A Thousand Kisses Deep Chapter 8
So, surprise! Not entirely forgotten after all. Here's the next chapter of A Thousand Kisses Deep. A few more to go and I should be able to wind it up. Sex is very difficult for me to write. Sex gives me the fits. I've been wrestling with this all afternoon and finally threw up my hands in surrender.
And there, most quiet and, as a child, most wise,
High throned you sit, and gracious.'>
Chapter 8
On the return train trip, Jensen is full of happy daydreams, the check for five hundred pounds burning a hole in his pocket. He wants to put in a new flagstone walk amidst the profusion of the garden and re-glaze every windows in the place; Gull Cottage being plagued most voraciously by drafts. Jensen is bloody tired of having frostbitten toes. The kitchen could use some refurbishing. And the bathroom. Water pressure is a luxury Jensen misses every morning when the shower dribbles reluctantly on his head.
Jared is going to be so pleased with him. They will choose the projects together and make their home even more perfect than it already is. Cheek pressed to the window glass, Jensen watches the countryside flash by in sweeps of vibrant autumn colors. Overhead, milk-white clouds plump into fat cushions at the push of the wind’s hurrying fingers. Jensen is hurrying, too. Home to the Captain.
Things don’t go exactly as Jensen has imagined them. The cottage is dark and cold when he arrives after picking up the Renault at the train station. Barreling down the narrow track of road at a reckless speed, he sings loudly, the happy news a painful pressure in his chest. He can’t wait to share the splendid success of his mission-to see Jared beaming at him with that eye-blinding smile of his.
Parking carefully on the sandy patch edging the garden, Jensen looks up to see the cottage shuttered, blank eyes turned away. It’s a guilty reaction, no doubt. Jensen assures himself he has nothing to feel guilty about. A little harmless flirting is hardly a capital offense, and there is no way Jared could know what happened hundreds of miles away.
Still, the chill permeates Jensen’s bones as he crosses the threshold, looking expectantly around the dark entryway for any sign of his ghost. After the gaiety of the City, the atmosphere is a bit of a shock. Even on first acquaintance, the cottage had been more welcoming. Jensen can’t help but feel something is seriously wrong.
“Jared? Are you here?”
The downstairs is empty, Jensen’s bedroom as well. The windows are open. A breeze with some autumnal bite to it creeps in under Jensen’s wool suit coat and makes him shiver. The floor near the window is covered with a sand-like substance that crunches beneath his shoes. He’ll clean it up later. Right now, he desperately need a cup of tea. Jensen trudged down to the kitchen, feeling oddly deflated after being on a heel-clicking high for nearly half the day.
Filling the kettle with water, he spots a granular sparkle on the windowsill beside the sink. He frowns, a twinge of unease flitting along his spine. It wasn’t there when Jensen left for London. What’s it doing there now? Setting the kettle down hastily, he exams it, touching a finger to his tongue, the sharp tang of salt flooding his taste buds. There is also a line of salt spread diagonal across the pine kitchen table, fanning out from an upended shaker, as though knocked over in haste.
“What the hell,” he mutters aloud, not even noticing the curse in the growing alarm working its way into his bloodstream. Backtracking through the cottage hurriedly, Jensen finds a line of salt at every point of entrance or exit, from windows to doors, even across the sill of the half-moon bathroom window high up on a wall over the basin. He swallows shakily, rubbing a hand over his mouth. Trying to calm himself doesn’t seem to do the trick. Jensen lets his mind reach out, searching for the essence of Jared that is always present, even when he had angrily vacated the premises for a time. There is nothing. The cottage is a hollow shell in his absence.
Father Ambrose. The name springs to mind and for reasons not entirely explicable, the little priest’s frowsy-headed countenance appears before Jensen, a look of horror still clearly etched on his face as he picks himself up out of a hostile rosebush, cheek limned in droplets of ruby red. It all comes back to Jensen in a rush; those first days in the cottage, his panicked call for an exorcisism, as well as the cleric’s sudden eagerness to conduct the banishment after his own ghostly encounter.
