I've Never Been Held Before”
Jake woke up slowly, looked around the room and the previous night came flooding back.
The black jock strap, Adrian, Cole. Cole! The spit roast, Cole! The epic orgasm, Cole! He was equal parts giddy with what had occurred, and shy about how to play it. What if Cole didn’t share his euphoria.
Cole was asleep beside him, oblivious to Jake’s churning mind.
Jake turned his head and looked at him seeking any clue as to what the answer was. Cole slept on his back, one arm thrown above his head, the sheet pulled to his waist and no further, seemingly having the best sleep of his life which Jake hoped was a result of what had gone down the night before. The dim morning light accentuated his physique in a way that made Jake want to take him right there and then.
He was, Jake thought, an extraordinary thing to wake up next to.
The chest was the first thing, broad and thick, the muscle built over years of the same 5AM discipline Cole had pulled Jake into, covered in a dense dark pelt that ran from collarbone to sternum and spread across the full width of him before tapering down the center of his abdomen. His stomach was carved, the muscle visible even at rest, the dark trail below his navel disappearing under the sheet in the same way it disappeared under his towel in the locker room. His shoulders were wide enough to make the pillow look undersized. His forearms, resting at his sides, were roped with muscle and dark with hair. His jaw carried the shadow that was, after 24 hours, already nearly a beard, and in sleep the jaw was relaxed, the composed professional expression entirely gone, replaced by something younger and more open.
Jake looked at him for a long time. He thought about eighteen months of side-by-side mornings at the gym, of standing at adjacent lockers, of telling himself it didn't mean anything. He thought about how much energy a person could spend not seeing something that was directly in front of him.
He thought, I have loved this man for longer than I knew what love was supposed to feel like.
He eased out of bed carefully, not wanting to wake him, and padded to the bathroom. He pushed the door open expecting Adrian, some version of Adrian at the sink, assembling himself for the day with that unhurried authority, and found instead a bathroom that was empty, clean, and absent a trace of a third person.
He looked around. He went back into the room. Adrian's clothes were gone. His shoes. His jacket from the chair. The Blanton's bottle, which had been on the credenza, had been left, a small and characteristic generosity. And on the nightstand, folded once, a note in handwriting that was as controlled and deliberate as everything else about the man:
Early flight, didn't want to wake you. Couldn't bring myself to deliver an early flight buzzkill to what was, by any measure, a historic evening. You two needed the morning more than I needed a goodbye. I'll text from the plane. The bourbon is yours. — A.M.
Jake read it twice. He stood in the amber morning light of the hotel room and felt the warmth, the grace, the generosity of a man who understood exactly when to leave.
He was still holding the note when he heard Cole stir behind him. The sound of Cole stretching, a low exhale, the shift of weight, the brief stillness of a man orienting himself. Jake turned.
Cole was looking at him. Dark eyes, fully present, none of the grogginess that most people carried into the first moments of consciousness. He sat up and gazed at Jake with a directness that would have been unreadable twelve hours ago and now was not. It was the same look he'd given him from between his legs last night, unhurried, certain, warm in a way the office version of Cole kept carefully contained. He didn't try to contain it now.
"Adrian?" Cole said. His voice was low and morning-rough in a way that did things to Jake's nervous system.
Jake held up the note. "Early flight."
Cole took that in. Something moved in his expression, not surprise exactly, more like recognition. Of course. Of course Adrian had done it that way. He nodded once and, like Jake, appreciated Adrian’s generosity in making an early exit.
Then he opened his arms.
"Come here, board boy," he said. Low. Certain. With the corner of his mouth doing the thing it did when Cole was genuinely amused and trying not to show it completely.
Jake climbed back into bed without a word.
Cole pulled him in against his chest, the full weight of him, warm and solid and extravagantly hairy, Jake's back against his front, Cole's arm coming around him and holding on, his legs wrapped around him. They lay like that for a moment. Outside, Atlanta was assembling itself into a Friday morning. In here, neither of them was in any hurry to be anywhere else.
With Cole gently caressing his chest, Jake asked, "How long?" He didn't specify. He didn't need to.
Cole was quiet for a moment. His thumb moved in a slow arc around Jake’s nipple. "Since about month three," he said. "Maybe earlier. Month three is when I stopped pretending I didn't know what it was."
