Chapter Nineteen
Cassian propped his chin on Lysander’s shoulder and watched the lamb wobble across a farmyard on unsteady legs.
“Show me again, Sander.”
Lysander’s thumb tapped the screen, and the video rewound to the beginning.
The cat appeared first, small and marmalade-coloured, sitting in the straw beside a white bundle that didn’t look like anything yet.
Then the bundle grew legs, and then the legs grew a lamb, and then the lamb grew until it was twice the size of the cat and still pressing its enormous woolly head on the cat’s flank as though it hadn’t noticed that it was now several times bigger than its friend.
“Again,” Cassian said.
“Cass, we’ve watched it six times.”
“Seven would be better.” He reached across Lysander’s arm and prodded the screen himself, which he’d only learned to do last week, and felt a private thrill of competence as the video started over. The lamb’s legs buckled on the second frame and the cat licked its ear.
“I’m going to show this to Uriel,” he said, straightening up on his stool.
“I’ve been teaching him YouTube. He didn’t know what it was, obviously, because the compound didn’t have Wi-Fi, and the first time I showed him a video on my mobile he held it away from his face like it might bite him.
” He drummed his fingers on the countertop, his knee bouncing underneath the island.
“I’m going to make him a Google account and a YouTube account so I can send him all the videos I watch.
He needs to see the one of the dog who carries his own lead on walks, and the one where the baby otter learns to swim. ”
“Yeah?” Lysander smiled at him. “What else have you been teaching him?”
Cassian brightened. “All sorts of stuff. I’ve got him to stop calling everything outside the compound ‘the territories of the unilluminated,’ which is what they say when they mean the regular world where people have Wi-Fi.
” He ticked items off on his fingers. “I took him to a library and showed him how I scan the books I borrow myself, with the machine, and he was very impressed by the machine. He watched me do it three times and then he tried it himself.” His second finger went up.
“And yesterday we sat on the bench outside Brown Sugar and he ate a jam doughnut with me, and he got icing sugar all down his jumper and I had to brush it off for him.”
“Sounds great, Cassian.” Lysander’s voice was warm and easy, the way it got when Cassian told him the things he wanted to hear. “Like he’s settling into proper Melbourne life.”
Cassian nodded. His fingers found the edge of his mobile on the countertop, and he traced the crack in the screen from corner to corner.
“Uriel is doing well,” he said.
Lysander’s gaze held his, and Cassian met it without flinching, because the doctrine had taught him how to hold a surface still while everything underneath it moved.
Uriel still talked about going back.
It didn’t matter what Cassian showed him. They’d sat side by side on the bench outside Brown Sugar while Cassian held his mobile between them and played the video of the baby otter learning to swim, and when it ended he’d said, “Charles has been asking after you.”
They’d walked through Carlton Gardens on a Thursday afternoon, the elm canopy throwing shards of light across the path, and Cassian had pointed out the possums sleeping in a tree hollow the way Lysander had pointed them out to him, and Uriel had looked up and said, “The Lumineer wants to know when you’ll be ready. ”
They’d kissed on the bench at Edinburgh Gardens while an old man threw bread to the pigeons three metres away, and when they broke apart Uriel stayed leaning close to him and murmured, “He misses you, Cassian. Charles misses you.”
The kisses didn’t stop it. Cassian could press his mouth to Uriel’s and feel the Universe rearranging itself inside his chest, the alpha’s scent making him weak, and still Uriel would surface from the kiss with Charles’s name sitting right there in his mouth.
Yesterday, Uriel had escorted him home from Brown Sugar.
They’d taken the long way, cutting through the back streets where the terrace houses clustered close together and the afternoon light came in at a low slant through the gaps between rooflines.
Cassian had been telling Uriel about the book Elisa was helping him read — a novel about a woman who sailed around the world on her own, which Cassian found both thrilling and doctrinally problematic — when Uriel’s hand had closed around his wrist and steered him sideways, off the footpath and into the narrow alley that ran along the back of Hamish’s row of cottages.
The alley was shaded and quiet, hemmed in by garage doors and the high wooden fences of back gardens.
Uriel walked him past it and pressed him against the garage door at the far end, where the jasmine from Hamish’s fence had crept over the top and hung down in a curtain of white flowers that brushed Cassian’s shoulder.
Uriel kissed him there, in the dim stripe of shade between two fences, with one hand flat on the garage door beside Cassian’s head. The jasmine’s scent tangled with Uriel’s until Cassian couldn’t separate them.
It went on long enough that Cassian’s knees softened and his fingers curled into the front of Uriel’s jumper and twisted into the fabric, pulling him closer.
Long enough that Cassian’s underwear was wet with his slick by the time Uriel drew back and pressed his thumb to Cassian’s lower lip, dragging it across the tender skin before letting go.
