Chapter Text
The zipper always caught on the same tooth.
Peter had a whole private relationship with that zipper. He could get it down in the dark now, two fingers, no looking, while Frank’s palm stayed over his mouth and the street did its street things two alleys over. A bus. A drunk man laughing. Someone kicking a can. Frank’s hand was dry and heavy and tasted like gun oil if Peter opened his mouth against it, which he did, because he was a desesperate and the alternative was making noise.
They had the brick wall. They always had the wall.
Frank’s tactical vest was still on. That was part of it. The plates, the heat, the way Peter’s cheek scraped nylon when Frank crowded him into the shadows. Jeans shoved to mid-thigh, both of them, inelegant and frantic. Frank’s cock was thick and already leaking at the head. Peter had spit in his own palm and reached blindly between them because Frank never remembered lube in an alley and Peter had stopped expecting him to.
It was good. It was always good in this stupid, efficient way. Frank moved like he was trying to be done before anybody walked a dog. Short, deep, a rhythm that punched the air out of Peter in little hits that died in Frank’s palm.
Peter’s fingers were in the webbing of the vest. He could have torn it if he wanted to but he didn’t. Instead, he hooked his knee up around Frank’s hip and let himself be opened up against cheap masonry and thought, not for the first time, that this man was built like the city had been using him for load bearing: the gut, the chest, the back. Old enough that Peter’s stomach went hot every time he looked too long.
Frank didn’t look at him much during. He watched the mouth of the alley. He looked at Peter’s throat, sometimes, like it was a complex problem he refused to solve. His other hand stayed locked under Peter’s thigh, hauling him up to meet every thrust, and Peter went where the hand put him, stronger than the grip and taking it anyway.
Peter came first, he almost always did. Tonight too. Fast and shaking, a breathless sound that Frank’s palm turned into nothing, spilling over his own stomach and Frank’s dark clothes. Frank made a low, strangled noise in his chest and followed a few strokes later, buried. His forehead against the cold brick over Peter’s shoulder, his breath punching out in ragged hitches.
They stayed locked together for the length of a truck rumbling past on the avenue.
Then Frank pulled out, messy, and the night air bit into the wet heat between them. He took his hand off Peter’s mouth. Peter suked in a lungful of exhaust and ozone, letting out a quiet, wrecked laugh.
“Hi,” Peter whispered
Frank zipped himself. He looked down at the dark, drying stain on his shirt.He still didn’t look at Peter’s face.
Peter pulled his jeans up, his mouth still burning with the ghost of Frank’s palm. He leaned in—stealing a second, stretching the boundary of what they were—and pressed his open mouth against Frank’s shoulder through the stiff nylon strap of the vest. Not quite a kiss. Salt, heat, and the residual twitch of exhausted muscle. He stayed there a second longer than the job required. Then a second longer than that.
Frank’s hand landed on the back of his head. A heavy, grounding weight. Peter’s lips dragged up along the collarbone, the warm skin just above the vest, and he felt his own teeth sit there, idle over the tendon, a question he hadn’t asked out loud in the weeks they’d been doing this.
He breathed against the pulse and felt Frank’s heartbeat stutter under his lips and pulled back before he did something he couldn’t put back.
Frank’s voice, low and flat to the alley:
“Car.”
The heater in the van still didn’t work. Peter sat with his knee pressed against the passenger door, the taste of Frank’s skin still heavy in his mouth, staring at the cracked dashboard as if it might confess something. Frank drove with his jaw locked, one hand on the wheel, the wet patch on his clothes already going cold.
He stopped two blocks from Peter’s building. The ritual spot. Engine running.
Peter broke the static, “You got come on your shirt.”
“I noticed.” Frank muttered.
“You could come up. I’ve got a sink and a clean shirt. I’ve got eggs that are only mildly tragic.”
Frank kept his eyes on the street. A cab blew past too fast, its taillights bleeding red across the windshield. His throat moved as he swallowed.
“Not tonight.”
It wasn’t even mean. It was the same not-tonight as last Tuesday and the Tuesday before. Peter had a collection of them. He nodded, because pushing made Frank’s mouth narrow into a hard, closed line, and Peter liked this mouth too much. Liked the scab at the lip from somebody’s ring, liked the way it went momentarily slack when he came.
