2. What the Whiskey Started #3
"Wanna feel?" Theo asked. "Or, tell you what, can I suck yours? Make it even. Just getting off. Survival bonding."
The last wall crumbled. Not with a crash but with a sigh, the exhausted surrender of a structure that had been holding too long against a pressure it was never designed to resist. Jace pushed his shorts down, his cock springing free, hard and flushed, the circumcised head dark with blood and slick with precum that had been leaking since the campfire.
"Yeah," he breathed. "Okay. Fuck it. Yeah. "
Theo moved without hesitation, rolling onto his side and dipping his head.
His mouth was hot, shockingly, almost painfully hot, and wet, lips sealing around Jace's shaft with a suction that pulled a groan from somewhere deep in Jace's chest. Theo's tongue swirled over the head, found the sensitive ridge beneath the corona, and pressed, the sensation so intense Jace's hips bucked involuntarily, driving deeper into the wet heat.
Theo took it, throat opening, nose pressing into the coarse hair at Jace's base, and the sound he made, a low, satisfied hum that vibrated through the shaft, was the most erotic thing Jace had heard in years.
"Fuck, your mouth—" Jace gasped, his balls tightening, the pressure building at the base of his spine like a wave gathering offshore.
Theo's hand found his balls, rolling them with knowing fingers, tugging gently, and the dual sensation, hot mouth, clever hand, sent Jace hurtling toward the edge with an urgency that was almost violent.
He came with a shudder that ripped through his entire body, cum pulsing in thick, heavy jets against the back of Theo's throat. Theo swallowed, the muscles of his throat working around Jace's cock, milking every spasm until Jace was empty and trembling.
"Your turn," Theo whispered, pulling off, lips wet and swollen.
Jace looked at the cock in front of him, the foreskin pulled back, the head flushed and leaking, the shaft heavy with blood and need, and lowered his mouth to it.
The taste hit him first: salt and musk and the tang of precum, earthy and male.
The foreskin bunched against his lips as he took the head in, the skin soft and smooth, and he explored it with his tongue, pulling the loose skin over the head and back, feeling the glide of it, the way it amplified every movement.
Theo groaned, hips lifting, and Jace sucked deeper, jaw stretching around the thickness, the unfamiliar weight of another man's cock on his tongue both foreign and fundamentally right in a way that something locked inside him had always known.
Theo came fast—a guttural grunt, a thrust that hit the back of Jace's throat, and then heat, bitter and thick, flooding his mouth. Jace swallowed what he could, the rest escaping down his chin, and pulled off gasping, the taste lingering.
They lay in the aftermath, breathing hard, the tent thick with the scent of sex, cum and sweat and the sharp, animal musk of spent arousal. Jace's heart was still pounding. His mouth tasted of another man. His body felt more alive than it had in months.
"Welcome to the wilderness, bro," Theo murmured, already half-asleep.
Jace waited for the panic to arrive. The three-AM reckoning, the what does this make me.
It didn't come. What came instead was a memory he hadn't let himself hold in fifteen years: sophomore year, his roommate toweling off after a shower, and Jace turning away so fast he'd knocked a lamp off the desk.
This hadn't started on the mountain. It had been there the whole time, folded small and put away where he didn't have to look at it.
He had loved his wife. That had been real—the marriage, the trying, the grief when it died.
All of it real. And so was this. He didn't have a word for what he was yet, and lying in a tent that smelled of pine and sex, he decided the word could wait.
What he kept circling back to, staring at the canvas ceiling, was not Theo. It was pale grey eyes watching from the firelight, and nostrils that flared as if tasting the air, and a voice that said You went quiet because you stopped thinking. That's different.
He could smell it, Jace thought. Tomorrow, he'll smell this on me too.
The thought should have been terrifying. Instead, it sent a pulse of heat through his softening cock that felt exactly like anticipation.
Outside, in the dark beyond the tent, something moved through the trees with the patience of a creature that had all the time in the world.
And when it paused outside the canvas, close enough that Jace could have touched it through the fabric, it breathed in slowly, deeply, the sound of a predator cataloguing its prey.
Then it was gone. And the only sound was the lake, and the wind, and the hammering of Jace's heart keeping time with a hunger he was only beginning to understand.
Canyon had told him to stay behind after dinner tomorrow. The invitation, if that's what it was, sat in Jace's chest like a lit fuse.
He did not sleep. And the mountain, as always, watched.