Page 63 of Fought it Through the Teeth

The late afternoon light catches his hair. The water running off his fingers catches the light. The lean line of his back is visible through the thin fabric of his shirt, and Morgan glances over his shoulder and catches Bohdi staring.

Bohdi does not look away.

It's nearly the first time. Once, in a doorway with the rain coming down, he held Morgan's gaze. Every other time Bohdi has looked away. Has turned his head. Has found something else to fix his eyes on, something safe, something that isn't the prince and doesn't have the prince's face or the prince's body or the prince's capacity to be beautiful without trying.

This time he doesn't. This time they are alone on a road between here and home, and Morgan is crouched at a stream with water on his hands and the afternoon light in his hair. Bohdi looks at him and lets himself look and does not flinch and does not turn and does not reach for the grin or the joke or any of the hundred mechanisms he has built to avoid being seen seeing what he sees.

Morgan looks back. His expression shifts, surprise, then something softer, then something so cautiously, desperately hopeful that Bohdi has to lock his jaw against the ache of it. Morgan doesn't smile. His eyes are steady and searching, reading Bohdi's face the way Bohdi reads rooms, and whatever he finds there makes him go still.

They look at each other across ten feet of sunlit ground, and the looking is a conversation they've never had.

Before they mount up again, Morgan takes his arm.

His hand on Bohdi's forearm, fingers wrapping around the tattooed skin just above the wrist, and his grip is firm and his face is tilted up toward Bohdi's and the question comes out of him considered and decided, ready to accept whatever answer he receives.

"Will you kiss me? Just once more before we go back?"

Bohdi shouldn't. He knows he shouldn't. The riverbank is a day behind them and the conversation on it is still present and unresolved and the word can't is still in the air between them, and kissing Morgan again is not the action of meaning what he said. It's making promises with his mouth that his life cannot keep, and Bohdi has always been scrupulously honest about one thing if nothing else: he does not make promises he can't keep.

He does it anyway.

He threads a hand into Morgan's hair. The blond strands are tangled and dirty and still damp from the stream and they slide between his fingers, and he tilts Morgan's head back and looks at his face.

He kisses him.

He intends for it to be simple. Sweet. Finite. A period at the end of a sentence, a closing parenthesis, the last gentle word before the silence resumes. He intends to press his lips to Morgan's and hold for a breath and pull back and let the moment be what it is, a gift, freely given and freely received, something to carry into the life where they can't have each other, a single point of warmth against the cold.

It does not stay that way.

Because Morgan kisses him back. Morgan's mouth parts on a moan, soft and barely there, and then Bohdi is delving into him. His tongue slides against Morgan's and his hand tightens in his hair and Morgan's fist closes in the sleeve of his shirt, gripping the fabric, pulling him closer, and the kiss that was supposed to be simple becomes complicated.

Bohdi pulls back. Morgan makes a bereft little sound and leans after him, drawn forward, unable to stop, and Bohdi kisses him again without meaning to. This one is shorter. Harder. His teeth catch Morgan's lower lip and Morgan gasps and Bohdi swallows the gasp and his hand is in Morgan's hair and Morgan's hand is fisted in his shirt and each kiss is a promise he has no intention of keeping and cannot stop making.

A third time. Morgan's mouth is soft and warm and tastes like stream water and the faintest trace of blood from the split on his lip, and Bohdi licks the taste of it from his own lips when he finally, finally pulls back.

Morgan's eyes are closed. His face is flushed. His mouth is red and his hand is still in Bohdi's shirt and his breathing is unsteady and he looks thoroughly kissed and not finished being kissed and resentful of the interruption.

Bohdi presses his forehead to Morgan's. They breathe. The afternoon is golden around them and the horse is cropping grass behind them and the road to Valen is ahead of them and neither of them moves.

Then Morgan opens his eyes and the blue of them is so close and so clear that Bohdi can see himself reflected in them, and the man reflected back is not the man he was a week ago.

They ride the last miles to Valen in silence.

Bohdi's arm around Morgan's waist. Morgan's hand resting on his forearm. The horse moving beneath them in the steady, patient rhythm of an animal that knows it's heading home. The landscape opens up, the trees thinning, the hills flattening, the sky widening into the vast, pale expanse of the northern coast, and somewhere in the distance, barely visible against the gray horizon, the first outlines of Valen rise from the curve of the fjord.

Bohdi's arm stays around Morgan's waist until the last possible second.

Then he lets go.

Chapter 33

Morgan

They ride through the city and people recognize them and call out. The blond hair does it, always the hair, the royal marker, the thing that identifies him at a distance as Eskil's blood. Voices carry from doorways and market stalls and the steps of the harbor. The prince is home. Prince Morgan is home. And word races ahead of them through the streets, faster than horses, faster than runners, carried by the irresistible current of gossip that moves through Valen faster than blood.

By the time they reach the Keep there's a crowd gathering at the base of the steps. Not an organized reception, something more organic, the accumulation of people drawn by the news, by the curiosity, by the magnetic pull that the return of a battered prince generates in a city that has been waiting and worrying for weeks. Morgan sees familiar faces in the crowd. Soldiers. Merchants. Children pressed against their mothers' legs, staring.

At the top of the steps, two figures waiting.