Work Text:
“Fuck! I’m bored. Why are we always stuck with the boring missions?” Adder says.
He walks a few steps ahead of Janosh down the slope of the hill leading into a deep gully. Overhead stretches the deep blue of a spring midday sky: The sun shines on Adder’s straw-yellow hair, the air is warm and bright with birdsong, and Janosh stands in it frowning at the open parchment in his hands.
“What are you talking about, hey?” he says. “We looking for treasure.”
“From some map Kubyenka lifted? Bullshit. It will probably just lead us to a wolf den and we’ll get our asses bit running back.”
Janosh shakes his head. He chuckles as he folds the map and tucks it back into his coat.
“You just grumpy from no women. We go, work up appetite, I make grub when we get back. You feel better, you see.” He nods toward the gully. “Come on, this way.”
Adder grumbles but follows as Janosh heads down the hill past him and scuffs and slides down the dirt embankment into the gully. Janosh stands a moment, staring down the earthen track. Ahead the gulley takes a meandering righthand curve, so they will need to follow along to see the extent of it.
He fishes in his coat for the map again, and traces the crude drawing of the route with his finger. Beside him Adder fidgets restlessly, tapping a dirt wall with his foot and then kicking a rock skittering and bouncing down the path ahead, the sound of it complicating into a thousand little echoes that spill through the narrow earthen passage.
The part of Janosh’s mind still focused on his companion knows what Adder will do next. And sure enough, Adder walks ahead a few paces and stands just before the bend. He leans back and cups his hands around his mouth.
“I want to fuck!”
The echoes of his voice ring and repeat from the walls. Adder turns back to Janosh with a smile, pleased with himself. Janosh sighs.
“You kokot, now wolves definitely hear us and come bite our—”
But before he can finish, the final echoes of Adder’s voice dissolve into much more present voices raised in confusion and alarm. Adder’s eyes widen as Janosh’s voice drops silent. He folds the map quickly and thrusts it back into his coat, then finds the handle of his fokos and catches it up off his belt and into his hand. Adder backs toward him, hand on the hilt of his half-drawn saber, all humor gone from the lines of his face and replaced with a watchful readiness.
The voices fade into footfalls. Three men come jogging around the bend of the gully, glance around, and find Adder and Janosh standing there, crouched and waiting in their battle-ready stances. The three glance around at each other; the leading man steps forward with a smirk.
“Wrong place at the wrong time, fellas,” he says. “I suppose it’s your money or your lives, then.”
Adder scoffs and glances sideways at Janosh with a grin. “What money? And with three men? They’re joking.”
But Janosh was sure he’d heard more, and a second later three more men come skidding around the curve.
Adder’s smile slips. “Fuck,” he says.
“Should we run for it?” Janosh asks, slipping into Polish for the advantage of not being understood.
But before Adder can answer, the men have weapons drawn and are jogging toward them, the scuff of their footfalls falling in dull echoes down the gully. Adder meets the leading man with a quick inward step, draws his saber in a smooth motion, and follows it through with a pointed strike to the man’s blade near the hilt—he hooks the curved edge of his saber around it and tosses it from the man’s hands to the bandit’s short yell of surprise.
“Whoreson can barely hold a blade!” the Pole shouts, laughing, and then backs toward Janosh as the rest of the men encircle them.
The gully dissolves into a chaos of sound: Boots scuffing on dirt, metal shrieking off metal or the dull thump of a club meeting a shield, grunts and oaths of men, all of it echoing and filling the narrow trench with the impression of a much larger battle.
Adder pivots to Janosh’s back and catches a strike with his saber, throwing another blade clean from its wielder’s amateur grip with a sharp, vicious laugh. They move in tandem, something immediate and automatic to the way their bodies move around each other. Janosh can sense Adder’s body and his movements like an extension of himself, even with the man at his back. He stands with his heel between Adder’s feet and turns with his shield just in time to catch a blow from a mace meant for the Pole’s shoulder. He throws it away with a grunt of exertion—he takes a quick step away from Adder and arcs his fokos out with a loose swing through his shoulder and strikes the mace-wielding attacker across the face. A dark red gash opens down the man’s temple, cheek, and jaw, and he drops to the ground spluttering and spitting blood.
