“Yeah.” A wry smile tucked the corners of Jacob’s mouth. “But nobody’s perfect.”
It shouldn’t make him want to laugh, but it did. Simon muffled the snort with a mouthful of cock and wrapped his lips around the firm shaft. He curled his tongue under the ridge of the slick head, tasted the penny-sour taste of precome, and dragged a rough sound out of Jacob that started as a curse and ended as a groan.
Simon let the cock slide out of his mouth and licked his way down. With his tongue he traced the ridge of veins under the velvet soft skin. Jacob caught his shoulders with his long hands and kneaded Simon’s clenched muscles through his shirt as he mumbled encouragement.
“God, Si,” he groaned. “That feels so fucking good. Don’t stop.”
“Maybe I should.” Simon lifted his head. He shackled Jacob’s cock with one hand and rubbed his thumb along the base of it as he looked up the sprawl of sinewy, bruised torso to his lover’s lean face. It made his balls cramp with lust, and the ache of it settled in his thigh muscles. Before Jacob he’d never known he had a type—when you were as far in the closet as he had been in school, you fucked whoever stumbled in there with you—but he did. Or maybe it was just Jacob. “Teach you a lesson?”
“Oh, I never learn,” Jacob said. He roughed his hand through Simon’s dark hair and tugged until he made Simon shift. “Now come up here and fuck me.”
He wanted to. The thought of Jacob under him, all tight muscle and tighter ass, made his stomach heavy with hot, angry need. The only problem was going black in knuckle-shaped patterns over Jacob’s ribs.
“You’re hurt.”
“Yeah, well, if I don’t need a hospital….” Jacob snarked. He rolled his eyes when Simon scowled at him. “I’m notyou. If it hurts, we’ll all know about it.”
The mattress creaked as Simon rolled off him and stood up. Left sprawled and hard on the bed, Jacob cursed him irritably.
“I’mfine.”
Simon unbuckled his holster, tugged the straps down his shoulders, folded it over, and set it on the bedside table. The absence of its weight at his ribs felt strange. A sweaty itch crawled over his skin.
“I actually don’t have any reason to care, do I?” Simon took his shirt off. “Just remembered.”
Somewhere in the pit of his brain, something twitched at exposing his left arm. Scars stippled it from shoulder to just above his elbow, half from the trauma and half from the surgeries to pin the joint and bones back together. It wasn’t vanity… it wasn’tjustvanity. When Simon looked at it, he could see the weakness—the shoulder that dislocated easier every time, the staple lines where they’d replaced bone with metal, the damaged muscles and nerves to target in a fight—basically all the reasons that the Marines didn’t want him anymore.
Jacob still did, though. He had hitched himself up on one arm, and his eyes trailed over Simon’s chest and arms with lazy appreciation. One hand was curled around his cock, and he tugged at it with slow, lazy strokes.
Simon shed his trousers and joined Jacob on the bed. He cupped the back of Jacob’s neck and scruffed him into a kiss. Stubble scraped his skin as he caught Jacob’s lip between his teeth and tugged.
“I do care, though,” Simon admitted reluctantly. “So shut up.”
Simon sprawled on top of him, braced his weight on his arms, and slowly rolled his hips against Jacob’s. Sweat and precome slicked their cocks as they pressed together, caught between the flat planes of their stomachs.
Jacob grabbed Simon’s ass, flexed his fingers against the hard rise of muscle, and arched his hips up to grind his cock against Simon’s abs as they thrust against each other.
“Fuck,” Jacob groaned. He screwed his eyes shut as he gasped.
Electric pinches of reaction stabbed down Simon’s cock and twisted his balls up tight between his thighs. The long muscles that strapped his back pulled tight and kicked off that old, familiar nag of bitch pain in his shoulder. The hit of endorphins blurred it and shoved it down for later. Simon kissed Jacob deeply, until they were breathless and gasping for air around tangled tongues.
Simon dragged his mouth away from Jacob’s and bit kisses down his jaw to the taut line of his throat. He scraped his teeth over the pulse point in Jacob’s throat, and it throbbed against his tongue as he thrust his hips roughly against Jacob’s.
They still weren’t okay—but this was close.
He buried his face against Jacob’s neck, where the cropped blond hair was matted with sweat. Their cocks bumped and slid together, and each thrust twisted a knot of hot pleasure tighter at the base of Simon’s spine and twitched through his muscles.
“Simon. Si,” Jacob said. He clawed up Simon’s back and dug into the slabbed muscles over his shoulder blades. His voice was cracked with lust and the lingering scars of fear. “I need you. I fucking need you.”
His hips jolted against Simon’s as he came and come smeared, wet and sticky, between their bodies. As Jacob went loose and boneless under him, it occurred to Simon that there was one lie Jacob had never told him—that he loved him. If he had….
Jacob twisted a hand in Simon’s hair and dragged him around into a kiss—all panted breath and scraping teeth.
Simon pulled back long enough to grit out between clenched teeth, “You’re still a fucking liar.” And then he came into the mixture of sweat and come that glued them together.
He collapsed on top of Jacob and pinned him to the cheap hotel mattress. They sprawled in the mess they’d made and breathed wetly against each other’s skin. Eventually Jacob winced and shoved at Simon’s shoulder.
“Ribs,” he grunted.
