For the first ten seconds, Hale thinks perhaps Rayner didn't hear him. He appears frozen in time, staring at Hale, still gripping the clothes in both hands. His lips move, but it takes a moment for sound to follow.
"P-pardon?"
"I want you," Hale repeats, slower this time, "to kiss me."
The pause afterward is much shorter. Then Rayner's moving, dropping the clothes, nearly tripping over them in his haste. He's pressing Hale back up against the door, cool hands sliding against hot skin, fingers tangling in his hair, and he's kissing Hale. Feverish, desperate, with none of the hesitation that marked their first kiss. Hale's nervousness evaporates.
He abandons all his predictive algorithms, all his behavioural templates, all the charts and graphs and observations upon which he'd normally base his every decision, and surrenders to the unchecked want. He gathers Rayner as close as clothing will allow. He lets his hands wander and explore every plane of Rayner's back, his hips, the curve of his neck. He kisses back. The taste of Rayner on his tongue is a rapture unto itself that he can't put to words.
Rayner's hands explore him too. At first only his neck, his face, anywhere he can grip Hale and pull him deeper into the kiss, anywhere there's exposed skin. But there isn't a lot of exposed skin, at least not in Hale's case. Evidently frustrated with this, Rayner yanks at Hale's shirt until he can slide his fingers under the hem and over Hale's belly.
The moan rises in his throat before he can prevent it. It feels like Hale's body is on fire. Like Rayner's hands are brands, scorching every place they touch. Like it should hurt, but instead it feels impossibly good.
It all stops too abruptly when Rayner pulls away. A protest is on the tip of Hale's tongue, but Rayner manages to speak first.
"Shirt. Off."
He's breathless and pink-cheeked. Hale can't resist and doesn't want to. It takes five seconds too many to wrestle his shirt over his head before Rayner is back in his arms again.
It's an entirely different thing to kiss with that barrier of clothing removed, pressed chest to chest. Rayner's skin, cool from the shower, heats to Hale's touch. Hale doesn't just receive data transmissions of Rayner's roaring heartbeat either; he can practically feel Rayner's pulse jumping under his skin. It's as though Rayner's sensitivity only compounds his own.
Between urgent kisses, Rayner gasps, garbled against Hale's mouth, "Sofa?" and starts guiding him by his belt loops. When the backs of Hale's knees hit said sofa, he falls back onto it. To his annoyance, Rayner leaves the towel on when he straddles Hale, one knee on either side of his hips. It's a little awkward, the towel restricting his movement, and Hale tries to be pointed in the way he slides a hand down Rayner's spine and under the edge of it.
That makes Rayner break the kiss, laughing a little against Hale's mouth. "You want it off?"
"Obviously," Hale says in a huffy tone he almost doesn't recognize as his own voice.
Giving him an arch look, Rayner rises up on his knees and reaches for the spot where the towel is tucked in around his waist. He has the audacity to only mime removing it the rest of the way, giving his hips a teasing wiggle. Hale's face must be the picture of impatience, because Rayner bursts out laughing.
"What's funny?" Hale demands, though he's starting to smile himself.
"You. Being so impatient," Rayner snorts. "Do you know how long I've waited to hear you say those words?"
"As long as I've waited to be able to say them," Hale answers quickly.
"And you can't wait a few seconds for the towel to come off."
"It's been a minute and six seconds since I asked," Hale responds haughtily. Reaching up, he cups Rayner's face with a hand and draws him down to kiss again. He receives a reading of Rayner's heart thumping harder than usual and stops to tilt his head in a silent question.
Rayner says, "I'm a little nervous."
"Me too," Hale admits.
"Okay..." Rayner catches his bottom lip between his teeth. With a little trepidation, he unwinds the towel and lets it fall to the floor. Before Hale can react, Rayner leans in to resume kissing him, and Hale is only too happy to sink into it. As the tension in Rayner's body unwinds, he slowly lowers his weight into Hale's lap, and as he does, the tip of his hard cock draws a line down Hale's abdomen.
