3
The hotel he chooses is in Hell’s Kitchen, the kind of place that exists to serve the throngs of upper-middle-class businessmen and Javits convention attendees, with stylized modern interior décor and a rooftop bar that is probably great for selfies and terrible for your wallet. Not that we go to the bar. Instead we take the elevator up to the tenth floor, and I follow Jamie down the hall to the room he’s just now reserved. These floor-to-ceiling windows are definitely out of my price range, so I can only assume that whatever Jamie does when he isn’t picking up girls at queer clubs is extremely lucrative.
“Sorry,” he says, frowning at the slick all-white king bed. And the thing I find bizarre after meeting the confident guy at the bar is that he really does seem sorry. “I didn’t realize it would be this bougie.”
“It’s okay. I really like the…art.” I gesture vaguely at the mass-produced contemporary art framed on the walls, and Jamie gives me a long, flat look before I finally break—and suddenly we’re both laughing, me with one hand clapped over my mouth.
“Come here,” he says, and he reaches out both hands to gesture me closer. I go, helplessly obedient when he’s looking at me like that, his deep brown eyes gone a little darker, shaded by the lowered fans of his lashes.
When he kisses me this time, it feels different than it did in the club. There, we were in public—and even if making out on the dance floor isn’t exactly an uncommon occurrence, it still felt visible. Here, there is no one to see us. It’s private. It’s intimate. His teeth catch my lower lip, and I make a soft sound that’s muffled against his mouth.
His fingers slide beneath the hem of my black T-shirt. “May I?” he murmurs, our lips still moving together. His voice has the low, husky quality that comes with desire.
I nod. His palms glide up over my ribs, and I lift my arms to make it easier as he strips the shirt off over my head. Then his gaze falls to my exposed body, its weird moles, the sharp edges that never quite softened, even years after I got off drugs. But he touches me like I’m delicate, fingertips skimming over flesh with the same care as I would use to touch the edges of my photographs as I dip them into developer—like he half expects me to tell him to stop.
I catch one of his hands with mine and move it to my breast. He quirks one corner of his mouth and gives in, tipping forward to scatter kisses along my neck, my shoulder, as his free hand does the work of unclasping my bra. Always love a man who can figure out bra hooks without help.
I’m not sure what I did to deserve to be here with him, in this fabulously expensive hotel room that probably cost $400 for the night and seems like it should be reserved for women in evening gowns whose diamonds are worth the GDP of a small country. But I’m not going to question it. I’m going to take his shirt off instead, exposing his firm, tattooed torso, the pale scars that curve like faint smiles beneath his pecs.
I can’t get enough of him, touching skin as it’s exposed and feeling his strength shifting beneath my hands. I kiss one of his tattoos, a rose illustrated in blackwork, its petals blooming over his heart. His fingers twine in my hair, twisting the loose dark waves around his knuckles.
I manage to get off my shoes and jeans without toppling over, which is an achievement for me. Then Jamie Look-alike—it is way too late to ask his name again—hitches me up off the ground, my legs automatically circling round his waist as he carries me over to the bed and tosses me down onto the plush mattress. I push up onto my elbows and watch as he undoes his belt buckle, the fwip sound the leather makes as he tugs it free of his jeans sending a frisson of want through my gut. The jeans come off and he crawls onto the bed after me, laying a trail of kisses from the inside of my ankle up to my thigh to the hollow below my hipbone. I shiver as his breath tickles my skin, palpable through the thin mesh of my underwear.
He hooks his thumbs under the waistband of those panties. “Tell me if anything’s too far,” he says, which is charming enough that I actually want him to give educational presentations to other guys I’ve dated, the ones who acted like getting consent is a socially uncomfortable transaction to be dealt with as perfunctorily as possible. “We can always slow down or take a break.”
“You’re fine,” I assure him, and lift my hips to help him peel my panties off. And this, I realize, is probably my cue to return the favor.
I’ve slept with trans women before but never a trans man. Everyone’s different, obviously, and everyone has different boundaries, but I’m still trying to find the right words to ask what his are when he reaches down from the edge of the bed and retrieves his backpack. He unzips it to reveal a strap-on harness and a very realistic flesh-colored dildo, the kind that has a bulb at one end that can go inside the wearer to stimulate them as well as the person being fucked. A girl I dated briefly last year used one, and though I never tried wearing it myself, she certainly seemed to enjoy it.
Jamie holds it up with an arched, questioning brow. “Yeah?”
I grin. “You came prepared,” I say, and he’s still blushing, the color visible in his cheeks despite the half-dimmed light as I push myself upright to help him put it on.
For a guy who’s been to Revel enough times that he knows the bartender by name, he sure seems self-conscious about being called out on that fact.
Which reminds me all over again that I really have no idea what to expect from this guy. I don’t know his lines, and I need to figure those out before we go much further.
I pause with my hands on his hips, glancing up to meet his gaze. “I don’t know if you…Some people aren’t comfortable with…”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he says firmly, rescuing me from having to fumble my way toward completing that sentence without humiliating myself somehow. “There’s a vibrator in the strap, and that’s good enough for me.”
“Okay,” I say, “sounds good.”
“It’s nothing personal,” he assures me. “But I don’t really know you, and it’s a whole thing.”
“No, I know.” I tip toward him and press a kiss to his sternum, my hands sliding up to his muscular waist as he pushes off his underwear. Once the cock is in place, he lets me take over buckling the harness onto his hips, my hands lingering long enough to enjoy the feeling of his firm ass held in both palms. “Why are you so freaking ripped?” I mumble against his clavicle, tongue tracing the shape of the tattoo there, which lies like a slash of ink along the bone. It’s very hot. Tattooed guys are universally hot.
