Chapter 11 #2
He'd gotten what he wanted. Malik's mouth on his.
Malik's hands on his body. Malik's fingers inside him, learning him, finding him, taking him apart piece by piece against a wall.
He'd gotten it. The thing he'd been wanting, the thing he'd been lying awake burning for, the thing he'd told himself he could never have.
And he should be fine. He got what he wanted.
What did he expect? Malik to what? Fall in love with him?
That's ridiculous. That is so absurd, so delusional, so cosmically out of proportion with reality that Newt wants to laugh at himself for even thinking it.
An ancient incubus falling in love with an inexperienced witch who can't control his magic and can't control his face and can't even get through a simple handjob without sobbing.
That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
Malik has been doing this since before Newt's entire bloodline existed.
Newt is a blip. A footnote. A contractual obligation who needed a release, and Malik provided one, and the fact that it felt like the world breaking open and reassembling itself into something new is Newt's problem, not Malik's.
He's just a meal for Malik. That's what incubi do.
They feed. They take sexual energy and they convert it into sustenance and they move on.
Newt is food. He's always been food, and last night was just Malik finally eating what was in front of him instead of going out for takeout, and Newt should feel grateful that it happened at all rather than devastated that it didn't mean what he wanted it to mean.
And apparently, he wasn't even a very good meal.
Because not only did Newt not reciprocate, not only did he do nothing except cling and moan and come apart in under ten minutes, but he didn't even react correctly afterward.
He didn't collapse. He didn't suffer. He didn't demonstrate the appropriate level of physical devastation that Malik's partners apparently experience, which means the exchange was so negligible on Malik's end that it didn't produce the normal after-effects.
Newt's orgasm, which had felt like the most cataclysmic event of his entire life, had been so underwhelming to Malik that it didn't even register as a proper feeding.
He'd spent weeks wondering why he wasn't enough. Now he knows.
He's embarrassed to even admit that was his first kiss.
Malik could probably tell. Malik, who has kissed thousands of people, who kissed Newt off-center and then corrected with his thumb and kissed him properly, Malik could absolutely tell that Newt had never been kissed before, that the clumsy desperate way Newt had surged back into it was the fumbling of total inexperience, and he's judging him for that too.
Of course he is. And Malik is probably starving.
He didn't go out to feed last night, which means Newt was supposed to be the meal, and Newt had been the worst one of his eight-hundred-year career, and Malik is sitting across from him being polite about it because Malik is, despite everything, surprisingly kind.
He called you love, whispers the stupid, hopeful part of Newt that will not die. He said love. Against your mouth. While his hand was...
Newt crushes it. He crushes it flat and buries it and puts a rock on top.
Incubi say things during sex. Incubi are creatures of desire and seduction and they say what their partner needs to hear in order to come, and Newt had needed to hear love and Malik had given it to him the way he gives everything, skillfully, precisely, without it costing him anything.
It didn't mean anything. It was a technique. Newt was a meal and the meal was bad and the word was seasoning.
Newt's eyes sting.
He can feel it starting, the hot prickle at the corners, the tightness in his throat, the pressure behind his face that means tears are coming whether he wants them or not.
His chest is tight. The silence is crushing.
And the smile on his face is crumbling at the edges and he cannot, he absolutely cannot, cry in front of Malik at the breakfast table after the worst sexual encounter of Malik's immortal life.
Newt pushes away from the table.
"I need some air," he says, and his voice is steady, which is the last miracle his body is going to grant him today.
He stands. He picks up his plate and sets it on the counter, uneaten, and walks through the living room with as much dignity as he can manage, which is not a lot, and he's willing to admit that his dignity reserves are critically low at this point and have been since approximately the moment Malik's hand slid past his waistband and Newt made a sound that could generously be described as desperate and less generously described as the noise a small animal makes when it's been stepped on.
He gets halfway through the living room before he realizes his room is not where he needs to go.
His room is the room where he lay in bed last night staring at the ceiling with the phantom feeling of Malik's fingers between his legs and his mouth burning from the kiss and the word love ringing in his ears, and if he goes back there he is going to fall apart in a way that is not recoverable.
He needs to get out. He needs space. He needs air that doesn't smell like Malik's amber and the ghost of what they did.
He pulls on his boots. His cloak. He heads out into the crisp morning air and the cold hits his face and it helps, a little, the way cold always helps, a sharp bright shock that pushes the tears back for a few more minutes.
He makes it to the bridge overlooking the river before he calls Knox.
The bridge is old stone, arched over dark water that smells of mud and magic, and the morning light is pale and grey and the city is just waking up around him.
He leans his elbows on the railing and breathes.
He breathes in the cold and the stone and the river and the absence of amber, and he pulls out his phone, and he hesitates for one long moment because he has never called Knox before.
They're friends, maybe. Friendly, at least. Knox is kind to him, genuinely kind, in a way that doesn't feel transactional or obligatory, and Dimitri tolerates Newt's existence with a grudging protectiveness that Newt suspects has more to do with Knox's feelings than Dimitri's.
But calling someone implies a level of closeness that Newt isn't sure he's earned.
Calling someone at this hour, about this, implies a level of trust that Newt doesn't know how to extend.
He calls anyway. Because he has no one else.
"Hey, Newt," Knox says.
Even though it's early. Even though he's probably busy.
Even though Newt has never called him before and the fact that Knox picks up on the second ring and says his name warmly, casually, as though calls from Newt are a normal and welcome part of his morning, makes Newt's throat tighten dangerously.
"Hey," Newt says. He rests his elbows on the railing and watches the river and says, "I hope I'm not bothering you."
"Of course not. Everything okay?"
