Chapter 11
Newt stands at his own bedroom door for four minutes before he can make himself open it.
He knows it's four minutes because he's counting.
Counting is better than thinking. Counting is structured and orderly and proceeds in one direction, which is more than can be said for anything else in Newt's head right now.
One. Two. Three. Breathe. Four. Five. Six.
Try to remember how to be a person. Seven.
Eight. Consider the possibility of living in this bedroom forever, never opening this door, subsisting on whatever crumbs are lodged in the crevices of his mattress.
Nine. Ten. Reject this plan on the grounds that there are no crumbs because he doesn't eat in bed because he's not an animal. Eleven. Twelve.
He has rehearsed several versions of how this conversation is going to go and none of them are good.
Version one: Malik pretends nothing happened.
They eat breakfast. They train. The kiss, the horribly embarrassing sounds Newt made, the fingers inside him, all of it sealed behind Malik's careful neutrality and never spoken of again, and Newt dies a slow death of mortification across the table while eating toast. Version two: Malik tells him it was a necessary magical intervention, won't need to happen again now that the ward is sealed.
Version three: Malik tells him it was a mistake.
Version four: Malik tells him it was fine but it didn't mean anything.
Version five: Malik is gone. Already left.
The chair across from Newt's is empty and the tea is cold and Malik has decided that touching Newt was the final straw and has terminated the contract and gone back to the underworld.
Version six: Malik looks at him and says love again, the way he said it last night, rough and low and pressed against Newt's mouth, and means it.
Newt does not allow himself to think about version six for more than half a second before shoving it into a box and nailing the box shut and setting the box on fire.
Version seven: Newt opens the door and Malik is standing right there and Newt has to look at him immediately without any buffer or preparation whatsoever.
He opens the door. Malik is not standing right there. The hallway is empty. The house is quiet. Newt exhales.
He goes downstairs.
Malik is at the kitchen table. Sitting in his usual spot.
He's dressed, which is somehow worse than if he weren't, because it means he's been up for a while, means he's had time to compose himself, means whatever expression he's wearing has been selected and curated and placed on his face with deliberate intent.
He looks up when Newt appears in the kitchen doorway and his expression is carefully neutral.
Neutral.
Newt's chest does something complicated.
Something that folds in on itself, origami-like, creasing along lines he didn't know were there.
Because neutral is worse than anything else.
Neutral is worse than anger, worse than discomfort, worse than the awkward fumbling of someone who doesn't know what to say.
Neutral means it didn't register. Neutral means it was routine.
Neutral means that what happened last night, which was the most overwhelming, terrifying, world-altering thing that has ever happened to Newt, was for Malik just another Tuesday.
Of course it didn't matter, Newt tells himself.
He's just a blip on a radar for an incubus who has been doing this for hundreds of years.
Malik has had thousands of partners. He has kissed thousands of mouths and touched thousands of bodies and made thousands of people come apart under his hands, and Newt is one more.
Newt is not special. Newt is not different.
Newt is a contractual obligation who needed a magical pressure valve and Malik provided one and that's all it was.
He didn't even reciprocate.
The thought lands like a fist in his stomach and Newt flushes so hard his ears burn.
He didn't do anything for Malik at all. He'd just stood there, pinned to a wall, clinging and moaning and begging and making sounds that he is going to hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life, and Malik had done everything and Newt had done nothing.
He hadn't touched Malik back, not properly, not the way a real partner would.
He'd grabbed his shirt and his hair and his horns and that was it.
He hadn't reached for him. Hadn't tried to give anything in return.
He'd just taken and taken and taken and then come apart like a pathetic, desperate, touch-starved mess and Malik had held him and wiped his hand on his shirt and buttoned Newt's pants for him like he was a child who couldn't dress himself.
God. He's so embarrassed. He can't even look at him.
He's flushed down to his neck and the collar of his shirt and probably all the way to his navel and he's mortified to even remember it.
He should have stayed in his room. He should have stayed in his room forever, subsisting on mattress crumbs, dignity intact.
Newt makes breakfast.
He does it on autopilot, the muscle memory of mornings carrying him through the motions while his brain screams at him from a great distance.
Kettle on. Bread in the toaster. Jam from the shelf.
Two plates. Two cups. He sets Malik's plate in front of him and does not make eye contact.
He sits down across from him and picks up his own tea and holds it in both hands, his fingers wrapped around the warm ceramic, and stares at the table.
He says absolutely nothing.
This is a first. Newt has never met a silence he couldn't fill.
Newt fills silences the way water fills cracks, instinctively, persistently, flowing into every gap until the space is full.
He talks about books and pigeons and the weather and whether dried sage belongs with healing or casting and he has never, in twenty years of compulsive chatter, sat across from another person and had nothing to say.
But this silence is full of things he's terrified to say.
The silence is so packed with unsaid words that there's no room for the safe ones, the filler, the comfortable noise he usually uses to cover the quiet.
Everything he might say leads somewhere dangerous.
Did it mean anything? leads to no. Are we okay?
leads to a version of okay that means nothing changes.
You called me love leads to a correction Newt will not survive.
So he sits. And he holds his tea. And he stares at the table. And the silence between them is so loud it fills the entire kitchen.
Malik speaks first, which should be a sign of how fucked up everything is.
"Are you okay?"
Three words. Simple. Direct. And Newt can hear how hard they are for him, can hear the effort behind them, the unfamiliar shape of concern in a mouth that is not built for it.
Malik is not used to comforting mortals.
He is definitely not used to comforting virgins (former virgins?).
He is almost certainly not used to sitting across a breakfast table from someone he got off against a wall the night before and asking them how they're feeling, because Malik doesn't stay for breakfast. Malik has never stayed for breakfast with anyone.
Newt knows this about him now, knows it in his bones, and the fact that Malik is here, sitting in his chair, drinking his tea, asking if Newt is okay, should mean something.
Newt can't let it mean something. If he lets it mean something and it doesn't, the fall will kill him.
He swallows. He realizes he's been staring at his plate, not eating, his toast going cold. He still can't bring himself to look at Malik. His eyes are fixed on the table, on the wood grain, on a small knot in the surface that he's tracing with his gaze over and over in tight, anxious circles.
He looks up. He forces a smile. It is very obviously forced. It is the kind of smile that would not convince a stranger, let alone a creature who can literally smell emotions.
"Um, yeah?"
Malik raises an eyebrow.
Newt flushes deeper. "Should I not be okay?"
Malik leans forward. Both elbows on the table, which is a posture Newt has never seen him adopt, a posture that makes him look less like an ancient demon and more like a person trying very hard to bridge a gap he doesn't know how to cross.
His eyes flicker across the table, over Newt's face, assessing.
"Usually after a night with me," Malik says, and his voice is careful, measured, "my partner is suffering the worst hangover of their life and can't stand on their own two legs." His gaze holds. "Let alone make me breakfast."
The thing is, Newt has been thinking about this for weeks.
Lying awake in his narrow bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Malik's hands on his shoulders and Malik's body behind him and the lipstick on Malik's jaw and the strangers Malik goes home with, and the thought that kept surfacing, the one he couldn't drown no matter how hard he tried, was: why not me?
Why does an incubus who touches him every day, who holds him during sessions, who presses against his back and murmurs in his ear and wraps his arms around him, go out every night and find someone else?
What is it about Newt that isn't enough?
What is wrong with him, specifically, that even a demon built to want everyone doesn't want him?
He'd spent weeks wondering. Weeks aching with it. Weeks carrying the specific, targeted humiliation of being a virgin in a house with an incubus who would rather fuck a stranger than sleep with him.
And then last night he'd had him.