Possibly as a result of his own question (or, rather, his question veiled as assertion, in pursuit of agreement, a fine difference), Marcus kneels out of his clothing in time to Flint stripping out of his final layer. Relieved it get it off of him finally, pants and drawers drawn together and pushed off the edge of the bed. Hard enough to show, arousal coming about in a slow and patient way that is nevertheless comparatively eager for having only been kissed, his shirt rucked up, a slight physical instinct for the sensation of another person letting down his hair. Small things that burn beneath his skin regardless.
And Flint, reaching for him. Determined to re-enter that gentle, warm space they'd cultivated, Marcus wanders a hand out to his chest as he moves in closer.
Whatever little twist of tension that had had him opening his mouth and asking something is still there, but also not unfamiliar. A more acute and conscious version of past twinges he's worked past before, is fairly confident he can be made to forget it again. Still, something a little lingering and searching in his expression as he sinks in nearer, but on his way to a kiss.
That look playing in the shadows of Marcus' face seems starkly laid, snagging at Flint's attention because some instinct has come sharply round to be on the lookout for it. Still, he kisses lift his chin slightly to meet Marcus' trajectory. Reaches after him with his spare hand as well, and half submits to and half draws him into that kiss he'd come leaning in after.
He kisses him briefly, not without warmth though he's very aware of the press of lips and the scuff of his own whiskers. Warm skin under hands and how plainly naked they both are. Give it a moment, he thinks, and the prickling nerve endings sense of this will slant reliably low and thick.
So "I'm sorry," is an abrupt interruption any way it's cut.
Flint draws back (down), some flex of the wrist transfiguring reaching into bracing so as to forbid Marcus from following should be be urged to. Finding Marcus' eye in the narrow space, and painfully aware of having his own wits being annoyingly about him. Probably they both would find a leaking cock and a little irrationality more preferable than the grinding little point hooked in the back of his attention, both dragging its heels and refusing to be shaken.
If spoken word wasn't enough, the adjustment of Flint's hand is more than. Marcus doesn't reel back or anything, but does stop, does rise up a little to lend Flint room.
His hand rests laxly high on Flint's chest, half-laying up on his other elbow. Conscious, in a sudden rush, of the arrangement of their bodies, about as sensitive to it as he'd been that first time when Flint had laid his his finger above blood-soaked bandaging, at least physiologically. The nearness of his semi-hard cock to warm skin, the nudge of his knee to leg, and the stillness of his hand near collarbone.
Brightly clear, the quick study he makes again of Flint's expression, even while he says, "It is," quietly, into this narrow space. A hesitation, deciding there's some other question there remaining, and offers, "And I want it to be what you want."
This. Whether he means the activities themselves or something else, the broader shape of the thing, the unravelling of its continuation. Hopefully Flint responds swiftly, before that cracks open any further.
Instead, a narrowing angle in his face draws closer still. Something tender (in the bruising sense), finding itself the subject of active examination, instinctively wants for shielding and Marcus' hand across his chest is warm, and it seems heavier than it is.
For all the foolishness involved in climbing back staircases to rented rooms, and dalliances in darkened corridors, and the generally intentional irresponsibility, he has understood this to quietly be a carefully managed thing. Predicated on what is meant to be simple and honest and just a little strict, objectively more dangerous to Marcus than it is anything else whether the man cares to acknowledge it or not.
(But maybe he is attempting to appease him to keep him in his bed; ostensibly wanting a thing halfway while glutting himself. The equivalent of offering to fuck Marcus and his cock yet so sluggish that it's a good thing he'd not taken him up on it. It's possible something humiliating lurks here, waiting for him to raise his arm far enough for it to come in under and bite into him.)
—So, no. If he has a reply, it's not immediately produced.
Regret is setting in, more like rust than frost, somewhere beneath the ribcage. For saying anything or the way he said it or when it was said and in relation to other things being said. There are times when Marcus would greatly like to be a little less stupid than he is conscious of being and now is one of them, as Flint is quiet and shuttering. They could just be kissing instead and it'd be good.
Rare to find a silence that he actively wants to fill, also, and that he doesn't is more of a comment on being uncertain what to supply it with than an instinct for reticence. A restless, shallow breath leaves him, gaze dipping down to the lay of his hand on Flint's chest.
Fingers flexing, stretching, the slight tickle of blunt nails.
"I don't tend to want things by halves," finally. "I think we're alike in that way." He looks back towards him, where blue-green eyes with their mingled hues have muddied some in the lower light. "I wanted to make certain."
He would like to fuck him again, would like Flint's mouth on him; the thought is enough to make his cock twitch. And he would also like coax Flint along as far as he'd like, as gentle and slow as they were a moment ago and to whatever conclusion arises naturally, and he would also like to lay here and read that stupid book if it was more fitting while his restlessness gave up on itself.
But he asks, "What is it you want?" without being sure exactly what it is they're speaking to, but also: he hadn't asked.
Something inexplicable bristles in him like hackles at the back of a dog's neck. An irrational frustration—how has he been unclear, exactly—which requires a hard check before it spills free of him. He blinks it back. Mentally fits a lid in tight over top of it, and instead studies Marcus down the length of his nose from where he has his chin resting against his chest. Pale eye wrought a different color by candlelight, that fleeting sense of restlessness and unease showing somewhere in it.
