Chapter 91: Chapter 91
The grey light hardened into the flat, white glare of a weekday. Felix’s mouth tasted of ash and regret. For a week, he didn’t call. He washed the sheets twice, but the phantom scent of Cassian—ozone, salt, and sweat—seemed embedded in the mattress. He went to his graphic design classes, ate dinners with his parents where he pushed food around his plate, and felt the strange, hollow ache in his body like a ghost limb. He was waiting, though he’d never admit it.
On Saturday, his friends from university dragged him out to a pub in the Pearl District. It was loud and gleaming, full of polished wood and people their own age. Felix drank pale ale to be polite, then switched to whisky gingers. The noise was a buffer, but it couldn’t fill the cavity inside him. He drank faster, seeking that liquid numbness that felt like armour. By the fourth whisky, the world developed a pleasant, woozy tilt. By the sixth, he was shouting along to a song he hated, his arm slung around a mate’s shoulders.
Stumbling out into the cool night much later, the alcohol hit him in a nauseating wave. He barely made it to a sliver of alley between two buildings before he was heaving, gripping rough brick as his stomach violently purged the evening. Whisky, bile, and shame splattered the concrete. He spat, tears stinging his eyes from the force of it. His head pounded. His body felt weak and treacherous. Yet, threading through the sickness was a sharper, more insistent need. The need to be overwhelmed, to be filled so completely he couldn’t feel anything else.
He fumbled for his phone, the screen blindingly bright. His thumbs, clumsy and wet, navigated to WhatsApp. He found the contact. No name, just the grim emoji of an anvil he’d assigned. He didn’t call. He typed, his vision swimming, erasing and retyping.
>me: you around
>
>me: just got home. im fucking wrecked.
>
>me: feel like being wrecked properly.
He stared at the messages, a hot flush of humiliation warring with the desperate ache between his legs. He hit send before he could think.
The three dots appeared almost instantly. Felix’s breath caught.
>ANVIL: Just got off shift. Covered in dock shit. No shower.
>
>ANVIL: You’re that desperate?
Felix’s reply was a frantic stab of his thumb.
>me: yes.
The dots again. A lifetime.
>ANVIL: 15 minutes. Door unlocked.
Felix’s heart hammered against the sickness. He used the wall to get himself upright, weaving his way the three blocks to his building. The stairwell spun. Inside his flat, he didn’t turn on the lights. He just dropped onto the sofa, head in his hands, waiting for the world to stop tilting. The sick, sweet stench of his own vomit clung to his jacket. He didn’t care.
The knock was the same: three definitive, shattering thuds. Felix lurched to the door and opened it.
Cassian stood there, backlit by the hallway’s unforgiving fluorescence. He was still in his heavy work gear—dusty cargo pants, steel-toed boots caked in dried mud, a thick thermal shirt stretched across his chest. The smell rolled off him in a potent wave: scorched metal, grease, the salty tang of dried sweat, and beneath it, the raw, animal musk of a long day’s labour. Grime was ground into the lines of his knuckles, his forearms.
“Christ, you look like death,” Cassian said, his voice a dry rasp. He stepped inside, filling the small space with his presence and his odour.
“Feel like it,” Felix slurred, leaning back against the door as it shut.
Cassian’s eyes, dark and calculating, tracked over him. “But not too dead for this, huh?” He reached out, his filthy, calloused hand gripping Felix’s chin, forcing his head up. “You stink of puke.”
“You stink of work,” Felix shot back, the defiance thin and brittle.
A smirk touched Cassian’s grime-streaked face. “Different kind of dirty.” He released Felix’s chin, his hand sliding down to the front of Felix’s jeans. He palmed the hard line of Felix’s cock through the denim, a rough, demanding pressure. “This doesn’t lie.”
Felix groaned, his hips bucking forward. Cassian unbuttoned his jeans with efficient, brutal tugs, yanking them and his boxers down to his thighs. The cool air was a shock on his exposed skin. Cassian spat into his own dirty palm, the sound obscenely wet in the quiet room. He wrapped his gritty, wet hand around Felix’s cock and stroked, once, twice, a rough, dry friction that was almost painful.
“Fuck,” Felix hissed, his head falling back against the door.
“Not yet.” Cassian released him, turning Felix around to face the door. He pushed him forward until Felix’s cheek was pressed against the cool wood, his bare ass exposed. He heard the rustle of Cassian’s work pants, the tear of foil, the slick, generous application of lube.
