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Angel Eyes squinted at him. “No,” he muttered, almost to himself.
Blondie quirked an eyebrow and gave him the barest glance. “‘No’?”
Angel Eyes looked him up and down, gaze sharp and heavy, stinging wherever it landed. He shook his head.
Blondie, not one to speak without needing to, kept an eye on him as he finished buttoning up the borrowed shirt, and slid the sheepskin vest over his shoulders.
“The outfit,” Angel Eyes went on in a murmur, near trancelike but for the sharpness of his eye: “it needs… something.”
Blondie waited, hand outstretched towards the brown-brimmed hat resting on the table, as Angel Eyes tutted and picked at his own shirt, and then watched with unblinking trepidation as Angel Eyes untucked his shirt, grabbed the hem, and tore off a neat black strip.
Moustache twitching in thought, Angel Eyes held the strip up in both hands, running it through his fingers, back and forth, making it ripple like the surface of a lake. “This.”
Blondie just looked at him until Angel Eyes gestured further.
“Put it around your neck.”
Blondie’s eyes bugged out, memories of Tuco and the noose fresh in his mind. “I don’t–”
“Come on,” Angel Eyes simpered, eyes playful now, but no less calculating, as he slid closer. “Like a scarf. It’ll tie the look together.” A laughing breath: “Trust me.”
I don’t, Blondie didn’t say, and out loud: “I didn’t take you to worry so much about fashion,” as even-toned as he could manage.
Sharp brown eyes narrowed at him. “If you’re going to be running with my crew, Blondie, I can’t have you looking sloppy.” Then he paused, eyes raking over Blondie’s torso in a way that was somehow both clinically detached and deeply invasive. “Well. Not while on the road, in any case.”
Blondie maintained eye contact for another moment before reaching out to take the black strip of fabric from where it was threaded between unresisting fingers. It wouldn’t really cost him anything. He looped the strip around his neck and flipped one end over his shoulder.
Angel Eyes tutted, his eyes flashed, and then there were hands at Blondie’s throat, gun-calloused and long-fingered, and Blondie barely managed to stop his hand before it landed hard on his gun.
“Easy,” Angel Eyes breathed, as if he were a damned horse. His face was very close and he was—laughing, shoulders giving a mirthful shake, lips twitching. “Here, if I tuck it—” He breathed, warm and wet against Blondie’s neck, arms raised, a strip of pale untanned skin visible above the waist of his trousers, shirt-hem askew and untucked and torn, hands at his neck—
“There,” Angel Eyes sighed, giving the collar—for that’s what it was, really, and Blondie wasn’t a horse at all, he was a dog—a final tug and stepping back towards the table to gather the last of his things.
Blondie stood still for a few seconds, wondering at his pounding heart, his shaking hands, his halting breath, and realized—he wasn’t quite feeling as outraged as he would have expected.
No: this unwelcome gesture of possession, this marking of ownership, had him feeling a sort of tingle in his chest, a squirming of his soul, and as Angel Eyes retreated to the other side of the cabin, Blondie found that he did not want him to retreat. He wanted to pursue this—this heat he was feeling, with a sudden desperation that almost frightened him.
And like a dog, he cracked open his jaws and wagged his insolent tongue: “Do you dress all your men in your scraps?”
Angel Eyes stopped just before the door, back tensing. He turned his head, just enough so that one rat-sharp eye flashed beneath the dark brim of his hat.
Blondie just watched him, and raised his eyebrows, fighting with the trembling wildness of his body to maintain an affect of arrogant nonchalance.
Angel Eyes advanced like a predator, all long limbs and slow, sure movements, but with bold human authority, firm heels striking the wood, fingernails drumming a warning rhythm on his gun belt. “What was that, boy?” he said when he was inches from Blondie, toe to toe, voice velvet-soft over an edge of steel.
It was when Blondie opened his mouth to respond that Angel Eyes’ eyes flashed dark. He got a hand around the back of Blondie’s neck, slipped under the collar, calloused fingers caressing dry on fevered skin for an instant before he fisted his hand into the material, whipsnake-fast, and twisted.
Blondie was expecting, now, the shock of tightness around his windpipe, the pounding of his heart at the sense of danger, the searing liquid heat of arousal, but still his knees trembled with the force of it all.
He thought perhaps the blood rushing through his ears had drowned out Angel Eyes’ acid speech, spared his ears the sting, before a glance told him that the man’s mouth was a thin, closed line, pensive.
Angel Eyes tugged at the collar and Blondie leaned down for him, unresisting; a dog taken by the leash, a horse by the reins. His body ached in time with the overtaxed muscle of his heart, raw-sweet like a tender fruit.
For minutes or years, Angel Eyes peered at him, eyes shuttered, searching, reading the lines and pages of him.
“Oh,” he said eventually, a soft undercurrent of breath. His eyes were whiskey-dark, the blackest shadow under a blinding noonday sun. “I seem to have played right into your hands, boy.”
“I would… I would argue,” Blondie started, struggling not to sound too breathy, to keep his gaze firmly locked on the other man’s face, to keep from rolling his eyes around in a wanton fervor— “that it is you, who rather has me in his hands.”