Meanwhile, his own hands have gone quiet though by no means have they withdrawn.
"If I didn't want you," he says at once. "I wouldn't have brought you up here, much less into this room. And I certainly wouldn't have you touching me in that one."
True.
But also, bluntly: "I said you would grow tired of me."
More or less. No, he doesn't expect Marcus will be satisfied with pieces of things.
Odd, the competing, prickling sensations inspired by this first thing. First, the sweep of warmth for something spoken out loud, and done so more generally than, say, how Flint might want his cock or his hands, a hard surface and a firm pounding, even though he had every intention to peel certain things out of context (It's all I've thought of) and admire them later. That, and a flush of something he might describe as guilt, for his own uncertainty, after they've made it this far, after what Flint had given him today.
And also, maybe, his own minor hackle. Is it not, after all, ordinary, to want certainty? After navigating invisible boundaries, no matter how well they tend to give when pushed. After subsisting off the sound of his name and a heavy breath in place of I want you too.
These competing near-tactile feelings don't have a chance to resolve before Flint says this next thing, and they scatter.
"No," Marcus says, after a beat. "I'm not."
Flint's hands haven't left him. If they had, he might not slide his hand up, palm warm up at the bend of Flint's neck. "I haven't. Not nearly."
Stupid—to find that it wrenches something in him. That there should be something that blooms warm in his chest, and that it should be painfully off center enough to ache there against his ribs. Here is a warm hand, and Marcus made at least halfway eager to fuck him, and despite them a stinging bite of something like disappointment. That grating sense of missing a thing that's presently perfectly within reach—under his hands, even.
That irritation turns to nip inward, some flex of pain in him and in his face for it. A briefly lowering brow and tightening mouth. The momentary impulse to set his jaw against it, and a more troubling reluctance to set his fingers about the thing and simply pry it free.
"Not today," Flint says, the even scrape of it humming under the shape of Marcus' palm. He hasn't looked away from him and there is something plain in his tenor as if what he's saying is just well reasoned fact and not a flinch. "But it will happen. It already is happening. Tell me I'm wrong, but this very conversation would seem to be evidence of some dissatisfaction."
The hand at Flint's throat doesn't remove itself, but does sort of open up, turn at the wrist, a gesture that's at a loss before it resettles.
But with a lack of a quick verbal reply, there's no choice but to consider it. Whether that in the asking Flint to caution him against some instinct in him, it's acted as a veil instead, obscuring but not hiding. Marcus' intent focus lowers, a furl of protest at his brow as he tries to match the things Flint is saying to the fretful tangle occurring beneath the surface.
(He should sit up. They should be dressed. He's not sure it helps his case to be like this, holding onto Flint like driftwood—)
"I know there are boundaries," finally, hand gentle where it lays. Not negligent or forgotten, either, palm shaped to the column of throat, fingertips set where hair textures scalp behind the ear. Not moving, just warm. "In theory, there are. It's a little like moving through darkness, finding them, or finding where they aren't. I asked what I asked because I don't want to give you cause to bring them in closer."
Back to Flint's eye, instead of where his gaze had wandered lower. "I'm trying to not be too reckless with you. It's all reckless enough as it is."
Dissatisfaction. It feels like an inverted way of naming it, that ache, but not wrong for it.
Hard to say in what direction the twinge of frustration that rises in him moves. Just that it is there, oily on the surface of everything else. Something to be accounted for as he submits to the hand curved close about his neck, its gentle pressure of fingers, and to Marcus' examination and the arrangement of his weight as it lays not really over but not really beside him either. As he weighs up his own reply, determined to be even handed.
This rationale Marcus has provided is neither particularly unfair or unhonest, however much it might rankle at a vulnerable piece of him prone to bristling. There is a difference between this and indictment, even if it feels very much like the latter. And much as he might bite back, sink his teeth in over it— then where would they be? Not on their way to fucking again tonight, at the very least.
So: checking himself. Fingers pressing like a reflex where his hands remain laid on Marcus' bare skin.
"My intention isn't to be difficult," he says in that same direct way. "But we are being careless." Reckless. Fucking behind the thin barrier of a bolted door and kissing slow and soft and unhurried here in this bed are, in some sense, on equal footing in that respect.
"I don't know that any close examination can practically be done without having the extent of that carelessness brought into the light alongside the rest of it."
Once, they shared a bed and pointed out each others scars and asked for the story that produced them. Since, there hasn't been complete reticence around the terrain underneath the skin, but there's a lot to be desired. The way Marcus looks at Flint now in that close space seems to search for it, would like to get fingernails beneath the seam of that direct and factual tone of voice and crack it open.
But the severity of it ebbs. The arm of the hand holding Flint's throat unfolds, some, a more generous splay of weight across Flint's chest.
"Alright," he says. Alright, forget examination. "Then let me," and another stop, before some internal shiver of hackles discards the notion of needing permission. "I'll keep coming back." His thumb swoops down the edge of Flint's jaw. "And looking for you across alehouses and stealing into your tent and oversleeping here in the morning. I'll wonder if a summons is to file a late report or because you want me to touch you and try for the latter as long as the door's locked."
All murmured rather seriously, but there is some fleck of amusement, or trying to evoke the same. "Until you tell me to stop in no uncertain terms, and even then, you might need to do it twice." His fingers press. "Agreed?"