Jake absorbed that. Month three. He'd promoted Cole for the first time at month four. He thought about that sequence and what it said about Cole, that he'd known and shown up every morning at 5AM anyway and done the best work of anyone on the team and said nothing. That kind of discipline was its own form of love.
"I didn't know," Jake said. "I want to be clear about that. I wasn't…I wasn't holding out on you. I genuinely didn't know."
"I know you didn't," Cole said. No accusation in it. Just a fact.
"But something," Jake said. He was working it out as he said it, the way he worked out the difficult things, out loud, in real time, trusting the process. "Something was there. I just didn't have the…I didn't have the language for it. I didn't have a door."
"Adrian gave you the door."
"Adrian gave me the door," Jake agreed. He thought about this. "He knew. Before Nashville, he already knew. He said as much, the first night we had dinner. He picked a place that was predominantly gay and watched my reaction. He told me that I was still open, still figuring out what I wanted. I thought he was talking about my career."
Cole made a sound that was almost a laugh. "He wasn't talking about your career."
"No," Jake said. "He wasn't."
The morning light shifted. Cole's arm tightened around him slightly, a small unconscious pressure, and Jake felt himself settle into it the way he'd settled into the collar, the contentment of letting someone else take control, deciding whose arms would be around whom. There was a pattern there. He was beginning to understand the pattern.
Cole could feel a Jake tremble. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he knew there was something. “What am I feeling?” Cole asked him.
“Nothing!” Jake answered too quickly.
Cole let a few moments pass before asking again, “I know it’s not nothing. Tell me, bro”.
Jake was silent, but Cole knew he was contemplating whether he should share whatever it was.
“Promise you won’t think I'm a baby?” he asked.
“Of course, not”, Cole assured him and squeezed him harder from behind, which unwittingly gave Jake the courage to confess.
Struggling to say it, finally he uttered softly, “I’ve…I’ve never been held before…”
Cole could feel Jake melt into him as he said it and knew not to overreact. He said with a smile Jake could hear in his voice, “Oh board boy, you better get used to it. This is just the beginning.”
Jake pushed back into even harder, nuzzled the back of his head into Cole’s shoulder, and said nothing. He let the moment speak for itself.
Finally he spoke up again, "What happens now?" Jake said.
Cole was quiet for a moment. "What do you want to happen?"
"That's a very Cole answer."
"It's a real question."
Jake looked at the ceiling. He thought about the office, about the org chart, about the Monday morning staff meeting where Cole would sit two chairs to his left the way he always did and they would move through the agenda and nobody would know. He thought about the complications of it, the HR implications, the power dynamic, the appearance of things. He thought about all the reasons this was professionally inadvisable.
Then he thought about Cole's hand finding his under the covers last night, and the eighteen months before that, and the door that was now fully open.
"I want this," Jake said. Simply. "I want you. I don't know what it looks like yet, but I'm not going to pretend last night didn't happen."
Cole turned him over then, a single smooth motion, Jake on his back, Cole above him, that dark-eyed gaze looking down at him with a directness that Jake had been cataloguing and misfiling for a year and a half. "It happened," Cole said. "And it's going to keep happening." He lowered his head and put his mouth to Jake's throat. "Starting now."
* * *
This was different from the night before. The night before had been orchestrated, Adrian's design, his timing, his careful architecture of revelation. This was just Cole. Cole and Jake and the morning light and no audience and no choreography and nothing to prove to anyone.
Cole was unhurried in a way that the previous night, for all its intensity, hadn't quite been. He moved over Jake with a thoroughness that felt less like dominance and more like attention. He had proven his dominance last night and found Jake to be entirely compliant. Now it was time to put it to use. His mouth moved across Jake's collarbone, his chest, the flat of his stomach, retracing the geography of the previous night with a patience that Jake felt in every nerve.
"You're staring at the ceiling again," Cole said, against his ribs.
"I'm thinking."
"Stop." Cole looked up at him. "Be here."
Jake looked down at him and found that being looked at by Cole in this way was singularly more meaningful and erotic than any experience he’d had with a woman.
Jake looked at him and Cole must’ve read his mind. "Better," he said, and went back to work.
