The last was a gamble. Even though he’d been so soft the last two weeks, Tris was not, in general, a soft man. He was a tough one. A proud one. And Francis didn’t want to shatter what they’d managed to piece together.
But Tris didn’t pull back. His brows lowered, but his lips pressed into a thin, bare smile. “That obvious?”
“It’s not a bad thing,” Francis assured, leaning in even closer, thumbing along his bristled chin, holding him in place. “Like I said: you just need practice.” He closed the last distance.
If it had only been his words – heartfelt though they were – Francis would still have doubted. But every touch had been reverent, every kiss ardent and hungry. Tris was starving for this; it gave Francis the confidence, when Tris again tried to go too hard too fast, to pull back just far enough to shush him, softly, and then press back in, taking control of the kiss, turning it slow and easy.
He heard Tris suck in a breath, and then, amazingly, he yielded.
Francis kissed him again and again, drawing it out, changing angles and stroking Tris’s jaw with just his fingertips, a gentle tease. When he passed the tip of his tongue along the seam of Tris’s lips, they opened right away, and he licked inside his mouth with the same lazy thoroughness, teasing, teasing, before pressing more boldly.
It went on for long minutes, until Tris was responding in kind; until it was a giving and taking, trading control back and forth.
Until hands latched onto Francis’s hips and, a low growl in Tris’s throat his only warning, he was hauled up into Tris’s lap. One hand tangled in his hair, and the other shifted to the small of his back, pressing him down as Tris lifted his hips. Straddling him like this, Francis could feel the whole hard length of him, fully-erect and straining behind his fly.
Francis gripped his collar, hard. “Oh, God, Tris, please–”
The world tilted, and he was on his back on the bunk, Tris above him, between his spread thighs, kissing him to within an inch of his life.
Fast learner, Francis thought, distantly, as Tris’s tongue slid along his own, and a rough hand urged his jaw wider.
Francis kissed him back, and petted his throat, his shoulder, his chest; felt the hard thumping of his heart through the wall of muscle on his chest and wished like hell for two hands. He tugged at the front of Tris’s shirt, until Tris reared up, suddenly, tugged it off and dropped it behind him, and then dove back in, attacking Francis’s neck with teeth and tongue; sucking a bruise over his pulse.
Francis touched every inch of him he could reach, skin shifting over iron-hard muscle, the feel of it headier than all the drugs they’d pumped into him over the past two weeks.
When he snaked a hand between them, gripped the hair on Tris’s chest and tugged, Tris groaned against his collarbone. “Christ, baby. Fuck, I’ve wanted you.”
He shifted back up and claimed Francis by the mouth again, wet, and heated, and clumsy in a way that wasn’t about practice, but about frantic want.
How long?Francis wanted to ask. He needed the answer like the air he wasn’t getting in the relentless string of kiss after kiss.How long have you wanted me?
But that didn’t seem important when Tris pushed his shirt up and touched bare skin, nothing like the careful, nurturing touches in the shower and the sick bed. Tris palmed his ribs, cupped his chest, thumbed over his nipples, urgent and needy, his tongue plunging deep in Francis’s mouth.
He didn’t need to ask how long, because he could feel and taste the answer. Melted down against the mattress and fisted his hand in Tris’s too-long hair. Whined into the next kiss.Please, please, keep showing me.
Unsteady, wet kisses trailed down his jaw and throat; over his chest, down the concave, trembling plane of his stomach.
Tristan kissed his hipbones, grown sharp from two weeks in bed; eased down his sweatpants, brushed a kiss to the head of his cock, and then drew him into his mouth all in one slow slide.
Francis had wanted, in all his many imaginings, to be eager and seductive in this moment. Had envisioned himself whole, and teasing, making all the right faces, giving as good as he got – convincing Tris that, yes, this was good, and he should want it again.
But he was tired, and dizzy, and overwhelmed; and even if his body was not whole, he felt wholly wanted in a way he’d never expected, and he was so, so eager in a way that left his eyes stinging and his throat aching. So he twisted his finger in Tris’s hair, and gave himself over to the drowning pleasure of it. Broken open, sated, and half-asleep by the time Tris kissed him on the mouth again, and offered him a taste of himself.
~*~
He was back in the clearing, kneeling in the mud, pain like a flashfire searing all the way up his arm, through his chest, like screws through his temples. Staring down at his arm. It already looked dead, waxy and unreal. As he watched, the fingers curled, shriveled; the skin turned gray, and then black, and then to dust–
He woke with a scream lodged in the back of his throat, gasping for air. He opened his eyes to a dark broken only by the soft glow of a single, recessed light up on the wall.
His nightlight.
In his dorm.
Not the forest, not that sickening moment kneeling in the mud.
The arm was gone, though. He lay on his right side, in his narrow bunk, and when he tried to reach out with his left hand, he knew only a tingling, pinching sensation at the place where the limb had been severed.
The scream became a whimper, one that slipped through trembling lips.
