Chapter Ten #3
After seeing Declan in nothing but his smallclothes, half-covered in the results of a bloody, disgusting battle, Antonio still wanted to touch Declan. Wanted to put his gorgeous hands on wings no one had held to discover if it brought Declan pleasure.
Yes.
Voids, yes.
“I’m very close to tackling you to the floor,” Declan’s voice came out unsteady. Raw. Ravenous. “Something that may impede your ability to touch.”
“Oh yeah?” Lips to his jaw, drawing a shiver from him. “What’re you gonna do instead?”
Everything. Anything.
“Kiss you,” is what he said, pushing at Antonio’s chest. Pressed him back despite the man’s weight, until Antonio sat upright again, eyes dark, the bond between them bright with need and affection and relief. “We can find out what it’s like, with these teeth. Ideally without causing damage.”
Declan never had someone wanting to kiss him, like this. There’d never been Antonio.
“They don’t look that sharp.” Antonio grinned, reaching out to brush his thumb over Declan’s lips. “Pretty sure we can figure it out. And if I bleed, you’ll heal it.”
Consent to use magic, and Antonio’s utter trust, struck just as surely as his touch. He’d been cautious of magic since that first morning when he’d felt Antonio’s upset at the touch of glamoured cloth.
Antonio’s hand slid into Declan’s hair. Declan’s curved around the back of his neck. One of them pulled, or both. All that mattered was the warm press of Antonio’s lips. He was the bite of soft leather and rough copper, as grasping as Declan.
Everything and anything.
Declan wanted more. He drew him in, down, closer. Antonio’s groan of want dragged more from him with the twist of his hand in Declan’s hair. “Figure it out.” Declan kissed the sentiment from his lips, deepened the kiss with only the slightest beat of pause.
Teeth, he called them. Like any other. Nails.
Fangs. Claws.
Declan broke the kiss only to breathe, dragging his nails down the back of Antonio’s neck. He was rewarded with an answering groan and Antonio’s other hand, solid where it gripped Declan’s ass.
“You should fuck me against a tree at some point,” words broken around shivering breath but he laughed when he said it, “but not now. I like where we are now.”
Where they were then, his teeth pressed gentle to Antonio’s lower lip, the flex of eager fingers on an ass with not that much to grab. Perfect, all of it.
A wild drunken night. A blow landed that had you grinning with it. A touch that fit like worn-soft leather.
“Fuck you on the damned moon if you want.” Antonio’s voice, serrated at the seams, a want-rough growl as ragged and breathless as Declan’s own.
“We can work our way up to the moon,” Declan murmured in agreement, reaching for more.
Exploratory touches to jaw and throat while he leaned in, drank in the ragged shape of Antonio’s breath with kiss after greedy kiss. He lost time to it, gone with the drag of Antonio’s tongue and reddening lips.
It’d been ages. And kissing never felt like this. It didn’t send a wildfire through his veins, claws careful the way he rarely paid mind to. Every other time he climbed on top of a strapping man, there had been a full glamour, and the human unaware of what they truly touched.
Antonio’s hand slipped up from Declan’s ass and under the hem of his shirt. Talented fingers found the ridge of his spine, and blunt human teeth nibbled at his lower lip.
“This shirt gonna get tangled in your wings if I take it off you?”
Pins and needles. Asked about it already, hadn’t he? Whether Antonio wanted the truth of him. Sharp edges. Grit.
He’d touched Declan before, unglamoured. Felt the juts and dips of him. The only one who ever had. Antonio had touched Declan before and still wanted him.
“No risk of tangling. I glamour them, mostly.” Declan kissed the words against the corner of Antonio’s curling mouth. “Otherwise they ruin shirts or get caught on stairwells and doorframes.”
Declan leaned as he spoke, testing the grip in his hair. Antonio held on but didn’t pull, or try to drag Declan back. Simply there, secure sensation and heightened nerves.
Declan kissed him for it, let Antonio feel his teeth until the man groaned from it, lips parted and his fingers dragging under Declan’s shirt, tracing the not-quite divet of his ribs where a glamour still sat.
“What about the marks?” Antonio asked into the kiss, returning teeth for teeth. “Got those glamoured too. They fit the Murderpunk vibe.”
Nearly all of him was glamoured to an extent at any given time. Until he shed it there, on Antonio’s lap, allowing the man to explore the true pull of his pale skin over bone. Warm-blooded touch blazed on Declan’s cooler form, felt like …
He didn’t know what it felt like. Antonio’s hands. His bond’s hands. No one had ever touched his bare, unglamoured sides and back before. Not since he was old enough to cast.
