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He wouldn’t have looked at the gorgonite twice if it weren’t for the way he laughed. He was too damn pretty, too put together, the kind of tightly-tailored prick who treated Undercity dives like an amusement park ride: good for a quick and terrifying drop before scaling back up to the heights. But it was an unguarded little snort and the way his well-tamed tendrils curled messily, the delicate hand brought up to cover a fake mustache, and suddenly it was Gideon’s stomach that fell away. Didn’t matter what made him laugh or who. Gideon wanted that laugh turned on him.
“You look like you got a fun story or two,” Gideon says, dropping into the seat beside the man. “Buy me a drink and maybe I’ll listen.”
The man swivels toward him, eyes like daggers, eyebrows curving high at the audacity, but whoever he’d been chatting with before is now forgotten, so job done. “How ‘bout you buy me a drink, and I’ll let you keep starin’ the way you are.”
Gideon stares right into those gorgonite eyes, knowing damn well what they can do. Violet irises like a vaportrail from the light racers; reinforced steel behind them that ought to serve as a warning. But Gideon’s never been good at heeding those. On a pretty face, they’re dangerous. On someone with a laugh like that and a keen and vicious tongue, they’re downright devious. All of it together, and this man’s already looking to become a big fuckin’ problem.
“Fine, I’ll buy. But I’m aimin’ to do more’n just look.”
The Seven Hells is the quietest he’s ever heard it; the chaos, bloodlust, revelry, and grief have collapsed under their own weight, and taken the bite out of even the toughest of the Hounds. Only Gideon seems unable to sleep, even after Frost and Blarbie’s tired murmurings have faded off, the crispy ping games have ended, the Bawb Seger tracks have run out, and Kremy has long since melted into a puddle of blatant affection and crispy-breath drool.
Mostly blatant affection. Much as Kremy was happy to be draped in his arms, rambling about everything they’re meant to keep locked away in their apartment, as soon as they’d bedded down for the night he was as business-like as ever, back turned to Gideon. Just resting his hand on Kremy’s hip was enough to earn Gideon a swat that might’ve even connected under normal circumstances, so Gideon left him be and stared up into the shadowed tunnel ceiling and tried to review his notes mentally, twisting and turning them every which way until he nodded off.
But when he awakens, it isn’t to the sounds of their crew stirring around them, or the whine of the overhead lights.
It’s to lithe, spindly fingers brushing over his stomach, and coaxing apart the fastenings on his pants.
“What the fuc—”
Before he can jerk away, though, another of those fingers presses to Gideon’s lips, familiar both in its shape and the cool gold of the rings stacked on it. Even the smell is pure Kremy, despite the stale spilled crispy on it, and Gideon slumps back down, though his heart is burst-firing against his sternum with an adrenaline surge. But the initial relief that they aren’t under assault gives way to the groggy question of just what the hell Kremy is doing. He’s little more than a darker gorgonite-shaped silhouette against the dull gray darkness of the common area where they’ve bedded down with at least a dozen of the Hellhounds, and—
And yet he’s straddling Gideon’s thighs, and tugging down the zipper on Gideon’s pants now, one agonizing click of zippered teeth at a time.
“Krem,” Gideon hisses again, quieter but more insistent. “The hell’re you tryin’—”
This time, Kremy stretches out across Gideon’s body to cover it with his own, as much as his spindly, long form can, and he kisses one corner of Gideon’s mouth with a faint scrape of fangs. “Quiet, baby,” Kremy murmurs, so soft Gideon feels it against his cheek more than he hears. “The fellas need their rest.”
“So do you, Drinksy,” Gideon says, as softly as he can.
But then he’s sucking air in through his teeth, back arching, choking back his own moan as Kremy’s hand dives into the front of his pants and wraps around his mostly soft cock.
“After what I went through tonight?” Kremy grins against his mouth as he pulls Gideon’s shaft loose. “What I need’s my big fuckin’ pig.”
Gideon knew it would only be a one-night stand before the night was even out; knew it the minute the man—Kremy, he’d called himself—hooked one polished lizardskin boot around Gideon’s calf and caressed it with his toes. Gideon tried to tell himself he didn’t care. It’s the admission price of tangling with a topsider, knowing you’re just a scruffy souvenir.
Not meant to last, he reminds himself, with Kremy’s legs folded up over his shoulders as he fucks him against the bar’s dirty tiled bathroom walls, and hopes the shitty lighting will cover up the spiderweb of cracks they put into those tiles.
Don’t get attached, he scolds himself, when they go for late-night diner waffles after, and Kremy presses the sole of his shoe over Gideon’s crotch without so much as a wink while they stuff their faces.
