7. Wes
Wes
He’s wrapped me in his wings and I don’t want to be anywhere else for the rest of my life.
It’s a strange thing to know that fast and that completely.
I’m twenty-nine, I’ve been left enough times to have stopped expecting otherwise, and I am kneeling on a cold cathedral floor inside the folded wings of a three-hundred-year-old gargoyle who I’ve just gone down on, and the thought arrives plain and quiet and certain: this one.
This is the one I’m not going to be able to walk away from.
It should scare me. It does scare me. The contract ends in two weeks.
But right now there’s the warm grey dark of his wings around us and the banked heat of his skin against my cheek and the slow subsonic note rolling through his chest, steady now, sated, and I let myself have it.
“You okay?” I ask.
The note hitches. “I don’t have a word for what I am,” he says. “There isn’t one that’s big enough.”
“Try ‘good.’”
“Good,” he says, like he’s testing it. “Good. Yes.” His wing tightens around me, the membrane warm and supple now, nothing like the carved stone I cleaned.
“Wes. You, that was for me. The whole of it was for me. You didn’t…
” He stops, and I feel him work up to it, the new vocabulary of wanting. “You didn’t take anything.”
“I’ll take plenty,” I say. “Don’t worry. I’m a generous man but I’m not a saint.”
The sound in his chest does something I’ve started to recognize as a laugh, a low warm pulse, three beats.
“This is a church for saints,” he says. “It’s the one thing I’ve never been.
They put me on the saint’s house and I was never one.
I was the thing on the gutter that the saints didn’t have to look at. ”
I pull back enough to look up at him in the window-grey. His face is close, the horns curving back, the heat shimmering, his eyes dark and open and fixed on me with that total ferocious focus that I will never, ever get tired of.
“Stone saint,” I say. “That’s what I called you. The first week. Before I knew. I’d climb up and say good morning, stone saint, and clean another inch of you.”
“I heard,” he says. “I kept it.”
“You keep everything I say.”
“Everything,” he agrees, and there’s no shame in it now, only that astonishing total attention. “You’re the only thing I’ve heard in three hundred years that was worth keeping.”
I have to kiss him after that. I don’t know how it’ll work, the size of him, the shape of his mouth, but I bring my hand to the side of his great head and I tilt it down and I press my mouth to the corner of his, to the warm stone-fine skin there, and he goes utterly still, and then he turns his head a careful degree and gives me his mouth properly, and it’s nothing like kissing a man and everything like being kissed by something that has wanted to be kissed for three centuries and never been allowed.
His lips are hot and broad and he doesn’t know what to do with them and that’s somehow the best part, that I get to teach him this too, slow, soft, my hand on his horn and his claws splayed and trembling against my back, never closing, never once closing, all that strength held in check around me like a cathedral built to keep me dry.
When we break apart I’m dizzy with it.
“Right,” I say, against his mouth. “Now you. I want to make you feel everything you’ve missed. All three hundred years of it. We’re going to need more candles.”
The laugh rolls through him again, and then it stops, and his wing draws back from around me just enough that he can look toward the high windows, and I feel the change in him, the cold thread of it under the heat.
“The grey’s coming,” he says quietly.
I look. The east windows have gone from black to the faintest charcoal, the rose window beginning to lift out of the dark.
The wonder of it hasn’t left me, that I can put my mouth to a creature carved to frighten and have him go soft and astonished under me, that the most dangerous thing in the old quarter wants to be kissed slowly and badly and learns it like a language he’s been starving for.
I keep one hand on his horn and I feel the great careful strength of him held in check all around me, the claws that never close, the wings that wrap but never crush, and I think about all the years he spent up there being good and still and unthanked, and something in my chest goes fierce and protective in a way I haven’t let myself feel for anyone in a very long time.
I’ve spent my life making myself small and leaveable.
With him I feel, for once, the size of the thing I could be to someone.
It’s terrifying. I want it more than I’ve wanted anything.
“How long?”
“An hour. Less.” His claws curl, not toward me, never toward me, into his own palms. “I have to be on the post when it comes. If the stone catches me down here, off the wall…” He doesn’t finish.
“What happens if it catches you off the wall?”
He’s quiet a long moment. The note in his chest has gone low and grave.
“It comes harder,” he says at last. “Every hour I’m down here, the dawn takes back. I told you there was a cost. The cost is that. The stone comes sooner, and heavier, and one of these mornings, if I spend too much, it won’t give me back.”
The cold goes all the way through me. “Castor. How much have you spent? Already. These nights, with me.”
“Don’t,” he says, gentle, and lifts one huge careful hand to my face, the backs of two claws against my cheek, feather-light. “Don’t do the sum. I’ve spent it gladly. Every minute.”
“That’s not, you can’t just…” My voice breaks and I hate it. “I’m not going to be the reason you…”
“You’re the reason I want the dawn to wait,” he says. “For three hundred years I wanted it to come, so the day would be over. You’ve made me want the night to last. Do you understand what that is, Wes? You’ve made me want to live. Don’t be sorry for that. Whatever it costs.”
And before I can answer he gathers me in once more, quick, fierce, his wings folding round me one last time, and then he’s up, the great soft drag of him unfolding, the rush of air, and gone up the pier into the dark, and I’m left kneeling on the cold flags in the rising grey with my heart in pieces and the taste of him still in my mouth and a sum I have to do, now, whether he wants me to or not.
The cost. The dawn. The two weeks I have left.
I have to find a way to make the night last that doesn’t cost him his life.
I look up. He’s settled at the lip of the gallery, folding down into the crouch, and even as I watch the grey reaches him and the warmth goes out of his skin and the supple wings stiffen and the great open eyes fix on the nave, and he’s stone again, the stone saint, the best thing in here, and I can’t tell, I’ll never be able to tell, whether the stone hurts.