by Cole McCade
Wally stared down at him, bracing his hands against Joseph’s stomach to keep from collapsing. He didn’t understand—and then he understood far too well. What Joseph asked of him. What Joseph needed of him, both to protect his body and soothe his soul.
“Anything,” he whispered. “Anything to be with you.”
He rolled his hips back, catching his lower lip between his teeth as the tip of Joseph’s cock nudged deeper, then pressed against his already sore, stretched entrance. His breaths hitched over and over again in his throat; his heart tried to give out in desperate flutters, while his stomach clenched. And before he could lose his nerve—before he could talk himself out of this for so many reasons why he shouldn’t when all that mattered was the one perfect reason why he should—he tensed his thighs and sank down, forcing his inner muscles to relax as he pressed himself down on Joseph’s cock and took him into his body.
He’d never remembered it hurting so much—but he’d never remembered desire so glorious, either, as the sheer thickness of Joseph’s arousal burned him open with hard, surging fire. He arched his back, gasping out his pleasure as Joseph bucked his hips upward and sank in deeper, and they crashed together somewhere in the middle as they met flesh to flesh and cry to broken, snarling, pleasured cry. Searing, lovely agony tore through him as if Joseph had ignited him from within, and he was sparks inside the skin of a man, threatening to burn himself up into nothing in a single beautiful conflagration. Desperate, needy, he moved, and nothing was more perfect than when Joseph moved with him, clutched at him, fisted Wally’s hair and dragged him down and kissed him over and over again with a fever that matched Wally’s until they became all mingling breaths and panting cries and the inferno of every kiss, touch, short and brutal thrust.
Nothing he had ever imagined in wistful daydreams of stolen kisses and secret whispers could match this combustive flame—his every fantasy burned to ash, nothing but flimsy paper against the blinding blaze of reality. This light filling him was too much; he was the sun, a star, a million stars, a galaxy twisting and turning and tearing itself apart with chaotic forces, and in every searing thrust he was born again and again in a nova of pleasure. He was eternity—and he lived for nothing but this moment, this heady kiss, Joseph’s perfect touch.
But when that touch wrapped around his cock once more, he whimpered as trailing strokes tore through him in small explosions. He was too fragile to contain this, too overwhelmed to stand another second of torture, and he begged and pleaded with his mouth slack against Joseph’s and his words captured and bitten to pieces by taunting, tormenting teeth.
“Not yet,” he keened. “Not yet, please—”
But there was no holding back. Not when the need he’d kept secret had built inside him for twenty years, a kernel waiting to bloom, unable to be contained. Not when Joseph’s every touch was a nuclear reaction, the fusion of body to body, desire to desire. And when Joseph curled his fingers against the back of Wally’s head and drew him in, when he twisted his hips upward to fill him deep and mark him from within, when he whispered into his ear in that husky, ragged voice that demanded “Come for me, Walford. Come for me—”
Wally’s willpower broke, and his body with it.
And he sobbed—with pleasure, with joy, with the agony of all things that must come to an end—as he came undone, and let the fire inside consume him until there was nothing left but the acid burn of pleasure and the sound of their voices, their meeting flesh, their heated breaths. Together, together…
Always together, and Walford thought he could never again stand being apart.
* * *
SILENCE, IN THE BREATHLESS SHADOWS after, was soft and tired, and Wally marveled at how he fit into Joseph’s arms when they stretched naked with their bodies pooled together, as if the fire between them had melted their flesh until they yielded and fit into each other’s corners and crevices so very perfectly. Wally liked the sound of Joseph’s breathing after sex, he decided. He’d spent nearly a week watching him sleep, listening to him breathe, catching every minute change that told him Joseph might be in pain or might need help or was beginning to recover when his breaths eased and deepened. But there was something different, now—a kind of satisfied sighing, a thrumming edge, as if Joseph were a sated beast sprawled warm and comfortable in its den after claiming its mate.