“Okay. Don’t wash it in cold water” Peter murmured, opening the door. “That’s how you set it. Not that you asked. I’m going.”
He got out. He stood on the sidewalk until the van pulled away into traffic. He didn’t text. Frank didn’t text. That was the whole arrangement.
Three nights later they did a garage in Sunset that smelled like oil and oranges from a broken air freshener. It went clean. A man with a duffel bag. Frank’s guns. Peter had dropped down from the rafters just as a second guy scrambled out of a bathroom stall like a bad surprise, planting the guy neatly on the floor tiles without crackinhg his skull, the ongoing, unspoken argument they never quite finished.
After, in the gloomy lee of a parked car, Frank unzipped the vest to check a scrape along is ribs. The shirt underneath was dark with sweat. Peter stared at his neck.
“You’re starring in your own low budget action movie,” Peter muttered, leaning against the window. “The air freshener’s really doing heavy lifting. Orange. Bold choice.”
Frank snorted, once. Ans hauled the vest back over his chest.
They used the wall behind the garage because the van was a block away and Peter had already started it. His mouth on Frank’s, less careful than the alley, hungrier. Frank made that small, traped sound in his throat that meant he was going to allow this, and then they were fumbling with clothes again. Frank’s hand went automatically over Peter’s mouth out of old habit, even though the garage was dead silent. Peter hitched himself up onto Frank’s thigh, taking him deep in short, punishing rolls.
His mouth slid off Frank’s hand and onto the meat of his shoulder. Chasing bare skin, chasing salt. He wanted to be closer to him, wanted to taste and eat him.
He bit down. A real, absolute close of his jaw. The kind his body had been circling for weeks, spider-strong and sudden, without him asking it to be.
Thee skin gave. Hot, metallic iron flooed his mouth, and Frank went completely, terrifyingly still inside him.
Peter froze too, his teeth still sunk into tick muscle. He tasted iron and sweat and the raw, living pulse of a man. His cock kicked so hard it was humiliating. He relaxed his jaw and saw it: a dark little mouth in the muscle, already welling, his own spit shiny around it. He whispered, voice shaking “Fuck. I didn’t— I didn’t mean—”
Frank pulled out of him, careful, which somehow felt infinitely worse than if he’d thrown Peter off.
He set Peter’s feet on the ground and didn’t zip up. He just stood there in the dim light with his cock wet and his shoulder bleeding in a small, insulting line, staring down at Peter’s blood stained moth.
“Peter,” he said. Just that.
Peter could feel the blood on his lip. He didn’t wipe it. He didn’t know how to wipe it without making it a thing he’d done on purpose. “I’m sorry.”
Frank’s hand came up. His thumb, the thick one, the nicked one, and he dragged it across Peter’s lower lip, wiping the smear away. Frank lolled down at his own thumn then did it again, cleaning the corner, tracing the cupid’s bow with a strange, unintended gentleness in an oil stinking garage.
Peter’s whole body went loose. He could have come right there on the concrete.
“I’m sorry.” Peter whispered again, small and broken.
Frank wiped the thumb on his own shirt, which already had a night on it. He pressed the heel of his hand hard against the wound, a soldier’s pressure.
Then, with brisk one handed efficiency tucked himself away and reached down to zipper Peter’s jeans for him, as if Peter’s hands had suddenly forgotten how to function. The backs of Frank’s knuckles brushed against Peter’s stomach, and Peter twitched like he’d been shocked.
Frank walked towards the van with his jaw tight. When they were beside it, his eyes found Peter’s again and they weren’t mean. They were tired, stunned and carrying an expression Peter didn’t really have a word for.
“We’re done tonight,” Frank said. “Go home.”
“I can tape it. I’ve got—”
“I know you do.” Frank’s mouth twitched into a small, ghost of a smile that died before it reached his eyes. He moved and hissed when the vest strap sat on the bite, though he didn’t take the strap off. “Go home, Peter.”
Peter sat in the passenger seat anyway until Frank got in, because leaving him in a garage with a bite felt like a crime, and Frank didn’t tell him to get out. He drove in silence. Peter watched the rag darken under the vest and wanted to put his mouth back on it and also wanted to jump into the Gowanus.
At Peter’s corner the engine idled. Frank’s thumb was still a little red in the streetlight. Peter stared at it.
