Heat in the Half-Built Loft

The loft on Peachtree still smelled like cut pine and wet plaster. I had been hanging drywall since noon, and by three my shirt was on a sawhorse and the Atlanta heat had made the open windows a joke. Sweat tracked the groove of my spine and soaked the waistband of my work jeans. I was twenty-nine, thick through the chest and shoulders from years on frames and roofs, forearms chalked white with dust. The west light laid itself across the subfloor and the drop cloths and did not cool a thing.

Marcus Hale came up in the freight elevator with two cold bottles and a tape measure clipped to his belt. He was thirty-four, a former Georgia linebacker who had traded the field for blueprints and still moved like a man who expected contact. The gray T-shirt clung to his pecs and the deep cut of his waist. Dust had settled in the dark hair on his forearms. He set a bottle beside my level and let his eyes travel the length of me, slow, like he was checking a span for true.

He drank first. I watched his throat work and the way his bicep peaked when he lowered the bottle. A car horn drifted up from the street. Neither of us looked away.
- You're still here.
- Drywall doesn't hang itself.
- I sent the crew home at six.
- You stayed.

He set the bottle down. The cap clicked on the plywood. I could smell him from three feet, clean sweat and the cedar soap he used, under the job-site dirt. My pulse sat high in my neck.
- You've been on my back all afternoon.
- Hard not to look.
- That a problem?
- Only if you want it to be.

I closed the distance. The sawhorse edge caught my hip and I stepped around it. His hand found my waist, thumb dragging through the dust on my skin, and the heat of his palm went straight through me. I kissed him. He kissed back harder, mouth open, a sound low in his chest that I felt against my lips more than I heard. Stubble scraped my jaw. My hands went under his shirt and up the heavy slabs of his back, muscle shifting under sweat-slick skin.

He got the shirt off over his head and I got his belt. The drop cloth by the west windows was already down, paint-stained and warm from the day, and he pulled me onto it. Our chests met, slick and hard, and the drag of skin on skin made my cock jump against my fly. He shoved my jeans down my thighs. I kicked out of my boots and the denim and lay back under him, bare, dust smeared across my stomach. His palm wrapped me, rough with callus, slow from base to tip, then tighter. I groaned into his mouth while he stroked me, thumb smearing what was already leaking over the head.

I pushed him onto his back. He was huge under me, thighs thick as posts, abs cut even while he breathed, cock heavy against his stomach when I freed it from his briefs. I spit into my palm and worked him, watching his stomach tighten, watching his head tip back on the cloth and his mouth fall open. Then I went down. Salt and heat and the weight of him on my tongue. He filled my mouth, the head pressing deep, and I took him as far as I could, one hand braced on the ridge of his hip, the other cupping his balls and feeling them draw. His fingers sank into my hair. His hips rolled, careful at first, then less careful, fucking my mouth in short strokes while I sucked him and swallowed around the thickness until his breath broke and his thighs shook under my forearms.

He sat up and turned me. My chest hit the cloth. Plaster dust and the smell of his skin mixed in the heat. He kissed down my spine, bit the thick muscle where my shoulder met my neck, and spread me with both hands. His tongue was hot and blunt. I pushed back into it, shameless, knees sliding on the canvas, the city glowing past the glass in long streaks of traffic. He licked me open until I was shaking, until I was grinding the cloth and making sounds that were not words, just need.

He reached for the gym bag by the ladder and came back with a small bottle. Cool slick coated his fingers. One pressed in, then two, working me open while he mouthed the back of my neck and breathed hard against my ear. I bore down and took them, the stretch bright, then good. When he pressed the head of his cock to me I pushed back and he sank in, thick and steady, a burn that sweetened as he filled me inch by inch. He held still at the base. I felt every ridge. My fists knotted in the drop cloth. Then he started to move.

The rhythm built slow and then it didn't. His hips met me with a wet sound, deep strokes that shoved the air out of my chest. One hand locked on my shoulder. The other slid under me and stroked my cock in time, grip tight, slick with spit and precum. Sweat dripped off his chest onto my back. I got my elbows under me so I could take him deeper, back arched, and he drove harder, the dull smack of his thighs on mine filling the unfinished room. The stretch was huge. Every thrust lit me up from the inside. I came first, spilling over his fist and the paint-stained cloth, vision whitening at the edges, clenching around him so hard his rhythm broke. He buried himself and followed, pulsing deep, a rough groan torn out of him, his whole weight coming down while he finished inside me.