Six Years Waiting for His Rival to Snap

The tumbler went first. It clipped the edge of the conference table and burst, whiskey and crystal spraying in a wet fan across the Helix contract, and then Cassian’s fist was in Damon’s collar and they were going down onto the mahogany together, forty pages of sabotaged paperwork skidding out from under them, the laptop cartwheeling off the far end and hitting the floor with a crack of cheap plastic. Damon’s knee drove up between Cassian’s thighs on the landing, a hard, accidental grind that dragged a noise out of both of them—Cassian’s a snarl, Damon’s something lower that he’d have denied under oath. A cufflink tore loose and rolled. Damon’s tie was already twisted into a leash in Cassian’s other hand.

“You leaked the bid to Gerald, you backstabbing prick,” Cassian spat, breath hot and bourbon-sour against Damon’s mouth. He let the tie drop and slammed both of Damon’s wrists to the blotter above his head with one hand. Ink smeared under the heel of his palm. A paperclip bit into the meat of Damon’s hand and stayed there. “Three years on that contract and you hand it to that vulture like a party favor—”

Damon laughed, ragged, right in his face. He bucked, not to get free so much as to feel the weight of him, the heat, the cock already thickening against his hip through two layers of wool. “I leaked it? You left the draft on the shared drive the night you were too busy staring at my mouth in the elevator to lock your files, Cass. Gerald didn’t have to try. You handed him the knife and now you’re shocked he used it.”

Cassian’s teeth found Damon’s throat instead of an answer. He bit down hard enough to make Damon hiss and arch, then dragged his mouth lower and ripped Damon’s shirt open with his free hand. Buttons pinged off the table; one skittered into the spreading whiskey and spun. Cassian’s voice dropped into the register he used when he wanted a room to shut up and listen. “Shut your mouth. No—keep talking. I want to hear you lie while I do this.”

He slid down Damon’s body and took Damon’s wrists with him, dragging them off the blotter and down until they were crossed over Damon’s stomach, clamped there under one hand, knuckles grinding against the bone of Damon’s own hip. The paperclip came with them, still embedded in Damon’s palm. Cassian got his other hand on Damon’s belt and yanked it open, then the zipper, teeth dragging a raw line down the trail of hair below Damon’s navel because he didn’t bother to pull the fabric away first. Damon swore. Cassian didn’t stop. He shoved trousers and briefs down to the tops of Damon’s thighs and looked at him for one long, mean second—Damon’s cock already hard and lying flat against his own belly, a finger’s width from where Cassian’s hand pinned his wrists.

“Hold still,” Cassian said, and put his mouth on him.

Not the whole thing. Not yet. He dragged his tongue flat up the underside, slow enough to be an insult, and felt Damon’s hips try to lift under his other forearm, which he laid across the crease of Damon’s thighs like a bar. Damon’s wrists strained. The blotter, still half under Damon’s shoulders, tore with a sound like a page ripping out of a ledger. Cassian took the head in and sucked, hard, cheeks hollowing, then let it go with a wet click and said, “Look at me.”

Damon looked. Cassian held his eyes and went down in one drop—no warning, no working up to it—until his nose was in the wet hair at the base and his throat closed around the head, and the table creaked under Damon’s back as he arched.

It cost Cassian more than Damon would ever know to keep that hand where it was. He wanted both of his on Damon—one in his hair, one on his hip—wanted to feel the whole body under him lose its shape, and instead he had to hold the wrists, hold the hips, hold his own throat open while Damon’s cock pushed spit up around it, because if he let go now Damon would get a hand on himself or a hand in Cassian’s hair and one of them would be steering, and it was going to be Cassian. He pulled up, gagged, went back down. Spit ran off the corner of his mouth and strung down to the mahogany. His jaw was already starting to ache at the hinge and he leaned into it. Damon tasted like salt and skin and the soap from the executive washroom, and Cassian hated that he knew which soap, hated that he had a whole catalog of this man filed somewhere he never opened. He hummed, low, to feel Damon jolt, and the table creaked again, a long wooden complaint, and Cassian did it a second time just to hear it.

