For an instant, Eugene misinterpreted Johnny's interest as a threat and he couldn't move, his instincts insisting that his stillness would protect him from the predator's gaze. But the moment passed and Eugene exhaled slowly through his mouth, and leaned in. The last thing he saw before he shut his eyes was Johnny's slow, curved smile, and then they met in a press of lips and tongues and teeth. Johnny tasted like gin and nicotine and Eugene moaned into the kiss, shivering despite the heat.

"Your heart's beating so fast," Johnny murmured against his mouth. "What are you afraid of?"

Eugene bit Johnny's lip and tugged, just to feel the stretch of Johnny's smile against his skin. He'd told Angelique that he wasn't scared of Johnny, but what he'd meant was that he wasn't any more scared of him than he was of anything else. "Everything."

"You can be afraid later."

They shed their clothes like snakes shedding skins, and the fabric dropped to the floor in crumpled heaps, discarded and instantly forgotten. When Johnny touched him, electricity shivered in his wake, and Eugene lost himself to it with the sort of abandon he had never dared. He touched Johnny’s cheeks, his lips, his hair—the hair that fell into his face, too long for any respectable man, making him look wild and otherworldly as he pressed Eugene into the mattress. Impossible heat bloomed in Eugene’s stomach and set him writhing against the sheets, drowning in it.

"Tell me what you want," Johnny said, digging his teeth into Eugene's shoulder, glancing up at him from the lace of his dark eyelashes. "Anything you want, I'll give it to you."

"I'll take anything you have. Please—"

Johnny's expression was wicked as he moved down Eugene's body, trailing kisses along his sternum, the sharp ridge of his ribs, his hollow stomach and jutting hipbones. Eugene kept one hand wrapped in Johnny's hair, silken knots around his fingers, and the other wrenched in the bedsheets as he fought to hold still under the pressure of Johnny's attention. When Johnny settled between Eugene's thighs, his breath hot over the delicate skin there, Eugene couldn't hold back the whine that escaped him. He flung one arm over his face, head pressed back into the pillow, trying to bite back his sounds as Johnny closed his mouth over him. They wanted to come out as prayers, a blasphemous litany of the sacred and profane.

The wet heat of Johnny's mouth was gone as soon as it had come.

"Look at me," Johnny said, his fingers digging into the flesh of Eugene's innermost thighs. Eugene dropped his arm to the side and helplessly met his gaze. "I want to hear you."

"The others—"

"They won't care," Johnny promised. "Don't hold back from me."

Eugene swallowed, dry-mouthed, and nodded. With a smile, Johnny lowered his head and sank back onto him, swallowing him whole. Cursing, Eugene struggled to get his elbows under him, propping himself up to watch. The night had the hazy, overwhelming pleasure of a wet dream on the edge of waking, better than any sex he'd had before. He kept his gaze trained on Johnny's face, the cut of his cheekbones and the wet, pink stretch of his mouth, and lost himself to the rhythm of it. The air thickened as his skin grew slick with sweat, slipping against the bedsheets, and he panted desperately as he tried to keep himself in check. Despite Johnny's assurances, he was still too self-conscious to be louder than that. He had spent his whole life hiding; one night wasn't enough to undo all that effort, even if no one in the farmhouse cared, and there was no one left in Chanlarivyè to pass judgment.