Jensen had put him off, and though the priest had phoned several times in the past weeks, Jensen was too preoccupied with transcribing the Captain’s memoirs to pay any serious attention to him, and thought nothing further of it.
Apprehension rises in a tidal wave. Finding a rosary tucked neatly between stacks of clean towels in the linen cupboard turns suspicion to flaming certainty.
“If you’ve driven him away, I’ll kill you,” Jensen shouts as he thunders down the stairs to the telephone.
His hand trembles. He misdials twice, insides snarled in a painful knot that makes it difficult to concentrate. When the priest finally comes on the line, Jensen can barely contain his fury.
“What have you done, you noxious idiot? What gives you the right to come into my home with your Popish mumbo jumbo and torment perfectly amiable ghosts who’ve done you no harm? All right. All right. Aside from the rose bush, blast and damn you.”
There’s a vein throbbing in Jensen’s temple. He touches it, head drooping, as the priest sputters indignantly in his ear.
“Don’t you make excuses. I can have you arrested. I will have you arrested if you don’t tell me how to break this blasted spell...or hex. Or whatever it is. I’m phoning the Constable the minute I hang up. You’ll rot in a jail cell for the rest of your life.”
Jensen is too frightened and too furious to trouble about the truth of what he’s saying.
“I didn’t harm It,” Father Ambrose reasons, a note of contrition creeping into his voice at Jensen’s clear loss of self-control. “I just drove It out and prevented It from coming back. I couldn’t do an exorcism without your permission. That’s obvious. But I was trying to help you.”
Rubbing the heel of a hand against his eye, Jensen lifts his head and stares out the window at the fading day, on the edge of going completely nuts. “He’s not...in some Purgatory or something, is he? Suffering for past sins?”
“My dear fellow, compose yourself. This is a wayward spirit we’re talking about. Not a person. There is no suffering involved, rest assured.”
The smug certainty makes Jensen want to rip the man limb from limb. “Tell me how to fix it. That’s all I want from you. Then I’ll be happy to never see or hear from you again.”
“I’m...I’m very sorry you feel that way. I was only doing what I thought best.”
“Just tell me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Christ! Tell me!” Jensen feels close to murder.
Father Ambrose sighs. His answer comes meekly. “You have only to break the salt lines and...”
The rest is lost as Jensen hangs up on him. Grabbing a broom from the pantry, he strides purposely from room to room, throwing open doors and windows, brushing the barriers away. The cottage opens in the gathering dusk, a soft pink glow suffusing the twilight sky.
“He’s a stupid little man,” Jared says mildly, his lips brushing the shell of Jensen’s ear. “Don’t be too hard on him.”
“I don’t know how you can say that.” Jensen sags in relief against the taller body behind him, Jared solid and real, the smell of him a heady perfume drugging Jensen’s senses. He reaches back, wraps a fist around one lapel. All his anxiety drops away, leaving the words he wants to say melting sweet on his tongue. “Take me to bed.”
++++++++++++++++
They make love by candlelight. The buttered glow paints Jared’s face with a reverence for Jensen that makes Jensen humble. He touches a cheekbone, the curve of an eyebrow with the pad of his thumb, a sketch he won’t ever forget.
“I didn’t realize how beautiful you are,” Jensen says, staring up at his manifest ghost. “I was too busy fighting with you all the time.”
Leaning in to take Jensen’s mouth in a kiss, Jared’s chuckles, bumps his nose against Jensen’s stubbled jaw.
“And you rival Adonis, boy; freckles and green eyes, a body made for sin.”
“Don’t call me boy. I’m a grown man.” He tries to squirm away from Jared’s scrutiny, cheeks heating up. “Did Adonis have freckles? I don’t remember that.”
