Page 22 of Bone to Pick
What else was there to know?
I lunged across the table and crashed my mouth into his.
His hands came out to clutch at my sweater to keep from tipping backward in the chair. He tasted like sweet, creamy coffee with a hint of the oatmeal cookies we’d eaten after lunch. The scratch of his stubble abraded my palms as I held his face to mine and devoured that sultry mouth.
The mouth that had teased me all day, that had tortured me last spring, that had cycled through my dreams more times than I could count…
The reality of it blew those dreams away. I couldn’t stop. He was like Sisyphus, who’d slyly asked Thanatos to demonstrate the chains, and I was Thanatos, bound up in them for all eternity.
Porter’s throat and mouth made noises that went straight to my dick. My brain begged me to stop kissing him, to get us back onto safer footing, but my body simply refused. It was too good, and rational thinking could go to hell.
Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one overwhelmed with desire. Porter grabbed my shoulders and pulled me closer until I fumbled around the table between us and ended up straddling his lap. His hands moved down my back and up under my sweater. As soon as the dry skin of his palms skimmed up my bare back, my entire body erupted in goose bumps.
I wanted this kid, thisman, more than I’d wanted anything for as long as I could remember. With my one remaining functional brain cell, I finally ripped my mouth from his and leaned back. “Wait.Wait. Fuck. Wait.”
Porter’s pupils were blown, inky black eating up the vivid green. His cheeks were flushed, and his lips were shiny from the kiss.
Mykiss.
“This is—” I began, but he clamped a hand over my mouth.
“Don’t say it,” he growled. “If you fucking dare tell me it’s wrong or some other high-minded bullshit, so help me, I’ll—”
I yanked his hand away and kissed him again, grabbing the back of his head to keep him pressed tightly against me. He groaned into the kiss and tightened his arms around me. For several hungry beats, we explored each other again until I could barely breathe. I pulled away again.
“Okay, wait. I just… give me a minute. Okay?”
Our audible panting filled the room with leftover heat and desperation.
“It’s not the forbidden thing, Theo,” Porter said firmly. “It’s more than that.”
Yes. It was definitely more than that, for both of us. But that didn’t make itright.
I moved off his lap and made it back to my own chair, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees so I could wiggle my hips to adjust my strangled dick.
“We can’t do this,” I said, holding up my hand. “And before you argue with me, please understand I am not saying I don’t want to. Clearly, I want to very, very much. But I am months away from becoming head of the very department you’re graduating from. I know that I’m not your professor anymore, but I—”
“No one needs to find out.”
A small puff of air escaped me. Christ, he really was temptation incarnate.
“Right now, we’re going to take a few deep breaths and slow down,” I said, speaking to myself more than to him. “I’m not saying no, Porter. I’m saying… wait.”
Porter inhaled a deep breath through his nose and held it before letting it out. “Okay. You’re right. I don’t want to do anything you’ll regret.”
Once again, I was surprised by his maturity and understanding, even though I shouldn’t have been. Porter Sunday wasn’t the typical undergrad. He was a twenty-six-year-old man who’d worked hard to get himself into college. A man who was so devoted to his work helping underprivileged children at the Hub, it seemed like he spent more of his hours there each week as an unpaid volunteer than as a paid employee. It took a special person to do that. To care as much as he did.
“Dinner,” I said, pushing myself to stand and stretch and trying very hard to block out the memory of Porter’s mouth on mine, his hands on me, and the sound of his whimpers and groans in my ears. I put my glasses back on, like they were some kind of armor. “Maybe you can grab us a couple of beers.”
We moved efficiently into awkward mode, moving around the tiny kitchen space without touching each other. I didn’t want things to be uncomfortable between us. Despite our antagonistic semester earlier in the year, and wholly aside from this conflagration of desire between us, I found IlikedPorter Sunday. More than I’d expected.
Once I’d served the stew and placed the wide bowls at each of our places on the table, I sat back down and held my beer bottle out for a toast. “To unexpected snowstorm company.”
He smiled back. “To impromptu angry sonnet performances, and the gracious unwilling hosts of those performances.”
I chuckled.
We clinked our bottles and took a sip before diving into the meal. Thankfully, the outdoor work had burned off enough calories that I was hungry for dinner despite the snack platter we’d shared a few hours earlier.
