by Meg Harding
Brady’s smiling, his dimples flashing, making William melt into a puddle of love and heat and want.
But he doesn’t get why he’s smiling.
William pokes at the left dimple with his free hand. “Why does that make you smile? Shouldn’t you be mad that she did this to us? I know I am.” He’s been enraged since it happened. Doesn’t think he’ll ever get over it, let alone be able to joke about Jennifer. Just thinking about her makes his brain throb with agitation. His hold on Brady tightens, all his muscles tensing involuntarily.
Brady bats his hand away and leans in, sipping at William’s lips, lazily drawing him into a kiss that gradually deepens, tongues sliding together. Slowly William starts to unwind. Brady groans into his mouth, catches William’s bottom lip with his teeth and playfully nips. When William’s a limp noodle—with the exception of one body part that is nothing close to relaxed—Brady pulls away. But not far. Their noses are touching. William’s eyes have to cross to see Brady properly.
He closes his eyes and just breathes in the scent of Brady. He smells like pasta sauce. Marinara. It makes William’s stomach rumble.
“When I realized what she did, I was livid. And I’m still upset. But I can’t change any of it. I can only move on from it. And in her own way, she did us a favor, though I doubt it was on purpose.”
And there goes William’s happy glow. “Excuse me?” Surely he had to have heard wrong.
“Okay, so this is maybe a really naïve and optimistic way of looking at it, but I’d honestly rather be happy than sad, so bear with me here. We couldn’t have been together like we wanted then. It wouldn’t have worked. But now… now we can really be together. Now we’re going to get years together where we can go out in public and acknowledge it. Where we don’t have to sneak around and hide. And—barring unforeseen things—we have decades ahead of us. People live to their nineties now. We have a chance of being little old men, sitting on a porch in our rocking chairs and gossiping about our neighbors.”
William thinks Brady’s crazy, and he loves the idea of that future but doesn’t find himself feeling warmer toward Jennifer. But this is why he fell in love with Brady. Because where William is doom and gloom and reality, Brady is optimism and sunshine. He makes the best out of everything. And if looking at things with a glass-half-full view helped Brady get through two lifetimes of waiting and insanity, then William is not going to argue with it.
But he’s also never going to say, “Oh hey, thanks, Jennifer,” or acknowledge she may have played a hand in giving them a better life in the end. Some things are truly impossible.
“What happened to her?”
William glances out the window, flashes back to the aftermath of Brady’s death. “She told everyone I killed you. I got my ass out of there before they could arrest me, and I imagine she kept on with her life. I think she convinced my father to let her take over my part of the business.”
Brady bumps their noses together, skims a kiss over his cheekbone. As if he can sense what William’s thinking. “What happened to you after? Where did you go? I know we have ages to learn everything, but give me the CliffsNotes version of it now. It feels weird not knowing everything when it comes to you.”
So much has happened to William since. Some of it good, some of it definitely not. But if they have time, maybe William can save the harder things for another time. He’ll tell him the gritty details about fleeing England. And having to constantly move from place to place, and how much that sucked at times. But for right now he wants to share only the good stuff with Brady. He wants to lighten the mood. Needs to.
“I’ve traveled the world, and I’ve taught myself new languages and seen things I couldn’t have even imagined before. I spent two years in Hawaii learning to surf. And I was in Africa for a few years before that, doing a stint teaching English. I’ve been to school so many times. I keep picking up degrees. One summer I went back to France, and I visited our old college. Marveled at how much Paris has changed and spent an asinine amount of money on shoes and suits.”
Brady’s gaze tracks to the shoes William’s currently wearing.
“Not these. These are from a trip to New York.”
Brady laughs, warm breath huffing over the lower half of William’s face and his neck. “It’s good to know your love of fashion hasn’t changed.”
“Mhmm. And I still hate layers, but I wear them because it looks good.”