The pressure of battle lifts suddenly as another man falls from a thump from Adder’s hilt to his temple. Janosh stands panting, staring after the four remaining bandits as they retreat back down the gully to leap up and pull themselves onto the grass to flee.
Adder jogs after them.
“Go home to your mothers and tell them what bitches you are!” he yells out once he reaches the far wall of the gully, before turning and sauntering back toward Janosh grinning.
Two men lie sprawled in the aftermath of the affray, one dead from Janosh’s blow to his skull, the other dazed and groaning on his back. Janosh kneels beside the dead one first to rifle through his pouches, humming with satisfaction to find a handful of dried mushrooms and a couple of groschen besides. He slips them into the pouch on his belt and comes back to his feet.
“Nothing,” Adder says, standing up from the dazed man with a spiteful little kick to his ribs. “Fuck. How am I supposed to pay for a fuck now?”
“Guess you got to do it old fashioned way and fuck yourself,” Janosh says.
“Piss off,” Adder says, but he laughs. “What’s that map say now, anyway?”
Janosh glances down and reaches into his coat for it, but can tell already by the dark bloom of blood on the fabric what state the parchment will be in. He peels the map open, parchment stuck to itself with bright red blood. The map has been reduced to unintelligible splotches of ink and blood.
“Kurva,” Janosh mutters. “Kubyenka gonna kill us.”
“Nah, we’ll buy him a drink and he’ll forget all about it. If he’s even sober enough to remember by the time we get back.”
“Buy him drink with what, hey? You broke, asshole.”
“I’ll owe you.”
“Yeah, yeah, you already owe me. What we do with map, then?”
Adder snatches the parchment from Janosh’s fingers to Janosh’s mild protest. He rips it cleanly in two and allows the blood-soaked fragments to drift to the ground, then grinds his heel into them as he starts down the gully toward the bandits’ camp.
“Come on!” he calls back over his shoulder. “Let’s check it out and then get back. I’m hungry.”
Janosh jogs to catch up with him, and they make their way down the gully bumping shoulders and laughing.
*
The heady heat of the moonshine Janosh bought them has settled into his gut and hazed his mind by the time Kubyenka at last remembers his map.
Outside, the night has settled down in its star-studded velvet black. Moonlight silvers the windowsills of the Devil’s Den and highlights the landscape beyond them. The tavern resounds with the bustle and perpetual din of many conversations—and a girl sitting at a table nearby has been eyeing Janosh all night, enough so that he’s held a couple groschen in his pocket in reserve in case her interest turns into an invitation.
Sometimes the low din of conversation erupts in shouts, and sometimes it erupts in violence. Matthew and Slavek had been a participant in one such altercation, and now they and the rest have fucked off, either passed out at tables around them or outside somewhere contributing to the ruckus. This leaves just Adder and Janosh sitting opposite Kubyenka at a table, with Dry Devil holding a mug of ale and standing behind them.
“Hey, didn’t I send you two morons out looking for treasure?” Kubyenka asks.
Janosh glances sideways to meet Adder’s eyes, widened in dismay.
“Aaah,” Janosh says, stalling. “Ah, it lead us nowhere, I think that map shit.”
“Yeah, we found a wolf den and took care of them before they could bite our asses,” Adder says.
“Well, I have no idea what he just said, but that’s a shame.” Kubyenka’s eyes are glassy the way they get when he is truly drunk: Treadlight’s moonshine is nothing to be trifled with. “Can I have it back? Maybe I can get a few groschen for it at least.”
