[fic] Pockets Full Of Stones - 1/1
Title: Pockets Full Of Stones
Author:
garnetice
Pairing: Carlos/Logan, mention of Kendall/James
Rating: M
Word Count: 2,520
Warnings: Bad words, bad dreams, sex. Zombie talk. Sex. Seeeex.
Summary: Every night, Carlos dreams about death, and when he wakes up, here with Logan, he lives.
Disclaimer: BTR is not mine.
Author's Notes: Part nine thousand and eighty seven of Kendall Is A Pirate And James Is A Princess. Or, alternately, one of many sexy side stories to Grab My Bags And Go and Hoping For The Shore (others include Crashing On Harbors -by moi- and Fall Into Your Sunlight and Just Breathe With Me -both by jblostfan16-). This verse has sort of spiraled out of control, AND ISN'T IT GREAT? WHO DOESN'T LIKE SEX AND ZOMBIES? So, if you don't want to read the rest, I'll sum up the world real quick: apocalypse, circa now. Zombie-water, plagues, wars, all with no rhyme or reason. Kendall and the boys hop on a ferry boat, despite the poison zombie water and go singing up and down the coastline in exchange for goods. Sex ensues everywhere. The end. OH, and jblostfan16 is the best beta/cheerleader/supporter this verse could ever have.
---
Carlos dreams about the woods.
He’s running, he thinks. Running away- No, wait. This isn’t the bad times yet.
He’s running towards something. He runs and he runs, the scent of fresh earth in his nose, leaves crunching, twigs snapping. His bare feet are callus-toughened from an endless summer of running. Laughter swells in his lungs, like joy; elation too overwhelming to hold inside of his chest. Behind him, there are footsteps, crashing through the underbrush. Laughter hits his ears, high and flighty. Carlos runs faster. He wants to win. To win- oh, to win. This is a race, then.
Up ahead looms this big, pristine lake. It is shiny and silver, metallic as a new quarter, right up until Carlos cannonballs beneath the surface. Bubbles stream past his face, and when he looks up, he can see sunlight and the crash of another body, downdowndown.
A foot kicks Carlos in the face, and there’s a rock and a flash of blond hair and a thud he can almost hear. Green and then not green, eyes flickering closed and-
He never gets farther than that. He always wakes up, sweat drenched, the taste of his own fear sharp in his mouth.
“I need to check on Kendall,” he mumbles, disentangling himself from the hammock.
Logan crashes to the floor, crashes awake. He rubs at his eyes and bites out, “What? Why?”
“I just- I need to,” Carlos says.
“Kendall’s fine.” Logan tells him, hand wrapped around Carlos’s ankle to stop him from bolting. “Carlos, I promise, he’s fine.”
“How do you know?” Carlos asks. He’s hyperventilating, maybe, just a little, but he can’t stop. He keeps seeing Kendall in the water, hitting his head and bubbles, bubbles everywhere. And his mind keeps screaming over and over and over again that water is death, water is a black cloak and a scythe, water is the grim reaper itself.
“Because James just shut up, like five minutes ago.” Logan shrugs, expression turning a little sheepish. “I was having trouble sleeping, and he’s really loud.”
Logan really shouldn’t judge. He’s also really, really loud.
“What if you’re wrong, and Kendall is hurt-“ Carlos starts, trying to move. Logan clings to his ankle, immutable. “Oh no you don’t. Kendall is fine. Great, even.”
“You’re sure?” Carlos asks, voice uncertain.
“I’m sure. C’mere.” Logan pulls Carlos down to the floor. He kisses him, his lips soft, insistent. Carlos’s shoulders slump in relief.
“Bad dreams?” Logan murmurs sympathetically, tongue darting out to wet Carlos’s lower lip, his arms circling Carlos’s shoulders. He is warm and safe and calming. Carlos opens up to him, letting the kiss turn into something different, something less chaste and more visceral. He presses himself into the hollows of Logan’s body, trying to dissolve into his skin. Logan’s fingers dig into Carlos’s bones.
He is here. He is alive. That’s important.
