#breynolds

“Do you know what the problem is with our relationship?” you ask, detaching Bob from the crook of your neck.

This is it, he thinks. This is the part where they realise that I’m punching way above my weight and they’re gonna break up with me. He knew this day was coming. Selfishly, he’d hoped to have you forever, but even he knew when to be realistic. He shifts underneath you, positioning the both of you so that you’re sitting up; you in his lap. You’re panting, lips swollen from making out, neck littered with little bruises from where he’d been sucking and biting. He feels his dick twitch in his sweats. Even breaking up with him you looked too good to be true. He wonders if you’ll at least let him fuck you when you’re done breaking his heart.

“Bob,” you drag out, sing-songy and breathless, “I asked you a question. Do you know what the problem is with our relationship?” you repeat. Your fingers are in his hair, and you’re dragging your nails across his scalp in a way that’s almost cruel.

“You’re too good for me. That’s the problem,” he sighs out. He’s leaning in again. One last kiss won’t hurt. He’s denied when you push his face away.

“Stop saying that, you know I don’t like when you speak like that. Try again.”

“Well I don’t know, our relationship’s perfect to me.” He’s nuzzling into the side of your neck again, hands creeping under the shirt you stole from him three months ago. His hands land on your waist, and his fingers hook into the waistband of your underwear.

“Okay well, I’ll tell you because I love you. We have a problematic hickey gap relationship.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he mumbles. He’s attaching his lips to your throat again when you climb out of his lap.

“Pay attention.”

"Fine,” he huffs, “educate me.”

“Okay. Every time we make out or have sex I walk out of there looking like I’ve been attacked by an octopus and you don’t. No matter how hard I try I can’t fucking land a hickey on you. It’s not fair,” you pout.

“You don’t look that bad,” he says but even he knows he’s lying. He liked marking you up, liked watching the purple marks bloom. He liked licking over them when he was done and he liked the way you’d buck your hips into his, desperate and needy and putty in his hands when he did it.

“Bob I haven’t been able to wear shorts in public for the past two weeks because of you.”

Pride swells in his chest, and he doesn’t even have the shame to look sheepish when you glare at him.

“I don’t remember ever leaving any marks below the neck,” he lies. He hopes you take the bait and he feels the blood rush south when you do, lifting his shirt so he can see. Your inner thighs are just a mess of love bites, some almost fully faded, others relatively fresh. None of them from today. He’d have to fix that.

He’s standing up and walking over to you before you can even think of dodging, pulling you in at the waist, pressing himself into you. You whimper when you feel him against you, hot and hard and wanting, and he watches you short circuit as he kneels down in front of you, thumbs pressing into the inside of each thigh.

“Are you even listening to me you pervert?”

“W-Why am I a pervert?” He’s still kneeling in front of you when you dig your fingers into his hair forcing him to look up at you. The pull is delicious and he doesn’t stop the moan that rips through him as you tilt his head up. You’re so hot from this angle it’s almost torturous. You’re looking down at him, wholly unimpressed by his inability to focus.

“I’m pouring my heart out to you and you’re trying to make my thigh situation worse.”

“I love you, but I just don’t think a ‘hickey gap’ is a real problem.”

And he really doesn’t. So what if you couldn’t land a hickey on him. Everyone knew he was yours anyway, you didn’t need to mark him up to prove it.

“It is to me,” you say quietly.

“Fine. Come give me one then.” He lets go of your thighs to pull your fingers out of his hair and leans back, supporting himself on his forearms. “Let’s fix this hickey gap thing so I can put you through your mattress. Please.” He watches you clench your thighs together but you still don’t move.

“How?You’re indestructible, remember.”

“We don’t know that for sure!” He’s pushing up, a hand wrapping around your knee, tugging you down very unceremoniously into his lap.

“You are bulletproof.”

“I’m pretty sure I still bruise.” A kiss to your throat, a squeeze of your waist.

“Yeah when you get thrown into concrete walls.”

“Do you have any solutions or is it just problems today?” he teases, maneuvering you so you’re straddling him. He cradles your head guiding it to his neck. “Just keep going until you do it, I believe in you,” he says, tilting his head to give you better access. He can feel you hesitating, and just when he’s about to take matters into his own hands, he feels your lips on his neck, mouthing at the dip in his collarbone.

