Page 36

Beneath you, Sterling is molten. Almost too hot to hold.

“You need this,” you whisper, planting sloppy kisses on his neck and collarbones. It’s not a question. He couldn’t make it more obvious, his moans and sighs crowding each other out and floating toward the twelve-foot ceiling.

When you first came to visit him at his condo in Nashville, you didn’t know about this bedroom. Sterling sleeps on many beds under many roofs, but Tennessee is his legal residence. It’s where he votes and where his driver’s license is registered. Moreover, it’s his home .

His favorite guitar rests against the wall. His clothes are in the closet. It’s his home base.

And Sterling’s all yours, here. Home on a break between the Oceanic and Asian legs of the tour, nothing to do all weekend, nowhere to be. Just a pretty boy in a big bed, a fever of arms and legs and lips.

It’s like this every time you get together, now. A dam broke somewhere along the line, and you two can’t get enough of each other. In public, it’s all tacit and tact: hands on lower backs, entwined fingers pulling one another from a car, soft and quick touches. Pecks on dry cheeks.

In private, though? Fuck.

You’re still half-dressed, your sweatpants tented out over your hard dick, your chest bare and barely containing your excitement as you lean over Sterling.

He’s spread out across his gray sheets, the pillows all tossed on the floor along with his clothes.

His hair is wild around him, a thicket of burnished brown gone to tangles with his body heat.

You grab a hank of it in your fist and use it to guide his head and take his mouth.

No longer do either of you pretend that you don’t both love it when you pull.

“I missed you,” he hums against your mouth, breathless. “This. I missed this.”

You groan in agreement, not letting yourself get too wrapped up in the actual words.

I missed you. It’s just bed-talk. He’s just hot for you.

You can relate, so you don’t hold it against him.

You suck your way down his chest, detouring over his sensitive nipples, and mouthing at the places where his ribs stick out.

It’s your—extremely private, never voiced—opinion that Sterling is too thin.

Not by a lot. Maybe ten pounds. Hollywood beauty standards suck.

You think this as you nibble love bites against his taut belly and across the span of his hips, studiously avoiding his cock.

He’s groaning and kneading his hands into your shoulders as you tease him.

There’s part of you—also extremely private and never voiced—that wishes he would grab you by the head and shove you down.

One day, you’ll tell him he can, if he wants to.

In the meantime, you’ll see how far you can test his civility.

“Kai,” he breathes. It takes another repetition before you realize that it’s not just saying your name for the sake of it.

“Mmm?”

“I want you inside me. Can you… can we do that?”

Trust Sterling to flip things on their axes. You sit back on your heels.

“Should we talk about this? I mean, I usually…”

“I know.” He bites his lip, in a way that probably was not meant to be so alluring. “But I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve actually…” He breaks out in a blush.

“You’ve actually what ?” You can’t stop your hands from running up and down his calves, fuzzing the light brown hair, feeling his soft skin.

“I’ve been getting ready for it.”

Your hands still. “You’ve been…”

Sterling tilts his chin to the bulge in your sweatpants. “I realized I wasn’t going to just… you know. With everything you’ve got going on. You’re, like, huge. It’s been a while since I bottomed, and… yeah. Since maybe Christmas? I’ve been getting ready.”

Your brain kind of short-circuits on that one.

It’s the second week of March. While you’ve been playing football and doing normal, everyday shit, Sterling has been on tour.

Releasing an album. Doing press. And, apparently, training himself to take your dick?

Your dick, that he just explicitly called big.

A million questions flood your brain. Did he use toys? He must have. Is there visual proof of this? ( Of course not, you horny fucking moron. )

Maybe you look as slack-jawed as you feel, because Ster pushes himself up on his elbows and laughs nervously.

“Is that a no?” he asks. “If so, that’s cool. We didn’t explicitly discuss it, and I know I said I go both ways, but…”

“You honestly think I don’t want to fuck you?” It slips out of your mouth before you know what’s happening. “Must be some kinda crazy.”

The pink blush on Sterling’s face goes fuchsia and spreads down his neck to his chest. Could be arousal, could be a little shyness, but it’s very pretty. Pretty enough that you feel compelled to cover his body with yours again and kiss him thoroughly.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” you murmur against his mouth.

He pulls back slightly. His blue eyes are a bit glassy, gone stupid with lust. “I want to feel you,” he says. “When I’m on stage next week. I want to think about how you felt when I’m singing those new songs about you.”

Okay, because that’s not enough to make you come in your underwear. Your hips pulse against his thighs, completely of their own volition. Sterling hums in his throat.

“Pants off,” he murmurs.

Sex with Sterling is always surprising. Surprisingly primal, surprisingly tender, surprisingly freaky by turns.

The partner you get in bed changes by the day and with his moods.

Today, with him on his knees and elbows, presenting himself to you, it’s more visceral.

Despite his assurances that he’s been preparing himself and the copious time you spend on foreplay with your fingers and tongue, you are shaking a bit when you line yourself up to enter him.

Part of it is nerves, and part of it is six million years of human evolution not working hard enough to control your bestial urges to fuck him into the mattress.

The architecture of his back, the bridge of his spine, and the flare of his hips all call to you.

He’s pale, slender, and soft. Breakable.

Part of you is terrified to do it, while your lizard brain wants to split him in half.

