Bromantasy

Chapter Thirty

Thirty

They may have kissed for a hundred years. Juniper didn’t know or care.

When Mo finally leaned back, looking down at him with those warm brown eyes, Juniper grinned up at him.

“We did it,” he said breathlessly. “Mo, we fucking did it.”

“You did it,” Mo said. “I saw you on that rooftop. Junebug, you hate heights. But you climbed all the way up there and talked her down.”

They glanced over to Phteven, who was now holding Bear, while Bill dug through his pack for more snacks.

The gathered townspeople and mercenaries cheered, and Mo held up his fist in celebration.

“Well, thank you, thank you,” the prince said, leaning on two of his guards to take a bow. His injured foot was wrapped now. “As Juniper and I had planned all along—”

There was a thump.

Jax was standing behind the prince, her large hand ready and waiting to thwap him again.

“Knock it off, Eddie,” she said. “We all saw what happened.”

“You can do that?” Juniper asked loudly, his voice carrying. “You can just whack princes?”

“If you’re me,” Jax said. It almost looked, for a moment, like she had winked at him.

Fern stalked through the crowd of people toward Juniper, who stiffened.

“You made me a promise,” Juniper said. “I get to go home, and so does Mo, and so does Bear. And you aren’t going to try any funny business.”

Her face was unreadable. “I didn’t believe you, you know,” she said. “About the girl being a shifter. My father won’t believe it, and—”

“And he wants us to eradicate dragons,” Edward interrupted.

Mo leaned heavily on Juniper’s shoulder, but he still managed to position himself between Juniper and the two royal siblings.

“This is just embarrassing for you,” Juniper said loudly. “At your big age? Embarrassing yourself all around the woods and letting your daddy issues get the better of you? That’s why you’re both here?”

Mo looked at him but didn’t say anything.

“Isn’t that what you did?” Bill asked.

Divona curse it all, Bill may have helped Mo get out of jail, but Juniper would still very much like to smack that smirk off Bill’s face.

“Shut up, Bill,” he said. “Bear, if you want to bite him—”

Mo smacked Juniper’s arm (at least it wasn’t his ass, in front of all these people), and Juniper shut up.

“As I was saying,” Juniper continued. “Displeasing your dad is all the rage, I heard. Become the family disappointment you were born to be.”

Edward looked as if he were readying himself for an argument, or a battle, or some other dastardly move, but Jax appeared behind him, poised and ready.

“I actually came along on this quest because I’m trying to leave the royal family behind,” Fern said.

The crowd was beginning to dissipate, the spectacle clearly over, but a few gossip reporters were much closer now, frantically drawing all the details they could. Juniper just knew they weren’t getting his nose right, much less—

“Don’t forget the sparkle in his eyes.” Juniper waved at them. “Mo’s eyes. Not the prince’s, just to be clear. The prince’s eyes are—”

“Junebug.”

“You wanted to leave the royal family behind?” Juniper asked Fern, her words just now finally registering.

“My father said success on an important quest would mean I could retire,” Fern said.

“There are a lot of responsibilities if you’re a royal child of marrying or fighting age, and I’m…

I’d like to be done with it all. So I asked to retire to my little cabin in the woods, where I could live in complete peace and silence.

Away from the constant buffoonery of my siblings. ”

“Including your second-most self-obsessed half brother,” Juniper said. “I know.”

Mo blinked, looking back and forth between them. “I’ve missed a lot, clearly,” he said. “Juniper? Let’s get our kid and a room at the inn and then go home.”

Fern nodded her head. “We have a block of rooms reserved,” she said. “You can stay in one of ours. But it—”

“I know,” Juniper cut her off wearily. “It has only one bed.”

The room was actually much nicer than Juniper was anticipating, but maybe he’d just gotten too used to sleeping outside and all of this felt like a luxury now.

The innkeeper, a woman named Graciella, pulled in an extra cot for Bear, but told them apologetically that the small single bed was all they had available.

She did have one of her bruggane assistants haul steaming bathwater upstairs.

(Bear insisted her water felt cold during her bath, no matter how many times she blew fire at it to make it warmer, but that might be a side effect of being a dragon and having a high body temperature to begin with.)

“Oh, warm, soapy water, how I missed you,” Juniper said as he sank into his bath.

