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There’s the cut of his cheekbone, and three fingers below it – Steve has the measure of him, long since honed with his own hands – the marble-smooth line of Bucky’s jaw.

There’s the jut of his knee, slipped free from his skirt, delicate and masculine at once.

The dip of his breast, if he only twists his body just so – a faint groove just perfect enough for Steve to fit his index finger in, right between Bucky’s pecs, framed like a work of art by the neckline of his dress, cradled in blue – blue like the ocean they both crossed to stumble like fawns into this war. Blue like the sky above Rockaway Beach, the day Steve first knew he was in love with his best friend. Blue like the suit Bucky slips on every day to walk the battlefield by Steve’s side, and snuff out lives as easy as birthday candles – for no country nor no flag, but for one man only. Blue, deep, deep blue, like the mantle that was thrust upon Steve when he didn’t want it, and the one he claimed as his own not so long ago– for one man only.

This man. The haloed vision before him, slacked back in his chair like he doesn’t know how devastating a sight he makes, dolled up the way he is. Like it just happened, see?, he didn’t do it on purpose.

There he sits, his bare legs crossed; the gleaming toe of his silver dance shoe pointing right at Steve like it means business, threat or promise, it has yet to decide.

Steve is sure he’ll die right here either way, mad with passion and with a tent the size of a circus mounted on his crotch.

Bucky’s lipstick-red mouth quirks up in one corner.

“See something you like, sugar?”

The warm, velvety pitch of his voice rakes shivers down Steve’s spine. Like? He’d set the whole world on fire for a single crumb of this.

Steve licks his lips. “Don’t see nothin’ I hate to look at.”

He swallows – It sticks in his throat.

Bucky’s foot rolls lazily towards him. The slim silver band wrapped around his ankle catches the light, and that single spark zings in the dimly lit room like a meteor, a swift spot of brightness in the night sky, there and gone again before Steve can think to capture it with his hands – or God, God, with his lips, with his open mouth if he could. He’d catch any drop, wouldn’t waste a thing. Do it again, he wants to beg. Please, fuck, just do anything, I’ll take it, I’ll take anything.

“Is that so,” Bucky drawls, unrepentant behind his smirk. “And that’s all you’re gonna do about it, is that it? Look? That’s enough for you. You don’t need nothing more.” His hand smooths down the folds of his skirt, red and white under his fingers. His eyelashes sweep, down and up again, his eyes full of promise. Steve has never felt so much like prey before, never so eager to step into his snare. “You’re happy like this,” Bucky husks, pitch dropping to sweet, bone-melting gravel. “You’re... satisfied.”

The sound travels straight to Steve’s cock, teasing and inviting at once.

“Buck.”

So weak. So weak of him, so pathetic.

“Don’t know about you, sweetheart, but I didn’t see nobody puttin’ up a sign saying ‘look but don’t touch’ around here,” Bucky teases on, hips tilting forward on the edge of his chair. “So, what’s it gonna be?”

Steve’s got some idea about what it’s gonna be.

“Fuck. Fuck, you’re gonna be the death of me, Buck.”

He’s desperate, small and pathetic and wanting, and if life would only grant him some modicum of dignity for once, he’d be able to hide just how desperate he is; but there’s no sense in even trying. Bucky already knows. Bucky always knows. Bucky knew it before Steve did.

Bucky loves nothing better.

Steve’s hand flexes around thin air, his palm sweaty against his dress pants.

“God, I want–” A breath, exhaled through his nose. It’s not enough, the slowed-down sliver of a moment it affords him is not enough, an eternity wouldn’t be enough for him to stop craving Bucky like cracked dry soil craves rain during a drought. “Wanna taste you. All of you, head to toe. Anywhere you want it I’ll give it to you, swear to God, baby, anything.”

Bucky lets him scramble his way through it like an indulgent teacher taking in his student’s fumbling words, calm and composed; but his mask is cracking, too. The tip of his tongue swiping across the seam of his lips betrays his hunger.

His Adam’s apple bobs on the column of his throat.

Hungry.

“Where would you like to start?”

Hungry.

It knocks the breath right out of Steve’s lungs. Christ. Christ, he knows just where he wants to start.

