THE NEXT evening, I was working on my Cultural Foundations II paper, but I was hopelessly distracted. Everything in the apartment seemed more interesting than Dante, especially Will, working at the drafting table next to me. I could smell him every now and then when he’d reach his arms up to stretch his shoulders or recross his legs. The sinews of his forearm tensed as he drew, and his hair seemed perfectly arranged to torment me with the shadow it cast beneath his cheekbone.
“Eyes on your own paper, young Leo,” he said without looking up, and I realized I was staring at the curve of his biceps that his white T-shirt revealed. I looked down at my work with a little shiver; Will’s half-amused, half-scolding voice just did things to me.
A few minutes later, Will pressed his hand to my thigh, just above my knee, and I became aware that I’d been bouncing it.
“You’re shaking the whole floor, babe.” He rapped my thigh with the pencil he still held and turned back to his work.
“Sorry,” I muttered. I leaned back in my chair, the front two legs coming off the ground, and closed my eyes for just a minute, letting the sounds from outside—traffic and birds and a song in Spanish—filter in.
Hands on my shoulders pushed the chair back onto all four legs, and Will said, “Would you do your damn work? I can feel how distracted you are from two feet away.” I made a pathetic groaning complaint and tried to rest my head back on his chest for some sympathy, but he just tapped the desk in front of me with that damn pencil, his breath ghosting the back of my neck. I shifted in my chair.
“Ummm, this should probably not turn me on, but I love it when you’re so fucking bossy,” I muttered, shaking my head.
“Is that right?” Will drawled, his voice taking on an edge. “What do you love about it?”
“Uh….” Was he serious?
I craned my neck to look behind me. He let go of my shoulders and sat down, looking at me.
“Tell me why it turns you on when I’m bossy, Leo.”
My face and neck got hot. I wasn’t sure why exactly, only that it somehow felt like when Will made decisions for me that he was exerting some kind of ownership over me. Like by deciding that I was his to order around, he was decided that I was just… his.
Then there was the way his eyes burned when I told him no. How he liked to push my buttons, liked to see how far he could go before I’d stop him. How much I would give him. But my mouth didn’t currently seem to be connected to my brain, so when I opened it all that came out was an inarticulate noise from the back of my throat.
“Do you like when people tell you what to do, Leo?” His voice was filthy. “You got a little hot-for-teacher action going on?”
“I… I like it when you tell me what you want,” I finally stammered out. “I like giving it to you.” Will’s expression softened for a moment, then his mouth curled into a smirk.
“Well, then.” He leaned in close to me, expression stern. “I want you to write for ten minutes.” He tapped the desk. “With no distractions.” He tapped my cheek.
“Can I—?”
“Work time is not talking time, Leo.” He turned back to his own paper.
“Whoa.”
I looked back at my computer, not even sure what was going on. All the blood had left my head and rushed… elsewhere, and when I looked at the words on the screen, they all blended together. I was too aware of Will next to me. The heat of his body, his smell. The drag of his pencil along paper hit me like a caress up my spine and raised goose bumps on my arms. I reached down to adjust my erection and felt Will’s eyes on me.
Will slid a hand to the inside of my thigh. Just that touch sent warmth rushing through my legs, made me want to press into his hand to feel his strength against mine. “I’m going to need to see a bit more dedication to your work.”
I swallowed hard and found myself nodding.
I wrote a few sentences, but I couldn’t have said what they were about to save my life. My heart was beating faster and faster and every hair on my body was raised. Will kept drafting like he didn’t notice the state I was in at all.
“How close are you?” he asked without looking up, and I practically swallowed my own tongue as my dick pulsed. Will rolled his eyes. “To finishing your paper.”
“Uh, like one more page.”
“Write it.”
“I’m trying,” I grumbled.
Will stood up and looked down at my work, resting his hand casually on my shoulder. He leaned just close enough that my skin buzzed with proximity, my hands itching to grab fistfuls of that perfect white T-shirt and pull him down into my lap. Kiss him until he forgot about what I was supposed to be doing and just begged me to fuck him. I groaned at the picture.
