New York City was never completely silent. Nor completely dark. When Jav woke in the middle of that tender night, the city outside the window breathed with a quiet, nocturnal rhythm. Enough streetlight filtered through the curtains that he could see the silhouette of Stef’s body. Sprawled on his side like a mountain range, hulking and majestic. Sound asleep. Quieter than the city.
Are you there?
Jav’s fingertips gently touched the center of Stef’s back, where the Saggitarius was inked between his shoulder blades.
Man is a centaur,
a tangle of flesh and mind,
divine inspiration and dust.
Jav rolled more on his side, wincing a little. He was still sore. Stef said it would be fine in the morning and Jav believed him. He believed everything Stef told him now.
Tonight their bedroom overflowed with magnificent sex. Death by sex. Grandiose, over-the-top sex. They were making love like architects of the universe. Fucking like mathematicians. Multiplying, dividing, canceling each other out and starting from zero.
Jav couldn’t get enough.
They ripped apart the bed, going at each other like knights in single combat. A grab became a caress before turning into a seize before melting into a kiss before fingers clenched and teeth sank and the weight of one crushed the other. Desire kneeled down and submitted as I love you. Then it rose up wild and raging and became I want to wreck you.
“Who do you belong to,” Jav whispered.
“You.” A crocodile death roll in the sheets, then Stef was pinning Jav’s wrists to the bed, kissing his way into Jav’s mouth and sliding hard along Jav’s stomach, rubbing the two of them together the way Jav loved.
But it wasn’t enough.
Stef sucked on Jav’s throat, marking him. He slid his tongue along the hollow between Jav’s collarbones, tasting him. Then glided down Jav’s body and wrapped his mouth around the aching need. The suck and the slick and fingers sliding within, the way Jav loved.
It wasn’t enough.
He knew it then. He understood how a human body could be consumed with a desire to be filled up. He knew it when he couldn’t get his legs apart enough, when Stef’s mouth wasn’t enough, when his hand wasn’t enough, when hand and mouth together weren’t enough.
Not this time.
This time, when the bedside drawer opened, Jav took the condom and rolled it on Stef. “Want you in me.”
“You sure?” Stef said.
“Positive.”
Stef fell on his hands and his mouth sank into Jav’s. “Oh my God, you don’t know,” he whispered.
“I know.” Jav shivered, tasting sweat and juice and need. The rattle of teeth against teeth, Stef kissing like he was trying to eat Jav alive. All the while something in Jav screamed for more. His body peeled open, layer after layer of desire. A mountainside fallen away to show centuries of strata. The love Jav thought himself incapable of. It was here, within him. It had always been in him.
I need him in here, too. It’s the only way he’ll know what it means to me.
Stef was careful. He’d been waiting and wanting a long time and his body was primed with raging excitement. A stallion rearing up and pawing at the night. Jav could feel him rein it in and gentle it down. Make his hands patient and slow.
“The second this doesn’t feel good, we stop,” he said.
Jav trusted him implicitly, still his faith faltered on the edge. A split second of denial when Stef pushed into him.
It won’t. I can’t.
Then it did.
And he could.
“Don’t move,” Stef said. “Just breathe.”
“Holy shit.”
“Let your breath out.” Stef reached and his hand ran slow over Jav’s face. “Look at me. Open your hands. Just breathe, Javi.”
Jav drew a long slow breath in and let go his fists. He was wide. Stretched to the limit of his physical and mental being. Even his field of vision had doubled, radiating out from a concentrated core of pain that wouldn’t allow any adjectives to stick to it.
“All right?” Stef whispered.
“Mm.”
“Burn?”
“A little. Yeah. Getting used to it.”
“You look amazing.”
The seconds dripped by, pink and anxious. Jav concentrated on opening. Reaching out to the strangeness instead of shying from it. His right hand clasped Stef’s, palm to palm, fingers wrapped around in a brothers’ handshake.
“Hurt?” Stef whispered.
“Yeah, but… No, it’s… I can’t say what it is.”
It hurt, but it wasn’t an agony that debilitated you. It was a complex ache that captivated you. Took your attention hostage. Demanded your full presence. You are here and nowhere else. Nothing else exists. No other thought. No other feeling. No other moment in any other time but now. No other man but him. No other love but his.
“Hold onto me,” Stef said. “I’ll stop whenever you want.”
“It’s intense,” Jav said, with an effort.
“I know.”
“I feel so here.” A groan spilled out of his throat as Stef’s hand closed around his cock and started to stroke. Jav leaned into the familiar grip, let it link up with the foreign pressure spreading him open. Letting Stef be both the squeeze inward and the pull apart. Letting Stef be everything.
“All right?” Stef said.
“Come in more.”
Stef slid a little deeper, finally hitting the pleasure on the other side of pain. It revved like gas to an idling engine and Jav thought he would do anything to never let it stop. Between the ache and the rubbing and Stef’s grip, he wanted to come until he went crazy.
“I feel so here,” he said again, running hands up Stef’s tight arms. His fingers pressed in, nails digging. He could’ve torn the world apart, laughing and screaming. Then curled up small in Stef’s palm, be tucked in a pocket where he could sleep forever, always at hand.
“God, when I hold still, I can feel your pulse.” Stef rested his forehead on Jav’s chest a few breaths. His fingers tapped a beat on Jav’s arm. “I can feel you living.”
“Lean on me,” Jav said.
Carefully Stef dropped onto one elbow, then the other. His warm, hard body pressed tight, pushed deep. He hit the sweet spot and the world wrapped around Jav twice. He began to babble, his fingers clenched tight in Stef’s hair.
“Come,” Stef said. “Just let it come.”
Both Jav’s body and his kiss opened wide as he took tight hold of himself and came. Pinwheeling through the dark. Plummeting through the colors behind his squeezed eyelids. All of him unfolded and unwrapped and undone.
“God, making love with you,” Stef said afterward. “I’ve never known anything like it in my life.”
The room drew in, rocking them in its dark arms. A heart beat in Jav’s ears. The sound of living. Jav touched the fine white line bisecting Stef’s eyebrow, then the healing seam along his cheekbone. Each scar a tribute to a life changed.
The scar was the price he paid.
The Finch wore his finest hours on his face and Trueblood never tired of looking at him.
“I love you,” Jav said. “I love you like hell.” The words tried to wrap around the emotion and felt inadequate. But when Jav wrapped arms around Stef’s body, it felt like prayer.
Mine. My most treasured friend and mate and lover and partner and…man.
Man.
I am a man and you are my man.
He felt it in his core. In his bones and marrow and DNA.
This is how I was born to love.
The world can call me whatever label they want. I know who I am.
I’m Stef’s.
Still sore, wide-awake in the middle of a New York night, Jav reached through the tangle of flesh and mind, through divine inspiration and dust, and touched the sleeping centaur.
“Finch,” he whispered
The silence stretched wide.
“Stef.”
“Mm?”
Jav smiled and closed his eyes. “Nothing.”
A rustle of skin against cotton as Stef looked back. “Whasrong?”
“Just seeing if you were there.”
Through his eyelids, he could feel Stef’s sleepy confusion. He could taste it as the confusion turned to a soft amusement. Hear when amusement melted into understanding as Stef rolled over to face him.
“I’m right here,” he said against Jav’s head.
“Sometimes I need to check.”
“I know.”
“I’m an idiot.” Jav’s hand crept around and curled in the small of Stef’s back. “Go to sleep.”
“You’re scared and playing the idiot card,” Stef said, his voice slurred and drowsy. His thumb tilted up Jav’s chin. “I’m right here. And you can wake me up to check anytime you want.”