by TA Moore
Son of a bitch. It would be.
Morgan stared at him, jaw set and gray eyes unreadable. He was probably pissed off, and Boyd couldn’t blame him. From his side of the frustration, Boyd probably looked like Cutter Gap’s biggest tease.
Morgan got up off the bed in one smooth movement and stepped forward to stand over Boyd. He hooked his thumb in the waistband of his jeans, fingers splayed over the bulge of his erection under the worn denim.
“Let me get this straight. You want to fuck me,” he said, “but you don’t think I can make my own decisions?”
Boyd took a deep breath. It smelled of sweat and blood, the promise of sex cut through it. He wanted Morgan so much that what he was going to say fell apart in his mouth. It took him a second to drag them all back into line.
“That’s clearly a trap,” he said.
Morgan set his jaw and narrowed his pale eyes. “That’s not an answer.”
“I don’t want to be an asshole,” Boyd said. “I don’t want to manipulate you. I don’t want you to feel you have to do or be anyone to pay me back. Or keep me on your side.”
Morgan exhaled raggedly. “Shut up,” he growled as he folded himself down, his knees planted on the waxed wood on either side of Boyd’s hips. There was a smudge of color around the split skin over his eyebrow and a welt scraped across his collarbone. He twisted his fingers in Boyd’s shirt and pulled him forward. “You want to know what I want?”
Boyd glanced down. “I think I can guess.”
“Not that. Not yet,” Morgan said. “How did you know I hadn’t stolen Bob’s money?”
Boyd drew a blank briefly. His mind had been somewhere else at the time. He’d just hit a man with a chair. Even if it was the town’s biggest asswipe, that was the sort of thing that could get you in trouble.
“Oh,” he said as his brain finally dredged up the moment. “I don’t know. I mean, screw him. I didn’t care if you had. Why?”
Morgan shook his head. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. Then he ducked his head to chew a rough, possessive kiss over Boyd’s mouth. It was hungry, almost desperate, and the intensity of it dragged at Boyd. He hung on to Morgan’s shoulders as though that would keep him from being swept away. When Morgan broke the kiss for a second, his breath warm against Boyd’s skin, and Boyd was breathless and unsteady. His lips were tender and his cock ached pleasantly. “And I promise, after I fuck you, I won’t be any easier to get along with.”
He flashed a grin at Boyd, his smile bracketed by deep dimples half-hidden in fine gilt stubble, and raised his eyebrows expectantly. Boyd squeezed his eyes shut for an instant. If he wanted his change of heart to stick, he had a feeling he should have left with it earlier, but it was definitely easier to think when he didn’t look at Morgan’s face.
“Shay needs to talk to you,” Boyd blurted out. He opened his eyes and tightened his grip on Morgan’s shoulders before he could draw back. “About the DNA results.”
Frustration flashed over Morgan’s face. “I don’t want to talk about Shay,” he said. “I don’t want to think about him. I don’t want you to think about him.”
There was an edge to Morgan’s voice, something about the way he stressed the word, that made it clear he didn’t just mean Shay.
“Okay.”
Morgan narrowed his eyes. “Okay?”
Boyd slid one hand up into Morgan’s hair, the unruly blond sticky with beer and blood. “I guess I don’t want to be a good guy that much.”
“You’re good enough for me,” Morgan said, the words mumbled against Boyd’s lips as he pushed him down onto the floor. The weight of his body, all muscle and bone, pinned Boyd down. He licked his way down to Boyd’s throat and bit a wet, openmouthed kiss into the tender skin over his pulse. “Pretty sure a saint has better judgment in men than you.”
Boyd compliantly tilted his head back. The low murmur of pleasure in his throat darkened into a groan as Morgan squeezed his cock through his jeans. He grabbed Morgan’s T-shirt, the fabric damp with sweat and spilled beer, and dragged it up toward his shoulders. It caught under his arms, and Morgan growled in annoyance as he untangled himself from Boyd long enough to get the shirt off. He tossed it at the desk in the corner of the room.
Dapples of blue and red stained his arms and ribs. Most of them looked like they’d fade in a few days, and there was an older, darker bruise aged to soft-edged greens and blues an inch over his hipbone. Boyd winced and cautiously brushed his fingers over the mark.
