G H O S T

Heedlessly does he abraid those marks again, mouthing upon them, warming their gelid skin with the heat of his tongue. Teeth scrape and snag upon them, Hua Cheng’s breath growing sharp in his mounting desire. His hand slips between their thighs, the bold ingress interrupted with a single sound.

“You can kiss me, you know,” comes the soft invitation, which might have been censure for how it arrests him, steals the breath from his lungs in his confusion. 

He cannot bear to give voice to any of the myriad questions that flood his thoughts in a deluge of doubt. As if any wrong word, any erroneous move might compromise whatever tenuous presence he holds in Shen Wei’s affections.

It’s too much to risk.

The questions die unspoken on craven lips that could never dare the probity he desires to voice, and he chooses the uncertainty of possibility over the surety of rebuke. This—whatever this is— has always been a convenient affection between two friendless, forsaken ghost kings. A matter of the flesh, and nothing more. Hua Cheng knows where their heart lies, where it has always lain. And it could never be with him. 

So he says nothing. Sinks to his knees, compelling a distance from those lips he would die to taste even once, with an anguish that consumes him and the disquietude of his heart. Hands slip beneath the folds of their robes, alighting upon their waist—not in the eloquent embrace he wishes but in tentative measure as he undoes the ties of their inner clothes, and pushes their drawers from their hips. 

The sight of them half hard is enough to vex the disarray of his heart, his mouth going dry with a celerity that could only be righted as he takes them whole within his mouth, lips closing about their sex. His tongue circles slowly at the base, urging them to hardness. His mouth is as ardent as he dares, sucking, licking in a vehement delight and desperation both until his mouth is full of the proof of his utility.