He took his time with Jake's body. Jake was his palate and he was the artist. Jake was the orchestra and he was the conductor. His mouth found each nipple in turn and stayed there until Jake's back arched. His stubble left trails of heat across Jake's stomach that Jake felt long after Cole had moved on. His hands, those hands that Jake had watched load barbells and handle spreadsheets and gesture across whiteboards for eighteen months, moved over him with a specificity that suggested Cole had been paying attention to Jake's body for considerably longer than last night.
When he finally moved lower, parting Jake's legs with a firm and easy pressure, Jake was already breathing in the shallow way that meant he'd stopped managing his responses and started having them.
Cole rimmed him slowly, not the urgent thoroughness of the night before but something more deliberate, more intimate, his tongue moving with the patience of knowing he had nowhere else to be. Jake's hands went to Cole's hair and held on. He said Cole's name once, quietly, in a way that had nothing professional in it at all.
Every time his tongue touched Jake’s hole, Jake seized up and made sounds no human had ever made before. Cole took joy in evoking this reaction, these sounds, making Jake behave like an animal. He licked his crack from bottom to top, probed his hole with the tip of his tongue, circled it playfully, and nuzzled his stubbled face into his cleft. Jake moaned, begging for more. "Tell me what you want," Cole said. Against him.
"You know what I want”, Jake pleaded.
"Say it."
Jake had said it before, to Adrian, in the heat of those first nights when everything was new and overwhelming. Saying it now, in the morning light, to Cole, his colleague, his right hand, the man he'd called his brother while meaning something considerably more, was different. More exposed. More real.
"I want you inside me,” Jake said. His voice was steady. "Please."
“Inside you? Say IT”, he commanded.
“Cole, I want you to fuck me. FUCK ME. Fuck your boy, Cole. Fuck him hard, like last night.”
Cole reached for the nightstand. He took his time preparing Jake utterly enjoying the taunt, thorough, attentive, two fingers finding the spot that made Jake grip the sheets and adding a third until Jake was loose and ready and making sounds he'd stopped being embarrassed about sometime around Tuesday. Cole watched his face through all of it with that unhurried dark gaze, reading him, adjusting, learning him.
"Ready?" Cole said.
"Cole." Jake looked up at him. "Please, Sir, PLEASE," he pleaded.
The corner of Cole's mouth moved. He lined himself up and pressed forward slowly, none of the declarative certainty of the previous night, just a long, steady slide that filled Jake completely and stopped when Cole was all the way in and both of them had exhaled at the same moment.
They held it. The morning light. The warm weight of Cole above him. The complete and unprecedented fullness of being exactly where he was.
"Okay?" Cole said. Quietly.
"More than okay," Jake said. “Thank you, Sir. Please, stay in me forever.”
Cole set a rhythm that was slow at first and deepened gradually, his hips finding Jake's in a conversation that didn't need words. Once again, Jake experienced a fullness that had no name. It had no name because it hadn’t existed before. It was a pleasure that completed Jake, fulfilled him, made him whole. After experiencing it, he couldn’t imagine life without it.
Jake needed more so he wrapped his legs tightly around his back and pulled him closer and Cole answered by going deeper, his hands braced on either side of Jake's shoulders, his face inches away, looking at him, always looking at him, that steady unwavering attention that Jake had spent eighteen months misreading. He wasn't misreading it now.
This was not the controlled intensity of the previous night. This was warmer and more human and considerably more devastating for it. The were both pure lust, but last night was passion and reward, this morning was affection and commitment. Cole's forehead dropped to Jake's and they moved together in the morning light. Eye to eye, Cole rhythmically sliding in and out of Jake as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
Jake was not going back. He knew it the way he knew the things that mattered, not as a decision but as a recognition, something that had already happened by the time he became aware of it.
Cole found his prostate and Jake stopped being philosophical.
Jake gripped Cole's back and held on. Cole worked that point with the focused relentlessness that Jake had seen before, in the boardroom, in the gym, and now in bed, the same concentrated commitment to doing the thing completely. Jake heard himself saying things he didn't plan to say. Cole answered some of them and ignored others and kept moving, deeper and more certain, his breathing ragged now, the professional composure entirely gone.
"Close," Jake managed.
"Me too." Cole's voice was rough against his ear. "Together. Now."
It was nothing like the orchestrated simultaneity of the previous night. It was messier and louder and considerably more honest. Cole buried himself deep and Jake felt the warmth of him release in a long, shuddering sequence, and his own release followed immediately, between them, Cole's stomach warm against him as they arrived and collapsed and lay tangled in each other in the morning light.
