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“Good Lord, I feel like I’m dyin’.”
Grinning downright wolfishly, pleased with himself, Nicholas takes full advantage of the down beat and brief guitar solo. Plucking his smoking cigarette up from the ashtray resting on a stool behind him, beside his empty crystal whiskey glass, he takes a long drag, cheeks hollowing. Quickly, it’s burnt down to the filter, and Nicholas spits it out onto the stage where Livio obligingly—though not without shooting him an exasperated look—trods on it.
Dragging a pink tongue over his upper lip, Nicholas dives back into the heady percussion of his drums. Each blistering drum beat is like a bullet striking Vash in the chest. Every cymbal clash makes his foggy head ring. The way Nicholas plays has always felt this way—the low, dry bass thump a kick that takes Vash in the gut; the high, crisp snares bursting like champagne bubbles on his tongue.
On the other side, Vash will stumble up out of his seat like he’s just gone a round in a back alley. Or been fucked within an inch of his life, cheek scraping against a wall. Or—
Vash downs the rest of his drink in one gulp, and squeezes his knees together.
Self-preservation has never been his strong suit, it’s true. But Vash thinks he’d be helpless to do anything but listen to Nicholas, watch him, utterly rapt, even if his life depended on it.
“Sometimes I feel,” his baritone scrapes and drags out of his throat, sandpaper on wood, warm as whiskey and twice as beguiling. “Sometimes I feel…”
The smokey light of the bar casts Nicholas in shifting shadows and colors; a stage light grants him a flame-bright halo, paints his cheeks a divine bronze. The shirt Vash buttoned for him a few hours ago has come open down to the top of his jeans where it’s half-tucked, wrinkled and spotted with sweat. Whorls of soft, dark hair curl across a shamelessly exposed chest. Worst still, when Nicholas leans forward it gapes wide enough Vash can catch teasing glimpses of dusky nipples.
“…like I’ve been tied,” on the sustained word his lips curl back away from his teeth, exposing a wickedly sharp canine for a heart-stopping second, “to the whipping post…!”
Strong, chorded forearms left exposed by his rolled up sleeves, deft hands loosely clutching the polished wood of his drumsticks, flash like lightning. Practiced and sure. The droplets of sweat clinging to the ends of Nicholas’ black hair—hanging in a messy tangle across his forehead, the back of his neck—fly off with the motion of his playing. Glittering, fine shards of glass or diamond arcing through the air.
Nicholas half rises from his seat as he growls out that line again—tied to the whipping post!—as if his aching soul is fit to burst out of his skin. His face contorts with something akin to pain, a vein visibly throbbing down the length of his neck beneath the black leather of his choker. The crucifix dances.
“Tied,” that flash of teeth again, “to the whipping post,” he spits, the end of the phrase a lash of its own.
Head thrown back, he abruptly crashes down to earth again; the drumming has stopped. The last guitar chord lingers heavy in the air, unresolved, slowly fading from the speakers. Nicholas’ foot hovers over a pedal, trembling.
Vash’s teeth are digging so hard into his bottom lip he thinks he tastes blood.
In the lull, Nicholas’ head rolls on his shoulders. He meets Vash’s gaze across the room. Shadowed, his dark eyes flicker. White-hot electricity rockets down Vash’s spine. Trick of the light or the product of an overactive imagination, so be it, Nicholas’ pupils flare briefly like the cherry on a cigarette.
Then they fall half-shut below a faintly pinched brow. Wolfwood’s broad chest heaves on an in-drawn breath. And then full, chapped lips meet the microphone; a filthy, open-mouthed caress.
“Good Lord,” he rasps, wretched and tired and aching, “I feel like I’m…”
Muffled between his bicep and the pillow beneath his face, Nicholas moans something that Vash barely catches.
I’m gonna come.
Shushing him, Vash slows his pace. Not yet, he thinks.
The stench of sweat, sex, stale smoke, and leather makes for a heady bouquet. It fills Vash’s nose and lungs. The empty ache between his own legs, the wetness dripping down his thighs, is unignorable. But the man beneath him is…is…
Nicholas’ back arches beneath Vash’s hands, one scarred flesh and one shining dully in the dim light, his muscles rippling in a mesmerizing wave. Reverently, Vash traces his fingers down raised red welts and the long scratches left by his fingernails. Presses his metal thumb into one of the dimples at the base of Nicholas’ spine.
“Beautiful. You’re beautiful.” Vash breathes. “Does it feel good, Nick?”
Where they’re bound together against the bedpost, Nicholas’ hands spasm. His knuckles have bleached white from how hard he’s gripping the slack on the rope, the post itself.
Low, Nicholas curses.
“Tell me,” Vash begs, heart pounding like a drum in his chest, and rolls his hips. His hefty strap-on bottoming out in Nicholas’ pliant body once more.
Nicholas makes a pitched, breathless sound; closer to a groan of agony than one of pleasure. Vash knows better.
Over his shoulder, straining a little to do it, Nicholas tosses Vash a red slash of a smile. His face has gone too slack and eyes too glazed with bliss for the nearly-feral desperation of earlier. When they’d torn into their room, hands grasping, lips and teeth scraping, over every inch of skin they could reach, bodies fever hot with need; until Vash seized both of Nicholas’ wrists and Nicholas shuddered as his head fell back and his broken throat opened around Oh, Christ, oh, yes, yes, y—
Lifting and squeezing Nicholas’ thigh tight against his side, Vash grinds his hips forward. Terribly, terribly slow. As deep as he can be.
Expression twisting up, Nicholas’ head drops to hang back down between his shoulders. Vash can feel it in the tension running through Nicholas’ body, the jump of muscle beneath his hand, the pretty wine-dark flush crawling down the back of Nicholas’ neck. He’s so close. So very close. All it would take is one touch, one thrust as rough and hard as he can take it. Oh, it must hurt.
But when Nicholas has caught his breath again, he answers.
“Mmm, darlin’, I feel…” Nicholas' rasping voice lifts, a little; wretched and aching and sinfully, sinfully hot, he croons for Vash, alone, “I feel like I’m dyin’.”
Covering the length of Nicholas’ body with his own, Vash presses his mouth against the thundering drumbeat of Nicholas’ blood through the vein at his throat. Fingers denting Nicholas’ flesh, listening to the hitch of his breath, Vash drives Nicholas down into the mattress until his poor, wrecked throat gives out at long last, and when he’s tipped over that high precipice his heart briefly skips, stops—as if, for just a moment, he really had.