Then the blunt, massive head of Cassian’s cock was pressing against him, insistent and unforgiving. Cassian’s hands, reeking of machine oil and dirt, gripped Felix’s hips hard.
“You’re gonna take every filthy inch,” Cassian growled, his mouth close to Felix’s ear. “You asked for it, you drunk little slut.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He shoved forward.
The penetration was a ragged, burning split. Felix cried out, the sound muffled by the door. Cassian was thicker than Felix remembered, a relentless, stretching invasion that stole the air from his lungs. Cassian buried himself to the root in one continuous, brutal stroke and held there, his body a furnace of heat and stink against Felix’s back.
“Tight little fuckhole,” Cassian grunted, his breath hot. “Clenching on me like a vice.”
He pulled back and slammed home again, setting a relentless, deep rhythm that shook Felix’s whole body with each impact. The door rattled in its frame. The pain was a bright, clarifying fire, burning through the drunken fog, leaving only raw, screaming sensation. Cassian fucked him with the steady, powerful drive of machinery, his grimy clothes rubbing against Felix’s skin.
“You love this, don’t you?” Cassian snarled, pounding into him. “Love getting your ass torn open by a man who smells like a fucking job site.”
“Yes!” Felix wailed, the admission torn from him. He was fracturing, pleasure detonating from the epicentre of the pain. His own cock, trapped between his belly and the door, leaked helplessly.
Cassian’s rhythm grew ragged, more frantic. One of his dirty hands snaked around, gripping Felix’s throat, not squeezing, just holding, a claim of utter ownership. “Gonna fill your drunk cunt up,” he rasped, his hips stuttering. “Gonna pump you full of come.”
The filthy promise, the crushing depth of his thrusts, the visceral reality of the dirt and sweat—it triggered Felix’s collapse. He came with a shattered, gasping cry, his release spurting against the door in hot stripes, his body convulsing around the invading cock. Cassian drove in one final, punishing time and locked, a low, guttural roar escaping him as he emptied himself inside the condom, his thrusts becoming shallow, possessive jerks.
They slumped against the door, a mess of sweat, grime, and spent desire. Cassian’s weight was immense. Felix felt utterly dismantled. After a minute, Cassian pulled out, a cold, wet trailing sensation following. He disposed of the condom.
Silence, broken only by their ragged breathing. Felix expected to hear the sounds of him leaving, the boots, the door.
Instead, Cassian spoke, his voice drained of its earlier ferocity. “Move. I need the shower. I feel like a fucking coal miner.”
Stunned, Felix shuffled aside. Cassian walked to the bathroom, shedding his filthy clothes in a trail on the floor. The shower hissed to life. Felix stood there, shaky and leaking, listening to the water run. He slowly cleaned himself up at the kitchen sink, avoiding his reflection.
Cassian emerged ten minutes later, a towel around his waist, his skin pink from scrubbing. He smelled of Felix’s cheap, citrus body wash. Without a word, he walked to the bed and collapsed onto it, on top of the covers. “Turn the light off.”
Felix did, plunging the room into darkness broken by streetlight glow. He stood, uncertain.
“You gonna stand there all night?” Cassian’s voice was a sleepy rumble from the bed.
Felix crept in, lying on his side, as far to the edge as possible. The mattress dipped as Cassian rolled onto his side, his back a solid, warm wall. The silence stretched, different from the cratered silence of the last time. This was heavy, alive with exhaustion.
Just as Felix’s eyes grew heavy, Cassian spoke again, so quiet it was almost swallowed by the dark.
“Don’t get used to it.”
Felix didn’t know if he meant the staying, the fucking, or the strange, post-combat stillness that had settled between them. He didn’t answer. He listened to Cassian’s breathing deepen into sleep, the unfamiliar sound of another person in his grandfathers’ gifted bed, and felt the slow, warm seep of a different kind of ruin begin.
The grey light solidified into the flat, ugly pallor of a Portland morning. Felix didn’t move. The crust of dried come on his stomach pulled at his skin. The ache between his legs was a deep, provincial throb, a map of the night’s usage. He could still smell him—the ozone, the sweat, the faint, metallic tang of the docks—on his own sheets. It took an hour for the shame to arrive. It didn’t come as a wave, but as a slow, seepage of coldness into his marrow. He’d begged for it. He’d loved it. Now, in the stillness, he felt like an empty container left on a forgotten shelf.