In the background, Newt hears Dimitri's voice, sharp and immediate: "Of course it's not fucking okay, angel. What did that motherfucker do..."
Newt laughs. It comes out wet and surprised and a little broken, but it's real, and the sound of Dimitri's immediate, reflexive fury on his behalf, the way Knox's soulbound demon goes from zero to homicidal in the span of a sentence at the mere suggestion that someone has hurt Newt, is so unexpectedly comforting that the tears he's been holding back spill over.
"It's not really anything anyone did," Newt says. He wipes his cheek with the back of his hand. "It's just... I feel overwhelmed and I feel like I did something wrong and I don't know how to fix it."
They talk for a while.
Newt doesn't tell Knox everything. He doesn't tell him about the kiss or the wall or the hand or the sounds or the word love spoken rough and low against his mouth.
He talks around it, the way you talk around a wound you can't quite bring yourself to touch, and Knox listens.
Knox is good at listening. He asks questions that are gentle and open and don't push, and when Newt says "I just feel like I'm not enough" Knox is quiet for a moment and then says, "Newt, you're enough. I promise you, you're enough."
And in the background, quieter now, Dimitri says, "Tell him I'll kill the incubus."
"Dimitri says he supports you emotionally," Knox translates.
Newt laughs again. Wipes his eyes again. Breathes.
When they hang up, the morning is warmer and the river is brighter and Newt feels lighter in a way that is fragile and temporary but real. He has friends. He has people who pick up the phone and listen and threaten to kill demons on his behalf. That's something. That's more than he's ever had.
He walks home.
The walk takes fifteen minutes and he uses every one of them to rebuild. To put the pieces back in order, to arrange his face into something that looks okay, to practice being a person who is fine. He will go inside. He will finish breakfast. He will train. He will be fine.
He opens the door.
The kitchen is empty. The table is cleared. Newt's uneaten toast is in the bin. Malik's cup is washed and sitting upside down on the drying rack. The chair across from Newt's is pushed in.
Malik is gone.
The word drops through Newt's body like a stone through water, displacing everything in its path.
Gone. Not upstairs, not in the living room, not in the armchair.
Gone. The coat is missing from the hook.
The townhouse is empty and quiet and it smells of amber, faintly, the ghost of a presence that has removed itself, and Newt stands in the doorway of his own kitchen and looks at the empty chair and the cleared table and the feeling that hits him is so devastating, so total, so precisely the thing he was most afraid of, that his knees buckle.
He catches himself on the doorframe. His hand grips the wood and his legs hold, barely, and he doesn't fall. He stands there, braced against the frame, and stares at the empty kitchen, and his chest is a collapsing thing, a structure with its supports kicked out.
He left.
Of course he left. Malik always leaves. Malik has been leaving for years.
Malik leaves after every encounter, every exchange, every transaction.
He takes and he goes and the door closes and that's all it is.
Newt knew this. Newt has always known this.
Newt has been telling himself for weeks that this is temporary, that the contract will end, that Malik will go, and here it is. Here is the going.
Except it isn't the going, is it. The coat is missing but Malik's things are still here.
His books are on the shelf, the ones he reads in the armchair when he thinks Newt isn't looking.
His cup is washed and sitting upside down on the drying rack.
He hasn't left left. He hasn't terminated the contract and vanished into the underworld.
He's gone out.
The realization settles over Newt slowly, like cold water filling a basin.
Malik is not gone. Malik has gone out. The way Malik goes out.
The way Malik has been going out every night for weeks, to bars and clubs and strangers' beds, to find someone to feed from.
The coat is missing because Malik put it on and walked out the door and went to find a better meal.
Newt sinks to the floor of his kitchen doorway.
He sits with his back against the frame and his knees pulled to his chest and his arms wrapped around them and he stares at nothing.
The thought is so clean, so precise, so perfectly calibrated to confirm everything he already suspected, that it doesn't even hurt at first. It just sits there. A fact. A simple, inarguable fact.
Newt hadn't been enough to sustain him. Newt had given Malik everything he had, every ounce of his body and his trust and his desperate, pathetic, first-time vulnerability, and it hadn't been enough.
Not enough energy. Not enough sustenance.
Not enough to keep Malik from putting on his coat and going out to find someone who could give him what Newt couldn't.
He thinks about every night Malik went out and came back smelling of someone else and how Newt had thought, foolishly, naively, with the delusional optimism of someone who has never been chosen for anything, that maybe if Malik touched him, if Malik kissed him, if Malik's hands were on him instead of on a stranger, maybe that would be enough. Maybe Newt would finally be enough.
And now he knows.
He's not.
The hurt arrives then, delayed, a wave that has been building offshore and finally reaches the shallows.
It fills his chest and his throat and the backs of his eyes and it is so much worse than the lipstick, so much worse than the buttons, because those had been before.
Those had been Malik choosing strangers over the possibility of Newt.
This is Malik choosing strangers over the reality of Newt.
This is Malik having had him, having tasted him, having held him against a wall and learned the shape of him and made him come apart, and deciding that the experience was insufficient.
That Newt, fully offered, fully open, fully given, was not a meal worth staying for.
He doesn't cry. He used up his tears on the bridge and there's nothing left, just the tight, airless ache of a chest that's been emptied, and the quiet kitchen, and the morning light on the clean table, and the empty hook where Malik's coat should be.
Newt sits on the floor and stares at the hook and thinks: You gave him everything and it wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough. You are never going to be enough.
The townhouse is very quiet.
The ward hums around him, perfect and unbroken, the most powerful spell he's ever cast, sealed with a kiss and a sob and Malik's hand between his legs. It holds the house together. It holds the walls and the windows and the cracked ceiling in place. It holds everything.
Except the person it was supposed to keep in.