Jensen isn’t used to pretty compliments, though he thinks for a second of Tom and his intense blue eyes. He lifts his own gaze almost apologetically to find Jared’s brows drawn together, as though he senses Jensen’s momentary disloyalty.
“You haven’t met someone else, have you? On the trip to London?”
The words send a spill of desire and fright along Jensen’s naked skin. He silences Jared with his mouth and tongue, the praise turning from a question to a low moan of pleasure. Long fingers play along the bumps of Jensen’s rib cage, smoothing out the tension coiling in his muscles, making him twitch and shiver. The hair all over his body sizzles with electricity.
This is all so new-the feel of another man’s length pressed to his own. Lifting his lips away, Jensen rumbles out a groan, teeth gritted, embarrassed by his lack of restraint. He was never like this with Margaret. Everything was done under the cloak of blankets and darkness. A furtive fumbling that left Jensen weak with shame at his insistent need. He tried to spare his wife such indignities as much as possible, but his body failed to be subject to his mind at odd intervals, and he had to pursue relief in the soft warmth of her cunt. Jensen hated that word. Yet, it was the only word his brain found appropriate for what he did to her. Fucked her cunt.
Jensen writhes beneath the wet tongue lapping at his throat, shudders building in his belly. A crawl of heat spills through the tightness of his balls. The touch of Jared’s palm on the faint trail of hair growing below Jensen’s navel focuses him on the overwhelming sensation of being petted with cherished absorption.
“Nhuh, nhuh.”
He tries to pull away. Jared cages him on the bed with bare arms and naked thighs, fondles his nipples until Jensen is shaking uncontrollably. Points of fire ache on his pectorals. The flushed brown circles spark hot when Jared tugs persistently at their fattened heads, tearing unintelligible gutturals from the back of Jensen’s throat. Digging his nails harshly into Jared’s wrists, Jensen attempts to break away from the sexual torture stealing his reason. Jared pins him down with ease, leaning a massive forearm gently across Jensen’s collarbone. Escape evidently isn’t an option.
“Don’t be afraid,” Jared soothes, lips leaving electrical pulses on the rim of Jensen’s ear. He bites the lobe tenderly, pulling on it. Thrashing with helpless abandon, Jensen pushes up on a heel to lock his calf around the sweat-slick bone of one slim hip.
“Please, Jared. I can’t stand much more. Do...what I need. Show me what I need.”
Spread, with one leg encircling his tormentor’s waist, Jensen is aware of being completely exposed. His face is flushed and hot, damp with perspiration. It burns his eyes and he blinks a stray bead away, feeling it catch on a lash before it drops to the curve of his jaw. One hand is star-fished on the soaked, slippery skin covering Jared’s spine. The muscles there dance with tension under Jensen’s fingertips.
“Will it hurt?” he whispers, afraid a sharp sound will break the spell cocooning them.
A thumb glides smoothly between the cheeks of his ass, circles the twitch of Jensen’s pucker, then nudges at the sensitive muscle. Jensen’s stomach clenches into a bright, balled fist of heat.
“Oh God.”
“It will at first,” Jared tells him. A hand cradles the curve of Jensen’s hip, draws him closer so that the two shafts, muted steel between them, touch, rub slickly . “Don’t be afraid. I’ll make the pain go away.”
Jared’s fingers caress and penetrate, coated in the cream he brought into the bedroom earlier; the cream that made Jensen laugh and ask him if he were chapped anywhere he didn’t want to talk about.
“No, but you’ll be.”
At Jared’s sly smile, Jensen blinked and shut up.
Now he’s glad that Jared hadn’t explained. Some things were too intimate to talk about lightly. Jaded’s touch on the inside of Jensen’s body is one of them. He lifts up, elbow tight around Jared’s neck, a knee-jerk retreat from the invasion. It feels curiously strange and blissfully dirty. The stroke and slide of being pet from the inside out is making Jensen harden even more than before.
