Chapter 13 #3
Sidney pulls the shirt off himself. It’s the second time he’s sat in front of Erath without a shirt, but the charge of it is different now.
This time Sidney is sitting on the couch in the low firelight with Erath’s hands on the linen at his sides and the ghost of Erath’s mouth still tingling against his jaw and the look on Erath’s face is not clinical.
It’s focused and intense, the same expression he’d worn in the kitchen right before everything went wrong, except this time his hands are where Sidney can see them and his arms are not braced on anything and there’s nothing behind Sidney but cushions.
“Alright?” Erath asks.
“Yes.”
Erath unwinds the linen. His fingers work slowly, unwrapping the bandage layer by layer, and the air of the room touches Sidney’s bare skin where the linen lifts away and he shivers, but not from cold.
The bruise on his ribcage is visible now, dark and mottled, purple fading to green at the edges, and Erath’s gaze drops to it and his jaw tightens in a way that Sidney recognizes.
It’s the same expression he’d worn when he’d first seen the bruise during the bandaging, a controlled anger that isn’t directed at Sidney but at the thing that put it there.
Erath leans forward. He presses his lips against the bruise on Sidney’s ribs.
Sidney’s breath catches. The press of mouth against damaged skin sends a wave of warmth through the injury, through the bone, through the tissue, and the pain that has been a constant companion for a week dissolves.
It doesn’t fade gradually. It just goes.
One moment his ribs are cracked and aching and the next they are whole, the bone knitted, the bruise vanishing under Erath’s mouth, and the sensation of being healed is so total and so sudden that Sidney’s eyes sting and he has to press his lips together to keep from making a sound.
Erath’s mouth moves. Lower. To the bruise on Sidney’s side, the one that wraps around from his ribs to his hip, and he presses his lips there and the bruise goes and the skin beneath is new and unmarked.
To his stomach, where a scrape from the alley has been slowly healing on its own, and Erath’s mouth closes over it and the scrape vanishes and Sidney’s hands are in Erath’s hair.
He doesn’t remember putting them there. They went of their own accord, his fingers threading through the dark strands, and Erath’s mouth is on his stomach, warm and open, and the sensation is no longer healing.
It’s just contact. Mouth on skin. Breath against his navel.
Erath’s hands at his hips, not holding, just resting, and Sidney can feel the restraint in them, the deliberate stillness of a man who is touching exactly what he’s been invited to touch and nothing more.
Sidney’s body is not shutting down. That’s the thing he notices, distantly, through the heat and the contact and the feeling of Erath’s mouth moving across his skin.
His body is not pulling the brake. The alarm is not firing.
He is lying on a couch with a man’s mouth on his stomach and his hands in that man’s hair and his body is responding the way bodies are supposed to respond, with want, with warmth, with the slow unfurling of desire in his abdomen, and the panic that usually arrives at this point in the proceedings is conspicuously absent.
It’s absent because Erath’s hands are on his hips and they’re not moving. They’re not controlling. They’re not sliding to his waistband or pressing his hips down or doing any of the things his body has learned to fear.
But it doesn't last. Erath’s mouth reaches the skin just above his waistband, and his thumb presses against the denim, and Sidney realizes all at once that it’s too much.
Not the panic. Not the shutdown. Just the intensity of it, the volume of his own wanting, the fact that his body is responding so completely that the absence of fear has left a vacuum and desire has rushed in to fill it and he is overwhelmed.
He uses his grip on Erath’s hair to push him back.
He expects to struggle. Erath is the god of death and even if he weren’t he’s bigger, he’s stronger, and every other man Sidney has ever been with has required escalation to stop.
But Erath moves immediately. He’s off of Sidney and sitting upright on the couch before the push finishes landing, hands at his own sides, expression dark but patient.
Not upset. Not frustrated. Patient, the way he’s patient about everything, and Sidney lies on his back looking up at the ceiling of the god of death’s living room and breathes through his mouth and tries to organize the chaos in his body into something he can work with.
“I don’t like being held down,” he says.
The words come out calm. Flat. The practiced delivery of a sentence he’s needed to say before and been ignored and learned the hard way what happens when he doesn’t say it at all.
