Chapter Six
Clay didn’t make plans.
In his experience that was just a hand-delivered invitation to the universe to fuck them up. Bad luck, assholes. A month in a military hospital getting dead flesh scraped off his arms three times a day by some doctor who skimped on the oxy. There was always something to throw a spanner in the works.
That said—Clay leaned back, his hands braced on the table behind him—he should have thought better of the music. It was still turned up loud enough he could feel it through his heels, all heavy bass and fast, insistent beats.
Fucking to this was going to leave him needing a new hip.
Clay glanced down at Grade—brown hair tangled from Clay’s fingers and Clay’s cock in his mouth—and idly wondered if he was getting too old for that joke to be funny. Probably not. Not yet, anyhow. His birthday wasn’t for another three months.
Too jacked up…
Maybe.
He took a deep breath as Grade’s tongue pushed up against the underside of his cock and felt the straps of scar tissue over his ribs pull painfully on the seams where it stitched into his skin. Clay sucked in a breath and waited for the sharp jab of pain to get watered down by the distraction of Grade’s warm, eager mouth around him.
Grade pulled back and let Clay’s cock slip out of his mouth. He looked up at Clay and then licked the tip of his cock with a slow, deliberate swipe of his tongue. Every fucking thing from Clay’s nipples to his knees clenched into a knot. He swore between his teeth and grabbed a handful of hair to pull Grade’s head back. His throat pulled tight, and… fuck, it had been a while. All the hickeys from last time had faded.
That could be fixed.
“Not going to finish the job?” he asked.
Grade ran his hands up Clay’s thighs, and his thumbs skimmed along the inside seam of the tailored trousers until they framed the unzipped fly.
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” he said.
Clay made a low, amused sound in the back of his throat and tugged Grade’s head back to a sharper angle. He watched Grade’s eyes go dark and hungry, the green iris just a narrow line around the swollen pupils.
“Starting to think I should have told you to get lost,” he said. “Kept the hookers.”
Grade touched the tip of his tongue to his lower lip. The absent gesture briefly distracted Clay as he remembered what that tongue had just been doing. His balls pulled tight and tender, and he exhaled raggedly.
“That would be expensive,” Grade said.
Clay snorted as he let go of Grade’s hair. “You ain’t exactly cheap.”
A quick smile tucked the corners of Grade’s mouth. His narrow frat-boy handsome face creased around the humor of it.
“You should see what I charge in LA,” he said as he pushed himself to his feet. With Clay still slouched against the table and Grade upright, he had to tilt his head back to look at him. “And I don’t even throw in a free blow job.”
Clay usually rolled his eyes when Grade talked about LA—whether it was how much better it was than Sweeny or how hard it was to get your footbackin the door—but that one startled a laugh out of him.
“The only thing in life that’s free is those samples they give you in the supermarket,” Clay said. He hooked his fingers into the waistband of Grade’s sweats and pulled him in closer until he stood in the spreadVof Clay’s thighs. “Everything else you pay for eventually. One way or another.”
He wasn’t sure where he planned to go with that line of thought. It was a joke, the right smartass thing to say in response to Grade’s jibe. Then he saw the flicker of flight-risk panic in Grade’s pretty green eyes.
Clay knew the look. Usually it was because he’d just threatened to feed someone their own fucking fingers when he found out who’d shorted the cut. Apparently, with Grade, all he needed to suggest was that Grade might—one day—want something from Clay.
That kinda stung, Clay wasn’t going to lie.
“The only thing I want is—”
Clay kissed him to shut him up, rough and impatient. He could taste the sticky saltiness of pre-come on Grade’s lips as he deepened the kiss. It twisted the ache that had settled in his balls and itched down in the very base of his brain where all his addictions lived.
He slid his hand under Grade’s sweatshirt and grazed it up his side, over the lean muscle along his ribs. The whimper that escaped Grade was soft, but Clay felt it against his tongue. He smirked and leaned back, away from Grade’s brief attempt to chase the kiss.
“Shut up,” Clay said as he wrapped his hand around Grade’s throat, lightly at first as he watched Grade’s face for his reaction. “I know what you want.”
