Rite of Summer: Treading the Boards, Book 1 (29 page)

“I have desired you for years. I have loved you since I saw the sun in your hair and heard you laugh by the banks of the river. And, for the life of me, I think I have been spoiled for all others.”

There—it was out, his heart was in a million shards that littered the inside of his rib cage, and Stephen could do with his new power whatsoever he willed.

Stephen braced his arms on either side of Joshua in the chair and leaned in to claim what had always been his.

The kiss was soft and gentle, and in that dry press of lips, a tentative reclamation of something Joshua thought was forever gone. He allowed it for a moment, tilted his head to lean in to it for longer than that, and then finally broke, burying his hands in Stephen’s hair and holding him there. He tasted the seam of his lips and Stephen opened to him, the tip of his tongue a teasing and tender thing.

And this—this was everything he had thought never to have again, the weight of Stephen pressing down against his shoulders, the slide of his hair under Joshua’s fingers, the huff of his breath as he laughed softly against Joshua’s questing and needy mouth. He was
there
and he was real, yielding happily under the gentle pressure of Joshua’s kiss, and he was
everything
.

When they parted, finally, Joshua’s lips buzzing and sore, Stephen’s eyes were wide and joyous.

“I asked you once before,” Joshua said, his heart an entire percussion section within his ribs. “I’ll ask it again. Come with me?”

“I will,” Stephen answered with no hesitation at all. “And gladly.”

That deserved another kiss, and this time Stephen’s teeth grazed Joshua’s lower lip. He sucked at it, bit it, kissed away the sting and left him breathless, everything about his mouth hot, slick and needy. Then he was gone, and Joshua’s eyes snapped open.

He didn’t go far, kissing down Joshua’s throat, past his loose cravat and down his shirt, stopping only to nuzzle at the bulge beginning in Joshua’s trousers. Stephen’s breath was warm, even through the layers of wool, the barest grazing contact enough to send Joshua dizzy with months’ worth of constrained desire.

He slid his hands through Stephen’s hair, held the loose curls back from his face so he could watch as Stephen mouthed at him gently. He laid his cheek against Joshua’s thigh, his eyes closed and with a look of such exhausted contentment that Joshua almost cried.

Stephen popped the buttons on Joshua’s fall front and ran his nose along the stiffening line of Joshua’s prick, only a layer of linen now between them. He tingled, everywhere, craved the feel of skin on skin, of more than just where this was heading.

“Stop,” Joshua asked, gripping Stephen’s head, his thumbs along the line of his beautiful jaw, and tugged gently to draw him away.

“What’s wrong?” Stephen asked immediately, dangerously close to a pout.

“Not like this.” Joshua shook his head, dropping his feet to the floor and rising to stand. “Not after so long.”

It didn’t take much to pull Stephen toward the bed after that. Clothing hit the floor in equal piles—waistcoats, trousers, shirts—until they were both gloriously nude, that long, lean expanse of Stephen’s skin now Joshua’s to taste and touch once more.

“Like this, then?” Stephen asked, as Joshua suckled at his nipple, the high pink nub hard even before his mouth had brushed across it.

Stephen rolled his hips up, his cock a thick and solid pressure between their stomachs. It slid along Joshua’s erection, the heads catching each other, knocking his pierced ring. A shock burst through him, settled deep in his lower back where heat and pressure coiled around each other. He shuddered and Stephen laughed, his rippling mirth a sound that Joshua could never tire of.

“Like that, I see now,” Stephen murmured, and did it again.

Joshua slid up Stephen’s body, grinding down into his hips as he did so. The ache burned in his shoulders from propping himself up, sweat stinging in the bend of his knees. He kissed Stephen’s mouth, sucked his lower lip between his teeth. Stephen opened for him, deepened the kiss into something hot and filthy.

Their cocks slid against each other, now slick, now rough, the scattering of dark hair on Stephen’s stomach adding another layer of sensation to the needful drag of skin against skin.

Joshua kissed down Stephen’s jaw, and Stephen lifted his chin, baring his throat in delicious surrender. Joshua tasted the salt there, his tongue darting out to flick at the lobe of his ear, leave wet trails down the straining tendon along the side of his neck, delve into the hollow of his collarbone where the sweat was gathering. It was too easy to nuzzle into the join of Stephen’s shoulder and throat, to press his face into the familiar curve and breathe him in for a moment. He smelled like travel, dust and horses, and damp wool—so good, so
real
, so far beyond the realms of his fantasies and memories.

