Page 46 of Poetry On Ice
Jesus. It really liked that.
I glance down at McGuire. He’s half on his side, half on his front. His face is squished into the pillow, hair in his face, lips cracked open, smile a little off-center. He should look a mess. He really should, but he doesn’t.
Instead, he looks angelic.
Angelic?
McGuire?
Get the fuck out of here with that kind of shit.
Wake up and sort yourself out.
I take an ice-cold shower and head back into the room with a towel around my waist because I forgot to bring my clothes into the bathroom.
McGuire has straightened himself out. He’s sitting up in bed with the sheets—my sheets—pooled in his lap and a mug of coffee in his hands. His lips are still swollen from sleep, but his eyes are laser-focused…on me.
It’s a searing green gaze that hits me right in the larynx and renders me unable to swallow. I breathe in through my nose as I try in vain to regain my composure.
He tilts his head toward the crumpled mess that’s his bed and says, “We’re doingthatagain.”
He says it like it’s a fact, not an opinion. Like it’s already been decided. Like it’s written in stone.
Like there’s not a goddamn thing I can do to stop it.
His gaze is uncomfortably intimate. Intolerable. His eyes are too much. Too hot. So hot that I can’t look directly at them, so I let my gaze track down his throat to the hollow between his clavicles, searching for a safe place to land. I mean to look down more, to focus on his nipples or abs because, as insane as it sounds, focusing on them seems like a better option than his face, but I can’t do that either. Something invisible has hooks in me. Deeply. My eyes travel upward, pausing briefly at his mouth. His perfect, plushy lips are still parted slightly. Still curled up a little. They curl up more from my attention.
“I know,” I croak eventually.
There’s no point in denying it. It’ll only make me look stupid later.
He looks pleased with himself, preening and giving me a little shake of his shoulders that makes his pecs flex. He’s infinitely smug and happy and sweet Jesus, I hate that.
“Just so you know, it’s casual,” I tell him. “This thing between us, it’s just fucking, okay? I’m not a relationship guy, and I’m not saying you are or anything. I just want to be super clear about who I am so we don’t get our wirescrossed.”
His eyes darken and his bottom lip narrows till it’s little more than a dot. He raises his mug to his lips and takes a spiteful sip of coffee.
A fission of fear carves a hole in my sternum.
I know that look.
I’ve seen it before. I saw it when I told him he couldn’t blow me anymore, and just look how that turned out—I’m twenty grand in debt to this man, and his mouth is practically my dick’s holiday home.
“We’ll see about that,” he says.
He puts his cup down and throws the covers off himself.
Before I have time to fully recover from the shock of seeing a totally naked Robbie McGuire less than five feet from me, he gets up and strides toward the bathroom, stopping at the door to look at me accusingly and say, “What are you waiting for?” like I’m some kind of idiot.
“I, um…”
I’m finding things a little hard to follow, but fortunately, my dick is quick to explain.He wants to blow you, bruh. Stop being a pussy and get in there.
When you really think about it, who am I to argue with that kind of logic?
I follow him into the bathroom and say, “You want to suck my cock, huh?” in a smarmy voice I’m not familiar with. “You want a piece of this, don’t you?”
As I say it, I catch a truly cringey glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. I’m grinning manically and holding my boner in one hand like it’s a pet rodent or something. I look exactly like any one of a hundred problematic porn stars from the seventies or eighties.