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tourdefierceIt's only when Chris is rolling Karl's socks, his surroundings coming into a clear picture, that he realizes he might be a little dense.
“Karl,” Chris says. He's gripping the rolled black socks in his hand. They feel like they are pulsating with some unattainable question.
“Yeah?”
Chris can't tear his eyes away from the pile of socks that he is dutifully matching and then rolling together. He's rolling Karl's socks and Karl is reading a thick volume of Kafka's short stories, complete with Chris' notes, reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose.
There is a chasm here. He knows it because he can feel it in the palm of his hand—endlessness.
"Are we dating?" Chris blurts out of his mouth, socks still fisted in his hand as if they could keep him afloat now.
Karl looks up from his book, head tilted as if Chris is a mildly interesting painting.
"Do you want to be?"
"Well, does it matter if we already are?"
Karl frowns and it makes Chris angrier at Karl's carefully measured words. Who dates someone and doesn't tell them? More to the point, who dates someone while they are fucking married?
"Wait," Karl says, marking the place in Kafka and putting it down next to him. Chris has the sudden urge to ruin all the endings just to spite him. "Are you angry?"
Chris throws the sock down into the hamper and looks away, embarrassment and anger sloshing around inside of him. He feels exposed and vulnerable with Karl staring at him like he has any answers and the sudden feeling that this is all his fault. Where has he been? When did this start?
"Chris," Karl says, a sigh curling around the soft hiss of his name. "I'm not sure what you want me to say."
"Is that how this goes?" Chris asks. He feels the bitterness twist inside of him. He feels played. "You make me feel guilty for wanting something with you, wife and kids back home, when all this time you've been leading me down that thought process?"
"That's not what is happening."
Chris shakes his head, already planning his escape route. Sweater on the back of the couch, keys by the door, heart mangled at Karl's feet.
"Look at us," Chris says with startling clarity. "We're playing house. Does this feel like home, Karl? Am I good little housewife?"
Chris curses, closing his eyes for a few minutes to catalog what this heartbreak feels like. Yes, he's sinking the boat of love and yes, water feels heavier than one would think in his lungs. Pond water seeps in and black mold is festering before Chris can take a proper breath.
"God, I'm an idiot," Christopher says when he opens his eyes.
Karl is shaking his head and getting up, a deep frown mangling his features, making him look both startled and disappointed. He doesn't look sorry, Chris notices.
"Chris--"
"Whatever, man. I'm fucking over it>," Chris bites out. He doesn't wait for whatever Karl wants to say, his hazel eyes flashing with all sorts of emotions that Chris doesn't want to decipher because he refuses on principle to be fluent in Karl's languages. Chris just leaves. He slams the door behind him, imagining Karl cursing behind it and running his hands over his bearded face, but he doesn't look back.
He's in his car and driving toward Zach's before he even realizes that he left his sweater hanging on the back of Karl's couch.
Yes, he ruins everything by saying it out loud. Big deal. Someone still gets to breathe fire. Someone gets to wield the sword. Calm down.
He suddenly feels too young, with youth's stupidity marring the slope of his shoulders and the palms of his hands. He should have known not to let himself into whatever cavern of space Karl had carved out for him. But with the heat of the steering wheel burning callouses into his palms, he doesn't know if he ever had a chance because in the end, he's just a Hollywood liar and it's written all over his face. He's a pawn, in what he's sure is a carefully crafted game between Karl and his wife. Pretty boys like him don't actually get fairytale endings. And why should he? He's just the pretend queer, playing house with a married man and dreaming about being the princess, tiara shining in the dusty mist of silly dreams.
He's not.
He's the beggar who gets run over by the Queen's carriage when she rides into town. Why he didn't know until now, is nothing more than his own talent at denying the inevitable.
Greed is a fickle thing when destiny is so fucking fleeting.
"Do I even want to know?"
Chris swallows around the bottle of Jack and stares blankly back at Zach, who is standing in the doorway of his bedroom with his hip cocked and looking at Chris as if he is a particularly special kind of stupid.
Chris settles more firmly back into the pillows of Zach's bed.
"Don't mock me," Chris says while he adjusts the comforter around him. "I'm getting drunk. I'm doing drugs. And I'm doing it all in the comfort of your bed."
Zach arches a wildly out of control eyebrow.
"Join me or don't. But just don't, not tonight, not now."