He cleaned himself in a shower so hot it turned his skin lobster-red. He scrubbed until the smell was gone, but the memory of that filthy, magnificent roughness lingered under the soap. He didn’t tell his grandfathers. When Sam video-called, his face concerned and warm, Felix talked about the weird art film he’d seen at the college cinema. He did not mention the feeling of drywall grit from a welder’s palm grinding into his hip bone.
A week passed. Then two. Cassian’s directive—don’t call me for a week—expired, then fossilized. Felix went to classes at the community college. He had coffee with his dad, Leo, and laughed at his terrible puns. He felt the ghost of that night in him, a silent, whispering vacancy. He filled it with vague, chatty dates with boys his own age. They were pleasant. They were soft. They left him feeling nothing but politely bored.
The raucous night started as a birthday party for Maya, his sister. It migrated from her apartment to a loud, crowded bar with sticky floors. Felix drank to be social, then he drank to keep up, then he drank to silence the whisper. The whisky sours went down easy. The tequila shots were a dare. The final round of dark beers was a blur. His friends’ faces swum in and out of focus, their laughter sounding like it was coming from the far end of a tunnel.
“You’re fucked, Maxwell!” someone shouted, clapping him on the back.
Felix grinned, a loose, sloppy thing. “I am perfec,” he slurred, emphasizing the ‘t’ with a spray of spit. The room tilted on a gentle axis. He felt magnificent. He felt invincible. He felt the ghost inside him stir, wide awake and hungry.
Stumbling home was an expedition. The pavement seemed to rise up to meet his feet in unpredictable ways. He made it to his building, fumbled with the key, and fell through his front door. The sanctuary of his flat immediately felt like a trap. The quiet was aggressive. He staggered to the sink, gulped water that tasted of metal, and his stomach revolted.
He barely made it to the toilet. He vomited violently, a sour, acidic eruption of beer and citrus and poor decisions. He heaved until his ribs ached and tears streamed down his face. He slumped against the cool bathroom wall, spent, the room spinning slowly. The hollow feeling was back, cavernous now, carved out by the alcohol.
He needed to be filled. Not with whispers. Not with polite, soft touches. He needed to be obliterated.
He crawled to his bed, found his phone. The screen was a blinding mosaic. He squinted, opening WhatsApp. Cassian’s name was a monument at the top of his recent list. No words, just the name. His thumbs felt like sausages. He typed, deleted, typed again, his drunk mind discarding nuance, aiming only for the raw signal.
Felix: 11:47 PM
im so fuckg drunk. need you to come fuck me. im at mine. right now.
He hit send before he could think. The double grey tick appeared almost instantly. Then the two blue ticks. Felix stared at them, his heart hammering a sick, excited rhythm against his fragile ribs. The typing bubbles appeared. They lingered. Felix held his breath.
Cassian: 11:49 PM just got in. smell like the fuckin dockyard. havnt showerd.
A wild, drunken hope flared in Felix’s chest. He typed back, almost missing the keys.
Felix: 11:49 PM
i dont care. i want to taste it. just come.
The bubbles. A pause.
Cassian: 11:50 PM door unlocked?
Felix: 11:50 PM ill do it now.
Cassian: 11:50 PM 20 min. dont pass out.
Felix rolled off the bed, stumbled to the front door, and turned the lock. The simple click felt like the cocking of a hammer. He went back to the bedroom, stripping off his vomit-tinged shirt, leaving his jeans pooled around his ankles. He lay back on the bed, his head swimming, his cock already half-hard against his thigh with a drunk, insistent ache. He waited. The silence was different now. It was expectant, charged, like the air before a lightning strike.
The heavy tread on the stairs was unmistakable. It wasn’t a knock. The door simply opened and closed. Boots on the hardwood. Cassian stood in the bedroom doorway, a silhouette blotting out the light from the hall. He was still in his work clothes: heavy cargo pants, dusty boots, a thick, grey thermal shirt stretched across his chest, dark with sweat at the neck and under the arms. The smell preceded him—a potent, overwhelming blend of salt, sea-rot, burnt metal, and the profound, animal musk of a hard, physical day.
“Christ,” Cassian muttered, his voice a low vibration. “You reek of puke.”
“You reek of work,” Felix slurred back, pushing himself up on his elbows. The movement made the room swoop. “Come here.”
Cassian stepped into the room. He didn’t undress. He walked to the bed, his movements deliberate, and looked down at Felix’s sprawled, drunken form. “You’re a fucking disaster.”