Jared’s hazel eyes track Jensen’s every expression, the twist of discomfort, the gasping thread of lust that quivers through his knotted brows and along the swell of his bottom lip as Jared continues to finger him. The glimpses are caught between pressed and ardent kisses meant to distract.
“I thought I’d lost you,” Jensen blurts, arching his back at the steady pressure building between his thighs, sweet rough touches pushing him closer to the edge of control.
“You’re never going to lose me. As long as I know I’m what’s best for you,” Jared promises in a husky whisper.
Elegant digits give way to a more adamant thickness. Jensen’s his head rolls on the pillow. He’s gulping mouthfuls of superheated air, damp strands of blond patched to his forehead.
“Jared.”
“Keep talking,” Jared tells him. “Keep talking. It will distract you from...”
He buries his face against Jensen’s throat, fingertips folded into the hollows of his hips, lifting the swell of his ass. The plump halves squeeze brutally on Jared’s shaft, all Jensen’s inner muscles bearing down.
“Sweet God,” he groans, pulling back and pushing in again past the resistant clutch of fluttering silken walls. “Talk. Not break my damned prick off at the root.” He rubs a thumb over where they’re joined, the crinkled ring jumping skittishly before it relaxes. Jensen makes a sound low in his throat, a shudder running from head to toes.
“You are a howling maniac! How can I keep talking when you’re....doing that to me.”
“You like it.”
Jared presses in farther, rocks there, balls to ass, kisses Jensen’s mouth and licks salt from the line of his cheekbone. Outside the darkening windows, lightning flickers a warning over waves building to a restless chop.
“Yes. I like it.”
Jensen’s throat closes. He can’t talk anymore. Can’t think anymore, the pulse of his body boiling under a thin covering of taut skin. Nothing in his experience has ever felt this good. Jared pushes and pulls him, manhandling him as they fuck. His belly rubs fire against Jensen’s own. Jensen’s cock goes tight with arousal, trapped there, throbbing heavily.
The sounds slipping between his lips are ones Jensen doesn’t recognize. This can’t be him, keening each time their bodies smack together. The hard slap of flesh on flesh, the thick scent of ocean filling his head, makes it hard to breathe. He twists, trying to drag in more air, but Jared goes rigid. Holds him flat, forehead to Jensen’s chest.
The minute the first pulse of fevered liquid floods his back passage, Jensen climaxes messily, digging his heels in, stiffening all over, his muscles twitching shakily with the effort to release. It feels like bliss. It feels like heaven.
Later, when they’ve dozed for a bit and woken to share languid kisses, Jensen tells Jared the news. Blood and Swash is going to be a huge success. He sits with the sheets pooled around his waist, beaming gleefully.
“I feel quite giddy with excitement. Even more so than I did that first day I moved in. We can put in central heating! Extend the garden! This is truly home now. Nothing can take it away from me. Us.”
Jared, his back propped against the intricately scrolled headboard, smiles at Jensen indulgently. “Lad, I expect you to have more confidence in me in the future. When I tell you a thing is so, it’s cast in iron. My life was a great tale of daring do. We’ll write a sequel. Sequels are all the rage now, I hear. We’ll call this one Rip Roaring Tales. How’s that?”
Jensen laughs delightedly. “It’s damned near perfect, my dear Captain. I’ll take it to Eton the moment the ink’s dry on the last page.”
“And you won’t mind another trip to London?” Jared asks seriously.
Jensen shrugs, ducks his head and tries not to think of Tom, before looking up at Jared with innocent green eyes. “Why, that’s eons away. With such a result as this, how can you doubt I’m happy to go. As long as that meddlesome priest minds his own damned business instead of ours.”
The pressure of impending disaster that Jensen has been living with for months, abruptly releases its hold on his guts and falls away, leaving him feeling newborn. He climbs out of bed clumsily, forgetting his nakedness in the excitement of wanting to share the visible fruit of their labor. He searches through his discarded pants until he finds the check and straightens, wiggling it from his fingertips seductively. At the sight before him, the volume of Jaded’s laughter rattles the window panes, drowning out the harsh clatter of newly arrived rain. Jensen does his naked dance.
