‘But—wasn’t it—’
‘Will you stop talking about it.’
The words were ground out. Damen was in the process of smoothing his hand up Laurent’s back, gentling his nape, kissing it, his head bent over it. He lifted his head when he heard that. Gently but firmly, he pushed Laurent back over, and looked down at him.
Revealed beneath him, Laurent was flushed and his breathing was shallow, and in his glistering eyes was a desperate irritation that overlay something else. Yet Laurent’s exposed arousal was as hot and hard as it had been in his mouth. For all his bizarre nervy tension, Laurent was indisputably eager, physically. Damen searched his blue eyes.
‘Contrary, aren’t you,’ said Damen softly, thumbing over Laurent’s cheek.
‘Fuck me,’ said Laurent.
‘I want to,’ said Damen. ‘Can you let me?’
He said it quietly, and waited, as Laurent’s eyes closed again, a muscle sliding in his jaw. The idea of being fucked very clearly had Laurent out of his mind, as desire competed with some sort of convoluted mental objection that really needed, Damen thought, to be dispensed with.
‘I am letting you,’ said Laurent, the terse words pushing out. ‘Will you get on with it?’
Laurent’s eyes opened, meeting Damen’s gaze, and this time it was Laurent who waited, heat in his cheeks at the silence that opened up around his words. In Laurent’s eyes, impatience and tension overlay something unexpectedly young and vulnerable. Damen’s heart felt exposed, outside of his chest.
He slid his hand up the length of Laurent’s arm where it lay outflung above his head, and, catching hold of Laurent’s hand, he pushed it down, pressed their palms into one other.
The kiss was slow and deliberate. He could feel the light trembling in Laurent’s body, as Laurent’s mouth opened under his. His own hands felt unsteady. When he drew back it was only far enough to find Laurent’s gaze again, seeking assent. He found it, alongside a new flare of tension. Tension, he understood, was a part of it. Then he felt Laurent press a glass phial into his hand.
Breathing was difficult. He could look nowhere but at Laurent, both of them here with nothing between them, and Laurent, allowing it. A finger slid inside. It was so tight. He moved it back and forward, slowly. He watched Laurent’s face, the slight flush, the fractional changes of his expression, his eyes wide and dark. It was intensely private. Damen’s skin felt too hot, too tight. His ideas of what might happen in bed with Laurent had not moved beyond an aching tenderness, which was only now finding physical expression. The reality of it was different; Laurent was different. Damen had never thought that it could be like this, soft and quiet and acutely personal.
He felt the slide of oil, Laurent’s small, helpless movements, and the impossible sensation of his body beginning to open. He thought Laurent must be able to feel the beating of his heart inside his chest. They were kissing now, slow, intimate kisses, their bodies in full alignment, Laurent’s arms twining around his neck. Damen slid his free arm beneath Laurent, palm travelling over the flexing incurvations of his back. He felt Laurent draw up one of his legs, felt the slide of Laurent’s warm inner thigh, the press of Laurent’s heel into his back.
He thought he could do it like this, coax Laurent with mouth and hands, give him this. Damen felt tight, slick heat with his fingers. It was impossible that he could put his cock there, yet he was unable to stop imagining it. He closed his eyes, felt the place where they were meant to interlock, to fit.
‘I need to be inside you,’ he said, and it came out raw with desire and the effort of restraint.
The tension in Laurent crested, and he felt Laurent push it down as Laurent said, ‘Yes.’
He felt a rush of that sensation that pushed at his chest. He was going to be allowed this. Every connection of skin against skin felt too hotly intimate, yet they were going to draw closer. Laurent was going to let him in. Inside him. That thought came over him anew. Then it was happening, and he couldn’t think of anything but the slow press forward into Laurent’s body.
Laurent cried out and his world became a series of fractured impressions. The head of his cock pushing into oiled heat, and the simultaneous feedback of Laurent, shuddering; the slide of muscle in Laurent’s bicep; his flushed face; the half fall of his yellow hair.
He felt some sense that he needed to hold onto this, to hold it tight and never let it out of his grip.
You’re mine, he wanted to say, and couldn’t. Laurent didn’t belong to him; this was something he could have only once.
His chest hurt. He closed his eyes and forced himself to feel these slow, shallow thrusts, the slow push and drag that was all he could allow himself, his only defence against the instinct that wanted to push inside, deeper than he’d even been, to plant himself inside Laurent’s body and hold onto this forever.
‘Laurent,’ he said, and he was breaking apart.
To get what you want, you have to know exactly how much you are willing to give up.
Never had he wanted something this badly, and held it in his hands knowing that tomorrow it would be gone, traded for the high cliffs of Ios, and the uncertain future across the border, the chance to stand before his brother, to ask him for all the answers that no longer seemed so important. A kingdom, or this.
Deeper, was the overwhelming drive, and he fought it. He fought to hold on, though his body was finding its own rhythm, his arms winding around Laurent’s chest, his lips at his neck, some closed-eyed desire to have him a close as possible.
‘Laurent,’ he said, and he was all the way inside, each thrust driving him closer to an end that ached inside him, and still he wanted to be deeper.
The full weight of his body was on Laurent now, his full length moving inside, and it was wholly sensate: the tangled sound Laurent made, newly, sweetly inarticulate, the flush on his cheeks, the averted twist of his head, si
ght and sound melded with the hot push into Laurent’s body, the pulse of him, the tremor in his own muscles.
He had a sudden splintering image of how it might be, if this was a world where they had time. There would be no urgency and no end point, just a sweet string of days spent together, long, languorous love making where he could spend hours inside.