The thing about worship is, it must come from the heart or it means nothing.

When Steve kneels in front of Bucky, he means it with every wound-up fiber of his being. His knees kiss the old creaking floorboards, tender like a lover, and Bucky uncrosses his legs, making room for him to slot in between: the first reward for Steve’s devotion.

“Here,” Steve rasps, wrecked with desire, looking up in Bucky’s darkening eyes. “I wanna start right here.”

He crawls closer on his two knees, his hands licking palmfuls up the length of Bucky’s legs, from the elegant notch of his ankles, up the supple curve of his calves, dusted with sparse dark hair.

Bucky leans forward, his tits – oh lord – his tits pressed together in his deep blue bodice, the cleft in between lookin’ as sweet as sin, and he pulls Steve to him, one hand cupping the nape of Steve’s neck, the other at Steve’s jaw, tracing the lines of him with his knuckles.

Bucky hovers there, maddeningly close. His lips are parted, slits of cherry red, wet from the caress of his own tongue; his breath warm, hot, intoxicating, ghosting against Steve’s face.

He’s only a hair’s breadth away. Their noses brush together, a glance of a touch: Steve’s pulse thrills in his veins.

Bucky’s head tilts just so, the way it would to fit their mouths together, and this is it, Steve tells himself, finally, finally, this is the moment they kiss, this is the first taste he’s gonna get tonight – not the boldest, perhaps, but the sweetest still.

“Buck,” he sighs, tipping his head back, his breath held inside his ribcage.

Bucky strokes light fingers down Steve’s throat, leaning in – but when Steve goes to collect his kiss, Bucky dances back an inch.

“Stevie,” he murmurs, holding his mouth barely out of Steve’s reach. “Sweetheart.”

He makes Steve chase his lips, lets him crane his neck and nuzzle at him, needy, turning his face to give Steve his cheek. Steve nips at him; kisses the rasp of Bucky’s stubble with slack lips, scrapes blunt teeth against Bucky’s jawline, holding a pinch of Bucky’s flesh between them for a moment just to prove that he can.

He wants. Wants, wants, wants with every last inch of his soul, and Bucky won’t let him have anything.

“Baby, please,” he groans, soft and wet below the hinge of Bucky’s jaw, his lips and nose mashed against Bucky’s gold-soaked skin. “You’re killing me here.”

Then, cruelty worse than any other, Bucky pulls away from him – enough that Steve can see the color of his eyes again.

He holds Steve’s chin, and his thumb slots naturally into the dip below Steve’s bottom lip, tugging to watch Steve’s mouth part under the gentle pressure.

He’s staring, his half-lidded eyes fixed right on Steve’s lips, swallowing thickly as though his own mouth were watering at the sight.

Steve knows what he’s picturing; Steve’s picturing it too, the familiar sting in his lips once they’re red and swollen and well-stretched around him. The sheen of spit he’ll leave on Bucky’s cock, cooling in the balmy night air, and the way it’ll feel on his tongue, slick and heavy and pulsing, dusky red like Bucky’s nipples and loved on with the same eager, suckling mouth. He can almost taste it. He can almost smell it, the salty musk of him, the throbbing arousal already wetting Bucky’s tip, here, beneath the ruffles of his striped skirt. Steve wants it. He’s been starving for it.

“Christ, your mouth, honey,” Bucky groans, his voice colored with desperation. He wants in – and Steve’s never wanted anything more than he wants to open up for him and let him slide home inside, where he belongs, where Steve will keep him warm. “Wanna feel it, God I want to. Steve.”

In the old days, they used to lay offerings in the lap of the gods: fresh bread and oil and wine, and fragrant incense to waft up to the sky, longing to please them.

Tonight, Steve lays all of himself right here: in this lap that would welcome him, in the temple he swore himself to, never so devout until the day he discovered that kneeling wasn’t only for church, and that a prayer could be uttered in the shape of a name – his own name, dripping from Bucky’s mouth, lit golden and gasped in the sweet pain of ecstasy.

Bucky wants him.

Bucky can have him.

“You want my mouth,” he says, staring up into Bucky’s ravenous eyes, a challenge, “you show me where you want it.”