And there, most quiet and, as a child, most wise,
High throned you sit, and gracious.'>
Chapter 8
On the return train trip, Jensen is full of happy daydreams, the check for five hundred pounds burning a hole in his pocket. He wants to put in a new flagstone walk amidst the profusion of the garden and re-glaze every windows in the place; Gull Cottage being plagued most voraciously by drafts. Jensen is bloody tired of having frostbitten toes. The kitchen could use some refurbishing. And the bathroom. Water pressure is a luxury Jensen misses every morning when the shower dribbles reluctantly on his head.
Jared is going to be so pleased with him. They will choose the projects together and make their home even more perfect than it already is. Cheek pressed to the window glass, Jensen watches the countryside flash by in sweeps of vibrant autumn colors. Overhead, milk-white clouds plump into fat cushions at the push of the wind’s hurrying fingers. Jensen is hurrying, too. Home to the Captain.
Things don’t go exactly as Jensen has imagined them. The cottage is dark and cold when he arrives after picking up the Renault at the train station. Barreling down the narrow track of road at a reckless speed, he sings loudly, the happy news a painful pressure in his chest. He can’t wait to share the splendid success of his mission-to see Jared beaming at him with that eye-blinding smile of his.
Parking carefully on the sandy patch edging the garden, Jensen looks up to see the cottage shuttered, blank eyes turned away. It’s a guilty reaction, no doubt. Jensen assures himself he has nothing to feel guilty about. A little harmless flirting is hardly a capital offense, and there is no way Jared could know what happened hundreds of miles away.
Still, the chill permeates Jensen’s bones as he crosses the threshold, looking expectantly around the dark entryway for any sign of his ghost. After the gaiety of the City, the atmosphere is a bit of a shock. Even on first acquaintance, the cottage had been more welcoming. Jensen can’t help but feel something is seriously wrong.
“Jared? Are you here?”
The downstairs is empty, Jensen’s bedroom as well. The windows are open. A breeze with some autumnal bite to it creeps in under Jensen’s wool suit coat and makes him shiver. The floor near the window is covered with a sand-like substance that crunches beneath his shoes. He’ll clean it up later. Right now, he desperately need a cup of tea. Jensen trudged down to the kitchen, feeling oddly deflated after being on a heel-clicking high for nearly half the day.
Filling the kettle with water, he spots a granular sparkle on the windowsill beside the sink. He frowns, a twinge of unease flitting along his spine. It wasn’t there when Jensen left for London. What’s it doing there now? Setting the kettle down hastily, he exams it, touching a finger to his tongue, the sharp tang of salt flooding his taste buds. There is also a line of salt spread diagonal across the pine kitchen table, fanning out from an upended shaker, as though knocked over in haste.
“What the hell,” he mutters aloud, not even noticing the curse in the growing alarm working its way into his bloodstream. Backtracking through the cottage hurriedly, Jensen finds a line of salt at every point of entrance or exit, from windows to doors, even across the sill of the half-moon bathroom window high up on a wall over the basin. He swallows shakily, rubbing a hand over his mouth. Trying to calm himself doesn’t seem to do the trick. Jensen lets his mind reach out, searching for the essence of Jared that is always present, even when he had angrily vacated the premises for a time. There is nothing. The cottage is a hollow shell in his absence.
Father Ambrose. The name springs to mind and for reasons not entirely explicable, the little priest’s frowsy-headed countenance appears before Jensen, a look of horror still clearly etched on his face as he picks himself up out of a hostile rosebush, cheek limned in droplets of ruby red. It all comes back to Jensen in a rush; those first days in the cottage, his panicked call for an exorcisism, as well as the cleric’s sudden eagerness to conduct the banishment after his own ghostly encounter.