“Aaaah,” Janosh says again, and trades another look with Adder. “We, ah, sold it already, hey? That where coin for drink come from.”
Adder laughs. “Yeah, we sold it to the ground, and I left a nice shoe print on it!”
“Shut up, kokot.” Janosh elbows him but it only makes Adder laugh harder.
Kubyenka just grunts and goes back to his drink. Janosh straightens, standing a little off the bench to look around the tavern, but the hopeful little light in his chest goes out when he cannot find that girl anywhere.
Dry Devil’s hand lands heavily on his shoulder. “She left a while back with some other poor sap.”
“Kurva,” Janosh groans. He slumps back to his seat on the bench.
“Hey,” Adder smacks his arm with the back of a hand. “If you aren’t going to fuck, give me those groschen so I can.”
“I already told you, go fuck yourself,” Janosh says. “I not paying for you to fuck.”
Adder drops his head back and heaves a loud, long, exasperated groan. He leans forward and thumps his arms and forehead down on the table.
“I want to fuck,” he says, his voice muffled against the wood. “It’s been days! Do you know what that does to me?”
“Yes, it make you act like even more of an idiot,” Janosh says, offhand.
He’s continued looking around the tavern, unable to altogether stifle that little ember of hope that perhaps he’ll catch the eyes of another available girl, pretty enough to bed and desperate enough toward the end of her working night not to ask too high a price. Or even a local girl looking for something quick and meaningless with a man who looks halfway clean and not cruel, though Adder is usually the one who attracts those types. Either way, meeting that girl’s eyes again and again has turned that stir of hope into expectation, and from expectation to arousal, and now Janosh sits here and nurses the frustrated, needing heat in his gut and curses his bad luck. He shifts uncomfortably on the bench.
Dry Devil sits down across from them, beside Kubyenka.
“Bad luck with the map,” he says. “We need some way to make coin, and fast. Haven’t got two groschen to rub together after tonight.”
Adder groans again. “I need to fuck.”
“Christ, isn’t there any way to shut him up?” Dry Devil says, and gestures toward the Pole.
Adder lifts his head from the table. “I would shut up right now if I had my tongue in some girl’s cunt!”
Janosh chuckles. “No you would not. I heard you fuck before, hey? You loud as fuck.”
“At least take his blabbering outside, will you? I can’t think,” Dry Devil says.
“He just being horny fucker.”
But the Devil nods toward Adder and then toward the door. “Out,” he says, a clear dismissal and one Janosh would be a fool to ignore.
Janosh shifts and stands up from the bench with a note of surprise and dismay to find himself a little hard. Worse, standing up and shaking Adder by the shoulder rouses him more—he feels the tickle of blood to his cock and barely suppresses a grunt as it lifts against his braies. Even his loose hose won’t hide his condition much longer. He gives Adder a more insistent shake, until he groans and grumbles and stumbles to his feet. They go out from the stuffy warmth and din of the tavern into the fresh night air.
It’s warm and humid, but brisk compared to the sweaty heat of bodies inside; it hits like a slap, bracing and refreshing, and Janosh stands blinking in it a moment as Adder walks ahead toward the trees.
“I wish I were fucking!” the Pole yells out, and Janosh shakes his head and follows.
They head into the trees deep enough for the voices from the tavern to drop away into a dull background murmur, replaced by wind hushing through leaves and the pad and rustle of their footsteps through the undergrowth. Adder kicks at the brush and then turns and slumps back against a tree, arms crossed and frowning toward the branches overhead. He heaves a long, groaning sigh.
“Fuck, I’ve been half hard all night,” he says. “I’m tired of fucking my hand. Please, God, if you put some lost maiden in the woods for me to find, and in her gratitude she fucks me . . . I’ll never ask for anything again.”
“Until you go four days without a fuck again and you ask for same thing,” Janosh says.
“Shut up, you prick,” Adder groans, head still leaned back against the tree. “Can’t you see I’m suffering?”
