29. Presumably Consecrated Ground #2
Briar waits for Bastian to say ‘You don’t know him like I do’ or ‘Who cares about nice?’ but instead he says, ‘In my first year a seventh-year dragged a few of us in so that he could practice Conduct on us, and I’d been working on Repellence, and instead of putting him off choosing me like it was meant to, it somehow .
. . it pushed him physically away. It was a really weird thing to do, or .
. . to be able to do . . . and I hated it.
Hated that I’d drawn attention to myself.
But afterwards Alistair marched right up to me, told me he knew my father, and told me to sit with him and his friends at lunch.
It had been such a miserable fucking year.
I knew what he wanted from me - power, he’s obsessed with it - but I wanted something from him, too. It worked.’
‘So you don’t love him.’
‘Ha,’ Bastian lets out a huff of a laugh. ‘Hardly. I was just . . .’
‘Just what?’
Bastian sounds disgusted when he says, ‘Very alone.’
Briar hates this. More, even, than the thought of Bastian and Alistair; more than they hated watching Alistair run his tongue down the side of Bastian’s neck.
‘So is it weird for you?’ Briar asks. ‘Eye contact?’
Bastian answers by looking straight at them, unwavering. ‘It was at first. But it’s not now. Not if it’s you.’
That goes straight to Briar’s head. And to their body, too, which suddenly aches to be closer.
Everything about Bastian is gorgeous in this light.
The fall of his hair, the lines of his shoulders.
His jaw. His hands. That half-nervous, half-defiant look in his eyes.
They take a step up towards the altar, and Bastian goes still.
‘What are you doing?’
‘You’re suddenly very into consent, for a guy who spends all his time ordering other people to do depraved shit.’
It’s the wrong thing to say. Bastian’s eyes snap back down. ‘If you think I’m so awful,’ he hisses, ‘then why are you—’
Briar takes Bastian by the collar of his sweatshirt and kisses him, bruisingly hard; Bastian takes a sharp breath, and then lets Briar pull him under.
He seems to just be reacting for the first few seconds, but then suddenly he’s clinging to the front of Briar’s shirt, his breath coming bright and fast. When Briar slides a hand along his jaw, their thumb just brushing the swell of his lower lip, he leans into Briar’s palm like a cat begging to be scratched.
‘I missed you,’ Briar says, and Bastian lets slip a desperate sound that might break Briar’s heart if it wasn’t also doing interesting things to their body.
Briar presses their fingertips to Bastian’s temple and then runs their hand through his hair, chasing threads of silver, and Bastian groans and lets his head fall back.
They’re pressed so tightly together, Briar feels like the only two things left in the world are this church and Bastian: the humming quiet of the transept, the soft scrape of teeth against lip, the distant drip of holy water, the sound of both of their breathing, too loud and hopelessly honest.
‘I can’t,’ Bastian says, leaning back, cheeks flushed, his pupils like black holes. ‘I don’t know if I can be . . . careful.’
Briar accidentally makes an audible noise of frustration. ‘Okay,’ they say shakily. ‘Okay.’
But as Briar follows him down from the altar and through the aisles, he keeps stopping to kiss them, the two of them stumbling in step as Briar’s back hits a pillar, a wall, the ornate wooden door that gives way and sends them both staggering into a side room, where Briar breaks away, breathing hard, and says, ‘Is this a . . . bar?’
Bastian gives the room a cursory glance; it’s mostly empty, but for the fresh flowers on each windowsill, bright lilies and snapdragons, and the long table running the length of the room, purpose betrayed by neat rows of highballs and wineglasses and the bottles of red wine and spirits arranged at one end.
‘Yes,’ he says distractedly, gaze flicking from Briar’s eyes to their mouth.
‘Why is there a bar in a chapel?’
Bastian looks vaguely irritated by the question. ‘For scholar and alumni events,’ he says, like Briar’s stupid. He reaches for their hair, finger and thumb following the line of the gentle curl where it meets their nape, and then drops his arm, aghast at his own daring.
It’s that look - naked desire replaced by innocent horror, like his hand has betrayed him for wanting to touch Briar so much - that makes Briar feel reckless and desperate.
‘It’s okay,’ they say, touching Bastian’s shoulders, his collarbones. ‘Look, how about this - I’ll tell you what to do. And then you don’t have to think at all.’
‘How?’ Bastian asks, with hushed fascination.
