Page 19 of Top Shelf
“Did I say that out loud?” My ears were burning with mortification. My inability to keep my thoughts inside my head was going to kill me.
“No. I just recognized the look on your face. It was the same look I had when I first saw your dick.” He reached out and gripped my cock, giving it a single stroke from root to tip. I groaned and thrust into the circle of his fingers, and he let me chase the sensation before letting me go.
“Fuck,” I gasped.
“Not yet.” His words were careful and tender, even as they were commanding. “Not yet, okay? I don’t want you to run out of steam before this is over, and I think when we finally get to that part, it’s going to take you out.”
Right. And it would also be over then. That would be the big finale. The conclusion. This wasn’t a forever thing. It wasn’t even for a little while. It was one and done.
The moment he dropped me back off at my place, that was it.
And that was what I wanted…right?
It had to be.
With my chest tight, I eased back away from him, then shuffled until I was situated on the mattress between his spread legs. I could see his scars up close now, and they were deeply cut.
“This one is from the accident,” he said, touching one that didn’t have any straight lines or symmetry. It went from mid-thigh to just past his knee. “The rest are from the surgeries that saved my leg.”
“I’m sorry. It still hurts?”
“A lot of my nerves are dead,” he admitted. His voice was tight, and I could tell that he didn’t like talking about it. I forced my gaze up and met his. He deserved the eye contact—as much of it as I could give. And while I would never, ever naturally be able to look at him like this, he was one of the few people who didn’t make it hurt. His eyes were so…soft. So pretty. “My knee won’t bend more than about twenty-five degrees, and it hurts all the way down to my toes when I try.”
I ran my fingers over it, and his entire body twitched. I yanked my hand back. “Sorry.”
“No.” He seized my wrist and dragged my touch back. “That feels nice. Most people don’t want to—ah…” He took a pause. “I don’t get touched there a lot. I don’t hate the way your hands feel.”
I pressed a little harder, dragging my fingers along each scar. The sensation of them was…interesting. Different. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it. I wanted to explore, but then his dick twitched again, and I remembered what I was supposed to be doing.
“Can I suck you without a condom?”
Something caught in his chest, and he had a tiny coughing fit. “Ah. That’s up to you, gorgeous.”
My neck felt all hot when he called me that. “I…well. It’s…” I took a beat to find my words. “You’ve been tested, right? I really don’t want to get herpes on my mouth. And I know it would be silly to trust you because you could just lie and then disappear, and never face the consequences, but?—”
He cupped my jaw to stop my rambling. “First of all, you know exactly who I am, so it’s not like I could actually disappear. Secondly, I hope you trust me a little. I haven’t had unprotected sex since a couple of drunk nights when I was nineteen. I was tested regularly when I was playing, and I’ve been tested several times since. I also haven’t been with anyone casually in about five years.” His thumb grazed my lower lip as my eyes widened. Five years? That couldn’t be possible. This man was so fucking beautiful—how did he keep people away from him? “I have my last round of results on my phone if you want to see.”
I nodded. That was the responsible thing to do, right? I didn’t really know what was socially appropriate. I never heard the guys talking about it, though a few of them had bitched about the dick swab after a wild night. But all I could think about were those little sex-ed PSAs from middle school.
Quinn rumbled a laugh as he grabbed his phone from the nightstand, and with a few swipes of his finger, he had his email up. “There you go. Just click on it. That way, you can tell it’s not some doctored screenshot I grabbed off Google Images.”
“D-do people do that?”
“People do a lot of ridiculous things to get laid,” he said with a shrug.
My fingers were still a little shaky as I clicked open the email and then tapped the attachment. The truth was, I didn’t know what I was reading at all. I’d never done this, and my parents were always the ones to handle any blood tests that I’d gotten,but after my eyes threatened to go crossed, I finally found something.
Negative. Negative. Six times.
“That’s a lot of tests.”
“I also got a prostate exam and a filling in my molar the day I got this done,” he said, grinning as he took the phone back and set it down with a thud. A moment of silence passed, and then he took both my hands in his and brought them to his lips, kissing my knuckles. “You’re sweet—and I don’t mean that in a patronizing way, Ferris. I have no business getting even a single night with you, but I’m grateful you trust me.”
I didn’t know what to say, and I was terrible at taking compliments. I wanted to put my hand over his face and shove him.
“You can suck me however you want,” he went on. “Or not at all. Some people like it with a condom because they hate the taste of jizz. Some people can’t stand latex, so they prefer to go bare. You get to choose what you want to try.”
I took a breath in through my nose, then freed my hands and pressed them over his pecs. He groaned and arched into me, so I rubbed harder, watching the flush crawl over his skin. God, why couldn’t I have this all the time? Why couldn’t my life be different?