Cassian had walked through the back gate on legs that didn’t feel entirely his, across the garden and in through the kitchen door where Lysander was standing at the counter chopping garlic, a knife in one hand.
Lysander’s head had turned as Cassian came through the door, and his nostrils flared, and the knife stopped. Lysander’s gaze tracked from Cassian’s face to his neck, to the collar of his shirt, where the jasmine petals had caught in the fabric. He hadn’t said anything, though.
Cassian had gone past him down the corridor to his bedroom, closed the door, and stood with his back against it while his pulse hammered in his throat.
Uriel’s scent clung to every part of him that the alpha had touched, and Cassian wanted more of it.
All of their outings ended up in the alley now. It didn’t matter where they started. That narrow strip of shade between the garage doors was their default destination now. They’d walk home along the back streets, and Uriel’s hand would find the small of his back as he steered him down the alley.
After they’d spent an afternoon around Flinders Street Station, Cassian teaching Uriel how to buy a Myki card from the machine, the tram ride home should have been good. Cassian sat by the window watching the shopfronts slide past while Uriel sat close enough that their thighs touched.
Then Uriel said, “Charles has been asking the Lumineer about a timeline for your return.”
Cassian stared at the window where his reflection hung, translucent, before the moving street. “I said no, Uriel.”
“He’s been very patient, Cassian.”
“I said no.”
The tram rattled on. Neither of them spoke again until Cassian pressed the bell for their stop.
He wasn’t expecting the usual treatment that afternoon. They’d walked from the tram stop without speaking, Uriel’s jaw set, Cassian’s stomach hurting with every step, so when they reached the lane behind Hamish’s cottages he turned to say goodbye.
Uriel walked him backwards until his shoulder blades hit the fence. The jasmine shivered above them, scattering petals onto the concrete. Cassian opened his mouth to speak and Uriel kissed him hard enough that the words dissolved in his head.
Uriel pressed him into the palings, one thigh wedged between Cassian’s, and when Cassian gasped at the friction, Uriel’s mouth moved from his lips to his jaw.
“Let me show you,” Uriel said, “what obedience is meant to feel like.”
Cassian’s hands came up to grip the front of Uriel’s shirt while the alpha’s mouth worked down his neck.
One of Uriel’s hands left his hip and moved between them, finding the button of Cassian’s shorts.
His zip came down. Uriel’s hand slid beneath the waistband of his underwear and cupped him, his fingers pressing into the wet heat of Cassian’s slick.
His hips jerked forward into the touch, and a sound came out of him that he’d never made before as two of Uriel’s fingers pressed against his entrance and pushed in slowly.
Where Charles’s hands had been rough and impatient, Uriel’s touch was deliberate, curving up inside him until it found the spot that made Cassian’s knees buckle so that only Uriel’s body kept him standing.
“There,” Uriel murmured, his mouth still at Cassian’s neck. “There. The Light rewards the open vessel, Cassian. It has always been waiting to reward you. You only had to stop fighting it.”
Cassian couldn’t answer. Uriel’s fingers worked inside him in a slow, rocking rhythm that built pressure low in his pelvis, tightening with every stroke.
The jasmine petals drifted down around them. A car passed at the end of the alley and kept going.
Cassian seized from the inside out, starting deep where Uriel’s fingers were still buried in him, climbing his spine and cresting behind his eyes.
His whole frame locked rigid and his cock pulsed upon his stomach, spilling warmth into the bunched fabric of his shorts in thick, shuddering spurts.
His thighs clamped together, and his knees gave way entirely so that Uriel had to catch his weight with an arm around his waist, holding him upright while whatever had just happened rolled through him.
Cassian tucked his forehead into the crook of Uriel’s neck and breathed the alpha’s scent in. His own heartbeat filled his skull.
“That,” Uriel said, withdrawing his hand, “is what waits for you at home. That is the marriage the Light intends, once your heart has been prepared and the bond set right.” He kissed Cassian’s temple.
“Come back with me. Charles and the Lumineer have agreed that I can work with you to help you return to a heightened state of receptivity.”
Cassian’s fists came up and beat at Uriel’s chest. The alpha just stood there and took it while Cassian hit him until his arms burned.
When he was too tired to go on, Cassian wrenched away from Uriel.
His hands were shaking so badly that it took him three tries to get his shorts buttoned, the zip catching on damp fabric before he yanked it up.
He dragged his waistband straight, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and headed into the house.
The back gate was twelve paces from the alley’s end, and he moved in a haze until he got to his bedroom and shut the door behind him.
He stood with his back against the wood, his breath coming in shallow, ragged pulls, and flattened both hands on his thighs.
His shorts were damp, and his fingers smelled like Uriel.
He brought them up to his nose, breathed in deep, and the ache between his legs settled into something the Lumineer would have called holy, if only the wanting had been directed at Charles.