Hale can't quite catch his breath with what that does to him.
The acute sensitivity to every part of them touching fills him with a static current, as if each point of contact creates a closed circuit and electricity flows through it. Especially when Rayner starts to rock his hips, grinding to bring them closer where clothes still keep them apart. If Hale had been hard before, now he's painfully so. It had never occurred to him that pleasure could transform into pain—the two always seemed opposites to him. It lends a sense of urgency to everything despite all Hale's templates instructing him to draw this out.
One of Rayner's hands traces a wayward path down Hale's stomach to thumb at the button of his fly.
"Is this okay?"
"Yes," Hale hisses on an exhaled breath.
Rayner undoes his jeans, and it's murderously slow, the way he slides a hand below the waistband of Hale's boxers until finally his palm glides into place. Hale's senses spiral, his body quaking under Rayner's touch. He has to muffle the noises rising to his lips by burying his face in the crook of Rayner's neck. He's never been touched like this by anybody, not since he gained the ability to feel it, and the intensity takes him by surprise.
The mechanics may be the same, but pleasuring himself doesn't compare.
Rayner looks encouraged by Hale's vocal approval. He removes his hand temporarily to spit into his palm. Hale thinks idly that Rayner's elegant, long-fingered hand looks very nice wrapped around his cock, but it feels much better.
Damo had insinuated Rayner would be the screamer of the two, but Hale is the one who has to smother unbidden keens and gasps for breath against Rayner's shoulder when Rayner starts to stroke him. None of Hale's moments spent alone fantasizing about this very thing quite measure up to the reality, and it's too much. The pleasure pulls at his every sense like the inexorable draw of an undertow.
There's a split second in which Hale recognizes that, too soon, the winding tension in his body is starting to turn, a wave on the point of breaking. One of his hands reaches up to reflexively grasp Rayner's elbow, but Rayner doesn't stop. If anything, his grip tightens a little and his pace speeds up.
It's too late to warn Rayner. An uncontrollable momentum carries Hale's body to its peak, and he climaxes with Rayner's name on his lips—the rest of his plea washing away with the bliss soaking through him.
Momentarily, Hale's vision feeds cut out, then return in bursts of pixels one bit at a time.
He's looking at the freckles spread out along Rayner's shoulder, where he's buried his face. Rippling aftershocks of pleasure lap at his consciousness.
He's a little embarrassed that he hadn't warned Rayner in time, and that he hardly lasted two minutes, and now they're both a mess. In previous encounters, Hale's orgasm had been tightly controlled, a command he executed at the appropriate moment. A purely superficial performance. This felt inevitable, or perhaps in the heat of the moment he'd forgotten he could prevent it. Despite all that, he's never felt quite so boneless, so relaxed. When he recovers enough composure to turn his face from Rayner's shoulder and look at him, Rayner's smile is a combination of fond and smug.
"Good?" Rayner asks.
Hale tries to answer, but only a strangled noise of assent comes out. Rayner looks extremely pleased and kisses his temple.
Collecting himself enough to speak, Hale stammers, "S-sorry."
"What for?"
"For ejaculating prematurely!"
"Don't be. That was really, really hot."
Hale chokes on a laugh. "Perhaps I can dial down my sensitivity settings, or reset my refractory period to a shorter timeframe if you—"
He doesn't get to finish that sentence because Rayner kisses him, and Hale can't tell if it's to shut him up or to taste him because it's a heady kiss with a lot of tongue. When he pulls away Hale feels remarkably less embarrassed. Glancing down between them, he raises an eyebrow.
"I could perform fellatio on you."
Self-reproach nips at his heels. Hale's predisposition for technical terms apparently doesn't translate well into dirty talk.
Rayner doesn't seem to find it unsexy though. He blushes scarlet. "Only if you want to..."
This time, Hale gives himself enough time to choose his words. "Rayner, I want to suck your cock."