A laugh rose up in Wally’s throat, and he was too exhausted to hold it back, his body shaking against Joseph’s as he buried his face in his naked shoulder to muffle his chuckles. Joseph made a disgruntled sound, then bit gently at the upper curve of Wally’s ear; Wally gasped, a lovely shiver dancing delicate fingers down his spine, but he didn’t have much left in him for more than that.
“What’s so funny?” Joseph growled, and Wally turned his head enough to peek at him.
“Picturing you rather like a wild animal in mating season, only there’s no other buck for you to lock horns with over me.”
“Better not be.” Joseph huffed, and Wally thrilled to the possessive way that rough-hewn arm tightened around him. “Your brain is a weird place, Wally.”
“Yes, but it’s filled with wondrous and fiendish delights.” He grinned and kissed the hard peak of Joseph’s collarbone, then rested his chin against his chest, looking up at the enticing yet utterly adorable lines that relaxation and satiation etched into Joseph’s features, accented by the fall of tousled, mussed brown hair drifting across his brow and into his eyes. “Are you all right?”
“Sore. Fingertips are tingling. Might need an oxy in a few.” Joseph pursed his lips thoughtfully. “But I’m fine for the moment.”
“That’s…not all that I meant.”
“Eh?”
With an exasperated sigh, Wally lightly smacked his chest. “You just had sex with a man for the first time in your life. With me, you effin’ nit. Are you all right with that?”
One of Joseph’s brows rose in a quizzical arc. “As long as the sex was good, is the fact that you’re a man somehow supposed to make it different? Cock goes in, everything feels good, everybody happy.”
“Oh, you absolutely vulgar, lewd—”
Wally pushed himself up and tried to roll out of the bed, but Joseph caught him around the waist, dragging him back with a rolling, rumbling laugh and trapping him against his body—not that Wally struggled particularly hard, though he scowled at Joseph while the bloody man grinned at him unrepentantly.
“Stop fussing,” Joseph said. “It just makes me want to tease you more. I knew what you were talking about. And it’s fine, Wally. I’m easy. As long as you liked it and I liked it, that makes it pretty simple for me.”
Wally wrinkled his nose and looked away. Hmph. Idiot. “…and did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Like it, you asshole.”
“If you need to ask me that, I’m rustier than I thought.” Joseph bit down lightly on Wally’s shoulder, then soothed the lingering sting with a kiss. “It was nice.”
“Only nice?”
“I liked it, weirdo. Don’t ask me for soliloquies or anything. You already make me get too damned emotional.”
“Heaven forbid.” Wally let himself sink into Joseph once more, relaxing and snuggling close again. “Mm…we didn’t use a condom.”
“I’m pretty sure after two decades of celibacy, I’m squeaky clean.” Joseph snorted. “You?”
“Let’s just say my periodic clinic checkups feel like aught else than an old man’s wistful whimsy.”
Joseph’s laughter was a silent thing this time, a shaking in that broad chest under Wally’s palm. Joseph trailed off into a sigh, then turned his head, studying Wally with an intensity that touched him more nakedly than the cold air on his bare flesh. He met Joseph’s eyes for as long as he could, then ducked his head, clearing his throat.
“…what?”
“Do you want to start using condoms?”
…oh. Oh. Wally bit his lip, fixing his gaze on his hand as he lightly trailed his fingers through
Joseph’s chest hair, combing through the light, silky pelt to find the heat and tautness of skin. “No,” he admitted, a flush burning its way down his throat. “I…I trust you.”
And if he was honest with himself, he didn’t want to give that up: that sensation when Joseph had lost himself and Wally had felt every second of it, still felt that particular sore slickness left behind that reminded him Joseph had been inside him and part of him and filling him in ways no one else could. He thought, if he looked up right now, Joseph would be giving him that look still, searching, penetrating, as if Wally’s desperate desire for intimacy scripted spells from the lines and cracks carved on his face, forming arcane sigils that Joseph sought to decipher.
Being looked at that way by someone who already held every secret in those whispered writings was more than he could stand, his heart a trembling and frightened thing that wanted to both reach for Joseph with both hands and recoil from the power this one man had to break him into shattered pieces. He looked away, searching desperately for a distraction, only to land on an open jar of Vaseline on the dresser—the lid tossed aside, the troughs of Joseph’s fingers still imprinted in the clear jelly inside.