Logan wears moonlight in the still of the galley, and nothing else. His skin is sky-shine and evanescence, like he could dissipate beneath Carlos’s fingertips. He wants to crawl over Logan and keep him anchored, to hold him to this earth. He also wants to free him, to send him up to the stars, where maybe he’ll actually be safe. The wind whistles through the cracks and crevices of the old, creaky boat.
That’s what their lives are now; cracks and crevices and emptiness. So much emptiness.
Carlos remembers going to New York City once. He remembers shoulders pressing into him at all angles, long legs and the fear he might get trampled. There were so many people.
He’s seen movies. He knows LA was the same, once. But now? They slip in and out of the negative space humanity has left, barely ever getting noticed.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Logan says, but how can Carlos not?
Kendall, nearly drowning.
Logan, scarred and scared.
James, facing down the barrel of a gun.
These are the things that haunt Carlos’s existence.
Every night, Carlos dreams about death, and when he wakes up, here with Logan, he lives. James used to have bad dreams when they were younger; they all remember the way he’d wake up sweat soaked and screaming. It still happens, from time to time, when James isn’t wrapped up in Kendall. But when those two are together?
James is lucky. Carlos’s nightmares never give him a reprieve.
“I can’t let anything happen to you. To any of you.”
“It’ll be okay. We’re going to live to be old, old men. You and me and Kendall and James; we’ll always be together. Always and forever,” Logan says softly.
“You can’t know that.” Carlos shivers.
“I’m a genius. I can too.”
The words aren’t as comforting as they should be. Carlos has been feeling unsettled for weeks, since they first heard the news of the horde from Middle America, the radioactive freaks and the cannibal tribes and the plague victims, all moving West. All he’s been able to think about is all the people that stand- or no longer stand- between them and the monsters. They’re safe here on the ferry boat, but what about their families, piled into the abandoned subway car in LA? Or all the people they’ve met, the people they sing for; the people who keep them alive?
“Hey, hey.” Logan taps the side of Carlos’s head. “Still with the thinking. Isn’t that my job?”
Logan kisses his neck. His lips are hot and dry, cracked from too many days on the sea. But his tongue is wet when he licks letters down the line of Carlos’s throat, and it’s a little bit obscene.
Carlos can feel the curve of Logan’s mouth against his skin, a grin for the small noise that Carlos makes. Carlos chokes out, “Lie on your stomach.”
Logan pulls back, his smile dimpling.
He’s a good looking kid. Carlos has known that for ages, that Logan’s handsome. He doesn’t have James’s inherent beauty, or Kendall’s wicked grin, but he is nice to look at. And when he sprawls out on the deck, his body a pale, glowing thing in the dark, he is beautiful.
Carlos starts at his hairline, mouthing across the back of Logan’s neck, ghosting across his skin. He dips his tongue along the notches of Logan’s spine. He sucks words into Logan’s shoulder blades, where wings would grow if they could actually fly away from this place. The boat rocks beneath them, a steady lullaby.
When Carlos reaches the curve of Logan’s ass, he licks out, teasing. Logan gasps, but Carlos isn’t ready for that. Not yet. He kneels down by Logan’s ankles and kisses the thin white scar on Logan’s leg, following the curvature and the places it puckers in. There’s another human being out there with a chunk of Logan inside its stomach, unless the thing has already melted into the pavement.
The night of the attack was the first time Carlos ever gave himself over completely to another person. He’d fucked Logan before, but that night Carlos sat in his lap, a tangle of limbs and love. He watched Logan’s eyes while he rode him, sweat sticky and gorgeous.
Their lives since then haven’t all been sadness and tragedy. Sometimes, when they’re out in open water, the sun on their faces and the endless blue sea beneath them, it is a kind of joy that bubbles up in Carlos’s chest, so overwhelming that he’s not sure he can contain it all. He wants to share the whole wide world with Logan. He wants to scream to the remnants of humanity that he’s found it; the kind of love that everyone searches for.
