Chapter 13

Andrew

 

It was almost four when we returned to our room with our freshly washed clothes. The day had been sticky hot, so we each grabbed a shower. While Eric took his, I put on a pair of shorts and sat down at the desk to check my email. Might as well see if I’d had any nibbles on the four thousand job applications I’d sent out this morning. None yet, but I reminded myself it was still early in the U.S. And maybe I’d send out a few more tonight just to be on the safe side. Assuming we didn’t wind up going out and coming back in really late. That was always a possibility.

The shower shut off, and a moment later, Eric came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist. A few droplets trickled from his dark hair onto his neck and shoulders. Good God, he looked hot like that, especially with his hair mussed and sort of halfheartedly finger-combed.

I looked him up and down. “You know, if we have any hope of going out and doing any tourist stuff tonight, you walking around like that isn’t helping.”

He laughed. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“Why do you think?” I hooked a finger in his towel and tugged him closer to me. He laughed and let me. Bracketed between my thighs, he rested his forearms on my bare shoulders and lowered his head for a kiss.

“We’re not being very good tourists today, are we?” he murmured.

“We adulted today.” I brushed my lips across his. “That should be enough to earn us sex and ice cream.”

Eric burst out laughing. “Sex and ice cream?”

“Why not? We’re in Italy.” I lifted myself up and grinned down at him. “We fuck, and then we go find gelato.” With a shrug, I added, “That seems like a reasonable reward for doing laundry like adults.”

He rolled his eyes and laughed some more. As he drew me back in, he said, “You’re a dork, and I love it. Now c’mere.”

I chuckled, but his kiss silenced me, and I let him lead me from the desk chair to the bed. Somewhere along the way, his towel landed on the floor. So did my shorts and briefs. When we sank onto the bed, we were completely naked, his damp skin pressed against mine.

For ages—I mean fucking ages—we lay there, lazily making out and teasing each other. He stroked my dick. I played with his. As turned on as I was, he could have gotten me off in seconds if he wanted to, but he wasn’t in any more of a hurry than I was. Sometimes his fingers drifted down and teased my balls, and sometimes I’d slide a couple of fingers inside him just to make him gasp like that.

I’d never had the kind of sex I did with Eric, and it had nothing to do with the physical differences. Sure, I’d never been a with a trans guy before him, so there’d been some new things to experience, but when I said the sex we had was different, I meant the entire experience. Everything. When we had sex, I was utterly consumed by him. Wherever we were—on a ship, in a hotel, it didn’t matter—the entire world outside disappeared until we were done. Sometimes we were rough and hungry. Other times we were so slow and lazy, I didn’t even know if orgasms were part of the agenda. Either way, once we started turning each other on, my focus narrowed to Eric and nothing else.

Once his hands or his mouth were on me, it was just us. Naked in bed with him, I didn’t have dwindling financial reserves or a daunting job hunt ahead of me. Nothing else existed, and if it did, it didn’t matter.

And you were worried about that guy at the laundromat?

The thought made me hold Eric even closer. I didn’t want to bring that guy up now. I’d seen in Eric’s eyes that he’d been uneasy and, yeah, maybe even insecure over me talking to the guy. And I supposed I didn’t blame him. The man had come in asking if I knew how to find some street or another, and then gone right into being flirty. It had been flattering as hell because the dude could’ve walked into any gay bar on the planet and had every man in the room at his feet, and I wasn’t used to being approached, but ditching Eric for him? Not a chance.

I slid my hand down his side and rolled him into his back. He parted his thighs, letting my hips settle between them, and moaned softly into my kiss as he wrapped his arms around me. I kissed down the side of his face, tracing the edge of his beard, then over his jaw and onto his neck. Another moan thrummed against my lips. He arched under me, dragging his fingers up my back as I kissed along his throat.

“Jesus,” he murmured. “Have I mentioned recently how much I love your mouth?”

“Mmm, I think you said something about that, yeah.” I flicked my tongue across the hollow of his throat. “Anything in particular you want me to do with it?”

He squeezed my hips with his thighs. “I think you know exactly what I want you to do.”

Goose bumps sprang up along my spine. Just thinking about him losing his mind while I teased him with my tongue sent heat through my entire body. Without a word, I started kissing my way down, and Eric writhed and arched as I planted soft kisses down the middle of his chest and over his smooth abs.

He swore when I curved my hands over his hips and swirled my tongue around his cock. God, I would never get tired of the sounds Eric made when I went down on him. Or the way he’d grip my hair and lift his hips to press harder against my mouth. His thighs trembled and his fingers kneaded my hair and his curses were progressively louder and more breathless.

In the beginning, I’d been nervous about my technique since I’d never done this before, but now? Hell, I was hooked on being so wrapped up in turning him on that everything else—even my worries about not knowing what I was doing—just… disappeared. Any time insecurity broke through and I worried I wasn’t great at this just because this was new, Eric would whimper and grind against me, begging for more.

And you thought I’d even consider wandering off with someone else?

I held his hips tighter and doubled down, licking and teasing for all I was worth.

“Oh fuck,” Eric moaned, gripping my hair tight enough to make my scalp sting. “K-keep… oh yeah…”

I didn’t stop. My tongue was starting to ache, but I ignored it because Eric was losing it, and nothing in the world turned me on more. He fucked against my mouth, slurring something that sounded like “don’t stop, don’t stop” as he held my hair in a death grip, and then he cried out as his back arched and his hips jerked. I held his hips as still as I could and kept going until he nudged my head away.