Jensen had put him off, and though the priest had phoned several times in the past weeks, Jensen was too preoccupied with transcribing the Captain’s memoirs to pay any serious attention to him, and thought nothing further of it.
Apprehension rises in a tidal wave. Finding a rosary tucked neatly between stacks of clean towels in the linen cupboard turns suspicion to flaming certainty.
“If you’ve driven him away, I’ll kill you,” Jensen shouts as he thunders down the stairs to the telephone.
His hand trembles. He misdials twice, insides snarled in a painful knot that makes it difficult to concentrate. When the priest finally comes on the line, Jensen can barely contain his fury.
“What have you done, you noxious idiot? What gives you the right to come into my home with your Popish mumbo jumbo and torment perfectly amiable ghosts who’ve done you no harm? All right. All right. Aside from the rose bush, blast and damn you.”
There’s a vein throbbing in Jensen’s temple. He touches it, head drooping, as the priest sputters indignantly in his ear.
“Don’t you make excuses. I can have you arrested. I will have you arrested if you don’t tell me how to break this blasted spell...or hex. Or whatever it is. I’m phoning the Constable the minute I hang up. You’ll rot in a jail cell for the rest of your life.”
Jensen is too frightened and too furious to trouble about the truth of what he’s saying.
“I didn’t harm It,” Father Ambrose reasons, a note of contrition creeping into his voice at Jensen’s clear loss of self-control. “I just drove It out and prevented It from coming back. I couldn’t do an exorcism without your permission. That’s obvious. But I was trying to help you.”
Rubbing the heel of a hand against his eye, Jensen lifts his head and stares out the window at the fading day, on the edge of going completely nuts. “He’s not...in some Purgatory or something, is he? Suffering for past sins?”
“My dear fellow, compose yourself. This is a wayward spirit we’re talking about. Not a person. There is no suffering involved, rest assured.”
The smug certainty makes Jensen want to rip the man limb from limb. “Tell me how to fix it. That’s all I want from you. Then I’ll be happy to never see or hear from you again.”
“I’m...I’m very sorry you feel that way. I was only doing what I thought best.”
“Just tell me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Christ! Tell me!” Jensen feels close to murder.
Father Ambrose sighs. His answer comes meekly. “You have only to break the salt lines and...”
The rest is lost as Jensen hangs up on him. Grabbing a broom from the pantry, he strides purposely from room to room, throwing open doors and windows, brushing the barriers away. The cottage opens in the gathering dusk, a soft pink glow suffusing the twilight sky.
“He’s a stupid little man,” Jared says mildly, his lips brushing the shell of Jensen’s ear. “Don’t be too hard on him.”
“I don’t know how you can say that.” Jensen sags in relief against the taller body behind him, Jared solid and real, the smell of him a heady perfume drugging Jensen’s senses. He reaches back, wraps a fist around one lapel. All his anxiety drops away, leaving the words he wants to say melting sweet on his tongue. “Take me to bed.”
++++++++++++++++
They make love by candlelight. The buttered glow paints Jared’s face with a reverence for Jensen that makes Jensen humble. He touches a cheekbone, the curve of an eyebrow with the pad of his thumb, a sketch he won’t ever forget.
“I didn’t realize how beautiful you are,” Jensen says, staring up at his manifest ghost. “I was too busy fighting with you all the time.”
Leaning in to take Jensen’s mouth in a kiss, Jared’s chuckles, bumps his nose against Jensen’s stubbled jaw.
“And you rival Adonis, boy; freckles and green eyes, a body made for sin.”
“Don’t call me boy. I’m a grown man.” He tries to squirm away from Jared’s scrutiny, cheeks heating up. “Did Adonis have freckles? I don’t remember that.”
Jensen isn’t used to pretty compliments, though he thinks for a second of Tom and his intense blue eyes. He lifts his own gaze almost apologetically to find Jared’s brows drawn together, as though he senses Jensen’s momentary disloyalty.