Carlos loves life, is the thing. Even in the middle of all this darkness, standing in the midst of ruins, he loves living. There is nothing he wants more than to spend the rest of his life waking up to Logan’s dimples and sailing the coastline, singing with his best friends. All of the fear and all of the paranoia, and all his nightmares; they spring from that love.
He licks a stripe up Logan’s thigh, up, up, up until he’s licking into Logan, tasting himself there, the dry flaky remnants of his own cum salty on his tongue. Logan is still loose and open from earlier, from when Carlos took him in the electrical room, where Logan whiles away hours tinkering with decrepit nav systems, sondes, and sonar buoys. Carlos felt lighter then, wilder, and the sex was carefree; laughter and tangled limbs and a little bit of roughness until pleasure built like a gasp between them.
Now Carlos wants- needs- something sweeter. He needs to feel Logan tremble, needs to feel him come apart beneath Carlos’s fingers. Carlos may not be smart enough to figure out what exactly a sonde is, but he’s always been very, very good with his hands. He puts them to use now, teasing in and out of Logan’s asshole while he traces his tongue in long, slow spirals along the rim. Logan squirms a little, mumbling out these tiny ahahah noises like he can’t even help it. He fucks back onto Carlos’s tongue, and again Carlos can taste himself; the salt-tang he left behind hours before, when he came with a shout, with Logan’s name the only word he could remember. The only word that meant anything at all.
When he’s ready, Carlos pulls Logan up by his hips, hands tight around bone. Logan grunts but follows Carlos’s guiding fingers until he’s propped on all fours, his ass up in the air. Carlos ruts against him, watching the contrast of his own skin against Logan’s as his dick slides between his cheeks. He’s teasing himself with it, with the heat and the way Logan arches up against him, already desperate for it.
Logan will have his revenge the next time he takes Carlos; he’ll taunt him until Carlos’s cock is hard and aching, leaking with want, but for now, Carlos is in charge.
He wraps his hand around the front of Logan, grip sure, and when he strokes up he tells him, “Be as loud as you want,” because he also needs Kendall and James to listen. They deserve to be kept awake and besides, Carlos doesn’t know why they wouldn’t want to hear. Logan is ridiculously hot when he’s turned on, his voice loud and clear and sexy as hell.
And more than that, he’s alive. The threads of Carlos’s nightmare still cling to him, gossamer and sticky, and now Carlos has a point to prove. He wants the whole world to know it; how very alive the two of them are, still, breathing and fucking and loving. But there is not a whole world to hear, just Kendall and James. At least they’ll appreciate the show.
He positions himself with his free hand, nudging up against tight heat and watching so that he can see the way Logan tries to suck him in. Precum beads at the slit of Carlos’s cock, smearing Logan’s hole with the sheen of it. His heart hammers, his breath hitches, and he thinks it’s kind of magical that he still feels this way about Logan after all the years they’ve been together, but he doesn’t dwell on it. Instead he shoves up inside of Logan with a jerk of his hips, the curve of Logan’s ass molding to his pelvis.
Logan’s mouth falls open, this gasp that Carlos can’t even hear over the sound of his own heartbeat. His body shudders, and he grinds back, testing, wanting, greedy for Carlos. “Move,” he begs, “Move, please, just-“
Carlos does. The boat rocks beneath them as Carlos rocks inside of Logan, jerky pumps that turn into slow slides as he catches his breath, then go spastic again when Logan squeezes tight around him, groans his name. Logan’s spine is visible through his skin, a sea dragon in pale waters, and Carlos bends forward, kisses it; licks and bites and nips, hips snapping forward for emphasis.
He doesn’t think he’ll last long, but he doesn’t actually need to. There is no one to impress except Logan, Logan who is desperate for him, who is lost inside lust, and who is impossible to disappoint. Even when Carlos fucks up, Logan is there, and Logan won’t mind if Carlos loses it first.
Still, Carlos tries. He builds up a pace, counts out the slap of skin and the needy noises Logan makes like it’s a beat, like it’s a dance, angling up, pushing in deeper. His balls hit skin, and he is tightdeepthere, too close for words. His skin is too snug, his heart is too big, and there is a thunder in his ears like crashing waves.