The fact that they are negotiating this at all means he should tell him to do so. Stop him, and put their clothes back on, and send Marcus out with the understanding that the next time they see one another that there will be no more of this.
So yes, apparently. He is looking to please him to an effort to keep him here in this room, in this bed with his warm hand at the base of his throat. To ensure that Marcus is willing to come back and to do all of this blind feeling around in the dark regardless of sharp things he might knick his fingers against. It's an absurd half measure and, Flint thinks, outrageously selfish.
(This is, objectively, not the sort of talk that occurs between two people who sometimes fuck because they've an itch for scratching and a convenient body available with which to do so. To say nothing of the fact that these past weeks have had the marked affect of aggravating that impulse—forgetting the long stretches in which he has not had a body convenient to hand, and to be suddenly and constantly ravenous given the barest reminder that such tastes can be satisfied.
It's all I've thought of, he'd said, which is more true than not. He isn't so stupid as to not made note of these things.)
"So long as you tell me when you've finished with it," he says, even handed.
It's simple to the point of stupidity, these parameters: to say when and continue pouring until. But the tension that had clawed in when he'd first felt Flint's hand turn to stay him— doesn't leave, but changes. Relief, as if having only been half aware of some source of discomfort and then being rid of it. Freeing.
"Aye," Marcus says, and means it. It's only fair.
His hand turns, though he hardly needs to tip Flint's face towards him very far when he pulls himself up that short distance. It isn't a hard and fast kiss, nor tentative for the lack—pleasure found in the gentle approach of it.
If he senses there was some near miss, a potential for Flint deciding that they ought to end this now if it necessitates any level of negotiation, then it doesn't manifest in the lay of his hand or the press of his mouth. Something that's been crafted through rough-handling need not be considered as fragile as that.
He answers. Of course he does. This is the whole point, isn't it? To be relieved by how the pressure slackens when they stop talking and resume this play of hands and mouths. Slowly, first. And then, his fingers tightly faintly over where his hands have settled about Marcus, not really dredging him down but intimating the shape of holding him a little closer. Kissing him slightly harder. Not hurried, just—
Insistent, as if they're meant to be proving something.
This is what he wants. The warm shape of Marcus aligned near to him, and the sharp taste of his mouth, and the lingering scent of the tobacco he smokes ingrained in the taste of him and in his skin. What is so fucking difficult about that? (And, more, why is the prospect of letting it go so irritating? There are other people they both could be fucking.)
He kisses him a second time, marginally less demanding if not half so slack as he'd been before Marcus had slipped from the bed to begin with. So, very close, as if on the way to a third—
"Can we get on to the part where you use my mouth now, then?"
At that faint pressure, Marcus pushes in closer. Bare skin, needless warmth, lips parting in answer to a harder kiss. Proving something in return.
There are other people they could both be fucking. That Marcus scarcely had for a long stretch of time before biting down on the chance of it with Flint means—what, really? Nothing, in that if they were to end this, he could find someone if he truly wanted to, or simply return to that prior state. But he's not insensible to the fact that by now, having compromised something, he thinks it would hurt. A more complicated rending apart than just abandoning one convenient lay for another.
It had been happiness, that curl of warm feeling in resting comfortably beside, pencil scratchings and too-sweet rum coating his mouth. Naming it so feels like a threat to its existence, capable of winking out.
There's the tip of Marcus' head that implies he'd been prepared to begin a deeper kiss, but catches Flint's words. "Mm," he says, a brief spread of a smile, and kisses him anyway, just shallower, and letting his teeth catch against his bottom lip, a silent sort of yes please. "How do you want me?"
A question with an answer that comes considerably more easily than all these others, though it is obfuscated by Flint's hand first shifting up after Marcus' chin. Catching him, he holds him there for a moment—not actually a kiss, but so close to his mouth (with the appealing stinging sensation in his lower lip) to nearly qualify.
"Here," he tells him. This too is plain and straightforward. "I want you to kneel over me."
He wants to be bracketed in by Marcus' knees and calves; to be caught, or implied to be, between him and the headboard; to feel Marcus press down after him. That might satisfy.
His next breath out sounds like agreement, and a shiver to it, a fresh spark of arousal for a compelling suggestion, the way it's delivered so near to his mouth, the bracket of the hand at his chin. Pushes past the catch of it to nudge a final kiss against his mouth, and then withdrawing.
There'd been some several seconds in the past conversation when there'd almost been something like self-consciousness for the way they'd both managed to strip down first before engaging in mutual existential crisis, and navigate the possibility of something breaking. Even during their first tangle, essentially strangers in the ways that mattered, he hadn't felt overly conscious like that for shedding his clothing. A reflexive modesty only for close quarters.
All this to say: it hasn't completely dispersed, that unbidden sense of exposure, but it doesn't clutch at him anxiously or have him pause. It is, instead, a pleasing tingle of discomfort in the moment when Marcus goes to kneel up, hand smoothing across Flint's chest before resting some weight against his shoulder, moving to straddle. Grips himself while they both adjust, encouraging that slow rethickening of blood and flesh.
Well. Maybe not so slow, now that he's here, looking down at Flint. A minor, vain instinct to discern whether what he sees is enjoyable in return.
Later, when the room has gone fully dark, that dissatisfaction will again come creeping up through the awareness Flint has for his own body among the bed linens. He will think for a long time, turning the pieces of this over in the mind in a way he has disallowed himself to do. Not intentional, exactly, in his obsessive review; merely compulsory, he will be unable to keep himself from it.
