Chapter 12 #6
They stay tangled together on the rug, breathing hard, the fire crackling beside them and the bearskin soft beneath them and the silence of the room settling around them, warm and heavy.
Bastian's face is pressed into the curve of Emery's neck.
His breath is hot against Emery's skin. His arms are still around Emery's waist, holding him close, and the holding is not possessive.
It is protective in the way that protection feels when it is offered by someone with the power to protect and the restraint not to confuse protection with ownership.
Bastian kisses him slowly. Mouth to mouth, gentle, unhurried, the kiss of someone who is not finished being close and is in no rush to be done. Emery kisses him back and tastes salt and warmth and something that might be the beginning of the rest of his life, if he lets it be.
The thought is too much.
Emery realizes, in the slow, cooling aftermath, that he has given this man too much.
Too much access, too much skin, too much of the soft, unarmored thing that lives beneath the cynicism and the sharp tongue and the years of performing indifference.
He has opened himself completely and the opening has left him raw and exposed and more vulnerable than he has been since he was a child, and the vulnerability is intolerable.
It is the one thing he cannot afford. It is the crack in the wall that will bring the whole structure down.
He pulls away. Not violently, but deliberately, shifting his weight, creating distance. He lifts himself off of Bastian and the separation sends a shudder through both of them and Emery does not look at the loss on Bastian's face because looking at it will undo what is left of his resolve.
Bastian does not reprimand him. He does not demand anything. He does not ask where Emery is going or why he is pulling away or what he did wrong, because he did nothing wrong and they both know it.
He says Emery's name. Gentle and deliberate, the way you say the name of something you are trying not to startle. And he takes Emery by the jaw, careful, and turns his face toward him.
"You can have whatever you want," Bastian says. His voice is low and steady and carries no pressure and no agenda. It carries only the truth, plain and unadorned, offered without conditions. "You can leave. You can stay. I will not chase you if you do not want to be chased."
The words land in Emery's chest and stay there, heavy and warm and aching.
He wants to believe them. He wants to believe them so badly that the wanting is a physical sensation, a tightness in his throat that makes it hard to swallow, and the difficulty of swallowing is the difficulty of admitting that someone is offering him exactly what he has spent his entire life convinced he would never have.
"You need me to find Sander," Emery says.
His voice comes out rough, scraped raw by the sounds he has been making, and he hates how it sounds, not because of the roughness but because of what the roughness reveals, which is that for the last hour he was not performing, was not acting, was not deploying his body as a tool.
He was present. He was real. And the evidence is in his voice.
"That is true," Bastian says. His thumb traces Emery's jaw, back and forth, a slow and soothing repetition. "But your obligation to me does not exist outside of that shared problem."
Emery scoffs. The sound is automatic, a reflex, the armor going back up because the armor is the only thing he knows how to wear. "Am I supposed to believe my safety doesn't hinge on your whim?"
Bastian is still holding his jaw. His dark eyes are steady and close and impossible to lie to.
"You are not a whim," he says.
Emery does not understand what he is saying.
The words are simple and their meaning is clear and he does not understand them, because understanding them would require a framework he does not have, a framework for being valued, for being chosen, for being something to someone other than useful.
He has been useful his entire life. Useful is the only currency that has ever kept him alive.
The idea that Bastian is offering him something beyond utility, something that exists in the space between need and want, in the place where people are kept not because they serve a function but because their presence is, in itself, the thing that matters, is a concept so foreign that Emery's mind rejects it the way a body rejects a transplant.
Not because it is wrong. Because it does not match.
He pulls away. He dresses. His hands are steady, they are always steady, even when the rest of him is not, and he pulls his clothes on without looking at Bastian because looking at Bastian right now would be the same as admitting that the thing he is running from is the thing he wants most, and he is not ready for that admission.
He may never be ready. But the not-readiness is not the same as not-wanting, and the distinction is the crack that will eventually break him open.
He goes to the door.
He does not breathe again until the door is closed behind him. The hallway is cool and dim and the lamps are low and the compound is quiet and Emery leans his back against the wall outside Bastian's room and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes and breathes, and breathes, and breathe.