He has to stop, buried in Logan who is too soft, too hot, too sexy. Carlos is going to- no. He takes a deep breath, tries to regain a tenuous grasp on himself, fucks a little deeper and listens to Logan whine.
He’s good, he’s okay, he’s got this. Carlos kisses the line of muscle between Logan’s neck and shoulder, thrusts forward, a sharp punctuation.
Logan cranes his head back, tries for a kiss, misses. His lips gape open and then closed, like a fish, which almost makes Carlos laugh, but then that mouth is on his cheek, trailing wet and hot along his jaw, and Logan is grinding back on him, clenching down. Carlos forgets all about laughter, humor drying up in his chest so that a shudder can take over, pleasure a spark inside of him, kindling that speeds to a burn.
Logan has this hard, determined look in his eyes, his eyes which are the most beautiful thing in the entire world. Logan always wears everything he thinks or feels right there, open and vulnerable, so much swimming around in the chocolate-caramel of his irises, and now what he is thinking and feeling so very clearly is Carlos, his name and his body and this bittersweet note of love that runs down to his marrow.
Never once in his entire fucked up life has anyone else ever looked at Carlos that way.
He comes without meaning to, Logan’s lips finally finding his, stars on the back of his eyelids. Impossible stars, because the real ones are hidden away, high above the toxic atmosphere. Carlos finishes Logan off with his hand while his own dick softens inside of him, and he ignores the sensitivity until Logan lets off a string of expletives and spills over the scars and skin and engine grease that cover Carlos’s fingers every second of the day.
They don’t bother getting back into the hammock, curling into each other on the floor like a tableau; Romeo and Juliet after poison and swords. Carlos listens to the breath-sounds of Logan falling asleep, his dreamscape a far less scary place than Carlos’s, and smiles.
This is their world; river rot and monster-men and love that hurts like a bruise, but heals like a kiss. It is not always good, and it is not always easy, but…
He is happy.
He is wanted.
He is alive.
---
Author:
garnetice
Pairing: Carlos/Logan, mention of Kendall/James
Rating: M
Word Count: 2,520
Warnings: Bad words, bad dreams, sex. Zombie talk. Sex. Seeeex.
Summary: Every night, Carlos dreams about death, and when he wakes up, here with Logan, he lives.
Disclaimer: BTR is not mine.
Author's Notes: Part nine thousand and eighty seven of Kendall Is A Pirate And James Is A Princess. Or, alternately, one of many sexy side stories to Grab My Bags And Go and Hoping For The Shore (others include Crashing On Harbors -by moi- and Fall Into Your Sunlight and Just Breathe With Me -both by jblostfan16-). This verse has sort of spiraled out of control, AND ISN'T IT GREAT? WHO DOESN'T LIKE SEX AND ZOMBIES? So, if you don't want to read the rest, I'll sum up the world real quick: apocalypse, circa now. Zombie-water, plagues, wars, all with no rhyme or reason. Kendall and the boys hop on a ferry boat, despite the poison zombie water and go singing up and down the coastline in exchange for goods. Sex ensues everywhere. The end. OH, and jblostfan16 is the best beta/cheerleader/supporter this verse could ever have.
---
Carlos dreams about the woods.
He’s running, he thinks. Running away- No, wait. This isn’t the bad times yet.
He’s running towards something. He runs and he runs, the scent of fresh earth in his nose, leaves crunching, twigs snapping. His bare feet are callus-toughened from an endless summer of running. Laughter swells in his lungs, like joy; elation too overwhelming to hold inside of his chest. Behind him, there are footsteps, crashing through the underbrush. Laughter hits his ears, high and flighty. Carlos runs faster. He wants to win. To win- oh, to win. This is a race, then.
Up ahead looms this big, pristine lake. It is shiny and silver, metallic as a new quarter, right up until Carlos cannonballs beneath the surface. Bubbles stream past his face, and when he looks up, he can see sunlight and the crash of another body, downdowndown.