“Your disaster,” Felix breathed, reaching a clumsy hand for Cassian’s belt.
Cassian caught his wrist, his grip iron. He guided Felix’s hand to the rough fabric of his thermal shirt, pressed it against the damp, solid muscle of his stomach. “This what you want? This grime? This sweat?”
“Yes.” Felix’s voice was a desperate scrape. He turned his head, pressed his face against Cassian’s thigh, inhaling the deeply ingrained scents of grease and ocean and man. “Fuck, yes.”
With a grunt, Cassian undid his own belt and fly. He didn’t push his pants down, just freed his cock. It was thick, heavy, already fully hard. It smelled intensely, purely of him. Of his day. Felix lunged for it, his mouth open, but Cassian fisted a hand in his hair and pulled his head back.
“Not yet.” He pushed Felix onto his back. “On your stomach. Now.”
Felix rolled over, his cheek smushed into the duvet. He heard the rustle of clothing as Cassian finally shucked his pants, the heavy thud of his boots hitting the floor. Then the weight on the bed, the heat of Cassian’s unwashed body covering his, skin to skin. The smell enveloped him, filled his nostrils, coated his tongue. Cassian’s rough, dry hands hauled his hips up, bending him into position. Cold lube squirted onto his hole, a shocking contrast to the heat of the body behind him. One thick, calloused finger, gritty with unseen residue, pushed inside without preamble.
Felix cried out, the stretch a bright, sobering flare in the drunken fog.
“Tight again,” Cassian observed, his voice close to Felix’s ear. He added a second finger, working him open with a brutal, efficient rhythm. The burn was acute, dizzying. “You’re just a hole that needs wrecking, aren’t you? Can’t even get drunk without thinking about a real cock in you.”
“It’s all I think about,” Felix moaned, the truth of it spilling out with the alcohol. He pushed back onto the fingers, craving more.
Cassian withdrew his hand. Felix heard the tear of the packet, the wet sound of him slicking himself. Then the blunt, immense pressure, hotter than the lube, pressing against him. Cassian didn’t ask. He didn’t command him to breathe. He just leaned his full weight forward and pressed in.
It was a slow, inexorable splitting. The ache was monumental, a stretching burn that consumed every nerve ending. Felix whimpered into the bedding, his fingers clawing at the sheets. Cassian sank deeper, inch by terrifying inch, until his sweat-slicked, filthy stomach was pressed against Felix’s ass. He held there, buried to the root, letting Felix feel the complete, violating fullness.
“You’re fucking consumed,” Cassian growled, his breath hot on Felix’s neck. He began to move.
His thrusts were deep, measured, and unbearably powerful. Each drive punched the air from Felix’s lungs and shoved him up the bed. The smell of Cassian’s sweat, the chemical tang of his work, the pure, dirty male scent of him—it was everywhere, in Felix’ Hochosylang draLaughs sorryLaugh480S-lang=ls mouth, in his nose, coating his skin. Cassian’s hands gripped his shoulders, holding him down, amplifying the sense of being pinned, used, invaded.
“Is this what you needed, you drunk little slag?” Cassian panted, his rhythm hardening, becoming less measured, more frantic. “You needed to be reminded what you’re for?”
“Yes! God, yes!” Felix sobbed. The pain had transformed, melted into a radiating, full-body shock of pleasure. His own cock, trapped beneath him, was leaking profusely, a slick pool beneath his hips. The room was a carousel of smell and sound: the slap of skin, Cassian’s guttural curses, the groan of the bedsprings.
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He listened to it until the first grey light of dawn began to bleed around the edges of his cheap blinds. The pattern held, because patterns do. A week later, drunk on loneliness and two pints of cheap lager, he texted Cassian a single question mark after midnight. The welder showed up within the hour, smelling of diesel and wintergreen chewing tobacco. He fucked Felix over the arm of the sofa with a grim, efficient focus, his rough hands pinning Felix’s wrists to the cheap fabric. He left a smudge of dark grease on Felix’s hip, a fossil from the docks. He came with a stifled groan, pulled his jeans up, and was gone before Felix’s breathing slowed. No words were exchanged beyond, “Turn over,” and, “You’re leaking.”
