10. Castor
Castor
He wants me to stop being careful, and I do not know if I can, and I want to so badly it frightens me.
It is the next night. Marisol has written back to him, I heard him read it aloud to me, fierce and hopeful, the old caretaker’s right is real, it exists, there’s an instrument, a deed of guardianship granted to a named lay keeper in the cathedral’s first century, and if it was never formally extinguished it might still run, might still hold, might be claimable.
He has eleven days no longer; he has ten.
He has spent the daylight at the records office across the river fighting for my life, and now it is dark, and he has come back, and he has lit the candles, and he is standing in the middle of the nest of dust sheets pulling his clothes off one piece at a time and saying, low and certain:
“Do it. The thing I asked. Cage me. Pin me. I want all of you, Castor. Not the careful half.”
I drop off the gallery and catch the air and land in front of him, and I am shaking.
“If I close my hand wrong,” I say. “If I put my weight down. The claws, Wes, one of them…”
“You won’t.” He stands there, small and bare and freckled and entirely unafraid, his own want plain on him now, hard and flushed, his eyes dark.
“You’ve held this body for three hundred years without one mistake.
You held the wall, you killed the things on the roofs, you came down out of the dark every night this week and never once hurt me.
I trust your control more than I trust my own.
Use it on me. I want to feel how strong you are and know you’ll never spend it wrong. ”
And the thing he’s offering, to let me be the whole of what I am, the size and the strength and the wings and the weight, and to call that a gift instead of a danger, undoes the last knot in me.
“Lie down,” I say, and my voice has dropped to the bottom of itself. “On your front.”
He goes down onto the dust sheets, and I come over him, and for the first time in three hundred years I let myself take up all the space I am.
I cage him, one hand planted by each of his shoulders, claws spread wide and dug into the canvas, not him, never him, and my wings come down and curve around on either side, walling us into a hot grey dark, and I lower my body over the length of his small one until he can feel the heat of me all along his back, close, not yet bearing down, the whole weight of me held a breath above him.
He makes a sound into the dust sheets that I feel in my own chest.
“Is this what you wanted,” I say, low, against the back of his neck, and I let just a little of my weight settle onto him, the heat of my chest against his spine, and he shudders all over and pushes back up into it.
“Yes, God, yes, more, I want to feel you…”
So I give him more. Slow. A degree of weight at a time, until he’s bearing the warm press of me along his whole back and he’s gasping with it, pinned and caged and surrounded, and the heat of me must be everywhere, banked July soaked into a January floor, and I bring one great hand to cover both of his where they’re fisted in the canvas above his head and I hold them there, all four of his fingers swallowed under my palm, claws lifted clear, and he goes still and soft underneath me in a way that is not fear, that is the opposite of fear, that is the deepest trust I have ever been given.
“Castor,” he breathes. “Open me up. I want you inside. I’ve wanted it since the first night you spoke.”
The want in me roars. “I’ll hurt you,” I say, anguished. “The size of…”
“Then we go slow. We’ve got all night.” He turns his head on the canvas so I can see one dark eye, one flushed cheek.
“There’s oil in my kit. The linseed, the clean one.
Castor. I’ve done this before, with men.
Never like this, never with, never with someone I, just go slow.
Stretch me. I want to learn you the way you learned yourself. Let me.”
I have to put my mouth to the back of his neck and hold still a moment, because the feeling is too large. Someone I, he said, and didn’t finish, and I heard the whole of it anyway.
I reach for the oil with one hand, the other still covering his, still holding him caged and warm and pinned.
I have never done this. I have no idea how, only what he tells me, only his voice low and steady guiding me, one finger, slow, yes, like that, give me a minute, now move it, and I learn him the way I learned myself, careful past all carefulness, one thick clawless-curled fingertip and then, when he asks, when he pushes back and begs, two, working him slow and deep in the candle-dark while he shakes and swears into the canvas and the sound in my chest rolls through both our bodies.
The oil warms the moment it touches me; everything that touches me warms. I feel him open around my fingers, the give of it, the heat, the small helpless rocking of his hips as he chases the stretch, and I have to set my forehead down against the back of his neck and breathe, because the want in me has gone past anything I have words for.
Three hundred years of stone and I never once knew my body could ache like this, could need a thing this badly, could be this close to losing the control I’ve built my whole existence on.
“You’re shaking,” he says, breathless, half a laugh in it. “You. The thing that scares crows off the parapet.”
“You scare me more than any of them ever did,” I tell him, and mean it as the truest thing I’ve ever said, and curl my fingers, and feel him break apart at the edges with a sound that makes the candle gutter.
“You’re so…” I can’t finish either. The heat of him around my fingers. The trust of him, opened up, pinned under three hundred years of held strength and asking for more. “Wes. Tell me when. Tell me you’re ready. I won’t move till you say.”
“Now,” he gasps. “Now, Castor, I’m ready, come here, come here…”
And I cover him with the whole of my body, wings caging us into the dark, my hand over his hands, my mouth at his neck, and I bring myself to him slow, so slow, the great stone-warm heat of me against the place I’ve opened, and I press, and he opens, and I sink into him by degrees while he sobs my name, and the dawn is hours off and counting and I do not care, I do not care, I would spend every dawn I have left to be exactly here.