A foot kicks Carlos in the face, and there’s a rock and a flash of blond hair and a thud he can almost hear. Green and then not green, eyes flickering closed and-
He never gets farther than that. He always wakes up, sweat drenched, the taste of his own fear sharp in his mouth.
“I need to check on Kendall,” he mumbles, disentangling himself from the hammock.
Logan crashes to the floor, crashes awake. He rubs at his eyes and bites out, “What? Why?”
“I just- I need to,” Carlos says.
“Kendall’s fine.” Logan tells him, hand wrapped around Carlos’s ankle to stop him from bolting. “Carlos, I promise, he’s fine.”
“How do you know?” Carlos asks. He’s hyperventilating, maybe, just a little, but he can’t stop. He keeps seeing Kendall in the water, hitting his head and bubbles, bubbles everywhere. And his mind keeps screaming over and over and over again that water is death, water is a black cloak and a scythe, water is the grim reaper itself.
“Because James just shut up, like five minutes ago.” Logan shrugs, expression turning a little sheepish. “I was having trouble sleeping, and he’s really loud.”
Logan really shouldn’t judge. He’s also really, really loud.
“What if you’re wrong, and Kendall is hurt-“ Carlos starts, trying to move. Logan clings to his ankle, immutable. “Oh no you don’t. Kendall is fine. Great, even.”
“You’re sure?” Carlos asks, voice uncertain.
“I’m sure. C’mere.” Logan pulls Carlos down to the floor. He kisses him, his lips soft, insistent. Carlos’s shoulders slump in relief.
“Bad dreams?” Logan murmurs sympathetically, tongue darting out to wet Carlos’s lower lip, his arms circling Carlos’s shoulders. He is warm and safe and calming. Carlos opens up to him, letting the kiss turn into something different, something less chaste and more visceral. He presses himself into the hollows of Logan’s body, trying to dissolve into his skin. Logan’s fingers dig into Carlos’s bones.
He is here. He is alive. That’s important.
Logan wears moonlight in the still of the galley, and nothing else. His skin is sky-shine and evanescence, like he could dissipate beneath Carlos’s fingertips. He wants to crawl over Logan and keep him anchored, to hold him to this earth. He also wants to free him, to send him up to the stars, where maybe he’ll actually be safe. The wind whistles through the cracks and crevices of the old, creaky boat.
That’s what their lives are now; cracks and crevices and emptiness. So much emptiness.
Carlos remembers going to New York City once. He remembers shoulders pressing into him at all angles, long legs and the fear he might get trampled. There were so many people.
He’s seen movies. He knows LA was the same, once. But now? They slip in and out of the negative space humanity has left, barely ever getting noticed.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Logan says, but how can Carlos not?
Kendall, nearly drowning.
Logan, scarred and scared.
James, facing down the barrel of a gun.
These are the things that haunt Carlos’s existence.
Every night, Carlos dreams about death, and when he wakes up, here with Logan, he lives. James used to have bad dreams when they were younger; they all remember the way he’d wake up sweat soaked and screaming. It still happens, from time to time, when James isn’t wrapped up in Kendall. But when those two are together?
James is lucky. Carlos’s nightmares never give him a reprieve.
“I can’t let anything happen to you. To any of you.”
“It’ll be okay. We’re going to live to be old, old men. You and me and Kendall and James; we’ll always be together. Always and forever,” Logan says softly.
“You can’t know that.” Carlos shivers.
“I’m a genius. I can too.”
The words aren’t as comforting as they should be. Carlos has been feeling unsettled for weeks, since they first heard the news of the horde from Middle America, the radioactive freaks and the cannibal tribes and the plague victims, all moving West. All he’s been able to think about is all the people that stand- or no longer stand- between them and the monsters. They’re safe here on the ferry boat, but what about their families, piled into the abandoned subway car in LA? Or all the people they’ve met, the people they sing for; the people who keep them alive?
“Hey, hey.” Logan taps the side of Carlos’s head. “Still with the thinking. Isn’t that my job?”