Another time, it was a rainy Thursday. Felix, buzzing with anxiety after a dismal grade on a college paper, sent a text: u free? Cassian replied an hour later: Done at 9. Your place. That night, Cassian tasted of rainwater and whisky. He pushed Felix to his knees in the entryway, worked his thick cock into Felix’s mouth with a relentless, shallow rhythm until Felix gagged, then dragged him to the shower. Under the scalding water, Cassian soaped him with a brutal, clinical thoroughness, then took him from behind, the tiles cold and slick against Felix’s cheek. The steam filled the tiny bathroom, a dense fog that couldn’t muffle Cassian’s final, muttered, “Christ.” He left a clean towel on the toilet lid on his way out.
The silence after each visit was no longer a crater. It had become a room Felix recognized. It held the phantom imprint of Cassian’s weight, the lingering scent of his labor, the specific, tender ache in Felix’s body. It was a transaction, stark and clarifying. Felix found a strange power in it, in knowing exactly what he was, and what it was for.
But on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, sitting in the sterile glow of the university library, the transaction felt insufficient. The memory of Cassian’s hands—their capable, destructive gentleness—didn’t stir a mere itch for release. It stirred a quieter, more dangerous curiosity. Felix pulled out his phone. The previous messages were brief, utilitarian columns of time and assent.
His thumbs hovered. He typed, deleted, then typed again, his heart doing a slow, heavy roll against his ribs.
Felix: Hey. You working days this week?
The reply came twenty minutes later, just as Felix was packing his books.
Cassian: Yeah. Swing shift. Out at 4.
Felix: I was thinking. Not tonight. But maybe Friday. If you wanted to get something to eat. Before.
He sent it. The “before” hung there, a concession, a bridge between what they did and what this might be.
The three blinking dots appeared. Disappeared. Reappeared for a long, agonizing minute.
Cassian: Eat.
Felix: Yeah. Like. A date. Or whatever.
The pause this time was seismic. Felix felt the library walls press in, the hum of computers distort into a taunt.
Cassian: I don’t do dates, kid.
Felix’s throat tightened. He forced his fingers to move.
Felix: I know. But you eat. I eat. There’s a Peruvian place on Belmont. Chicken is stupid good. No pressure after. Just…food.
Another eternity passed in dotless silence. Then:
Cassian: Friday. 5:30. I’ll be in my work clothes.
A wave of relief, so intense it felt like nausea, washed through Felix.
Felix: I know. I’ll get a booth in back.
Friday evening carried the damp, metallic promise of more rain. Felix arrived early, choosing a secluded booth shrouded in shadow, far from the front windows. He wore a clean, dark green henley and jeans, and he’d scrubbed his hands raw. The restaurant was warm, loud with families and the sizzle from the open kitchen. When Cassian pushed through the door, the space seemed to warp around him. He wore his standard uniform: heavy boots, worn jeans, a grey thermal shirt under a frayed flannel that strained across his back. A day’s grime was etched into the lines of his knuckles and under his nails. He stood for a moment, scanning the room, his gaze flat and assessing.
He found Felix. A brief, almost imperceptible nod. He slid into the booth opposite, the bench creaking under his weight. He smelled of outdoors, of cold air, engine grease, and the faint, permanent tang of welded steel.
“Menu,” he said, his voice its usual low gravel.
They ordered. Cassian chose the spicy chicken stew, a Coke. He drank the entire glass in three long pulls before the food arrived, his Adam’s apple working. Felix picked at his saltado, his appetite vanished under the weight of Cassian’s silent, physical presence.
“How’s the dock?” Felix asked, just to break the quiet.
“Loud. Cold. The new foreman’s a prick.” Cassian tore a piece of bread, sopped it in his stew. He ate with a focused, economical motion. “You? School?”
“It’s… fine. My sociology professor thinks my arguments lack historical rigor.”
Cassian chewed, swallowed. “What’s the argument?”
“That urban isolation isn’t a modern phenomenon. That it’s baked into the architecture of industrialization. The docks, actually. Separating work from community, creating these… solitary terminals.”
Cassian paused, his spoon hovering. He looked at Felix, really looked at him, for the first time since sitting down. His eyes were a hard, weathered blue. “Bullshit.”
Felix blinked. “What?”
“The dock’s the loudest, most crowded fucking place you’ll ever see. You’re never alone. There’s always some bastard yelling, machinery screaming, radios blaring shit music. The isolation…” He took another bite, pointed his spoon at Felix. “That comes home with you. In your lunch pail. In your ears, ringing. You carry it out the gate. The noise outside just makes the quiet inside louder.”
Felix stared. He had never heard Cassian string so many words together. They were rough, unpolished, and carried the absolute authority of lived truth. “Oh,” he said softly.