It’s for the best, he insists to himself, on his knees and forearms in the back of Kremy’s fine sedan, and it’s the first time he hasn’t scolded someone for grabbing his horns, asked him to even, and fuck if it weren’t the right call when Kremy slams into him and wrenches his head back, and Gideon groans and ruts against the leather seats like the boar he is.
He isn’t surprised when he goes to clean himself in the diner washroom and comes back out to find both Kremy and his fine sedan are gone.
What he doesn’t expect is when Kremy turns up at King Coal’s garage a few weeks later, chatting with Gideon’s father the King himself, making him laugh as hard as Kremy laughed that night they shared, and Papa Coal slyly nudges Gid and tells him, “I think you gotta meet this guy.”
Gideon’s eyes are finally adjusted to the dark enough to make out the shifting tendrils on Kremy’s head as he tugs the blanket up over them and slinks down between Gideon’s thighs. His eyes are almost glowing violet under the blanket, but Gideon’s focused more on the wet, hot breath Kremy’s exhaling around his cock. Fuck.
His head rolls back as Kremy’s split tongue flickers against his tip, and the night swirls behind his eyes: the warehouse, the shrieks and wails and gunfire, the blood, the freezerburn stink. And Kremy—Kremy—Kremy. Flung against the wall. Limp in that monster’s grasp. Sputtering and choking as Gideon throws aside his Bertha and rushes to his husband instead.
He’s never cared who sees them, but neither has he ever tried to make them seen. It didn’t seem important, before, back when it was only really the two of them; and once the Starlight started up, the business of keeping things running smooth overtook all the rest. Their employees learned about them in the way they learned to flush the middle toilet stall twice, or that the best crispies were on the bottom shelf: understood but unspoken. It ain’t no one’s business but ours, Kremy said once, and Gideon agreed.
But that was before he felt just how thin and fleeting Kremy in his arms could really be.
“Fuck,” Gideon whispers again, as Kremy’s lips sink down around him, and his hips roll up on their own volition to push deeper into his satiny mouth. He slings an arm over his eyes, because even the dim glimpse of Kremy’s mouth stretching and struggling to wrap around him is too fucking good to resist. He’s seen it a thousand times, and still hasn’t had his fill.
Maybe Torbek’s whuffling snore beside him ought to shock him back to his senses. But then Kremy’s cheeks are scooping in with an agonizing suck and his long throat swallows around Gideon’s cockhead, and Gideon has to hold back a cry so hard his lungs begin to burn.
Kremy huffs in dismay; Gideon peeks from under his arm as one ring-covered hand emerges from under the blanket to wag an admonishing finger at him. With a scowl, he bucks his hips upward, and the bug-eyed look and wet glrk Kremy makes is worth it. Kremy grabs at Gideon’s hand to pry it from where it’s covering his eyes, and then his fingers lace in Gideon’s, squeezing hard. Demanding he looks.
Gideon does more than look.
His thighs clench and he burrows his other hand in Kremy’s tendrils, and they writhe and flow over his fingers as he thrusts himself up into Kremy’s mouth. Spit glistens on his shaft and Kremy’s mouth with each snap of his hips, and for just a few moments, Gideon loses himself in the beautiful crush of Kremy’s mouth and throat as he’s caught off-guard, in those violet eyes wide with strain—
And all at once, Gideon’s body locks up. But not with release.
With those violet eyes boring right into his brain, freezing him in place.
Kremy drags his puffy lips off of Gideon’s cock and slithers right back up his body to whisper into his ear while Gideon is still restrained by his gorgonite wiles. “Ain’t done with you yet.”
Gideon isn’t proud of who he became in the still-burning husk of King Coal’s Garage. He’s not proud of the sledgehammer rage, the slurry of days and nights of green haze and burning whiskey and fists bloodied from faces he wishes he remembers caving in. But Kremy was there on the other side of it all, probably somewhere in between too, blank-faced but yielding the moment Gideon slumped into his arms. How long did he languish in Kremy’s one-room flat, too cried-out for more tears and throat too raw to scream? How many hanging threads did Kremy snip away for him, and never admitted?
“Let’s get married,” Gideon tells him, sometime after the fog finally lifted into a dull haze like any other in the Greenlight District. “I’m not leavin’ anything to chance.”
“You’re stupid, Gid.”
“Only coz you make me stupid.”
Kremy curls into him, long fingers trailing down his bared chest, watching him from under angled brows. He still smells like the chemicals from the designer vials he’s selling, because no one stays in the underground without running some kind of grift. Gideon only hates it when he can’t be there to watch his back, but with Pa gone, he’s got nothing now but time. He’s got no one left to protect.
Krem kisses his cheek and sighs, melting against his scruffy beard. “Not half so much a fool as you make me.”
