15. Wes
Wes
We do it in the middle of the nave, under the lantern tower, on the dust sheets I drag to the exact centre of the crossing where four hundred years of worship used to pool, and I mean every second of it as hard as I have ever meant anything.
I undress him first, there’s nothing to undress, he’s bare grey heat, but I mean it as undressing, I lay my hands on the whole of him with intent, naming him as I go, the keeper’s words copied out and learned by heart.
I keep this place. I keep this guardian.
I hold this wall holy by my own hand and will, and I do not leave.
I say it against his skin, into the seam of his shoulder, against the place in his chest where the sound lives, and the sound answers, rolling up through the whole building, and I swear the candles stand straighter.
He takes the words into himself the way dry stone takes rain.
I feel them land, each one a small weight set down somewhere deep in him, kept, guardian, hold, do not leave, and the heat of him climbs under my hands until my palms are slick with it and the cold cathedral around us has gone close and warm, the January damp burned out of the air in the ring of candles.
I take my time over every part of him. The broad plane of his chest where the sound lives.
The seams of muscle in his great arms, the wrist with its secret feeling, the hot centres of his palms that I taught him with my mouth that first night and teach again now, on purpose, with intent, naming him as holy with each touch.
He’s trembling before I’ve even finished, three hundred years of a body that was never allowed, undone by being learned slowly and meant.
Then I let him have me.
This is the part that makes it real, I think, not me claiming him, but me giving myself to be claimed, in the place, on purpose, with the whole of what I mean.
I lie back on the dust sheets in the centre of the crossing and I open my arms and I say, “Take me and make this place ours and don’t stop till the dawn.
And this time I don’t want the cage. I want the opposite.
I want you to open them all the way and use them.
The thing this building never once let you do.
” And something crosses his great grey face that I have never seen, because for three hundred years the close walls and the cost and the careful folded-down cage forbade exactly this, and tonight there is no cost left to spare and no wall worth sparing, only the floor we are making holy, so he rises up over me and opens his wings the whole way, not down and around to wall me in but up and out, the full dark span flaring to fill the lantern tower, every spur extended, the membrane gone taut and lit red-gold from the inside by the ring of candles, and for the first time since I have known him he does not fold them.
He leaves them open. He uses them. The heat of him pours down over me, January gone, sun on stone, and he takes me.
He opens me first, slow, the warmed oil and his careful fingers, and I’m loose and ready from all the nights before but he does it anyway, thorough, greedy with it, his forehead set against mine and his eyes on my eyes, until I’m rocking down onto his hand and begging in fragments, now, please, Castor, now.
And then he brings the great stone-warm length of him to me and presses the broad blunt head of his cock against where I’m open and slick and waiting, and I open, and he sinks into me by degrees, the stretch of him going deep and deeper while the note in his chest rolls down through both our bodies and the candles lean toward us, and it’s enormous and it’s exactly right and I have never in my life been so completely held by anything.
It lasts all night. We make it last. Every time one of us crests we slow, we breathe, we say the words again, I keep this place, I keep this guardian, I do not leave, and then we begin again, the candles burning down one by one, the rain coming and going on the lead, and somewhere past midnight I stop being able to tell where I end and he begins, my whole body open and held and worked deep and slow and then hard and then slow again, his weight rolling into me, his open wings beating a slow furnace of heat down over both of us, the great rolling note in his chest gone constant now, a sound the whole cathedral seems to make with him.
And then he does the thing no night before this one ever allowed, because every other night the cost forbade it and the close cage forbade it and the careful folded stillness forbade it.
He gathers me up off the floor entirely.
One arm hooked under me, the length of him still buried deep, and his wings come down in one great slow stroke against the air and we lift, the dust sheets falling away under my feet, the cold flags dropping back, and he holds me there against his chest a foot off the holy floor and beats his wings to keep us steady and fucks up into me suspended in the candle-lit dark of the crossing, no floor under me, nothing under me but him, the deep stone-warm cock of him the only thing in the world holding me up.
I sob and lock my arms around his neck and the height of it, the float of it, the absolute trust of being held off the ground on a thing that could drop me and never, ever will, takes the last word out of me.
The wingbeats rock us together, lifted on the upstroke, driven deep on the down, a rhythm no bed and no floor could ever give, and the lamp-light slides red through the membrane above us, and far up in the dark tower the bell shifts on its mounting, just once, a low iron whisper, woken by the note rolling out of his chest, the first warning of the toll to come.