His voice cracks and he honest to God thinks he might cry, blankets piled around him because he's turned up the air conditioning, booze leaning against the pillow and his clearly fragmented dignity lying in shambles-- and it's probably written all over his face. Whatever it is, Zach softens visibly.
"Oh, baby," he says with a sashay of his hips, leaning over the bed to kiss Chris' forehead. "Papa Quinto will fix everything."
Chris chokes on his laughter, taking another burning gulp of Jack.
"More like Fairy Godmother," he says while his throat works around the amber alcohol and the lump that's formed from trying desperately not to cry. But as soon as he says it, he regrets it, because Zach is looking at him with the saddest eyes and Chris knows the blistering face of pity when he sees it.
"You're no princess," Zach whispers, and Chris closes his eyes.
It's just as he's feared.
"This cigarette is better than a blowjob," Chris says around his second cigarettes in as many minutes. Zach holds the ashtray and scrolls through his iPhone, humming.
"I didn't even realize they made me quit."
"Chris, it was in your contract. And you complained for days."
Chris shrugs and inhales deeply, his head feeling full of air and blissfully empty of anything else. The fact that he gets a bit high off two cigarettes is pathetic. He feels like he's in high school again, smoking outside the gym and pretending to be cool in his high tops.
"I know, but-- tunnel vision," Chris says with a shrug, not bothering to take the Parliament out of his mouth.
Zach hums in agreement. "Alright, I'm going to make a few phone calls."
"Drugs?" Chris says perkily while trying to smoke and drink at the same time.
"Possibly," Zach says with a frown. He puts the ashtray in Chris' lap, moving off the bed and toward the open door. There is a slight breeze and Chris watches the sway of Zach's hips, which have shed their jeans and are now clad in tiny black briefs that leave little to the imagination. Although it's not like Chris didn't try to love Zach, to touch him until they were both mindless for anyone but each other.
It hadn't ended well but maybe this is better.
"Zach would have a drug dealer," Chris says with a tap of his cigarette into the ashtray. Noah nuzzles his thigh in reply. Chris considers the look of adoration on Noah's face before he attempts to pour Jack into Noah's panting mouth.
"Stop it," Zach snaps from the doorway and Chris leans the bottle back. He tries to look as innocent as Noah but fails, miserably, and ends up laughing, cigarette burning his wrist as he cackles until he cries. It's not his proudest moment but the sobbing helps. His shoulders are hunched over with each wave of his evisceration. There aren't many tears but Chris can hear himself sob, feel Noah press his nose firmly to Chris' shaking thigh and he knows that this breakdown is possibly the climax of his story. Zach watches, head tilted, from the doorway until Chris chugs the whisky to wash away the taste of salt. Then Chris wipes his nose on the comforter and inhales hard, until the smoke curls to settle in the bottom of his lungs, crawling down his throat until it feels like it's scorching his chest and burning his heart out.
If this is what relief feels like, Chris doesn't know if he's cut out for recovery.
Turns out, cigarettes can't kill you.
At least not instantly, but that doesn't stop Chris from trying and really, he thinks, it's the thought that counts. By midnight Chris has gone through almost two whole packs, a fifth of Jack, and completely disassembled his Blackberry. Noah is slobbering all over both their thighs but Chris is too drunk to care.
His fingers are clumsy, the rolling paper slipping out from between his thick fingers. It doesn't seem like too long ago, but he can remember the foggy euphoria of getting stoned before class, his glassy eyes and lazy tongue folding over Whitman and trailing after Plath on a warpath for answers that she only found in the back of a drafty oven. He remembers clawing at the ends of sentences and peering into ellipses and being enveloped into words. He remembers letting prose consume him until he was nothing more than just a character, just another literary device. He remembers tickles in his throat that almost choked him during class and he remembers Dalton Graves who used to literally fuck the poetry right out of Chris. (Dalton had never wanted to be an actor, just a painter. They were the worst kind of dreamers: queers.)
He remembers smoking to feel more then, not less.
"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Zach says from beside him, his breath hot on Chris' shoulder. They are down to just their underwear now and there is such a lovely safe feeling hollowed out between them.
"It's sloppy," Chris replies. "But it'll do."
"Just like you," Zach replies, pressing his lips against Chris' shoulder. He's less drunk than Chris, but Chris figures it has something to do with being less sad and hurty inside.