“You haven’t met someone else, have you? On the trip to London?”
The words send a spill of desire and fright along Jensen’s naked skin. He silences Jared with his mouth and tongue, the praise turning from a question to a low moan of pleasure. Long fingers play along the bumps of Jensen’s rib cage, smoothing out the tension coiling in his muscles, making him twitch and shiver. The hair all over his body sizzles with electricity.
This is all so new-the feel of another man’s length pressed to his own. Lifting his lips away, Jensen rumbles out a groan, teeth gritted, embarrassed by his lack of restraint. He was never like this with Margaret. Everything was done under the cloak of blankets and darkness. A furtive fumbling that left Jensen weak with shame at his insistent need. He tried to spare his wife such indignities as much as possible, but his body failed to be subject to his mind at odd intervals, and he had to pursue relief in the soft warmth of her cunt. Jensen hated that word. Yet, it was the only word his brain found appropriate for what he did to her. Fucked her cunt.
Jensen writhes beneath the wet tongue lapping at his throat, shudders building in his belly. A crawl of heat spills through the tightness of his balls. The touch of Jared’s palm on the faint trail of hair growing below Jensen’s navel focuses him on the overwhelming sensation of being petted with cherished absorption.
“Nhuh, nhuh.”
He tries to pull away. Jared cages him on the bed with bare arms and naked thighs, fondles his nipples until Jensen is shaking uncontrollably. Points of fire ache on his pectorals. The flushed brown circles spark hot when Jared tugs persistently at their fattened heads, tearing unintelligible gutturals from the back of Jensen’s throat. Digging his nails harshly into Jared’s wrists, Jensen attempts to break away from the sexual torture stealing his reason. Jared pins him down with ease, leaning a massive forearm gently across Jensen’s collarbone. Escape evidently isn’t an option.
“Don’t be afraid,” Jared soothes, lips leaving electrical pulses on the rim of Jensen’s ear. He bites the lobe tenderly, pulling on it. Thrashing with helpless abandon, Jensen pushes up on a heel to lock his calf around the sweat-slick bone of one slim hip.
“Please, Jared. I can’t stand much more. Do...what I need. Show me what I need.”
Spread, with one leg encircling his tormentor’s waist, Jensen is aware of being completely exposed. His face is flushed and hot, damp with perspiration. It burns his eyes and he blinks a stray bead away, feeling it catch on a lash before it drops to the curve of his jaw. One hand is star-fished on the soaked, slippery skin covering Jared’s spine. The muscles there dance with tension under Jensen’s fingertips.
“Will it hurt?” he whispers, afraid a sharp sound will break the spell cocooning them.
A thumb glides smoothly between the cheeks of his ass, circles the twitch of Jensen’s pucker, then nudges at the sensitive muscle. Jensen’s stomach clenches into a bright, balled fist of heat.
“Oh God.”
“It will at first,” Jared tells him. A hand cradles the curve of Jensen’s hip, draws him closer so that the two shafts, muted steel between them, touch, rub slickly . “Don’t be afraid. I’ll make the pain go away.”
Jared’s fingers caress and penetrate, coated in the cream he brought into the bedroom earlier; the cream that made Jensen laugh and ask him if he were chapped anywhere he didn’t want to talk about.
“No, but you’ll be.”
At Jared’s sly smile, Jensen blinked and shut up.
Now he’s glad that Jared hadn’t explained. Some things were too intimate to talk about lightly. Jaded’s touch on the inside of Jensen’s body is one of them. He lifts up, elbow tight around Jared’s neck, a knee-jerk retreat from the invasion. It feels curiously strange and blissfully dirty. The stroke and slide of being pet from the inside out is making Jensen harden even more than before.
Jared’s hazel eyes track Jensen’s every expression, the twist of discomfort, the gasping thread of lust that quivers through his knotted brows and along the swell of his bottom lip as Jared continues to finger him. The glimpses are caught between pressed and ardent kisses meant to distract.