“That had to hurt.”
“I deserved it.” Morgan shrugged dismissively, although he held still as Boyd traced the outline of the bruise. “I started that fight.”
“The cop?” Boyd guessed.
The reminder made Morgan look sour for a moment before he shook it off. “Good guess. Maybe you know me better than I thought.” He sat back on his haunches, knees braced on either side of Boyd’s waist, and gave the hem of his T-shirt a tug. “Your turn. I wanna see what I got in the draw.”
Did he know him? Boyd wondered as he searched Morgan’s face. Two hours and a suggestive DNA result ago, Boyd was pretty sure he knew the answer—that Morgan was, somehow, Sammy. But as always, Morgan’s staunch confidence that he was himself rattled Boyd’s assumption.
He wasn’t even sure that it mattered. Not to him, not right now.
But whoever Morgan used to be, it was who he was now, bruised and impatient as he raised a sandy-brown eyebrow at the lack of stripping, that Boyd wanted.
The idea felt almost blasphemous. Boyd was the boy left behind, the one who had to get up, go out, and live his life for two. It was his job to care, to turn up at Mrs. Calloway’s door once a year and let her whet her grief on him.
“Promise me something,” Boyd said as he grabbed his T-shirt and dragged it up over his stomach. The words slipped out of him before he could think about it, and then his brain went blank. Promise what? “Whatever happens, this is just us. Okay?”
Morgan curled up the corner of his mouth in a bitter smirk. He unbuttoned his jeans and let the worn denim slouch around his lean hips.
“You want this to be our dirty little secret?” he asked. “I can do that.”
Boyd snorted. “I can’t keep a secret to save my life,” he said through the folds of his T-shirt. “Not even somebody else’s surprise party, never mind an entire cock. I’ll probably tell the desk clerk we fucked on the way out.”
Morgan snorted laughter as he ran his hands over Boyd’s stomach and grazed his thumbs over his abs and up to rub roughly over his nipples. Pleasure plucked at Boyd’s nerves and made him twitch with a jolt of reaction that shot down his spine and clenched his ass.
“Noted. What, then?”
“It’s not about anybody else.” Boyd pulled the shirt off, left it wadded up behind his head like a pillow, and squinted up at Morgan’s backlit face. “Not Shay. Not Mac.”
Not Sammy, although he left that unsaid because it felt too strange to call his old friend right now, even just the memory of him. He figured they’d both get it.
“Just sex,” Morgan said.
“Just us,” Boyd corrected him.
Morgan leaned down and pressed a kiss to Boyd’s shoulder. His lips curved into a smile against his skin. “Just two exceptionally hot guys and all the fucking they do?”
Boyd exhaled in exasperation at the willful sidestep. He wasn’t entirely sure what, exactly, he wanted to say, but it wasn’t that this was simple… or disposable. But that seemed to be the last thing Morgan wanted to hear, and the more his hands roamed, the more Boyd came around to his train of thought.
“Sure,” he said as he dug his fingers into the heavy bulk of muscle in Morgan’s shoulders. “Why not. Keep it simple.”
He hissed a startled intake of breath through his teeth as Morgan bit him. He scraped his sharp teeth over Boyd’s tight skin and caught on the point of bone in his shoulder. Already stimulated nerves registered the dull throb and filed it away in his balls as pleasure.
&nb
sp; “What was that for?” he griped anyhow.
Morgan looked up at Boyd from under his eyelashes, his chin on Boyd’s chest. After a second he lifted his head and propped himself up on his elbow.
“What’s so wrong with simple? This.” He shifted his hips so his cock pushed, hard and insistent, against Boyd’s thigh. “It’s simple. What I want is simple—you, an orgasm, and a good night’s sleep. I’m not the one with ghosts on my back, Boyd.”
Liar. Boyd held the accusation behind his tongue. It would just sound like he meant Sammy—and maybe he did, a bit—instead of the clumsy knob of a long-healed fracture in Morgan’s collarbone and the frantic energy that boiled under his skin whenever he felt trapped.
“You do make simple sound good,” he offered instead. “Maybe I should just shut up?”