Chris back-burns the joint, letting the paper curl and lick around his fingers before moving the lighter away. Zach is looking wide-eyed from his shoulder and Chris smiles, feeling listless and sheltered. The paper sticks to his spit-slick lips and he sucks up the smoke into his lungs until it burns in his belly. The end of the joint glows orange and Chris wants to cough, the feeling welling up inside of his throat until it sputters out, the smoke billowing out of his lungs and spilling between them.
It's sweet, dizzying and putrid.
Chris takes a second hit, letting the pot dance out of his lungs and clutter up his head in smooth sailing motions. Zach takes the joint from his fingertips; Chris' eyes are still closed as he breathes tiny, wheezing breaths.
"God," he whispers as Zach takes three small pulls from the joint beside him. "It's been entirely too long."
Zach nods, gulping air into his lungs to mingle with the smoke before he blows out on a cough as well. Their eyes are watering but Chris feels so utterly detached from his feelings that for the first time in the last few hours, he's certain he's not crying.
It feels like an accomplishment.
"I don't want to be the princess," Chris says when the joint is glowing amber between them and Zach is holding his hand.
"Why not?"
Chris shakes his head but it doesn't clear. The cobwebs are man-made because Christopher knows the spider personally. He asked him to put them there to scare him off. The path to the dungeon is long but not hard to follow.
"What if no one comes to get me?"
Zach blows out smoke and stubs out the joint. He pulls Chris down, heavy and reassuring on his shoulder, until they are both lying against the warm linen. Chris cuddles in close, feeling lost but completely fine. Fine.
"Where are you, Christopher?"
Chris clutches at Zach's arms, pressing half moons all down his skin.
"I'm in the tallest tower," Chris whispers. "The tallest tower of them all."
"This is the apex," you say with heart-heavy limbs and sagging eyes. Sleep is chasing after you.
Zach smiles; it's sharp and familiar. "How very Victorian of you."
"Yes," you whisper. "I'm a modern day Oscar Wilde."
There is stillness and it's suffocating so you inhale sharply, only to find your lungs oh so full of smoke that's eager as all hell to choke the life out of you. You gasp until it sounds like you're laughing, pathetic sobs of desperation that filter up out of your chest and hang, mockingly, between you and felicity.
"Is this amusing to you?"
Zach looks incredibly sad. The bow of his mouth looks inconsolable and the place where your heart is supposed to be located aches, displaces into your stomach, and keens.
"Is this a joke to you?"
You close your eyes and float in and out of his words. You roll around the curl of his tongue and crawl, finger nails dragging until the surface underneath you bleeds.
"Chris," he says with soft hands around your neck.
This, you think. This must be your trial.
Morning is ugly.
Chris pulls himself away from Zach's hairy limbs, which are wrapped around him like an octopus. He thinks briefly about Emily Dickinson and her life of solitude and blearily tries to wrap his mind around what it would be like if Zach and him remained forever single and together. He's pretty sure that their picnic baskets, lowered out of bedroom windows, would be filled with more than just Sunday baking.
"We should start a knitting club," Chris says when he finally dismounts Zach's bed. Zach doesn't wake from his alcohol-induced sleep but he does turn over, spreading the width and length of his frame more proportionally over the entire plane of the bed. He looks so at peace and Chris is exceedingly jealous.
The bathroom light is too bright and Chris switches it off as soon as it hits his eyes. On second thought, it's probably better that he doesn't see his reflection in the mirror. He feels his way to the toilet and giggles when he imagines Zach's face if Chris misses.
He makes it back to the bed without incident but doesn't have the heart or the energy to push Zach's sprawling form in one direction or the next to make room for Chris. Instead, Chris sits on the bed and watches the sun fight its way through the curtains.
There are stirrings of guilt and embarrassment leaking inside his chest but he's too strung out to examine them closely. He knows that somewhere, him and Karl went down a one-way and now they are trying to find their way back to zero. Chris just has not figured out if they'll end up destroying each other on the journey back to the beginning. Maybe they already have.
"What are you doing?"
Chris doesn't turn from his position staring out at the window. Zach is shifting behind him, hands moving about until they find Chris' lower back.
"Chris?"
Zach's throat is as scratchy as his. "Yeah, I couldn't sleep."
"What time is it?"
"Just after seven."
