Rock N Soul (35 page)

He put the guitar down and was on his feet by the time I reached him, and I put my hands on the sides of his face and kissed him.

It wasn’t . . . perfect. There was enough resistance now that my fingers and lips didn’t automatically go through him unless I pushed hard, but he wasn’t exactly solid and touching him didn’t feel like touching skin. The warmth wasn’t there, and I couldn’t feel smoothness or roughness or any real sensation other than pressure and movement, but fuck, it was better than nothing, and it was more than we’d had before, and surely that meant it could get even better than this.

I threw myself into the kiss, closing my eyes and trying to pretend like my tongue wouldn’t go straight through his head if I pushed too hard. And it did at first, a few times, until we found a rhythm and it was almost—
almost
—like kissing someone who was made of flesh and blood, and it turns out that “almost” counts in both horseshoes and making out with ghosts.

I’d never been the kind of guy who talked while kissing before, but this time I pulled away just long enough to whisper “Can you feel me?” before diving back into the sensation of almost-teeth and almost-lips and almost-tongue.

He moaned softly, and his hands slid from my waist around to the small of my back. I opened my eyes for a second to find out that
his
eyes were closed. Chris put a hand in my hair and it actually moved under his touch. I broke the kiss to push my head backward into his hand like a cat being stroked.

Chris pressed his lips to the spot on my neck where my pulse was pounding against the skin. “How can we be doing this?” he asked, breathless and with his eyes still closed.

“I don’t know,” I murmured back. I put my own hand in his hair like he’d done to me and if I concentrated hard, I could not-quite-but-almost feel the texture of it on my fingers. “Don’t stop.”

He kissed the spot on my neck again and dragged his lips up to my ear. “Don’t stop what?”

I shivered. Maybe some things weren’t quite so tangible yet, but his voice wasn’t just
almost
and the low, husky tone was right there in my ear as if the rest of him was as solid. “Anything,” I said, closing my eyes and leaning into him as much as I could without pressing through. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t stop.”

His fingers tightened on my back, and he pulled away from my ear so he could look me in the eyes. “Are you sure?”

I swallowed hard. My whole body was vibrating with the urge to pull him down on the bed and see how solid I could make him. But that would mean officially crossing the line of what I’d done with another guy before, and that was scary enough without adding in the fact that if I went ahead with this and then Chris disappeared, it might literally kill me.

But then again, it wasn’t like living the rest of my life without him and never knowing what it would have been like would actually be
better
, so I nodded and leaned my forehead against his. “I want you,” I said as if that explained everything, and maybe it did.

“You have me,” he said in a low voice. “I’m yours.”

I wanted to ask if he meant that as a for-tonight-only thing or if I was getting more than just sex from him, but it didn’t seem like the greatest time to check. My fingers itched to curl into the fabric of his shirt and walk backward to the bed while I pulled him along behind me, and I put my hand on his chest and tried it, but I couldn’t get a grip on the fabric or feel the difference between shirt and skin. So instead I kissed him again and then left my lips against his while I whispered, “Bed?”

“Yes,” he said, but he didn’t let go immediately. I let him hold on to me and concentrated on the way my heart was beating fast and staccato like an action-movie machine gun. He leaned his forehead against mine, and I closed my eyes and tried to imagine how he would have smelled, how hot his mouth would have been, how fast his own heart would have been beating if it still could.

And then he was kissing me again, and it was hard and hungry and desperate, and I threw my arms around his neck and stepped closer to him as I kissed back with matching enthusiasm.

He felt more solid now, and it seemed to take more effort to push through the resistance and dip my fingers into the back of his head, or maybe that was an illusion. But illusion or not, it made it easier to hold on to him and to pour everything I had into the kiss.

I felt his fingers on my waist again, not stroking or digging in or any movement I recognized, but I was having trouble caring as long as he was doing things to my knees by way of my mouth. I stepped backward toward the bed, and he followed me.

His fingers moved again, and he whispered, “Fuck” against my lips in a frustrated tone.

