Chapter 6 #2
Newt is on the windowseat. He hears the door open and close and Malik's footsteps on the stairs and then the front door and then nothing, and the townhouse is quiet, and Newt reads his book and doesn't think about where Malik is going because it's not his business.
He falls asleep on the windowseat with the book open on his chest and wakes up when the door opens.
He doesn't know what time it is. Late. Very late.
The street outside is dark and silent and the lamp he left on is the only light and he blinks in the warmth of it and looks toward the door and there is Malik.
Malik coming through the door. Malik shrugging off his coat. Malik, whose shirt is buttoned wrong.
Newt stares at the buttons. At the misaligned fabric, the third button threaded through the fourth hole, the collar sitting crooked. He stares at the smear of color on Malik's jaw, dark and waxy, and it takes him a long, slow, terrible moment to understand what it is.
Lipstick.
There is lipstick on Malik's jaw.
Malik's shirt is buttoned wrong because someone else unbuttoned it and then he put it back on in the dark.
And there is lipstick on his jaw because someone else's mouth was on his face.
And Malik was gone for hours, and Newt was on the windowseat reading his book and not thinking about where Malik was, and Malik was. .. he was...
The understanding arrives all at once, not in a wave but in a collapse.
A floor giving way beneath his feet. The sudden, vertiginous drop of realizing something that he should have known, that he would have known if he weren't so spectacularly naive, that was obvious from the very first night if he'd had the experience or the cynicism to see it.
Malik has been going out to have sex with strangers.
Every night. Every night he leaves this townhouse and doesn't come back for hours, he's been finding someone and taking them to bed and feeding on them.
Newt has been thinking he was getting into fights, brewing him thistle tea for bruises that weren't from fists, taking care of him after nights that didn't need care, and the entire time Malik was fucking someone else.
Of course he was. Of course. He's an incubus.
He's a sex demon. He feeds on sexual energy and Newt is not providing that, has never provided that, has been standing in his living room getting aroused by the touch of someone who is, at best, tolerating him professionally and, at worst, holding him the way one holds a casting tool that happens to have feelings.
Malik needs to eat. Malik eats by having sex.
Malik is not having sex with Newt. Therefore Malik has sex with other people.
It's logical. It's obvious. It's so simple that Newt should have worked it out weeks ago and the fact that he didn't is just further evidence that he is the most naive, most embarrassing, most pathetic witch in the entirety of Haven.
The tightness in his chest is back. Tighter this time.
Sharper. It doesn't feel the way the rejection usually feels, the way it felt when the coven dismissed him, the way it felt when Mathilde looked through him, that dull, familiar ache of not being enough.
This is new and this is sharp and this is the specific, targeted pain of wanting someone who would rather fuck a stranger than touch you.
"Hey," Malik says, from the doorway. He's looking at Newt on the windowseat with an expression that Newt can't read, or maybe doesn't want to read, because whatever is on Malik's face right now is going to have to compete with the lipstick on his jaw and it's losing.
"Hey," Newt says back, and his voice is steady, which is a miracle, and he smiles, which is another miracle, and the smile is so bad, so transparent, so obviously a mask pulled over the thing he's actually feeling that he should be embarrassed but he's too busy being devastated.
"You should be in bed," Malik says.
Newt nods. He picks up his book. He unfolds himself from the windowseat and stands and walks past Malik toward the stairs and he doesn't look at the lipstick.
He doesn't look at the buttons. He keeps his eyes forward and his chin level and his hands steady around his book and he walks upstairs and into his room and closes the door and sits on the edge of his bed in the dark.
The tightness in his chest expands until it fills his whole body and Newt sits with it.
Sits with the weight of it. Tries not to think about what it says about him when an incubus doesn't want him.
When the literal embodiment of sexual desire, who is contractually obligated to be in his presence, who touches him daily, who holds him against his chest and wraps his arms around him and presses his body against Newt's body, would rather go to a bar and find a stranger than sleep with Newt.
It shouldn't feel new and sharp. It should feel the way it always does when no one wants him. Familiar. Expected. The dull, reliable ache of being overlooked.
But this isn't being overlooked. Malik sees him. Malik touches him. Malik wraps his arms around him and holds him and says good boy in that voice that makes Newt's spine dissolve, and then Malik puts on his coat and goes out and fucks someone else.
That's worse. That's so much worse than being invisible.
Newt sets his book on the nightstand. He lies back on his bed and stares at the ceiling and pulls his pillow over his face and breathes into the dark.
The pillow smells of laundry detergent and nothing else and Newt presses his face into it and does not cry, because he refuses to cry about this, and the tightness in his chest settles into something he can carry and he carries it.
He carries it to sleep.