Zach swears and Chris feels him shifting around behind him again. The sun is flooding the sliding glass door and he doesn't find it as assaulting at the artificial light of the bathroom.
"Are you still drunk?"
Chris shakes his head. "I don't think so."
"Then why," Zach moans, his voice muffled by his pillow, "why are you awake?"
"I'm having a 'Death of the Moth' moment."
"Christopher, I love you dearly--as last night can attest because I would never consume that much alcohol or weed for anyone who I didn't adore--but it's way too fucking early in the morning to be angsting over your boyfriend."
"Boyfriend?"
Chris turns but Zach is glaring, half-raised in bed. He looks utterly debauched and beautiful. He's Jack Walls. He's Ryan McGinley. He's photography in motion, slowly building to Robert Mapplethorpe in a litany of perfect words. Chris smiles, stretched and thin and wanting.
"You're a fag," Zach says with a tiredness that Chris feels. "You're just a fag like everyone else."
Chris tilts his head, taking in the pillow creases on Zach's exposed collarbone.
"Yeah?"
Zach nods. "Yes," he says with a firm smile before falling back onto the bedding, his hair fanning out on the pillow. "And fags, no matter how much they yearn, will never get the romance or the fairytale endings they deserve."
Zach's hand curls around his wrist. It feels warmer than the sun filtering through the window and safer. He wishes he understood why he's surrounded by a dozen princesses when the knights have gone off to play hide and seek with the dragon.
"Come back to bed," Zach says, and Chris does exactly that, collapsing on Zach's chest and trying not to think about the curve of Karl's shoulders or the weight of Karl's wrist or how Zach smells like a hipster and Karl? Well, Karl had smelled of home.
It's funny, but then Chris thinks about the frozen aisle, thinks about linoleum pressed against his cheek, and sleeps.
Text from: Karl Urban
Stop hiding at Quinto's.
Chris wants to fling his phone across the room just to watch it shatter (again, he's moving toward actually becoming his mother but the conclusion doesn't bother him). However, Zach is sitting across the breakfast bar reading Cosmo with his serious face on and Chris longs for the absurdity of these moments.
"He's right, you know," Zach says without looking up. Chris scowls.
"Who?"
Zach turns the page with a delicate flick of his wrist. "Karl."
"How could you possibly know that was Karl?"
"Because," Zach says with a glint of pure evil in his cow brown eyes. Chris loathes him. "You always get this constipated look on your face."
Chris throws his pen at him. He does not make a face like that. He doesn't even have a facial expression like that.
Zach ignores the pen and continues to stare at Chris, face contemplative. "Well, maybe not constipated, but remember that one time when we went out to Gay Friday and someone came on your pants while you two were dancing?"
"We agreed never to speak of that."
"Tough. Anyway, you make that face when Karl texts you," he says before frowning. "You're not into come-play or shit, are you? Because that would explain a lot."
Chris feels severely affronted.
"I'm leaving," he says instead of justifying anything Zach has said with a response. "And if I did have an extreme kink, Zachary, I certainly wouldn't tell you."
Zach yells, "Prude!" on the way out and it's how Chris knows that Zach is most definitely the dragon. On the other hand, Chris is smiling again.
“I think about you,” he says awkwardly. “I think about you for extended periods of time.”
Karl arches an elegant eyebrow but doesn't look terribly affected by Chris' confession. Chris pulls his cardigan, which is sticking to his sweaty skin, closer to him. He tries again.
"I'm pretty sure I'm in love with you. And I absolutely have no idea what that means but I think I'm ready to-- you know," Chris says with an ambiguous hand gesture. "I'm ready to figure out what this means, between us, with you. You know, if you're into that."
Karl's face doesn't move but he leans forward, his lips softly grazing Chris' forehead. Christopher doesn't lean back, just stays pressed against him. There isn't much space between them but Chris feels every centimeter of it and he aches to close the distance.
"Are you going to run again?"
"I don't know," Chris whispers, feeling Karl's breath against his brow. "But I want to try staying."
Karl pulls back abruptly and grabs Chris' wrist, his fingers burning a delicious ring into the bones there, pulling him into the town home and it's there in that moment that everything breaks. Chris practically tackles Karl, desperate and needy and a clash of titanic emotions that are communicated in frantic kisses. He knows that he misses Karl's lips most of the time but the agency has been returned to his body from the land of broken hearts where Chris had banished it long ago.
