I make a face. “No. Queens.”
And there’s something unbearably awkward about the prospect of an hour-long subway ride with a stranger I met at a random club. I don’t want the magic to dissipate under the fluorescent train lights, to see the sweaty lines and crevices of another human instead of…this, his eyes reflecting the amber streetlamps, his body still tilting in close to mine. Jamie like the perfect photo of a perfect man, or something out of an oil painting.
But I’m also fucking broke, so I’m about to open my mouth and suggest we split cab fare when he says, “We could get a hotel.” And before I can start calculating the impact of that on my grocery budget, he adds, “My treat.”
Well, I’m not arguing with that.
3
The hotel he chooses is in Hell’s Kitchen, the kind of place that exists to serve the throngs of upper-middle-class businessmen and Javits convention attendees, with stylized modern interior décor and a rooftop bar that is probably great for selfies and terrible for your wallet. Not that we go to the bar. Instead we take the elevator up to the tenth floor, and I follow Jamie down the hall to the room he’s just now reserved. These floor-to-ceiling windows are definitely out of my price range, so I can only assume that whatever Jamie does when he isn’t picking up girls at queer clubs is extremely lucrative.
“Sorry,” he says, frowning at the slick all-white king bed. And the thing I find bizarre after meeting the confident guy at the bar is that he really does seem sorry. “I didn’t realize it would be this bougie.”
“It’s okay. I really like the…art.” I gesture vaguely at the mass-produced contemporary art framed on the walls, and Jamie gives me a long, flat look before I finally break—and suddenly we’re both laughing, me with one hand clapped over my mouth.
“Come here,” he says, and he reaches out both hands to gesture me closer. I go, helplessly obedient when he’s looking at me like that, his deep brown eyes gone a little darker, shaded by the lowered fans of his lashes.
When he kisses me this time, it feels different than it did in the club. There, we were in public—and even if making out on the dance floor isn’t exactly an uncommon occurrence, it still felt visible. Here, there is no one to see us. It’s private. It’s intimate. His teeth catch my lower lip, and I make a soft sound that’s muffled against his mouth.
His fingers slide beneath the hem of my black T-shirt. “May I?” he murmurs, our lips still moving together. His voice has the low, husky quality that comes with desire.
I nod. His palms glide up over my ribs, and I lift my arms to make it easier as he strips the shirt off over my head. Then his gaze falls to my exposed body, its weird moles, the sharp edges that never quite softened, even years after I got off drugs. But he touches me like I’m delicate, fingertips skimming over flesh with the same care as I would use to touch the edges of my photographs as I dip them into developer—like he half expects me to tell him to stop.
I catch one of his hands with mine and move it to my breast. He quirks one corner of his mouth and gives in, tipping forward to scatter kisses along my neck, my shoulder, as his free hand does the work of unclasping my bra. Always love a man who can figure out bra hooks without help.
I’m not sure what I did to deserve to be here with him, in this fabulously expensive hotel room that probably cost $400 for the night and seems like it should be reserved for women in evening gowns whose diamonds are worth the GDP of a small country. But I’m not going to question it. I’m going to take his shirt off instead, exposing his firm, tattooed torso, the pale scars that curve like faint smiles beneath his pecs.
I can’t get enough of him, touching skin as it’s exposed and feeling his strength shifting beneath my hands. I kiss one of his tattoos, a rose illustrated in blackwork, its petals blooming over his heart. His fingers twine in my hair, twisting the loose dark waves around his knuckles.
I manage to get off my shoes and jeans without toppling over, which is an achievement for me. Then Jamie Look-alike—it is way too late to ask his name again—hitches me up off the ground, my legs automatically circling round his waist as he carries me over to the bed and tosses me down onto the plush mattress. I push up onto my elbows and watch as he undoes his belt buckle, the fwip sound the leather makes as he tugs it free of his jeans sending a frisson of want through my gut. The jeans come off and he crawls onto the bed after me, laying a trail of kisses from the inside of my ankle up to my thigh to the hollow below my hipbone. I shiver as his breath tickles my skin, palpable through the thin mesh of my underwear.
He hooks his thumbs under the waistband of those panties. “Tell me if anything’s too far,” he says, which is charming enough that I actually want him to give educational presentations to other guys I’ve dated, the ones who acted like getting consent is a socially uncomfortable transaction to be dealt with as perfunctorily as possible. “We can always slow down or take a break.”
“You’re fine,” I assure him, and lift my hips to help him peel my panties off. And this, I realize, is probably my cue to return the favor.
I’ve slept with trans women before but never a trans man. Everyone’s different, obviously, and everyone has different boundaries, but I’m still trying to find the right words to ask what his are when he reaches down from the edge of the bed and retrieves his backpack. He unzips it to reveal a strap-on harness and a very realistic flesh-colored dildo, the kind that has a bulb at one end that can go inside the wearer to stimulate them as well as the person being fucked. A girl I dated briefly last year used one, and though I never tried wearing it myself, she certainly seemed to enjoy it.
Jamie holds it up with an arched, questioning brow. “Yeah?”
I grin. “You came prepared,” I say, and he’s still blushing, the color visible in his cheeks despite the half-dimmed light as I push myself upright to help him put it on.
For a guy who’s been to Revel enough times that he knows the bartender by name, he sure seems self-conscious about being called out on that fact.
Which reminds me all over again that I really have no idea what to expect from this guy. I don’t know his lines, and I need to figure those out before we go much further.
I pause with my hands on his hips, glancing up to meet his gaze. “I don’t know if you…Some people aren’t comfortable with…”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he says firmly, rescuing me from having to fumble my way toward completing that sentence without humiliating myself somehow. “There’s a vibrator in the strap, and that’s good enough for me.”
“Okay,” I say, “sounds good.”
“It’s nothing personal,” he assures me. “But I don’t really know you, and it’s a whole thing.”