Unlocked Dive (Broken Boys of Cirque #2)

11. Echo

11

Echo

B yrd kisses like he can’t believe I’m real, savor on his tongue like syrup and smoke.

I’m greedy by comparison, sucking at his lips and teeth, hungry to harness all the things he holds hidden. Everything coalesces, urgent at the edges of my skin—the shift-surge of his thighs under mine, the euphoric torture of his zipper through my sweats, the half-moon bite of his fingernails on my shoulders crushing me into his hard heat.

Does he want to crawl inside me the way I want to do to him?

I drag my hands from the gorgeous wreck of his hair, fumbling at his jeans in the not-space between us. He sucks in a breath, breaking free of my mouth, and stops me with a hand on my wrist.

“Wait.” His voice is ravaged. “Stop.”

“No.” After weeks of torment, I’m ready to climb him right here in the car—fuck lube, fuck condoms, all I can think about is getting his cock in my hands, in my mouth, everywhere .

“Echo.” He drops his forehead to mine, breathing hard, and my name from his lips spells divinity and damnation .

All my life, I’ve been able to reach out and take . Skill. Admiration. Desire. Everything I ever wanted, effortlessly mine. The tremor of his fingers digs into my scars, and I won’t survive if he rejects me now.

“Byrd… please .” I want to be myself again, not this messy, hollow thing . “Isn’t it killing you not to touch me?”

It’s killing me.

“I am touching you.” He knocks his head gently against mine and strokes his thumb along my thigh.

“Not enough.”

A choked laugh escapes him, and he pulls back, searching my face. I’m too far gone to show him anything but the raw bones of my need, rattling at the edge of connection. How much he sees, I have no idea, but he releases my wrist, and his next words send anticipation lurching giddily up my spine.

“Put your arms behind you and grab the steering wheel.”

I give his button one last tug and do as he demands.

“If you let go, I’ll stop,” he warns. “And whatever you do, don’t lean on the horn.”

He grips my neck then, his thumb heavy against the pulse point under my jaw, and skims his other hand down my chest, skating over the bare skin at my hip. When his fingers slip behind the elastic of my sweats, I make a sound embarrassingly close to a whimper, and his mouth quirks.

“Is this better?” he asks.

“ Not enough .”

He drags his knuckles over the head of my cock, and my hips buck, straining for contact.

“How about this?”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Baardwijk.” I’m clutching the steering wheel at my back hard enough to feel every stitch in the leather. “Just put me out of my misery. ”

And then he wraps his fingers around me, and ohfuckyesohjesusfuckinggod, I’d fall into him if he wasn’t holding me in place. I might anyway . I’m wound so fucking tight, the whole thing’s gonna be over in, like, thirty fucking seconds, and I don’t even care.

His hand is warm and calloused-rough, and he’s done teasing. He jacks me firm and steady, squeezing the base of my cock and twisting his palm over my crown on the upstroke to gather the precum leaking from the tip and smear it down the sensitive underside.

His eyes are locked on my face, full of wonder and hunger finally unleashed, drawing me up and over into rapture. I’m completely unmoored, babbling a nonsensical string of curses and ragged pleas, and my balls are tight and aching. As he increases the pace, I fly past all my salacious fantasies. The head of my cock swells, and I’m thrusting into his hand and…and…

When I come, he makes a sound so primal, I feel it on the back of my skin. Like it’s not just me coating his fingers and coming apart.

Holy fucking shit.

I collapse against him, peeling my hands from the steering wheel to clutch at his hips.

“I think you might be better at taking charge than you give yourself credit for,” I say, burying my face in his neck. His breath is rough and unsteady in my ear.

“Maybe my tastes are changing,” he murmurs. His fingertips stroke the fine hair at my nape, and the late-afternoon sunlight slants warm and drowsy on my back. “Is it enough?”

Instead of answering, I grip his wrist and suck my cum from his fingers, and I imagine that his galloping pulse beneath my cheek means everything I want it to.

I watch him quietly panic on the ride home, his lips still bruised from my kisses, while a local radio station plays shitty jam-band music from the nineties. My post-orgasm haze has long faded by the time he finally breaks the silence.

“Put your shirt back on. Please.” His voice is huskier than usual, with a note of desperation to it that makes me grin.

“It’s sticky.” Actually, it’s more crusty than sticky now, but the point still lands. I swear he fucking blushes, but he changes the subject before I can press my luck.

“You looked good on the silks back there, with Milla.”

Fine. Let him pretend he didn’t have my dick in his hand if he wants to.

“Gabe taught me to do star drops as soon as I could invert at the top of the silks. I’ve been doing them since I was seven.” And there’s no unlocked release .

“ Gabe taught you?”

“Yeah.” The memory makes me grin. “My dad almost killed him. I’d only been in classes for about two weeks, and we weren’t supposed to be in the studio without an adult watching us.”

“Gabe didn’t count as an adult? He must have been, what? Seventeen?”