Jake felt a fullness that he’d never before experienced. Full of Cole’s cum, full of Cole’s cock, full of Cole’s love. He felt Cole’s gift to him drip down his leg and hated that he was wasting even a few drops of it.
Cole didn't withdraw. He lowered his full weight onto Jake and Jake took it and clenched it, he didn’t want to surrender it, under the physical satisfaction of it, something quieter and more permanent settling into place.
"Te quiero, cabrón," Cole said, into his neck.
Jake tightened his arms around him. "Yeah," he said. "I know. Me too."
They lay like that until the morning made it impossible to stay.
They made it to the shower eventually.
Cole turned the water on and adjusted it without asking, the temperature Jake had used every morning at the Equinox for a year and a half, which Cole knew because Cole had always been paying attention. Jake registered this and said nothing and stepped in.
The shower was hotel-generous, wide enough that two men could move in it without negotiating, with a rainfall head that made everything feel less urgent than it was. Steam filled the space quickly. Cole stepped in behind him and reached past him for the soap with an ease that suggested he had always intended to end up here, in this specific place, at this specific hour.
He started at Jake's shoulders.
His hands moved with the same unhurried certainty that characterized everything Cole did, working the soap across the width of Jake's shoulders, down his sculpted back, the results of eighteen months of 5AM sessions visible in every line of him. Cole's hands found each muscle group with a familiarity that made Jake realize he'd been memorizing this body in the gym for longer than either of them had acknowledged, cataloguing it in the way he catalogued everything that mattered.
"You've been looking at me in the gym," Jake said. Not an accusation. A realization.
"Since week one," Cole said, without a trace of apology.
Jake almost laughed. He put his hands against the tile wall and let Cole work downward, his hands moving around Jake's waist, across his stomach, the carved definition that Cole had built with him, lower. Jake's head dropped back against Cole's shoulder as those hands moved with deliberate intent south of his waist, finding him already responsive, already half-hard in the steam.
"Again?" Jake said.
"Problem?" Cole said, against his ear.
"Absolutely not."
Cole worked him slowly with one hand while the other stayed at his hip, holding him in the way Jake had come to understand was Cole's form of possession, not gripping, just present, just claiming. The water ran down them both. Jake pressed back against him and felt Cole already fully hard against his lower back, the dense warmth of him insistent.
"Turn around," Cole said.
Jake turned. Facing him now, Cole's dark eyes level with his, the steam between them, the full impressive breadth of him sheened with water, the dark hair on his chest and stomach plastered to his skin in a way that made his physique more visible and more immediately arresting than it had been in the dry light of the gym. Jake had stood across from this man in a locker room a hundred times and told himself it was clinical familiarity. Standing here now, with Cole's hands at his waist and Cole's cock hard against his stomach, the clinical argument had fully collapsed.
He kissed him.
They had kissed last night, but the night had had its own logic and was different from now. Jake put his hand at the back of Cole's neck and pulled him in and kissed him the with an intensity intended to convey he was all in, and Cole, who was in charge of everything else, who directed and decided and said turn over and stay and you know how to address me, went entirely still for one suspended moment and then kissed him back with the full force of eighteen months of patient wanting.
It was, Jake thought, a remarkable kiss.
Cole pressed him back against the tile wall, the cold of it against his shoulders and the heat of Cole against his front, and Jake felt the full weight of him and didn't want it to be any different. Cole's cock slid between his thighs and Jake adjusted his stance instinctively, opening for him, not penetration but pressure, the slick heat of the water making everything smooth and urgent.
Cole's hand found him and stroked with a focused efficiency that Jake's body answered immediately, his hips rocking forward into Cole's grip, his own hands moving over the dense landscape of Cole's back and shoulders. The steam was so thick now the walls of the shower had disappeared. There was only this, Cole's mouth at his throat, his hand working him toward the edge with the same systematic commitment he brought to every task he decided to complete, Jake making sounds he couldn't control, his fingers digging into Cole's shoulders as the pressure built.
"Cole —"
"I've got you," Cole said. His voice was low and entirely certain. "Let go."
Jake let go.
He came against Cole's stomach with the intensity of a body that had completely surrendered, his forehead dropping to Cole's shoulder, Cole's arm coming around his back to hold him upright through it. The water ran over them both. Cole held him until the trembling stopped.