Logan kisses his neck. His lips are hot and dry, cracked from too many days on the sea. But his tongue is wet when he licks letters down the line of Carlos’s throat, and it’s a little bit obscene.
Carlos can feel the curve of Logan’s mouth against his skin, a grin for the small noise that Carlos makes. Carlos chokes out, “Lie on your stomach.”
Logan pulls back, his smile dimpling.
He’s a good looking kid. Carlos has known that for ages, that Logan’s handsome. He doesn’t have James’s inherent beauty, or Kendall’s wicked grin, but he is nice to look at. And when he sprawls out on the deck, his body a pale, glowing thing in the dark, he is beautiful.
Carlos starts at his hairline, mouthing across the back of Logan’s neck, ghosting across his skin. He dips his tongue along the notches of Logan’s spine. He sucks words into Logan’s shoulder blades, where wings would grow if they could actually fly away from this place. The boat rocks beneath them, a steady lullaby.
When Carlos reaches the curve of Logan’s ass, he licks out, teasing. Logan gasps, but Carlos isn’t ready for that. Not yet. He kneels down by Logan’s ankles and kisses the thin white scar on Logan’s leg, following the curvature and the places it puckers in. There’s another human being out there with a chunk of Logan inside its stomach, unless the thing has already melted into the pavement.
The night of the attack was the first time Carlos ever gave himself over completely to another person. He’d fucked Logan before, but that night Carlos sat in his lap, a tangle of limbs and love. He watched Logan’s eyes while he rode him, sweat sticky and gorgeous.
Their lives since then haven’t all been sadness and tragedy. Sometimes, when they’re out in open water, the sun on their faces and the endless blue sea beneath them, it is a kind of joy that bubbles up in Carlos’s chest, so overwhelming that he’s not sure he can contain it all. He wants to share the whole wide world with Logan. He wants to scream to the remnants of humanity that he’s found it; the kind of love that everyone searches for.
Carlos loves life, is the thing. Even in the middle of all this darkness, standing in the midst of ruins, he loves living. There is nothing he wants more than to spend the rest of his life waking up to Logan’s dimples and sailing the coastline, singing with his best friends. All of the fear and all of the paranoia, and all his nightmares; they spring from that love.
He licks a stripe up Logan’s thigh, up, up, up until he’s licking into Logan, tasting himself there, the dry flaky remnants of his own cum salty on his tongue. Logan is still loose and open from earlier, from when Carlos took him in the electrical room, where Logan whiles away hours tinkering with decrepit nav systems, sondes, and sonar buoys. Carlos felt lighter then, wilder, and the sex was carefree; laughter and tangled limbs and a little bit of roughness until pleasure built like a gasp between them.
Now Carlos wants- needs- something sweeter. He needs to feel Logan tremble, needs to feel him come apart beneath Carlos’s fingers. Carlos may not be smart enough to figure out what exactly a sonde is, but he’s always been very, very good with his hands. He puts them to use now, teasing in and out of Logan’s asshole while he traces his tongue in long, slow spirals along the rim. Logan squirms a little, mumbling out these tiny ahahah noises like he can’t even help it. He fucks back onto Carlos’s tongue, and again Carlos can taste himself; the salt-tang he left behind hours before, when he came with a shout, with Logan’s name the only word he could remember. The only word that meant anything at all.
When he’s ready, Carlos pulls Logan up by his hips, hands tight around bone. Logan grunts but follows Carlos’s guiding fingers until he’s propped on all fours, his ass up in the air. Carlos ruts against him, watching the contrast of his own skin against Logan’s as his dick slides between his cheeks. He’s teasing himself with it, with the heat and the way Logan arches up against him, already desperate for it.
Logan will have his revenge the next time he takes Carlos; he’ll taunt him until Carlos’s cock is hard and aching, leaking with want, but for now, Carlos is in charge.
He wraps his hand around the front of Logan, grip sure, and when he strokes up he tells him, “Be as loud as you want,” because he also needs Kendall and James to listen. They deserve to be kept awake and besides, Carlos doesn’t know why they wouldn’t want to hear. Logan is ridiculously hot when he’s turned on, his voice loud and clear and sexy as hell.
