Page 37 of Fought it Through the Teeth

The words come out sharper than he wants them to. Sharper than the setting calls for, sharper than the careful, calibrated version of himself that he maintains in this stronghold — the easy grin, the loose hands, the man who is everyone's friend and nobody's enemy. That man is gone. The man who is speaking is the one who sat in Ivan's study last night and heard the chieftain ask him to break the prince, and who has been carrying that weight for sixteen hours and has not set it down.

"These are men who have already expressed their interest in making you a subservient bride. You think they're going to ask you first?"

Morgan bristles. The color in his cheeks goes from steam-pink to anger-pink, a distinction Bohdi knows intimately, and his jaw sets in the way that means every word that comes out of his mouth next is going to be aimed to wound.

"I'm well aware of their intentions, Bohdi. You think I've never had someone ignore me when I told them to fuck off?" Morgan turns his head and looks at him directly, and his eyes are hot and bright and furious. "I'm well aware of the way men treat men who look like me."

Bohdi's blood goes hot.

It goes hot in a way that has nothing to do with the bathwater and everything to do with what Morgan just said and the way he said it — flatly, without self-pity, with the resigned certainty of stating a fact he has known for years. He means men who are slender and sharp-faced and beautiful in a way that makes other men want to possess rather than admire. Men who draw attention they didn't ask for and are blamed for the drawing. Men whose bodies are treated as invitations by people who have never learned the difference between wanting and taking.

Bohdi's hands are clenched into fists against his thighs under the water. He can feel his knuckles pressing against the stone ledge, can feel the tendons in his forearms standing out, can feel the rage building in his chest, pressure mounting with nowhere to go. It is not the rage he felt in Ivan's study. That rage was cold and strategic and aimed at a specific man. This rage is hot and formless and aimed at every man who has ever looked at Morgan and decided that looking like that was permission.

"You never told me," Bohdi says.

"Because I don't need you running to Eskil about it," Morgan snaps.

The words are fast and final. Morgan doesn't want Eskil to know. Doesn't want the overprotective older brother descending with his longsword and his fury on every man who has ever made Morgan feel unsafe, because Eskil would do it and Morgan doesn't want to be the reason his brother becomes that version of himself.

So he has been carrying it alone, managing the unwanted hands and the ignored refusals and the grinding indignity of being a beautiful young man in a world full of men who think beauty is an offering, because the alternative is watching his brother burn the world down on his behalf and living in the ashes.

Bohdi purses his lips. The rage is still there but it has nowhere to go and nothing to hit and the man beside him doesn't need it. Morgan needs something else. Something Bohdi isn't sure he knows how to give.

"There is a great deal I do not tell Eskil about you, Morgan," Bohdi says. His voice is quieter now. Controlled. Stripped of the sharpness. "And a great deal more I don't tell you I know."

Morgan flushes. Not the anger flush — the other one, the deep, spreading heat that starts at his chest and climbs his neck and reaches his cheeks and the tips of his ears. Embarrassed and furious and exposed.

"What, are you checking up on me?" Morgan's voice has an edge of broken glass. "Following me to see who I let fuck me?"

Bohdi should stop. He knows he should stop. The conversation has gone off the road and is hurtling downhill and the smart thing, the right thing, the thing that keeps the wall intact and the boundary respected and the years of careful distance preserved, is to pull back. Make a joke. Grin. Deflect. Turn the whole thing into banter and let Morgan retreat behind his sharpness and let the moment pass the way every other moment between them has passed — unexamined, unresolved, carefully and deliberately ignored.

And it has been an entire fucking week.

It has been a week of Morgan being brave and sharp and impossibly, heartbreakingly composed in front of people who want to break him, and a week of Bohdi watching it happen from arm's length and holding himself back until there is nothing left to hold. The hideous request in the study last night is still burning in Bohdi's skull.

He is very clearly not thinking straight when he says it.

"Should I be? Are you still fucking older men who look like me?"

The words leave his mouth and he hears them arrive in the space between them and he knows that he cannot take them back.

Morgan gapes at him.

The expression is so unguarded, so completely stripped of Morgan's usual composure, that it looks wrong on his face. His lips are parted and his eyes are wide and there are two spots of color high on his cheekbones that the steam didn't put there. He is looking at Bohdi with the shock of having something private and vital dragged into the light.

You fucking idiot, Bohdi thinks. You stupid, reckless, unforgivable fucking idiot.

Because he knows. He has always known. He knew it when Morgan was sixteen and chose a red-haired guard for his first time — an older man with Bohdi's coloring and as close to Bohdi's shape as the barracks could offer — and Bohdi understood, with a horror so complete it left him hollow, exactly what Morgan had been trying to have. He has known it every year since, though he hasn't followed, hasn't checked, hasn't tracked the prince's sexual history with anything resembling deliberate surveillance. He hasn't needed to. He knows Morgan. He reads people the way Morgan reads contracts, and the pattern was legible from the first entry: older, broad, red-haired when he could find it, tattooed when he couldn't. Men who were Bohdi in the dark, men who could pass for him if Morgan closed his eyes, men who gave him a body to hold that was shaped the way he wanted and couldn't have.

And Bohdi just said it out loud. In a bath. In the Wolfe stronghold. In enemy territory, sitting naked beside the man he has spent two years refusing to acknowledge he wants, with steam rising between them and nowhere for either of them to go.

Morgan turns to leave.

The motion is abrupt and graceless — not the measured exit of a prince preserving his dignity but desperate, instinctive retreat, flayed open and needing to get away before the wound is examined further. He pushes off the ledge and the water surges around him and Bohdi catches his wrist.

"Morgan —"

Morgan's composure snaps.