Page 18 of Housesitter

Livid lines striated both Kel’s knees, puckered and white as they wrapped around the joints. Another scar, long and dented, ran down the front of his shin.

“Don’t worry,” Kel interrupted Shepherd’s study. “Everything above the knee still works.”

He paused as he thought about it.

“Everything below them too,” he added with a flicker of pedantic humor. “It’s just the fucking knees that aren’t pulling their weight.”

“I’ve seen worse,” Shepherd said. Then he rubbed the back of his neck as he thought about it. “That’s probably not the right reaction. Should I try again?”

Kel started to answer, stopped, and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know if there is a right reaction.”

“I could say ‘sorry’.”

“You didn’t do it.”

“True,” Shepherd said. He touched his fingertips to the scars and felt the dull heat of them. Muscles twitched under his hand in a reaction that could have been good or bad. “Does it hurt?”

Kel took a slow breath. “...yeah,” he admitted, his voice thin as if he had to draw it out of himself.

“Now?”

Kel shrugged. “Pretty much always.”

Shepherd cupped Kel’s knee in his hand, fingers tucked in the hollow behind it. It felt oddly intimate. He leaned down and brushed a kiss lightly over the scars.

“Would fucking make it feel better?” he asked.

That got him a spluttered laugh from Kel.

“It can’t hurt,” Kel said, then paused as he quirked the corner of his mouth in that slightly bitter smirk as he corrected himself. “Not so much in this position, at least.”

Shepherd could work with that.

He pushed Kel back down onto the floor and climbed on top of him. The grit of old bonemeal and old bones dug into his bare knees. Under the circumstances, he thought it would be ungracious to complain about that.

Sprawled out under him, Kel looked almost shockingly vivid against the sun-bleached wood. It made his mussed auburn hair ruddier and picked out the coppery tones in his tanned skin. One hand idly cuffed his cock and stroked it, slow and easy, as his gaze trailed down over Shepherd’s body appreciatively.

“I’ve never been with a guy who’s not cut before,” he remarked.

Shepherd glanced down at his cock. He was already erect, his foreskin rolled partially back from the flushed head of his cock.

“You want to fuck me?” he asked as he reached down to pull it back the rest of the way. The thin skin creased under his fingers and prickles of pleasure snapped back along his nerve endings. “Or for me to fuck you?”

“Does it make a difference?”

Shepherd shrugged. “Not for me,” he said.

Kel offered him the condom he’d fished out of his jeans, the foil packet pinched between his fingers. “It’s still early,” he said, casting a glance up at the sky through the glass panels overhead. “And I’m still young enough to go again…if you want.”

The offer managed to sound grudging. Shepherd decided not to take it that way. He plucked the condom out of Kel’s fingers and ripped the corner off it with his teeth.

“We could, I guess,” he said. “Not like there’s anyone waiting up for me.”

He pulled the ring of latex out, clear and slick with lube, and slid it onto Kel’s cock. It stretched around the heft of his shaft, pliant and cool over hot flesh.

Kel moved his hand to make it easier, tracing his fingers up the inside of Shepherd’s thigh instead.

“What about the doll?” he teased.