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Sometimes, Nathan likes to work his way across Jack’s skin, cataloging every blemish, every mole, every blue vein rising to the surface, every scar.
He likes the discipline of it, the way it forces him to pay attention to the fragility of Jack’s body, opened before him: pulse point, tendon, muscle, bone. Jack makes it easy to forget how breakable he is. He moves with abandon -- particularly like this, when they’re alone together, naked. Enfolded in the privacy of an late afternoon (or evening or early morning), the sun crossing the cabin bedroom from east to west, casting lengthening shadows along the floorboards, worn smooth with generations of padding feet, shuffling slippers, scuffing shoes.
Today, he’s started with the little moon-shaped scar on the knob of Jack’s left wrist, a little white curve where a piece of broken windowpane had once required two stitches in the ER. Jack likes the flutter-firm pressure of Nathan’s tongue on his inner wrist, a swirling curve around his wrist-bone, a slight nip on the flesh of his forearm.
“Mm -- Nathan --” he’s relaxed, post-coital, edging towards a doze, but Nathan’s not done with him yet. Nathan had come first, this time, Jack’s hands wringing the orgasm from him up against the doorframe, where they’d stopped -- laughing, grappling, half-undressed. It’s still a wondrous thing, Nathan thinks, how easy Jack’s hands are on him, how Nathan's own body unfolds into the touch, turning, opening. It surprises him, every time, that his body has said yes, yes, yes, to this, to Jack, now. And now, again.
Limbs still weak, trembling, he’d tumbled Jack across the room, breathless, onto the bed. Let Jack rut up against his hip, riding with and against the rhythm, until his hands rediscovered the joys of coordination and he could pull Jack back against his chest, reach around, wrap his fingers around Jack’s length, feel the soft silk of Jack’s overheated skin under his palm, holding tight as the orgasm shook through Jack -- radiating out belly to limbs to the curl of his toes, the grip of his hands.
Next stop: the welt of scar tissue on Jack’s upper arm where some punk drug dealer, a few years back, had come at him with a knife and sliced across the deltoid before Jack’s partner could tackle him from behind. Nathan liked the way this particular scar was bracketed by a constellation of fine freckles, two scalene triangles overlapped in such a way he could, if he wanted to, make a six-pointed star or a lop-sided hexagram. He runs his tongue along the scar, kisses each freckle, tracing the line between each point with warm exhalations of breath.
Jack murmurs sleepily, lips curling up in a smile. Nathan pauses to kiss him on the mouth before dragging his own lips down to the faint jagged line on the base of Jack’s chin, only visible when he’s recently shaved, where at age four he’d fallen off a patio chair and opened his chin on the concrete. It had taken Nathan nearly four months of regular sex (and hence close proximity to Jack’s unclothed skin) to notice this particular imperfection, and now it feels like a secret piece of Jack’s history, something Nathan can taste in the salt that secretes there.
Knowledge: He knows no stronger aphrodisiac.
Tonight, he’s working his way down toward the faint birthmark that rides low on the inside of Jack’s pelvis, just above the first delicate curlings of pubic hair, when Jack shifts slightly in the late afternoon sun and Nathan notices a miniscule knot of angry tissue on Jack’s right nipple, shiny and pink.
He gives it a lick, then circles the nipple with his index finger, watching it pucker and rise to the touch.
“What happened here?” He asks, always wanting the story. The need to know more.
“Hmm?” Jack flickers his eyes open, wipes a hand across his face -- “What happened where?”
“Here.” Nathan jabs his finger lightly against Jack’s chest. “There’s a scar I hadn’t noticed before.”
“Oh. That.” Jack squirms. Is that -- embarrassment? Usually, there’s something about the state of nudity that makes Jack impervious to embarrassment.
Yes,” he can feel himself starting to grin. “This.” Another jab.
Jack clears his throat. “I, um. I pierced it. Once.”
Nathan’s brain skips a beat. He thinks he may have lost several seconds of time -- it’s happened before, though usually through extraterrestrial means.
He’s seen guys with nipple piercings before, sure. Not many since his Boston-Berkeley days, but still. It’s just that he’s never put Jack -- all-American, earnest, crew-cut, straight-married, baseball-loving-for-fuck’s-sake Jack -- in the mental category of People Into Decorative Body Modification.
He leans over before his brain has fully caught up with his body and bites.
Jack groans, arching up into the touch. Nathan’s been feeling bolder, as they’re nearing the first-year mark and Jack still hasn’t given him up as a lost cause, and he’s starting to remember how much he enjoys just that little edge -- teeth a little too hard, tongue a little too deep, nails a little too rough against over-sensitized flesh. He’s been pushing boundaries in little ways, getting promising responses.
Like the way Jack’s hand comes up, fists in the hair at the nape of his neck, pulls tight, but doesn’t pull away. It’s almost a warning, but not -- more of a, “I’ll see that and raise you this.”
He pulls his lips away, letting his teeth scrape as he drags his head up again.
“Pierced it.”
“Uh -- yeah.” Jack’s voice filters through a little hazy from the combination of fading afterglow and newly-rekindled lust. “Yeah, I.” He pauses. “When I was seventeen. I was bored.”
This was not the story Nathan was expecting, and he knows his face must show his bafflement; he’s not guarded enough around Jack anymore to hide the thoughts flickering behind his eyes.
“You were bored.”
“Bored,” Jack repeats. “And, you know, it was something I could do. Prove I wasn’t just the preacher’s kid who played baseball and mowed my grandma’s lawn every Saturday before the game? Who wouldn’t do stupid shit like drink and drive? It was a way to prove I wasn’t, well -- boring.”
“So you went and got your nipple pierced." Nathan digests this for a moment, then asks, "fake ID?” Nathan himself had had one starting around age fourteen, to get into the clubs in Tunisia, France, later Germany.
Jack snorts. “Right, like I -- no. No, I mean I pierced it. Myself. With one of my mom’s quilting needles.”
It’s Nathan’s turn to cough, more of a choke, in surprise.
“I sterilized the needle first!” Jack protests. “They’d taught us about wound care in Scouts.”
Right. Boy Scouts.
Nathan has a sudden vision of Jack showing off his new nipple ring to a troop of Eagle Scouts, then wipes the image from behind his eyes, not sure whether to be impressed or appalled that future-Upright Citizen Jackson Carter had stuck himself with a sterilized sewing implement because he was bored.
Or afraid of boring other people.
Nathan supposes they all get a handful of free "get out of stupid free" passes as teenagers.
“So. Piercing. Nice.” He’s fingering the nipple again, watching Jack’s face, thinking about the possibilities of a thin gauge of metal to tongue again and pull.
“Yeah.” Jack’s eyelids flutter slightly, “Yeah. It was -- I liked it. I mean, painful -- don’t let anyone tell you stabbing yourself with a needle is a walk in the park. It burned for awhile, while it was healing. But I liked feeling it there.”
“So -- what. They make you take it out when you got to Glynco?”
“Hah! -- they probably would have, but no. Got infected my sophomore year in college and I had to take it out. That’s why it scarred. Student health service gave me a course of penicillin just to be on the safe side, though I doubt I was the worst thing to pass through their waiting room that year.”
There’s a pause.
“I -- miss it, sometimes,” Jack admits, tentatively.
“Yeah?” Nathan’s thinking Christmas presents, he realises, or something custom-made from this shop he remembers from his last visit to the Castro --
“Bite me again?” Jack requests, by way of answer. So Nathan does.