Juniper had insisted that Mo bathe first, not because Juniper was selfless and didn’t mind waiting (he was selfish and he did, thank you very much), but because whomever bathed second got to bathe for longer, since there was nobody waiting to change the water and take their turn. That was just the well-known rule.

Mo knocked and then opened the bathroom door without waiting for Juniper to say anything.

His eyes swept up and down Juniper’s body, and then he limped to the stool beside the bath basin and sat down. “I missed you,” he said.

Juniper reached through the haze of suds and lavender bath salts and grabbed Mo’s hands. “I missed you all the way to the moon,” he said. “Listen, if you want to go on quests again, I support your dreams. But after this, I’m sleeping until spring and never leaving our farm again.”

Mo laughed. “It was never about quests,” he said. “I love a little light adventure. But if anyone had told me this was all going to happen, you wouldn’t have seen me past the bounds of Tús. But I didn’t come for me, anyway. You know that, don’t you? I signed up for this quest for you.”

“Ah,” Juniper said. His eyes were getting a bit misty, but he was worried that the gossip scroll artists had drawn him crying (for some reason) so he really needed to get a handle on the amount of tears he seemed to be regularly shedding. “Ah, well. You’re better than I deserve, Mo Elmthorn.”

Mo leaned down and began massaging soap through Juniper’s hair. It was unfair how good those hands felt.

“Do you know that I dream about your hands?” Juniper said. What could he say, inhibition was low and it was talk-about-your-embarrassing-feelings o’clock. Or at least he thought it might be. Juniper couldn’t read those wall clocks with the arrows and the numbers.

“Did you know I dream about your mouth?” Mo asked, softly enough that Bear (hopefully) wouldn’t be able to hear them through the oak door. “I dream about just how you’ll use it.”

Juniper’s whole body must be blushing at that, so it was a good thing the excessive amount of bubbles were covering him up. “Morn,” he hissed. “Do not make me hard in this tub.”

Mo grinned, that little quirk of his perfect lips that he had just for Juniper.

“I could also take care of it for you,” he said.

But then he went back to massaging soap through Juniper’s hair.

He moved on to Juniper’s arms, gently rubbing away the layers of grime that had begun to feel like they were part of Juniper now.

Juniper fought back tears. “What’s Bear up to?” he asked in a normal, not-emotional-at-all voice.

“Bill and Phteven said they would watch her for a bit, but I think they’re mostly letting her scroll.

Because it turns out she likes scrolling as much as you do,” Mo said with a shake of his head.

“I think she might have stolen the one she has now? It’s one of those scrolls with the little masked illustrated animals who are supposed to be heroes but they’re really always doing the king’s bidding?

Who knew children’s programming was so full of propaganda. ”

“Ugh,” Juniper said. “We were too busy suffering when we were children. Remember how we had to walk in the snow to get to school? It felt like it was uphill both ways. We didn’t have time to scroll.”

“You have always had time to scroll.” Mo leaned in and kissed Juniper on the forehead. “And now you sound like an old man.”

Juniper grinned up at Mo. “If you don’t get in this tub with me right now,” he said, “I will be forced to write a formal complaint.”

Mo stripped slowly, Juniper helping peel his shirt up over his injured shoulder. There were bruises, too many to count, though Juniper had his fair share of those by now, too.

And then his trousers, and Juniper was sitting in the water, mouth salivating at the sight in front of him. His own length grew harder at the sight, too, something he had studiously tried to ignore for about ten winters, now.

“We sure did a lot of wrestling instead of talking about how we felt,” Juniper said mournfully. He took Mo’s hand, helping him into the tub, their limbs tangling.

Mo’s thick calf brushed Juniper’s as he settled in. Mo reached out, brushing a strand of wet strawberry-gold hair behind Juniper’s ear.

“I spent a lot of years trying to make up for what I’d done,” Mo said slowly, his expression turning serious.

“We had so much fun, Juniper. We laughed so much, and I love our farm, and our life, and the sunflowers in the garden, and the way you hum while you braid the little ropes of garlic for winter. I just—”

“Wanted something more,” Juniper finished for him, confidently.

Mo stopped and took a breath in. Blew it out slowly. “Juniper,” he said. “I’m gonna need you to let me finish my sentences. I think you trying to predict me hasn’t really helped us.”

“Oh.” Juniper blushed. “Right. You just what?”

“I just get a little blue in the winter,” Mo said. “I didn’t think about leaving every winter. I don’t know why you believed that.”