It isn't until he's pressing tiny, frenzied kisses to Karl's cheekbones that Karl frames his face with strong hands, holding him in place and effectively grounding them. Chris is panting, breaths short and labored where Karl's are smooth and even across Chris' face.
"Chris," Karl says with so much affection that Chris has to close his eyes from the weight of it.
He waits until his breathing slows. He loosens his grip from Karl's neck and jaw. He's reminded of Zach's nail-imprinted arms from before and Chris is suddenly thankful.
"Chris."
"Sorry," he says. "I'm sorry it took me this long."
Karl shakes his head, hazel eyes wide and tumultuous. Chris wonders if they reflect his own panic-stricken wildness, still humming through his body although not as urgent. He doesn't want to lose this, not when he's just realized that it was his all along. If this is his tea cup and madeleine, then he wants volumes of memories and more time to classify every subtle taste in the infinite line of connections here.
"I was waiting," Karl says softly. Chris nods, wanting to kiss him again, but resisting. He lets Karl work the words out of whatever place they've been hiding. "I was happy to wait but while I was waiting for you, I realized that maybe I needed to wait for myself too."
"Is that why--"
"Yes," Karl cuts him off. "I didn't handle our last conversation well and I'm sorry."
Chris shakes his head but it's obvious that Karl doesn't need an apology about this because Chris wasn't supposed to take the last conversation well. It wasn't how the story was supposed to go. It was the brick in the grocery store window that let the monsters in to feed, blood slippery bright on the linoleum floor.
"You just surprised me. You're so fucking abrupt."
Chris laughs and it doesn't feel ripped from his chest with a crowbar.
"Forget the dragon," Chris whispers between gulping laughter, hands stroking Karl's openly kind face. He sees the beauty here, so different from anything Chris has held in his hands or wanted before but perfect and divine in all the same rights as it should be. He's lost here, buried between the pages of Karl's lips and the soft margins of his stubbled cheeks.
"Forget the dragon, leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness," Chris whispers out against Karl's lips, and he feels the feedback loop back onto him.
Karl's face ripples with softness. "Do I even want to know?"
"Yes," Chris says before the kiss. It's not sweet or chaste but it's messy and ecclesiastic, like he's bearing more than just his poetic obsession for Karl, but uncovering all those places he hid from the vampires and werewolves. He's handing Karl the pencil, he's asking him to make it work; to build a city for him, call it love, and then to build another and call it forever. Yes, this is where things get crossed out and penned over. This is infinite revision.
"Chris," Karl whispers when the kiss picks up, tongues tangling together while their hips press forward to meld together. The friction is delicious, coiled and hot where there used to be sudden darkness and only suddenly darkness.
"Yes, yes," Chris moans. His hands twist into Karl's hair, begging for permission to do this right for once in his life.
This, Chris knows, is what happens when he saves a place-setting for forgiveness and it finally shows up to Sunday dinner.
"Zach texted me earlier," Karl says.
Chris stills amidst his exploration of Karl's ribs. They aren't ready to go again because seventeen was too long ago for both of them but Chris is entertaining many ideas for round two. He doesn't want to remember the first time being with Karl as coming in their trousers, pressed up against the back of the couch with hungry hips arching into each other, but that's exactly what had happened. Chris would feel guilty but he's more concerned with cataloging every valley of Karl's skin. At least, he was until Karl decided to talk.
About Zach.
"We need to make a rule about no conversations about Zach in bed," Chris says against Karl's armpit. Chris will admit to even liking this part of Karl and it sickens him how lovely he thinks this man is. But Chris is sure it will wear off when nakedness is no longer new. If not, Karl's quitting his geek-actor gig and coming to play slave for Chris. The dress code is less formal in the business of house-confined sex slaves but not unlike many of the roles Karl has done in the past, so Chris thinks Karl won't have any trouble adjusting. Plus, Chris imagines that the time he wants to spend exploring Karl's body is an expedition that has more ambition than Magellan and more potential for gold than Cortez.
"He warned me about your hardcore kinks," Karl says. "Don't you think we should talk about that?"
Chris looks up from his position, lips hovering over Karl's naval. He just wants to rub his face all along Karl's body and he'd love to do it without conversation. "Karl, I don't have any hardcore kinks."
"I'm not mocking you," Karl says with a teasing smile.
