Chapter 11 Soucy #2
"It's not standing up straight. It's the opposite of everything your brain wants to do, which is hold still and control the variables. You can't control this. You have to let it move you and trust you'll catch up." He steps off to the middle of the floor. "Watch. Don't analyze it. Just watch."
And he does something I have no vocabulary for, a slow controlled unfolding, all of that mass moving like it weighs nothing, like the laws that apply to the rest of us got a waiver in his case.
The pattern-recognition brain that catalogues a shooter's tell from forty feet lights up trying to map it. It can't. There's no tell. There's just a six-foot-five man being briefly, privately, the most graceful thing I've ever watched move.
"Okay," I say, when he stops. "That isn't a flexibility thing."
"No."
"That's the thing you do that nobody gets to see."
"You're getting to see it." He comes back, breathing a little hard, light in his face I want to file and keep forever.
"Your turn. Move with me. You're going to be terrible and that's the entire point.
The point isn't to be good. The point is to move with somebody and not flinch when you're bad at it in front of them. "
"You picked the wrong man for not-flinching."
"I picked the exact right man. Come here." He sets my hand at his shoulder and his at my waist. "Just follow the count. Un, deux, trois. You already track everything. Track me instead of the steps."
So we move together, badly. Two enormous goalies learning to put weight through the same beat. I'm terrible and he's patient past all reason.
Somewhere in the third or fourth disaster I stop tracking my own errors and just track him. His hand turning me. His breath. The count he keeps under it. The studying-everything engine that runs my whole life turns off the steps and onto him and stays there.
"Better," he says, close.
"That wasn't better."
"It was. You stopped counting yourself." He's still holding my waist. "You let me have it for a second."
?
We don't make it ten minutes into my apartment that night before I've him backed against the inside of the door. The difference tonight is that I'm not the one being taken care of.
In the hotel he ran it. He had the framework and the steadiness and he set me down inside all of it and made my first time good with the patience of a man who'd done this before.
The whole drive home from the studio I've been doing the thing I do. Taking the problem apart. The problem is this. Nobody runs anything for Lundy. Nobody ever has.
He showed up for a Seattle room for six years and then for this one and then for me. The showing-up flows one direction, always. A man who built himself into the thing that holds and has no idea on earth what he looks like when he's the one being held.
So tonight I aim the engine at him.
"Let me," I say against his mouth, and I feel the hesitation move through him, the reflex toward giving instead of getting.
"I've got you. You don't have to do this."
"I know I don't have to. That's the point. You did me, in that hotel. Tonight you let me study you, and you don't get to manage a single second of it."
Gaspard watches us from the arm of the couch, deeply unimpressed by human priorities. I close the bedroom door on him and he registers his complaint through the wood, once, a single offended yowl, and then silence. Noted.
I take him to the bed and I undress him slowly because I want the data, all of it, the breadth of him laid out under my hands and the lamp, and I use everything I learned three weeks ago and everything I've catalogued since, every sound he made, every place his breath caught, and I give it back to him with interest. I learn the weight of his cock in my hand and then in my mouth, and I watch him the whole time, because the watching is the point, the watching is the thing that takes him apart.
His hand comes to my hair and I take it and lace our fingers and pin it down to the mattress, gentle, and the small wrecked noise he makes at being held there, at not being allowed to do the work, is a sound I'll be replaying for the rest of my life.
"Jules." Every steady thing has gone out of his voice. "You don't have to do this."
"Stop telling me what I don't have to do." I come up just far enough to make him look at me. "You spend your whole life being the one who's useful. Tonight you are just wanted. That's the only job. Lie there and be wanted."
Something crosses his face that I don't have a name for, underneath the pleasure and older than it, a man hearing a sentence he's needed for years and never once been handed, and I watch it crack him open, and then I put my mouth back on him and take him there with my eyes on his face the whole way, cataloguing the exact instant the protector stops protecting and lets himself be taken care of, and it's the most beautiful read I've ever made in my life.
He comes apart saying my name like it costs him everything he has, both his hands crushed in mine, and the French comes up out of me unbidden into the hollow of his hip, viens, je te tiens, words I didn't decide to say.
After, he's quiet in a way I've never heard from him, flat on his back with one arm thrown over his eyes, and his chest is doing something uneven.
"You okay?" I ask.
"Yeah." A long breath. "No. I don't know. Give me a second."
I lie up alongside all that mass and put my hand flat over his heart the way Gaspard stood over mine, and I wait, because some reads you don't rush.
"Nobody's ever done that," he says finally, into the dark above us, and I know it isn't the act he means. "Just let me be on the receiving end of something and not need anything back for it. I don't actually know how to do that. I keep waiting for the part where I'm supposed to earn it."
"There's no part. That was the whole thing."
"That's the problem." He moves his arm off his eyes and looks at the ceiling like it owes him an explanation. "If I'm not the one doing the holding I don't know what I'm in the room. That's. I didn't expect to find that out tonight."
"You're the man I just took apart on purpose because I wanted to. That's what you're in the room." I keep my hand where it is, over the engine of him, feeling it slow. "I read your file. All of it."
He laughs, wet and caught off guard, and turns into me, all six and a half feet of him folding toward the smaller man for once.
Gaspard thumps up onto the foot of the bed and glares at us both and stays.
I lie there in the dark holding a man who has never once let himself be held.
My hands still. The hum in them finally quiet.
Three still places in my entire life and every one of them somehow in this room tonight.
I understand that I've just handed him something he doesn't yet know what to do with, and that neither entirely do I.