Work Text:
It was supposed to be that they were halfway between nowhere and nowhere any which way anybody wanted to describe it. A town so small it didn’t even have a name, a hotel full of grimy prospectors who eye-fucked their well-groomed and bloody-handed selves, and them, the two of them, Marquis Warren and Chris Mannix, going nowhere. Except at dinner, Warren had gone through their warrant sheets and found them a mean, burly bastard with a haunt maybe fourteen miles away, so then they were going somewhere after all. It was probably that that jinxed him. On the whole, he wished he hadn’t done it. It had set some kind of tenor for the evening and one thing had led to another.
The fucking wasn’t new. The fucking they had actually been doing for a while.
“You’ve been saving me some money,” Warren had said miles back, after Mannix had tracked chalk-white dust all over his knees reacquainting himself something proper with Warren’s johnson after a couple nights when exhaustion had flattened both of them down. “Money and time. It used to take up a not inconsiderable portion of both, finding a reasonable whorehouse where they knew they ought to be paying me and not the other way around. You’re a cheap fucking convenience, Chris Mannix.”
Mannix huffed and turned the collar of his jacket up. “See that, major? All your meanness is just cold rain running down the back of my neck. I don’t let that bother me.”
Warren chuckled. “No, you don’t let anything bother you.” He started putting on his gloves, flexing his fingers, tugging the wrist all the way down. It was the pair that buckled, so he did the left one up with his right hand, teasing the leather tongue through the clasp nice and slow.
“That ain’t nice,” Mannix said, watching him do it. He looked like a snake watching some motherfucker play the flute.
“The meanness has been established,” Warren said. But he let himself get persuaded to put his hands on Mannix like that.
Maybe that had been what’d jinxed him. He’d started granting special favors like that, and all of a sudden they were… somewhere. Doing something other than what he’d meant to do.
But he was pretty sure he had a handle on it until the night in that drafty hotel, when they were both telling themselves and each other that they’d had too much to drink. Because that was when he stopped caring about money and whorehouses and time. He just wanted something.
Something unnecessary. Or necessary, maybe. He didn’t really know.
Something that involved bending Mannix over the bed, that was for damn sure.
So that was what he did. Both of them bare-ass naked even though there was no reason for it. He supposed it gave him a view—the starburst-looking bullet scar on the back of Mannix's thigh, his own slicked-up finger sliding in and out, his hard cock up against Mannix’s ass so Mannix could feel it even as he wasn’t getting it. And boy, did it drive him wild that he wasn’t getting it: he kept fidgeting around against the bed trying to somehow fuck himself backwards onto Warren’s dick. Kept breathing noisily, like he was trying to drown out the sound of the wind whistling through the walls.
“Quiet down,” Warren said, adding a second finger. “You wouldn’t want to make too much noise, would you? People might come up and just break down the door to see what was the matter. What’d they make of you, Mannix, bent over the bed with my fingers up your ass?”
“Fuck, major.” Mannix pushed his hips forward, rubbing himself against the bed even as Warren rubbed him from the inside, getting right at the place that seemed to uncouple Mannix's sense, or at any rate what passed for it, from the rest of him, seemed to reduce him to so much need and so much gibberish. “Would you get your fucking cock in me, please?”
Warren got a kick out of that. He slid his fingers out and put the head of his cock against Mannix’s hole—Mannix actually bending over further, getting his ass up further, like Warren would really need that much cooperation to persuade him it if that were what he wanted to do—and then drew back and just pressed himself against Mannix strictly on the outside. He regretted the need for quiet then, because it would have been something to have warmed Mannix’s ass up further before settling up against that hot, smacked-red skin. Mannix kept whimpering and pushing, which Warren put up with because it did in fact give him some enjoyable friction and because he liked the notion of Mannix all-out begging for it. But then he went back to what he’d been doing, two fingers up inside Mannix sudden and hard. Mannix’s incoherence managed to sound both relieved and cheated all at once, and Warren laughed at him for it and used his other hand to press him down even more onto the bed.
“Ask nicely.”
“I said fucking please, didn’t I?”
Three fingers then, in most teasing kind of way he could come up with, giving Mannix just enough before taking it back down to two, to remind him of just how much he wasn’t getting fucked.
“You can do better,” Warren said.
Sometimes he thought he liked Mannix best like this. Never mind the conversation, never mind the gunplay, never mind Mannix’s skin freckled with blood and his hands dark with gunpowder: give him Chris Mannix outright forgetting himself and his white skin and whatever dignity he felt he had to pretend to. Even if he did have to be helped along once he got in that state.
Warren said, “So do better.” He thrust forward more against Chris’s ass and thigh and bit off a sound of his own: stroked himself with his hand trapped between them.
“Please, sir,” Mannix said, which was an uninspired but heartfelt beginning. “Please fuck me. I won’t make a single fucking sound only will you quit fucking teasing—oh shit, major, right there, right like that. Motherfucker, oh, you black motherfucker.”
“See, that’s why I wouldn’t call this teasing,” Warren said. “Seems to me you’re coming off pretty well.” He was having a hard time stringing words together and had to fight against giving himself over to it all: one hand on himself and the other hand inside Mannix, his cock and balls feeling drawn tight and hot to form some exclamation point, rubbed by his own callus-roughened palm and the soft skin of Mannix’s ass and thigh at the same time. “You ain’t being punished, white boy, just deprived.”
Close, close, but he wanted to tip Mannix over first. That didn't bother him, because wanting to win never did, but the impulse to get gracious in victory was new and unwelcome.
Still, he kept on: “I won’t say you’ve misbehaved any, but I’m far from convinced you’ve been good as gold or anything like. You don’t deserve my cock up in you. Most I’m willing to offer is the next time I give you my fingers, I’ll wear my gloves. You like that? Smooth, cool leather all inside you—and there you go, that's it. That’s good.”
Mannix bucked and bucked, thrusting helplessly against the bed, riding himself out, biting down on his own hand to stifle any noise, and Warren kept on rubbing inside him even after Mannix took his hand out of his mouth to hoarsely beg him to stop, to say he couldn’t take any more, couldn’t stand it. He was pressed up against Mannix even harder now, his own hips moving in a jumpy, urgent rhythm, and he just took his left hand off himself and stroked Mannix’s hip reassuringly even as he didn’t let up on him. He’d bust Mannix apart if it suited him. He’d watch Mannix come and come and come.
And then he came too, with a feeling sudden and somehow wide, like a flash of heat lightning—came and his fingers stilled and Chris said, “Yeah, sir, yeah, just like that for me, fuck, let me see you, I want to see you,” and damn if he didn’t practically unscrew himself off Warren’s fingers and get himself turned around on the bed, his legs wrapped around Warren to pull him closer. He took Warren’s cock in his hand and stroked him softly through the last of it, looking at Warren all the while like he’d never seen any sight so fine. Which was probably true.
Warren didn’t know what to do with that look, though, not from him of all people, not when he'd never wanted it, so he just pulled Mannix closer still until Mannix’s face was pressed up against him and they were in a strange kind of embrace. Somehow he didn’t know that he’d improved on the situation any.
In the morning, he found out the town had a name after all. He declined to commit it to memory, and was irritated, years later, to realize that he still knew it after all. Though when Mannix asked him if he remembered where they’d been that night—“well, you know the one I mean”—he said no.
“Middle of nowhere,” he said.
But age had made him soft, prone to undoing what he’d just decided was going to stay done, so he added, “But the hotel was called the While-Away.”
“You got a mind like a steel trap,” Mannix said happily.
Warren said, “Or something,” and blew out the lamp.