But for the moment, the impulse can be dressed in other colors. If there is a sense of lingering vulnerability in the flesh, it can be assigned to Marcus' weight at his shoulder and being cast in the shadow of his body as he shifts in over him; if there is something restless and buzzing in him, it can be the pleasant kind of anxious anticipation that comes from putting himself in a position where he will be relatively obligated to rely on the good will of his partner. The sense of some easing tension can be for so readily getting what he'd asked for.
Even so, having shifted faintly higher up into the rearranged pillows from between Marcus' knees by those half degrees necessary to free up some partial range of motion in his shoulders, this might make for slightly claustrophobic quarters were some part of him not in some way still keen to justify himself. This is perfectly permissible. Preferable, even, to how he might have had to arrange himself otherwise to accomplish this. It's very easy this way to swing his attention between Marcus' face down to the work of his hand, and there is something intent in the press of Flint's fingers high on the outside of Marcus' thighs for it.
He would say if it were too much.
Instead, with a low rumbling note of something like approval, he mostly allows himself a few moments to watch the shape of Marcus' hand and the rousing of his cock in it. To test flicking his attention upward, scraping over the line of his Marcus' body to look him in the face. When he does finally shift, it's to slide a hand from thigh to hip, and then moving to replace Marcus' hand with his own.
Marcus' focus shifts from Flint's face to his hands, an eager flick of transition. Abruptly desiring to watch that, maybe just as much as it will be appealing to note the stretch of warm mouth around him. Maybe more, given his latest obsession for watching Flint handle things, much less himself. His own hand shifts back as Flint's fingers move in under his, setting somewhere high on his thigh, something like a mirror to his Flint had held himself for him, on the table.
Easier not to worry as much, with blood redirected to cock, thought redirected to the slow winding up of tension, but admittedly—
He will probably not analyse very much tonight at all. He may even feel satisfied for something uneven having been smoothed out, content in the knowledge that something has been said out loud and can't be taken back. Here, kneeling over Flint, there is no flicker of concern that some advantage is being taken as that contented rumble out of the other man shivers through him, and that they can safely continue this slow trade of want and give and take. Flint will say if something is too much. When he is too much.
That Marcus allows Flint to set a pace is a matter of courtesy in the moment, and the absence of urgency he feels for having already gotten off not so long ago. Nice to kneel here and be touched, his hand wandering over Flint's arm and shoulder, letting his breath thicken in his lungs and fall heavier from him.
The pace in question being set is not so much slow as it is almost casually exploratory—taking advantage of the navigation room afforded by the lack starving edge to their appetite, transmuting the whir of consideration humming in the back of his head to testing the ways of touching and stroking Marcus instead. There is little reason not to linger here for a few moments, hand playing at the length of Marcus' cock and his attention sliding from the thickening shape of it up to the other man's face. A series of stolen glances that moves between the two, somehow slightly sensing illicit regardless of the direction they move in.
So: a calloused thumb works softly at the underside of Marcus' cockhead, unaided by spit or oil and rendered light in deference to that fact. And the gentle circling of fingers, quietly teasing at restriction. Some soft, insistent squeeze and stroke that somehow mirrors the trajectory of Marcus' hand at his bicep and shoulder.
When Flint does make to use his mouth, the hand lingering at Marcus' thigh presses in mute encouragement to draw him nearer to the effect that he might taste there at the base of him. Breath in the smell of his body and press a wet, hot kiss to the sensitive skin of his balls where the bristle of beard might be most effective while Flint's hand continues to work the rest of him close across the line of his cheek.
This is all easily done; readily given, selfishly taken.
His expression in these little stolen glances is mild, eyes cast down to watching Flint's hand work him over, the occasional twinge of tension that corresponds imperfectly with the feel of a thickened pulse under the skin, a small flex of tension up the thigh where he sways just a little into that teasing rub of thumb up under him, a squeeze against palm.
Moves in closer once silently asked for, and the feeling of Flint's mouth, that open kiss between his legs and the rough friction of beard are enough of a dial twist to evoke a sound out of him, a breathy grunt of pleasure. His hand grows harder at Flint's shoulder. The sound of his other palm gently meeting the edge of the headboard, steadying.
Unable to help the slight nudge forward of his hips, sliding cock through hand and against cheek, all still a little dry and tentative and necessarily gentle but the friction does something for him too. A contrast to the slicker spread of tongue, velvety warm breath. He still smells of sex and sweat, they both do, but it's hard to be self-conscious for this fact after being ushered in so insistently.
The hand at Flint's shoulder roves to the back of his neck, his head, the gentle presence of blunt nails, biting and approving.
It's reassuring. That low noise and the soft creak of the bed under the weight of Marcus' hand finding purchase on it; the dig of fingernails and the prickle of sensation and the flush they inspire; the appeal of that minor friction between fingers and across his face. Despite the implied vulnerability of this place between Marcus' knees, it all feels very like being in control. This is all at his discretion. Soon, when Marcus is fucking his mouth, it will be because he let him do it.