“You shut up,” Janosh says. “You already annoy Devil, now you annoying me. I am horny too, hey? You not hearing me bitch about it.”
“Great! We’ll ask God to put someone in the woods for you, too.”
Adder’s stream of sexually charged complaints has had an uncomfortable effect on Janosh: He’s growing harder by the second, the rub of his stiffening cock on the fabric of his braies lighting his nerves with an electric tension that concentrates in his gut. He stares at Adder hard, enough so that the Pole’s eyes flick down to find his in the heavy silence falling between them.
Adder laughs. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
At first Janosh doesn’t answer. He isn’t even quite certain of his own intentions when he shifts his weight forward and advances a step, his eyes remaining hard on Adder.
“What if we did something together?” he asks.
“What?” Adder snorts, and shakes his head, and looks off into the branches again. “You’re more drunk than I realized.”
But Janosh doesn’t look away. A heady flush of desire and inebriation warms his cheeks. They’ve been drunk together countless times before, lamented a lack of girls together before, but something about the night air and the moonshine and Adder leaned back with his arms crossed against the tree, and the tightness of arousal in his gut . . . And maybe that fight earlier as well, the adrenaline and the closeness of battle, feeling Adder as an extension of himself . . .
His eyes drop at the stir of motion in Adder’s hose. Adder hadn’t been joking about being half hard, and now he huffs a soft breath as the impression of his cock presses out more firmly against his tight hose. Janosh can’t explain, and is too drunk to question, the hot pang of desire in his own belly at the sight.
His breath draws thin through his lips, his heartbeat tapping in his throat. He shifts forward another step.
At last Adder lowers his head to look at Janosh properly, confusion and apprehension registering in his frown and the furrow sinking into his brow.
“What are you doing?”
Janosh eases forward the final step to bring them face to face. Adder doesn’t move, just stands leaned back against the tree, his arms still crossed over his chest, eying Janosh with suspicion and curiosity. His hot breath rushes over Janosh’s lips. They stare at each other from very close. Janosh imagines a similar sort of consternation in his own expression as he sees in Adder’s. But he doesn’t stop, and Adder doesn’t move away.
Janosh shifts his stance wider, his feet to either side of Adder’s. He brings his hips forward and rubs the hard bulge in his pants against Adder’s. The Pole’s eyes widen and then squeeze shut on the moan that rattles out of him, and a second later Janosh’s voice joins his. He rubs himself more firmly against the other man’s cock, and this time the hot ache of pleasure in his belly forces a louder sound out of him. Adder rocks his head back against the tree and groans.
“Janosh, what are you doing . . . ”
Janosh takes another step in, his chest against Adder’s pushing him back against the tree, their cocks pressed firmly together. The heat between them thuds with its own taut heartbeat.
“You want me to stop?” Janosh asks. He leans in until their lips barely touch, the thin rush of Adder’s breath tingling on his lips.
Adder’s throat bobs as he forces down a swallow. He keeps his eyes pressed shut.
“No,” he says.
Janosh takes his lips in a first hungry press. Adder’s brow tightens, the stitch between his eyes deepening. But after a second he returns the kiss greedily, his arms uncrossing, one hand slipping around Janosh’s side to dig his fingers into his back and the other sliding up his neck to grip his thick dark hair. Janosh grips him hard at the hips and pulls Adder into his thrusts. It only takes a few moments for the kisses to turn deep and open-mouthed. They exchange hot breaths in the cool night air.
They pant sharply into each other’s mouths as they grind together over their hose. Janosh squeezes Adder’s hips and then releases him to run his fingers up to the hem of his doublet. He pops open a few of the buttons leading up the Pole’s stomach, enough to slide his hand up beneath it over the heat of Adder’s skin and his well-muscled abdomen. Adder groans, lips parted around gritted teeth when Janosh breaks the kiss with a last hot breath into his mouth.
“You got me so hard already, you fucker,” Janosh pants into his ear.