And more than that, he’s alive. The threads of Carlos’s nightmare still cling to him, gossamer and sticky, and now Carlos has a point to prove. He wants the whole world to know it; how very alive the two of them are, still, breathing and fucking and loving. But there is not a whole world to hear, just Kendall and James. At least they’ll appreciate the show.
He positions himself with his free hand, nudging up against tight heat and watching so that he can see the way Logan tries to suck him in. Precum beads at the slit of Carlos’s cock, smearing Logan’s hole with the sheen of it. His heart hammers, his breath hitches, and he thinks it’s kind of magical that he still feels this way about Logan after all the years they’ve been together, but he doesn’t dwell on it. Instead he shoves up inside of Logan with a jerk of his hips, the curve of Logan’s ass molding to his pelvis.
Logan’s mouth falls open, this gasp that Carlos can’t even hear over the sound of his own heartbeat. His body shudders, and he grinds back, testing, wanting, greedy for Carlos. “Move,” he begs, “Move, please, just-“
Carlos does. The boat rocks beneath them as Carlos rocks inside of Logan, jerky pumps that turn into slow slides as he catches his breath, then go spastic again when Logan squeezes tight around him, groans his name. Logan’s spine is visible through his skin, a sea dragon in pale waters, and Carlos bends forward, kisses it; licks and bites and nips, hips snapping forward for emphasis.
He doesn’t think he’ll last long, but he doesn’t actually need to. There is no one to impress except Logan, Logan who is desperate for him, who is lost inside lust, and who is impossible to disappoint. Even when Carlos fucks up, Logan is there, and Logan won’t mind if Carlos loses it first.
Still, Carlos tries. He builds up a pace, counts out the slap of skin and the needy noises Logan makes like it’s a beat, like it’s a dance, angling up, pushing in deeper. His balls hit skin, and he is tightdeepthere, too close for words. His skin is too snug, his heart is too big, and there is a thunder in his ears like crashing waves.
He has to stop, buried in Logan who is too soft, too hot, too sexy. Carlos is going to- no. He takes a deep breath, tries to regain a tenuous grasp on himself, fucks a little deeper and listens to Logan whine.
He’s good, he’s okay, he’s got this. Carlos kisses the line of muscle between Logan’s neck and shoulder, thrusts forward, a sharp punctuation.
Logan cranes his head back, tries for a kiss, misses. His lips gape open and then closed, like a fish, which almost makes Carlos laugh, but then that mouth is on his cheek, trailing wet and hot along his jaw, and Logan is grinding back on him, clenching down. Carlos forgets all about laughter, humor drying up in his chest so that a shudder can take over, pleasure a spark inside of him, kindling that speeds to a burn.
Logan has this hard, determined look in his eyes, his eyes which are the most beautiful thing in the entire world. Logan always wears everything he thinks or feels right there, open and vulnerable, so much swimming around in the chocolate-caramel of his irises, and now what he is thinking and feeling so very clearly is Carlos, his name and his body and this bittersweet note of love that runs down to his marrow.
Never once in his entire fucked up life has anyone else ever looked at Carlos that way.
He comes without meaning to, Logan’s lips finally finding his, stars on the back of his eyelids. Impossible stars, because the real ones are hidden away, high above the toxic atmosphere. Carlos finishes Logan off with his hand while his own dick softens inside of him, and he ignores the sensitivity until Logan lets off a string of expletives and spills over the scars and skin and engine grease that cover Carlos’s fingers every second of the day.
They don’t bother getting back into the hammock, curling into each other on the floor like a tableau; Romeo and Juliet after poison and swords. Carlos listens to the breath-sounds of Logan falling asleep, his dreamscape a far less scary place than Carlos’s, and smiles.
This is their world; river rot and monster-men and love that hurts like a bruise, but heals like a kiss. It is not always good, and it is not always easy, but…
He is happy.
He is wanted.
He is alive.
---