Stephen arched his hips up against Joshua, trapping their cocks between their bellies. “Please,” he gasped out, and Joshua kissed the words from his mouth.

Stephen licked a wet stripe up his hand and slid it down between them, past Joshua’s arms where he propped himself up, down to where their cocks dragged together. He wrapped his hand around them both.

Joshua dropped his head to brace against Stephen’s chest—the hard pressure of Stephen’s prick and the tight, wet heat of his hand was too much, too soon!

He needed to move, had to thrust, to ride up into the circle of Stephen’s fingers and slide through the slick that was forming there.

He felt rather than saw the progress of Stephen’s other hand, wrapping around his buttock, the pads of two fingers pressing against the tight muscle between. Those questing fingers traced circles on the tender skin, but with no oil on hand there was no further entry possible.

“Not yet,” Joshua begged shamelessly. The pressure began to build.

Stephen’s fingers toyed over the sensitive skin behind, while his fist gripped Joshua’s prick against his own. His thumb flicked at the ring, flicked and tugged, adding to the overwhelming wave crashing down around Joshua.

It had been so long, too many months apart, and now to lose all control like this, to be taken apart so easily—

“Stop, or I am lost!”

“Do it,” Stephen begged, arching up beneath him and thrusting faster into the circle of his own hand. “Fuck me just like this, finish on me. Mark me as yours. I need to see you do it.”

Their cockheads emerged and vanished back into Stephen’s hand. Joshua could look down between their bodies and see them, red and purple, gleaming wet now, their foreskins riding along the slickness of their shafts. The sight struck him like a thunderbolt—he could not stop now if the world itself collapsed to pieces around them both.

“Please,” Stephen begged again, and Joshua caught his gaze and held it.

Stephen’s eyes were black, tears gathering in the corners, his hairline dotted with gleaming beads of sweat. He panted, his lips parted, and he stared up into Joshua’s eyes as though he saw revelations playing out inside them.

“I love you,” Stephen gasped, wonder filling those eyes again. “I love you.”

His hand tightened, Joshua’s toes curled and his fingers dug into the sheets on either side of Stephen’s head. Lightning bolts rushed through his body, coiling, boiling and exploding out along his cock. He came, fiercely, more powerfully than anything he had managed on his own. A thousand pearls of white splattered across Stephen’s stomach, gleaming in his dark hair.

“Mine,” Joshua announced triumphantly, exultantly, still hovering in that realm between desire and disbelief. He shuddered and clenched, Stephen’s fingers pressed firmly against the entrance to his arse, his other hand closed tight around Joshua’s cock. “You’re mine and I am yours,” he said again, Stephen’s body rising underneath his. “I love you.”

Stephen cried out, kissed Joshua to muffle the sound that wrenched out of him. He came, hot and wet between their bodies, his emissions splattering across Joshua’s chest and abdomen.

Ripples of ecstasy ran through Joshua’s body as the aftershocks took him, Stephen’s hand slowly stroking back and forth along their pricks to work the last of their pleasure from them. It was too much, finally, his body recoiling from the contact, and Joshua let his arms buckle. He rolled to the side as he collapsed, exhausted.

The sheets crumpled beneath him, warm from their skin and wet from Stephen’s damp hair, the mattress firm and just yielding enough to let him sink. He closed his eyes, his entire body tingling.

And so he missed the moment when Stephen rolled over to flatten on top of him. The breath would have been knocked out of him if he’d managed to catch it yet, his lover’s dead weight pressing him down into the mattress.

Joshua opened his eyes into a mass of dark-brown curls, and he reached up to push them out of the way.

Stephen captured his hands and brought them back down to their sides, lacing their fingers together securely. He hummed to himself as he lay there, his head on Joshua’s chest and their legs tangled, semen drying between them to fuse them together even more permanently.

That would become a disastrous mess at some point soon, but Joshua could not bring himself to care. Not just yet.

For now, he would lie here, Stephen’s solid warmth secure above him, their chests rising and falling in unison, their hands locked together in a wordless and unnamed pledge.