He says it now because Erath needs to know, and because the last time he hadn’t said it soon enough the evening had ended with him shaking against a door and Erath walking down a hallway with his coffee unfinished.
Erath looks at him. There’s a long, held silence, and Sidney watches the processing happen behind Erath’s eyes, watches the information land and settle and reshape everything. Then Erath does something Sidney isn’t expecting.
He takes off his shirt.
Sidney’s mouth goes dry. The expanse of Erath’s chest in the firelight, the breadth of his shoulders, the lines of muscle that move under dark skin, all of it hits Sidney at once and his anxiety spikes even as his desire does.
He doesn’t know what’s happening. He doesn’t know what Erath is doing or where this is going and the not-knowing is the dangerous part, the part where it always goes wrong, the moment between intention and action where other men have shown him who they really are.
Erath reaches for Sidney’s hands. Sidney lets him take them. And then Erath pulls him forward, gently, and lies down on the couch, and guides Sidney on top of him.
Sidney straddles Erath’s thighs and looks down at him and his brain goes very, very quiet.
Erath is beneath him. On his back. Looking up at Sidney with dark eyes and an expression that is open and patient and wanting, and his hands find Sidney’s waist and stay there. They don’t control him. They don’t move him. They just hold on.
Erath places Sidney’s hands on his chest and asks, “How about this?”
Sidney swallows. His palms are flat on Erath’s chest and he can feel the warmth of him, the steadiness, the rise and fall of breath that Erath doesn’t need but takes anyway.
He is looking down at the god of death from above and Erath is looking up at him from below and the configuration is so far outside anything Sidney has experienced that his body doesn’t have a script for it.
There’s no weight above him to fear. There’s no surface behind him and no arms on either side.
There’s just Erath, underneath him, hands at Sidney’s waist, holding on.
“Yeah,” Sidney says. “This is good.”
He starts touching him. Slowly at first, his hands moving across Erath’s chest, his collarbone, the ridge of his shoulders.
He traces the lines of muscle and the planes of skin and Erath lets him, lying still and warm beneath him, and his hands don’t move from Sidney’s waist. They don’t creep.
They don’t wander. They hold on and they stay and Sidney’s gaze keeps drifting to Erath’s mouth.
He doesn’t know if this includes kissing.
A lot of his encounters hadn’t, and he doesn’t like when he assumes one thing and is told another.
But Erath is looking at his mouth too, and the look is not ambiguous, and Sidney thinks about the kitchen, about the first kiss, about putting his mouth on Erath’s and the world rearranging itself, and he knows Erath is going to wait. Erath always waits.
Sidney leans down and kisses him.
Erath doesn't hesitate to kiss him back.
His hand comes up to the back of Sidney's neck and Sidney's mouth opens and Erath opens against him and the kiss is slow and deep and thorough.
It tastes like warmth and the specific, mineral sweetness that is Erath's mouth, something like pomegranate seeds crushed against the tongue, something like the cold clear water at the bottom of a well.
Erath kisses like he has all the time in the world, because he does.
He kisses like the kiss itself is the point, not a doorway to somewhere else, and Sidney feels the pull in his chest detonate.
It goes from loud to overwhelming, a full-body flare that makes every nerve ending sing, and Sidney makes a sound against Erath's mouth that he doesn't mean to make and Erath's hand tightens in his hair.
It's good. Sidney has never felt anything so good in his life.
Erath is broad through the shoulders and lean through the waist, the kind of body that doesn't announce itself until it's bared.
The firelight catches on the long muscle of his stomach, on the dark hair that runs down the center of his chest and narrows to a trail below his navel, on the cut of his hips where the trousers still ride low.
There's a scar that runs pale along his ribs, an old one, neat.
There's another, smaller, at the hollow of his throat.
His skin is cold-toned in the low light, and Sidney can see his pulse moving under it at the base of his neck.
He looks like something carved and then breathed into.
He looks like a man, not an untouchable god, and Sidney wants to put his mouth on every part of him.
He touches the scar at Erath's ribs with two fingers. Erath doesn't flinch, just breathes out, slow, and lets himself be touched.