“What?” I asked, then experimentally pulled at his bottom lip with my teeth.

He groaned and stepped back to put a little distance between us. I held on to his lip for as long as I could. “I can’t get a grip on your fucking shirt,” he said. He yanked his own shirt off over his head. “Take it off. I want to see you.”

I’d never seen his chest and abs bare before—not in person, at least—and he wasn’t gym-rat-ripped or anything, but he was toned and sexy and there was enough definition in his abs to give me the ridiculous urge to play them like a xylophone and use my cock as the mallet. And he had muscular arms that wouldn’t have any trouble pinning my hands above my head while he fucked me into the mattress, and even though the thought of bottoming had always seemed a little scary before, the idea of Chris topping me somehow didn’t worry me at all.

I pulled off my shirt and tossed it on the floor, then decided to hell with modesty and dropped my pants and boxers too. My dick sprang free and bobbed around for a second before settling down to point hopefully in Chris’s direction. I fought off a blush and kicked my pants to the side while Chris looked me over.

“Nice,” he said after his eyes finished making me feel even more naked than I already was. “My turn.” He undid his pants and slid them down his legs, not exactly doing a striptease but definitely going a lot slower than I had the patience for. Then he looked up at me with a wicked grin, and I took two steps toward him, pulled him upright, and kissed him again with all the impatience I felt.

He put his shaking hands back on my waist, the motion like the thrum in my throat from a particularly awesome bass line in a song. “You’re shaking,” I whispered while I kissed the corner of his mouth.

“I’m nervous.” His eyes were closed, and when he swallowed, my eyes followed the bob of his Adam’s apple.

But this was Chris Raiden, international rock star with videos of himself boning super-hot celebrities, and I couldn’t imagine him being
nervous
. Not about sex. “Why?”

He looked at me with a weirdly vulnerable glint in his eyes. “Because I want to do this right.”

“You’ll do fine,” I said, and I put my hands on his cheeks again and pulled him in for another breathless kiss.

During a natural pause in the kiss, he said, “But I want to do better than fine.” Kiss.

I love you
, I thought, and the words seared through my body like someone had injected refrigerated fire directly into my bloodstream. Maybe it was just the sex talking—but I’d never even considered the words with anyone before, even during the best sex I’d ever had. He was gorgeous and he was funny and he was
mine
, at least for tonight, and I loved him so much that each individual cell in my body ached with it, but I couldn’t tell him. Not yet. Not when everything was so fragile and uncertain.

So instead of saying it out loud, I grabbed his hand and pulled it between us. It felt almost as warm as a living hand now, complete with a phantom pulse in his wrist.

Or maybe his increased realness was just wishful thinking. But either way, it was definitely doing it for me, because Chris wrapped his fingers around me and gave me a long, firm stroke, and I threw my head back and hissed through my teeth at the jolt of
yes
that crackled through. While my neck was exposed, Chris took the opportunity to lean forward and nip at my throat with teeth that were almost solid enough to be sharp, and his mouth was
definitely
warmer than it had been before.

He urged me back toward the bed while he stroked slowly, twisting his wrist as he moved his hand to give me the maximum amount of sensation. I followed him willingly, even gratefully, because I was pretty sure that my legs were going to mutiny any second and send me to the floor in an ungraceful heap.

I lay down on the bed, reaching for Chris even before I got settled. He followed and climbed on top of me, straddling my hips and then taking both of our cocks in his hand. He held them together and moved his hips so that his dick slid against mine and we both moaned in unison.

“We’re the same size,” he said, looking down between us.

I put my hands on his ass and tried to concentrate on not embarrassing myself like a nervous virgin. “That’s good,” I managed to choke out. “Wouldn’t want you to feel inadequate.”

He grinned at me, and looked so damn
happy
that I almost didn’t recognize him.

Who knew that giving a shit about the person you’re with could be hot?
That sounded pretty good in my head, so I said it out loud, grinning back up at him.