Morgan’s chuckle sounded dark and heavy as it vibrated through Boyd’s bones, and he licked a kiss over his stubble-rough jaw. “I don’t care. You don’t piss me off. Most of the time. And when you do, I know how to shut you up.”
Boyd shoved his hands down the back of Morgan’s jeans and cupped the lean curve of his ass. He ran his tongue over the curve of his lower lip as he glanced down between their bodies. “Well, I was kind of hoping I’d get off first this time. I’ve had a long day.”
He glanced back up in time to catch the hot flush that swept over Morgan’s face. His eyes looked pale, more gray than blue, against the stain of pink in his cheekbones.
“I meant kiss you, asshole,” he said. “Not that.”
“Oh,” Boyd said. He grinned as he stretched his head up to claim Morgan’s mouth with a quick tease of a kiss. “Yeah, that works too.”
Morgan followed his head back down, teeth sharp against Boyd’s lips and breath hot between their mouths. He shoved his tongue into Boyd’s mouth and tangled it with his, almost harsh with hunger as Morgan explored him. He cupped Boyd’s chin in one hand, fingers spread along the line of his jaw to hold him in place. The pressure ached in Boyd’s jaw and across his shoulders. It felt like control and desperation stitched together, and it wasn’t how he was used to being kissed.
Want spread under his skin like heat and static. It felt darker, heavier, as it ran down his spine and tightened around the base of his cock—not the pleasant zing of electricity, but the sticky, almost painful thickness of molten honey.
Boyd moaned and arched his hips, eager for the pressure of Morgan’s flat stomach against his cock. If he stopped, if he let his brain shift gears back into “Are you going to regret this?”, he might have to call a stop to it.
That was—Boyd shoved Morgan’s jeans impatiently down around his hips—the last thing he wanted.
Under the denim, Morgan’s skin was warm and smooth against Boyd’s fingers, layered over taut muscle and pulled tight. There was a scar on the back of his thigh, a ragged crescent of well-mended tissue that made Morgan tense when Boyd traced it with his thumb.
“Don’t.” The order was bitten into Boyd’s mouth, his lower lip folded between Morgan’s teeth.
Boyd hesitated. “Don’t touch?” he checked.
“Don’t ask.”
The order made curiosity bubble in Boyd’s chest with a knot of questions that, he reminded himself as he swallowed them, weren’t any of his business. It was Morgan’s scar, Morgan’s past, Morgan’s life. There were enough people determined to pick his secrets out of him, and while they had the best intentions, Boyd didn’t have the right to be one of them.
“Roll over,” he said instead as he shoved at Morgan’s shoulder.
Morgan grumbled but did as he was told and kicked his jeans the rest of the way down his thighs as he did so. He sprawled out on the wooden floor, all tawny skin and long, lean lines under the dim light of the old bulb. His cock was hard and lay in a heavy straight line against his stomach, the head slick with precome.
“Why?” he asked warily.
“You wanted to see me naked,” Boyd said as he got his feet under him and stood up. It felt like an odd sort of evening out, vulnerability for vulnerability. “Now’s your chance.”
Morgan slowly licked his lips. Then he folded one arm behind his head and wrapped his free hand around his cock. He pulled his hand along the hard length of it in lazy, pace-holding strokes. “Go on, then.”
Boyd unzipped his jeans and pushed them down over his hips. They were tighter cut than Morgan’s worn-soft denim and took a bit more work to strip off. He balanced on one foot as he pulled the other out of the leg.
“If I’d known this was planned, I’d have worn different pants,” he muttered. “I’m sure this is really attractive.”
“I’m not complaining,” Morgan said idly. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a briefs man, myself, but they frame your cock nice.”
Finally free of the tangle of denim, Boyd kicked it out of his way. He gave Morgan a wry look. “I don’t need your pity.”
Morgan let his lip slip from between his teeth, flesh flushed and tender, and cocked his head to the side. “What do you need?”
“Guess,” Boyd said as he hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his briefs and pushed them down.
The band slid over his cock, and it lifted toward his stomach, hard and eager, as he stepped out of the puddle of black fabric. It twitched in time with his heartbeat, and he could feel the ache of want in his balls get heavier. He brushed his fingers along the taut shaft, and a tight prickle of pleasure tugged back into his stomach, but he didn’t really want his own hands on his cock. Not tonight.