As I lifted myself up, he collapsed back to the mattress, a hand over his eyes as if the light in the room was suddenly too bright. I grinned and licked my lips; God, I loved the sight of him like that—panting and shaking as his orgasm’s aftershocks rippled through him.

“Holy shit,” he murmured.

I lay beside him, trailing my hand up the middle of his chest. “You’re so hot when you come like that.”

Eric lowered his hand and grinned at me. “Which reminds me—now it’s my turn to make you come.”

“Mmm, I’m not going to say no to that.”

“No?” He slid closer and, as he nudged me onto my back, climbed on top. “You sure?”

I grinned up at him. “Have I ever protested?”

“Can’t say you have.” He leaned down to kiss me but only let it linger for a second before he mirrored what I’d done earlier, kissing down my neck and onto my chest. Then he moved all the way down, and suddenly my cock was deep in his mouth, and… oh God, yeah. He hardly owed me an orgasm after I’d gotten him off, but I wasn’t saying no to the magic he worked with his mouth.

He kissed up and down the shaft. Swirled his tongue around the head. Deep-throated. Licked. Sucked. Fluttered. Teased my balls. Teased… fuck, he even kissed and nipped at the skin of my inner thighs. And just when I didn’t think I could handle any more, he looked up at me and sucked two fingers into his mouth.

“Oh God,” I moaned, spreading my legs wider. “Yeah…”

Eric grinned up at me. Then he started on my dick again, and he pushed two spit-slicked fingers into my ass, and my eyes rolled back as the twin sensations of being sucked and fucked overwhelmed me.

“Yeah,” I moaned. “Yeah, that’s… fuck…”

He groaned around my cock. His fingers crooked just right, and his tongue made slow, perfect circles around the head of my dick. He wasn’t in any hurry, licking and sucking and fingering, and there was nothing for me to do except lie back and enjoy it. This was the best kind of blowjob—no rush. No need to get from point A to point B as soon as possible; he went down on me the same way I went down on him—like it was just as hot to give as it was to receive.

“God, yeah, baby,” I moaned. “Keep going just like that.”

He crooked his fingers a little more, and his mouth was utterly relentless on the head of my cock, and it was only a matter of seconds before he had me careening over the edge in a flurry of groaned curses. I tried not to thrust into his mouth, but damn, when I came that hard it was impossible not to move. Eric moaned and egged me on with his voice and with his fingers, and I fucked into his mouth as he coaxed a long, intense orgasm out of me.

The second it became too much, he stopped, and I sagged back onto the sheets as he slid his fingers free. He came up beside me, and I pulled him in for a kiss. I was dizzy and breathless but still wanted to kiss him. I couldn’t help myself; I couldn’t get enough of anything he did, whether it was languid kissing until our lips were swollen or sixty-nining until our necks were stiff or one of us fucking the other until our legs turned to rubber.

Better get as much as I can because he’s not going to be around much longer.

The thought pushed the breath out of me.

I was going to miss all this amazing sex, but mostly, I was going to miss Eric. God. Saying goodbye at the end of this trip was—

Not something I had to think about tonight.

I cuddled closer to him, savoring the warmth of his skin against mine. No, all that could wait. For tonight, I had him, and I felt amazing, and that was all that mattered.

“I think,” he slurred, “you said something about hunting down some ice cream.”

“Mmhmm. I did.” I nuzzled his neck. “‘Cause after sex like that, it’s either ice cream or a cigarette.”

“Well hell. When you put it like that…”

I met his eyes, and we both laughed. Then we got up to find our clothes and wallets.

After we’d dressed, we left the hotel and walked up to the roundabout by the hotel. There, we found the mother lode—a restaurant that boasted an enormous selection of gelato. It was all brightly colored, which I’d heard was a sign that this place catered to tourists instead of locals, but I didn’t care. I was a tourist, damn it, and I was hardly a food snob.

It took some hemming and hawing before we decided on flavors. Eventually, I settled on a scoop of chocolate and a scoop of strawberry, and Eric went for pistachio. Ice cream in hand, we sat down at a table and watched the fountain and the endless stream of cars circling around it. There were a lot of people out and about, but it didn’t seem like the hustle and bustle of downtown Chicago or anything. I’d even go so far as to call it peaceful.

After a while, Eric broke the silence. “It really doesn’t get any better than this, does it?”

“Nope.” I shook my head. “It doesn’t.”

We exchanged smiles, our eyelids still heavy with post-coital fatigue, but his sparkled with mischievousness. As if we shared a secret no one else in this busy restaurant—hell, this busy city—knew. Because we did share one.

On the tip of my tongue, there was a comment about how he shouldn’t worry about guys flirting with me. There wasn’t a man in this city who could talk me out of Eric’s bed. But I didn’t mention that. I felt good, he seemed to feel good, and I didn’t want to ruin the mood by mentioning that moment in the laundromat earlier today.

So I just indulged. In the moment. In our surroundings. In the food. In the man sitting across from me.

And sitting outside on a hot Italian night, my body still achy and tingling from being in bed with Eric, I didn’t think ice cream had ever tasted so good.