“Are you having trouble concentrating?” Will said in my ear. I let out a nervous laugh. “Maybe you need an incentive. Beyond, of course, the reward of a job well done.” I groaned as his voice dropped lower on the last three words and nodded so quickly I almost gave myself whiplash.
Will moved behind me and put his hands on my shoulders, pressing me closer to the desk. “Start writing,” he murmured and then proceeded to do something to my neck that “kiss” was far too tame a word for. He feasted on me—licking and sucking at the place where my neck met my shoulder, biting gently at the muscle there, scraping his teeth over tendons and breathing on my damp skin.
He kissed the back of my neck softly, nose in my hair, on his way to the other side, and did the whole thing all over again. I was writhing in the desk chair, hard as rock and gasping at the sudden attack that had amped up my arousal so quickly I was almost light-headed with it.
By the time I coordinated my brain and my limbs to reach back and touch Will, he had pulled away with one final, hair-raising kiss to the back of my neck. Then he sat down at the drafting table, and the scritch of his pencil tip tore through me.
“Fuuuuck.”
“Do your work,” he said softly, his voice rough. I groaned and dropped my forehead to the desk. His hand settled warm and heavy on the back of my neck and squeezed.
“Fuck!” I said again, and he chuckled, leaning close.
“Leo. Your first job is to finish your paper, and your second job is to fuck me over this desk.” He rested his palm on the desk near my face. “Each are worth fifty percent of your grade,” he said, voice teasing, and then sat back in his chair.
“Oh my god, seriously, why is this turning me on so much?” I shook my head at myself.
“Who cares why? Do your first job so you can do your second job, would you?”
“Mmhmm.” It came out as kind of a whine.
I wrote the end of my paper, the words coming from somewhere and who the hell knew what they were, but I told myself I would fix it in the morning before I turned it in. I hit Command+S and slammed my laptop shut, looking to Will immediately.
He raised an eyebrow. “Finished.”
“Yeah.”
“How did it turn out?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, taking in the angle of his jaw, the line of his neck, and then moving down to the strong planes of his chest. “Wait, what?”
He was up in a flash, straddling my thighs and attacking my mouth. I groaned as his tongue slid against mine and clutched him tight, grabbing his ass in both hands and dragging him onto my erection. He grabbed the back of the chair with one hand and wrapped the other around my neck.
We kissed with all the pent-up heat of the last hour. I was desperate for him. For the taste of his hot mouth and the feel of his weight on my lap, the sensation of his arms around me and the muscular thrusts of his hips flexing to stay on my lap, struggling to get us at the right angle.
When we found it, we ground together, groaning. I leaned back a little so he could balance and he folded against me, his weight pressing our dicks together. He made a tiny gasping sound in my ear, and I was wild with need for him. I started pulling at his clothes, just needing skin on skin contact. His chest was flushed and I pinched his nipple, loving his hiss in response, th
e feel of his nails digging into my shoulders. Then he found my mouth again, latching on and kissing me until we were both breathless and sweating.
I pressed him back against the desk, pushing the chair away so I could get his pants off. My movements wild, I kind of squashed him backward, and he grabbed for my laptop, catching it before it toppled off the desk. We both froze for a moment, and he laid it gently on his drafting table, on top of the drawing he’d been working on.
“Top marks for enthusiasm, but I’d hate you to have to explain to your professor how you couldn’t turn in your paper due to busting your laptop in a freak desk-sex accident.” I didn’t even know how he could say “desk sex,” which was a real tongue twister, when I could barely think in more than grunts, so I just nodded and went back to kissing the shit out of him. It was, after all, my job.
I bore him back onto the desk, and we ground into each other, arms clutching, hands everywhere, mouths meeting so heatedly my lips buzzed, and I could feel them bruising. And I loved it. I loved any evidence of Will’s passion that I could keep with me on my body. Whenever he left marks on my skin, I’d track their progress as they lingered on me, feeling bereft when they faded, like without them my skin was too uncomplicated.
