Chapter 6 #3
He presses forward. His hands drop to the counter on either side of Sidney’s hips, arms bracing, and Sidney’s back is against the edge and Erath is against his front and they’re pressed together with nowhere for Sidney to go and Erath kisses him harder, deeper, and it’s good, it’s unbearably good, and he wants--
Sidney goes rigid.
Not slowly. Not in stages. It’s instantaneous, total, every muscle in his body locking at once.
His hand, which had been cupping Erath’s jaw, drops to his chest and flattens and pushes.
His breathing changes, shallow and rapid and wrong, the breathing of someone who is not getting enough air even though nothing is blocking it.
Erath’s hands are off the counter before he’s finished processing what’s happening.
He steps back. One step, then another, putting distance between them until there’s a full arm’s length of empty air where his body had been, and he watches Sidney’s hand, which is still extended, still pushing against the space where Erath’s chest was, shaking.
Sidney’s eyes are open but they’re not focused on Erath. They’re focused on something that isn’t in the room.
“Sidney.” Erath keeps his voice level. He keeps his hands visible, down at his sides, palms open. “I’m right here. You’re in your kitchen.”
Sidney blinks. His eyes refocus, slowly, and the kitchen reassembles around him.
He looks at Erath, at the distance between them, at Erath’s hands held open at his sides, and the expression that crosses his face is something Erath was not prepared for and recognizes anyway.
Shame, deep and immediate and all-consuming.
Fury, directed inward, at himself, at his own body for betraying him.
He presses his hand flat against his sternum and shakes his head.
“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is thin. “I can’t do this.”
A moment ago Sidney had been kissing him.
A moment ago Sidney’s hand had been on his jaw and Sidney’s body had been pressed against his and every signal, every sound, every involuntary motion had been saying yes.
And now Sidney is shaking and can’t breathe and the shame on his face is swallowing everything else and Erath knows, he knows, because Sidney told him, because what he said has been sitting in the front of Erath’s mind since last night.
The understanding hits Erath with the force of something physical.
He did this. Not intentionally, not maliciously, but he did it.
He knew. Sidney had handed him the map last night, had said the words out loud in his living room, and Erath had heard them and filed them away and still, in the grip of wanting, had pressed Sidney against a counter and boxed him in and the fact that he hadn’t meant to doesn’t matter.
He should have been more careful. He should have been paying attention to something other than the taste of Sidney’s mouth and the sounds he was making. He should have remembered.
He looks at Sidney’s hands. They’re trembling.
Not the fine tremor of nerves or adrenaline but a deeper shaking, the kind that comes from somewhere structural, and Sidney’s jaw is clenched so hard the muscle is jumping and his breathing sounds like it’s being pulled through a straw and his eyes, which a minute ago had been warm and wanting, have the glassy, faraway quality of someone who is not entirely present.
“Alright,” Erath says. His voice is steady. He makes it steady, with effort, because the thing happening inside his own chest is not steady at all. “Of course.”
His coffee is on the counter, half finished, and he leaves it there.
Going to the sink would mean crossing the kitchen, getting closer, occupying space that Sidney needs to be empty right now.
Every instinct Erath has is telling him to go to Sidney, to touch him, to hold him, to do something, and he overrides every single one because every single one is wrong.
The last thing Sidney needs is more hands on him.
The last thing Sidney needs is another man who doesn’t leave when he’s told to.
Sidney is watching him. Braced. Waiting for the follow-up, the push, the are you sure, the negotiation that always comes after the first no.
He is so visibly prepared for it, so rehearsed in the expectation of it, that the preparation itself is an indictment of every man who came before, and Erath feels a hatred so precise and so total that the temperature in the kitchen drops three degrees before he catches himself and pulls it back.
“Thank you for the coffee,” Erath says.
Sidney’s lips part. Something flickers across his face, confusion or disbelief or the beginning of a question he doesn’t know how to ask. Then it’s gone and his expression settles into something careful and controlled and held together through will.
He walks Erath to the door. His steps are measured. He opens it and stands in the frame with one hand on the wood.
“Goodnight, Sidney.”
“Goodnight.” His voice almost doesn’t waver.
Erath turns. He walks down the hallway and hears the door close behind him and walks down four flights of ugly carpet and out through the secured door and into the cold night.
He doesn’t look back at the fourth-floor window.
He makes it three blocks before he stops.
He stands on a corner. Very still. The city hums around him, distant and irrelevant, and the cold settles over his skin and he replays the last five minutes with the unforgiving precision of someone who does not have the luxury of forgetting.
Sidney’s face. The shame. The fury. The I can’t, not I don’t want to, not this was a mistake, but I can’t.
The word is specific. Want was not the problem.
Sidney had wanted him. Erath had felt it in the kiss, in the urgency of it, in the sounds and the pulling and the heat.
The want had been there, vivid and real, right up until the moment Erath had put his arms on either side of Sidney’s body and taken away the space to leave.
He knows what comes after the wanting. Sidney named it for him.
He thinks about Sidney kissing him anyway.
Crossing the kitchen and reaching for him anyway.
The specific, terrifying courage of wanting something your body has been trained to punish you for wanting.
Sidney had told him the pattern and then walked directly into the part of the pattern where it goes wrong, and he’d done it with his eyes open, and when his body had overridden his mind he’d been ashamed.
Not scared. Not angry at Erath. Ashamed of himself, for not being able to control a reflex that someone else had put there.
The hatred returns, colder now, more focused.
Erath doesn’t know who they are. He doesn’t know their names or their faces.
But he knows what they built inside Sidney’s body, the wiring of flinch and brace and shutdown, and he knows that they built it with their hands and their weight and their refusal to leave when they were asked.
And he knows that tonight, for one unforgivable moment, he put himself in the exact same position they had been in and Sidney’s body could not tell the difference.
He puts his hands in his pockets. He stands on the corner for a long time. Then he walks back to the underworld, and the dark closes around him, and the staircase descends, and the cold follows him down.