In the way his hand made its examination of him, so too does Flint's mouth. Kissing and licking there at the base of him with only a glance in the direction of a real rythmn, letting the gentle scrape of his whiskers be put to work. When he does turn his head, tongue sliding unhurried up the underside of Marcus' length to tease these gently sucking kisses at the sensitive place his thumb had previously circled, it's in part to slick him sufficiently so that the next time he invites that slide of cock across his cheek it will go more easily. Leave a faintly damp stripe across his face made for glinting in yellow candlelight.
This lazy combination of hand and cheek and tongue, fleeting glances that steal up to watch Marcus from beneath the shape of his cock, continues for a wandering, patient interval. Until it becomes clear—moving to taste there at the pleasantly bitter tip of him only to revert back to kissing elsewhere—that if Marcus wants past his lips, he's going to be required to ask for it.
There's a part of him more than willing to linger here, soaking up the attention of warm mouth, precise hands, catching the occasional snare of eye contact. That knife-edge of teasing, the roving of Flint's mouth without an obvious pattern he can anticipate. He can rely on this, the slide of his cock against the other man's cheek, but that isn't the same as hot-wet-pressure that, slowly, he feels himself starting to need.
Above Flint's head, Marcus grips the headboard that little bit tighter at that fleeting taste of it, warm mouth against the end of his cock where he's started leaking, and there's the (potentially) satisfying sign of muscles tensing up his thighs and abdomen, anticipating. And then that touch roves away, and the short breath out of Marcus has an edge of frustration bitten back.
He rolls his head back on his neck, soaking up those differently directed kisses and licks, the luxurious tease of it. The hand he has cupped at the back of Flint's head had slackened some, neglected, but comes back alive as he looks back down, moving around to palm across jaw and cheek, the silvery evidence of saliva there a match for the shine of it on his own swollen skin, small patches nested around the base of himself.
"Flint," has an asking tone, a match for the small, needing shifts of his hips he's started making.
It draws the eye up, that sound. From under the shape of Marcus' hand moving to touch him, mouth warm and tongue wet alongside those narrow flexing movements, Flint catches his eye. Lifts his chin by an absent degree, a thin limn of pride glinting there with the trace shine of spit. Not nuzzling into the palm of Marcus' hand, but certainly encouraged by it.
It would be easy to play coy and see that asking thing turned into a real question. To hum some soft question of a sound against sensitive skin like blowing in the ember of Marcus' frustration to make it glow. But he doesn't actually want to. He wants Marcus moving between his lips and over his tongue, and that hand gripping at the back of his neck. He wants him to know that he wants him; that he is inviting it rather than indulging him. That Marcus isn't wrong—this does stir something low and tight in him.
So instead, attention trained high on Marcus' face, he parts his lips. Rubs the shape of that cockhead briefly across the eager flat of his tongue and murmurs a low note of encouragement that's echoed in the coaxing press of fingers at Marcus' thigh.
Satisfying, in this moment, to be so invited. His eyes hood under the feeling of flat tongue working against the same spot that had evoked that little spark of frustration, the mild reverberation of sound from Flint's throat and the press of fingers. His hand slides backwards just enough for fingers to curl up beneath Flint's ear, before Marcus pushes his cock past parted lips.
The heavy pant out of him is nearly loud in the quiet room, as is the creak of mattress and bed in response to slightly redistributed weight, a knee nudged higher. Immediately swept up in the impulse to list more heavily forwards, to lean against the headboard and fuck down Flint's throat, but reflexive restraint locks in. Just carefully pushes in enough to fill the other man's mouth, and holds there with the plain desire to be sucked.
It could be differently humiliating to be as plainly eager as he is, but the tenor of dialogue never quite skewed it that way. No, it's simply good to be wanted and to show up for that want, where his eagerness is not managed but counted on.
When he draws back, it's only shallowly, only for the purpose of seeing how Flint treats that freedom, attention dipping back down. Thumb skirting along the line of his cheek, freshly shaved.
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no subject
And Flint, reaching for him. Determined to re-enter that gentle, warm space they'd cultivated, Marcus wanders a hand out to his chest as he moves in closer.
Whatever little twist of tension that had had him opening his mouth and asking something is still there, but also not unfamiliar. A more acute and conscious version of past twinges he's worked past before, is fairly confident he can be made to forget it again. Still, something a little lingering and searching in his expression as he sinks in nearer, but on his way to a kiss.
no subject
He kisses him briefly, not without warmth though he's very aware of the press of lips and the scuff of his own whiskers. Warm skin under hands and how plainly naked they both are. Give it a moment, he thinks, and the prickling nerve endings sense of this will slant reliably low and thick.
So "I'm sorry," is an abrupt interruption any way it's cut.
Flint draws back (down), some flex of the wrist transfiguring reaching into bracing so as to forbid Marcus from following should be be urged to. Finding Marcus' eye in the narrow space, and painfully aware of having his own wits being annoyingly about him. Probably they both would find a leaking cock and a little irrationality more preferable than the grinding little point hooked in the back of his attention, both dragging its heels and refusing to be shaken.
"Is this not what you want?"
no subject
His hand rests laxly high on Flint's chest, half-laying up on his other elbow. Conscious, in a sudden rush, of the arrangement of their bodies, about as sensitive to it as he'd been that first time when Flint had laid his his finger above blood-soaked bandaging, at least physiologically. The nearness of his semi-hard cock to warm skin, the nudge of his knee to leg, and the stillness of his hand near collarbone.