Damon couldn’t get his wrists free. He tried. The paperclip ground deeper into his palm every time he twisted, a hot little point of pain that made no difference against the wet heat sliding up and down his cock and the humming, the fucking humming, Cassian’s throat vibrating around him like he was making a point in a meeting. Whiskey had soaked through the contract under his shoulder and was seeping cold through his shirt to skin. He could smell it, and under it, faint and vile, Gerald’s cologne still hanging in the room from the afternoon. He could hear Cassian swallow. He could hear the spit. Six years of this man’s voice going gravelly across a table when he was losing an argument, and now that voice was buzzing against the vein on the underside of Damon’s dick and Damon was making a sound he didn’t recognize—high, cracked, out through his nose because his teeth were clenched.

“Louder,” Cassian said, pulling off just long enough to say it, lips shining. “I said I wanted to hear you.”

“You—fuck—you think sucking me off is going to make the board forget you cost us twelve million?” Damon’s voice broke in the middle because Cassian had dragged his tongue along the vein and then swallowed him back down to the root, nose pressed hard into his abdomen, throat working. “Gerald’s going to eat us alive in the morning and you’re down there like you’ve been waiting six years for an excuse—”

Cassian came off him with a sound like a cork leaving a bottle, spit down his chin, eyes wet and bright and furious. He didn’t let go of the wrists. “I’m not down anywhere, you arrogant bastard. You’re on my table. And don’t tell me you haven’t been waiting. Don’t tell me that cock hasn’t been hard every time I called you a liability in front of the partners.” He went back down, slower this time, letting Damon feel every inch disappear, letting the wet sounds get obscene in the empty forty-second floor. Damon’s hips heaved against the forearm and Cassian bore down with his whole weight, a growl rumbling out of him and straight into Damon’s body.

The table wasn’t built for it. Cassian’s elbow, planted for leverage, knocked the whiskey bottle and sent it rolling off the edge; it hit the rug and broke with a dull, heavy crunch instead of a shatter, and the smell of it thickened. Damon’s shoe caught the leg of a chair and sent it spinning on its casters into the credenza. Damon stripped to the waist and bared to the thighs, shirt in rags and tie wrecked, and Cassian still fully buttoned above him, still belted, still in his jacket, sucking him like the fight was still happening and his mouth was just the newest venue for it. Damon could feel it gathering at the base of his spine, too fast, too bright, and he hated how badly he wanted it and hated more the thought of coming pinned to his own sabotaged contract with Cassian’s eyes on him and Cassian’s collar still done up.

“Off,” Damon snarled, voice a rasp. “Get off—Cassian—if you make me come like this I will never let you live it down, I will bring it up in every quarterly until one of us dies—”

Cassian released him with one last dragging lick that made Damon’s thighs jump. “Then don’t come,” he said, and his voice had a burr in it now, a fray at the bottom edge that hadn’t been there five minutes ago. “Fight me for it.”

He let go of the wrists and hauled Damon off the table by the torn shirt. Damon came off the edge with his trousers still around his thighs and his feet couldn’t find the floor fast enough; he got one shoe down, the other skidded on a wet page, and Cassian used it, kept pulling, kept him off balance. Damon grabbed Cassian’s shirt in both fists and tried to turn him, tried to use the momentum to put Cassian’s back to the table instead, and for half a second it worked—Cassian’s shin cracked against the spinning chair and he grunted—but the lamp cord was under his foot, and when Cassian stepped back to brace, the cord went taut around his ankle and the lamp came off the credenza. It hit the rug beside them with a bang and the bulb blew, and in the dark that followed the room was city-lit, blue-grey, the broken filament ticking as it cooled.

They went down. Damon’s shoulder hit first and a piece of the bottle ground under it through the rug, a crunch he felt in his teeth. Cassian landed on him, knee to the inside of Damon’s thigh, elbow to the rug, and Damon bucked and got them rolling—got Cassian half onto his side, got a hand on his jaw—and Cassian drove his knee down and his hips forward and Damon’s shoulder blades skidded across the carpet and went hot. Rug burn, immediate and stinging. Cassian tore Damon’s trousers down and clean off one leg, the shoe going with them, and left the rest tangled around the other ankle, and Damon used the moment to yank Cassian’s belt open like he was trying to hurt him with it, and Cassian shoved his own trousers down his thighs one-handed, cock springing free, hard and flushed, and knelt up between Damon’s legs breathing like he’d run the stairs.

“Stay down,” Cassian said.

“Make me,” Damon said, and Cassian spat into his palm.

