Chapter 20 #3
Bastian's hands come to his waist and pull him forward, and Emery goes, climbs into his lap on the rug, knees on either side of Bastian's hips, the position that has become familiar and that still sends a bolt of heat through him every time because the position means closeness and the closeness means contact and the contact means Bastian's body against his, warm and solid and wanting.
He can feel the wanting in the tension of Bastian's thighs beneath him, in the grip of hands on his waist, in the quickening of breath that means Bastian is holding himself back and the holding is costing him.
Emery works at Bastian's tunic. The open-chest design means there is little to remove.
The garment is more frame than fabric, held together by clasps at the shoulders, and Emery's fingers find the clasps and release them with the focused urgency of permission given and intention to use it.
The tunic falls away from Bastian's shoulders and Emery pushes it down his arms and off, and the firelight finds the dark skin beneath: charcoal and ink, the tattoos that blend into his skin and become visible only at certain angles, the musculature that is present but not excessive, the body shaped by violence and discipline and something older, something that belongs to whatever a Vesper is beneath the skin.
Emery kisses Bastian's throat.
The act is deliberate, specific, meaningful in a way that both of them understand.
Bastian's throat is where his power lives.
The Vesper's voice, the weapon, the thing that can shatter bone and boil blood and reduce a human being to ash originates here, in the column of dark skin that Emery is pressing his mouth against, and the pressing is an act of trust so complete it borders on madness.
He is kissing the place that could kill him.
He is putting his mouth on the weapon and the weapon is not firing and the not-firing is Bastian's choice and the choice is the whole of what they are to each other.
He works his mouth down. Bastian's collarbones, sharp beneath the skin.
The broad, flat plane of his chest, the tattoos dark against dark, the skin hot beneath Emery's lips.
Bastian's heart is beating. Emery can feel it through his mouth, fast and strong, the rhythm of being taken apart by someone trusted enough to do it, and the feeling of it, the living, thundering proof of life beneath his lips, makes Emery's chest ache in a way that has become familiar and does not stop being overwhelming.
He continues down. Bastian's ribs, the lines between them, the places where the muscle shifts and flexes beneath the skin as Bastian's breathing deepens.
His stomach, the lean plane of it, the fine trail of white hair that leads down from his navel.
Emery follows the trail with his mouth, pressing open-mouthed kisses into the warm skin, tasting salt and heat and the clean, indefinable taste that is just Bastian, and his hands are at Bastian's waist, working at the laces of his trousers with fingers that are trembling not from nerves but from want.
This is the first time he has done this.
Not the act. The act is familiar, practiced, something Emery has performed more times than he can count in more places than he cares to remember.
He has used his mouth on men in the Hollow, in boarding houses, in the dark corners of establishments where the transaction was quick and joyless and accompanied by hands in his hair that steered rather than touched.
He has done this for money and for survival and for the grinding necessity of a body that had to be sold in whatever configuration the buyer preferred.
He has never done it because he wanted to.
The wanting changes everything. The wanting transforms the act from a transaction into a gift, from a performance into an offering, and the offering is the most intimate thing Emery has ever given anyone because it is the first time the giving is voluntary.
He is on his knees between Bastian's legs not because he has been paid or directed or positioned there by someone else's hands, but because he wants to be here.
Because the want has overrun every levee he has built and the flood is warm and the drowning is not drowning but swimming, and he is swimming toward something instead of away from it for the first time in his life.
He unlaces Bastian's trousers. His fingers work the fabric loose and Bastian lifts his hips to help and the cooperation is mutual: Bastian's hands moving to his own waistband, pushing the fabric down, and Emery's hands pulling from the front, and the mutuality is its own kind of intimacy.
Emery draws the trousers down Bastian's thighs and the sight of him, hard and thick and flushed dark against his charcoal skin, sends a pulse of want through Emery so visceral it borders on pain.
The wanting is in his stomach and his thighs and his mouth, and his mouth is where the wanting is loudest, and his mouth is where he wants Bastian to be.
He looks up. Bastian is looking down at him with an expression that is dark and intent and carrying barely-controlled hunger, watching someone he wants do something he has fantasized about, and the hunger is visible in the tension of his jaw and the dilation of his eyes and the way his hands are gripping the rug on either side of his hips, fingers curled into the fur, restraint holding while Emery sets the pace because the pace-setting matters more than the satisfaction.
Emery almost says it. The words are right there, right at the edge of his tongue, close enough to taste, and asking is harder than doing, harder than any act of physical intimacy, because asking requires admitting what he wants out loud and the admitting is the vulnerability and the vulnerability is the thing he has spent his entire life avoiding.
"Talk to me," Emery says. His voice is rough and low and barely above a whisper, and the words cost him something visible on his face: a tightening, a flushing, the physical evidence of asking for something he has never asked for and bracing for the asking to be refused or mocked or used against him.
Bastian's eyes go dark. Darker than their usual black, if that is possible, a deepening, an intensification, the visual equivalent of the subsonic vibration that lives in his voice and that Emery feels in his bones.
His hunger sharpens. Visibly, measurably, the edge of it honed and gleaming, and the sharpening is not frightening.
It is wanted. It is the exact thing Emery is asking for.
"I can do that," Bastian says, and his voice is low and rough and carrying the vibration that settles into Emery's chest and closes around his heart.
Emery lowers his mouth.
The first contact is devastating. His lips close around the head and the heat of Bastian on his tongue, the specific, concentrated heat of a Vesper's body at its most sensitive, is enough to pull a sound from Emery that he does not try to suppress.
A moan, low and throaty and vibrating around Bastian, and Bastian hisses in a breath that is sharp and bitten and carrying the strain of control over a body that does not want to be controlled.
Emery takes him deeper. He works his mouth down the length of him, slow and deliberate, and the slowness is not teasing.
It is savoring. He is tasting Bastian, learning the shape and the weight of him on his tongue, mapping the ridges and the veins with the same meticulous attention that Bastian has used to map every inch of Emery's body.
He takes him to the back of his throat and holds there, breathing through his nose, and the fullness is overwhelming and perfect and he has never wanted anything in his mouth as much as he wants this.
Bastian talks to him.
He begins low, a murmur, barely above a breath, the words tumbling out as though the speaking is involuntary, as though the sensation of Emery's mouth has opened a valve that he cannot close.
He tells Emery how he looks. On his knees on the rug, firelight in his blond hair, his mouth stretched wide, his pale fingers wrapped around the base of what his lips cannot reach.
He tells Emery how he feels: hot, wet, perfect, the pressure of his tongue and the suction of his cheeks and the way his throat opens when he takes him deep.
He tells him no one has ever, and his breath catches, and his hand finds Emery's hair, no one has ever looked like this, no one has ever felt like this, no one has ever been this.
The voice does things to Emery.
It always does. It always has, since the first night in the Hollow when Bastian spoke low in his ear and the vibration settled into his bones.
But tonight the voice is different: rawer, less controlled, the silk-danger stripped away to reveal the thing beneath it, which is not danger at all but need, vast and specific and aimed entirely at the man on his knees.
The vibration moves through Bastian's body and into Emery's mouth and from Emery's mouth into the rest of him, radiating down his throat and into his chest and lower, pooling in his stomach and between his legs, and the pooling is not metaphorical.
He is hard. He is aching. He is fully clothed and untouched and so aroused that every word Bastian speaks pushes him closer to an edge he did not know he could reach without a hand on him.