“I don’t know why I did that,” Peter said, which was a lie. He knew exactly, the wanting to put something on this man that a job couldn’t wash off. “Your shoulder. Does it—”
“It’s a bite.”
“Yeah. I got that.”
Frank looked at him. Really looked, the way he assessed a hostile room.
“Don’t do it on a vein,” Frank said.
Then he waited until Peter climbed out and drove off. Peter stood on the sidewalk with Frank’s blood in the seams of his teeth and the phantom weight of a thumb on his mouth, and he went upstairs so fast he missed a step.
His phone, twenty minutes later:
Frank: it’s fine
Peter stared at the two words until they went blurry. He typed I have tape and deleted it. He typed sorry and deleted that too. Finally, he sent a thumb-up because he was a coward and shoved the phone under the pillow so he wouldn’t send anything else.
He slept with his mouth open, tasting rust that wasn’t there.
Three days later, patrolling the baking asphalt of Queens, Peter swung down from a water tower and landed softly on a brick parapet, his mask pulled up just enough to breathe. Across the street, walking out of a dingy office that sold vinyl siding and, as of twenty minutes prior, illegal ammo, came Frank. His vest was zipped. The split on his lip had faded into an old crust. He walked like the street belonged to nobody, which was how he always walked.
Up on a second-story fire escape, two women sat with their legs dangling through the iron rails, sharing a cigarette. One said something Peter didn’t catch. The other woman laughed, low, and said:
“I’m just saying. I wouldn’t kick him out. The Punisher? Yeah. The arms. You saw the arms.”
The friend went girl and they both giggled, not even looking at Frank anymore, looking at each other, a private joke about a man who had just walked out of a slaughter like it was a shift.
Peter’s mouth flooded with hot, bitter spit.
Frank hadn’t heard them. He was already turning the corner, checking a burner phone. He had no idea some woman on a fire escape had just put his arms in her mouth and liked the taste. He didn’t think of himself as a thing you could want in the open air. That was the precise thing that made Peter’s stomach twist with a hot, irrational spike of fury. She could look. She had eyes. The city was full of eyes. But she didn’t get the nylon vest scraping her cheek. She didn’t get the way Frank went entirely still under his hands. She didn’t have last week’s bite healing under his cotton shirt. A little mouth Peter had carved into him in the dark.
Peter stayed on the roof until Frank was gone around the corner. He looked at the women. Ordinary and harmless. One of them ashed into a plant. He wanted, for one ugly second, to drop down and say something he would never say. Then he went the long way to the van so he wouldn’t pass them.
When he climbed into the passenger seat, the engine was already running. Peter pulled the mask up over his nose, his hands twitching restlessly against his knees.
“You’re staring,” Frank said, pulling out into traffic.
“You got looked at.”
Frank’s eyes flicked to the rear-view, scanning the street, ignoring Peter. “Cops?”
“No.”
Frank waited. Peter could feel the heavy, assessing weight of him. Peter let out a short, jagged sound that came out meaner than he intended.
“A woman. She told her friend she wouldn’t kick you out. She liked your arms. That’s a review, four stars. The vest does a lot of heavy lifting, I’m just saying.”
Frank kept driving. A traffic light bled from yellow to red. His hands on the steering wheel were knuckle-bruised. The exact hands that had been clamped over Peter’s mouth three nights ago. Peter wanted them there now, inside the car, because a stranger’s casual comment had left an itch in his bones.
“People talk,” Frank said.
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t mean anything.”
“I know what it means.” Peter heard himself. He tried to ease it. “I’m not mad at her. She’s right. You look like that, and then you walk out of a building, and people get to have an opinion. I don’t like them having an opinion. That’s not very mature, I’m aware.”
Frank’s mouth twitched. The light went green.
Peter’s hand landed on Frank’s thigh, then higher, on the belt, two fingers hooked in the leather like he had a right, like this was his car and his man and the fire escape had been a joke he was in on. He waited to be moved off. Frank didn’t move him off. The belt was warm. Peter could feel the gun at the hip, the heat of the body underneath. His.
Peter’s hand shot out, landing heavy on Frank’s thigh, sliding up to his belt, hooking two fingers into the leather as if he had an absolute, unquestioned right to it. Like this was his car and his man and the fire escape had been a joke he was in on. He waited to be shoved away. Frank didn't move him. Peter could feel the gun at the hip. The belt was warm, radiating the heat of the body underneath.