He stroked himself twice, slick, the wet sound of it obscene in the dark, then spat again, onto Damon this time, and worked two fingers into him, fast and rough, more a threat than a preparation. Damon’s heel dug into the rug and slid. Cassian pulled the fingers out, lined up, and pushed.

It stalled. Damon’s body locked against him, all muscle and refusal, and the head of Cassian’s cock sat there at the edge of him, burning, going nowhere. Damon’s jaw was clenched so hard the tendons stood out in his neck. “Don’t,” he said, and then, “Move—fucking move—no, don’t, don’t—” and his hands came up and clamped on Cassian’s upper arms, nails in through the shirt.

Every muscle in Cassian’s back was screaming at him to shove. He didn’t. He held there, shaking with it, sweat running off his nose and hitting Damon’s chest, and made himself stay exactly where he was while the burn built and Damon’s breath came in short sawing pulls through his teeth. He had spent the whole night, the whole six years, being the one who didn’t flinch first, and he wasn’t going to be the one who lost it now on the floor of his own conference room. “Breathe,” he said, and it came out lower than he meant it, the burr in his voice gone rough enough to snag. “Breathe, Damon, or I swear to God—”

Damon breathed. The clench eased, a fraction, and Cassian slid in an inch on the exhale and stopped again, and Damon made a sound like a door being forced. Another inch. Damon’s hands slid down to Cassian’s ribs and dug in. Cassian rocked back and forward, shallow, working the give, and the give came all at once—Damon’s body letting go around him in one long, hot slide—and Cassian was in to the root before either of them was ready, his hips flush against Damon’s ass, his forehead dropping to Damon’s because his neck wouldn’t hold it up.

“Fuck,” Damon said, quietly, to the ceiling.

“You feel that?” Cassian’s voice was shredded. He didn’t move yet. He couldn’t. “That’s six years of you sitting across from me in those meetings looking like you’d rather eat me than the budget. Gerald can have the contract. He doesn’t get this.”

Damon’s hands slid down to Cassian’s ass and his nails went in, pulling him closer even as he snarled up at him, “You don’t get to rewrite history because you’re finally inside me, you smug—ah—shit—move. If you’re going to fuck me on the floor of the office we lost, at least commit to it.”

Cassian moved.

The first thrusts were hard and short and Damon’s back dragged on the rug with each one, the burn on his shoulder blades spreading. His heel slipped on the carpet and he had to dig it in again, had to plant it to push back, and every time he got the leverage Cassian took it away by changing the angle. This is happening. This is actually happening. I’m never going to be able to look at this rug again. I’m never going to be able to sit in a meeting with him and not hear the exact sound he makes when he bottoms out. Damon could hear it now, a low grunt at the end of each stroke, and the rug fibers rasping under them, and glass grinding somewhere near his hip, and his own breath going high and thin.

Cassian’s elbow went down into the whiskey that had run off the table edge and pooled in the rug; it slid out from under him and dropped his full weight onto Damon for a second, chest to chest, and Damon’s trapped cock got crushed between their stomachs and dragged through the slick of his own precome and his whole body jolted. Cassian felt it. He got his elbow back under himself and did it again on purpose, grinding down, the drag of belly against cock making Damon’s voice crack and climb. Damon’s leg, hooked over Cassian’s hip, slipped and dropped to the rug and the angle changed—shallower, then Cassian shifted his knee and it was deeper, blunter, hitting something inside Damon that made his mouth fall open on nothing.

Sweat ran into Damon’s eyes. He couldn’t wipe it. His hands were full of Cassian and if he let go he’d lose whatever purchase he still had. He tried to get one down between them anyway, to get a fist around himself, and Cassian caught the wrist before it got there and slammed it to the rug beside Damon’s head.

“No,” Cassian said.

He could feel Damon getting close. He could feel it in the way Damon’s thighs had started to shake against his sides, in the pitch of him, the way the swearing had stopped being words. And something in Cassian went flat and deliberate. He slowed. Not gentle—there was nothing gentle in it—but measured, each stroke the same length and the same speed and the same depth, a metronome, and he watched Damon’s face while he did it and watched him realize what was happening. Because if Damon came now, on the floor, under him, it would be over, and Cassian would have nothing left to hold onto except his own face and whatever was on it. So he held the pace exactly where Damon couldn’t use it. He watched Damon’s eyes go furious.

