Chapter 13 #2
Vale's hands slide higher. Up the channel of August's spine, palms flat, fingers tracing the lines of his warding tattoos through touch alone.
The skin is smooth and warm beneath his hands, impossibly warm for someone who had been cold to the touch a week ago, and the corruption, what little remains, yields under his palms. He can feel the knots of tension buried in August's muscles, the physical record of fourteen years of suffering, and he works his hands across them with slow, deliberate pressure.
Not healing, exactly. Not anymore. Just hands on skin, learning what lives beneath the surface, attending to the body of a man who has spent more than a decade not being attended to.
August makes a sound.
It's not the sharp, caught inhale of surprise or the bitten-off gasp of someone trying to maintain control. It's a sigh. Long, shuddering, pulled from somewhere so deep it sounds as though it's been trapped there for years. A sound of something finally, irreversibly letting go.
August melts.
There's no other word for it. The tension leaves his body in a wave.
Shoulders dropping, spine curving, his weight settling fully against Vale as the last structural resistance dissolves.
His hands slide from Vale's shoulders to his chest, palms flat, fingers curling loosely into the fabric of his shirt.
His forehead tips forward, dropping against Vale's jaw, and then lower, his face tucking into the curve of Vale's neck.
His breath warm and slow against Vale's skin.
But there's no rift to recover from, no crisis driving the contact, no justification beyond the simple, devastating fact that August wants to be here. Wants to be held. Wants Vale's hands on his skin for no reason other than how it feels.
Vale's hands continue their slow path up August's back.
He maps the topography of him. The ridge of each vertebra, the planes of his shoulder blades, the delicate architecture of ribs that have too little flesh over them.
Each pass of his palms draws another degree of tension from August's body, another fraction of the armor he's been wearing since childhood, and each release is accompanied by a sound that Vale is cataloguing with a devotion he will never admit to out loud.
The sigh when Vale's thumbs find the knotted muscles beside his spine.
The soft, involuntary hum when his palms press flat between his shoulder blades.
The shuddering breath when his fingers trace the line where the corruption's boundary used to be, months of dark veins reduced to a ghost-memory beneath skin that is warm and alive and his to touch.
August is being unmade, and he's letting it happen. In Vale's lap, in the grey afternoon light, with no crisis and no excuse and nothing between them but the choice to be here.
Vale turns his head. His mouth finds August's throat.
The bruises are already there. Three of them, vivid against pale skin, marks that Vale left last night in the stairwell and the bedroom and the spaces between.
He presses his lips to the darkest one, just below August's jaw, and feels August's pulse hammering beneath the bruised skin. Fast. Unsteady. Alive.
August's breath catches. His fingers curl tighter in Vale's shirt.
Vale mouths along the column of his throat.
Slow, unhurried, the same deliberate patience he's using with his hands.
He traces the line of August's neck from the bruise below his jaw to the one at the base of his throat, and August tips his head back to give him room, a gesture of trust so complete it makes Vale's chest constrict.
The skin beneath his lips is warm and thin, still slightly tender from the night before, and when Vale's tongue traces the edge of a bruise, August's hips shift in his lap.
A small, involuntary movement. The first indication that his body has noticed the direction this is heading, even if his mouth is still catching up.
"Vale." August's voice is wrecked. Barely a whisper, shaped against the air above Vale's head. "I thought you said rest."
"This is rest." Vale's mouth finds the hollow of August's throat, where the pulse beats hardest, where the skin is warm and sensitive enough to make August's breath stutter.
His hands are still moving beneath August's shirt, still tracing the slow, healing path up and down his spine, and the combination, mouth and hands, warmth above and warmth below, draws a sound from August that Vale feels against his lips.
A vibration in the column of his throat.
Half moan, half protest, entirely undermined by the way his hips have started rocking in small, barely perceptible movements.
"This is not rest," August manages, but the protest is perfunctory. His body has made its position clear. He's boneless in Vale's lap, pliant and warm, his head tipped back and his throat bared and his fingers twisted in Vale's shirt.
"You're sitting down," Vale offers against his skin. "Close enough."
August laughs. Or tries to. It comes out as a breathless, shaking thing that dissolves into a gasp when Vale's teeth graze the hinge of his jaw.
The sound is sharp, punched out of him, and it's followed by a roll of his hips that is no longer involuntary, no longer subtle.
August grinds down against Vale's lap with a slow, deliberate pressure that drags a groan out of Vale before he can stop it, because August's weight is directly on his cock, and Vale has been hard since August's face tucked into his neck, and the friction of August's body shifting against him is enough to make his vision narrow.
August feels it. He would have to be dead not to feel it, and despite the corruption's best efforts, he is very much alive.
His hips still for one beat, registering the thick, hard line of Vale through layers of denim, and his breath catches.
His hands slide from Vale's chest to his shoulders, fingers digging in, and he lifts his head from Vale's neck to look down at him.
His eyes are storm-dark. Luminous. Heavy-lidded and wanting and so beautiful it makes Vale's teeth ache.
His pupils are blown wide, and there's a flush crawling up from his collar, visible even in the grey light, spreading across his throat and jaw.
His lips are parted, still damp from where he'd bitten them, and he's breathing in short, shallow pulls that do nothing to hide the state of him.
"If we don't stop," August says, with the careful enunciation of someone holding onto coherence by their fingernails, "we are not going to make it to the subway tonight."
Vale looks up at him. At the flushed skin and the bruised throat and the grey eyes that are asking him to stop and begging him not to.
At the man in his lap who had walked into the Cathedral this morning because Vale asked him to, who had stood in front of a Sanctus and told the truth and earned his right to exist, who has been so brave and so afraid and so stubbornly, infuriatingly alive despite everything the world has done to try to kill him.
"We'll make it," Vale says, and pulls him down into a kiss.
It's messy. Urgent. No preamble left between them, no careful approach, no testing the waters.
They've already drowned in each other. This is what comes after.
August's lips part on a broken sound and Vale takes the invitation, tongue sliding in, claiming the wet heat of him.
August makes a noise into his mouth, low and wrecked, and his hips roll forward in a slow, desperate grind that drags the full length of his cock against Vale's through their clothes.
Vale's hands find August's hips. His fingers dig in with just enough force to guide, not bruise, and he rocks August against him in a deliberate rhythm.
Long, dragging rolls that let the hard line of Vale's cock press right up against the cleft of August's ass through layers of fabric.
August shudders, thighs flexing as he chases the pressure, and the denim between them is too much and not enough all at once, creating a friction that's maddening in its insufficiency.
Vale can feel the heat of August through the cloth, can feel the way his body grinds down seeking more contact, and the sound August makes when Vale's cock catches against him is desperate and needy and goes straight to the base of Vale's spine.
"Fuck," Vale mutters against August's mouth. His hands tighten on August's hips. "Look at you. Already so desperate for it."
August's answer is a gasp, head tipping back again, throat working.
His fingers are in Vale's hair now, gripping, and his hips have found their own rhythm, rocking in tight circles that are half deliberate and half instinct.
The friction is building, heat pooling heavy and insistent between them, and Vale can feel how hard August is through the denim, the thick line of his cock straining against the fabric, hot even through the layers.
Vale wants more. Wants skin. Wants to feel August come apart with nothing between them.
But the sight of August in his lap, fully clothed, grinding down on Vale's cock with increasingly desperate movements, cheeks flushed, throat bruised, mouth swollen from kissing, is its own kind of devastating.
There's something about the clothes. The barrier of fabric making every point of friction more acute.
The way August has to work for it, has to press down and grind and roll his hips just right to get the pressure where he needs it, and the sounds that effort produces are obscene.