Adder breathes a laugh. “Fuck, me too. But I need more than this to come.”
“All right.”
Janosh pushes his hand into the waist of Adder’s braies. Adder frowns down on him as Janosh pushes his hose and his braies down far enough to expose his cock and testicles. Some of the consternation has returned to Adder’s expression, in the deep lines to his forehead and between his eyes and in the sharp downturn of his lips. Janosh makes a soft sound of approval as he runs his fingers down the trail of blond hair leading from Adder’s stomach to his cock. He’s seen it before, of course—he’s even seen it hard. Impossible to avoid when spending so much time in close quarters with a man who spends most of his life in some degree of arousal.
But he doesn’t think Adder has seen him hard. Janosh tugs down his own pants and braies and breathes a soft sound of pleasure as the cool night air brushes the heat of his erection.
“Nice cock,” Adder says.
“You seen him before, hey?”
Adder laughs. “Yeah, not like this!”
Janosh chuckles too. And then laughter dissolves into moans as he nudges his cock against Adder’s and takes them both in hand.
They gaze down on Janosh’s hand around them as he begins to stroke. A low, grateful sound shakes out of Adder. He rocks his hips forward into Janosh’s hand, and the long slide of his erection against Janosh’s, the tip of his cock pressing up through his fingers, brings a groan from Janosh as well. The heat settles lower in his gut, warming his thighs and tightening that hard delectable pressure at the base of his cock. He begins a firm, slow rhythm down them both.
Adder pants through his loud moans. “Oh, fuck, oh fuck,” he groans, growing louder. “Oh fuck, yeah.”
But a rush of low voices comes through the trees from a path much closer than Janosh expected. Without thinking he lifts his free hand and presses his palm over Adder’s mouth.
“You being too loud,” he murmurs. “Somebody gonna hear us.”
Adder makes a muffled grunt of strained protest and arousal. The stitch in his brow deepens. The next moan he heaves out comes as a humid and muffled mmf against the flesh of Janosh’s palm.
Janosh’s dark eyes flick back down to watch his hand as he closes his grip more firmly around them and begins a steady downward pump, gritting his teeth against his own strangled grunts and groans. Adder’s hips buck in rhythm with his strokes, his head rocking back and eyes shut tight as he blows a series of harsh pants against Janosh’s palm. It only takes a few strokes more before Adder sucks in a sharp breath, holds it, and then gutters it out in a groaning rush; Janosh strokes through the stiffening throb of Adder’s cock in his hand, and through the spurt of semen that coats his fingers and slides down both their cocks.
Adder twitches and sucks in another breath not quite of pleasure when Janosh slides his hand up to stroke the heads of their cocks together. The hot ache concentrating in his cock sharpens to its breaking point. A moment later it tightens in a final sharp pang and pleasure spills out through his body in a warm, numbing wave. He grunts as the staggered pulse of his release joins Adder’s on his fingers.
Janosh doesn’t notice how he’s clamped down his grip over Adder’s face until the Pole gives another grunt of protest and turns his head to try and escape it. He drops his hand back to his side and leaves Adder gasping heavy breaths of fresh air.
Their foreheads touch as they huff their recovering breaths and stare down at Janosh’s fingers draped limp around the bases of their softening cocks, the cum sliding down their skin gleaming in the soft moonlight through the trees.
“Fuck,” Adder says after a minute of silence. He draws in a long breath and blows it out slowly. “I need a drink.”
Janosh nods in agreement to both sentiments. He picks himself up away from Adder and fishes in a pouch with his clean hand for the ragged scrap of cloth he uses to wipe and oil his fokos, and this time uses it to wipe himself and Adder clean. They stand apart, unspeaking, as they pull up braies and hose.
They walk in silence together back through the trees toward the uninterrupted ruckus around the Devil’s Den, until finally Adder breathes a laugh and steps sideways to shove Janosh with his shoulder.