“Feels good,” he manages to gasp out. His hands find your waist, and he grinds you into him. “Oh baby that feels so good keep going,” he encourages, eyes shut. Confident, you graze your teeth across his skin, then nip lightly at first, then a little harder. He bucks up into you so ferociously you’re surprised he doesn’t knock you straight off. You put your hands in his hair again, pulling and Bob swears he nearly cums from the feeling alone. He lets one of his hands slide around, kneading the flesh of your ass as you continue to nip at him with singular focus. “Fuck, you’re doing so well. So so well for me,” he mumbles into your hair. He can’t help the way he continues to buck up into you, chasing some relief. You don’t let up, even when he starts whining in your ear about how the hickey doesn’t matter and cries of “pleasepleaseplease just let me fuck you” fill the room. You’re ferocious now, sucking and biting with an intensity he didn’t even know was possible. Bob can feel himself leaking precum, too blissed out to care about being embarrassed. You feel so good like this, pulling at his hair, grinding into him, sucking at his neck. “Harder,” he pants into your hair. And you oblige. Bob doesn’t even feel his orgasm creeping up on him, but before he knows it he’s holding you down on his lap, hips twitching into yours as he spills into his sweats.

He’s so dazed he doesn’t notice that you’ve pulled yourself away from his neck until you’re giggling.

“I did it,” you pant, finger tracing the dark purple mark blooming on his neck. “Oh my god, I actually did it.”

You’re elated, a glint in your eyes as you stare mesmerised. Figures. You’d pretty much undone him without really trying and all you were worried about was that goddamn hickey. He’s so in love with you in that moment that he feels his chest physically ache.

“‘M so proud of you, really,” he says. “Now can we please get back to what we were doing?”

He’s already taking your shirt off, attaching his lips to your chest.

“No, wait I wanna give you another one,” you say, high off the feeling of success.

“After.”

“Bob-”

“After.”

He’s hardening beneath you already, still aching for you in a way he didn’t know possible.

He hadn’t realized. He smiles as his fingers draw to a stop on Reynolds’ chest. He lays his palm over the other man’s heart.

“I always pay attention, Reynolds,” he says.

But the smile fades as the silence sinks back down. Somehow he believes the subject on his mind is the same one weighing on Reynolds. It had made their coupling slower than usual but no less intense—all pulling and grabbing, firm grasps and softer touches, trading hot breaths and deep kisses, hands always upon one another. There had been a meaning to it, an understanding. And that same understanding weighs heavy on Brimsley’s heart as they lie there in the afterglow.

“Do you think we believed it?” he asks.

Reynolds studies him a long moment. “I thought you did not wish to speak about this.”

“I do not.” A pause. “But do you think we believed it?”

Reynolds sighs. “Believed what?”

“That we could have a lifetime.”

Quiet. Reynolds looks away. His expression sinks into a soft, unreadable frown.

“I believe we had to,” he says. His eyes find Brimsley’s again. “It would have been . . . Intolerable, otherwise.”

Brimsley nods slowly. “I believe you are right.”

They gaze at one another for a long, searching moment, and then shift together on an unspoken impulse. Brimsley takes Reynolds’ face in his hands and presses their lips hard together. They kiss, open-mouthed and feverish, tangling together on Brimsley’s bed. Their breathing turns to harsh, hot pants into each other’s mouths; Reynolds’ teeth close around Brimsley’s lower lip. Brimsley lays a hand on Reynolds’ shoulder, pushes him back, and climbs atop him. The room fills again with the shift of blankets and the low grunts, gasps, and moans of their coupling.

Theirs is and has always been a love comprised of stolen moments—handfuls of minutes taken together beyond the watchful eye of society, always careful, always discreet. Theirs is a connection informed by distance, by separation, but made no less deep or meaningful for it. Theirs is a love made of longing.

But they are together now, Brimsley’s lips at the hollow of Reynolds’ throat, his hands at the other man’s hips lifting them to his, caressing and kissing, breathing in his scent as Reynolds’ body heaves beneath him. They are together and these moments are theirs.