Brady plays with the buttons of William’s waistcoat. “It’s the Victorian in you. You can’t give up the waistcoats. It was hammered into us growing up that gentlemen dressed a certain way.” His lips graze William’s ear. His voice drops, getting husky and a little slow. “And I like the look. A lot.”
“I promise I won’t stop wearing them,” says William breathily. He’ll wear them all the time if it makes Brady happy. He gets stuck on a replaying image of Brady hovering over him, painstakingly taking his time as he undoes all William’s many buttons to remove his clothes. It’s a torturous kind of tease, a dangling carrot of what’s still to come.
“Mind out of the gutter,” says Brady, who then gently bites the tip of William’s nose. “Keep telling me about you.”
“Don’t distract me, then,” says William, unable to hold back a smile. He doesn’t remember them being quite this sappy and touchy, but he figures centuries apart will do that to a person. Absently, he wonders how long it’ll take to get them back to a place where they snipe at each other and argue and then have wonderfully glorious make-up sex….
“Mind, gutter,” interrupts Brady. “And I didn’t do a damn thing to distract you that time.”
Brady being Brady is a distraction all on its own. William shakes his head to clear it and get back on track. “Where was I?”
“Paris and shoes.”
“Right. I went to Woodstock. That was… interesting. I managed to enjoy the sixties and seventies, for the most part. Went a little off the grid as I tried to embrace the whole flower-child thing. I camped, and I experimented with some substances I probably shouldn’t have, and I wore really awful clothes. Bell-bottom jeans weren’t my thing.” He lowers his voice and pulls back so he can see Brady’s expression for this next bit. “I’ve got tattoos now. Just a few.”
Predictably, Brady’s eyes widen and his brows wing up in surprise. He skims his gaze over William’s body like he’ll magically be able to see where and what they are. William goes to roll up his sleeve to bare the first one, but Brady stops him.
“I want to find them on my own.”
If William wasn’t teetering on the edge of control before, his cock hard and insistent that they get right down to business, he definitely is now. He glances out the window at the line of red lights trailing down the street, barely moving. The snow is swiftly falling, but visibility isn’t bad, and it’s not a torrential amount. These people should know how to drive in it.
This is why road rage exists.
Does the world not understand that William has important things to do? Naughty, amazing things that he’s going to have an aneurysm if he doesn’t get to do? Stat.
Lord, give me patience.
Chapter Four
THE REMAINING twenty-seven minutes and sixteen seconds it takes to reach William’s apartment is spent with Brady in his lap, kissing him till William’s lips are puffy and damn near numb and the rest of him is buzzing like a live wire. Brady is pure, blissful evil wrapped in an enticing and sweet package.
William’s got his hands under Brady’s shirt, tracing the notches in his spine and the jut of his shoulder blades, down to the dimples in his lower back that so perfectly frame his ass when he’s naked. Selfishly, he hopes that’s one thing that hasn’t changed about Brady over the years. Please still have all your dimples. He finds his hands drifting more than once, fingers edging toward Brady’s waistband despite his brain telling him that the back of a hired car isn’t the place for this.
Brady helpfully swats his hands away each time, grabbing William�
�s wrists and bringing his hands to rest on Brady’s hips, and then—very unhelpfully—Brady wiggles his hips in the most torturous way possible.
Needless to say, by the time the car finally—oh God, finally—rolls to a stop in front of his building, William isn’t capable of thoughts that don’t involve his dick and Brady. He nearly face-plants climbing from the car. Which, later when he can think about this better, he will blame on the icy sidewalk and not his jellylike legs.
The doorman gives them a wide-eyed look as they stumble in, straight past him in a giddy tangle of uncoordinated limbs and right into the elevator. William has to work a little too hard to remember his apartment’s on the eighth floor. He stabs the button, and then he’s crowding Brady against the wall and, hands on his thighs, lifting him up.
He’s not expecting Brady to start giggling.