“Not to my dad. He was still in his overprotective phase back then. But I’d seen Gabe perform the trick at his show, and it looked so cool. I wouldn’t have been able to learn it at the gym until I hit level three, and Gabe was getting ready to go off to NCC. I was impatient.”

“Imagine that.” He catches my smirk with a sidelong glance and turns quickly back to the road. “Did you and Gabe do a lot of training together?”

“Not really. By the time he got back to the States, I’d switched to the rope, and he was an actual adult with no room in his life for a little brother.”

This time, he does look at me, the sympathy on his face making me squirm.

“I told you, I grew out of that hero-worship shit a long time ago,” I remind him. Stop looking at me like a stupid child. Go back to jealous, horny Byrd.

“Why did you apply to Cici?”

“You mean because it was Gabe’s school?” I shrug. “Maybe I like proving that anything he does, I can do better.”

Something hungry flickers behind his woodland gaze, but he only turns up the music and ignores me for the rest of the drive. By the time we’re climbing the front porch to the cabin, it’s cold enough that I’ve pulled my cum-stained shirt back on, and I’m itching for him to say something. Anything.

“I’m sorry.”

Anything but that.

“That you gave me a hand job, or that you feel guilty about it?” I ask, masking my frustration with my fallback snark. He doesn’t answer, leaning against the glass doors in the living room with his hands shoved in his pockets and that familiar wary look in his eyes.

I’m fucking sick of it.

I step into his space, gratified by his sharp exhale and the heat that inevitably flares between us when I reach up to cage his head with my hands on the glass. “Don’t be sorry. I’m not. Just tell me you have lube in this house.”

“I don’t even have condoms.” He shakes his head. “But you know it doesn’t matter because I’m not fucking you.”

I open my mouth, and he almost smiles.

“And you’re not fucking me.”

“So that wasn’t foreplay? Back there in the car?”

“It was a mistake.”

“You’re so full of shit.” I press into him, wedging my thigh between his. “Stop pretending you don’t want this as badly as I do.”

“Echo, I’ve crossed so many lines already. If I’m pretending, I’m doing a terrible fucking job of it.” He brings his hand to my jaw and brushes his thumb over my lips. “But Reggie is expecting me— paying me —to give her an unbiased evaluation. How the hell am I supposed to do that job if we start having sex?”

“Who cares? The evaluation is fucked anyway. You already know I’m not good enough for her school anymore.”

“I don’t know that. There’s still plenty of time.”

God, he actually believes it. That somehow, he can still salvage my future. And all of a sudden, it clicks into place. He’s not trying to reject me.

The salvation he’s holding out for isn’t his, it’s mine .

I drop my arms and step back. Time to try a different tactic.

“You know when I don’t feel fucked up?” I ask. “When you touch me. When you look at me like something worthy of wanting.”

“You are worthy of wanting. When I’m around you, all I do is want.”

“Then give me something. Prove it, and I’ll show you. ”

For a long moment, he searches my face, and I try to hide my creeping fear. Finally, he leans in until his lips brush my ear, his words low and feral.

“The whole time I was jerking you off, all I could think about was taking you to bed and spreading you open with my tongue and fingers until I had you begging for my cock.”

Well, fuck.

“And you say I have the filthy mouth,” I gasp, heat thrilling over my skin and buzzing like static at the base of my spine.

“I love your filthy mouth,” he admits. “And it’s your turn.”

I haven’t been on the rope with a hard-on in years, and for a second, I’m fourteen again, with Jason Kase’s voice in my ear telling me, “The opposite-side climb-over gives better friction.” But hey, it’s the easiest way into the unlocked dive anyway.

I do three of the inverted climbs because fuck it—it feels good, the rough weave dragging over my keyed-up cock with every hook and pull. When I slip into the prep position, I throw a smirk over my shoulder and catch him staring at my ass with the rope wedged tight between my cheeks.

Don’t think. Just do it.

Be Echo.

I dive, my right hand releasing above my head and finding the tail between my legs like a thousand times before, my abs contracting to control the drop.

“If you let go, I’ll stop.”

I don’t let go. My eyes find Byrd’s, and my relief looks like pride in the reflection there.

I wrap a leg and do a fireman’s slide to the mat. He’s there when I land, wrapping his arms around me and dropping a kiss into my hair.

“Is it enough?” I ask, pressing my face onto the slope of his shoulder .

“Yes,” he says. “Tonight, it’s enough.”

“Does it change anything?”

“It shouldn’t.” He sighs and pulls away. But underneath the reluctance is his faltering resolve.

“Why not?” I don’t want it to end. I want to soak up this small moment of triumph and turn it into sweat and spit and slick, tangled limbs. Not to break him, but to give him back a piece of something as sacred as the feel of the rope sure in my hands.

“Have you ever just taken what you wanted?” I ask, as if I can’t already guess the answer. “Just for yourself, and fuck the consequences?”

“Are you asking me to be selfish?”

I drop to my knees on the mat at his feet, offering up all my damaged, desperate fervor. “I’m not asking for anything,” I say. “I’m telling you to take .”