Chris tightens his hands on Karl's sides and nips at the smooth curl there. "Alright, you want to know my kinks?"
Karl's eyebrows try to disappear into his hairline and Chris decides that yes, he likes this look on Karl's face. There is eagerness there, and adoration and an openness that Chris has loved from the beginning-- but seeing it in this new setting is more fulfilling somehow.
"You," Chris says as he mouths at Karl's hipbones. He doesn't break eye contact, letting Karl track him from one hip bone to the other. "You and... poetry."
Karl laughs, throat deliciously bare.
"Do you bring poetry into the bedroom?"
"Oh yes," Chris murmurs, nodding enthusiastically as Karl's half-hard cock bobs against his chin. "I generally make it a rule to fuck with words."
The multitude of directions that line implies is received and Karl curls his hands over the hair behind Chris' ears. He doesn't give Chris any push or pull, just sets his hands there—his wild, strong hands that speak in delicious whispers. Chris can finally begin to hear them, and their feral, melodic sound runs curiously deeper than he expected. Chris sucks a bruise into the crease of his hip, licking a long stripe there until Karl moans.
"Well," Karl says in a gravel rough voice that has Chris pushing his own renewed erection against the bedding and not being able to look away at the lust in Karl's eyes, "I do like the idea of getting fingerbanged by your words."
Chris swears, hips stuttering as tension flows through his body. "You can't fucking say things like that," he says, nipping the words into Karl's skin while the Kiwi bastard chuckles, fingers flexing in Chris' hair as his hips lift off the bed to chase Chris' mouth. Karl's cock slides against Chris' cheek before catching on Chris' open lips, drawn to the heat of Chris' strangled breath. He doesn't suck Karl down, although he wants the weight of Karl's cock on his tongue so badly. He hungers for it in a way that makes him want to be ashamed but he only finds himself wrought with need. Instead of devouring, he kisses the tip with panting breath, the flat of his two front teeth pressing against the slit until Karl lets out a broken moan with hands tightening in Chris' hair as Chris carefully navigates the tender head of Karl's cock like a particularly difficult Proust paragraph.
"Chris," Karl groans out like a prayer and Chris can't remember who is worshiping who here, knees tucked against the pew of Karl's bedspread.
When Chris pulls back, his lips reluctant to leave their place at the altar without communion, Chris closes his eyes and tries to breathe. But there is a pale fire growing between them, and it's more than just heat now.
This is not happily ever after, but it's the closest you're ever going to get.
There is nothing freeing here, Karl's weight bearing down on you from the waist down and his mouth branding a slick heated highway along your back, teeth scraping over the knobs in your spine as you twist beneath him.
There is begging in the air.
This is the shackles manacled around your wrists, the soft cries pulled out of your throat like an executioner draws out final confessions and lies for the throne. This is the princess on the night before her betrothal, filthy servant between her legs and rebellions rioting in her heart. This is the death of the dragon and the coronation of the king with every stroke of Karl's cock, breaking inside of you until you can only think of screaming.
His voice, magic words lacing your skin until you're fit for no one but him.
"Chris," Karl hisses when his hips sink into you so slowly that you can feel every inch of him inside of you, finding every moment of weakness to claim and breathe life into.
You want to say something meaningful but all you can do is gasp, his name falling off your lips as he pins your hips to the mattress and fucks into you with startling precision.
"You fucking gorgeous thing," he murmurs against your neck that is straining back to meet his thrusts. "So tight, so good for me, oh fuck yes."
You can only nod, feel his hair stick to your back as he drags his head up and down your shoulders, mouth open as he seats himself further inside of you. He ignores your desperate whines that communicate your need to push back onto his cock. He keeps your own painful erection pressed against the sheets with the solid force of his hips and the length of his cock, branding his demands inside of you.
"Love you like this, spread out for me and begging for my cock," Karl says before he bites down into your neck, his hips stationary as they grind in tight circles. You whine, back arching in a way that makes you want to cry for how much you want this man.
You choke out words, mostly his name over and over again until he resumes his careful exploration of just how far you can take this. But it's not enough and you're sure, so fucking sure, that you will never be able to get enough of him, but you want it anyway. There is greed written on the insides of your veins.
"Please," you say when his hips slide against your prostate and your hand reaches back to pull him down until he's covering your entire body from shoulders to calves, his thrusts adjusting until they are tiny but forceful, hitting home on each return.
