Eli had a system for leaving, and I hated every polite second of it.
Eight on a Tuesday morning, he was standing at the foot of my bed winding his phone charger into a coil so neat it looked like evidence. His canvas bag was zipped by the door. His boots were laced. In the bathroom the blue toothbrush he’d used for three months was already back in its little travel sleeve, and it left a dry clean circle on the porcelain where it had lived since June.
I leaned in the doorway in my silk robe with a mug of coffee and watched him check the bedside table for the third time.
“Did you look under the radiator?” I said. “I think you left half a breath of air in the corner. Better bag it.”
He looked up with that slow lopsided smirk that ruined my concentration the night we met. “Funny. Some of us respect personal space.”
“You don’t respect my personal space, Eli. You treat my apartment like a boutique hotel where you’re scared of losing your deposit.”
“I have excellent references as a houseguest.”
“That’s the problem.” I put my coffee down on the dresser with a clack. “You’re not a houseguest.”
His hand stopped on the strap of the bag. The banter thinned out for half a second and the real thing showed through, the thing that had been growing in this apartment since spring. He looked at me, my curls all over my shoulders, my bare collarbones, my face that doesn’t offer anything I don’t mean.
I reached in my robe pocket and took out the key.
Brass, new, on a thin black cord. I’d had the super cut it yesterday and I’d carried it around all night like it was hot. The super had put one of those little manila tags on it and I’d written under his handwriting at two in the morning.
I set it on the cherry dresser right where his watch had been twenty minutes ago, and it rang on the wood, small and clear.
Eli stared at it. “What’s that.”
“Front door and the lobby deadbolt.”
He didn’t reach for it. “Noa.”
“Don’t Noa me like I handed you a lease. You’ve slept here four nights a week for two months. You know the radiator that clanks. You know where the espresso filters are. Stop asking if you can keep one clean shirt in my bottom drawer.”
“A shirt is laundry,” he said, and his voice dropped into the raspy register he uses when he’s trying to stay composed. “A key is a mailing address.”
“A key is access. And I don’t give it to polite boys who pack their toothbrush in plastic every time they wake up next to me.”
He let out a long breath. “You like being in charge, huh.”
“I like being honest. You’re the one pretending every morning you’re not coming back at six tonight.”
The bag hit the floor. In two steps he had me by the waist and walked me back against the dresser, cool wood in the small of my back, all his heat against my front, and God, I knew the shape of him so well.
“Say that again,” he whispered, knuckles on the silk at my hip.
“Stop asking permission to belong here.”
His jaw went tight. “You think you can give an order and I roll over?”
“I think you’ve wanted that key since August,” I said, chin up. “And I think you want somebody to tell you that you don’t have to keep proving you’re allowed in the room.”
That cracked him. His hand came up around the side of my throat, not squeezing, just holding me right where he wanted me, thumb sliding along my jaw to the pulse going wild under it.
“You’re impossible.”
“And you’re still dressed to leave.”
He didn’t answer with words. He kissed me, deep and slow and hungry, the kind of kiss with months in it, and I got both hands in the dark hair at the back of his neck and pulled him down, and he tasted like mint and the sweet black coffee we’d made an hour ago.
When he broke it we were both breathing hard.
“Jacket,” I said.
He smiled, that defiant little edge I love, and shrugged out of the denim and let it drop.
“Shirt.”
He dragged the tee up over his head and tossed it. In the clean morning light his chest scars lay pale and flat across olive skin, two neat lines healed years ago, and I put my palms on him and felt his heart slamming under my fingers. I kissed the middle of his chest, right between them, and he shivered and his head went back.
“Look at you,” I said into his skin. “Perfect.”
“Noa,” he said, wrecked, hands tight on my shoulders.
I stepped back and pulled the tie on my robe and let it slide off my arms. I stood in the sun in just my panties, tall, soft, and my cock already hard against the lace, and I watched his eyes go dark as they took me in. He’s looked at me like that for months, like I’m a thing he’s allowed to want. I’ve never gotten used to it.
“God,” he said. “You take my breath away. Every single day.”
“On the bed. Lie back.”
He sat on the edge, then lay back against my pillows, kicking his boots off with two lazy flicks. He undid his pants and shoved them down with his briefs, and his dick sprang free, hard and flushed and thick, the way it gets for me. I love it. I love that he lets me love it.
I walked over on bare feet, and instead of climbing on the bed I dropped to my knees on the floor between his spread legs and put my elbows on the duvet either side of his thighs.
“You’re gonna make me late for my meeting,” he said, swallowing.
“Cancel it.”
I licked him slow from the base to the head, flat tongue, and his hips jumped off the sheets and he hissed through his teeth. “Noa, fuck.”
“Hands on the headboard.”
They went straight back and gripped the rail, muscles standing out along his arms. He held on and gave me all of him, and I took the head in my mouth and swirled my tongue around it and sank down, three, four, five inches, cheeks hollowed, one hand wrapped around the base and the other flat on his belly where the muscle jumped.
His breathing broke into pieces. The headboard creaked under his grip.
“Look at you,” I murmured, pulling off just enough to lick the pre-come from the slit. I went back down. “Taking all of it like you were made for this.”
“You talk,” he groaned, hips rolling up into my mouth, “too much.”
“You love it.”
I picked up the pace, my head moving in long wet waves, my throat opening for him. I looked up through my lashes and met his blown dark eyes. The look on his face. This strong capable man, undone, letting himself be held and sucked and worshipped in broad daylight on a Tuesday.
“Good boy,” I whispered, tightening my lips. “Let go, Eli. You’re home.”
That did it. He cried out my name and his hips drove up into my mouth, and he came hard, hot on my tongue, pulse after pulse, and I held him and swallowed every drop with this greedy devoted feeling in my chest, until his shaking turned into heavy shallow breaths.
His hands slid off the headboard and flopped on the duvet. He was gone. Flushed, glowing, chest heaving.
But I was still kneeling there with my cock leaking all over the lace, and he opened one eye, and saw it.
“Hey,” he said. “Come here.”
I climbed up over him. He caught my hips and pulled me up his body till I was straddling his chest, and he looked at me in my ruined panties, and he said “God, look at you,” in a voice that made me shake. He pulled the lace aside and wrapped his hand around me, rough and sure, and stroked.
I braced both hands on the headboard where his had been. He watched my face the whole time. He stroked me fast, thumb dragging over the head every time, and I rocked into his fist, and I said his name, and he said “that’s it, baby, that’s it,” and told me how pretty I was, how good I looked all flushed up in the sun.
“Eli, I’m gonna…”
“Do it. On me.”
I came with a long broken moan, striping his chest and his belly, over the old scars and the dark hair, and he kept stroking me through it until I whimpered and went boneless and collapsed on top of him in the mess. He didn’t care. He wrapped his arms all the way around me.
We lay there. Five full minutes, nobody talking. Just the hum of the fridge in the kitchen and the radiator clanking and our breathing slowing down together.
Finally he reached past my head with one hand and picked up the brass key off the dresser. He turned it over in his fingers, feeling the weight.
“I’m keeping the key,” he said quietly.
I smiled into his collarbone and traced the line of his ribs. “I know.”
Later, when he got up to clean off, he unzipped the front pocket of his bag and pulled out his favorite gray henley. He went to my closet, opened the bottom drawer, and folded it in next to my sweaters. He put the key in his pocket. Then he walked back across the room and climbed into bed with me and pulled the blanket over both of us.
He missed his meeting. He didn’t seem sorry.
The toothbrush is still on the bathroom shelf, out of its sleeve. I checked.
