11. Wes
Wes
He’s inside me and the whole world has narrowed to the heat of him and the weight of him and the sound rolling through both our chests, and I have never in my life felt so held.
He moves slow. He’s terrified of hurting me and the terror makes him gentle in a way that wrecks me, every stroke careful, deep, the great stone-warm cock of him filling me by degrees while his wings cage us into the dark and his hand stays locked over mine and his mouth stays at the back of my neck, and the size of him should be too much and instead it’s exactly enough, the stretch and the burn going to a deep slow ache that’s nothing but good, that has me pushing back into every thrust, greedy, gone.
The heat of him is the thing I’ll never get used to.
It’s everywhere, his chest a furnace against my spine, his breath hot at my nape, the great heavy cock of him buried hot inside me, January burned right out of the building.
I’ve been cold for eleven days in this cathedral, two jumpers and chilblains and breath fogging over the stone, and now I’m sweating under a creature made of banked sunlight, and the contrast undoes me as much as anything, the cold flags under my hands and the furnace of him over my back.
“You feel that?” I get out, finding the words between his strokes. “The cold floor. The hot you. That’s, that’s the whole thing, that’s us, the stone going warm…”
“Don’t talk like a restorer while I’m inside you,” he says, gravel and helpless, and I feel the laugh roll through his chest into mine.
“Make me stop,” I tell him, and push back hard, and he does, a deeper stroke, a curl of his hips that finds the place that whites out the words, and I stop talking entirely, my forehead going down to the canvas, gone.
“Castor, like that, don’t stop…”
“I won’t,” he says against my neck, wrecked, half a growl in it now. “I couldn’t. Wes, you feel, there’s no word, there’s no word for what you feel like…”
“You don’t need a word.” I turn my head, find his eye in the dark. “Just feel it. That’s all. Just feel it and don’t hold back.”
And he doesn’t. By slow degrees he stops being careful in the way that’s fear and starts being careful in the way that’s love, still controlled, still spread wide and clawless against me, but moving now with his whole heavy body, the weight of him rolling into me, the candles long out, just the grey window-light through the membrane of his wings and the heat of him everywhere and the deep buzzing note in his chest that I feel in my own bones.
He cages me and he pins me and he holds my hands down and he takes me apart slow on the floor of the cathedral he’s guarded for three hundred years, and the whole time I’m thinking: this is the most power I’ve ever had over anyone in my life, because he is the strongest thing I have ever touched and he is utterly, completely mine, undone by me, led by me, breaking open at the sound of my voice telling him he’s allowed.
That’s the truth of us. He’s the one who could crush me and I’m the one in charge, because I’m the one who chose to stay, and he knows it, and it’s the thing that’s breaking open in him even now, that someone chose.
That out of all the world he could have an entire small freckled man who looked at the thing on the gutter and saw someone worth keeping.
“Castor,” I get out. “I’m close, touch me, I need…”
His free hand comes around me, the great careful claw-curled hand, the heat of his palm closing around my cock where I’m aching and leaking against the canvas, and he strokes me in time with the deep roll of his body, and it’s too much, the fullness and the heat and the weight and that enormous hand working me, and I break apart over his fingers with his name torn out of me, the choir ringing with it, and I feel him feel it, feel the way I clench around him, the way I shake, and it sends him over, and he buries himself deep and holds and lets go inside me with a sound that isn’t subsonic and isn’t a roar, a sob and a groan and a great rolling note all torn together, raw, helpless, nothing holy in it at all, his wings snapping wide and then crushing back around me, caging us into the hot dark while he shakes and spends and spends.
We come down slow. He stays inside me, careful even now, his weight a warm pin all down my back, his wings a tent, the sound in his chest going to something low and stunned and almost like weeping.
“Wes,” he says, into my hair. “Wes. I didn’t know. Three hundred years and I didn’t know a body could…” He stops. “You gave me my whole self. In ten days. The whole of what I am, and I never knew I had it.”
I find his hand with mine and lace our fingers, his swallowing mine.
“You always had it,” I say. “Nobody let you use it. That’s all. That’s the only thing that was ever wrong with you. Nobody let you.”
I trace the seam where his wing joins his shoulder, the supple warm membrane gone soft as worn leather now, nothing like the carved stone I cleaned that first week.
He shivers under my hand and the note in his chest stutters and steadies.
We fit, is the thing I keep coming back to.
Not in spite of the size of him and the smallness of me, not in spite of the claws and the wings and the stone, but because of all of it, because he is exactly the wrong size for the world and exactly the right size for me, because he holds himself in check for me the way no one’s ever bothered to be careful with me before.
I press my mouth to the hot grain of his skin and feel his heartbeat, slow and enormous, under it.
He’s quiet. The rain comes on the lead. Then, low, careful, the bravest thing I’ve heard him say: “You let me. You stayed. Wes, when this is over, when the sale…” The note in his chest stutters. “I don’t want you to watch. The dawn that doesn’t end. I don’t want that to be the last thing you…”
“Stop.” I twist around in the cage of his wings, in the press of his weight, until I can get a hand to the side of his great head, to his horn.
“Listen to me. It’s not going to be the last thing.
Marisol’s filing the caretaker’s right tomorrow.
There’s a hearing. If a named keeper holds this building in sanctity, the binding holds, you live, and I am going to be that keeper, Castor, I am going to claim it, I’m going to stay and hold the wall holy so it never stops needing you… ”
“You can’t,” he says, anguished. “It’s three hundred years, Wes, it’s the rest of your life, you’d be tying yourself to a ruin and a thing on a gutter…”
“I’d be tying myself to you,” I say. “I’ve spent my whole life being hired and used and left. You’re the first thing that ever wanted me to stay. You think I’m going to walk away from that to keep my options open?”
He has no answer. The sound in his chest rolls and rolls. And outside, far off, the dawn starts its count, and we have nine days, and a hearing, and a thread to pull, and tonight, at least, we have this.