His gaze dropped to Cas’s spine and the trident spearing up the center of it. Then he reached out and shoved Cas’s head back into the headrest, running his fingers over the dark strands of hair all the way to the nape of his neck.
Cas’s skin was warm and felt like silk under the roughness of Jonah’s hands. Jonah had never given a massage before. Fuck, he’d never touched Cas’s bare skin before. His breath caught in his chest as he ran two fingers down Cas’s spine, counting the knobs, and feeling the sharp rise and fall of his breath. Under the fury, Jonah thought he detected something almost like anticipation.
“What were you doing in Russia?” Goddamn, his skin was so fucking smooth.
“Did I mention that I won’t be answering any questions I don’t feel like answering?”
“You didn’t. That might change.” Jonah walked his fingers down and up Cas’s spine, then rolled his knuckles into the meat of his shoulders, noting the tiny tremor that ran through the muscles there.
“God, you’re cocky. I can’t remember if you were always like that.”
“I saidmight.Why’d you trash the apartment?”
“I didn’t trash the apartment.”
“What’d you have for lunch?”
Cas snorted. “A fucking footlong from Subway. Why?”
Jonah dragged the tip of his finger across the hills and dips of Cas’s ribcage, then backtracked to trace the trident’s prongs, following each to its apex. Cas twisted ever so slightly with the caress, and Jonah fought the urge to grip him tighter. “Just trying to establish our baseline.”
“Our baseline is me stonewalling you until you get fed up and get the fuck out.”
There was little humor in Jonah’s quiet laugh. “Yeah, I’m starting to get that idea. Are you back here for good?”
“None of your business.”
Angling the heels of his palms, Jonah dug them hard into Cas’s shoulder blades, feeling bone slide beneath the pressure.
He kneaded and stroked knots of tension until they loosened and Cas let out a soft groan that sparked and smoldered through Jonah. In the past, he’d forced himself to be satisfied knowing the barebones of Cas’s existence—his general whereabouts and that he was alive. There was so little he knew of how Cas had spent the last five years. Had he traveled with anyone? Lived with anyone? Slept with anyone?Lovedanyone?
Jonah stroked a tendon in Cas’s neck with his thumb, following it to a terminal pressure point behind his ear while he tried to ignore the increasingly dangerous trajectory of his thoughts. “What were you doing in Russia?”
Cas didn’t even bother to reply this time, and Jonah shifted position, moving to Cas’s flank. He gave in and gripped the boy’s sides, working the pads of his thumbs slowly down his back until he reached his waist. So much smaller than his own, so easily spanned, but solid and warm in his hold. He felt the tide of Cas’s breaths in the tips of his fingers as his thumbs brushed against the towel.
Jonah inhaled a long, quiet breath, fighting a strange mix of desire and feral sense of possession. Fighting the temptation to move his hands lower.
Right above Cas’s sacrum was a thin two-inch scar, and it drove Jonah to distraction wondering where it’d come from or who might’ve put it there.
When he mapped its length with the tip of his fingernail, Cas shivered. The side of Jonah’s hand caught the edge of the towel, revealing a few scant inches of creamy skin and the round slope that darkened near the crevice of Cas’s ass. When he felt himself growing hard, he almost flinched away.It’s not him. It’s the fact that you cut yourself off mid blow job last night and you haven’t gotten laid in weeks. It’snothim.
Biting the inside of his cheek, Jonah pushed the towel away with a grunt, fully exposing the plump, vulnerable curve of the boy’s ass. Round, tight, andfuck.He clamped down on his lower lip to keep from making a sound, but didn’t miss the rough intake of breath that came from the head of the table as he followed the curve with the back of his hand.
Jonah’s eyes shot that way, taking in Cas’s bare shoulders and how they rose and fell unevenly with quickened breaths. Did he…like this? He certainly wasn’t squirming away, and he definitely could have.
He hadn’t told Jonah to stop, either. In fact, he’d barely fucking moved.
With his gaze fixed to the back of Cas’s head, Jonah smoothed his open palm in another light caress over the boy’s bare ass. “Why’d you trash the apartment?”
“I told you, I didn’t.” Cas’s voice sounded strained and guttural, and it sparked something fierce and relentless in Jonah. Jonah thought that training and dedication and, shit, just the sheer gruesomeness of what he did for a living had leeched away his ability to be tempted, to want something deeply and recklessly. He was careful and patient. Never impulsive. But, right now, there was an undeniable hunger in the way he studied Cas. He thought he should be terrified of it. Instead, he was intrigued.
But the obvious lies pissed him off.
Cas yelped as Jonah brought his hand down so hard on his right cheek that his palm stung with the rebound and the crack of skin on skin reverberated in the small room.
Even in the dim light, Jonah could see the skin pinking immediately. His cock gave a sudden, sharp twitch in his pants. “You think I don’t have surveillance?”
“Those cameras might as well be from nineteen fucking eighty three, as grainy as I remember them being,” Cas grated out. “I doubt you bothered to upgrade them. You didn’t see sh—” He cried out again as Jonah brought his hand down in a second blow, this time on the other cheek.
