Chapter 18
"Here we are. Your accommodations for the night." Luka pushed open a door, and the room behind him made my old Soviet apartment look decent.
Two narrow cots stood against opposite walls with barely a meter between them.
A bare lightbulb hung on a wire. The whole place smelled like damp stone and old cigarettes.
Luka said something about communal showers and breakfast at dawn, but his voice slid past me because Diego had already walked through the doorway and dropped onto the nearest cot like someone had cut his strings.
The door closed. Luka's footsteps faded down the hallway.
Diego sat with his elbows on his knees, his head hanging forward, staring at the floor. His hair was still wet from the shower where they'd stripped and searched us, and water dripped onto his collar.
My babushka used to say you could tell when someone was at the end by how they held their shoulders.
Diego's curved forward, trying to fold in on themselves.
He'd kept forty people organized since the gully, kept them moving through the mountains, stood stone-faced while they put his grandmother in the ground.
Two days on fumes and stubbornness, and now the fumes were gone.
I crossed to him and put my hand on his shoulder. "Lie down."
He looked up slowly. His eyes took a second to focus. "What?"
"You need to sleep. Lie down."
He stared at me, then let me guide him back onto the cot. He rolled onto his stomach and turned his face to the wall.
I knelt beside him and put both hands on his shoulders.
My hands knew how to break bones, how to find the soft places between ribs where a blade would slide in clean, how to dislocate a shoulder with one sharp twist. Violence lived in the muscle memory. But this thing, making someone better instead of worse, had no training behind it.
I pressed my thumbs into the muscle on either side of his spine and found the knots there, working at them the way I'd work at a locked door.
Diego groaned into the pillow and dropped his shoulders.
Heat crawled up my spine and settled low in my gut.
I shifted on my knees, but my body had different ideas. Diego was making sounds under my hands, going loose because I was touching him, and apparently that was enough to get me half-hard on a stone floor in Casablanca.
I kept going. The tight places loosened one at a time under my thumbs.
His shirt was damp and clinging to his skin, and after a minute I gave up on the cotton and pulled the fabric to his shoulders.
His skin was hot and slick under my palms. I pressed into another knot, and a low noise broke out of him, deeper this time.
I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper.
"Jasper." His voice was rough. "You're hard."
I froze. My face burned. My hands started to pull away, but Diego shifted, rolling onto his side to look at me.
"It's okay, guapo." His eyes were dark. "Take what you need."
My hands hovered over his skin. In the vans I'd been terrified they were hurting him, that I'd never see him again, that the last thing between us would be him finding out I'd lied about Eight for a year. And now he was here, alive, looking at me like he wanted this too.
"Diego." My voice broke on his name. "I need..."
"I know." He sat up and pulled his shirt over his head, dropping it on the floor. Then the belt, the jeans, everything, until he was naked on the cot. "Get your clothes off."
I stripped fast, fumbling the belt buckle, jeans hitting the floor. When I looked up, Diego was lying back, watching me.
"Come here," he said.
I climbed onto the narrow cot and he pulled me down on top of him.
Our skin met, his chest against mine, his cock hard against my hip, and a sound tore out of me, raw and wrecked.
Diego swallowed it. He wrapped one hand around the back of my neck and pulled me into a kiss that tasted like exhaustion and want and cheap soap.
I shifted, and our cocks slid together. The noise we both made was graceless and desperate. Diego slid his free hand between us and wrapped his fingers around both of us, his calloused palm dragging friction straight up my spine.
I rolled my hips, grinding down, his cock against mine in his fist.
"That's it," Diego said. He tightened his grip and stroked us together. "Show me how much you need this."
I buried my face in his neck and moved faster. Pre-cum made everything wet and easy. The cot was too narrow, and we kept sliding toward the edge, and none of it mattered except his voice and the way his body moved under mine.
"I was scared," I said against his skin. "When they separated us in the vans. I thought..."
"I know." He sped up, bucking up into his own fist. "I know, guapo. But we're here now. And you're going to show me you know that."
He twisted his wrist on the upstroke, and my vision went sharp at the edges.
The pleasure was still there, but it had picked up speed, running ahead of me, and I couldn't reel it back.
Too much friction, too much skin against mine, his hand on us both, his voice right in my ear.