Chris smiled and leaned down quickly to kiss me. “I give a shit about you too,” he said after one brief peck, then slanted his lips against mine and started kissing me like there’d be a winner at the end of it. There was no way I was going to lose that fight, though, so I left one hand on his ass and buried the other one in his hair, giving back as good as I got.

He started stroking again, keeping his hand around both of us and thrusting into his fist so that the undersides of our cocks rubbed together. He broke the kiss and sucked at the pulse point on my neck, then licked his way up to my ear. “I would let you fuck me right now if I could,” he growled, then ran his tongue over the curve of my ear.

I shivered and dug my fingers into his ass cheek, forgetting for a second that he wasn’t entirely solid. My fingers pushed through the resistance and I mumbled an apology.

He chuckled into my ear. “That’s what I’m afraid would happen if we tried it.” He took my earlobe in his teeth and pulled at it.

I arched against him and moaned, then spent a couple of seconds reciting the preamble to the Constitution in my head to get myself under control. “We’ll figure it out,” I said once I fought my orgasm back to a manageable distance.

“Lucky for you,” he said, his husky voice sending daggers of lust through me, “I give head like a fucking pro and I’m going to suck you until your eyes cross.”

“
Fuck
.” My hips bucked up against him and there was nothing I could do about it.

He let go of us and kissed his way down my body, and when he got to my cock he didn’t waste time teasing me—which was good, because if he’d done any of that bullshit right now I would have had to use my newfound Chris-touching ability to strangle him until he stopped. He licked me from the base to the tip and then took me in his mouth and slid his lips down, running his fingers over my balls. Whimpering, I tried unsuccessfully to keep myself from writhing under him.

I looked at him and put one hand in his hair, twisting it in my fingers and pulling just a little, mostly to prove I could. He glanced up and smiled at me with his eyes. And it turned out that the fucker had dimples while he was smiling
and
while he was sucking cock, and that was just unfair.

Chris bobbed his head, swirling his tongue on the head of my cock at the end of each movement, and my body felt like pieces of it were splintering off and floating in the air around us. I wasn’t sure how long I could hold myself together before the rest of me exploded, and God only knew what words would come pouring out of my mouth when that happened.

But then there was no time to worry about that, because Chris came to the upward swing of his latest head bob and moved his lips back down and then . . . kept going, taking even more of me in than before. His mouth was warmer than it had been when we’d started kissing. Then his lips got all the way down to the base of me and he pressed his fingers against the sensitive skin below my balls; my whole body shuddered, and I tightened my fist in his hair and slammed my other hand down on the bed as an orgasm dragged me under like a red-flag undercurrent, and fuck, it was such a relief that I almost started sobbing.

When it was over, I took a second to evaluate what I’d yelled when I came down his throat, and I decided that the only words had been a combination of “fuck” and “shit” and “hell yes” and Chris’s name. All of which were totally legit. Good job, Tyler. Gold star.

Chris crawled up my body and kissed me, and I moaned into his mouth and held him as tightly as I could.
I love you, I love you, I love you
, I thought, and with that came a bone-deep certainty that Chris was The One. And he just
had
to feel the same way. Surely this couldn’t all be me.

After letting me have a couple of seconds to come down, he thrust his hips so his cock slid over my stomach. The kiss deepened, and he started shuddering at the end of each thrust, so I pulled back enough to ask if he wanted me to suck him, and he moaned loudly and came as soon as the words were past my lips. His mouth was open against my neck, and he was doing that desperate gasping breath that only happens when you’re totally letting yourself go, and he kept thrusting even after he was done.

A while passed—only thirty seconds or so, but it seemed longer—and then he slowly lifted himself up and met my eyes, sort of shell-shocked. I wondered if I had the same look in my own eyes. Probably, to be honest.

It would have been so easy to say it, to pull him down for a softer kiss and whisper it into his mouth, but I’d read enough of the magazine articles that Carmen had just
happened
to leave around the apartment to know that you were never supposed to say it right after sex, especially not for the first time. So instead we just fucking gazed into each other’s eyes while we got our breathing under control.