Page 18 of Setting the Break

When Bohdi pulls back, just far enough to breathe, Morgan chases him. He does not mean to. His body simply follows, tilting forward, and Bohdi catches him with a hand on his chest and holds him there and looks at him.

Then Bohdi kisses him again, harder, and bears him backward.

Morgan's back hits the bedroll and the ground beneath it, and the impact knocks a breath out of him that Bohdi swallows. The fire is at their side, close enough that the heat licks across Morgan's skin, and Bohdi is above him, blocking out the canopy of branches and the cold scatter of stars, and Morgan hooks a hand around the back of his neck and pulls him down and bites his lower lip, because he does not know how to want something this much without making it a fight.

Bohdi growls against his mouth, low in his chest, and there is a limit in the sound, close and approaching. He gets a hand into Morgan's hair and pulls, and Morgan's head tips back and his throat is bared and he gasps, sharp and helpless, and thinks: here. Finally. Here.

And then a thought crystallizes that has been forming since they left the valley this morning, since the last farmstead disappeared behind them, since Bohdi's laugh rolled across the empty track with no one to hear it.

There is no one here.

There is no keep, no stone walls with ears, no guards on the other side of a door, no servants in the corridor, no Eskil two rooms away pretending not to know what he knows. There is no fist pressed against his own mouth to keep himself quiet, no Bohdi whispering against his throat while Morgan bites his own knuckle raw because the alternative is making a sound that carries. Every time they have done this, every desperate stolen time, it has been with one ear on the door and one hand ready to separate and a silence between them that was never a choice but a necessity. The necessity has shaped everything. It has shaped how they move and how they breathe and how they touch each other. Morgan did not realize how much of it was restraint until this moment, when there is nothing left to restrain against.

The realization hits them both at the same time.

He can feel it in Bohdi's hands, the way the grip on his hair tightens past careful, past measured, into something raw and greedy. He can feel it in Bohdi's mouth, which leaves his lips and drags down his jaw and bites at the tendon of his neck hard enough to bruise, openly, without the careful calibration of marks that can be hidden beneath a collar. Bohdi makes a sound against his skin, low and rough and hungry, and the sound is loud. It is louder than Bohdi has ever been with him, louder than Morgan's chambers where the guards change shift outside the door, and the volume of it, the sheer unguarded want in it, goes straight through him.

They are not careful with each other's clothes. That is not new. But the speed is different, and the ferocity. Bohdi strips him with a roughness that borders on destructive, unlacing and pulling and shoving fabric out of his way, at war with it. Morgan's cloak goes first, yanked aside and discarded. Then his shirt, hauled over his head with a force that catches his ear, and he does not care. When the cold night air hits his bare chest he shivers and Bohdi's hands are already there, running down his sides, broad and warm and pressing hard enough to leave heat behind them.

Morgan gets Bohdi's shirt with fingers that are not steady and are not trying to be. He does not unlace it. He grabs the collar and pulls and something tears and he does not care about that either. Bohdi laughs against his mouth, dark and breathless, and shrugs the shirt off his shoulders, and the firelight catches the ink that covers him, line over line over line, every year he has handed to somebody else written into his skin, and the sheer impossible scope of him.

Morgan's hands go still against his stomach. He has seen this before. He has memorized it, mapped it, catalogued every scar and the story behind it. But Bohdi in firelight, out here in the open dark where no one can see them and no one can hear them and the world has shrunk to the circle of warmth around their fire, that makes his mouth go dry and his cock throb heavy against his unlaced trousers.

"You're quiet again," Bohdi says. "I'm getting concerned."

"I'm admiring the scenery," Morgan says. "I told you I've changed."

Bohdi laughs again, warm and surprised, and strips the trousers off him in one clean pull that takes his smallclothes with them, and Morgan is naked on a bedroll in the middle of the woods with the fire painting him gold and Bohdi kneeling between his legs, still half-dressed, looking down at him with dark unhurried eyes.

Morgan props himself up on his elbows. He is hard, flushed, exposed. The impulse to say something cutting is nearly overwhelming. Instead he holds Bohdi's gaze and lets himself be looked at, and the effort of not reaching for the armor makes his pulse pound in his ears.

Bohdi's gaze travels down his body, slow and proprietary. It pauses on the lean cut of his hips, on his cock curved up against his stomach, on the insides of his thighs where riding has left the skin reddened and tender. Then he reaches into the saddlebag he set beside the bedroll and pulls out a small corked bottle of oil and sets it on the ground beside Morgan's hip.

Morgan looks at the oil. Looks up at Bohdi. "You packed that."

"A good warrior is always prepared," Bohdi confirms, without a trace of shame.

"We left for an intelligence-gathering mission and you packed oil."

"I'm an opportunist, what can I say?"

Bohdi uncorks the bottle, takes Morgan's hand, and tips the oil into it.

Morgan blinks. The oil is cool against his fingers, slicking between them, pooling in the cup of his palm. He looks up, confused, and Bohdi leans in close. His mouth finds the curve of Morgan's jaw, not a kiss exactly, just the press of his lips and the heat of his breath against the hinge of bone beneath Morgan's ear. Bohdi says, low and unhurried and certain, "I want you to open yourself up for me."

Morgan's cock twitches so hard it aches. His stomach drops straight through the bedroll and into the ground beneath it and his face floods with heat. The image blooms behind his eyes, himself, spread open, working his own fingers inside his body while Bohdi watches.

Bohdi has told him before that he likes watching him. Morgan remembers it, a murmur against his throat in the dark. And Morgan had accepted that and catalogued it alongside the other things he has learned about what Bohdi wants, the hair-pulling, the biting, the way his voice drops when Morgan talks back to him, and filed it away as useful intelligence. Bohdi liked to watch. Bohdi liked to look at him. That was manageable. That was something Morgan could control, could perform, could weaponize.

But this is not that. Bohdi is not asking to watch Morgan undress or watch Morgan's face while Bohdi is inside him. He is asking Morgan to do it to himself, to put his own fingers inside his body and open himself up while Bohdi sits back and watches it happen for his own benefit. The vulnerability of it is different in kind and not just in degree. It is Morgan alone with his own hand, making the sounds he makes and moving the way he moves when he does this to himself, with no Bohdi to hide behind, no mouth on his to swallow the noises, no broad body above him to disappear into. Just Morgan, exposed, performing the most private act he knows while the man he loves watches from three feet away.

His mouth opens and closes. For one of the vanishingly rare moments in his life, nothing comes out.

Bohdi pulls back from his jaw. He settles onto his heels, easy and patient, and regards Morgan with those dark steady eyes. The corner of his mouth twitches.

"I’m waiting, your highness."

Morgan stares at him. His oil-slick fingers are curled loosely against his own thigh and his cock is hard and flushed against his stomach and his brain is running several competing processes at once, most of which boil down to oh gods and absolutely not and yes, yes, immediately yes.