He took his chance and escaped from the bathroom.
Luis followed him into the kitchen and tugged him away from the window. He eased Paolo’s coat off his shoulders and let it fall to the ground. “I know it’s the wrong thing for us to do right now, that you need so much more from me, but I can’t do anything else . . . not yet. Please. I need you.”
“I’m not going to rage bang you when you just passed out.”
“I didn’t pass out.”
“You really did.”
“Please.”
Paolo squeezed his eyes shut, scrabbling for strength he didn’t possess. Luis whispered his plea again, plaintive, desperate, and Paolo’s resolve crumbled to dust.
He opened his eyes and pointed at the bed. “Fine. Have it your way. Get on your damn knees.”
22
Luis had never been more thankful that past him—the one who’d oh-so-briefly believed getting naked with Paolo could be a long-term thing—had optimistically bought a bottle of lube and stashed it in the bathroom.
He waited on the bed while Paolo fetched it.
Paolo came back, spinning it in his hands, his expression hungry and grim. “No condoms.”
“We don’t need them. I got tested, like, five years ago, and I’ve only been with you.”
“You got tested in prison?”
“Yeah. They offer it to all queer inmates.”
“I got done a month before you got out.”
Luis nodded, not asking why because he didn’t want the answer. He didn’t want anything except Paolo.
His dick throbbed with need. He rose up on his knees, weak with fatigue and hunger but unable to contemplate anything but Paolo. He held out his hand. “Come here . . . please?”
Paolo knocked his hand away. “Stop saying that.”
“What?”
“Stop saying please. It makes me crazy.”
“Crazy how?”
“Crazy like I want to bend you over and fuck your brains out.”
Finally, they were getting somewhere. Luis licked his lips. “Do it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Fuck me. I need it.”
Paolo groaned, and something seemed to give inside him. He shoved Luis’s chest and turned him around, pushing him down onto the mattress. Adrenaline sparked in Luis’s tired veins. He widened his legs and shivered as he heard Paolo shuck his jeans. Rough hands—perfect hands—shifted Luis around until he was where Paolo wanted him, hips raised, legs spread, lube dripping down his thighs.
Luis was dizzy with need. He hung his head, shoulders quivering, and shouted out a deep groan as Paolo entered him. The stinging burn was everything. He was still sore from the first time, but he pushed back on Paolo’s dick, craving more. “More.”
Paolo grunted and slid all the way in, his bare cock filling Luis to the brim. For a protracted few seconds, he stayed stone still, as if frozen in place. Then he growled and gave Luis what he wanted, snapping his hips back and slamming into Luis hard enough to make the bed jump.
Luis cried out. It hurt, but he liked it. Clung to it, as though the pound of Paolo’s cock inside him could erase the day and bring him back to earth. Pain gave way to dark pleasure. Sounds he didn’t recognise fell from him, and he arched his spine, responding to Paolo’s bruising grip. “Harder, harder.”
Paolo growled and fucked him harder, hunching over Luis’s back, gripping Luis’s shoulders, his strained moans like god damn poetry. Skin slapped skin, and Luis was flying, lost to the coil of pleasure unravelling in his belly. He reached for his cock, but for the second time in the space of ten minutes, Paolo knocked his hands away.
“No. You want this, you let me give it to you.”
Luis had never come hands free. He’d seen it in porn, but always figured it was Viagra induced or another magic trick, not something that happened between ordinary men. But there was nothing ordinary about the electrifying climax that barrelled towards him as Paolo drilled him. It touched every part of him, clenching his fists and curling his toes. He shouted again, chasing it, and yet somehow afraid of it. “Fuck, I’m gonna come. I’m gonna come so fucking hard.”
Paolo’s rhythm grew more frantic, and his cock swelled and pulsed inside Luis. His groans turned desperate, tipping Luis over the edge as orgasm hit, Luis first, then Paolo.
With a ragged yell, Luis drove his fist into the mattress, spilling his release over the duvet cover, thighs quivering, equilibrium lost, if he’d ever even had it, all while Paolo kept fucking him.
His cock dragged over Luis’s prostate. It was the best kind of torture. Coming seemed to last forever, but of course it didn’t. Growling, Paolo drove in deep and stayed there, juddering as he came too, tying them together as Luis trembled with aftershocks.
And then it was over. Luis fell slack, and Paolo slid out of him with far more care than he’d entered. He disappeared, but not for long. He came back with a warm, wet towel—Luis’s only towel—and cleaned them both up.
Luis rolled onto his back, exhaustion settling into his bones. His eyes were heavy with the sleep he so desperately needed, but as Paolo returned to the bed again, he knew their strangest of nights was far from over. “Are you going to tell me how you got into my place without a key?”
Paolo shrugged and sat on the edge of the bed, naked from the waist down but still wearing his T-shirt. “I wasn’t always a good boy, and your door is rubbish.”
Luis couldn’t argue with that, and he yearned to know more about what had happened in Paolo’s life to teach him how to break and enter, but he’d run out of time for deflection. He owed Paolo an explanation. More than that, he owed him the truth.
He coaxed Paolo into his bed, and in the dark bedsit, lit only by the slivers of streetlight from outside, told him everything, right up until the moment he’d left Dante bleeding on the sticky snooker club floor.
Paolo listened in silence, his expression unreadable, but his wandering fingertips held Luis’s fear at bay. “So you left the drugs with Dante? Like that Martell dude wanted you to?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it hard to leave your brother?”
Luis nodded. “Annoyingly so, even though it was his fault I was there at all.”
“You’ll probably feel guilty about it for a while.”
“You think?”
“For sure. That’s where you’re totally different to him, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you should. And I guess you need to live with that guilt for as long as it’s there. Fighting it won’t change anything.”
“You’re so wise.”
Paolo hummed and slid further down the bed. “Not really. If I was, I probably wouldn’t have broken into a road boy’s flat.”
“Ex road boy.”
“No offence, mate, but I’ve heard that shit before.”
“And it was true when I said it. I only went with Dante because—” Luis stopped. He’d promised Paolo the truth, but was he really about to tell him Dante had been creeping on his elderly grandparents? Holy fuck, his life was a mess.
“Because what?” Paolo nudged him. “And don’t give me bullshit. I gave you what you needed, now it’s my turn.”