“You’re in a mood,” Frank said.
“I’m in a car.” Peter thumbed the buckle, idle and trying to be provocative. “You gonna drop me at the corner?”
Frank didn’t answer for a block. Then he took a left that was away from Peter’s block entirely. He pulled into the dark behind a shuttered car wash, crunching over gravel beneath a sign with half its neon dead. He shut the engine off. The metal ticked as it cooled.
Peter’s pulse went stupid. He took the mask off all the way and dropped it in the footwell. His hair was wrecked. He knew how he looked. Young and obvious. He didn’t care.
“You didn’t ask me anything,” Peter said.
Frank looked at him. “Ask you what.”
“I don’t know. Come here. Stay. Something. You never do. You just—” Peter’s laugh went helpless. “You zip me up and you drive. I’m trying to get you to want it out loud. That’s kind of humiliating. I’m going to stop talking.”
He didn’t stop talking. He climbed over the console instead, clumsy, a knee in Frank’s thigh, the steering wheel in his back, and then he was straddling Frank’s lap. The seat had been shoved back. Peter’s weight settled right over Frank’s hips. The vest was a hard barrier between their chests, but Peter didn’t care. Because this was the chest. The heat.
Frank’s large hands went automatically to his hips, holding him steady so he wouldn’t crack his skull on the roof. Peter’s cock was already a problem in the suit.
“Peter.”
I know. The car." Peter dropped his mouth onto Frank’s, open and tasting the old copper. Frank made a low, strangled sound into his throat that wasn't a protest. Peter ground his hips down, finding Frank hard under the denim. The possessiveness surged through his veins like raw liquor. She doesn’t get this, he thought. She gets the arms from a fire escape. I get this.
He kissed down the jaw, feeling the scrape of stubble. He felt Frank’s pulse jump, and he didn’t bite the neck, he had a scrap of sense. He dragged his mouth to the good shoulder instead, the untouched by last week’s teeth, and bit right through the shirt.
Cotton, then the give of muscle. Frank’s breath punched out of him in a ragged, involuntary gasp, his fingers digging into Peter’s hips hard enough to leave a print through the suit.
Peter moaned into the cloth. Filthy and happy, then bit again. On the same place, worrying it, until he tasted salt and then iron through the shirt, a bloom. Frank’s hips kicked up into him once, a full ugly tell.
“Christ.”
Peter didn’t take his mouth off. He talked into the wet cotton, wrecked already.
“They don’t get this. They can look at you. That’s fine. This is—” He licked the bite through the shirt, the little tear he’d made, copper and laundry soap. “This is mine. You can tell me that’s crazy. It is crazy. I’m still the one in your lap.”
Frank’s hand slid from his hip to the back of his neck. Holding him there, anchoring him. Peter sucked at the mark until Frank made another small, helpless sound deep in his chest.
Peter got a hand between them, popped Frank’s belt, the zipper, got him out. Thick, and flushed, the smell of him filling the cabin. Peter wanted it in his mouth and also wanted to stay on the shoulder. He managed a messy compromise, stroking him with a spit-slick fist while his teeth stayed in the muscle.
Frank’s head fell back against the headrest, his throat bared to the pale streetlight. He didn't tell Peter to stop.
“Look at you,” Peter whispered, mean and fond, a little high on it. “The Punisher. You’re going to come in a car wash lot because I bit you. That’s so—” He laughed, helpless, and twisted his wrist the Frank liked, the mean little turn at the top. “That’s mine. Say if you don’t like it. You went still last time. You wiped my mouth after. You texted it’s fine. You’re so fine you’re letting me.”
Frank’s eyer flew open, dark and starved. He looked at Peter’s red mouth smeared with his own blood, and his thumb came up to Peter’s lip again, just resting there. Peter sucked the thumb deep into his mouth, automatic and filthy, and Frank’s cock jumped hard in his fist.
“Look at me,” Frank said, hoarse.
Peter licked the bite in a slow drag before getting his own suit down, spitting into his palm, and bringing them together. Both of them in one fist. The slide was slick and mean and perfect. He pressed his forehead against Frank’s, letting the man see the raw, exposed want in his eyes.
“I keep thinking you’re mine,” Peter said, barely. “You don’t have to say it back. Just… don’t put me on the corner for a minute. Let me have this.”
