journey over Tucker’s thighs, along his length, skating the silk of his lower abdomen.
The movement of Tucker’s fingers on his own startled him and brought his attention to the frightful ache in his own groin. But Tucker needed, and Angel let him wrap Angel’s fist around his cock, and then Angel squeezed and stroked, as he’d watched Tucker do not that long ago.
Tucker let out a soft groan, not tortured but needy, and Angel stroked again and harder. Tucker spurted against his fingers, hot and sticky. Angel wanted to taste it, but he feared it too. Would Tucker’s seed make him human forever? Would that break one of those rules of heaven?
Then Tucker tangled his fingers in Angel’s hair, urging him back to Tucker’s chest.
“Your hair, Angel—it feels amazing. Thank you. Thank you.”
Angel kept stroking, his breath coming faster as Tucker broke into pants, his hips thrusting in Angel’s hand.
“Angel, I want…. Oh God, I want.” Tucker made a move then—reciprocation? Perhaps to explore Angel’s masculine human body with his own hands, his mouth. Oh, Tucker’s mouth looked sinful and wanton, and Angel found himself craving it all over his newly discovered skin.
But Tucker moved, and his hips arched, and Angel’s thumb caught the edge of his cockhead. Tucker let out a gasp and a soft moan, and his entire body tautened in one giant arc of climax.
His cock spat come, graceful and scorching, covering Angel’s fist, wrist, and forearm, making him shake with the intimacy of the seed on his skin.
Tucker grasped his hair—not harshly but firmly—and pulled Angel until they were face-to-face. Then Tucker lifted himself off the bed and pushed his lips against Angel’s, invading his mouth with an urgent, beery tongue and sweeping Angel into the whirlwind of his first kiss.
Angel fell into it with a violence of need, and Tucker ravished him, still on his back, his body splayed, with spend cooling on his exposed skin.
“Let me,” Tucker whispered. “I want to give you everything.”
And then Tucker’s hand slid through Angel’s body, like Angel was mist, or a wish, or a prayer, and Tucker’s cry of loss shattered them both.
“Angel!”
“I’m sorry, Tucker,” Angel whispered, laying his head on the pillow next to Tucker. He wanted to cry, but he wasn’t sure he could shed tears, even ghostly ones. His incorporeal construct ached, though, ached with need, ached with loss, ached with wanting the touch of the man next to him.
“But what happened?”
“I think….” Angel skated his hand over Tucker’s chest, not setting it down in case he slid through skin and flesh. “I think it’s because, for a moment, you stopped bleeding.” When Tucker was hurt, Angel became human enough to touch him.
But Angel had given him sex and comfort, and the bleeding was staunched.
And Angel was incorporeal once again.
Tucker’s sound of hurt almost made Angel disappear. He didn’t want to face it—didn’t want to feel Tucker facing one more goddamned loss.
But he’d promised.
“But I won’t leave you,” he said again.
“You promised.”
“I did.”
Tucker let out a breath and pulled up his boxers, then tugged the covers up around his chin.
When he’d settled himself back again, he stared at Angel in the darkness until Angel burst out, “What?”
“Thank you.”
“I promised.”
“Thank you for that too, but that’s not what I meant.”
Angel’s incorporeal construct heated.
“I would have done so much more,” he said wretchedly.
“You stayed for the kiss.”
Angel saw back into Tucker’s memory, that terrible, wonderful, tainted memory of a kiss that never was.
“Anyone would want to stay for the kiss, Tucker. If there was anything they could do at all to make that happen. I promise.”
“Mm.”
His eyes were closed. Grief, sex, and grief again. That would exhaust a man.
“I’ll stay, Tucker. I swear that I’ll stay.”
BEING CORPOREAL apparently expended a lot of energy—Angel slept contentedly on the bed until long after Tucker’s usual time of rising.
When he came to, Tucker was gone, but Angel could hear him in the kitchen, and morning smells as well as morning light and sounds were coming through the wall.
Angel materialized in the kitchen to find Tucker sitting in front of a half-eaten plate of eggs and toast, looking at the notebook Angel had pulled from his backpack the day they’d visited the cemetery and a bigger, half-filled photo album he’d apparently gotten from the boxes in the corner.
Every so often he’d find something and grunt, then write in the notebook again.
“Tucker?”
Tucker looked over his shoulder and smiled tentatively. Dark circles saddened his eyes, and high patches of red showed up against