“You’re buying, asshole. If you won’t pay for me to fuck, at least pay for me to get drunk.”
Janosh sets his palm against Adder’s shoulder and shoves him stumbling and laughing away.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, and chuckles. “You already drunk, you Polish fucker.”
*
The Devil’s Den quietens as the night ages: in the hours past midnight all the carousers have either gone on their way or fallen asleep upstairs or at the tables around Adder and Janosh. Treadlight and the alehouse maids have long since retired, leaving the men downstairs to their own devices.
Janosh lifts his wooden mug and drains the last drink of ale. That experience in the woods had sobered him a bit, but he’d passed proper drunk again hours ago and they’ve only kept drinking, burning through his final few groschen and then cajoling a few extra drinks from Treadlight on credit. Across from him Adder sits with his elbows on the table, lips parted and eyes glassy as he stares at the grain of the wood. He sways a little even sitting.
“I need to puke,” he says abruptly, and pushes himself up off the bench with his palms on the table. Janosh barely makes it up in time to catch Adder’s weight when he comes to his feet and immediately lists sideways.
He grunts as he stumbles beneath the taller man’s body, getting one arm around Adder’s shoulders and holding him up with a hand against his chest. Together they stagger out of the quiet tavern, Janosh slamming the door open with his shoulder and letting Adder spill from his loose hold onto his hands and knees beside the inn. He barely keeps himself from going to the ground as well. The world around him bobs and spins, and when he closes his eyes to keep himself from joining Adder in puking against the side of the building, the ground beneath him heaves.
“You need me hold back your hair?” he asks over the sound of Adder’s retching, his words slurred but jovial.
Adder groans. “Go drown in the creek, you prick.”
He picks himself up enough to slump over onto his ass. Janosh stands over him, smiling down until Adder blows a steadying breath and reaches a hand up toward him. Janosh claps his hand onto Adder’s, steps back, and yanks, hauling Adder to his feet and pulling the larger man staggering directly into him.
They erupt in delirious laughter as this time Janosh goes stumbling backward, shoes scuffing the loose dirt until his feet go out from under him and he hits the ground hard on his ass. Adder lands beside him on his chest with an oof as the impact forces the breath out of him. After a stunned second he heaves himself over onto his back, arms splayed out to the sides, shaking with laughter that fills his blue eyes with tears.
“Fuck, we’re a mess,” he says, fighting the words through his breathless laughter.
“I don’t think I ever seen you this drunk,” Janosh says.
Adder’s eyes slip shut. He laughs a second longer, and then his smile fades.
“Speak Polish, I’m too drunk to listen to Czech.”
Janosh nods. “Come on, let’s go to the creek,” he says in Polish.
They make it the handful of feet to the trickle of water in a shambling half-stand and half-crawl, and both slump down sitting close at the creek’s edge, knees drawn up in front of them. The water laps across the stones with its soft, silvery sound, gleaming and dark in the moonlight.
They pass a little while in silence before Janosh lets his knee fall sideways and bump Adder’s. The Pole looks at him with a smile. Janosh leaves his knee there.
“You know, it would be easier if you just spoke Czech,” he says. “Then everyone could understand you.”
“And why should I? I’m a Pole,” Adder says. He frowns as he looks back at the water, but it doesn’t take long for his smile to return. “These fuckers won’t bother to sound stupid in my language, so why should I sound like an idiot in theirs? It’s bad enough I have to understand the bullshit they say.”
Janosh chuckles. He returns to Czech without even registering the change.
“You make good point,” he says. “Except you still sound like idiot in Polish.”
Adder glances at him, eyebrows raised. He snorts a laugh and gives Janosh a shove that nearly topples him bonelessly over.
“Fuck you.”
Both of them laugh, and then quiet. Adder groans and leans back with his palms on the earth behind him. He lifts his face to the stars. Janosh studies him for a second, the pale light on his hard features, before returning his attention to the trickle and flash of the water at his feet.