Frank’s hand found his nape. He fucked up into Peter’s fist and he watched Peter’s face like it was the alley mouth, the thing he had to manage.
When Peter bit the side of his neck, just sucking this time, leaving a hot purple claim, Frank came with a ragged grunt that sounded dangerously like Peter’s name, spilling hot over their knuckles. His other hand crushing Peter’s hip.
Peter followed him over the edge a second later, shaking against Frank’s chest and giggling into Frank’s mouth because he had gotten that sound out of the big bad thing in the vest and he wanted to live in it.
They sat in the quiet dark of the van, the air thick with sex and iron. Frank’s shirt was wrecked at the shoulder, a dark flower. Peter was still straddling his lap, unwilling to move an inch.
He put his clean-ish hand on Frank’s chest, over the plate, and felt his heart going. And thought, quiet, almost shy, my man, and then he wanted to bite his own tongue off for thinking it. He thought it again anyway.
Frank reached past him, found a napkin in the door pocket, He wiped Peter’s stomach first, clumsy, then himself, then Peter’s mouth, the blood at the corner, gentler than the sex. His eyes were on the work. His neck was flushed.
“You’re going to feel that tomorrow,” Peter murmured, nodding at the shoulder. “On a job. Under the vest. ” He grinned, couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry. I’m not sorry.”
Frank glanced at the tear. He didn’t pull the vest over it. He left it showing in the dark of the car, a round dark mouth in cotton, and Peter’s stomach went molten, because Frank could have hidden it, and chose not to.
“You talk too much after,” Frank said.
“You come too quiet. I’m just filling the air.” Peter stole a quick, messy kiss “Take me home. My home. You don’t have to come in. I just don’t want the corner tonight. She got to look at you, so I get the rest of the block. That’s fair. That’s extremely fair. I’m a lawyer now.”
Frank started the car with Peter still half in his lap, which was insane, which made Peter snort and scramble into the passenger seat, his suit sticky and his mask stuffed in the footwell. Frank drove. His right hand sat on the wheel while his other hand sat on the torn shoulder, a man checking his own damage. Peter watched that hand and wanted to replace it with his mouth and also wanted to be driven to his door like someone who got to keep this.
They passed Peter’s corner. Frank pulled up at the stoop, engine idling, and looked at the building, and then at Peter, and he didn’t tell him to get out right away.
“Upstairs,” Frank said quietly. “You got tape.”
Peter’s grin hurt his face. “I got tape.”
“It’s a shirt, Peter.”
“It’s my shirt now. It has my mouth on it. That’s the law.”
Frank shook his head once and shut the engine off.
They went up. The stairwell smelled like other people’s dinners. Peter went first, then let Frank go first because he wanted to look at the shoulder from behind, the dark bloom, the way Frank didn’t hunch to hide it.
On the landing Peter’s keys stuck. He swore. Frank took the keys and opened the door like he had a right, which was a thought Peter was going to have to sit down with later.
Inside, in the dim, cramped bathroom, Peter unpeeled the ruined shirt from the fresh wound and made a sound in his throat he didn’t mean to make. He cleaned it with hands that barely shook, then pressed a dry, utterly stupid kiss directly onto the white tape.
Frank’s hand came down on his hip, heavy and warm.
“You’re proud of yourself,” Frank said.
“A little.” Peter’s ears burned hot. “They don’t get to see this. That’s all. You can be weird about it all you want. I’m still glad.”
Frank’s thumb rubbed once at Peter’s hip, a small absent thing, and then he stood, and Peter had to step back, and they were too close in the bathroom. Frank pulled the ruined shirt back over his taped shoulder. The bruise at his neck still showed.
At the door, he looked back. “You work tomorrow.”
“I work tomorrow.”
“Don’t drop off a roof because somebody talks.”
Peter smiled, all teeth. “I didn’t drop. I came to the car. That’s growth.”
Frank held his gaze for one long, unblinking second. Then he reached out, his warm palm briefly cupping the side of Peter’s neck, right over the pulse, before turning and walking down the stairs into the night
Peter stood in the open doorway long after the street door clicked shut. He pressed his fingers to his own nape where Frank’s hand had been. He just let the wanting sit. He let the word mine echo in the empty room. He laughed once, a little fond and insane because he had bitten a killer and the killer had walked him to the door.