Page 52 of Gunpowder

Blair came with a wordless cry, his cock pulsing and spilling between them. His whole body jerked with the force of his climax. For a wildly irrational moment, he thought he might have fallen to pieces if Wren’s arms weren’t holding him together. His walls seizing around Wren’s cock must have sent Wren over, too, as Blair felt a rush of warmth inside him. Wren rode out his orgasm with short, sporadic thrusts against Blair’s prostate that made him arch and shiver with overstimulation.

Blair let his hand fall away from Wren’s neck, and Wren gasped as air surged back into his lungs. They were both quiet for a moment, breathing heavily and in Blair’s case, trying to remember how to speak. Wren slipped out of him but Blair kept an arm around him so he couldn’t get up. The feeling of Wren on top of him tethered Blair to the present and kept him from floating into the warm, hazy fog enveloping his brain.

Blair traced the red imprint his fingers had left on Wren’s neck. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine. I should be the one asking you that.” Wren propped up on his elbows to look down at him. “Are you hurting?”

“I feel good,” Blair said with a grin. Looking in Wren’s eyes made the fog heavier.

Wren laughed. “Oh, you’re in it deep.”

Blair didn’t know what that meant, but he liked Wren’s laugh. He didn’t like that Wren was getting up, though. “Hey,” Blair protested.

“I’m coming back.”

Good. The thought of Wren leaving after all that made Blair’s stomach feel empty and queasy all at the same time. He watched Wren go downstairs, and true to his word, he came right back with some damp paper towels. Wren cleaned them up before getting back on the bed and laying on his side next to Blair, and Blair mirrored him. The bed wasn’t the largest so there wasn’t space between them, but Blair didn’t want space between them.

“You can stay if you want,” Blair said.

Wren draped an arm over him. “I’ll stay for now.”

Blair knew that was the best compromise he was going to get, so he took it. He shifted to get more comfortable, triggering a sharp pain in his lower body that made him wince.

“Sore?” Wren asked, fingers stroking along Blair’s ribs.

“It’s not bad. Got a couple aches here and there but after you’ve been shot in the leg, everything else just kind of tickles.” His head was starting to feel clearer, his thoughts forming into words with much less effort than before.

“You would find the silver lining around a hurricane, wouldn’t you?”

Blair didn’t know what to say to that. He had joined Incindious out of bitterness and loneliness. While he wouldn’t hesitate to lay down his life for them now, his motives to join had been pretty selfish. They dealt weapons to people who would undoubtedly use them to hurt other people, and had their hand in other business ventures including drugs. He didn’t count himself as a good person.

“Hey, Wren?”

“Hm?”

“You said you were only becoming a doctor because it’s what your dad wants. What would you do if you got to pick?”

“I might join a criminal organization and illegally distribute firearms. It seems like fun, you get to go to war and everything.” He laughed when Blair smacked his arm, then said more seriously, “I was going to be a computer programmer. It was the only thing my father ever taught me that I actually liked. Computers were just so much simpler than everything else, so uncomplicated compared to people,” Wren said, eyes darkening so marginally when he mentioned his father that Blair wouldn’t have noticed if he wasn’t staring at him from such a short distance.

Blair scoffed. “Simple and uncomplicated are real fucking low on the list of words I would use to describe computers, but okay. We would have been good friends in school. I was a skater kid that got adopted by the nerds.”

“You never would have met me before highschool,” Wren said, propping himself on one elbow to look down at him. “And I wasn’t the friendliest person.”

Shocker, Blair wanted to say. Instead he asked, “Why not?”

“I attended most of school in Los Angeles. We didn’t move here until I was a junior,” Wren said, idly tracing the tattoo under Blair’s collarbone. The swirling black and red lines of the flames were still colored in blue by the bruise Wren had left there.

Blair pictured a dotted line appearing from California to New York and his mouth fell open. “Holy shit, why did you move across the country?”

“I don’t know. When I was sixteen, my father said he was moving the business to New York. We were packed and gone within a week.”

Blair hated the tension that settled around Wren when he talked about his father, so he dropped the subject. He turned to yawn into the pillow.

“Go to sleep,” Wren said. “I’ll wake you up before I leave.”

“M’kay.” Blair scooted forward until he could tuck his head against Wren’s neck, and he pushed his calf between Wren’s, just because. It occurred to him after he’d already gotten comfortable that Wren probably wasn’t big on cuddling. Blair wanted to offer to move, but after the almost-fight or whatever the hell that was in the hallway, and then what happened after, he was tired. Besides, he liked the way they fit together. In a lot of ways.

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