“Yeah. ‘Oh.’” Cassian went back to his stew. “Eat your rice.”
They ate in a more comfortable silence. Felix found he could taste his food again. He asked about the kinds of ships that came in. Cassian described Baltic freighters and Korean auto-carriers with a grudging, technical detail. He asked about Felix’s family, and Felix mentioned his grandfathers, the apartment. Cassian just nodded, as if the gift made perfect sense.
When the plates were cleared, Cassian sat back, studying Felix. The restaurant’s dim light hollowed his cheeks. “This was okay,” he stated.
“Yeah. It was.”
“Your place?”
Felix’s pulse jumped. “Yeah.”
They split the bill. The walk to Felix’s flat was fifteen minutes in the biting damp. No words were exchanged. Cassian’s shoulder occasionally brushed against his, a solid, warm pressure. Upstairs, the familiar space felt different. The bed was made. The single lamp cast a soft pool of light. Cassian stood just inside the door, his gaze traveling over the bookshelf, the small desk, as if cataloging new data.
“It’s cleaner,” he said.
“I was expecting company.”
Cassian’s mouth twitched. He shrugged out of his flannel, then pulled the thermal shirt over his head. His torso was a familiar landscape, but Felix saw it now: the faded white scar along a rib, the dusting of salt-and-pepper in the hair on his chest. This was a man who worked, who hurt, who carried quiet out of a riot of noise. Felix stepped forward, not with drunk desperation, but with a deliberate ache. He placed a hand on Cassian’s sternum. The skin was warm, the muscle beneath dense and unyielding.
Cassian looked down at the hand, then back up at Felix. He caught Felix’s wrist, not to move it, just to hold it there. His thumb stroked the fragile bones. “You sure about this?”
“Yes,” Felix said. The word meant more than it ever had.
Cassian leaned down and kissed him. It was nothing like before. It was slow, searching, almost clumsy. His lips were chapped. He tasted of spicy stew and Coke. Felix melted into it, a soft sound escaping his throat. Cassian walked him backward to the bed, his mouth never leaving Felix’s, his hands coming up to cradle Felix’s face. It was terrifyingly tender.
They undressed each other without haste. Cassian’s palms smoothed over Felix’s shoulders, his sides, his soft stomach, as if mapping territory. He laid Felix back on the duvet and followed him down, his weight a settling anchor. He kissed Felix’s neck, his collar bone, took a nipple into his mouth and worried it gently with his teeth until Felix arched beneath him.
“Cassian,” Felix breathed, his fingers finding the welder’s short, coarse hair.
“I know,” Cassian murmured against his skin. He reached for the lube on the bedside table. The routine was the same, but the rhythm was new. He prepared Felix with a patient, stretching attention that made Felix writhe with a building, sweet tension rather than sharp pain. When he finally pressed inside, it was with a controlled, gradual push that allowed Felix’s body to sigh open around him, inch by inch.
“God,” Felix gasped, his legs wrapping around Cassian’s hips, pulling him deeper.
“Look at me,” Cassian ordered, his voice strained.
Felix opened his eyes. Cassian was braced above him, his face a mask of raw concentration, the cords in his neck standing out. He began to move, a deep, rolling rhythm that was less an assault and more a claiming. Each stroke was deliberate, pushing Felix steadily toward a precipice that felt emotional as much as physical. The grunt of Cassian’s breath was hot against his lips.
“You feel… fuck, Felix…” Cassian choked out, his hips stuttering. He was losing his famed control, unraveling.
That undid Felix completely. The sound of his name, broken like that. “Come in me,” he begged, clawing at Cassian’s back. “Please, I want to feel it.”
Cassian’s answer was a shattered groan. He drove deep and held, his body locking as he pulsed, a hot, liquid release that Felix felt in shuddering waves. The intensity ripped through Felix a second later, his own climax tearing from him with a cry that was half-sob. They collapsed, tangled and breathing in ragged unison.
A long time later, Cassian shifted. He didn’t get up. He rolled to his side, taking Felix with him, pulling him close against his chest. His breathing eased into a slow, steady rhythm in the dark. His arm, heavy and real, stayed draped over Felix’s waist.
Outside, the rain began, a gentle tap against the window of the flat his grandfathers gave him. Felix lay awake in the new silence, listening to the fall of the rain and the sound of a man sleeping beside him. The quiet inside was no longer loud. It was simply full.