4. Earned #3
The taste was intense, warm skin, clean musk, the slick salt of precum flooding his tongue as the head pushed past his lips.
The girth stretched his jaw to its limit, and Jace worked it with determined focus, tongue pressed flat against the underside, bobbing in shallow strokes that let him explore the geography of veins and ridges and the thick, throbbing shaft that pulsed against his tongue with each of Canyon's deep, slow heartbeats.
"Jace—" Canyon's voice was strained, the first time Jace had heard it waver, the first fracture in that monolithic control.
His hands gripped the sheets, knuckles white.
His hips trembled with the effort of not thrusting.
"Your mouth, god, your mouth is so hot, I can feel your heartbeat through your tongue—"
Jace took him deeper, gagging slightly, tears pricking his eyes, but the sound Canyon made, a low, rumbling growl that vibrated through the mattress, was worth every second of discomfort.
He sucked harder, cheeks hollowing, one hand wrapping around the base of the shaft to cover what his mouth couldn't reach, the other finding Canyon's balls, heavy, drawn tight with need, and rolling them with firm, kneading pressure.
Canyon's composure shattered. His hips flexed, driving his cock deeper into Jace's mouth, and his hand found the back of Jace's head, guiding without forcing, fingertips pressing into the skull with a restrained urgency that communicated volumes.
Jace matched the rhythm, sucking, stroking, squeezing, and felt the massive cock swell even larger in his mouth, the veins distending, the head flaring, the entire shaft going rigid with the unmistakable tension of imminent release.
Jace didn't pull off. He pushed deeper, throat opening, and Canyon erupted, the first jet hot and thick and copious, hitting the back of Jace's throat with enough force to make him choke, followed by wave after wave, each pulse accompanied by a sound from Canyon that was barely human: a roar compressed into a growl, the vocalization of something ancient releasing a need that had been building far longer than tonight.
The cum was thick, slightly bitter, with that metallic undertone, and Jace swallowed what he could, the rest spilling from the corners of his mouth, running down Canyon's shaft in warm, pearly streams.
Before Jace could recover, Canyon had him, flipped, repositioned with inhuman speed, Jace on his back and Canyon over him, mouth descending on Jace's untouched cock with a ferocity that was all reward.
The suction was merciless, the tongue devastating, and Canyon's still-hard cock pressed against Jace's thigh, impossibly ready again, the recovery time nonexistent.
Jace came in under a minute—a blinding, full-body orgasm that tore through him in waves, cum pulsing into Canyon's throat in thick, desperate jets that Canyon swallowed with audible hunger, drinking him down like water in a desert.
They lay in the aftermath. Breathing. The fire in the other room cracking faintly. Canyon's arm across Jace's chest, heavy and warm, the scarred forearm resting against skin that was still flushed and damp.
“Let me hold the pieces I broke open,” Canyon murmured against his throat, licking the bruised bite marks with gentle attention. Not feeding, tending.
Jace closed his eyes. The man who’d spent thirty-four years holding himself together finally let someone else hold the seams.
"Your eyes," Jace said quietly. "Last night. In the forest. They... changed."
Canyon was silent for a long time. His thumb traced slow circles on Jace's collarbone, and in the lamplight his eyes were grey and human and guarded.
"You saw that," Canyon said. Not a question.
"I saw that."
"There are things on this mountain that don't have names in any language you speak. I'm one of them." A pause. "And what I'm becoming around you is something I haven't been in a very long time."
He pulled back. His face was unreadable.
"Go back to your cabin. Sleep. Tomorrow I'll push you harder than today."
"Canyon—"
"Go."
Jace dressed and left. Crossing the dark clearing to his cabin, he looked back once at the lodge, and through the window of Canyon's quarters he saw a shape standing motionless, watching him with eyes that caught the lamp's glow and held it, silver, luminous, inhuman.
Not glowing with the light.
Glowing despite it.
Jace's hand went to his neck, to the bruises that pulsed with a warmth that wasn't his. His other hand pressed against his stomach, where the ghost of Canyon's release still clung to his skin like a brand.
The mountain watched. The pines held their breath.
And in the darkness between the trees, something that was not a wolf howled once, sharp, territorial, the sound of a claim being staked in a language older than speech.
***
Jace locked his cabin door and sat on the edge of the bunk, and for the first time since arriving at Black Pine, he was not thinking about his divorce or his emptiness or his broken life.
He was thinking about silver eyes. And the taste of something ancient on his tongue. And the question that Canyon had planted in his chest like a seed in dark soil:
What am I becoming around you?
Sleep, when it finally came, was dreamless.
The glowing eyes had seen to that.