37. Recommended Weight Limits for Elysian Dynamics Bedframes
Chapter thirty-seven
Recommended Weight Limits for Elysian Dynamics Bedframes
Cass
He didn’t mean to fall asleep so fast.
The house was small and familiar and wrong in ways he couldn’t figure out.
The furniture was where it had always been—the woven rug Honey had made during enrichment, the shelf of approved texts with their cracked spines, the two ceramic cups on the counter that they’d painted during a pottery workshop, hers with precise geometric patterns and his with lopsided flowers that she told him were beautiful and that he knew, even then, were not.
Riot asked about what Brother Matthias whispered, and that made Cass’s head hurt again.
“Can you just hold me together for a bit?” he asked instead.
Riot took off the tunic that was a little too tight in his shoulders and laid down in the bed that was supposed to be for Cass and Honey alone and opened his arms. Cass climbed onto the bed, let Riot’s hand settle on his injured shoulder, and Cass was asleep before his next breath.
We need to release the negative energy sooner rather than later.
Brother Matthias’s words, whispered close enough that Cass felt the warmth of his breath against his ear.
The door rattled.
Sooner rather than later.
This is the light finding its way in, this is the divine making space for itself inside you.
He knew what those sessions were. They were healing.
They were necessary. They were the reason his scars existed—because the negative energy lived so deep in him, so stubbornly, so resistant to the gentler methods, that Brother Matthias was forced to use more intensive techniques for weeks and months and years.
Everyone said so. Brother Matthias said so. The scars were proof of how hard they’d worked together to fix what was wrong with him, and he still was unable to heal himself.
The door rattled harder.
Cass turned away from the door. In the space between waking and sleep, this was something he could do—just turn, the way he’d turn from a window when the view was too bright. The headache eased slightly. The rattling faded to a vibration he could ignore if he held very still.
Before they’d taken Sage away to the Sisters’ Sanctuary and Riot to the infirmary, Cass caught her elbow in the corridor and asked the question that had been sitting in his stomach since the roadblock.
“What did they want?” he asked. “The wild Berserkers. When they said borrow. I offered to cook and clean and they looked at me like…what did they want?”
Sage glanced both ways down the corridor, then leaned in.
“That very loud thing you and Riot did in the root cellar?” she’d said, her voice flat and quiet. “That’s sex, Cass. They wanted sex.”
The word had landed in his body and sent ripples outward through his chest and stomach and legs.
Riot had taught him other words, the steps between, the way bodies moved together and apart.
But knowing the word and understanding that six men had looked at him and wanted that—wanted what he and Riot had shared in the dark, in the cellar, where it had been good and frightening and chosen—
They wanted to take that from him. Without asking. Without the choosing.
“Oh,” he’d said. And then, because his mouth was faster than his brain and always had been: “Oh, no.”
Sage squeezed his good arm once and let herself be taken away to the Sisters’ Sanctuary and Cass stood in the corridor with the word sex sitting inside him like something swallowed wrong.
As he’d been drifting back to consciousness with Riot’s heartbeat against his back, Riot’s hand warm on his shoulder, in the bed that wasn’t theirs holding them both in a space that smelled like lavender sachets and Honey’s hair oil—his mind did the thing it sometimes did.
The thing that wasn’t thinking, exactly.
More like... settling. The way water settled, finding the lowest point and resting there, and seeing from that place what the shape of things actually was.
Brother Matthias saw marks on his body and Cass lied to his face about it.
Those were from Riot and the thing they’d done together that was loud enough for Sage to hear from far away, apparently, which was embarrassing but also—it hadn’t been something done to him.
It had been something they’d done with each other.
Riot’s hands on his hips and thighs left those marks.
They’d been the hands that stopped. The hands that shook when they stopped.
The hands that held him after and stroked his hair.
But Brother Matthias couldn’t know that
Riot needed to be seen as good, because he was good, deep down, underneath the gold eyes and the violence and the hands that didn’t always stop the first time, he was the man who picked wildflowers.
