“Then I won’t put a shirt on. All night. You can map out every tattoo.”
“It won’t lead to sex.”
“I didn’t think it would.”
“I just want to look and—” Andrew holds his breath, laying his hand at Nicholas’s throat to skim his fingers over the intricate line work that goes from the hollow between his collarbones up to his jaw. “Touch.”
“Touch me all you want, princess.”
“I don’t want you to be mad.”
“Why would I be mad?”
Andrew shrugs, but Nicholas is pretty sure he understands, even if Andrew can’t verbalize.
“Will you get mad if I get hard?”
“Of course not,” Andrew says.
“Then why would I get mad if you don’t?”
“I might get hard though,” Andrew explains. “But that doesn’t mean I want sex. Not always. Definitely not tonight.”
“Has someone gotten mad before?” Nicholas asks.
Again, Andrew shrugs which says enough. The amount of rage Nicholas feels that someone would do that is enough for his teeth to grind.
“If I ever make you uncomfortable, you can punch me,” he says, unsure what to do with the sudden sense of helplessness.
“I’m not going to punch you,” Andrew scoffs, his tone suggesting he thinks Nicholas is joking.
“Fuck me up. Hit me. I can take it.”
“I’m not going to hit you,” Andrew hisses.
Nicholas is endlessly fascinated by this contradiction of a man. So bossy and firm at times, his boundaries for others so strong, yet his own seemingly nonexistent.
“Fine, then talk to me. Tell me. If I upset you, you’ve got two options—tell me or punch me.”
“Fine,” Andrew sighs, the expression on his face making it clear he’s not a fan of either option.
Andrew’s fingers skim down Nicholas’s throat, over the arch of his Adam’s apple and down to trace the wings of the death moth tattoo whose wings wrap around his entire throat. This particular tattoo fucking hurt, but Nicholas had wanted something no clothing or uniform would hide. Somewhere along the line, from getting his first tattoo to piss off his father to a sleeve of them to really piss him off, he’d stopped caring what people thought and got them for himself.
“It’s beautiful,” Andrew says, both hands on his throat now. Nicholas shivers, unused to being touched like this. “The line work is so clean, the symmetry of the wings identical.”
“You like it, princess?”
“Yeah. It does something to my brain,” Andrew admits, stroking each of his thumbs over Nicholas’s throat in a way that has Nicholas’s dick thickening in his sweats. He doesn’t move a muscle, not wanting to startle Andrew in case he stops. “When things match up, when they make sense, everything in my brain goes quiet. So often things don’t make sense. So much of life doesn’t make sense and…it’s stressful. But your tattoos are like the perfect pattern. Random, but not—the use of space, the symmetry—looking at them makes my brain calmer somehow, happy.”
Pride wells up in Nicholas. His body,histattoos, make Andrew feel that way. He’s never given a fuck about making anyone else happy before, but right in this moment, he cares a whole fucking lot.
“I’ve got more.”
“I know you do,” Andrew laughs softly, “I’ve seen your social media remember.”
“More than that—ones I’m not allowed to show on camera.”
Andrew’s eyes trail down his chest, “Where?”