He makes the sweetest noises as you inch inside his tight hole with your cock, opening him up bit by bit.

Your knuckles are white from holding back and going slow , and there’s so, so much lube, but it’s impossibly tight.

You’ve never had a virgin, and it freaks you out a little bit before you remember that Sterling’s not.

He’s got this. He’s got his eyes closed, long lashes sooty against his cheek, his face against the mattress.

There’s no pain on his features, just a deep concentration.

When you’re fully engulfed in his heat, every millimeter of you deep inside of him, you take long, steadying breaths as you give him time to adjust to your size.

It feels like it took eons, years stretching out in front of you like a tunnel as you focused infinitesimally on being careful. Being good for him.

“You all right?” you ask between clenched teeth. He pants a tormented little yes that goes straight to your balls. Your hands are framing his ass, and the top of your head—both heads—are about to blow the fuck off.

You don’t last as long as you’d like. Sterling is too much like this, too tight, too hot, too good.

You hold off as long as you can, but slowing down seems to make him mad.

He begs for it with his whole body, drilling himself back against you and fucking himself when you are trying to pace yourself and picture playbook assignments, the x’s and o’s scribbled on whiteboards swimming across your choppy vision.

“Harder,” he urges you.

“I’ll come,” you stutter, half-incoherent. Your orgasm seems a conclusion foregone. You can feel it barreling down on you like a freight train, making your balls tight and your thrusts unsteady .

“Then do it,” he says. “I can take it. Come on.”

The words light a fire low in your belly. You stroke into him, long and deep, being mindful not to hurt him. Sterling pushes up on his arms and throws his head back. Your fingers itch to grab his hair, but you keep them tight on his hips.

“Fuck, Ster,” you breathe. “It’s s’good. S’good.”

A muffled moan is all you get, but it’s enough. Your teeth clench and little pinprick stars streak across your vision as you come, shooting off what seems like your whole blood volume in cum. Sterling rocks you through it, fucking himself slowly on you until you shiver from over-stimulation.

He looks back at you over his shoulder, and his face is bright and hot.

You waste no time tying off the condom and grabbing him by the waist. Flipping Sterling over is the easiest thing in the world; he’s much smaller than the men you’re used to throwing around.

In a split second, he’s flat on his back, and you’ve inhaled his cock down to the root, pistoning your lips around it hungrily with your cheeks hollowed.

Sterling groans and writhes on the bed. You place an arm across his lower belly, pinning him in place.

Kind of loving how easy it is to do so, to hold him down.

You file that thought away for later contemplation.

With your free hand, you cup his balls and run your fingertips over his perineum, teasing.

Sterling makes incoherent noises and does his best to press towards you, pleading with his sounds and the limited movement you are affording him.

You take the hint and slide two fingers inside his hole, easy as anything.

He’s still slippery and open from your cock.

His prostate is right there, you know how to find it, and he’s heady and gone on the feeling.

You can fucking hear him gulping for air, whining and trying to buck.

You are in Sterling Grayson’s bed, and you have him where you want him, sucking his cock, fingering his asshole.

Making him stupid for you. It’s almost enough to get you going again.

You can’t get it up so soon, but you rub your hips against the silky-soft top sheet anyway.

Because you can. God, you are the luckiest motherfucker.

Sterling must have been pretty close just off the short amount of time you fucked him, because you’ve barely gotten into a rhythm, and he’s making needy, desperate babbling sounds, cries that aren’t quite words.

He chokes on your name, and you know he’s right there.

You incrementally increase the speed and tempo of your fingers, and deep throat him like your life depends on it, swallowing around the head of his dick.

He knows that you’re gonna want his cum in your mouth, so he doesn’t warn you, just rolls his eyes back and shoots down your throat, whining like he’s either in pain or experiencing a near- religious ecstasy.

You have the filthy, unprovoked thought that you wish you could get a picture of it, blow it up on your ceiling, stare at it every night before you went to sleep.

Sterling coming. It’s the loveliest thing.

You keep his cum beneath your tongue as you slow your mouth and lave him through his climax.

You ease your fingers out gently. Sterling pants hard, all his impeccable breath control shot to shit in a way that is intensely gratifying to you.

You ease up the bed to where his head is, his hair a damp and wavy mass beneath him.

It gets all up on your cheek, wiry and coarse, when you tenderly lean down to kiss him and slip a bit of cum into his mouth.

When he tastes it, he moans in his throat and licks into your mouth, sloppily sucking it back out.

You two kiss lazily, swapping spit and spunk, as your bodies cool.

Outside, on the terrace, ferny branches bend in the mild breeze.

Fifteen minutes later, you are wrapped in a sheet with your back against the headboard, sex-stupid and blissed out.

Sterling sits cross-legged on the foot of the bed.

His guitar is on his lap, cradled in his arms like a lover.

He’s stark naked, his messy hair tied off his face in an inelegant bun, and he’s crooning Leonard Cohen’s “Bird On the Wire” in your direction.

It just kind of happened. You two were talking quietly between yourselves, just nonsense post-coital patter, and he crossed the room and picked up the instrument.

Didn’t take a request, just strummed a few chords and started softly singing.

Talk about pictures—if the world could see Sterling like this, it would break the internet. It would be worth tens of millions. People would scream and cry and faint. But it’s just for you, this moment.

That kind of blows you away.