Page 55 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Morgan pulls away. The motion is slow and effortful. He climbs into the bed and pulls the blanket up and turns to face the wall, and Bohdi watches the line of his back settle and his shoulders drop and his breathing begin to slow.

Bohdi turns and gets dressed. He moves quietly. By the time he finally lies down on the far side of the bed, Morgan's breathing is soft and even. The cadence of sleep, or something close to it. His blond hair is drying on the pillow in pale strands and his hand is tucked under his cheek and his body is curled inward.

He lies on his back and stares at the ceiling and listens to Morgan breathe, and the sound of it is the only thing that lets Bohdi sleep at all.

Chapter 27

Morgan

Morgan wakes up beside Bohdi for the second time in as many days, which is a mockery of everything he has ever wanted.

The light is gray and thin through the single window. Early morning, the quality of dawn that says the sun hasn't cleared the ridgeline yet. The room is cold, the fire went out sometime in the night and neither of them woke to feed it, and the only warmth is the bed and the body in it.

Bohdi is still asleep.

Morgan lies on his side with his cheek on the pillow and looks at him and does not move. Bohdi is on his back, one arm flung above his head, the other resting on his stomach. His face is turned slightly toward Morgan, and in sleep the whole arrangement has changed, the hard lines softened, the jaw slack, the perpetual tension that lives in the muscles around his eyes and his mouth dissolved. The tattoos on his face, the fine lines that trace his cheekbones and jaw, the knotwork at his temples, look different without the grin beneath them. Gentler. The markings of a man rather than a weapon.

Morgan loves him so much he aches with it physically. A real pain under the ribs that Ivan's boot didn't cause. It lives in the same place as the bruise and the cracked bone and it is not sharper but it is deeper, and it has been there longer, years longer, and it will outlast the bruise and the bone by a margin so vast that the comparison is meaningless.

Bohdi promised he'd keep him safe and he has. Against every odd, through every obstacle, past every moment where a lesser man would have made the calculation that the prince's life wasn't worth the cost. He has kept Morgan safe from the road south to the stronghold gate and every step since.

He got them supplies, shelter, a roof, food, clean clothes. He killed a bear in a cave with nothing but a borrowed sword.

And what has Morgan contributed?

An emotional collapse at the first sign of hardship. One lucky knife.

He lies in the gray light and catalogs his own uselessness. He is the prince who was sent as a decoy bride and couldn't even manage that without being beaten to the floor. He is the diplomat who gathered intelligence and almost died before he could deliver it. He is the man who tried to stab a warchief and missed, who ended up on the ground with a boot in his ribs, who was rescued, again, always, eternally, by someone stronger and braver and more capable than he will ever be.

This is precisely why he is better suited to libraries and treaty rooms.

He can't stop thinking about the bath at the stronghold, the single, unrepeatable moment of being wanted by this man, proof that the distance and denial had been a choice and not an absence of desire. For one moment in the steam and the heat, Morgan had been had. He had been exactly where he belonged, in the arms of the only person he has ever wanted, and it had been everything.

And Bohdi has clearly filed it as a mistake.

He has gone out of his way to behave as though nothing changed. The bath happened, and then the world intervened and everything since has been survival, and in the wreckage of it Bohdi has not once mentioned what happened between them. He has held Morgan and comforted him, but he has not said I kissed you or I wanted you or the thing that happened in the bath was real. He has folded it away, neatly, efficiently, into the compartment where it can't be examined. Everything about the two of them goes there.

Morgan does not know what to do with having had the one thing he wanted most dangled in front of him and then pulled deliberately out of reach.

He's had plenty of lovers. More than Eskil knows about, fewer than Bohdi probably suspects. Most were near his own age. Some were older. Some who were kind and some who were skilled and one or two who were both. He has been fucked and held and kissed and wanted by men who saw him and desired him and put their hands on him with intent. Not one of them, not a single one, in the cumulative hours of skin and sweat and bodies moving together, made him feel a fraction of what Bohdi's hands on him did.

A fraction. That's the scale of it. Every other man Morgan has taken to bed is a fraction of this one. A percentage. A decimal point. The whole number is Bohdi and has always been Bohdi and is going to be Bohdi until Morgan is dead or old or stupid enough to stop wanting, and none of those seem likely.

He reaches out.

He doesn't decide to. His hand moves the way it moved when it grabbed Bohdi's shirt in the dark the night Morgan was drunk, without strategy, without permission. It is driven by the part of him that is tired of asking and tired of waiting and tired of being sensible about a want that has never once responded to sense. His thumb finds Bohdi's cheek.

He traces the line of the tattoo that follows Bohdi's cheekbone. His thumb moves along it, reading the lines, following the patterns.

Both of Bohdi's eyes open.

They open at once, not the slow, groggy surfacing of deep sleep but the immediate, full awareness of a body trained to wake at a touch. His eyes are clear and looking straight at Morgan, and Morgan's thumb is still on his cheek, and neither of them breathes.

Morgan doesn't think before he leans in.

He closes the distance between them, the six inches of pillow and morning air and years, and presses his mouth to Bohdi's.

It's soft. It's not the kiss in the bath, not the fierce, desperate collision of two people who have been circling each other for years and have finally, catastrophically stopped. This is something quieter. A question asked with lips instead of words. Morgan's mouth against Bohdi's, gentle and tentative, offering rather than taking, and the taste of him is sleep and warmth.