Chapter 7 #2
"We're done here," Malik says, and stands, and puts money on the bar, and walks out.
The night air is cold and sharp and Malik walks through it without a destination, hands in his coat pockets, jaw tight, and he thinks about what he said.
He thinks about the way it came out, unfiltered, uncontrolled, and how that is a thing that does not happen to him.
Has not happened to him in his entire life.
He is a creature of precision and control and deliberate action and he does not say things by accident.
Except he just did.
He deserves better than that.
Better than an incubus taking advantage of a contract.
Better than a demon feeding on a virgin who has never been touched by anyone, who has never been wanted by anyone, who looks at Malik with those enormous green eyes full of trust and desire and a hope so raw it makes Malik's chest hurt.
Better than being one more thing that uses Newt and leaves him emptier than before.
That's what he meant. That's the noble version, the version he can live with, the version that lets him maintain the fiction that he is keeping his distance for Newt's sake.
But it's not the whole truth, and Malik has been lying to himself long enough to recognize when he's doing it.
The whole truth is that Malik wants him.
The whole truth is specific and detailed and keeps him up at night, staring at the ceiling of the armchair or the dark of whatever stranger's bedroom he's retreated to, and it is this: he wants to know what sounds Newt makes.
Not the small, caught gasp that escapes him when Malik's hands find his shoulders, not the barely-there intake of breath when Malik's body presses against his.
The other sounds. The ones Newt would make if Malik put his mouth on him.
If Malik's hands went somewhere other than his shoulders, his arms, his waist. If Malik peeled that threadbare t-shirt over his head and found every freckle on his chest and his stomach and his hips and his thighs and mapped them with his tongue.
He wants to pull that red hair free from its tie and wrap it around his fist.
He wants to feel Newt's pulse under his thumb again, wants to press his mouth to the hollow of his throat, wants to feel the vibration of whatever desperate, breathy, overwhelmed sound Newt would make against his lips.
He wants to know what Newt looks like when he comes.
Every time Newt flushes scarlet and looks away, Malik wants it more.
Every time Newt's scent blooms, sweet and warm and devastating, Malik's vision narrows and his teeth ache and the wanting is so acute it feels like a wound.
Every time Newt smiles at him, open and bright and trusting, the wound gets deeper, and Malik is running out of ways to pretend it isn't there.
He tells himself it would be taking advantage.
Newt is bound to him by contract. Newt is a virgin who has never been touched, who has no frame of reference, who would say yes because he doesn't know what no looks like when it's an option.
The power imbalance is staggering. The ethical implications are clear.
Malik would be taking something from someone who doesn't understand what he's giving, and that is a line that even an incubus should not cross.
He almost believes it.
Except that Malik has never in eight hundred years given a single thought to the morality regarding sex.
Not once. Not with any partner, in any configuration, under any circumstances.
He has fucked people who were desperate and people who were lonely and people who were making terrible decisions and people who were using him as much as he was using them, and he has never once paused to consider the moral architecture of the exchange.
He is a sex demon. As long as they’re consenting and of age he shouldn’t consider the details.
The fact that he's considering it now, the fact that he's inventing moral frameworks to justify keeping his hands to himself, is a tell. A neon sign. A flashing alarm that says the reason he won't touch Newt has nothing to do with consent or power imbalances or the nobility of restraint.
The real reason is simpler and worse.
He's afraid that if he starts, he won't stop.
Not in the predatory sense. Not in the taking-too-much sense. Malik knows how to take without breaking. He's been doing it for centuries. The fear is not that he would hurt Newt.
The fear is that he would want to stay.
That he would touch Newt and taste him and hear the sounds he makes and feel the magic sing between them and he would want to do it again.
And again. And again. That he would wake up beside him in the morning and not leave.
That he would sit across the breakfast table and drink the tea that Newt brewed for him and eat the toast that Newt made for him and look at the freckled face across the table and think: I want this tomorrow, too.
And Malik does not stay. Has never stayed.
Has built his entire existence on the principle that desire is transactional and intimacy is temporary and leaving is not just easy but necessary, and if he touches Newt, if he crosses that line, if he allows himself to have the thing he wants, he is going to discover that leaving is not easy at all.