William pauses in his exploration of how every bit of Brady’s neck feels on his lips and pulls back to look into his smiling face. “What?”
Brady tilts his chin up. “We’re under the mistletoe.”
William looks. The entire ceiling is covered in dangling mistletoe. Someone in the building went mistletoe happy when decorating. Over the centuries and with several country changes, many traditions have come and gone, but kissing under the mistletoe is one that has always been consistent. Granted, William hasn’t done it in two hundred and one years, but maybe this is one old tradition he can keep alive.
He keeps the kiss slow, teasing glides of tongue and barely there grazes of teeth. Brady has his hands in William’s hair, massaging William’s scalp with the pads of his fingers. It makes him sigh into their kiss, and he has to lock his knees to keep from falling. God, he’s missed this.
The elevator jolts to a stop, and it takes both of them to unlock William’s front door. Their brains and ability to function like competent adults have taken a leave of absence in favor of letting passion and their dicks take over.
The door bangs into the wall, and once they’re over the threshold, William reaches back blindly to shut it. His mouth is too preoccupied with Brady’s at the moment to allow him to step away. There’s a few seconds of grasping air, and then his hand lands on it, and it’s shutting just as loudly as they’d opened it.
“Bed,” he says, tilting his head so he can lick the sensitive spot right behind Brady’s ear. He’s rewarded with a shaky sigh and a full-body shiver.
“Good idea. Where is it?”
Right. This is William’s place, and Brady hasn’t been here before. He doesn’t know where anything is. William sucks in a deep breath—which is a mistake with his nose practically buried in Brady’s hair. He’s got a lungful of Brady’s heady scent now, and how is he supposed to concentrate?
His bed is… somewhere.
He nibbles Brady’s earlobe, nips his way down his neck to his collarbone.
Palms to his chest, Brady shoves lightly. William staggers a step back. Brady raises an eyebrow.
William scrapes his hand over his jaw. His lips feel puffy, and he’s got a little more than a five o’clock shadow coming in. He has to close his eyes to think. The sight of Brady standing there, disheveled from all the teasing touches with his clothes wrinkled and his curls in a crazy mess, is not conducive to thoughts outside of what William would like to do to him next. He shakes his head. It’s been so long, and he’s overflowing with too many emotions. This is a lot to take in, and he’s not doing a great job of keeping himself together.
Brady circles his hand around William’s wrist, fingers tight like a manacle. “Are you okay?”
William nods. His throat has a lump the size of Texas in it all of a sudden. His eyes are still closed. He should probably open them. He’ll wait till they stop burning. His body has gone AWOL on him.
After letting go of his wrist, Brady wraps his arms around William and they’re hugging. They’re not kissing. There’s no searching touches. They’re wrapped around each other like if they let go the world will implode, and Brady’s breath is hot against his neck, his chin digging into William’s shoulder.
They’re both still hard, but neither of them is doing a damn thing about it.
William lowers his head to Brady’s shoulder, tucking his face against his neck. “I love you,” he says. “I never ever stopped.” If there’s only one thing he’s ever been sure of in life, it’s that the man in his arms is his soul mate, and he doesn’t care how sappy or crazy that sounds. Brady is his perfect other half, and there’s so much he wants to do, to say, that he’s torn as to what to do first. Logically he knows he has time now. Finally. But that’s not curbing his impatience. His need.
“I love you too,” says Brady, his grip tightening. “So fucking much.”
He doesn’t know how long they stand there, but it somehow feels like seconds and hours at the same time. It’s long enough for William’s cock to start doing the lion’s share of the thinking and for his turbulent emotions to sway toward pure desire, though.
He manages to distance himself, to grab Brady’s hand and lead him through the living room, down the hall, and into the master bedroom. He’s got deep blue walls and a gray accent one, and the bed is the main focus of the room. It’s a California king, because he likes to move in his sleep, and he has like a million pillows. He frequently wakes up on the opposite side of the bed from which he went to sleep on.
