Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
“Did I seem like I didn’t want that?” Brendan growled.
“You…fuck, you’re awful.” Cillian braced his hands against Brendan’s chest; his breaths fell loud and shaky between them, and although he fell still…he trembled.
And Brendan was so tempted.
He wasn’t sure if he liked that.
Being tempted.
Not just by the promise of pleasure in a willing, inviting body, but by Cillian himself; by just how deeply satisfying it was to draw those reactions out of him, make him writhe with just a touch.
And after a moment, Brendan let go, just saying, “…I know.” He just…pulled Cillian against him, pushing aside that disquieted feeling that raised questions he didn’t want to consider. Instead he diverted with, “So really, why are your parents so against a nearly thirty-year-old man deciding what to do with his life?”
“…if you don’t want sex, you can say it in ways that don’t involve my parents,” Cillian replied in a disgusted mutter, tension bleeding out to leave him slumped and loose against Brendan. Pensive eyes lidded. “My path in life was ordained the moment I was conceived, even though it doesn’t matter. It’s just…not important to anyone but them. They’re big on tradition. Passing on the family work and all.”
Just what kind of repressive, controlling family did Cillian come from?
“What do they do?” Brendan asked carefully.
“Administration. Politics.”
“…you. A politician.”
“I’ve never even played one, and I don’t want to.” Grumbling, Cillian butted his nose against Brendan’s shoulder. “I don’t want to talk about them.”
“Well if you’re not interested in talking anymore, I have a few other suggestions,” Brendan said, and let his fingers drift along the curve of Cillian’s hip.
Eyes widening, Cillian curled his fingers against Brendan’s arm. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to be wearing you out!”
“Trust me. This doesn’t wear me out.” Brendan bowed to nuzzle against Cillian’s throat, capturing salt-sweet skin and biting down gently, laving his tongue over tender flesh and absorbing the vibrato of Cillian’s moan against his lips. “But,” he murmured, shaping the words over Cillian’s pulse, “I was thinking of something else.”
“L-Like…?”
Brendan bit down gently once more, then let go. “There’s a VHS player in the entertainment center…and an entire shelf full of tapes.”
Cillian caught his breath, and this time when Brendan lifted his head those pale brown eyes were alight with excitement, rather than desire. “Cantonese opera?”
Brendan grinned, if only because around this monstrous wretch he could never seem to stop. “Cantonese opera.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GOD, CILLIAN WISHED HE COULD have held on to the afterglow from last night.
Because right now, he was having a very, very crappy day.
It was like Newcomb could smell it on him—the lingering pheromones, the floating cloud of lazy pleasure that had left Cillian so sated he’d barely made it through thirty minutes of Brendan’s old opera tapes—bright colors, vivid emotion—before he’d passed out in a contented heap, tangled up with Brendan on the sofa, naked in their tumble of blankets.
He hadn’t had sex that good in a while.
If ever.
And Brendan hadn’t even been roleplaying much—just a few dirty words here and there, just enough to give Cillian that shiver of pleasure that came from feeling like he was doing something just a little bit shameful.
If Brendan actually took it further…
Cillian caught himself drifting on those thoughts all day. And then rudely slapped out of them multiple times—Tell this and Tell that, Newcomb hounding him over every imagined infraction until he was ready to shout, slap the script out of the director’s smarmy little hands, ask him how he’d fucking like it if—
Breathe.
Breathe.
The only things that had kept him steady throughout the day were Sophie’s irreverent sympathetic humor…and Brendan. Always there on the sidelines, always a watchful guardian…always reminding Cillian with every heated glance just what they’d done last night, until Cillian missed more than one cue and maybe, just maybe earned a few of those shouts of his name, the calls of cut, the disgusted demands to do it again.
Please don’t let me be this dickmatized.
Please.
By the time he made it back to his rental cottage after Newcomb called an end to shooting for the day, Cillian had about zero patience left for Maxwell’s disapproving looks. His backward comments about Cillian coming home in the same outfit he’d left in…forty-eight hours ago. The pointed reminders about how long it had been since he’d called home, or listened to his parents’ voicemails. The…the…everything, until it was all Cillian could do to bite his tongue and remember not to take his frustration out on anyone else. Silence was the only thing that got him through showering, changing—and then escaping again, giving Maxwell the night off and calling an Uber just to lift the weight of judgment Maxwell carried around him all the time.
He just wanted to spend the evening with Brendan, calm down, possibly have wild, crashing, dripping, mindless sex again.
Only Brendan was in a mood, too.