It's Like This by Anne O'Gleadra Page B

being such a douche?” I mumble.
    “I believe the term is douchius,” he corrects, smiling a little. “And no. Never.”
    He puts his arms around me, finally, letting me hide my stupid face in his bony shoulder.
    “You OK?” he asks.
    “Yeah,” I breathe. “It’s just…fuck. There’s so much stuff we’ve never talked about, so much stuff we’ve avoided…”
    “Like what?”
    I lift my head and step back enough to see his face. Rylan’s arms slide down mine ’til we’re carefully holding each other’s forearms. “I don’t know…anything my apparently neurotic brain deemed taboo?”
    He looks at me curiously. “Like…?”
    “I dunno! Like sex. Or us. Or how we started, or when we started, or what we do, or what we’re doing.”
    “Do you want to? I mean, I’m happy to, but talking doesn’t seem to be your absolute favourite thing.”
    “Well. Yeah. I guess I think I do. Like…I don’t even know how you decided to…make a move that first morning.”
    Rylan snorts. “I have no idea how I decided either. I was terrified I would permanently screw things up between us. Thought you would shove me off, or knee me in the balls, and I’d be lucky if you passed it off as us being drunk.”
    “I thought about it,” I offer, and then clarify, “The drunk thing. Not the other stuff.”
    “Ha. Thanks.” He pauses. “I’m pretty glad you didn’t.”
    I shrug. “One of the smarter things I’ve done in regards to you, apparently.”
    “Yup. See? You’re not a complete fuck up.” He shakes my arms gently to show he’s joking.
    “Fuck you!” I counter, with next to no venom.
    He laughs and for a second we’re quiet, until suddenly he’s pushed me backwards and is straddling me on the bed, arms around my neck, face so close me mine we’re almost touching.
    “I love you,” he says. “An unsurpassable amount.”
    I blush stupidly and slide my hands over his ass and he kisses my face.
    “I would do anything for you,” he continues, and there’s a weightiness to his voice that wasn’t there a second ago.
    “I know…”
    He shakes his head. “No, Niles, I don’t think you do. I don’t think you could. Because I mean anything . You’ve got your family. I know that. But me…you’re what I’ve got. Like it sounds a bit fucked up, but you’re it. So…you get the whole undiluted devotion. The anything.” His tone lightens. “So if you want me to use a condom, I most certainly will…”
    “Fuck no. No condom. Worst idea I ever had.”
    His arms tighten around my neck and he throws his head back and laughs. I kiss his throat and squeeze his ass and run my hands over his thighs and he waits for me, lets me be the one to close the distance, to slip his shirt over his upstretched arms, to press my lips against his chest and flip him.
    He lies beneath me, calm and curious. I undress us both and we’re naked together for the first time tonight. He runs his palms along my forearms and I feel bigger, stronger, more powerful than him, and I have a weird surge of protectiveness that I’ve never really experienced. Rylan smiles like maybe he knows what I’m thinking and maybe he doesn’t but it’s actually OK either way.
    I kiss his neck and jaw and chest and it seems beyond bizarre that I haven’t really done this before: been this complicit, this participatory. He rolls his hips where they lie beneath mine. Neither one of us is very hard, yet. I kiss his face once more before standing and hunting out the lube, then wet my palm with it and toss it on the bedspread. I take both our cocks together, spreading the fluid over them both and it just feels…really fucking nice. Rylan hooks his heels around my thighs and sighs happily.
    “God, you feel good,” he says, and it’s not dirty talk, it is just Rylan-brand genuinity.
    And he feels good, too. I rut against him, sliding my fist, now joined by his, up and down both our stalks. The soft-hard slide of his cock against mine is nothing