He squeezes Brady’s hand. They’ve never shared a bed overnight before. Ten years together and it had been too risky to pull off.
As if this day wasn’t momentous enough already.
“You nervous?” asks Brady, and he’s speaking barely above a whisper, but William swears it echoes in the room.
William licks his lips. Is he? He’s… something. It’s not nervous, though. He tells Brady so. “It feels like the first time.” Like everything has led to this moment in time that’s completely and utterly meant to be.
Brady untangles their fingers and crosses to the bed. He bounces as he sits on the end. William watches as Brady toes his shoes off while starting to unbutton his chef’s coat.
“Do you remember our first time?” asks Brady, a wicked, naughty smile quirking his lips. “I’ve got it in my memory bank, but… I’m thinking it’s not the same as having been there.”
William’s heart stutters. He takes a step closer, shrugging out of his tux jacket and then getting to work on his waistcoat buttons, kicking off his shoes at the same time. It’s weird to think that he knows the man in front of him, his likes and dislikes and his body, and yet at the same time he doesn’t. This Brady might have different taste, and he remembers things but hasn’t lived them, and his freckles might be in different places. “It was awkward,” he says. He can remember their first time like it was yesterday. They’d been young and clumsy. “We had no clue what we were doing, and I came in like five seconds. You elbowed me in the nose trying to get your shirt off.” His waistcoat hits the floor. The buttons on his shirt are next. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me. The first time—not the elbowing.”
Brady laughs, deep and giddy. “Thanks for the clarification.”
His shirt is hanging open, showing off his bare chest. He’s pale and freckled all over. His happy trail is a thin, barely there line of curls that disappear into his pants. The scar he’d shown William in the alley is visible, a livid mark on otherwise perfect skin. As William watches, he shrugs his shirt off and lets it flutter to the hardwood floor.
Brady crooks his finger. “Come here.”
Because he’s a smooth kind of guy, William trips over his own feet in his haste. Thankfully he manages to catch himself and come to a—dignified, dammit—stop in front of a smirking Brady. Brady spreads his legs, and William moves into the cradle of them, rests his hands on smooth bare shoulders. He traces the shape, the dip of Brady’s collarbone, the jut of his shoulder blade. He wants to know it all.
Brady starts at William’s waist and smooths his hand up over the planes of his toned abdomen, to his chest where he tea
singly flicks each nipple. He leans forward to kiss them, tongue darting out for a too-quick taste. William twitches, pushes his chest forward. Brady ignores him, moving to William’s shirt to shove it down and off. It requires William to put a pause in his own exploration, and he resists for a brief second before letting the dress shirt fall. Now they’re both in their pants and nothing else. He immediately returns to learning Brady’s body.
“I see two.”
William’s gaze is focused on the steady rise and fall of Brady’s chest. He glances up, confused. “What?”
Brady trails his fingers over the brightly colored sugar skull on the inside of William’s forearm, and then over the Captain America shield on his ribs. “You’re not even American. Though you have lost your accent.”
“I thought it was fitting. He’s a man living in the wrong time.” William circles Brady’s wrist, just because. “You’ve still got an accent. How’d that happen?”
Brady tilts forward and licks a path from William’s belly button to his right nipple. He nips sharply, taunting him. William’s breath hitches.
“Well, you see, a couple in Manchester decided to engage in the ancient art of—”
William slaps his free hand over Brady’s mouth. “I get it. No need to give me the details.”
Brady licks his palm. William’s nose scrunches up. Logically he shouldn’t care, he doesn’t mind when Brady licks anywhere else, but… still. He makes sure to wipe his palm on Brady’s chest, which earns him a gentle back of the hand slap to his stomach.
“You’re a dork,” says Brady, nothing but fondness in his voice. He starts unbuttoning William’s pants. “I wonder if what’s in here lives up to my memories of it.” He’s careful about pulling the zipper down over the straining bulge.