I couldn’t get enough of him. I dropped to my knees before him and kissed his belly, exalting in the way his hands fell immediately to my shoulders to keep in contact. I cupped his hips and dipped my head lower, nuzzling into the crease of his groin, kissing the insides of his thighs until they trembled. I buried my face in his crotch, mad with the need to touch him, smell him, taste him everywhere.
“Ah fuck,” Will groaned as I sucked the base of his cock, pressing my thumb behind his balls. He canted his hips forward, and I slid my mouth over his erection, the taste of him exploding on my tongue, all heat and salt and sweet sweat. Will’s legs softened as he gave himself over to my mouth.
I worked him slowly at first, then lapped at the tip of his cock to make him shudder and pull away, only to press closer again. The sounds that were coming from above me sent bolts of arousal through me that gathered in the pit of my stomach and made my ass clench.
I stroked Will’s balls until he whined. I pulled off him and rested my forehead against his stomach, trying to calm down a bit. Will ran sweaty fingers through my hair and held me to him.
“One sec,” he said and pulled me up, twisting away. He tore open the condom and rolled it on me, and I bit my lip at his touch. I couldn’t look away from him. He was sweaty and flushed with arousal, his hair a mess and his lips swollen. His jaw and around his mouth were pinked from the stubble I hadn’t bothered to shave the last few days, and his eyes were wild.
I wanted to tell him how beautiful he was, how absolutely stunning, but I was afraid he’d hear only the emptiness of the words he’d heard so many others say to him in the past.
Someday I would find a way to tell him that his beauty wasn’t separate from him for me. That it was animated by the real him he let me see—made complicated and imperfect and specific because of his Will-ness. And I thought maybe he saw some of it on my face, because he softened for a moment, his eyebrows drawing together slightly and his eyelashes fluttering as he leaned in to kiss me, just a sweet press of his mouth to mine as we stood together.
“I want you so much” was all I said.
“I want you too,” he whispered against my lips.
I took his shoulder and turned him onto the desk, chest down and ass up. I kissed down his back to the perfect curve of his ass and bit lightly at one cheek, patting the other.
“This is a whole new level of ass-kissing to try and get a higher grade, Leo. You know, you already—nnggh!” He groaned brokenly when I licked his hole, holding him open for me.
He swore wildly, and I huffed out a laugh against his skin. “Okay, okay, do your job, please,” he said finally, breathing heavily.
“Wow, was that a please I just got?” I stood up and leaned over Will’s back to kiss his neck.
“It’s all you’re gonna get unless you get on with it right fucking now.”
“Always something to say, huh?” I spread his legs wider, felt his opening relax to my cock as I pressed against him.
“You love it,” he retorted.
“Yeah. I do,” I said, and I thrust inside him, pleasure shooting up my spine and down the backs of my thighs as I joined us together. We both groaned, and I stilled inside him, enjoying the closeness, the heat, the fucking delicious pressure of his body around mine. I could feel his heartbeat and smell his sweat, and I pulled out slowly to feel the drag of his ass, then slammed back inside him, groaning as pleasure tore through me.
We went fast and hard, and I bent my knees to get the angle right, governing my body by Will’s every reaction.
“Oh fuck, yes, harder,” he demanded when I changed position slightly, and I did as he said, the desk slamming into the wall. “Oh my god, if you break my apartment, I will kill you,” he groaned, then, “Fuck, don’t stop!”
I laughed into his neck as I tried to fuck him harder and not break his apartment at the same time. Finally, I just grabbed his hip and his shoulder and pulled him back against me as I pounded him as hard as I could.
I felt him come apart in my hands, his back bowing, his head thrown back, his hands scrabbling at the wood of the desk. I bit the side of his neck and used every muscle I’d developed in yoga over the past year to maintain enough of a crouch that I could thrust upward at just the right angle.