For a time they let the nighttime quiet settle down around and between them, their knees resting together, Adder gazing skyward and Janosh staring at his fingers with his arms slung over his knees and hands hanging between his legs. No sound but the subtle hush of breeze in the grass, the occasional call of some bird or creature in the distance, and the soft shift or murmur of some soul passed out inside or around the tavern. And Adder’s breath, drawn in slowly through his lips and breathed out in a resolved sigh.
“What we did . . .” He trails off and turns his head to look at Janosh.
Janosh looks back at him, his eyebrows raised. “Yeah?” he asks. And in Polish: “You regret it?”
Adder gazes at him and then huffs a laugh. “No way.” But there’s something vulnerable about the way his eyes dart away and then back before he asks, “You?”
“No,” Janosh says. “We’re both less horny now, right? Where’s the harm?”
Adder laughs. “Exactly!”
But there’s a significance to the companionable silence sinking down afterward. Neither of them remarks on it, but it remains as a kind of softness. Janosh goes on gazing at Adder even when the other man looks up smiling into the stars again. He knows Adder well enough by now to tell when there’s something else he wants to say. He can see it in the slight furrow to the man’s heavy brow and feel it in the way the silence rests between them.
Finally Adder breathes another slow exhale. He looks sideways at Janosh, his smile fading.
“My name is Leszek,” he says.
Janosh stares at him, too drunk to absorb the information quickly.
“Leszek,” he says. “It . . . good name.”
Janosh looks back at the water and Adder at the stars. The weight of the revelation sits in Janosh’s mind, present but not quite processed, his thoughts hazed by inebriation and fatigue as the events of the day and night settle more deeply into his body. After a second he gives a sage nod.
“My name Janosh.”
A pause, and then Adder snorts and begins to laugh. It takes Janosh a moment to realize why, and even then he isn’t quite sure why they’re laughing: but they are, breaking the close, cozy silence of the countryside with their hard, loud laughter, until someone wakes up enough to yell at them to shut the fuck up, and they stagger to their feet and drag each other still shaking with laughter up the stairs to bed.
*
The next morning dawns bright and piercing through the square window set in the loft.
Janosh groans and blinks blearily into it, his face scrunched into a grimace of confusion and pain. The more he wakes the more the consequences of the night before settle into him, in the form of a pounding dry pain in his temples and a heaviness and ache all through his body. And he still feels a little drunk, which means it will only get worse.
He lies there on his back as memories of the night before swim back to him. His eyes widen as a vivid image returns: his mouth hot on Adder’s, grunting and moaning together as he rubbed their cocks, pressing his palm over Adder’s mouth, and the deep stitch in the man’s brow as he’d come over Janosh’s hand.
And the name. Leszek.
Janosh lets his head fall sideways on the straw. There is Adder asleep beside him, his heavy features slack in sleep, lying on his stomach shirtless with one arm beneath his head, snoring a soft rumble on each exhale. Janosh lies there and watches the small motions of his eyelids and lips as he sleeps. He listens to the rush of Adder’s breath and the quiet sounds he makes, a soft clearing of his throat, a shift in the straw as his fingers twitch. A smile touches Janosh’s lips at the sight of him like this, disheveled and vulnerable. Ugly bastard.
There’s a tenderness in him, almost, for the man sleeping beside him. A warmth and a softness he doesn’t believe he’s felt for anyone before, not really. They’ve had this immediate and natural accord since the first words they’d spoken to each other, but the context of it has infinitesimally yet essentially changed. Deeper now, and closer.
Adder will wake up hungover with straw in his yellow hair and fuss at Janosh to re-do his two small braids. And he’ll sit there smiling and talking shit while Janosh chuckles and plucks scraps of straw from his hair and does so.
Janosh’s smile deepens. His eyes narrow with affection as he gazes into Adder’s sleeping face.
Leszek.
***