My Divorced Neighbor Fucked Me

The box of books was cutting a red line into my forearm when the door across the landing opened. I was twenty-four, three weeks out of college, and the apartment still smelled like the lemon cleaner the last tenant had left under the sink. My mattress was on the floor. The bed-frame screws were in a bag I had already lost. I had told myself I could do the move alone, and I had been wrong about that for about an hour.

He filled the doorway the way a man does when he has spent twenty years lifting things that don't want to be lifted. Forty-two, I would learn before the afternoon was over. Divorced. Construction foreman on a downtown high-rise, the dust of it still in the creases of his knuckles. Gray work shirt rolled to the elbows. Sun on his neck. A mouth that looked like it didn't waste words.

"You're going to drop that," he said. Low voice, scraped at the edges. "Then you're going to spend your first night picking paperbacks out of the stairwell. Give it here."

I gave it. Our hands met on the cardboard. His were hot and rough. Mine were soft from four years of sitting in libraries. He noticed. I noticed him noticing, and something low in my stomach turned over hard enough that I had to look at the step instead of his mouth.

"Ravi," I said.

"Nathaniel." He hiked the box like it weighed nothing and started up. "You the new one in 2A?"

"Just moved. Graduated in May. This is the whole adult thing, I guess."

He glanced back, and the look lasted a second too long to be neighborly. It went down my chest, my arms, the strip of stomach my T-shirt had ridden up. I had been checking him out since the door opened. Shoulders. The thick vee of his back under the shirt. The way his pants sat low on a working man's hips. He caught me at it and didn't pretend he hadn't.

"Twenty-four and already living alone," he said. "Brave."

"Or stupid."

"Both can be useful." He set the box on my kitchen counter and turned, close enough that I could smell sweat and sawdust and the cheap soap from a job-site shower. "You've got more downstairs."

"A lot more."

"Then you need a real man around." He said it plain, like he was talking about a dolly or a drill, but his eyes stayed on my mouth. "Skinny grad students don't haul dressers. Not without hurting something pretty."

Heat climbed my throat. "You offering?"

"I'm standing here, aren't I?" His gaze dropped again, deliberate, to the fit of my jeans, the way I was already half-hard from nothing but his voice. "Nice arms for a kid who reads. Tight through the middle. You work out, or you just got lucky?"

"Lucky," I said, and my voice came out thinner than I wanted. "You look like you break things for a living."

"Only the things that ask for it." He smiled, not kindly. Interested. "Come on. I'll take the heavy ones. You can watch."

We made four more trips. Every time our shoulders brushed in the narrow stairwell I felt it in my teeth. He stripped the work shirt off on the third trip because the landing was hot, and the white undershirt underneath was damp and clung to a chest that had no business being that close to my door. I told him he looked like he could carry me up with the dresser. He told me not to tempt a divorced man who hadn't had anything worth wanting in months. I laughed, too loud, and he watched my throat while I did it. When the last box was in, he stood in my bare living room with his hands on his hips and looked at me the way a man looks at a job he intends to finish.

"You need anything else," he said, "you knock. 2B. I'm home after six."

I nodded. I didn't trust my mouth.

He came back the next evening without a shirt.

I heard the knock and opened the door in sweatpants and an old college tee, and there he was, forty-two and still flushed from the site, chest bare, a towel over one shoulder, a six-pack of soda in his hand like an excuse. The hall light cut along the line of his stomach. I forgot how to stand.

"Figured you didn't have anything cold yet," he said. "Fridge takes a day to mean it."

"You could've put a shirt on."

"Could've." He stepped in when I moved aside. He didn't ask if he could. I didn't want him to. "You look good like that. Soft. Like nobody's put their hands on you right in a while."

I shut the door. My pulse was in my ears. "Is that the neighborly version, or the other one?"

"The other one." He set the soda on the counter and leaned there, thick arms crossed, watching me try not to stare at the trail of hair under his navel. "I've been thinking about you since yesterday. That little sound you made when I said you needed a real man. You hard right now?"

