Chapter 366 - Kissed

Chapter 366: Chapter 366 - Kissed

Shao kissed him.

Not the careful thing from before the wardrobe, not the slow measuring press of mouth to mouth. This one had a hand behind it.

It drove Jai back a step, two, and his fingers scrambled at the front of Shao’s shirt and stayed there because there was nowhere else to put them, no thought left in his head that could form the word wardrobe or stairs or father.

Then the hand dropped to his waist and closed, and the floor went out from under him.

Jai made a strangled noise against Shao’s mouth and grabbed his shoulders with both hands. Shao carried him like he weighed nothing, one arm banded under his hips, walking blind across the room with his mouth still working and his shoulder knocking the workbench as he passed. Something rolled. Something fell.

Jai didn’t care. His knees had gone to water. His whole body had gone to water. He hung there, folded against a chest that didn’t so much as stutter, and when Shao tossed him onto the bed he landed in a sprawl of his own limbs and lay there breathing like he’d run the compound wall.

Shao stood at the foot of the bed.

He didn’t climb on after him. He stood there and looked, and then he reached for his own collar, and Jai forgot how breathing worked.

The shirt came off over his head in one pull.

Jai’s mouth went dry.

He’d seen Shao bare before. In the yard, in the rain, once in the infirmary with a wound being packed and the whole of his back turned. Seen it and made himself look away because a man had to keep some dignity. There was no looking away now. He couldn’t have managed it.

The lamp threw the light low across all that muscle, the heavy shelf of his shoulders, the ridged stomach, the veins running down the forearms, and the wounds.

The wounds healed over now, but not gone. White traces scored across the brown of his skin like old chalk, one along the ribs, a longer one climbing the outside of his thigh.

Badges of every time he’d stood in front of something that should have killed him and hadn’t moved.

Jai’s tongue dragged across his lower lip before he’d told it to.

Shao saw. Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, brief and hot, and then he was on the bed and over him, one knee planted by Jai’s hip, and he caught Jai’s face in one hand and kissed him deep.

It went to Jai’s head like liquor. The world narrowed to the wet drag of it, Shao’s mouth slanting, his lower lip caught and pulled and let go, his tongue sweeping the seam until Jai opened for him, and then the slow thorough slide of it. Wet. Deliberate. Unhurried, like Shao had all three of the hours they’d lied for and intended to spend them exactly here.

When he broke off, he stayed close enough that Jai could feel the words.

"Sweet as honey."

Jai’s brain shorted out.

"Your mouth," Shao murmured, and kissed him again, softer, and drew back an inch. "Tastes like honey."

Jai tried to say something clever. What came out was a thin, wavering sound that wasn’t a word at all, and Shao’s mouth curved against his own and then dropped to his jaw, to the pulse jumping under it, and down.

The sound got louder.

Shao answered it with a low noise in his chest. It started somewhere deep and came up rough, almost a growl, rumbling through Jai’s sternum where they were pressed together, and Jai’s legs gave out completely. They slid open. They fell apart around Shao’s thigh and hung there, useless, and Jai tipped his head back and let his eyes fall shut and stopped trying to hold anything together at all.

Then he felt it.

Something soft and wet between his own cheeks, spreading as his legs fell wide, cool where the air touched it.

He twisted, trying to get a look.

Shao’s hand closed on his thigh and pinned him flat.

"Why are you wriggling?"

Jai went red from the collar up. He made a vague gesture toward his own backside. "It’s ... that thing again."

Shao frowned. "What thing?"

"That thing. The ... you know. The stuff."

Shao looked down at him, uncomprehending, and then reached for the waistband of Jai’s pants and peeled them off before Jai had finished forming the argument against it.

He didn’t get the argument out anyway.

Shao went still.

Then he made a sound, short and punched-out, and bent closer.

Jai clamped a hand over his own face.

The hole was twitching. He could feel it, the small fluttering clench of it, and it was slick and shining and there was more of it than there had any right to be, a slow clear trickle running down and pooling on the sheet. His thighs wanted to close. Shao’s palms held them open.

"Don’t look," Jai said, muffled behind his hand.

Shao didn’t answer.

"Shao."

"Mm."

"You’re just ... staring at it."

"I’m looking at it," Shao agreed. His voice had gone rough.

"There’s nothing to look at."

His thumb moved. Brushed low, beside the hole, careful and unhurried, and Jai’s hips jumped. Shao’s eyes didn’t leave him. "Where’s it coming from? It’s been happening before?"

Jai swallowed. "Once or twice. When ... after we’ve been close. It just ..." He risked a look between his own legs and immediately regretted it. Shao was still staring like a man reading something difficult and enjoying every line. "It’s embarrassing, alright? Give me the sheet."

"No."

"Shao."

"Look at it," Shao said. His thumb pressed in a little, spreading the shine, and Jai felt the whole of his body pull taut. "It’s waiting."

"It’s not waiting, it’s just ..."

It twitched again, right under his thumb, and Jai’s sentence died in his throat.

Shao’s breath left him in that same low growl. He shifted up, settled his weight over Jai properly, and bent his head to the side of his neck again.

"You going to keep wriggling," he said into the skin there, "or are you going to let me have it?"

Jai’s hand came off his face. He turned his head, found Shao’s ear, and got his mouth working again at last.

"Stop asking," he said. "And don’t you dare be gentle."