“I thought I’d lost you,” Jensen blurts, arching his back at the steady pressure building between his thighs, sweet rough touches pushing him closer to the edge of control.
“You’re never going to lose me. As long as I know I’m what’s best for you,” Jared promises in a husky whisper.
Elegant digits give way to a more adamant thickness. Jensen’s his head rolls on the pillow. He’s gulping mouthfuls of superheated air, damp strands of blond patched to his forehead.
“Jared.”
“Keep talking,” Jared tells him. “Keep talking. It will distract you from...”
He buries his face against Jensen’s throat, fingertips folded into the hollows of his hips, lifting the swell of his ass. The plump halves squeeze brutally on Jared’s shaft, all Jensen’s inner muscles bearing down.
“Sweet God,” he groans, pulling back and pushing in again past the resistant clutch of fluttering silken walls. “Talk. Not break my damned prick off at the root.” He rubs a thumb over where they’re joined, the crinkled ring jumping skittishly before it relaxes. Jensen makes a sound low in his throat, a shudder running from head to toes.
“You are a howling maniac! How can I keep talking when you’re....doing that to me.”
“You like it.”
Jared presses in farther, rocks there, balls to ass, kisses Jensen’s mouth and licks salt from the line of his cheekbone. Outside the darkening windows, lightning flickers a warning over waves building to a restless chop.
“Yes. I like it.”
Jensen’s throat closes. He can’t talk anymore. Can’t think anymore, the pulse of his body boiling under a thin covering of taut skin. Nothing in his experience has ever felt this good. Jared pushes and pulls him, manhandling him as they fuck. His belly rubs fire against Jensen’s own. Jensen’s cock goes tight with arousal, trapped there, throbbing heavily.
The sounds slipping between his lips are ones Jensen doesn’t recognize. This can’t be him, keening each time their bodies smack together. The hard slap of flesh on flesh, the thick scent of ocean filling his head, makes it hard to breathe. He twists, trying to drag in more air, but Jared goes rigid. Holds him flat, forehead to Jensen’s chest.
The minute the first pulse of fevered liquid floods his back passage, Jensen climaxes messily, digging his heels in, stiffening all over, his muscles twitching shakily with the effort to release. It feels like bliss. It feels like heaven.
Later, when they’ve dozed for a bit and woken to share languid kisses, Jensen tells Jared the news. Blood and Swash is going to be a huge success. He sits with the sheets pooled around his waist, beaming gleefully.
“I feel quite giddy with excitement. Even more so than I did that first day I moved in. We can put in central heating! Extend the garden! This is truly home now. Nothing can take it away from me. Us.”
Jared, his back propped against the intricately scrolled headboard, smiles at Jensen indulgently. “Lad, I expect you to have more confidence in me in the future. When I tell you a thing is so, it’s cast in iron. My life was a great tale of daring do. We’ll write a sequel. Sequels are all the rage now, I hear. We’ll call this one Rip Roaring Tales. How’s that?”
Jensen laughs delightedly. “It’s damned near perfect, my dear Captain. I’ll take it to Eton the moment the ink’s dry on the last page.”
“And you won’t mind another trip to London?” Jared asks seriously.
Jensen shrugs, ducks his head and tries not to think of Tom, before looking up at Jared with innocent green eyes. “Why, that’s eons away. With such a result as this, how can you doubt I’m happy to go. As long as that meddlesome priest minds his own damned business instead of ours.”
The pressure of impending disaster that Jensen has been living with for months, abruptly releases its hold on his guts and falls away, leaving him feeling newborn. He climbs out of bed clumsily, forgetting his nakedness in the excitement of wanting to share the visible fruit of their labor. He searches through his discarded pants until he finds the check and straightens, wiggling it from his fingertips seductively. At the sight before him, the volume of Jaded’s laughter rattles the window panes, drowning out the harsh clatter of newly arrived rain. Jensen does his naked dance.