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I put my mouth by his ear.

“You know what you are.”

He makes a sound into my palm.

“You’re mine,” I say. “Not hers. Not theirs. Mine to hold down. Mine to fuck. There’s not one person in that building tonight who knows the first thing about you, and every one of them went home thinking they’d been kind to a man they’ve never met.”

His eyes are open. He’s looking at the wall, at nothing. There are tears coming out of the outside corner of the one I can see and going into the pillow. He’s not crying in any way that involves the rest of him.

“You’ve spent your whole life paying people back,” I say into his ear, moving in him. “Not tonight.”

I pull out almost to the head and hold there. He tries to push back onto me, and he can’t. I have his wrists, his hips are pinned under mine, and all he can do is clench around the head of my cock and make a noise into my hand that I’ll hear for the rest of my life.

“You want it,” I say.

He nods into my palm, hard, as far as my hand will let him.

“Then take it.” I sink back into him, all the way, slowly enough that he feels every inch go in. “All of it. It isn’t a debt. Nobody’s counting.”

He hits nothing. His hands stay where I have them. His fists open and close in my grip. The tendons stand up in his forearms, and he doesn’t use one ounce of the strength he has. He could break this hold in a second and a half if he wanted to. We both know it.

I slow down. I fuck him long, unhurried, unbearable, dragging out until he clenches to keep me and grinding back in deep. His cock is pinned between his belly and the sheet, and every stroke drags it through the wet patch he’s made. He can’t move unless he chooses to stop me.

“Look at the wall,” I say. “You don’t get to hide. You wanted somebody to say it, so hear it. Nothing to send back. Nothing to write down.” I get deeper into him and hold. “You don’t owe me for this. Lie there, take it, be wanted. You’re going to come like this, on my cock, without anybody touching you.”

I hold him right there. I grind in deep and small, not pulling out at all, the head of my cock rocking against that place inside him. His breathing goes ragged, then stops, then starts again in short, shocked pulls. His thighs start to shake under mine. His hole flutters around me, tightening, tightening.

“Now,” I say into his ear.

He comes.

Untouched, with his hands pinned behind him, my palm across his mouth, and nothing under him but a sheet. It goes through him in one long wave from the shoulders down. His hole clenches around me in hard pulses, and he spills against the sheet under him and shouts into my hand for four seconds.

It goes on longer than it should. He keeps clenching and spilling and shaking, and I keep moving through it, slowly, because every stroke drags another pulse out of him and another sound into my palm.

I get maybe six more strokes, the grip of him dragging it out of me, and then I’m gone too, buried all the way in, emptying into him with my forehead against the back of his neck, my hand still over his mouth and his heart going like a bird under my chest.

For a while, neither of us moves. I stay in him. Every few seconds, he clenches around me in small aftershocks, and each one drags a breath out of him. I take my hand off his face first.

“Talk to me.”

His voice is shattered. “I’m fine,” he manages.

I reach over and tip his chin up. “Say something else.”

He takes a breath. “Nashville,” he says, then laughs—a sound I’ve heard four times.

I let his wrists go and get off him, slowly. There’s a mark on each wrist where my hand was and a red place at his hairline where I had him by the hair. He rolls onto his side with an arm over his face.

I get a cloth, then water. I clean my cum off the backs of his thighs and the mess off his stomach. He lets me, and doesn’t say anything about it. While I’m there, I get a hand into the muscle over the bad hip. I work it with my thumb, along the joint, until the shaking changes. He grunts once when I find the right place and then goes loose all down that side.

I press gently on the hip. “How’s the hip?”

“Fine,” he says. I keep working it. He finally looks at me, eyes red, voice shattered. “It’s fine. That’s the first time in nine years my whole body’s been quiet.”

I put the covers over him.

He’s asleep in under two minutes. He does it like he does everything else, without any ceremony whatever, on his front with one arm off the side of the bed and his face turned into my pillow.