The pleasure and the panic hit as the same signal, and my nervous system couldn't tell the difference.
I grabbed his hip, and my rhythm stuttered. My forehead pressed into his collarbone while I tried to breathe.
Diego stopped moving. He went still around us both.
"Hey." The heat banked in his voice, and something steadier came through. "Where'd you go?"
"Here." I forced the word out. "Just. A lot."
"Too much?"
I nodded against his chest. My skin buzzed, every nerve firing at once, and I needed something in my mouth. The urge was so specific that it overrode everything else. I needed to be full, needed something to close my jaw around, needed the pressure to ground me back into my body.
I slid down without thinking about it. Diego let go, and I kept going, pressing my mouth to his sternum, his ribs, the trail of dark hair below his navel. I breathed against his hip.
"Jasper." He put his hand in my hair. "You don't have to."
I opened my mouth and took him in.
The weight of his cock on my tongue settled something in my chest. I closed my eyes and just held him there, jaw loose, breathing through my nose. The buzzing in my skin quieted. Diego curled his fingers in my hair and made a low sound that vibrated through his belly and into my lips.
"Fuck." His voice had gone somewhere deeper. "That's... yeah. Okay."
I wasn't sucking. I was just holding him, my mouth full and warm, my brain finally going quiet.
His cock lay heavy on my tongue, and I focused on the texture of him, the heat, the pulse I could track against my lower lip.
My own cock pressed hard against the mattress, and I locked my hips to keep from grinding down.
Moving would break this. Moving would start the noise again, and I needed the silence more than I needed the friction, so I stayed still and breathed and let my jaw go soft around him.
He ran his thumb behind my ear. "You look so good like this." His fingers curled tighter. "Just keeping me warm. Taking what you need."
I sucked once, slowly, and his hips jumped. He swore in Spanish and pulled hard enough to sting.
"Do that again," he said.
I worked my tongue against the underside and sucked him deeper.
A ragged sound punched out of him, his head dropping back against the pillow.
The taste spread across my tongue, and the need in my chest shifted from grounding to wanting.
My hips pressed down against the mattress before I could stop them, and the friction jolted through me, sharp and good and greedy.
"Get back up here." His voice scraped. "I want your skin on mine when we come."
I pulled off slowly, dragging my tongue along the underside as I went. The sound he made was going to live behind my eyelids for a month.
I climbed back up his body. He grabbed my hips and pulled me down, and the slide of our cocks together was easy now, slick with pre-cum and spit. I pressed my mouth to his throat. He smelled like cheap soap, sweat, smoke from every cigarette he'd shared with me in the mountains.
My mouth found the place where his neck met his shoulder. I breathed in, and my hips started moving on their own.
"There you are," Diego said. He wrapped his hand around us both again and stroked, slow, matching the roll of my hips. "Stay with me this time."
"Yeah."
"Yeah?" His thumb swept over the heads of our cocks on the upstroke, and my whole body jerked. "Good."
"You're very bossy for someone who was unconscious twenty minutes ago," I said into his neck.
He laughed under me. "Shut up and fuck my hand, guapo."
I grabbed his hip hard enough to bruise.
He made a pleased sound and thrust up into his fist, his cock sliding against mine.
The friction was right this time, building instead of flooding.
He worked us with a rhythm that matched my breathing.
Every inch of him tracked against me, every callous on his palm.
"Jasper." He bucked harder. "Tell me."
"Close," I managed.
"Then let go." He stroked faster. "I want to feel it."
His breath caught, and his rhythm broke. His whole body went tight beneath me. The wet heat of him coming between us sent me over. I came hard, adding to the mess, shuddering against him while he kept working us both through it.
We lay there breathing hard, stuck together. Diego still held us loosely, our cocks softening, his heartbeat hammering against my chest.
I hadn't been this safe in years.
"We need to clean up," he said, but his arms locked tighter around me.
"Yeah."
A sound rumbled through his chest, low and easy, and I could feel it in my ribs. "Bathroom's down the hall."
Neither of us moved. His breathing slowed against my temple, and the bare lightbulb hummed above us, and the stone walls held the warmth in. We were both alive and both here, and my thoughts drifted slow and heavy, in no particular hurry to get anywhere.