It does occur to Briar, as they help Bastian up onto the bar, that if there really is such a thing as God, trading bits of magic with scholars in exchange for hard work and fealty, then they’re definitely going to hell.
Briar takes the soft cotton of Bastian’s sweatshirt between their fingers and says, ‘Take this off,’ and wonders at their own power when he does. His chest is naked underneath, and when Briar runs a hand slowly from his throat to his naval, he shivers.
‘Are you cold?’ Briar asks, leaning over to kiss a lone freckle on his shoulder.
Bastian shakes his head. ‘No.’
But he shivers again when Briar bends to his chest, kisses his sternum, his ribs, the hollow of his hip. He’s got some lean muscle, broader shoulders than expected tapering to the narrow planes of his waist, and Briar can’t help but ask, ‘Have you been . . . working out?’
‘No,’ Bastian says again. ‘I . . . swim.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Sometimes I—’ Bastian breaks off, his head tipping back as he arches into Briar’s hand, which has slid to the button of his jeans.
‘Sometimes you what?’
‘I - fuck,’ Bastian whispers, throat bared, pale hair spilling down his shoulders. ‘Do you want me to . . . ? Should I—?’
‘No,’ Briar says, unbuttoning Bastian with one hand and sweeping a thumb across his stomach with the other, watching him shudder in response. ‘I’ve got you.’
Briar knows now, as they kiss Bastian open-mouthed and languid, their hand working beneath the waistband of his jeans, that they’ve been desperate to do this for the past three weeks.
It’s why picking fights has felt so good; Briar’s hand on Bastian’s chest, Bastian’s weight crushing Briar into the tiles, his teeth in the muscle of their arm.
Better to be hurting him, and being hurt, than not touching him at all.
That’s insane, Briar thinks, but then Bastian slumps forward to rest his head on Briar’s shoulder, and groans quietly, so close to their ear that a chill runs down their spine.
Punching him certainly hadn’t felt as good as this, right now: feeling him cant his hips and breathe their name on a sharp inhale; the way he can’t help but watch as Briar sends a brief mental apology in the direction of the apse and then slowly eases down onto their knees; the ragged gasp Bastian lets slip when Briar takes him into their mouth, and then a little later, when Bastian digs his fingernails into the back of Briar’s neck and starts to shake.
‘You don’t hate me?’ he asks, voice trembling with effort, careful to phrase it as a question, not a demand. He reaches down to touch Briar’s cheekbone, barely skittering across their skin, his eyes wide with wonder, like he’s not convinced Briar really exists.
Briar surfaces to look at him right in the eyes, steady and unwavering.
‘No,’ they say, pressing a gentle kiss to the soft skin of his thigh. ‘I don’t hate you, Bastian.’
In the end, it’s probably the eye contact that wrecks Bastian completely, sustained with blazing intensity until the precise moment he comes, a glass shattering distantly on the stone floor; afterwards, Briar stands up and rests their head on Bastian’s chest for a moment, listening to the quickness of his breath and the thundering of his heart, until Bastian flushes red and pushes them away.
‘We shouldn’t have done this,’ he says, dressing quickly and roughly, his hair caught under the neckline of his sweatshirt. Now that Briar’s not dragging gasps from his lips with single-minded abandon, they have to agree.
Hard to justify this one under the guise of reconnaissance. Worse, even, than admitting they just wanted to see what might make Bastian blush. This was a fucked-up thing to do. Even in a place like this.
Beyond the afterglow, there’s a ringing hollowness. I don’t know who I am any more.
‘Yeah,’ they say, trying to match Bastian’s certainty.
It’s not too late. Helping Hadley and the others can be its own kind of redemption. And if it means they really are using Bastian, these moments between them nothing more than the sacrifices made in the course of espionage?
Briar’s only fighting fire with fire.
Just looking at Bastian now, the way he’s closing off already, they can tell it’s too late to extract any useful information anyway.
They can hardly just come out and say it - ‘Oh, by the way, what’s up with the fourth Trial?
’ - and it’s not like things can get much worse, so they say, ‘Do you want to go for dinner tomorrow?’
‘What?’
Of all the things Briar has said and done tonight, apparently this is the most outrageous.
‘Meet me in the car park at seven?’ Briar says, picking up their jacket and shrugging it back on, impassive in the face of Bastian’s incredulity. ‘I’ll drive.’