“Are you saying I just made that up between us?” Juniper blurted. “That none of what I felt was real?”

He had tortured himself every single winter? All winter long? And for nothing?

“I think what you felt was real, inside of you,” Mo said.

He reached out and placed those big hands on Juniper’s shoulders, squeezing a little.

His touch was firm and gentle and Juniper’s tight shoulders relaxed beneath it.

“It was real for you, but it was just never between us the way you thought. Just like how I felt—guilty about leaving, like you wouldn’t or couldn’t forgive or trust me again—was real inside of me, but not between us. ”

Juniper pressed closer, wrapping his arms around Mo’s waist. “I want you to hold me forever,” he said. “We have so much lost time to catch up on. We should probably also, uh, have a repeat of this.”

“The talking about our feelings?” Mo asked. “Or this next part? Because if you’ll have me, Juniper O’Reilly, I want to—touch you.”

Juniper blushed rowanberry red. “I would like that,” he said.

“Good,” Mo said. “First, I thought we should maybe talk about—”

“Me betraying everything we both hold dear,” Juniper interrupted. “I know.”

“You interrupting me because you think you know what I’m going to say.”

“Oh. That. Yeah.”

“Sometimes,” Mo said, “I talk slowly. Maybe I even think too slowly. But I just want to be heard, Junebug.”

Juniper waited to respond for what felt like a thousand business moons, just to make sure he did not interrupt. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I—I need to work on it.”

“Thank you.” Mo leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Juniper’s forehead.

It was warm and real and good, and Juniper could have sunk into the safety of it forever.

“And I’ll listen to you more, too,” he said.

“You do have good ideas. And sometimes I have wildly bad ones. So maybe we both could share our ideas a bit more?”

“You’re perfect,” Juniper said. “You’ve always been perfect. I don’t care if you interrupt me until the day we die.”

“Which might be tomorrow, if the prince and princess change their mind,” Mo said cheerfully. “But, Juniper, I want to respect you.”

“I think I’d like you to be a little disrespectful, honestly,” Juniper told him. “During sex. But yeah, okay, I can see it. More respect, more listening—did you say we might die tomorrow?”

Mo looked surprised at his worry. “I mean, we aren’t home yet,” he said. “Death is always one of the options on a quest.”

Juniper groaned. “It ruins emotional, romantic, or otherwise intimate moments when you talk about death,” he told Mo. “Just so you’re aware.”

“Okay,” Mo said.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“It’s hard to argue with you,” Juniper said, “when you won’t argue back.”

“Good. I was hoping we could skip to the part where I fuck you the way I’ve always wanted to.” Mo had leaned back against the walls of the tub, his posture relaxed, those corded arms resting along the wooden sides.

“Mo,” Juniper said faintly. “Your ability to talk about these things out loud without blushing, crying, or jumping into the river are both superhuman and terrifying. Maybe one thing at a time? We solve the whole talking-about-our-emotions thing, and then negotiate what kind of mind-blowingly good sex we’re going to have? ”

Mo shrugged again. “Have it your way,” he said. “But, Juniper, I want you to know.” He looked into Juniper’s eyes, so seriously Juniper braced for an emotional revelation. “I have wanted to rail you every day for the past ten years.”

“Oh, great afterlife and all the gods within it,” Juniper said.

His vision swam a little bit.

“I tried to look respectfully,” Mo said, a little sadly. “But I did not. Juniper, you have an ass.”

“Who knew my very sweet and heroic roommate is also a little freak?” Juniper stared back at him, jaw agape. “You have an ass, too, Mo. And everybody in Tús looks at it. Including the bruggane grandmams.”

“Do they?” Mo looked shocked at this information. “I didn’t know. I was only looking at you.”

I was only looking at you.

Juniper unspooled it all, took the memories from the shelf, and dusted them off.

They looked different in this new light.

Every early spring morning planting seeds on the farm.

Every early summer day shearing sheep, Mo’s eyes on him as he held the sheep steady for Juniper to shear.

Every cozy autumn evening, Juniper braiding garlic and Mo sharpening his scythe.

Every long winter night, Juniper making tea and Mo knitting steadily.

Eyes on Juniper.

Always on Juniper.

And who could he become now that he could see himself through this light, through the eyes of someone who had devotedly, steadily loved him for so many years?

Juniper reached for Mo, then, and Mo reached for him, too.