He almost fell asleep that way. Or maybe he had, and it only seemed like he’d just been dozing. Either way, the sky outside the shutters had gone fully dark, the candle the only light.

Stephen still lay on his chest, occasionally pressing a tender kiss against Joshua’s naked skin. He needed to wash—things were itching where they should not be itching—and he desperately wanted to crawl beneath the counterpane and sleep. Which was not going to happen while he was still sticky.

“Stephen?” he murmured, flexing his fingers.

Stephen snored once, going limp and pretending to be asleep.

“I know you’re awake,” Joshua added, a smile playing over his mouth. “Get off me.”

“No, I shan’t,” came the mumbled retort, vibrating against his collarbone. “And you can’t make me.”

That sounded like a challenge if ever he had heard one. Joshua extricated one of his hands from Stephen’s clutches, ignoring the small whimper that followed. He ran his fingers down Stephen’s neck, which got him squirming but not moving. Down his spine, then, as far as Joshua could reach from that angle—no luck. Under his arms, then, into the tuft of dark hair that trapped and held his scent.

Stephen yelped and rolled away, jamming his hands into his armpits to protect himself from the threat of tickling. “Ugh!” he declared, half sitting on the bed, the sheet tangled around his legs. “Cruel man!”

“One of us needs to be the practical one,” Joshua said easily, and he leaned over to kiss Stephen, tender and soft against his lips. Stephen pressed into him, all but falling over when Joshua rose to soak a cloth in the washbasin and attend to his ablutions.

He returned to the bed a few minutes later, clean, cold and with a fresh pair of smalls dragged over his bare skin.

Stephen’s turn for ministrations, then. He took longer than he probably needed to, for the sheer novelty of being able to do this again. To draw the cloth across Stephen’s chest and watch his nipples tighten, to run it through the tangle of coarse, dark hair below his stomach and watch the curls bounce back into place, to roll the cloth over Stephen’s soft prick, stroking the silken skin and letting it tap lightly against the firm muscle of his thigh.

Stephen shivered, his arms up over his head and his knees fallen to either side, granting Joshua all the access he could ever desire.

And because Joshua could never leave well enough alone, he had to break the silence to ask, “You meant what you said?”

Stephen opened one eye and looked at him, his brow coming down low. “Which part?”

Joshua frowned at him. “All of it.”

“That I love you? Yes.” Stephen sat up, his eyes open and tracking Joshua’s movements carefully. He drew back the counterpane and slipped beneath it, holding the covers up for Joshua to join him in the warmth. “That Evander is no longer in my life, most emphatically yes.”

Joshua followed his lead, more for the chance to end the shivers than anything else. Stephen wrapped his legs around Joshua’s almost immediately, facing him as he laid his head on the pillow.

“That I followed your advice and have built a reasonable life for myself, yes. That said life would be infinitely improved by your permanent presence in it, a million times yes, yes and yes again.” He punctuated each of those affirmations with a gentle tap of his fingers on Joshua’s chest, directly over his heart.

Said heart swelled until it pushed the tears up to his eyes, and Joshua blinked them away hurriedly. Words were easy.

But he rode through a storm to find you, chased you down until he had the chance to plead his case. What further proof of his devotion do you need?

“And you will sail with me tomorrow?” Joshua asked because he needed to know, now, with their lusts sated and their bodies quiet. “Leave this new life of yours and willingly begin over again, somewhere entirely new?”

Stephen nodded, his smile all the sunshine needed in the room. “My trade is portable. Where I can take my instrument and music, I can find employment of some kind. I would rather be with you in a peasant’s cottage than alone in a vast mansion,” he pledged, a teasing light in his warm, dark eyes.

“It may yet come to that,” Joshua answered dryly. “There are no guarantees in our types of lives.”

“Nonsense,” Stephen replied blithely. “And either way…” he wrapped his arms around Joshua and curled in close, “…we have each other to keep warm.”

“Are you sure you’re a musician? With lines like that, one would swear you’re a writer of ladies’ romances.”

Stephen laughed, despite Joshua’s fond sarcasm. “With smudge on his fingers and paint on his nose,” he recited in a singsong rhythm.

Joshua rubbed at his nose automatically, but no color came off on his hand.