Before Tris could react, Francis let go of him – only to hook his arm around his neck and drag him down to the mat.
It wasn’t a fight, and it definitely wasn’t a sparring match. It was abrawl. A tangled, floundering, rolling-around knot of inelegance.
Tris got a knee in the stomach, and an elbow to the chin. Francis knotted his fingers in his hair, and wrenched his head around.
Tris felt teeth at his throat, and, okay, that wasit.
In a few quick, brutal moves, he had Francis face-down on the mat, his knees braced wide apart, his arm twisted behind his back.
A familiar pose.
But one made wholly different because, Tris noticed with a wave of horror that had him easing back, Francis was braced now on the stump of his left arm, instead of his hand like so many times before.
“Don’t you dare,” Francis growled. “Don’t youdare.”
Tris paused. He felt the throb of Francis’s pulse in the wrist that he held; felt the staccato beat of his breath in the ribs that pressed backward into his own.
Francis made a sound like he meant to speak again, an aborted little huff, and Tris understood, then.
They’d been intimate during Francis’s recovery – had not even slept in separate beds, no matter how small the bunks were, since he’d been released from the med bay – but Tris knew that he’d been handling him carefully. That he’d been sure to take control in a way that resulted in Francis laid carefully on his back, or propped on pillows, without having to do much work and definitely without having to put any strain on what was left of his arm.
That had apparently been insulting.
No, he thought, catching a glimpse of the fire sparking in the one blue eye that he could see from here: that had been devastating.
He took a breath, and leaned back in, hips tucked to Francis’s ass, weight pinning him down.
Francis gasped.
“What do you want me to do?” Tris asked.
“Finish what you started.”
Tris didn’t think he meant tonight, now, in this moment. He thought of another moment like this, weeks ago, when he’d still been resisting, before any of this had happened, and he’d been cold, and cruel, because he didn’t want to open himself up to something with this kind of power to hurt him.
And Francis had been the one to get hurt instead.
“Alright,” he said, voice tight now from a mix of anticipation and regret. “Alright.”
Tris kept hold of his wrist, but slid his other hand down from between his shoulder blades, down his neck, and over his nape, until he had a grip of his hair.
Francis let out a low, immediately-heated sound. “God.” He spread his knees a little wider, so that Tris rested against him more fully. “Tris…”
“Shh, it’s okay. I got you.”
Francis sighed, and the tension bled out of him, even though he began to shake with want. “Please.” The quiet, breathy plea went straight to Tris’s cock.
He let go of the wrist he held, tightened his hold on Francis’s hair, and looped an arm around his waist; felt the trembling in his belly, beneath the sweat-damp cotton of his shirt. When Tris sat back on his heels, he lifted Francis up with him, back to chest, Francis’s legs spread wide so he was all but straddling Tris’s lap.
Tris bit at his neck; pushed his shirt up to palm over his chest, and tweak his nipples.
Francis arched back into him, murmuring wordless encouragement, hips moving in a way that Tris was helpless but to echo.
Francis wanted it rough, he knew; hard, and unforgiving. A persistent fantasy, then: to be held down and taken mercilessly, to be shown that he was the weaker of the two.
But coming through what he had, wanting to stay, getting up again and again, no matter how many times he hit the mat; pushing back against every one of Tristan’s stupid, fearful protests – that was a strength that Tris didn’t know if he had the power to put into words.
And he would only be forceful if he was assured that Francis knew how much he admired and adored him, first.