He sees it, the slow, blood-hot exhale leaving Bucky through his nostrils, the way his chest falls and swells again with the next breath.

“Yeah. Show me, Buck. Show me where.”

Bucky leans back, draping himself against the backrest of his chair. He’s tall like this, taller than Steve, the way he used to be, towering over him. He never made Steve feel that difference, never once looked down on him even when Steve was tilting his head back to look him in the eye, drawn to the easy confidence of Bucky’s smile.

Bucky leans into his advantage now, tall and magnificent as a godling on his throne, his body heavy and high-strung and flushed over with desire, the way only a mortal creature can be – flesh-made and bone-dense and fragile, human and finite and brimming with life all the more because of it.

He’s perfect. The combed waves of his hair limned with copper from the lamplight, the faint outline of his nipples showing just barely through the fabric of his dress, his face, his face – transfigured, intent, eyes bright and breath shallow with anticipation. Steve would kiss the ground his feet stepped on, and beg for more after.

Bucky grabs two fistfuls of his skirt.

He’s deliberate with it, slow and meticulous, the way he gets when Steve turns impatient under his hands; when he decides that they’re going too fast, scorching their way towards the edge, and he needs to rein it in, show Steve that this, what they share, what they give, is worth waiting for. Pay attention, he seems to say: This is important. He doesn’t want Steve to miss a single moment of it.

“Here.”

The hair stands to attention on Steve’s arms, gooseflesh rushing across his skin.

Bucky pulls. Slowly, slowly, as though time didn’t matter, as though the seconds ticking by were nothing but hard pearls of sugar dissolving on his tongue, only his to savor, a thousand more of them to spare, tucked just in his pocket.

“Here’s where I want you.”

The sound of the fabric grazing over his legs is hypnotic. Up, up the skirt’s hem goes, baring Bucky’s thighs in its wake – and what are they, if not the pillars to Steve’s temple, the doors to his shrine.

Bucky’s legs spread for him, the red and white of his skirt hiked up around his hips to show Steve the nest of dark curls between them, the proud shaft rising from the core of it, waiting for reverent lips to come and soothe its hurt, lick its tears away.

“God, Buck.”

He takes his mouth to Bucky’s knee, diving in blindly and laving open-mouthed kisses into Bucky’s inner thigh, where his flesh is most tender. When Bucky lifts his leg and hooks it up over Steve’s shoulder, Steve surges, heart and body, like a man possessed, palms grasping Bucky’s naked hips under his skirt. He presses his face snug into that coarse thatch of hair, inhaling Bucky’s scent, licking up the sweat collected in the warm crease between Bucky’s hip and thigh. Bucky gasps out loud above him, a soft, perfect “Ah,” startled by the wet heat of Steve’s tongue.

“Steve,” he urges, a fervent prayer, choking on his own breathless voice.

His fingers sink in Steve’s hair, cradling him close, pleading with him, mercy, oh, mercy.

What’s more sacred than this? What’s holier than the giving, than the pure, wholehearted glory of bringing pleasure to the man he loves? In crafting it with his own means, wrought from his own body, from the touch of his hands, from the heat of his mouth?

He remembers his Sunday mornings at mass, Steve does. Nothing was ever deemed more devout than dropping to one’s knees and opening one’s mouth to receive.

He remembers the lectures, when he was a child preparing for his first communion; how the nuns held up the thin wafer discs, not yet blessed by the priest, and told the children, We don’t chew on the body of Christ.

No. You were supposed to hold it in your mouth, let it slowly come apart on your tongue, and then, only then, swallow it all.

It was only many years later, kneeling between Bucky’s trembling legs and hearing him instruct, soft and brittle of breath, “Don’t use your teeth, doll,” that Steve had seen the old lesson truly come to fruition.

He remembers it, even now.

You don’t bite into something holy: you simply take it inside of you, whole and glorious, just as it is.

He noses along Bucky’s hardness, tongue glancing over his tip to gather the first taste of him.

Steve Rogers was made for the worship of one man, and one man only; and like a faithful at the altar, taking his holy bread, Steve curls his hand around Bucky’s cock, parts his wet lips, and swallows him down.

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