Angel Eyes paused at this, giving them both a moment—god, was that Blondie breathing so loud, panting warm and wet in the mild air?—and then twisted his hand tighter; his mouth fell open as if to swallow the gasp that flew from Blondie’s lips.
“You like this,” Angel Eyes said, voice low, not a question. He held him there, suspended in a moment of submission, a hound tethered to a stake hammered deep into the earth, crouching stone-still and quiet beside a coiling rattlesnake.
The words stung like mockery, and Blondie curled his lip, bared his teeth, feral-like, on the edge of a snarl—
Angel Eyes clamped blunt teeth on the corner of Blondie’s jaw and bit down hard.
Everything flashed vivid red. Blondie pushed him off, instinct and fury and heat coiling up into a tight violence, and punched him across the face. Angel Eyes’ hat flew clean off his head, a bird soaring free on wings built for gliding, an albatross.
Angel Eyes staggered back, laughing a bit, blood on his mouth. He tapped his fingers lightly to his lip, looked at the red wetness a moment, and then, keeping his eyes locked on Blondie’s, brought it to his tongue.
Blondie panted, eyes wild, hand tight to the sore spot on his jaw.
Angel Eyes was still laughing, little breathy half-chuckles, looking at him with eyes cold, calculating, but sparkling—he was red-cheeked, eyes hooded, and his teeth caught on his split lip—his eyes gleamed warm and dark.
As if pulled by a string—by a leash, by the reins—Blondie advanced, rough and bare-handed, a soldier discarding his weapon and walking into the clutches of his adversary.
He grabbed Angel Eyes’ open shirt collar, pulled him forward, and bit his bottom lip, licking over the wound, a trace of salty-sweet bursting on his tongue. Angel Eyes followed, unresisting, still gasping out little huffs of laughter against Blondie’s mouth as he was crowded back against the table—spine bending back against the wood, body taut like a drawn bow—and Blondie pushed him, pushed him, until Angel Eyes was practically lying on his back, Blondie’s hands rough on his shoulders, Blondie’s tongue in his mouth.
Angel Eyes allowed this to happen for a few graceless, fumbling moments, calmly allowing the dog to shake and growl, red mouth and rolling eyes, before he grabbed Blondie by the black band around his neck and pulled.
Blondie let out the tail-end of a breathless moan. His body was a trembling live wire, a snake writhing in its death throes, a feverish rabid dog begging to be put down.
With Blondie gasping into his mouth, lost and wanton, Angel Eyes pulled at the collar until he had enough room to sit up, at which point he pushed the larger man down flat onto the table with a hand caged around his throat.
Various items—a gun, a belt, some unfortunate stoneware—fell from the table with a loud clatter, but Blondie could hardly hear that over the blood in his ears, his own heavy breathing, the feeling of Angel Eyes crawling over him, hand at his Adam’s apple, thigh pressing up past Blondie’s splayed open knees, up between his legs, rocking slightly as he licked his way back into Blondie’s mouth.
Angel Eyes twisted his hand again, pulling hard at Blondie’s collar, nearly cutting off his air. Blondie went with the motion until his mouth was positioned at Angel Eyes’ sun-browned neck, and he barely took a moment to think before his teeth were biting down at the junction of Angel Eyes’ shoulder, eliciting a startled grunt and a harder tug at his collar. Blondie didn’t let go, alit with wretched fire, skin stinging, and shoved his hands up the back of Angel Eyes’ untucked shirt, digging his nails in, scratching parallel trails down his shoulder blades until Angel Eyes was growling—
Blondie let go, only to latch right back onto Angel Eyes’ neck, high up near his ear, letting his lips graze the sensitive skin before he clamped down again, violent, possessive, furious. Angel Eyes was hissing and cursing and scratching at him, but he was also tilting his head away as if to give more access, and he was pressing the hardness between his legs against Blondie’s leather-clad thigh, stuttering out a brutal rhythm—
Blondie’s breaths escaped him in harsh pants, hot and wet against Angel Eyes’ skin, and he was furious, he was furious, he was nothing but fire, and his rage was like a physical thing, pouncing out of him, jackhammering—
Angel Eyes buried his long fingers in Blondie’s sweaty blond hair and pulled—
* * *
Blondie’s knees dangled uselessly off the edge of the table as he lounged back, cigarillo perched between his lips.
Angel Eyes was grumbling at the little mirror hanging on the wall, prodding at the rapidly darkening patches on his neck.
Their eyes met in the reflection, and Blondie barely raised an eyebrow, puffing out a curl of smoke, knuckle tracing a slow path along the sore spot at the corner of his jaw, faint redness peeking past his stubble.
Angel Eyes’ smile was a sharp, toothy little thing. He tucked the torn edges of his shirt into the waist of his pants, straightened his gun belt over his hips, and it was like nothing had happened, if you ignored the bruises.
“Best be going, then,” Angel Eyes said, voice smooth, casual.
His finger slipping under Blondie’s collar was like an afterthought.
And Blondie followed, like a dog running unchained towards the master’s whip, mouth wet.