So that was what that had been.
“But,” he said crisply, and plucked the jar from the dresser, holding it up and lofting a brow at Joseph skeptically. “Petroleum jelly? Really?”
Joseph blinked, then laughed and dragged a hand over his face. “I had to improvise, all right? Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I needed to think about lube?” He pulled the jar firmly from Wally’s hand, set it down on the nightstand, and capped it. “Vaseline probably wasn’t the healthiest thing to use, but it was here and I didn’t think you wanted me to stop. It’s not like it’s some kind of special medical Vaseline with side effects. I just use it when the skin gets dry around my injection points.”
“We’ll have to go shopping, then.” Wally hesitated. “…won’t we?”
Joseph paused, before his gaze softened and he smiled. “Yeah. We will. I think it’d be a good idea.”
He dragged Wally back down unceremoniously, capturing him in a bloody bear hug that Wally only made a half-hearted effort to escape from. With a grumble, he tucked his head up under Joseph’s chin, settling into him. He could drift off like this, he thought; sleep through the worst of the afternoon swelter, until the cool bliss of evening came. And he might well have, he thought, if Joseph hadn’t murmured his name against his hair.
“Wally?”
“Hm? Yes, dearest heart?”
Joseph didn’t answer at first—and when he did it was quiet, faltering, a strange note of reluctance underscoring every word. “Have you ever loved someone who’s all wrong for you?”
“More times than I can count, darling.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to see what’s wrong until you’re looking at something that might be right,” Joseph said. “When wrong is all you know…”
It wasn’t like Joseph to sound so uncertain. So vulnerable, as if asking Wally permission for something. Permission to be here, maybe, tangled in this bed together as if they were still fresh and young, so wild and careless that a moment of passion could only mean endless love.
Or maybe, Wally thought, Joseph feared that this would end the same as when he had been fresh and young and blissfully in love, or thought he’d been—and was wordlessly asking if Wally and his sister were one and the same, and one day Wally would leave him, too.
Wally didn’t know. He didn’t know how to ask, either, when he pushed himself up enough to look down at Joseph and found those dark brown eyes distant and unreadable, turned inward to things Wally couldn’t see and couldn’t touch.
He brushed his fingers to Joseph’s cheek, wordlessly asking: come back to me. “Love blinds us in the strangest ways,” he murmured.
“So does hate.” Joseph’s eyes focused, and he captured Wally’s hand and turned it over, studying it intently as he stroked his fingers into uncurling, tracing the length of each one from base to tip and coaxing it to extend with a ticklish caress of his thumb. “Sometimes I think I tried so hard to hate you as much as possible, so I wouldn’t have to see how lovely you are. How kind. I didn’t want to forgive you, and seeing your sweetness, this glow you have, made me want to.”
Brightness bloomed inside Wally, promising to burst through his skin and rival the midafternoon sun. “Have you forgiven me, then?” he breathed.
“Yeah. I guess I have.” Joseph kissed each of Wally’s fingertips, then the center of his palm, his moving lips and scraping stubble a tantalizing contrast of softness and scratchy rough friction. “Sometimes good people do terrible things. Out of ignorance, or stupidity, or emotional impulse. It doesn’t take back the damage done, but…” One last kiss, to the delicate and sensitive skin that Wally’s fluttering pulse raised against his inner wrist. “It’s my choice if I want to forgive or not, and I do.”
“…Joseph.” Wally leaned down and stole those lips for himself, tasting Joseph, reveling in how Joseph melted for him, not a second’s hesitation in how his mouth yielded and melded with gentle pressure that they gave back to each other again and again until they met in one last gentle, brushing caress before Wally let go. “I only…I worried that by coming here to check on you yet again, I was overstepping my bounds.”
“It’s different. It’s one thing to have someone who cares enough to check and make sure you’re okay. It’s another thing to have someone dehumanize you so much they assume you never are.” Joseph let go of Wally’s hand to slide both arms around his waist, those square, strong hands curling against the small of his back. “I spent a long time thinking you were the latter. I’m finally starting to believe you’re the former.” He grinned. “And it’s pissing me off a little less. Just don’t press your luck.”