Then Cole turned him gently back to face the wall, took his hips in both hands, and found his entrance in the slow deliberate way Jake was coming to understand was Cole's signature, not hurried, not asking, simply certain of its welcome.
He slid in with a single smooth stroke.
Jake exhaled against the tile. The fullness of it, the familiarity of it already after a single night, the sensation of Cole inside him, was something he'd run out of ways to describe to himself. He pushed back and Cole answered by gripping his hips harder and finding a rhythm that the steam and the water and the confined space made feel more immediate than anything had felt yet, no collar, no rope, no choreography. Just the two of them and the hot water and the feral simplicity of it.
Cole came with his mouth against the back of Jake's neck, a low unguarded sound that Jake felt he had earned, in some essential way, and intended to go on earning.
They stood under the water for a long time afterward, not talking, Cole's arms around Jake from behind, both of them looking at nothing and thinking whatever they were thinking.
Then Cole reached past him and turned off the water.
“It’s nearly checkout time”, he said.
"I know," Jake acknowledged.
Neither of them moved for another full minute.
* * *
They dressed in the comfortable silence of two people who have been in locker rooms together enough times that the practical business of getting dressed has no charge to it, except that it had charge to it now, a different kind, the awareness of each other that wasn't going to recede back to whatever it had been before, because that version of things no longer existed.
Jake was buttoning his shirt when he felt his phone buzz on the nightstand. He reached for it. Cole's phone buzzed at the same moment.
They looked at each other. Jake picked up his phone.
Adrian.
A single message, sent to both of them simultaneously. Jake read it. Cole read it. Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Airborne over Tennessee. Sorry for the disappearing act, I trust you'll forgive me. An early-morning goodbye after a night like that one would've been an anticlimax nobody needed, least of all me.
I want to say something to both of you. What happened last night was not an accident. I've been in enough rooms with enough people to know when something real, and what’s between the two is as real as anything I've seen. I'm happy I got to be the one who opened the door. I'm even happier about what was waiting on the other side of it.
Now. A word of advice, offered with genuine affection and the authority of a man who has seen this go wrong.
Jake, you run the boardroom. You always have and you always will, and the board knows it, and Darius knows it, and frankly Cole knows it better than anyone. Own that. Don't apologize for it and don't let what's happening between you complicate what you've built professionally. That career is real and it belongs to you.
Cole, you run the bedroom. Based on last night's evidence, this is not in dispute. Jake needs what you give him more than he realizes, and something tells me you knew that long before last night. Hold that with the same care you hold everything else.
The challenge you're about to navigate is that both of those things are true at the same time. Jake is Cole's boss by org chart and Cole is Jake's boss by everything else. This will be difficult for both of you, you, especially Jake. Figure out how to let both of those things coexist without letting either one devour the other. It's not easy. It's also not impossible. You're both too smart to let it be impossible.
One more thing. Don't get too comfortable.
Dallas is in eight weeks. I've already blocked the Tuesday before the meeting. But I have an inkling which I’m not in a position to share yet, that there may be more at stake than a typical quarterly update. If so, we will be called upon and if last night is any indication of what the three of us are capable of when we put our minds to it, Dallas is going to be considerably more interesting than the board agenda.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
— A.M.
P.S. Jake — the Blanton's is yours. Cole, you're welcome for everything.
Jake lowered his phone. He looked at Cole across the hotel room, Cole in his fitted shirt, phone in hand, that jaw, those eyes, the composed professional expression back in place except that it wasn't quite the same as it had been before last night, because Jake knew now what was underneath it and Cole knew he knew.
Cole looked up from his phone and met his eyes.
"Dallas," Jake said.
"Dallas," Cole agreed.
A beat. Then the corner of Cole's mouth moved in the particular way it moved when Cole was amused and trying not to show it entirely.
"What do you think he’s talking about?" Cole asked, not really expecting an answer.
"God only knows," Jake said.
Cole picked up his bag. Jake picked up his. They walked out of room 1614 together into the Friday morning hallway of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, and the door clicked shut behind them on everything that had happened inside it, and they rode the elevator down to the lobby side by side without touching, maintaining the precise professional distance of a CMO and his Director of Consumer Insights at the end of a board meeting week, which was what they were.
Among other things.
Considerably among other things.
-To be continued-
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