He was the man who bought a silver circlet from a Neutral Zone vendor and couldn’t make eye contact while explaining what it was.
He was the man who said I love you and Cass felt it differently than when Honey said it.
Cass was already known as deficient. He was the one the programs didn’t work on, the one whose earthly attachments ran too deep, the one who needed extra sessions and stronger supplements and more intensive guidance.
If the marks had to belong to someone, they could belong to wild Berserkers.
Wild Berserkers who did terrible things in terrible places. That story kept Riot safe.
He was okay with that. He’d been told he was damaged his whole life, carrying one more mark on the inventory wouldn’t change the shape of what he was.
The door kept rattling.
Cass woke and lay very still, allowing the dreams he could never quite remember recede. His head ached. His stomach was hollow. The door was rattling faintly, distantly, the way it always did after the dreams.
I’m okay. I’m in my house. Riot is here. I’m okay.
He breathed and focused on what was real: the heartbeat against his back. The hand on his shoulder. The scratch of the woven blanket against his calves. The lavender from the window box. The—
Oh.
Oh, no.
His body was doing the thing again.
The warmth between his legs was unmistakable, not the neutral warmth of sleep but the specific, liquid, insistent warmth that meant his body decided to do things without consulting him.
The hollow ache was there too, low in his belly, that deep craving that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the feeling of Riot pressed against his back, Riot’s hand on his shoulder, Riot’s heartbeat syncing with something in Cass’s chest that pulled and pulled and pulled.
His thighs were damp. The slick was still there. His body flushed hot and then cold.
He needed to move. He needed to get to the bathroom and clean up and get this under control before Riot woke up, but moving meant leaving the warmth.
Moving meant losing the hand on his shoulder and the heartbeat against his back and the single point of safety in a place that was supposed to be home and felt, for the first time in his life, like a strange place.
Cass pressed his face into the pillow and squeezed his eyes shut and told his body, firmly and clearly and with as much authority as he could manage, to stop.
His body did not stop.
It never stopped when he told it to. That was, Cass was beginning to understand, sort of the whole problem.
But something smelled good, and he was momentarily distracted from the problem between his legs.
The scent was warm and herbal like chamomile, maybe, or the lemon-ginger blend that Honey kept in a tin above the stove.
Faint and drifting, the kind of thing that could have been real or could have been the atmospheric adjusters cycling through one of their programmed scent rotations.
The house had those, all the Springfield Gardens houses did, subtle shifts designed to promote calm or energy or spiritual receptivity, depending on the time of day.
He wasn’t supposed to notice them. He was just supposed to feel slightly better about existing and attribute it to personal growth.
Cass always noticed. He’d just never told anyone, because noticing felt like a failure.
For a single breath, he felt guilt, and then it passed.
Because the thing was—the actual, honest, body-level thing was—he’d woken up next to Riot almost every day since the hotel, and every time he did, the first thing his body did when it recognized Riot’s warmth against his back was settle.
It was a yes that lived in his bones and he wasn’t sure he could wake up without Riot anymore.
Cass turned his head.
Riot’s face was close—closer than Cass usually saw it, because Riot was always looking at things, assessing, cataloguing, his eyes sharp with the particular alertness of someone who expected every room to try to kill him, or gold eyes that looked hungry.
Asleep, all of that was gone. The lines between his eyebrows had smoothed.
His copper hair was a wreck—flattened on one side, sticking up on the other, a piece of it stuck to his cheekbone where he’d pressed his face into the pillow.
His lips were parted slightly, his breathing deep and even, and the freckles scattered across his nose and cheeks looked, in the early morning light filtering through the curtains, like someone flicked gold paint at him and it had landed exactly right.
Cass kissed him.
Not urgently. Not with the heat-driven desperation.
He rolled, leaned forward, careful of his shoulder, and pressed his lips against Riot’s mouth the way he would press a hand against something warm on a cold day, because Riot was asleep and beautiful and Cass wanted to be the first thing he felt when the world came back.