Brightly clear, the quick study he makes again of Flint's expression, even while he says, "It is," quietly, into this narrow space. A hesitation, deciding there's some other question there remaining, and offers, "And I want it to be what you want."
This. Whether he means the activities themselves or something else, the broader shape of the thing, the unravelling of its continuation. Hopefully Flint responds swiftly, before that cracks open any further.
no subject
For all the foolishness involved in climbing back staircases to rented rooms, and dalliances in darkened corridors, and the generally intentional irresponsibility, he has understood this to quietly be a carefully managed thing. Predicated on what is meant to be simple and honest and just a little strict, objectively more dangerous to Marcus than it is anything else whether the man cares to acknowledge it or not.
(But maybe he is attempting to appease him to keep him in his bed; ostensibly wanting a thing halfway while glutting himself. The equivalent of offering to fuck Marcus and his cock yet so sluggish that it's a good thing he'd not taken him up on it. It's possible something humiliating lurks here, waiting for him to raise his arm far enough for it to come in under and bite into him.)
—So, no. If he has a reply, it's not immediately produced.
no subject
Rare to find a silence that he actively wants to fill, also, and that he doesn't is more of a comment on being uncertain what to supply it with than an instinct for reticence. A restless, shallow breath leaves him, gaze dipping down to the lay of his hand on Flint's chest.
Fingers flexing, stretching, the slight tickle of blunt nails.
"I don't tend to want things by halves," finally. "I think we're alike in that way." He looks back towards him, where blue-green eyes with their mingled hues have muddied some in the lower light. "I wanted to make certain."
He would like to fuck him again, would like Flint's mouth on him; the thought is enough to make his cock twitch. And he would also like coax Flint along as far as he'd like, as gentle and slow as they were a moment ago and to whatever conclusion arises naturally, and he would also like to lay here and read that stupid book if it was more fitting while his restlessness gave up on itself.
But he asks, "What is it you want?" without being sure exactly what it is they're speaking to, but also: he hadn't asked.
no subject
Meanwhile, his own hands have gone quiet though by no means have they withdrawn.
"If I didn't want you," he says at once. "I wouldn't have brought you up here, much less into this room. And I certainly wouldn't have you touching me in that one."
True.
But also, bluntly: "I said you would grow tired of me."
More or less. No, he doesn't expect Marcus will be satisfied with pieces of things.
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And also, maybe, his own minor hackle. Is it not, after all, ordinary, to want certainty? After navigating invisible boundaries, no matter how well they tend to give when pushed. After subsisting off the sound of his name and a heavy breath in place of I want you too.
These competing near-tactile feelings don't have a chance to resolve before Flint says this next thing, and they scatter.
"No," Marcus says, after a beat. "I'm not."
Flint's hands haven't left him. If they had, he might not slide his hand up, palm warm up at the bend of Flint's neck. "I haven't. Not nearly."
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That irritation turns to nip inward, some flex of pain in him and in his face for it. A briefly lowering brow and tightening mouth. The momentary impulse to set his jaw against it, and a more troubling reluctance to set his fingers about the thing and simply pry it free.
"Not today," Flint says, the even scrape of it humming under the shape of Marcus' palm. He hasn't looked away from him and there is something plain in his tenor as if what he's saying is just well reasoned fact and not a flinch. "But it will happen. It already is happening. Tell me I'm wrong, but this very conversation would seem to be evidence of some dissatisfaction."
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But with a lack of a quick verbal reply, there's no choice but to consider it. Whether that in the asking Flint to caution him against some instinct in him, it's acted as a veil instead, obscuring but not hiding. Marcus' intent focus lowers, a furl of protest at his brow as he tries to match the things Flint is saying to the fretful tangle occurring beneath the surface.
(He should sit up. They should be dressed. He's not sure it helps his case to be like this, holding onto Flint like driftwood—)
"I know there are boundaries," finally, hand gentle where it lays. Not negligent or forgotten, either, palm shaped to the column of throat, fingertips set where hair textures scalp behind the ear. Not moving, just warm. "In theory, there are. It's a little like moving through darkness, finding them, or finding where they aren't. I asked what I asked because I don't want to give you cause to bring them in closer."
Back to Flint's eye, instead of where his gaze had wandered lower. "I'm trying to not be too reckless with you. It's all reckless enough as it is."
Dissatisfaction. It feels like an inverted way of naming it, that ache, but not wrong for it.
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This rationale Marcus has provided is neither particularly unfair or unhonest, however much it might rankle at a vulnerable piece of him prone to bristling. There is a difference between this and indictment, even if it feels very much like the latter. And much as he might bite back, sink his teeth in over it— then where would they be? Not on their way to fucking again tonight, at the very least.
So: checking himself. Fingers pressing like a reflex where his hands remain laid on Marcus' bare skin.
"My intention isn't to be difficult," he says in that same direct way. "But we are being careless." Reckless. Fucking behind the thin barrier of a bolted door and kissing slow and soft and unhurried here in this bed are, in some sense, on equal footing in that respect.
"I don't know that any close examination can practically be done without having the extent of that carelessness brought into the light alongside the rest of it."
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But the severity of it ebbs. The arm of the hand holding Flint's throat unfolds, some, a more generous splay of weight across Flint's chest.
"Alright," he says. Alright, forget examination. "Then let me," and another stop, before some internal shiver of hackles discards the notion of needing permission. "I'll keep coming back." His thumb swoops down the edge of Flint's jaw. "And looking for you across alehouses and stealing into your tent and oversleeping here in the morning. I'll wonder if a summons is to file a late report or because you want me to touch you and try for the latter as long as the door's locked."
