Tobias flushed. He’d meant that because of the state of the house, it was understandable if the garbage can hung out in whichever room Sullivan or his sister had been working in last. “That’s not what I meant,” he said stiffly. “I meant I can see that you wouldn’t always have the inclination to drag it from room to room—”
“That’s very kind of you,” Sullivan continued, a saccharine simper on his lips. “We don’t all have maids to serve our entitled asses with whatever our hearts could want in any given moment, regardless of how it might affect the little people—”
“Buy another trash can!” Tobias yelled, and threw the bag of crumpled sandwich wrappers at him.
Sullivan batted it out of the air easily, his dark eyes flashing with equal parts anger and that’s the best you can do? and that was it. Tobias wanted out of this damned house and away from this ass, who was determined to interpret every word out of his mouth in the worst possible way. He headed back toward the family room and freedom, picking up steam as he went, but Sullivan didn’t move. He braced his feet like a colonist protecting his square of uncharted land—I claim this disgusting hallway in the name of juvenile hair and too many tattoos. He clearly meant to force Tobias to squeeze around him, and probably break an ankle on the pile of wood, at which point he would smirk—
“Move,” Tobias gritted out, stopping directly in front of him.
“Giving me orders in my own home, now?” Sullivan snorted. “It suits your social class, I suppose.”
“I swear to God—”
“Have we gotten to the threats already? Please do tell me what you intend to do to me for standing in my own fucking hallway.”
Tobias was moving before the idea registered in his thoughts. He had Sullivan by the upper arms and was shoving him aside, and Sullivan stumbled over the loose boards. Tobias had caught him so much by surprise that he’d have fallen if Tobias hadn’t used the wall and his own body to keep him on his feet, Sullivan’s breath exploding from him in a huffed uh, and Tobias felt a thrill of victory that had his heart thumping wildly in his chest.
You didn’t think I had it in me, he wanted to shout. He hadn’t thought he had it in him, either, actually, because Tobias didn’t fight. He’d never put his hands on someone in anger before in his life, and—God, what had he done?
Tobias lost the wild spree of fury that’d left him reacting so blindly. His fingers loosened, his mind spitting out oh, God, did I hurt him, he’s going to be livid, I just wanted to leave, wanted him to get out of my way, how did this go so wrong—
Sullivan’s eyes—wide and startled—narrowed and hardened, and he shoved back, harder and with far more determination, his body twisting in a way that took Tobias not only into the other wall, but with enough force that it hurt. Tobias struggled, shoving back, trying to get free rather than cause pain, rapidly becoming aware that while he might outweigh Sullivan slightly, he was slow and clumsy in comparison, so he finally went still. He wasn’t—he wasn’t sure what to do, how to get out of this, but he knew he didn’t want to fight, not like this, and he was angry but not angry enough to hurt someone, so he prepared himself to lose his first fistfight, and then abruptly he realized that they weren’t fighting at all.
Sullivan was restraining him but not hurting him, and as Tobias simply stood there, Sullivan’s grip loosened further until his hands were only resting on Tobias’s arms.
Sullivan’s gaze was uncompromising, but pleased, too, the tilt of his head somehow... Tobias didn’t have the word for it, but it sent fear and craving tumbling madcap together through every nerve in his body.
It was the same thing he’d seen in Sullivan’s eyes the other day in the motel, when he’d pushed Tobias against the wall, when the air between them had shifted and gone loaded and raw in a way that had made Tobias’s blood go heavy and slow and bewildered. Something seemed to click inside him now, some switch that flipped so that his brain stuttered to a halt, and he just, he just...
There weren’t words for what he was feeling, but his body knew what he meant, what he wanted.
He went to his knees.
* * *
Well, this was interesting.
Tobias couldn’t fight for shit—if Sullivan had been interested in doing more than containing him for a minute while they got their tempers in order, there’d have been no contest—so Sullivan wasn’t surprised to feel him give up and sag against the wall. Sullivan wasn’t surprised that his dick was hardening, either, because Tobias was attractive in addition to being an asshole, and it was deeply satisfying to finally feel like he had one up on that superiority complex.
He was more surprised about the whole Tobias-going-limp thing.
Or not limp. He was going down, down on his knees, and that took a second of adjustment, because he hadn’t expected Tobias to reach for Sullivan’s fly, to tentatively rest his hands there for a moment in a silent question before opening his jeans, especially not in this dingy, cluttered hallway, with their tension and anger still emanating from the walls around them.
He hadn’t put any real thought into Tobias’s style of getting down, but if he’d been forced to guess, he’d have imagined some mildly snotty Harvard girl who went to college as much to find a husband as