“You absolute bastard,” Damon said.

“Say please.”

“Choke on it.”

Damon used the slick under Cassian’s elbow. He waited for the next stroke and when Cassian’s arm slid he bucked sideways with everything he had and they went over, Cassian’s shoulder cracking against the leg of the chair that had spun into the credenza, and for three breaths Damon was on top, knees on the rug, sinking down on him hard and fast and angry, chasing it, the wet slap of it loud in the dark. Cassian’s hands were on his hips. Cassian’s teeth were bared. Damon got both fists in the front of Cassian’s shirt and wrenched, and the placket gave the way Damon’s had, buttons spitting into the dark, and he dragged the ruined thing down and back off Cassian’s shoulders so hard it trapped his arms behind him for one wild second—and Cassian snarled and wrenched free of the sleeves, bare to the waist now, the shirt left in a heap by the fallen lamp. Then Cassian planted his heel and bucked and got his arm around Damon’s back and they rolled again, Damon’s head narrowly missing the lamp, and Cassian came down on top and took both of Damon’s wrists and pinned them to the carpet on either side of his head and drove in so deep that Damon’s shout came out with no sound in it.

“Say his name again,” Cassian said. He was going hard now, all the metronome gone, and his voice had climbed and roughened both, gone thin at the top like it might crack. “Say Gerald’s name while I’m fucking you and see what I do.”

“Gerald can choke on the Helix numbers,” Damon gasped, and then, because he was still a bastard even now, even like this, “—and you can choke on the fact that I wanted this since the night you called me a parasite in the parking garage and I went home and came thinking about your hands on my throat.”

Cassian’s rhythm stuttered. Something went across his face in the blue light that Damon had never seen there, and then it was gone and Cassian was fucking him harder, brutally, like he could drive the sentence back into Damon’s body where it came from.

It wasn’t going to hold. Damon’s thighs were trembling. The rug had taken the skin off his shoulder blades. Cassian pulled out with a wet, sucking sound that made both of them hiss, and Damon’s legs didn’t work—he got an elbow under him and his knee slid and he was on his side, and Cassian got a hand under his arm and hauled. Damon came up onto his knees. Glass ground under Cassian’s knee and he swore and kept pulling. Damon got his bare foot planted and the other leg buckled and his hip hit the leather visitor’s chair and it skidded a foot across the rug on its feet, and Cassian shoved him over the arm of it.

Damon’s chest hit the leather flat, a slap, then a squeak as his sweat met it. His hands went out and found nothing—the seat cushion, the far arm, no purchase. His feet were still on the rug but only just, toes dug in, weight all on his ribs where the padded arm caught him. And he couldn’t see. He could see the seat of the chair and the dark shape of the credenza and the blue blur of the city in the glass, and behind him he could hear Cassian breathing and feel Cassian’s hand spread on the small of his back and that was all. He turned his head and Cassian’s hand went into his hair and turned it back.

“Eyes front,” Cassian said.

He needed it. He didn’t look at why too closely, but he knew it the way he knew the taste of him now—that if Damon turned around and looked at him while this happened, if Damon saw what his face was about to do, there would be no walking into a boardroom tomorrow. So he kept a hand in Damon’s hair, kicked Damon’s feet wider on the rug, took his own cock in his other fist, and lined up by feel. Damon flinched at the touch of him. Cassian pushed in—easier now, slick with spit and the wet Damon’s body had made—but the angle was different bent over the arm, steeper, and Damon’s breath went out of him in a long broken drag and the leather squeaked under his chest with every inch.

“Take it,” Cassian said against the back of his neck, hand fisted in his hair, yanking his head up so Damon’s throat was a long stretched line. “You’ve been taking my shit for years. Take this. Come on my cock like the lying, gorgeous, infuriating—” He lost the sentence on a groan because Damon had pushed back onto him, greedy, hips working against the arm of the chair. Damon’s cock hung heavy between his legs, untouched, dripping onto the rug, and the angle was destroying him—every stroke dragging over the same place, and he couldn’t see it coming and couldn’t brace for it and couldn’t do anything but make noise into the seat cushion.

