Chapter 20 #2
The fire burns. The tea cools. Emery's fingers work through the braid in slow, repetitive motions, tracing, following, retracing, and the repetition is meditative and grounding and pulling something loose inside his chest that has been tight for weeks.
For years. For the entire duration of his adult life, possibly.
The tightness is old and deep and so familiar that he has long since stopped recognizing it as tightness and started experiencing it as simply the shape of himself, the default state of a body that has been clenched against the world since it was old enough to understand that the world was something to be clenched against. The loosening is slow.
It happens in degrees, each pass of his fingers through Bastian's hair releasing a fraction of the tension, and the releasing is not painful but it is felt.
A cramp easing. A fist uncurling. A door that has been bolted from the inside for so long that the hinges have rusted and the opening requires effort.
He puts the book down.
He does not set it aside or close it or mark his page.
He simply stops reading, because the reading has been eclipsed by something more present and more important and more real than the words on the page, and the something is the man on the floor beside him whose hair is in his hands and whose warmth is against his knee and whose quiet, patient presence has been the steady, unmoving center of Emery's world for weeks and who deserves to be told.
Emery climbs down from the armchair.
The movement is ungraceful. He is folded into the chair and the unfolding involves limbs and angles and the awkwardness of a body rearranging itself in a confined space, but he manages it, and then he is on the floor beside Bastian, on the rug before the fire, his bare feet tucked beneath him and his knees touching Bastian's thigh and his hands free and empty and trembling with the tremor that means not fear but intention.
He takes Bastian's face in his hands.
Both hands. The way he has learned to hold this face: framing his jaw, his thumbs against the sharp planes of his cheekbones, his fingers resting against the warm, dark skin behind Bastian's pointed ears where the piercings catch the firelight.
Bastian's eyes find his. Dark and deep and close, carrying the steady, patient warmth that Emery has come to understand is not a performance or a strategy but the actual, unmediated truth of how this man feels when he is looking at the person he has chosen, and the truth is vast and specific and terrifying and beautiful.
Emery kisses him.
The kiss is sweeter than any kiss he has ever given anyone.
It is not the desperate, surging kiss on the rug before the fire.
It is not the fierce, claiming kiss he pressed to Bastian's mouth across the desk.
It is not the drowning, breathless kiss in the hallway at the Hollow, the first kiss, the one that started everything.
It is a new kind of kiss. A quiet one. A careful one.
The kind of kiss that says I am not running and I am not performing and this is the real thing underneath all the other things and I am giving it to you because you are the only person I have ever trusted enough to see it.
Bastian holds onto his arm. The grip is firm but does not pull, his fingers wrapped around Emery's forearm, holding, anchoring, but not directing.
He does not pull Emery forward. He does not deepen the kiss or press for more or do any of the things that his body, which Emery can feel coiled and warm and wanting beneath the calm exterior, clearly wants to do.
He holds and he is held, and the mutuality is the whole of what is happening between them right now, and the whole is enough.
Emery pulls back. His forehead rests against Bastian's.
His breathing is unsteady, not from exertion but from the effort of what he is about to say, because what he is about to say is the most dangerous thing he has ever done.
More dangerous than the contracts. More dangerous than the stronghold.
More dangerous than the alley three streets from the compound where a blade went into his side and the world went grey.
What he is about to say is the thing that will make him fully, irreversibly, catastrophically vulnerable, and vulnerability is the one thing he has spent his entire life building walls against, and he is about to take a sledgehammer to the walls and he is going to do it with his eyes open.
He breathes in. The inhale is deep, shaky, the breath of standing at a cliff's edge.
"I want to stay," he says.
The words are quiet. They are the simplest words in the world, three syllables, no complexity, no ambiguity, no room for misinterpretation.
And they are also, in the context of Emery saying them to Bastian in the warm dark of their room with their foreheads touching and the fire burning low, the most significant thing he has ever said.
More significant than any lie he has told, any cover he has maintained, any false name he has given to a mark in a brothel.
These words are true. They are the truest thing in his mouth.
Bastian's hand tightens on his arm. The tightening is involuntary, a reflex, the body's response to receiving something it wants, and the involuntary quality of it tells Emery that Bastian heard the words and the hearing landed somewhere deeper than the ears.
"You're welcome to stay," Bastian says, and his voice is low and warm and careful, holding something that might break.
Emery bites his lip. The biting is the physical expression of the thing he is doing to himself: clamping down on the part of him that is screaming at him to stop, to protect himself, to leave the next words unsaid because unsaid things cannot be used against you and said things can and will be, always, in his experience.
"No," Emery says. "I want to stay as yours."
The word yours leaves his mouth and enters the room and the room changes.
Emery can feel the change. It is physical, a shift in the air, in the temperature, in the quality of the firelight and the hum of the Depths and the charged silence that fills the space between two people when one of them has just said the thing that cannot be unsaid.
The word is there. It is between them. It is Emery's and it is Bastian's and it belongs to the space they have built together, and the belonging is mutual and terrifying and irrevocable.
"I want to be yours," Emery says, and the repetition is not redundancy.
It is emphasis. It is the act of saying it again because saying it once was not enough, because the saying needs to be solid and sure and carrying the full weight of what it means, which is everything.
His whole life, rearranged around a single person, organized around a single point of gravity, and the rearranging is an act of bravery that costs him more than any kill ever has, because killing requires only the willingness to end something and this requires the willingness to begin.
Bastian threads his fingers through Emery's hair.
The gesture is slow, deliberate, his fingers moving through the blond strands from the temple to the nape of his neck, and the touch is gentle and possessive and shaking.
Bastian's hand is shaking. Emery feels it, the fine tremor in fingers that can break bone, in a hand that has killed and built and held and destroyed, and the tremor is the most human thing Emery has ever felt from him.
More human than the warmth, more human than the sex, more human than the singing on the rug or the story about his mother or the clean dagger returned at the Hollow.
The tremor is the physical evidence of composure that is absolute and control that is total, and right now, shaking, because the person in front of him has just offered him the thing he wanted most and the receiving of it has overwhelmed the mechanisms that usually keep him steady.
"You do not have to ask me to keep you," Bastian says, and his voice is rough at the edges, worn by the same emotion that is in his hands. "I have wanted you since the first night I saw you."
The words land in Emery's chest and the landing is a detonation, a controlled, devastating, total explosion that levels every remaining wall and leaves nothing standing except the foundation, and the foundation is this: he is wanted.
He has been wanted since the beginning. Not acquired, not purchased, not strategically obtained.
Wanted. In the simple, devastating, human way that one person wants another, the way that has nothing to do with utility or appearance or the transactional economy of the Underground and everything to do with the specific, irreplaceable, unduplicable fact of who he is.
Bastian wanted him when he was a dancer in a brothel.
Wanted him when he was an assassin sent to kill him.
Wanted him when he ran, when he stabbed Fredan, when he came back covered in blood, when he sat on his desk and defied him and refused to give up Sander's description.
Wanted him through every version, every performance, every mask and every lie, because Bastian saw through all of them, saw through them from the first night, from the card table, from the moment Emery slid into his lap and Bastian's hand settled on his hip and the touch was electric, and what he saw underneath was the person Emery has spent his entire life hiding, and he wanted that person.
Specifically, exclusively, with the same steady, patient, unshakeable conviction that he brings to everything.
Emery kisses him again.
This kiss is not sweet. This kiss is hungry. It is the kiss of starvation broken, the feast laid before him with no catch and no condition and no expiration, and he is allowed, for the first time, without reservation, to eat.