Page 18 of Fought it Through the Teeth

The touch is still careful. Bohdi is following the bruising the same way he did the shoulder, mapping the damage with his fingers before working the salve in. There is nothing in the touch that is anything other than friendly.

But his hand is on Morgan's lower back, just above the waist of his trousers. And his fingers are warm and broad and slightly rough with calluses, and Morgan can feel each individual pad of each individual finger against his skin. The intimacy of the location is doing something to his composure that grain tallies cannot counteract.

He breathes slowly through his nose and counts the exhale: one, two, three, four.

Bohdi's other hand comes up to brace against Morgan's side, a stabilizing touch, practical, holding him steady while the working hand presses into the muscle alongside his spine. The spread of Bohdi's fingers spans from Morgan's ribs to his hip, and the warmth of the second hand against his bare skin is, it is⁠—

Morgan aggressively recalculates the northern grain yield.

Bohdi has gone quiet.

Morgan notices it as an absence, not the silence itself but the lack of what had been filling it. The banter has tapered off somewhere in the last few minutes, the easy back-and-forth replaced by a concentration that Morgan can feel in the quality of the touch. Bohdi's hands are still moving, still working, but the commentary has dried up. The breathing behind him has changed, steadier, more controlled, measured and deliberate, paying attention to his own breathing in a way that suggests his body has started doing something his mind needs to override.

"Still back there?" Morgan asks. His voice comes out lighter than he feels. He means it as an invitation: say something, fill the silence, give me something to parry so I can stop thinking about your hands.

Bohdi's thumb presses into a knot of tension beside his spine and Morgan's breath catches.

"Sorry, got lost in thought about killing overbearing hosts," Bohdi says. His voice is different, not the smooth, easy, performative voice Morgan is accustomed to, not the charming drawl that works rooms and wins over chieftains. This one is quieter and lower, stripped of the grin Morgan can usually hear even when he can't see it.

His hand moves to the bruise on Morgan's hip. Bohdi's fingers curve over the swell of his hip, finding the swollen tissue, and the pressure is gentle but the location is⁠—

Morgan's hands curl against the table as every thought in his head dissolves into a white roar of sensation.

He thinks about Bohdi's hands sliding lower. The thought arrives without permission, vivid and explicit: Bohdi's fingers hooking the waist of his trousers, dragging them down over his hips. Bohdi's palm flat on his stomach, pressing him back against the broad warm wall of Bohdi's chest. Bohdi's mouth on the back of his neck, on the knob of his spine, teeth scraping against the tendon, and Morgan's head falling back against his shoulder and the sound Morgan would make⁠—

Bohdi's thumb follows the swollen border of the bruise on his hip, slow and careful, where it wraps around toward his stomach, and Morgan makes a sound.

It is not a word. It is not a hiss of pain. It is a low, involuntary thing that climbs out of his throat before he can catch it, soft and open and unmistakably a moan.

Bohdi's hand stops.

It doesn't lift or pull away. It simply stops mid-motion, every point of contact preserved and frozen, his thumb still pressed to the curve of Morgan's hip and his palm still flush against his skin.

Morgan's face burns. The heat of it is instantaneous, flooding up from his chest and across his neck and into his cheeks and the tips of his ears, and he is so grateful that he is facing away from Bohdi that the gratitude is almost its own kind of pain. His hands are gripping the table hard enough that his knuckles ache. His jaw is locked. His eyes are open and fixed on the wood grain and he is not seeing it, not seeing anything, because every scrap of awareness he possesses is focused on the terrible reality that Bohdi heard. That there is no possible misinterpretation of the sound he just made in response to Bohdi's hand on his hip.

He should say something. He should laugh it off, make a joke about the bruise, produce some plausible excuse that gives them both a way out. He opens his mouth and nothing comes, because every version of an explanation he can construct is worse than the silence, and the silence is already unbearable.

He can hear Bohdi breathing. It has gone hard and Morgan is so tense he could snap in half.

Neither of them says anything.

The moment stretches past comfort, past silence, past the point where not addressing it becomes its own form of address. Bohdi's hand stays on his hip and Morgan's hands stay on the table, two men breathing in a room that has become very, very small.

Then Bohdi's hand moves. It lifts. The warmth withdraws.

"Best advice is sleep on your stomach," Bohdi says.

His voice is rough and he is already moving. Morgan hears the pot of salve being capped, hears footsteps crossing the stone floor, hears the quality of movement that says I am going now as quickly as possible. "If the swelling gets worse you should see the physician."

"Yes," Morgan says. "Thank you."

It comes out too fast, clipped and airless and so transparently desperate for this to be over that it functions as its own confession, a second one, compounding the first. He does not say Bohdi's name because he does not trust what his voice will do with it. He does not turn around because turning around means Bohdi seeing his face, and his face is still burning, and whatever is written on it right now is not something he can arrange into anything survivable.

Bohdi pauses at the door. The silence holds for one breath, two, and Morgan can feel the weight of something unspoken pressing against the back of his teeth, and he knows Bohdi is feeling it too, standing there with his hand on the latch and the decision sitting hot in his chest.

Bohdi opens the door and walks through it. It closes with a firmness that is just slightly harder than necessary, the latch catching with a click that echoes in the empty room, and then Bohdi's footsteps recede down the corridor and are gone.

Morgan stays braced on the table with his eyes closed.