As tight a fit as his husband’s sweet little hole is sometimes—it’s exponentially harder to push into him without making noise. Kremy’s on his side, one leg thrown back over Gideon’s massive trunkish thighs, and bracing himself on the makeshift pallet, and while he swore up and down he’d readied himself while Gideon was asleep, Gideon’s severely having his doubts just how much readying the drunken mess actually did. He bites down hard on the back of Kremy’s neck, and thrusts into him with a muffled grunt, but Kremy’s tight walls are squeezing him like a fist and Gideon has to stop to breathe a few times before making one last thrust to bury himself to the hilt.
“Dammit, Gid,” Kremy whines, as Gideon weighs into him, rocking them both back and forth under the blanket, and Gideon laughs airily right in his ear.
“Now, now, you told me to be quiet,” Gid says softly, right up at Kremy’s ear. “Wouldn’t want nobody to know about us.”
Kremy shrinks down into his shoulders as Gideon slides one palm around his cock. “Oh, shut the fuck up.”
“Not like it’s a secret anyhow. Not like it kept us from bein’ targets.”
He keeps his words to a muted rumble, but he’s working his hips back and rocking forward again, finding just the right angle in their awkward position to make Kremy’s back arch into him and Kremy’s erection throb in his hand and maybe, just maybe, it only seems fair that Kremy should be the one to have to try to stay quiet, much as Gideon wants to unleash all his threats and gushing praise, his anger, his relief, and maybe he shouldn’t be rewarding Kremy for such reckless behavior and for drinking himself numb, but he’s just too fucking glad to have his Kremy here at all—
“Gid,” he says under his breath, reaching back to steady himself against Gideon’s horns. Then harder—“Gid—”
Gideon shudders as he plants himself deep, arms tightening around Kremy, balls tightening, body tremoring with more emotions than he could ever name. “I got you, baby.” He eases back, then thrusts into him with a sharp slap of skin on skin. “I always will.”
“Kremy, take your hands off my fuckin’ shades.”
“I want it to be a surprise!”
“I don’t want the surprise to be me wreckin’ my hog, can’t fuckin’ see—”
“Fine, fine.”
Kremy pulls his hands away as Gideon coasts the bike to a stop. They’ve pulled into a shallow terminal street in District 87, and Kremy’s arms drop to wrap snug around Gideon’s thick waist. A dimly lit convenience store sits to one side, and the backside of a warehouse to another, but before them is a nondescript empty box of a place, probably a server farm or former net cafe.
“Okay, call me surprised, I guess,” Gideon says. “What’m I meant to be lookin’ at?”
Kremy leans up to smooch his shoulder, then slinks off the motorcycle’s back and heads for the front door of the empty building. “I told ya I’d find the perfect spot, an’ I did.”
“Wait. For the whole—nightclub thing?” Gideon hops off the bike, too, after locking the kickstand into place. “Thought you said it weren’t makin’ financial sense.” But he’s already envisioning how that flat, wide front would look lit up in neon; already calculating the rigging he could use, the control system on the backend to change the signage whenever they want—
“And it still doesn’t, not really, but I’m diggin’ deep to make it work.” Kremy glances back over his shoulder at Gideon, then heads for the door, swinging a brand-new keystick around one finger. “Not like I got any other use for all’a that.”
Gideon still doesn’t know what all’a that is, but he knows it’s better not to ask: Kremy is here, now, his topsider patina broken in to a comfortable sheen, and neither of them are going anywhere.
Once the magnetic seals on the door unlatch, he beckons Gideon inside. And the inside is . . . well. it’s just a warehouse, for now. But there’s space for so much more. A stage, seating clusters, VIP lounge, a central bar . . . It’ll take a lot of work and a lot of time to build it into something more, especially if it’s just the two of them still to start. But every home begins that way. It’s what they make of it that matters.
“I think you had the right of it, Gid. We only got so many dreams to dream in this life.” Kremy turns back toward him, and presses one palm to the broad curve of Gideon’s partially bared red chest. “So no use leavin’ anything to chance.”
And when Kremy clenches around his cock and he pulls taut as a bow, how can Gideon not cum too? Losing himself in the neon bliss of release, the warmth of his husband, alive, still alive, their secrets discarded and shame forgotten, because nothing is more important than what they have right here. Each other. Their friends. Their family. A tomorrow.
And if they weren’t as quiet as they thought, half as subtle as they think, that too can be a problem for another day, as long as they face it together.
“Love you, my huckleberry,” Gideon murmurs.
Kremy tips his head back to nuzzle against Gideon’s shoulder, falling limp in his arms still, the blanket shrouding them both. They’ll have to clean themselves up before everyone else wakes, but Gideon just wants one more moment clinging to him, messy and sweaty and stained and alive.
“Love you, my big fuckin’ pig.”