All murmured rather seriously, but there is some fleck of amusement, or trying to evoke the same. "Until you tell me to stop in no uncertain terms, and even then, you might need to do it twice." His fingers press. "Agreed?"
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So yes, apparently. He is looking to please him to an effort to keep him here in this room, in this bed with his warm hand at the base of his throat. To ensure that Marcus is willing to come back and to do all of this blind feeling around in the dark regardless of sharp things he might knick his fingers against. It's an absurd half measure and, Flint thinks, outrageously selfish.
(This is, objectively, not the sort of talk that occurs between two people who sometimes fuck because they've an itch for scratching and a convenient body available with which to do so. To say nothing of the fact that these past weeks have had the marked affect of aggravating that impulse—forgetting the long stretches in which he has not had a body convenient to hand, and to be suddenly and constantly ravenous given the barest reminder that such tastes can be satisfied.
It's all I've thought of, he'd said, which is more true than not. He isn't so stupid as to not made note of these things.)
"So long as you tell me when you've finished with it," he says, even handed.
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"Aye," Marcus says, and means it. It's only fair.
His hand turns, though he hardly needs to tip Flint's face towards him very far when he pulls himself up that short distance. It isn't a hard and fast kiss, nor tentative for the lack—pleasure found in the gentle approach of it.
If he senses there was some near miss, a potential for Flint deciding that they ought to end this now if it necessitates any level of negotiation, then it doesn't manifest in the lay of his hand or the press of his mouth. Something that's been crafted through rough-handling need not be considered as fragile as that.
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Insistent, as if they're meant to be proving something.
This is what he wants. The warm shape of Marcus aligned near to him, and the sharp taste of his mouth, and the lingering scent of the tobacco he smokes ingrained in the taste of him and in his skin. What is so fucking difficult about that? (And, more, why is the prospect of letting it go so irritating? There are other people they both could be fucking.)
He kisses him a second time, marginally less demanding if not half so slack as he'd been before Marcus had slipped from the bed to begin with. So, very close, as if on the way to a third—
"Can we get on to the part where you use my mouth now, then?"
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There are other people they could both be fucking. That Marcus scarcely had for a long stretch of time before biting down on the chance of it with Flint means—what, really? Nothing, in that if they were to end this, he could find someone if he truly wanted to, or simply return to that prior state. But he's not insensible to the fact that by now, having compromised something, he thinks it would hurt. A more complicated rending apart than just abandoning one convenient lay for another.
It had been happiness, that curl of warm feeling in resting comfortably beside, pencil scratchings and too-sweet rum coating his mouth. Naming it so feels like a threat to its existence, capable of winking out.
There's the tip of Marcus' head that implies he'd been prepared to begin a deeper kiss, but catches Flint's words. "Mm," he says, a brief spread of a smile, and kisses him anyway, just shallower, and letting his teeth catch against his bottom lip, a silent sort of yes please. "How do you want me?"
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"Here," he tells him. This too is plain and straightforward. "I want you to kneel over me."
He wants to be bracketed in by Marcus' knees and calves; to be caught, or implied to be, between him and the headboard; to feel Marcus press down after him. That might satisfy.
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There'd been some several seconds in the past conversation when there'd almost been something like self-consciousness for the way they'd both managed to strip down first before engaging in mutual existential crisis, and navigate the possibility of something breaking. Even during their first tangle, essentially strangers in the ways that mattered, he hadn't felt overly conscious like that for shedding his clothing. A reflexive modesty only for close quarters.
All this to say: it hasn't completely dispersed, that unbidden sense of exposure, but it doesn't clutch at him anxiously or have him pause. It is, instead, a pleasing tingle of discomfort in the moment when Marcus goes to kneel up, hand smoothing across Flint's chest before resting some weight against his shoulder, moving to straddle. Grips himself while they both adjust, encouraging that slow rethickening of blood and flesh.
Well. Maybe not so slow, now that he's here, looking down at Flint. A minor, vain instinct to discern whether what he sees is enjoyable in return.
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But for the moment, the impulse can be dressed in other colors. If there is a sense of lingering vulnerability in the flesh, it can be assigned to Marcus' weight at his shoulder and being cast in the shadow of his body as he shifts in over him; if there is something restless and buzzing in him, it can be the pleasant kind of anxious anticipation that comes from putting himself in a position where he will be relatively obligated to rely on the good will of his partner. The sense of some easing tension can be for so readily getting what he'd asked for.
Even so, having shifted faintly higher up into the rearranged pillows from between Marcus' knees by those half degrees necessary to free up some partial range of motion in his shoulders, this might make for slightly claustrophobic quarters were some part of him not in some way still keen to justify himself. This is perfectly permissible. Preferable, even, to how he might have had to arrange himself otherwise to accomplish this. It's very easy this way to swing his attention between Marcus' face down to the work of his hand, and there is something intent in the press of Flint's fingers high on the outside of Marcus' thighs for it.
He would say if it were too much.
Instead, with a low rumbling note of something like approval, he mostly allows himself a few moments to watch the shape of Marcus' hand and the rousing of his cock in it. To test flicking his attention upward, scraping over the line of his Marcus' body to look him in the face. When he does finally shift, it's to slide a hand from thigh to hip, and then moving to replace Marcus' hand with his own.