He laughs and one hand dips between our bodies, his fingers teasing along the seam of my cunt. And then I forget to make stupid comments at all, because he touches me like he’s playing an instrument, tugging a sharp gasp from my lips.
I muffle the sound with another kiss, this one sloppier, needier. His tongue slips into my mouth and I twist my fingers up in his messy hair, keeping him near. Heat pools low in my stomach as his lips shift to my jaw, my throat. I wrap my hand around his cock too, stroking it in the same slow rhythm with which he’s touching me. The movement must be grinding the vibrator attachment against him because that earns me a soft moan and the sharp bite of teeth. The pain lights something warm inside me, and it’s been a long time since I’ve felt like this, where I could touch pain and not immediately want to blot it out, drown it in a cascade of alcohol or drugs. Instead, I…I like it.
Maybe too much.
“We could pause and check the minifridge if you want,” he mumbles against my lips. “They probably have Sanpellegrino.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I tell him, and punctuate the demand with a rake of my nails down his spine.
A sly smile cuts across that beautiful mouth. “Yes, ma’am.”
This is supposed to be a one-night stand. I’m not supposed to be imagining lazy mornings, teasing him over his terrible seltzer taste, finding out the meaning of the tattoos that slide beneath my fingers as I touch him. Those are the kinds of little mysteries that will exist forever. I’ll never unravel him. He’ll just be a story I tell one day, a shadowy figure from my past.
Jamie shifts down the length of my body, leaving kisses in his wake. I push up onto my elbows, and our eyes meet as he grasps one of my thighs, easing it up and out of the way. He’s still looking at me as he dips his head and traces his tongue along me. I shudder—I can’t help myself—and reach down, lacing my fingers together with his and holding on tight as he swirls the tip of his tongue around my clit, teasing.
My want is a living, throbbing thing inside me, unignorable. I squirm beneath him as he does it again; fucking torturous, it really is, and when he finally breaks eye contact, it’s to slide two fingers inside me and stroke me from the inside too. He touches me like he actually cares if I get off, like he actually cares more about my getting off, even, than his own. And maybe that shouldn’t be a rare quality, but it kind of is.
Or maybe I have a habit of giving myself to people who want me for very different reasons. I’ve never asked for more. Never thought there was more to demand.
“Fuck,” I whisper, and he curls those fingers, earning a sudden jump and a gasp on my part.
I expect him to spend just a minute or so down there, to give up the second his jaw starts to hurt and move on to what most guys perceive to be the main event. But he stays. He keeps going, driving me closer and closer to the edge—until my body is liquid heat, until I’m coming, clenching down around his fingers again and again as he works me through the finish.
I’m breathless, my chest rising and falling erratically as he makes his way back up the bed. I taste myself on his lips when he kisses me, and I’m too strung out in the afterglow to care. I can’t even feel self-conscious about my nakedness, spread out before him; he looks at me and touches me like I’m beautiful, and so I believe it.
“Come here,” I say eventually, reaching for his cock and guiding it to my entrance.
The dildo attachment is pretty big, but it’s not too big—enough that it hurts a little as he slides in, but then my body adjusts, accommodating him. He hovers above me, braced on one elbow, our noses nearly brushing.
“Good?” he asks. And judging from the rough, husky quality of his voice, he’s as affected by this as I am.
I nod and curl one leg around his waist, using it to urge him in deeper.
He fucks me slowly at first, rolling his hips against mine in steady waves. I can’t stop touching him; I can’t get enough. My hands grip his thighs, his ass, dragging up his long spine to tangle in his hair.
“Is this okay for you?” I ask him, because in this half-light it’s hard to see his face, hard to tell—but he blows out a heavy breath, half a laugh, and says, “Yeah. Yeah, it’s fantastic.”
He reaches down to touch me again as he fucks me—and if I’m sensitive at first, that’s quickly overwhelmed by a new and building pleasure. His body is over-hot against mine, our skin slick with a faint sheen of perspiration as we move together. I can’t take my eyes off his face, memorizing the way it shifts from parted lips to furrowed brow, his teeth gritting as he gets close, and always—always—his gaze hot and dark and fixed on mine.
I come again before he does, not even bothering to try to be quiet this time. My head tips back, and he drags his mouth along my exposed and vulnerable throat, his hips stuttering against mine as his climax hits a second later. His moans are muffled against my shoulder, breath hot on my skin, my nails digging into his back, dragging down, leaving my mark.
He stays inside me after, during the several long seconds that we remain intertwined, his weight heavy atop my chest and my arms hanging lax and loose about his body. The Midtown city light slants in from the windows, bluish, casting deep shadows between us and making this moment feel out of time—otherworldly.
At last he pulls out and rolls off of me, hands making quick work of the harness buckles and casting the thing onto the floor. I shift onto my side and slide my palm over his flat, damp stomach, kissing the place where his collarbone meets his neck. Some men find this to be an erogenous zone. Jamie, it seems, is no different. I relish the shiver that rolls through him at my touch.
“Was that okay?” he asks me at last, perennially, it seems, the gentleman.
I kind of want to smack him and tell him to stop being so nice, that someone in this city is gonna take advantage of that eventually. Instead I coil in closer and say, quite honestly, “That was some of the best sex I’ve ever had.”
We drift off together like that, tangled up and listening to the arrhythmic music of horns and ambulance sirens that careens through the city below—until he turns toward me around midnight and asks if I want to go again, and I, helplessly, agree.