Page 38 of Fought it Through the Teeth

It doesn't crack. It doesn't fracture along the careful fault lines Morgan has spent twenty years reinforcing. It snaps and what comes out of the wreckage is raw and wrecked and aimed directly at Bohdi's heart.

"What do you care?" Morgan asks. His voice is high and tight and nothing like his voice. "If you don't want me, then —"

"It doesn't fucking matter what I want," Bohdi interrupts. His hand is still on Morgan's wrist and his grip is firm and his voice is tight — wound around itself, every word pulled out through clenched teeth. "Do you know exactly what position you put me in? You are the king's brother, Morgan."

Morgan stares at him in disbelief. His chest is heaving and his wrist is in Bohdi's hand and the water is lapping at his ribs and Bohdi can feel his pulse hammering against his fingers — fast, desperate, running from something for years and just caught.

For a moment something shifts in Morgan's face. A flicker — understanding, maybe. Recognition. The brief, awful acknowledgment that Bohdi is not wrong, that the position is impossible, that the distance between them has never been about wanting and has always been about cost.

Then the anger comes back up hotter.

"Is it that you're a coward," Morgan asks, and his voice is shaking and his chin is lifted and his eyes are blazing with a fury so pure it looks like grief, "or are you just used to asking my brother where you can put your cock?"

Every scrap of composure and willpower Bohdi has hoarded for two years goes straight through his fingers.

The sound that comes out of him is closer to a surrender — a low, rough exhale that carries the last of his resistance out of his body. "Gods," he says, and the word is wrecked and reverent, and he reaches out and takes a fistful of Morgan's blond hair and watches the younger man's eyes go wide. "The fucking mouth on you —"

And then he kisses him.

Chapter 17

Morgan

Morgan is aware, distantly and academically, that there is something to be said for playing hard to get and not flinging oneself bodily at a man.

He flings himself bodily at the man.

The person he has been in love with for years is kissing him. Naked. In a steaming pool. In the bathhouse of a hostile warchief whose study is two floors above them and whose guards are somewhere in this building and whose entire clan would happily gut both of them if they walked in right now. And Morgan is twenty and warm-blooded and possesses precisely zero capacity for restraint where Bohdi is concerned. He has spent a long time hoarding his restraint, parceling it out in careful increments and the vault is empty. There is nothing left. The last of it went out of him when Bohdi's hand closed in his hair and his mouth came down, and Morgan has been running on fumes for years and the fumes have just caught fire.

He grabs Bohdi's shoulders and climbs into his lap.

There is nothing elegant about it. The water surges around them and his knee skids on the submerged stone ledge and he nearly goes sideways, but Bohdi's arm is already there — banding around his waist, hauling him forward, pulling him flush against a body that is as hard and as hot as the water they are sitting in. Morgan's legs bracket Bohdi's hips. His chest presses against Bohdi's chest. There is nothing between them and the shock of skin against skin, the full length of his body against the full length of Bohdi's, is so overwhelming that Morgan's vision goes white at the edges and a sound comes out of his mouth that he does not authorize.

Bohdi's arm tightens around his waist. The hand in his hair tightens. Bohdi kisses him deep and fierce and thorough, starving for it, tongue sliding against Morgan's, mouth slanted hard over his — and Morgan opens for him with a moan that would embarrass him under any circumstances that are not these. Under these circumstances embarrassment is a luxury he cannot afford and does not want and would not trade for anything in the known world, not with Bohdi's tongue in his mouth and Bohdi's hand in his hair and Bohdi's body solid and real and under him. Morgan has dreamed of precisely this, specifics and all, waking up hard and aching in his bed at Valen with the ghost of it on his lips — and the reality is so much more than the dream that the dream is a rough sketch beside it.

Bohdi's erection is hard as iron against him.

Morgan feels it — the blunt, impossible pressure of it against the cleft of his ass — and every fantasy and wet dream he has ever had is put to shame in a single instant. The reality is heat — the thick, insistent press of Bohdi's cock against him, bigger than his hand ever approximated, harder than anything he has felt. The knowledge that it is Bohdi, that this is Bohdi's body responding to him, that he has made this man hard just by being in his lap, sends a pulse of want through Morgan so acute he has to break the kiss to gasp.

He rocks against him. Immediately. Shamelessly. He rolls his hips and grinds down and the drag of Bohdi's cock along the cleft of his ass wrenches a sound out of both of them — Bohdi's a low, bitten-off groan that Morgan feels vibrate through his chest, Morgan's something closer to a keen, desperate and open-mouthed and aimed at the ceiling. He is hard. He has been hard since Bohdi's hand closed in his hair, possibly since before that, possibly since the moment he sat down beside this man in the water and saw the firelight play across the ink on his shoulders. His cock is trapped between their stomachs, slicked by the water, and every roll of his hips grinds it against the hard plane of Bohdi's abdomen and pushes him back onto Bohdi's length and Morgan cannot hold a thought in his head longer than a second.

Bohdi kisses him deep. Tongue in his mouth, hand fisted in his hair, the other hand splayed across the small of Morgan's back, holding him close, holding him down. Morgan grinds on him until they are both panting into each other and the water is lapping at the edges of the pool and Morgan can't remember his own name and doesn't care to try.

Then Bohdi's cock catches on his rim.

A second of blunt pressure — the broad, slick head finding the exact right angle by accident or by gravity or by the cruelty of a world that has decided Morgan is going to lose his mind today — and pushing against him, not in but there, right there, a promise and a threat and the most exquisite torture Morgan has ever experienced. Then it slides past, the angle shifting, and Morgan grips Bohdi's shoulders hard enough to bruise and gasps loud enough to break the kiss.

His whole body is trembling. His thighs are shaking on either side of Bohdi's hips. His fingers are digging into the hard muscle of Bohdi's shoulders, finding the tattoos by touch, the ink-stained skin hot and slick under his hands. He pulls back enough to see Bohdi's face, and the sight of it nearly undoes him. Bohdi is flushed, eyes dark, lips swollen from the kiss, wearing an expression Morgan has never seen in years of looking at this man and recognizes immediately because it is the mirror of his own.

Want. Pure, ungoverned, catastrophic want.

"Bohdi, fuck me," Morgan says.

The words come out of him without strategy and without shame. He moves his hands up from Bohdi's shoulders to frame his jaw, cupping his face, tilting it so he can look him in the eyes and Bohdi can see exactly how much he means it. His thumbs rest against Bohdi's cheekbones. His fingers curl into the wet hair at his temples. He holds Bohdi's face the way you hold something precious, something you have wanted to touch for half a decade and have only just been given permission to reach for.

"Please, please fuck me," he says.

Bohdi hisses in a breath. The sound is sharp and involuntary and comes from somewhere deep, pulled out of him by the words or the tone or the look on Morgan's face or the feeling of Morgan's body pressed flush against his, trembling and desperate and asking. He swears — vehemently, creatively, in a combination of Rengaran and something that might be Old Northern and is definitely not appropriate for polite company — and hauls Morgan back in.