Whatever it felt, Antonio hissed, too, a new strength to his hold, cock pressed hard against Declan’s thigh, jeans be damned.
“They don’t always.” Declan’s hips rocked, ground down, shuddering with Antonio’s wandering fingers. He met his arched eyebrows with a twisting smile, and a kiss to his jaw. “They change. Perhaps better explained when I’m not attempting to fuck myself on you through our clothes.”
“Yeah?” Antonio slipped his hand from under Declan’s shirt, both between them to tug at the topmost button. “How else you gonna distract me while I get this off you?”
“By continuing my valiant attempts to fuck myself through our clothes. Naturally.”
It was easy, how nothing was easy, to bury his claws in Antonio’s hair when the man leaned back. Right to kiss that laugh from his lips, lick and bite until there were gasps instead.
Declan squirmed, watched with hooded eyes as Antonio turned to kiss the inside of his wrist. No one Declan had brought to his bed had ever shown him such affection. Sometimes laughter. Surprise. Pleasure, both given and taken. But never this warmth and care mixed with it.
Nor humor, at Antonio’s playful nip at the base of his marks. Declan laughed, surprised, fingers curling to tug at his hair. A too-wide smile and Antonio looked so smug he couldn’t even care.
“Fancy me cracks, do ye?” Declan leered and found himself dragged into another kiss.
Pulled closer, and Declan, reckless, fell into him with more passion than caution, seeking more rather than gentling it.
Allowed himself the pleasure of nails over skin, just a touch, to skate that line of what was good and what could draw red.
“Yeah. Cracked porcelain.” The sun of his hands moved over Declan’s stomach, chest, the curve of his shoulders, pushing his shirt down skinny arms. To the floor. “That’s what you remind me of.”
The brush of callused fingers to his jaw, tracing one such mark, nearly undid him. Declan caught the hem of Antonio’s shirt in retaliation, careful, eyes on the broad strokes of him.
Something to hold on with, under that too-hot gaze, when it set Declan to shifting under the attention.
“That’s one descriptor for them, aye.” The words were, somehow, halfway steady. “I’ve a cousin that glamours hers gold. She’s a fan of kintsugi.”
“Stripped,” she had called the two of them, the pair of sluagh with their pulled tight skin just shy of skeletal. Everything about them sharp in the way Antonio claimed to enjoy. Lean muscles, if just. “Down to the marrow.”
“I like yours.” Antonio traced one up the plane of Declan’s stomach, dragged a shiver from him. Shaking. “Fucking incredible.”
Declan swallowed hard. The admiration was far from comfortable, though hardly unwelcome, dragging his breath from him in shallow sips.
“I’ve not the first clue how to respond to that.” Honesty for honesty, laid out for the taking. Shaking words, lust-rough as Antonio’s study.
Antonio scoffed. “Don’t gotta say shit if you don’t want to, so long as you’re having a good time.”
Another kiss. Always another. Antonio’s hands traced over edges and marks alike, touched until Declan squirmed, rocked down against the hard length of Antonio’s cock, layers of clothing be damned. Earned himself a nip and returned like for like.
“Me glamour’s down,” Declan heard himself say, a throaty rasp before he licked a hungry line down Antonio’s throat, chased it with his teeth. “All of it. Marks and wings and claws, all down for you. No magic.”
No magic, except for himself. The only sort that Antonio appeared to appreciate. If he was wrong, Declan had no wish to know it.
At any rate, Antonio gave him little time to second guess. The human leaned in, caught the words on his lips and swallowed them with a low sound, pushed his chest closer as Declan dared to run flat palms down, over the planes of his chest.
“I ask too much, you tell me,” Antonio said, kiss broken. He leaned back, away, much to Declan’s hissed displeasure. The sound cut off at Antonio’s quick smirk and equally swift divesting of his shirt. Bare, broad muscles, decorated only by tattoos. “Know I’m probably pushing some lines.”
Oh.
Well.
Declan paused, his eyes roving over Antonio’s chest and arms, the black of ink looking settled on his warm brown skin. Some faded, others crisper, and all of them something Declan, too, wanted to trace with his tongue.
“My safe word is papyrus,” he said, his half-laugh unsteady. He drew one of Antonio’s hands to his hips, as close to purring as a sluagh could be when Antonio squeezed and dragged him in closer. Strong for a human, as if Declan were no weight at all.
“‘Back the fuck off’ works too. Or however you say that in Irish Murderpunk.”
Fresh heat over his hip bones with the drag of Antonio’s thumbs, Declan’s hands tightening over his with a shivering hiss. A raptor’s sound, pleased and low. Antonio’s approval radiated through their bond, lit it up all the more.