Only You Read Online Free

when they were staking a claim. “I don’t know why I did that.”
    So he said. Barrett would eat the spoon and given Nick every drop of stew if he hadn’t picked up some kind of bug at the game, but…well. It didn’t hurt any longer, and odd as it seemed to Barrett, he couldn’t be bothered to care. Distracted. Too fascinated with Nick’s kittenish licking. Strange, the way that felt. The touch tugged at something far deeper down than skin. Nothing sexual, not really. Something with timbre and roots that curled around his chest and through his ribs.
    Something that wasn’t sexual to start with, no, but got there pretty damned fast.
    Barrett steadied his feet and took a better hold on the granite countertop to keep himself from falling over. Good thing, too. Nick never had taken his hand away. As Barrett moved to accommodate him, he spread his fingers wide to stroke Barrett’s rising cock and made his palm a firm cup to push against. If Barrett had got hard then Nick was harder still, pressed tight and close to him. He rocked into Barrett with tiny nudges of his hips in time with the movements of his lips, his tongue, his fingers.
    “Not…” Barrett licked his lips, dry from breathing shallowly through his mouth. Always did, when he got worked up. “Not trying to start anything, you said?”
    Nick’s stubble scraped his jaw. “I might have lied. Unintentionally.”
    “Unintentionally, sure. Are you sure you’re…hmm.” Barrett nudged back with one elbow, just giving himself room to move and turn and kiss Nick properly. He tasted of pepper, dark and spicy, and made Barrett’s lips tingle, wanting more.
    He pressed into the kiss and forgot what he’d meant to ask in the first place.
     
    Though Nick hadn’t had much left to lose, he considered it now his mission to strip Barrett just as bare. Barrett, happily enough, didn’t mind a bit. Between the two of them, they’d left a trail of clothing that stretched from kitchen range to the edge of their bed, and Nick’s determination left them naked by the time he pushed Barrett onto the sheets.
    Barrett had his arms around Nick and gotten back to kissing before the bed stopped bouncing. Nick let him, gladly, and gave back with interest.
    Nick had grown up on stories of soulmates. Everyone did. Teenagers just old enough to have figured out they could do more with their dicks than piss gathered like clusters of hormonal hand grenades to whisper to each other. Girls were more likely to pass around novels with dog-eared pages, and guys to scribble graffiti on their gym lockers, but it all came to the same end. Sex was one thing. No harm in having sex with someone before you found your mate. Probably better if you did, was the sensible opinion. Keep it safe and sane, and when you do find your mate, you’d actually have a clue about what to do with them.
    And it wasn’t cheating if you hadn’t met your mate yet. Not if the bond hadn’t formed and the soulmark didn’t show. It’d be a long and lonely life without human contact, and if that meant someone to play around with in bed, well. Everyone did it.
    That was how he and Barrett had started. Back when they’d been spotty-faced and bored to death, putting in their time in Drivers’ Ed and shop. Sneaking around under the bleachers, joy-riding when they had their licenses, oh, all the clichés, and they’d enjoyed every last one.
    The thing was, most people stopped, or at least slowed down, as they grew older. Little passions ran their course and petered out, and children grew out of boyhood crushes. Such was the way of the world.
    But not for them. Not him and Barrett. Never had, not once.
    There were stories about people who never generated a soulmark. No one knew why. Science could barely wrap its head around the existence of soulmarks, let alone the tangles theologians made of them. But they existed, for whatever reason, and so did those who stood outside the norm. The born bachelors. The aberrant. The