He went wild around me and then froze, letting out a broken cry as he came all over the desk. He grabbed his dick, stroking hard and groaning as he kept coming.
“Oh god.” I slammed into him in a rush of hot pleasure, my hips moving even after my orgasm had wrung me dry, body seeking each shivery tendril of sensation. I collapsed over Will’s back, and he whimpered. Then the whimper dissolved into a laugh and I looked down to see that he’d come all over my notebook.
“Omigod,” I said into his neck.
“Good thing I moved your laptop.”
“Thanks,” I murmured absently, kissing up his neck and jaw to his ear. He shivered a little, so I did it again. After a minute, I eased out of him, biting my lip at the loss of his heat. I turned him around and pulled him to me, kissing his mouth. Then I wrapped my arms around him and just hugged him. He always tensed at first, and then he always softened. I waited for it, and when it came, I squeezed him even tighter.
“So, what’d I get?” I asked.
“Hmm?”
“Well, you said this was fifty percent of my grade. That’s a lot, especially during finals.”
Will grabbed my ass and squeezed. “An A,” he said softly. “Definitely an A.”
His voice was gentler than I expected, and there was no tease in it at all. He didn’t let go but kept holding on to me, wrapping his arms around my waist.
It felt… heavy somehow. But good. Right.
“What?” I teased, just a little, so he didn’t get self-conscious the way he sometimes did. “Not an A plus?”
Will squeezed me, and I could feel his smile against my collarbone.
“NYU doesn’t give A-pluses, silly. You know that.”
TWO DAYS, many bagels and coffees, and not enough hours of sleep later, my last paper was turned in and my final final taken. I thought my physics project had turned out well, despite changing it again at the last minute.
After Gretchen and I left sunrise yoga, I’d been floaty, almost drunk on the morning, but for all that I’d considered grand notions like measuring love and every yoga-related physics experiment I could think of, the image I couldn’t get out of my head was of standing with my friends and hallmates in the middle of the night, during finals of my first year in a brand-new city, and picturing Will bathed in the light of the same moon.
It was sappy and personal, and no one would know that it had anything to do with Will except me, but I couldn’t help it. I measured the gravitational force of the moon.
At
first I wanted to measure its effects on me and then on Will, so I could have actual data that would show how much of it we shared. But when I sat down to actually design the experiment, I realized I’d have to measure the fluctuations in weight over a twenty-four-hour period, during which we’d have to basically stay totally still in the same spot. And, like, not eat or pee or sweat or anything, so that wasn’t really feasible. So I just measured its effects on a glass of water instead. After all, we were seventy percent water, so whatever effects the moon had on water it had on us, right? Plus, you know, it was a way easier experiment.
Anyway, call it a love letter sent in the form of a final project—that was as romantic as sending the sounds of your love into space, right? Even if Will would never know about it.
It had been hard to leave Will’s the other night. After we had sex, he was in a mood I didn’t recognize. Like he had something to say but was holding back. Everything in me wanted to stay and pry it out of him, but I reminded myself of Tonya’s words and I made myself let go. My work now was to finish finals. I knew I had to have a major conversation with Will, but that wasn’t the moment.
Our dorm room looked like a whirlwind had hit it. An FBI-profiling, serial-killer-tracking genius whirlwind. The filing cabinet seemed to have taken up permanent residence on Charles’ bed, and I didn’t even think he was paying attention to where he was in any schedule, thirty-six-hour days or otherwise, because he had, as far as I could tell, been up for two days straight, finishing the write-up of his behavioral psychology project. I couldn’t really bring myself to care much, though, and, since the filing cabinet wasn’t on my bed, I dropped onto the messy covers and was asleep before I could even think the words filing cabinet.
Later, I’d just gotten out of a much-needed shower and was feeling shockingly not dead when I got a text from Will telling me to come over whenever I was done and we could watch the Lord of the Rings extras in celebration.