In all Hale's time alive, there had been countless moments in his fumbling attempts at a balance between decorum and humanity where he'd searched for the right thing to say and regretted his choice, but the look on Rayner's face is worth every second of stumbling that led them here. There's a barely contained eagerness in his eyes that Hale finds tantalizing, irresistible.
With an arm around Rayner's waist, Hale turns to lower him onto the sofa. He takes a moment to shimmy out of his jeans the rest of the way, kicking them onto the floor, before positioning himself seated between Rayner's thighs. It's the first moment Hale gets to really see Rayner—all of him—spread out and naked. He's leaning back, head tipped against the arm of the couch, one ankle hooked around Hale's hip. The freckles so prevalent on his face spill onto his shoulders before fading down his arms and disappearing entirely. Slender, long legs are cocked up and coyly spread, enough that the shape of them and the taper of Rayner's waist look like the lines of a perspective drawing, all leading to a singular vanishing point.
Which is still erect and sorely neglected, but Hale wants to take his time.
Slow and deliberate, Hale leans down and drops a kiss into the hollow of Rayner's throat. In response, Rayner's breath catches in his chest. Taking that as an implicit invitation to continue, Hale trails a few more kisses down from Rayner's clavicle to his breast bone, pressing his tongue into the shallow dip in the centre of Rayner's chest. It's a slow act of discovery. Every time Rayner's pulse jumps or he whispers a curse under his breath, Hale commits the spot to memory, charting a map of Rayner's body one landmark at a time. So he might one day know its cartography blind.
By the time Hale reaches the conjunction of hip and thigh, where he pauses to look up. Gripping the sofa with white-knuckled hands, Rayner's eyes are half-lidded, brows pinched. He's at once strung tight and unravelled, silently begging Hale to carry on.
Perhaps another time, Hale might venture to see what could make Rayner voice those pleas aloud, but now his own patience has run out. He gets down on his knees at the foot of the sofa, drags Rayner by the hips, and coaxes him to turn so he's seated at the edge.
A tiny, distant part of Hale's mind reminds him that he's never done this before, but he's imagined it plenty of times, so...
He licks a long stripe from the base of Rayner's cock to the tip. The taut, breathless silence that follows is more feverish than a moan. Though he'd long anticipated tasting Rayner, Hale hadn't known the taste of skin could vary by location, and the slightly musky smell is both new and rich to his senses. Upon sucking the head into his mouth, Rayner's hand convulsively reaches to grip Hale's hair. It's provocative having Rayner hold onto him while he's losing his grip on control, so Hale guides Rayner's other hand, placing it on the back of his head too.
There's still a lot of teasing on Hale's part. And a lot of hesitation on Rayner's before he finally applies pressure to Hale's head, encouraging him to go deeper, and Hale does. He picks up a rhythm, shallow at first, then taking more. Taking Rayner apart. Taking his time, because he doesn't want to rush this, doesn't know when they'll have the chance to do it again. It's intoxicating to hear Rayner's erratic breathing as he approaches the brink, as he tenses in anticipation, and Hale's data streams are like an erotic love letter with no need for words.
While Hale tests how much of Rayner's cock he can take, Rayner quietly holds his breath, but it's not long before that silence breaks. At first with incoherent, half-strung words of encouragement. Then, a few harried warnings, which Hale doesn't heed. Last, Hale's name, whispered over and over and over.
Hale savours the sound, the tug of Rayner's fingers tightening in his hair, the slightly salty taste on his tongue, and when Rayner finally comes he does so while Hale is enthusiastically deep-throating him.
One thing engineers didn't deign to include in his design, apparently, was a gag reflex.
It takes Rayner a good minute to recover. Hale is about to get up in search of tissues, but Rayner stops him, both hands cupping Hale's jaw and drawing him up off his knees. Apparently, he has no issue with kissing after Hale just finished sucking him off, and as Rayner sinks back onto the couch, still kissing him, Hale can't say that he objects either.
"Was that—" Hale starts to ask between kisses.
"Perfect," Rayner answers. "It was perfect. You're perfect."