Page 55 of Top Shelf
I kissed him a second time, digging all ten fingers into his waist, framing it as best I could to keep him close and steady. “I think my bedroom would be best. Do you think you can manage one set of stairs?”
He nodded. “Easy.”
As Ferris stepped back, I could feel the distance between us like a physical thing, and I hated it. I moved to close the gap again, and he seemed to realize what I was doing because he gave me a playful grin, then turned and hurried toward the bedroom.
His walking boot thudded heavily with each step, and he was even slower than I was, but we made it to the landing without incident. Ferris came to a halt just outside the first guest room. “Why is your bedroom up here?”
“All of the rooms are on the second and third floors,” I told him, wrapping an arm around his waist and kissing the side of his neck.
“That doesn’t make sense. You should have a first-floor room.”
“Mm, but that’s hard to find in Boston, sweetness. And anyway, I can manage just fine. I swear.” My words were muffled against his warm skin, and I enjoyed the way he tilted his head to the side, like he was asking for more.
I bit down on his tendon, sucking lightly before letting go. I didn’t want to leave a mark if I was about to meet his mother in a few hours.
Which…fuck. I was about to meet hismotherin a few hours.
Shoving that thought aside, I slipped past him and led the way past the second guest room, then opened my bedroom door. It was deceptively large—like most of the brownstones were in Boston. The buildings looked narrow and small and claustrophobic from the outside, but the ceilings were high, and the windows let in so much light it made the room feel cavernous.
It was nothing like the place I’d grown up in. A suburb of a suburb—a small rented house with two bedrooms—one for my parents and one for me. My dad was an accountant and used our breakfast nook as his office. My mom worked at a laundromat,and she sometimes brought clothes home to fold, so our formal dining room became her space.
Everything smelled like printer ink and dryer sheets.
And after they had both passed, every time I smelled something like it, I got an ache in the pit of my stomach. I rarely wanted to remember them. I wasn’t some beloved miracle baby. I was the late-in-life accident—the oops that changed the way they had to live.
They put me in sports to keep me occupied and rarely came to my games. They were gone by the time I was drafted, and I didn’t want to remember how lonely that felt, so I curated my space to be my own.
There was no nostalgia in my home. It was a little sterile, but it was mine.
“This doesn’t look like you,” Ferris said as he turned in a circle.
The place had come half-furnished. The bed frame came with the house, the mattress was mine. The dresser and armoire were part of the bed frame set, and the art on the walls were generic flower paintings they’d used to stage the house and let me keep.
When I played for New York, I had two bedrooms in a high-rise in Brooklyn that I let my PR manager decorate since she’d been trying to change careers for years. It hadn’t been me either. That was mostly her, but I’d liked it.
I had no passion, though, and no idea who I even was back then, so when I set foot here and I realized that all of the weight of making this place a home was on me, I just…gave up.
Now, I felt strange. Almost embarrassed.
“What would look like me?” I asked. Ferris was at the window now, so I set my cane against the dresser, then walked over and pressed my chest to his back, burying my nose in his neck.
He laughed softly and shrugged. “Earth tones. Browns. Mahogany. What’s that stuff that goes along the bottom of walls?”
“Honey, I have no idea. I have never once decorated my own place.”
He sighed. “I can tell.” Turning in my arms, he let his back fall against the glass, and I pressed into him, kissing him again. It was lush, intense, deeper than I’d ever kissed anyone before. He tasted like a goddamn dream. “I want to be on the bed,” he said when I broke away.
Nodding, I stepped back and took his hands, guiding him toward the center of the room. My bed was sized perfectly for me to slip in and out without having to struggle with my leg, so Ferris had no problem climbing onto the mattress. His feet hung over the sides, so I took his shoe off, then toyed with the straps on his boot.
“I can be careful if you want this off for a bit.”
He bit his lip, then shook his head. “I don’t trust myself. I get too fidgety.”
“I can work with that too.” Instead, I grabbed the hem of his shirt and lifted it over his head, letting my fingers toy with his pecs, his nipples, then his lower stomach. His abs jumped under my careful touch. “When I get you naked, I want you to jerk off, okay? Don’t make yourself come. Just get yourself nice and hard for me.”
He shuddered, nodding as he bit his lip and fell back against the pillows. It took some work to get his sweats all the way off, but I folded them into a haphazard pile with his shirt and set them on the end of the bed before walking to my dresser and opening the top drawer.
A handful of toys and two bottles of lube were staring back at me. I had the warming kind, but I had a feeling Ferris might not appreciate the sensation that one caused. The other was theone I used most, the bottle more than half-gone. I had condoms beside that and then two toys I hadn’t yet used on myself.
