecting one or the other of them to pull away, to stop this before it got more intense, but neither of them shied away from what they were doing. One step, Darien took. Another, Noah did. Equally, step by step, they were headed down the new road of this relationship, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to Darien.
 
 Noah’s fingers slid over Darien’s chest, toying with his nipples, making the breath catch in his throat. Shameless, he moaned, arching his chest, pressing toward those clever, sweet fingers.
 
 His own hand moved, slipping over Noah’s tight, beautiful little body, tracing over the slender stomach and down. Every movement, from both of them, was done not only with the desire to bring each other pleasure, though that was there, but also with the nearly perfect understanding that this was bringing them closer.
 
 With exquisite, excruciating slowness, Noah’s hand slipped down and wrapped around Darien’s aching, throbbing erection, his fingers toying with the head of it, slick with precome.
 
 He touched Noah in return, and in perfect rhythm, they stroked each other, their movies unhurried but still urgent, bodies straining to fit together more closely as they lay side by side and pleasured each other.
 
 Noah was so slick. He’d leaked so much precome that Darien’s hand slid over him effortlessly, stroking him from the very tip all the way down his shaft, and then back up again. And Noah was doing the same to him, and there was not a time in the whole history of the world when a simple hand job had felt like too much.
 
 “Noah,” Darien gasped. “Noah, I don’t want to come this way.” And he could come, far too easily. He could spill all over Noah’s clever, knowing hands if he let himself. But even what they were doing wasn’t close enough for him. He wanted more, far more.
 
 “I know,” Noah admitted. “I don’t want to, either. I want you inside of me.”