Wally chuckled breathlessly. “I don’t deserve it. But I’m grateful.”
“Take it while I’m being sentimental.” With a mock-snarl, Joseph tumbled them both over onto their sides, pinning Wally with a leg draped over him and burying his face in his throat to bite and lick and nuzzle until Wally was laughing, pushing at his shoulders.
“Bloody stop that!”
“Nope.” Joseph bit his jaw lightly, then laughed and burrowed into him. “But FYI, I’m a pushover after sex. You should take note of that for future reference.”
“Giving me ammunition already?”
“Just a page out of the Joseph Armitage handbook.”
“And what would that be? The Proper Care and Feeding of Boyfriends?”
Joseph stilled. “Is that what we are?”
“Is what what we are?”
“Boyfriends.”
Oh. Well that was…quite a bit more of a question than whether or not they’d be having sex again, wasn’t it? And still Joseph was so unreadable, simply watching Wally quietly, yet his body language was lazy and relaxed—and Wally didn’t think he’d be this lax and lovely stretch of warm sinew and masculine ease if the idea made him so very angry.
“If you’d like to call it that,” Wally ventured shyly, a small tremor taking hold of his heart. “I could call it many things.”
“Such as…?”
“A tryst. A liaison. An entanglement. Or…a second chance at what could have been.”
A slow smile broke over Joseph’s face, a dawning that crept up one second at a time until between one breath and the next it bloomed into something that snared Wally’s heart in bright-burning tangles. “Yeah?” he asked, and Wally let out a flustered laugh.
“Yeah.”
“I like that.” Joseph chuckled and kissed the top of Wally’s head. “But ‘boyfriends’ is less of a mouthful.”
Wally slapped his chest. That…that—He’d let Wally hang just to see a reaction; Wally would lay money on it. “You are so daft.”
“So are you. Only I’m going to call you a dumbass, because I don’t do cultured words like ‘daft.’”
Wally rolled his eyes. “You’re determine
d to mock everything you can about me, aren’t you?”
“Isn’t that how you know I like you? Pulling pigtails in the schoolyard?”
“Do I need to buy you a handbook on feminist theory?” Wally retorted. “It applies to men, too.”
“You already gave me a first edition Austen.” Joseph shrugged. “Well. Loaned.”
“Gave. It’s not as though I don’t know where to find it, if I want to have a gander at it.”
And Wally was struck with a thought, then: a hazy thing, a wondering, and yet it teased with ideas of Wally in Joseph’s space and Joseph in Wally’s space until there was only one space to be in, and yet he didn’t want to give up his shop or apartment and would never ask Joseph to abandon his house…
What was he thinking?
One little tumble, and he was already aching to make house and home, move in together and blend their lives as if they belonged in each other’s day to day?
Joseph frowned. “What?” he asked, and Wally snapped to. He’d just been looking at Joseph, he realized, without really seeing him.
“What?” he repeated blankly.
“You’re staring at me, and you look upset. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Wally pushed himself down to tuck his head under Joseph’s chin again, closing his eyes. “I’m only thinking thoughts I shouldn’t have.”
Joseph’s hand curled against his nape: heavy, comforting, thick fingers cupping the back of his head and sinking into his hair. “Tell me. I can’t reassure you if you don’t tell me.”
“Perhaps later?” Wally deflected. “I simply need time to sort things in my head before I say something ridiculous and get myself in trouble.”
“All right.”
Wally thought he would get away with it, as he let that acceptance become silence, and that silence become contentment. It was strange how quiet Joseph’s house was; Wally’s shop in the Jackdaws was next door to a dry cleaner’s, and if it wasn’t the hum of the machinery or the jingle of the bells over the doors it was traffic in the streets, cars droning past like heavy, buzzing bees fat with the people they carried on their backs. But few cars came through the Nests; fewer people lingered outside, when even in the brightness of midday that silence might be punctuated by the popcorn sound of gunshots or the occasional sweep of sirens.