He is going to discover that somewhere in the last few weeks, between the breakfast and the tea and the sighs and the scent and the small, trusting body leaning back against his chest, he has built something he doesn't know how to walk away from.
And that terrifies him.
Malik, who has not been terrified of anything in his entire life. Malik, who has faced down greater demons and elder gods and the cold, patient machinations of a coven matriarch without flinching. Malik, who has walked through the underworld and back and never once felt his hands shake.
His hands are shaking.
He puts them deeper into his pockets and walks faster and goes home.
The townhouse is quiet when he opens the door, which is not unusual. It's late. Newt should be asleep. But Newt is not asleep.
Newt is standing in the living room.
The furniture has been pushed back against the walls.
The rug is rolled up in the corner. Newt is standing in the center of the cleared floor in bare feet and a t-shirt that's too big for him and his hair is down, loose and red around his face, and his hands are raised in front of him and there are three objects hovering in the air.
A book. A candle. A fork. They're orbiting each other in a slow, precise pattern, weaving around each other without touching, and Newt's eyes are closed and his face is calm and his breathing is even and his magic is the steadiest Malik has ever seen it.
He's training alone.
Without Malik's hands on his shoulders. Without Malik's body behind him.
Without any contact at all. He's standing in the middle of his own living room, by himself, in the dark, and he is controlling three objects simultaneously with a precision and steadiness that he has never achieved in any of their sessions together.
Malik stands in the doorway and watches and something in his chest does something terrible.
Newt's brow furrows, just slightly. The candle wobbles, dips, steadies.
The book rotates slowly, pages ruffling.
The fork catches the faint light from the street and gleams. It's not perfect.
There's a tremor in the pattern, a faint instability at the edges, but it's so close to perfect that the difference is academic.
And he's doing it alone. He's doing it because he pushed the furniture back and rolled up the rug and decided to try, all by himself, without anyone telling him he could, without anyone's hands on him, without anyone saying good or again or I know you can do this.
Then Newt opens his eyes.
He opens his eyes and sees Malik in the doorway and his face does the thing it always does, that uncontrollable, incandescent bloom of warmth and surprise and want, and his concentration shatters.
The book drops. The fork clatters to the floor. The candle hits the coffee table and the coffee table... explodes.
Not dramatically. Not catastrophically. But the candle strikes the wood and the burst of uncontrolled magic that accompanies the collapse of Newt's concentration detonates the table outward, splinters and surface and legs flying apart, and the candle's wick catches and a small, cheerful fire starts burning in the wreckage.
Malik crosses the room and stamps it out.
His boot comes down on the flame three times, efficiently, without urgency, and then the fire is gone and there's a blackened patch on the hardwood and the coffee table is kindling and Newt is standing in the center of the room with his arms at his sides and his face absolutely scarlet and his mouth working around an apology that won't come out.
Malik looks at the remains of the coffee table. He looks at the fork on the floor. He looks at the book, which has landed open and face-down and is probably going to have a crease in its spine that will bother Newt for weeks.
He looks at Newt.
Newt, whose face is doing everything at once.
Mortification. Embarrassment. The lingering warmth of whatever he'd felt when he opened his eyes and saw Malik.
And underneath all of it, barely hidden, the devastation that Newt always carries now, the one that appeared three nights ago and hasn't left, the one that Malik has noticed and doesn't comment on.
Malik doesn't comment on any of it.
He doesn't comment on the coffee table. He doesn't comment on the fact that Newt was training alone with a steadiness that makes something behind Malik's ribs feel like it's cracking.
He doesn't comment on the fact that Newt's concentration shattered the instant their eyes met, or what that means, or the small, devastating implication that Malik's presence is both the thing that stabilizes Newt's magic and the thing that destroys it.
"I'll get a new table," Malik says.
Newt's mouth closes. His eyes are bright. He nods, once, and picks up the fork and the book and goes upstairs, and Malik stands in the living room with a scorch mark on the floor and thinks about the way Newt's face had looked when he opened his eyes.
The warmth. The want. The way his concentration had dissolved, instantly, completely, because Malik walked through the door.
He thinks about the sounds Newt would make.
He thinks about never leaving.
He stands there for a long time.