Chapter 12 #5
He pressed his fingers just outside, testing. May hissed, swore, wriggled and said keep going, and so he did. One finger, then two, adjusting the angle by feel, determined to get this right. May’s stuttered breaths turned into shallow moans and Cassiel could hear nothing else.
May drew his knees up, and Cassiel moved over him. The lamp’s warmth fell across May’s shoulder and chest, the light playing at the tips of his hair, a halo around him.
“Kiss me?” May said. It sounded like a question. Cassiel answered.
The first minute was negotiation; the pace of his thrusts and May’s breaths not yet aligned, two separate cadences looking for the right downbeat.
A catamaran. The word surfaced from a video he’d watched at 2 a.m.—stability produced by two hulls in parallel, the space between them structural.
The space between his rhythm and May’s narrowed until they found it, locked now, the stability both immediate and startling.
May’s hip shifted, a sound pressed into the pillow that was ragged and surprised and brand new to Cassiel’s ear.
He repeated the exact action with the same pressure and same angle.
The sound came again, shorter, bitten off, and it made Cassiel’s hands shake.
The tremor started in his right hand from too much sensation, all of it wanted.
He pressed his palm flat against May’s stomach.
May waited. A hand came up to cover Cassiel’s, fingers lacing through. Then the tremor passed, and Cassiel’s hand resumed, and May’s fingers squeezed once and released.
Then fingers grabbed his wrist again. May paused; a hesitation visible only because Cassiel was calibrated to detect deviations of fractions of a second, and this was a deviation. The fingers that had been following, accommodating, mirroring, were now redirecting.
“Here,” May said, and moved Cassiel’s hand.
The redirect—May knowing what he wanted, the precision of the placement, the word stripped of every register Cassiel associated with May’s voice—
Cassiel’s composure broke in stages—his breaths first, then his hands.
His eyes closed. He pressed his face against May’s shoulder—the skin, the muscle, the warmth of the hollow above the collarbone, seeking the dark enclosed space he always sought when everything ran too loud, except this wasn’t overload, or it was, but it had never mattered less.
The anger was here, still, did not go away just because he was inside him, because May was around him.
The precision that managed everything was failing, lived in the other room where May had said you don’t get to and Cassiel had heard it.
The failure had not killed him. His hands were imprecise as his words and the person underneath him hadn’t left.
A sound escaped against May’s shoulder and Cassiel’s hips stuttered, lost their rhythm.
The sound came low, pressed into skin. Cassiel would have swallowed it anywhere else.
Here the walls were close enough to hold it, here where everything was graceless and urgent.
He felt May’s hand tighten on the back of his neck and then May said his name—Cassiel, emphasis harsh and punched out on the el—and that voice undid the last of him.
* * *
Cassiel lay on his back. May was against his side, one arm across his chest, his breathing slow and settling. May was warm, lighter than he should be, quieter than he should be. Cassiel’s hand drifted, found May’s wrist. The pulse was there—steady, decelerating. He held it there and counted.
“Your heart rate’s dropping,” Cassiel said.
May laughed. Quiet, pressed against his ribs. “You’re counting?”
“Seventy-one.”
“Sixty-nine.”
“That’s not accurate.”
“No, but it’s funny.”
The sheets were disordered. The single pillow had migrated, would need retrieving. Outside, a bus passed on Balboa and the building shook faintly.
Three notes surfaced from Cassiel’s throat, hummed into the quiet above May’s head. May’s arm tightened across his chest, fractionally, and then relaxed.
Quiet. Almost. The turntable was in the other room, the platter still turning, the needle riding the groove it had been riding since the last song on Side A ended.
May’s hand moved. Slowly—up from Cassiel’s chest, along the side of his neck, and then two fingers rested against his cheek.
The pressure was gentle, light, just tracing the bone.
It felt familiar, though May had never touched him like this.
With nothing more to do, say, control but this, his hand covered May’s.
Thumb pressed against pinky finger, palm held against his face.
And May’s pulse was in his fingertips but the count was irrelevant.
What was relevant was the hand on his cheekbone, the body beside him, in the apartment that was not his apartment, where the light was not his light.
The only thing he recognized was the person next to him, the person whose hands were warm and teeth were sharp.
“Where’d you get to?”
Cassiel couldn’t answer. He’d lost track of the count.