I was. I didn't lie. "Yeah."

"Good." His eyes went dark and pleased. "Say it cleaner tomorrow. I like hearing it."

He didn't touch me that night. He drank a soda, told me about the divorce in three blunt sentences, a wife who had wanted a different life and a man who had let her have it, and then he left me standing in my kitchen with my cock aching and his smell still in the room. The next night he came back the same way. Shirtless. Closer. He sat on my couch like he already lived in the dent he made, and the talk got filthy by degrees I could feel in my spine.

He asked if I had ever taken a cock as thick as his looked in those work pants. I said no, not like that, and my face burned, and he smiled. He asked if I got myself off thinking about older men bending me over. I said yes. He told me he had jerked off in his shower after helping with the boxes, picturing my mouth, picturing how tight a twenty-four-year-old ass would feel around him. I sat there shaking and admitted I had done the same thing with two fingers and his name in my throat.

By the fifth night the space between us on the couch had disappeared. His knee was against mine. His hand rested on the back cushion behind my head, not quite touching my hair. The window was open. The city made its ordinary noise. None of it mattered.

"I want you to fuck me," I said. The words came out shaky and clear. "I've wanted it since you took that box. I keep thinking about your cock in me. I want you to wreck me. Please."

Nathaniel went still. Then his hand came up and caught my face, rough palm on my jaw, thumb at the corner of my mouth. He kissed me hard. Not a question. Teeth, tongue, the taste of him, the scrape of stubble, a sound in his chest like something giving way. I opened for it. I grabbed his bare shoulder and pulled him in and kissed him back until I couldn't breathe.

He broke it just far enough to talk against my lips. His voice had dropped into a growl. "Been dying to wreck this tight ass. Since the stairs. Since you looked at me like you already knew what I was going to do to you. You sure? Say it so I hear it."

"I'm sure." I was hard enough to hurt. I was twenty-four and shaking and completely clear. "I want it. I want you. Right now. Don't be gentle unless I ask."

"You won't ask." He kissed me again, slower, filthier, and I felt him smile. "Good boy. Take your clothes off."

I did. Shirt, sweatpants, briefs, all of it on the floor of my first apartment while a forty-two-year-old man watched with his hand working the front of his jeans. When I was naked he stood and shoved the denim down. His cock came out thick and heavy, darker than the rest of him, already wet at the head. I stared. My mouth watered. My hole clenched on nothing.

"On your knees," he said.

I went down on the rug. The fibers bit my skin. He stepped in, one hand in my hair, not cruel, just sure, and he fed me the head. Salt. Heat. The stretch of my lips around him. I groaned and took more, eager, sloppy, spit slicking my chin on the second stroke. He let me find the rhythm for a minute, let me worship it, then his grip tightened and he started to fuck my throat the way I had begged for without quite saying the words.

"That's it," he muttered. "Open. Take it. Look at you. Needy little mouth."

He was thick enough that my jaw ached and my eyes watered. I wanted that. I held his thighs and let him use me, gagging, pulling off to breathe, diving back down because the emptiness was worse. Spit strung from my lip to his cock. He praised me for it in that low scraped voice, called me desperate, called me perfect, told me I was going to take every inch when he got me bent over. I nodded around him, moaning, one hand wrapped around what I couldn't swallow, the other between my own legs, not stroking yet, just holding on so I didn't come from the taste of him alone.

He pulled out shining. I gasped. A line of spit clung and broke.

"Couch," he said. "Now. Hands on the back. Ass up. I want to see what I've been thinking about all week."

I scrambled. The couch was secondhand and too low, and it put me exactly where he wanted me, chest down, back arched, hole exposed to the room and to him. I heard him spit. Felt the blunt press of two fingers, slick enough, patient for three strokes while I pushed back and begged, and then the fingers were gone and the head of his cock was there, huge, hot, notching against me.

"Raw," he said. "You want it raw. Tell me."

"Yes. Raw. I want to feel all of you. Fuck me."

