The white towel slung low over Clay’s lean hips as he padded out of the bathroom. Drops of water ran down his stomach and beaded in the hair on his thighs. The scratchy black-and-red tattoos that covered his arms spread over his shoulders and along his collarbones before they petered out. His torso was decorated with scars instead, a spray of shiny, knotted skin that ran down one side of his body from his nipple to the sharp jut of hip bone above the towel.
Clay tucked wet curls back behind his ears. The streaks of blond in the brown were more obvious when it was soaked. He spread his arms to pull his skin tight over the play of hard muscle and make the scar tissue slide and tighten.
“Gonna ask?”
Grade leaned back on the bed, arms braced behind him, and shook his head.
“No.”
Clay raised his eyebrows, arms still outstretched. Grade wasn’t going to complain. The play of taut muscle was nice to watch. “You’re not curious?”
He didn’t need to be. It had been a car accident. Grade could see the diagonal void where the seat belt had protected his skin when what he’d been wearing had burned. The telltale char pattern—skin, in Clay’s case—down his left side was distinctive and easy enough to replicate on a corpse if you remembered to factor in movement.
That was what they liked to call—in the business—a mood killer. People might think it was hot when Sherlock Holmes read people, but when your specialist subject was the stigmata of violent death… suddenly it was creepy. It had been in the past, anyhow.
“It’s not a date,” Grade dodged the truth with another truth. “I’m not here to get to know you.”
Clay lowered his hands to the towel and toyed with the loose knot that held it in place. He wriggled his eyebrows at Grade.
“You don’t even want to see how far they go down?” he asked.
Grade ran his eyes down Clay’s body, from the crosshatched skull on his shoulder to the last lick of raised pink scar tissue that cupped his hip bone. He skipped his eyes over the damp drape of the towel to the taut muscles of Clay’s tanned thighs. His skin felt too small for his bones and uncomfortably hot as he tried not to squirm. Lust settled heavily in his balls and pulled them up tight to his body.
“I can see where it ends,” he pointed out. “The towel kind of killed the element of surprise.”
Clay smirked, turned around, and dropped the towel. The scars were a lot less severe on his back, but they wrapped around his ribs and dribbled down his side to scour dimples into the lean curve of his ass.
“Shows what you fucking know,” he said over his shoulder. “I always got something in my back pocket…. which was the problem.”
Grade wasn’t going to ask on principle now. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees and hands dangled between them.
“You know what I do,” he said. “You’ve seen it. Did you need to stage the whole shower thing to make sure I wouldn’t freak out over a few scars?”
Clay turned back around and slid his hand down to lazily wrap his tattooed fingers around his semi-erect cock. The thin skin creased as he dragged his hand back along it. His lazy smirk didn’t slip, but his dark eyes went hard under the straight lines of his eyebrows.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. His voice dragged, thick and slow with something dangerous, as he folded his lower lip between his teeth. “You gotta get clean if you want to get dirty, and that’s what you’re here for, right? Now, you want to get some of my grime on you, City Boy?”
Heat flushed through Grade in a painful, ragged rush. It left his ears sunburn hot and his mouth dry. His cock was suddenly, uncomfortably hard, pressed against the zipper of his pants insistently enough he thought he could count the metal teeth.
The sudden gut-punch of lust wasn’t what Grade had expected. He’d come here to get fucked, sure, but that was just… mechanical. Grade had gotten wound too tight, and he needed to take some of the tension off his internal springs before they snapped. Just to stop the roundabout of all the various ways he’d screwed up.
This wasn’t that. It was a ten on a dial meant to be turned to seven, and Grade was bizarrely resentful about that. There wasn’t enough blood in his brain right now to explain why exactly, but it felt like he’d missed a step somehow.
Clay wasn’t supposed to know him well enough to press the buttons needed to leave Grade hot and hurting. It didn’t feel like Grade was in control anymore, and his body might like that, buthedidn’t.
“I… I’m just here to get off,” he said. His voice was dry, and every time his eyes strayed down to Clay’s thick, slick cock, the words caught in his throat. “Let’s not make it complicated.”
Clay laughed at him.
“Fucking’s always complicated,” he said. “If anyone tells you any different, they’re lying.”
Grade’s shoulders tightened, as if he’d just been caught out on something. Except he hadn’t. Not yet.
“It’s just sex.”
“It’s people,” Clay said. “People make everything complicated. Except me. I’m an open book. With its cock out, in case you wanted to join in before I finish the job myself.”
Grade swallowed hard. This had been his idea. He wanted this—needed it, still—so he didn’t know where the sudden conviction he should take the out Clay offered came from. He supposed it didn’t matter; he wasn’t going to do it. His brain had just earned the right to say “I told you so” later.