Morgan grinned, freed his hand from his cock, and started to push himself up off the floor. He got halfway, and then Boyd grabbed his shoulders to push him back down.
“I want to look at you,” he said as he slid down into Morgan’s lap. Boyd could feel the hard ridge of Morgan’s erection pressed against his ass. Boyd rocked against it, his stomach tight from hips to ribs as the thick shaft stroked over his balls and along his taint. “While your cock is inside me.”
It didn’t quite make Morgan blush again, but he grabbed Boyd’s hips to hold him still. “You got a condom?” he asked.
Boyd shrugged as he leaned over to brace his hands on Morgan’s chest. “I trust you.”
That got him a slap on the ass that made him jump and his cock twitch eagerly in response to the unexpected delivery of almost-pain. “You fucking shouldn’t,” Morgan said. “Idiot.”
Fair enough. Boyd reached back to rub his ass. He’d spent a few morning afters cursing himself as he scrambled back into his clothes, sick with the usual guilt of not having made the most of his life. Still….
“I know I don’t have anything,” he said. “And you already came in my mouth. So…?”
The second slap evened out the heat on the other side of Boyd’s ass. This time Morgan smoothed the sting away with one hand while he reached under the bed with the other to drag out his duffel.
“For a smart guy, you say a lot of stupid things,” Morgan said as he fumbled with a zippered pouch on the side and pulled out a strip of condoms and a bottle of lube. “Hand?”
Boyd gave him the finger instead. He wasn’t some naïve kid, and Morgan was the one who kept saying he wasn’t who they thought he was. So he didn’t get to act like he got a say in Boyd’s life or—
Morgan squirted lube all over Boyd’s finger. The slippery gel coated his finger, ran down over his knuckles, and dripped onto Morgan’s stomach.
“You want me inside you?” Morgan growled, his voice a low, demanding rasp. “Get yourself wet.”
Part of Boyd rankled at the order. He’d never been great at being told what to do, not outside of work, at least. But it was outnumbered by the rest of him that really wanted this.
Boyd shifted position up onto his knees and reached back to smear the lube down into his crack. He worked it over and around his asshole and then pushed his finger inside. It wasn’t enough, but the pressure of his finger still made his thighs tremble and his balls clench with reaction.
“That�
�s it,” Morgan said as he reached over Boyd’s hip and covered Boyd’s hand with his own. He pushed Boyd’s finger deeper and slid one of his in behind it, thick and blunt as they fucked Boyd’s ass slick and open. “Make it real nice for me.”
At some point, around the time that Morgan blushed over a blowjob, Boyd had assumed he was the one with more experience. Now he could feel the heat crawl up his own chest with a flushed mix of arousal and nerves as lube slid between their fingers and into him.
“You’re a… jerk,” Boyd said raggedly as he pushed back against the fingers in his ass.
For some reason the accusation made Morgan grin. “Yeah, but you still want me.” He ripped open the condom with his teeth and shook the ring of rubber out onto his sweat-damp chest. “Say it.”
“What?”
“What you want me to do.”
Ah. That. Boyd ran his hand over the taut line of Morgan’s stomach and up to the flat coins of his nipples.
“I want you to fuck me,” he said, his voice ragged and blunt with lust. “Now.”
Morgan’s chuckle was a low, dark noise as he slid his fingers out of Boyd. The sudden feeling of emptiness made Boyd whimper as his ass tightened around nothing. He leaned back to sit on Morgan’s lean thighs, his hand loosely wrapped around his cock as he watched Morgan slide the condom down over his cock. The thin layer of latex stretched over the thick shaft and outlined the heavy vein that ridged the underside from base to wet, shiny head.
The memory of that cock in his mouth, the weight of it on his tongue and the taste of Morgan, made Boyd groan softly. He tightened his fingers around his cock, the pressure-pleasure sticky and thick in his balls as he imagined it inside him.
“I’m still a bad idea,” Morgan said. “You were right about that.”
“I know,” Boyd said. “You’re worth it.”
Morgan half smiled and then shook his head. “That makes no sense, but I’m not going to argue.”
“Good.” Boyd lifted himself up and slid forward until he was in position over Morgan’s cock. “I want you. I want this. I know what I’m doing.”