He pushed in.

The stretch burned in a bright, perfect line. I clawed the cushion and bore down and took him, inch by thick inch, until his hips met my ass and I was full in a way that wiped the week, the boxes, the diploma, everything but him. He stayed there, buried, one rough hand spread on my lower back, and he laughed once, soft and wrecked.

"Tight," he said. "Jesus, Ravi. This hole was made for me."

Then he started to pound.

Deep. Brutal. The couch jumped under us. Every stroke drove the air out of me and replaced it with a broken sound I didn't recognize as mine. He held my hips and fucked me like he had been saving it, long strokes that dragged over the spot inside me until my legs shook, then short savage ones that slapped skin to skin and made my cock swing, leaking onto the cushion. I begged. I told him harder. I told him not to stop. He called me a needy hole and I clenched around him like the words were a hand.

"Listen to you," he growled, bent over my back, sweat dripping onto my spine. "Taking a divorced man's cock like you were waiting in this apartment for it. You were. Weren't you."

"Yes. Yes. Don't stop. Please, Nathaniel, fuck, don't stop."

He didn't. He railed me until my voice went hoarse and my hole was soft and slick and greedy, until I was pushing back to meet every thrust like I could get him deeper by wanting it more. When my arms started to give, he hauled me up and turned me, manhandled me onto my back on the cushions, and shoved my knees toward my chest. Missionary. His face over mine. His cock finding me again in one mean, perfect slide that made us both curse.

"Stroke it," he said. "I want to watch you while I ruin you."

I got a hand around myself. I was so hard it hurt, slick with precum, and the first pull made my vision white out at the edges. He fucked me mercilessly, hips snapping, the wet sound of it obscene in the quiet apartment. I tried to keep the rhythm. I really did. My hand moved, clumsy, desperate, and then the pounding hit that spot again and again and my hand fell away because I couldn't do two things at once, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but take it.

"I can't," I gasped. "I'm gonna, I'm, oh God, I'm coming, I'm coming from just, from you."

It tore through me untouched. My cock jerked against my stomach and I came in hard pulses, striping my own abs, my chest, my throat open on a sound that wasn't a word. Nathaniel watched it happen with his teeth bared, fucked me through it, three more deep strokes while I clenched and shook and sobbed his name, and then he yanked out.

He fisted himself twice and came with a rough, broken groan, painting my chest and abs in thick hot ropes that mixed with mine. A massive load. It striped me from collarbone to navel. He kept stroking through it, milking the last of it onto my skin, eyes locked on the mess he had made of the twenty-four-year-old who had carried boxes badly and asked for this.

For a while the only sound was breathing.

He reached down, slow now, and found his discarded T-shirt on the floor. He wiped the cum off my chest with it, careful, unhurried, the cotton dragging through the mess, over my nipples, down the trembling line of my stomach. When I was mostly clean he dropped the shirt and leaned in and kissed me. Slow. Deep. Nothing like the first one. I tasted myself on his mouth and kissed him back with my whole tired body, one hand in his short hair, the other spread over the sweat on his back.

He pulled away just far enough to speak. His forehead rested against mine.

"This is just the beginning," he said, quiet, certain. "Every night. I'm going to come over here and do worse to you than this. You're going to open the door and bend over and take it. My divorced neighbor. Your tight ass. You understand me?"

I grinned. I couldn't help it. My cock, spent a minute ago, was already thickening again against his hip, traitorous and eager. "Stay," I said. "Stay the night. Round two in the shower. I want you again. I want all of it."

He looked at me. Something in his face eased, not soft exactly, but settled, like a man who had found the thing he had been missing and didn't need to announce it anymore.

Neither of us spoke after that.

The city went on outside the open window. His weight stayed on me, warm and heavy, one rough hand resting over my heart where the mess had been. My fingers stayed in his hair. The apartment, my first apartment, held us, and the quiet did too, full and unbroken, while our breathing slowed and matched and the night settled down around the two of us like it meant to stay.