Then he brings us down, slow, careful past all carefulness, and lays me back on the dust sheets, and I sob into the canvas with how good it still is, how deep, the heat of him everywhere, the wall I am making holy under my hands and the guardian I am keeping over my back.
And then later he gathers me up against his chest, my back to his front, my legs spread over his great thighs, and works up into me slow while one enormous hand splays flat over my stomach to feel himself move inside me, the other curled around me, stroking, and I unravel like that, the first of three times that night, my head fallen back against his shoulder and his name wrecked in my throat.
He doesn’t stop. He keeps me there, on the edge, in the light of the guttering candles, hour after hour, both of us meaning it, meaning all of it, with everything we have.
Every time the dawn-ache tries to creep in at the edge of my mind, the count, the cost, the grey that’s coming, I push it down and say the words again into his skin, and he answers them, and we make the night last out of nothing but will and heat and the refusal to let it end.
“Say it back to me,” I tell him, near the end of the longest night of my life, with the grey not yet at the windows but close, close. “The keeper’s vow. Say it back. Make it true from both sides.”
And he does. He says it through his teeth now, no gentleness left in it, the gravel of his voice gone ragged and driving, his hips snapping up into me harder with every word as if the saying of it is the same act as the having of me: “I am kept. I am held. I give the whole of myself to this place and to the one who keeps it, and I do not leave, and I am, Wes, I am yours, you’ve got me, I can feel it, I can feel the binding…
” His voice tears in half, nothing soft in it, nothing reverent, only want and terror and the wall coming loose.
“It’s moving. It’s tearing off the old anchor. It’s reaching for…”
“For me,” I gasp, “anchor it to me, I’m the keeper, I’m holy, this place is holy because I keep it…”
And we go over together in the centre of the crossing, both of us at once, the great note in his chest going to a sound I’ve never heard, not a roar, not a sob, a bell, the lantern tower ringing with it, the actual bell up in the dark tower swinging and tolling though no hand touched it, and I feel something move through the floor under us, through the dust sheets and the cold flags and up through both our bodies, a deep slow turning, the binding letting go of one anchor and reaching, blind, for another, for the keeping, for me, and finding it.
It’s a feeling like a hand closing around my heart, warm, enormous, ancient, and then settling, and then holding.
I gasp. Castor goes rigid above me, his wings flung wide, his eyes blown black, and then he sags down over me, careful even now, his weight held off on his shaking arms, and the sound in his chest goes to something soft and stunned and almost like weeping.
“It took,” he says. “Wes. It took. I can feel it, it’s anchored to you, to the keeping, not the bricks, they can sell the bricks, they can build their flats, it doesn’t matter, the wall I’m bound to isn’t the building anymore, it’s…”
“It’s us,” I say. “It’s the keeping. It’s me staying.”
“It’s you staying,” he breathes.
And then the grey comes at the windows.
He goes still. We both do. The east window lifts out of the dark, charcoal to pearl, the rose window beginning to glow, and the dawn comes, the dawn that was meant to be the last one, the one that doesn’t give him back, and Castor lifts his great horned head and looks toward the light, and I grab his hand and hold on with everything I have, and I think: if I was wrong, if it didn’t take, if the stone comes early and heavy and final right now while I’m holding him,
The light reaches us.
And Castor turns to stone in my arms the way he turns to stone every dawn, the warmth going slow, the wings stiffening, the great eyes fixing, but gently, the ordinary thaw run backward, no early grip, no cruel grab, the binding settling him into stone the way it has for three hundred years and not one second sooner, because the wall he’s anchored to is still holy, because I kept it holy all night, because I’m not leaving.
I lie under the cold stone weight of him in the dawn light, in the centre of the crossing, and I start to laugh, and then I’m crying, and then I’m doing both, my arms around as much of the stone saint as I can reach.
“It worked,” I tell him, and I know he can hear me, I know he’s in there, aware, holding the wall. “Castor. It worked. You’re going to come back at dusk. You’re going to come back every dusk. I’m keeping you. I’m keeping this place and I’m keeping you and I am never, ever leaving.”
The bell up in the tower gives one last small toll, settling, though no hand touched it. And the dawn light comes down through the rose window onto the two of us in the centre of the holy wall, and I hold my stone saint, and I wait for the dark.