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Easier not to worry as much, with blood redirected to cock, thought redirected to the slow winding up of tension, but admittedly—
He will probably not analyse very much tonight at all. He may even feel satisfied for something uneven having been smoothed out, content in the knowledge that something has been said out loud and can't be taken back. Here, kneeling over Flint, there is no flicker of concern that some advantage is being taken as that contented rumble out of the other man shivers through him, and that they can safely continue this slow trade of want and give and take. Flint will say if something is too much. When he is too much.
That Marcus allows Flint to set a pace is a matter of courtesy in the moment, and the absence of urgency he feels for having already gotten off not so long ago. Nice to kneel here and be touched, his hand wandering over Flint's arm and shoulder, letting his breath thicken in his lungs and fall heavier from him.
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So: a calloused thumb works softly at the underside of Marcus' cockhead, unaided by spit or oil and rendered light in deference to that fact. And the gentle circling of fingers, quietly teasing at restriction. Some soft, insistent squeeze and stroke that somehow mirrors the trajectory of Marcus' hand at his bicep and shoulder.
When Flint does make to use his mouth, the hand lingering at Marcus' thigh presses in mute encouragement to draw him nearer to the effect that he might taste there at the base of him. Breath in the smell of his body and press a wet, hot kiss to the sensitive skin of his balls where the bristle of beard might be most effective while Flint's hand continues to work the rest of him close across the line of his cheek.
This is all easily done; readily given, selfishly taken.
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Moves in closer once silently asked for, and the feeling of Flint's mouth, that open kiss between his legs and the rough friction of beard are enough of a dial twist to evoke a sound out of him, a breathy grunt of pleasure. His hand grows harder at Flint's shoulder. The sound of his other palm gently meeting the edge of the headboard, steadying.
Unable to help the slight nudge forward of his hips, sliding cock through hand and against cheek, all still a little dry and tentative and necessarily gentle but the friction does something for him too. A contrast to the slicker spread of tongue, velvety warm breath. He still smells of sex and sweat, they both do, but it's hard to be self-conscious for this fact after being ushered in so insistently.
The hand at Flint's shoulder roves to the back of his neck, his head, the gentle presence of blunt nails, biting and approving.
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In the way his hand made its examination of him, so too does Flint's mouth. Kissing and licking there at the base of him with only a glance in the direction of a real rythmn, letting the gentle scrape of his whiskers be put to work. When he does turn his head, tongue sliding unhurried up the underside of Marcus' length to tease these gently sucking kisses at the sensitive place his thumb had previously circled, it's in part to slick him sufficiently so that the next time he invites that slide of cock across his cheek it will go more easily. Leave a faintly damp stripe across his face made for glinting in yellow candlelight.
This lazy combination of hand and cheek and tongue, fleeting glances that steal up to watch Marcus from beneath the shape of his cock, continues for a wandering, patient interval. Until it becomes clear—moving to taste there at the pleasantly bitter tip of him only to revert back to kissing elsewhere—that if Marcus wants past his lips, he's going to be required to ask for it.
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Above Flint's head, Marcus grips the headboard that little bit tighter at that fleeting taste of it, warm mouth against the end of his cock where he's started leaking, and there's the (potentially) satisfying sign of muscles tensing up his thighs and abdomen, anticipating. And then that touch roves away, and the short breath out of Marcus has an edge of frustration bitten back.
He rolls his head back on his neck, soaking up those differently directed kisses and licks, the luxurious tease of it. The hand he has cupped at the back of Flint's head had slackened some, neglected, but comes back alive as he looks back down, moving around to palm across jaw and cheek, the silvery evidence of saliva there a match for the shine of it on his own swollen skin, small patches nested around the base of himself.
"Flint," has an asking tone, a match for the small, needing shifts of his hips he's started making.
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It would be easy to play coy and see that asking thing turned into a real question. To hum some soft question of a sound against sensitive skin like blowing in the ember of Marcus' frustration to make it glow. But he doesn't actually want to. He wants Marcus moving between his lips and over his tongue, and that hand gripping at the back of his neck. He wants him to know that he wants him; that he is inviting it rather than indulging him. That Marcus isn't wrong—this does stir something low and tight in him.
So instead, attention trained high on Marcus' face, he parts his lips. Rubs the shape of that cockhead briefly across the eager flat of his tongue and murmurs a low note of encouragement that's echoed in the coaxing press of fingers at Marcus' thigh.
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The heavy pant out of him is nearly loud in the quiet room, as is the creak of mattress and bed in response to slightly redistributed weight, a knee nudged higher. Immediately swept up in the impulse to list more heavily forwards, to lean against the headboard and fuck down Flint's throat, but reflexive restraint locks in. Just carefully pushes in enough to fill the other man's mouth, and holds there with the plain desire to be sucked.
It could be differently humiliating to be as plainly eager as he is, but the tenor of dialogue never quite skewed it that way. No, it's simply good to be wanted and to show up for that want, where his eagerness is not managed but counted on.
When he draws back, it's only shallowly, only for the purpose of seeing how Flint treats that freedom, attention dipping back down. Thumb skirting along the line of his cheek, freshly shaved.
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how can this truly be the gay pirate show if i can't have icons for this scenario
dear jon steinberg—
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