The room was cold. He hadn’t noticed until now, the building’s air on his wet back, the sweat on his chest going clammy where it was trapped between him and the leather. Cassian’s rhythm had gone erratic, chasing something. Damon could hear himself, high and cracked and saying Cassian’s name over and over like it was the only word he had left that wasn’t about money or Gerald or the wreckage they were going to have to walk into at nine. The hair on his forearms stood up. He felt it happen, felt it move down his arms and across his back in a wave, the skin drawing tight, and then the fist in his hair let go—his head dropped, forehead to leather—and a forearm came down hard across his shoulder blades to hold him, and Cassian’s other hand came around his hip and closed around his cock and Damon’s whole body locked.

Cassian felt the skin change before anything else. Gooseflesh rising under the forearm he had braced across Damon’s back, then under the fist he had around Damon’s cock, the whole surface of the man going tight and pebbled and cold in the blue dark. Damon was shaking. Not trembling—shaking, hard, his thighs knocking against the front of the chair, and Cassian stroked him twice and Damon came with a sound that had fear in it, thin and shocked, his cock pulsing in Cassian’s fist and come spattering the rug between his feet, streaking the leather front of the chair, running hot down the inside of his own knee, slicking Cassian’s knuckles. The chair scraped an inch along the floor with the force of him. Cassian had to drag his bracing arm down and around Damon’s chest to keep him from sliding off it.

Then it hit Cassian too. The cold came up off the wet rug, off the sweat going clammy down his bare spine, out of the shudder running up through Damon’s body and into his at every point of contact, and the last of the control he’d been holding all night with his teeth just went. He didn’t decide to come. His hips slammed in and stayed there and he was coming, a sound tearing out of him that he would not have recognized as his own, low and helpless and cracked straight through the middle, his arms breaking out in gooseflesh, his whole body jerking against Damon’s back in the same cold-flash shudder while he emptied into him in long pulses he couldn’t slow or stop. His hand was still around Damon’s cock. He couldn’t make it let go.

They stayed like that, shaking, breath sawing. The lamp filament had stopped ticking. The office was very quiet and very cold.

Cassian’s forehead came down between Damon’s shoulder blades, on the raw skin there, for one breath.

“Get out of me,” Damon said, into the cushion.

Cassian pulled out. The sound of it was small and wet and the mess ran down the inside of Damon’s thigh and Damon made a noise of pure disgust and didn’t move. Cassian didn’t step back far. His legs weren’t interested in it. He stood there in the dark, bare-chested, trousers still shoved down around his thighs, the city light picking out the sweat on him, his hand still sticky.

“If you say a word about this in the debrief,” Damon said, still bent over the chair, voice scraped hollow, “I will end you.”

“You first, you sanctimonious prick.” Cassian found his shirt, or what was left of it, in a heap beside the dead lamp and didn’t put it on. Just held it. “We’re walking into that boardroom at nine and Gerald is going to smell it on us.”

Damon got his hands under him and pushed up off the chair and his knees went and he caught himself on the arm. There was come on the rug between his feet and streaked down the leather front of the chair and he looked at it and looked away. He found his trousers still tangled around one ankle and got them up with hands that shook in small, cold jerks he couldn’t stop, and the paperclip was still in his palm and he pulled it out and dropped it and it hit the rug without a sound. He found his shoe by feel and stepped into it without bending to lace it. His shirt had no buttons. His tie was a rag. He put the tie in his pocket. Behind him, Cassian’s belt buckle clinked. Neither of them looked at the other for the full minute it took, and neither of them turned the light on, and neither of them said anything about the chair.

“The Helix numbers are still wrong,” Damon said, tucking in a shirt that had nothing to hold it closed. “Gerald’s going to bury us.”

Cassian’s laugh was short and had nothing in it. He stepped into Damon’s space, close, too close for men who had just done that, the wrecked shirt still balled in one fist, and his free hand came up like it was going to do something and then just straightened Damon’s collar, hard, a yank. “Then we bury him first,” he said. “And you’re paying for the blotter, since you tore it with your face.”

“You had my wrists.”

“You had a mouth.”

They walked out of the wrecked room and down the blue-lit corridor toward the elevators with their shoes crunching on nothing, still going at each other under their breath—liability, parasite, twelve million, the elevator, your mouth, your fucking mouth—and Cassian pressed the call button twice because his hand missed it the first time, and Damon watched him miss it and said nothing about that either.