9. Wes
Wes
Ihave a plan, or the bones of one, and I have eleven nights, and tonight I’m not going to spend a single second of it on the dawn.
The plan is this: a building stays holy if someone keeps it holy.
Deconsecration is a ceremony, a piece of paper, a bishop’s signature, but the records I’ve been buried in all day say the binding answers to something older than the diocese’s paperwork.
Custos ad murum donec murus sanctus. Holy isn’t only the bishop’s word.
There are older deeds. There’s a foundation right, a caretaker’s right, that predates the diocese’s freehold by two centuries, a lay guardianship, a named keeper who holds the building “in sanctity” independent of the see.
If I can find the instrument that grants it, and if I can claim it, and if I can stop the sale long enough to register it, It’s a long shot stacked on a long shot.
It’s a man who’s good at making old things presentable trying to make an old right walk again.
But it’s a thread, and I’m going to pull it, and I’ve sent the photographs of the deed to the one person I half-trust in Veilwood’s records office, a dry careful woman named Marisol who owes me for a job I did under cost.
But that’s tomorrow’s fight. Tonight Castor is flesh, and tonight is for him.
“Come down here,” I tell him. I’ve made a place, dust sheets layered six deep over the choir floor, the painters’ canvas the diocese left, every cushion from the rectory, a nest in the candlelight between the misericords and the trestle. “I want you on your back. I want to take my time.”
He goes still in the held way. “On my… Wes, I’ll crush you. The weight of me…”
“You won’t. I’ll be on top. You just have to lie there and let me.” I step into his heat, both hands flat on his chest where the sound lives. “Can you do that? Let go and let me have you?”
The note climbs. “I don’t know how to let go,” he says, low. “I’ve held for three hundred years. Holding is the only thing I know how to do.”
“Then I’ll hold you,” I say. “You let go, and I’ll hold. That’s the deal.”
He looks at me a long moment, that total focus, and then, slowly, carefully, a thing I understand is enormous, he lowers himself down onto the dust sheets, onto his back, wings spreading out beneath him across the choir floor like a dark spilled cloak, and he lays his great clawed hands open at his sides, palms up, and he gives me the most defenceless thing he has, which is the soft grey expanse of his front, all that strength laid flat and still and trusting.
I climb over him.
He’s so big I can kneel astride his hips and barely span him.
The heat comes off him in waves, sun on stone, and I strip my jumper and my shirt over my head so I can feel it on my skin, and his eyes go dark and the note in his chest drops as he looks at me, small and pale and freckled astride the great grey heat of him, and I watch him learn the difference between us, the size of it, the way it could frighten and instead just makes his breath come faster.
It’s the difference that gets me too, if I’m honest. I’m not a small man among men but I’m a small man here, on top of three hundred years of grey muscle and folded wing, and there’s a thing that happens in my chest when I look at the size of his hands lying open and still at his sides, those hands that could close around my whole skull, those claws that have killed things in the dark over this city, and know they’re holding themselves still for me.
The most dangerous thing in Veilwood’s old quarter, flat on its back on a dust sheet, letting me decide what happens next.
I’ve spent my life being the one things happen to.
I have never once held this much power and it goes through me hot and dizzy and I have to take a breath before I trust my own hands.
“You know what this is?” I ask him, and rock my hips down slow, just to watch his face. “This is you trusting me with the most strength I’ve ever touched. Don’t think I don’t know what that costs you.”
“It doesn’t cost me anything,” he says, low, wrecked, his eyes never leaving mine. “It’s the only easy thing I’ve ever done. Trusting you.”
“Look at you,” I say, and run both hands up the centre of his chest, over the broad flat plane of it, learning the grain of his skin, the close fine warmth of it, the place low in his chest where the subsonic note buzzes under my palms. “Lying still for me. You’re doing so well.”
The sound he makes is wrecked. “Wes…”
“Shh. Let me.” I move down him, mapping, my mouth following my hands, the heat is fierce against my lips, almost too much, sun-warmed rock, and I press kisses into the seams of him, the great architecture of muscle and bone, and everywhere I touch he shudders, the want building in him fast now, his hips lifting under me without his meaning to, and low between us his cock stiffens against me, heavy and hot, the part of him I learned with my mouth last night.
“There,” I murmur. “I want to watch this time. I want to see your face.”
I take him in my hand, both hands, he needs both, and the groan that tears out of him rolls up through the lantern tower and the candles lean and I stroke him slow, hot stone-flesh in my grip, and I keep my eyes on his face, on the open wreck of it, the horns thrown back against the dust sheets, the carved-saint mouth gone slack with a pleasure he has no defences against.
The heat of him in my hands is the thing I can’t get over.
It builds the more I touch him, sun banking into rock, until my palms are slick with the warmth and my own pulse is going hard in answer.
I take my time. I twist my wrist the way I’ve learned makes the note in his chest drop, and watch his stomach go tight, watch the great muscles of his thighs flex against the dust sheets, watch three hundred years of a body that was never allowed to feel anything learn, in real time, under my hands, exactly what it was built for.
“You’re so quiet usually,” I tell him, low, working him steady. “Up there on the gutter, being good, being still. Nobody up there ever heard you. I want the opposite. I want you loud. I want the whole nave to know what you sound like when somebody finally touches you right.”
“I can’t,” he gets out. “Wes, I can’t hold, it’s too…”
“Don’t hold.” I work him steady, relentless, my own want a hard ache I’m ignoring because this, this is the thing I want, this great held creature coming undone because I won’t stop. “That’s the whole point. Don’t hold. Let go. I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Castor, let go…”
And he does.
His wings snap wide, the whole dark span of them flares out across the choir, the rush of air putting half the candles out, and then they come down and around, curving up off the floor to cage me, to wrap us both, the membrane shuddering, and he lets go into my hands with a sound that isn’t subsonic and isn’t a roar, it’s a sob, three centuries of held everything breaking at once, and I stroke him through all of it, every wracked pulse, until he’s spent and shaking and folded around me inside his own trembling wings.
I lie down on his chest. The sound in him is going slow and stunned. His wings stay curved around us, a warm grey tent, the last candles guttering through the membrane.
“You caged me,” I say, wondering, into his skin. “Just now. Your wings.”
“I didn’t mean…” he starts, alarmed.
“No. I liked it.” I lift my head. “Castor. Next time I want you to do it on purpose. I want you to cage me and pin me and not be careful. I trust you that much. I want you to have that.”
The note in his chest stops dead. Then starts again, low and deep and astonished, and his wings draw a fraction tighter around me in the dark.