"Going to come inside of you, Christopher. Wanna feel you come around my cock, clutching me, begging me, belonging to me."
His pace picks up, your body slamming into the mattress and then back onto the heat of his cock and the solid strength of his body. This is what ownership feels like. This is authorial intent.
When you come, it's with his teeth clamped on your neck, his mouth sucking a painful bruise onto your skin and his cock shoved so deep inside of you that you're afraid that you won't ever want him to retreat from this assault. He presses on your too sensitive prostate, he grinds his cock against it until you see white light and are practically sobbing into the linen of his sheets.
You hope they smell like tears. You hope they smell like blood and sex and pain. You hope they smell like everything you want to give him and everything anyone has ever written in the margins of your life.
You're pliant and hazy, your orgasm still rippling through you viciously. Your cock is still half hard and pressing against the sheets when he leans you back onto your knees and takes hold of your hips. This is different. This is the king knighting his subjects. This is the knight crawling down the tower with the head of the dragon hanging from his hand, blood covering his forearm with sweet, sticky victory. This is blissful surrender.
"Fuck," you hiss out as he hauls your hips back onto his cock, bracketed by his thick hands, in a repetitive motion that loses rhythm before it begins. He's saying your name. He's praying.
"Mine," he growls out when you arch and cry out because he's hitting your prostate with every single brutal stroke and you're too sensitive, the friction is too much to exist within you. "You're fucking mine."
"Yes, yes, yes, oh God yes. Karl!"
You twist out his name, orgasm rolling through you again although there isn't any more come left inside of you to spill out onto his sheets. It's dry and painful but so incandescently good that you don't even notice Karl shouting your name and coming inside of you with twists of his hips and choked moans that are sure to leave bruises on your heart and bleed love out of your ears.
He collapses against you, the heat of your bodies sticky and oppressing.
"Karl…" It's you and you're whimpering.
"Shh." He hushes you with hands spreading over your body and smoothing down your back until you're breathing in time to the way his hand presses over your back and then lets up. You're trying not to hyperventilate. You're trying to rearrange all the nouns in your head. You're trying to re-appropriate the definition of verbs and it's intoxicating.
You're reclaiming a litany of words and it feels like you might be on the precipice. It feels like you might fall off and that's damning.
He says your name over and over again until sleep claims you just as Karl has.
Text from: Zach/Noah
is there a pea underneath your bed, princess?
Text to: Zach/Noah
this has nothing to do with happiness.
Text from: Zach/Noah
maybe i'm your fairy godmother after all.
Text to: Zach/Noah
karl and I fucked on your bed last saturday.
Text from: Zach/Noah
fucking bitch cunt.
"Come to bed."
Chris turns his head from where it's smashed against the pillow. Karl's sprawled out next to him, naked and divine-looking in the soft shadows from the street. Chris looks back at his phone, which was stuffed underneath the pillow until Zach started to text him; it's ringing, with Zach's name flashing across the front. There is no doubt in Chris' mind that the mere thought of bodily fluids in Zach's bed has him jumping off the sheets and running toward the bleach. It doesn't matter that Chris is considerate because Zach is anal and too much of control freak to think that anyone in the world could do something as well as he.
"I am in bed," Chris says teasingly, rejecting Zach's call and thumbing his phone to silent. Karl shakes his head, hand already stretching into the space between them to pull at his shoulders until he's giggling and abandoning his phone underneath the pillow in favor of letting himself be pulled into Karl's warm body.
"I thought we said no Zach in our bed," Karl murmurs against Chris' ear.
"He started it."
"I'm sure," Karl mumbles. "You two queers fight more than bitches in heat."
Chris elbows Karl in the ribs, watching the way Karl's lips curl into a smile even if his eyes are still closed. Karl huffs out in mock pain but just clutches Chris closer to him.
"Watch who you're calling a queer," Chris parries back.
"Hmm, right. Faggots," Karl says, with so much affection that something shifts inside of Chris and he closes his eyes, grasping like Mrs. Dalloway to the end of memory, to the evolution of Clarissa and the daffodils of this life in the search for lost time.
For the first time in a long time, Chris feels like Clarissa at the top of the stairs instead of Septimus.
Karl picks up the phone before it can ring more than once, shushing it with a slide of his finger. Chris nuzzles into his chest, still asleep and sprawled comfortably on top of Karl.
"Hey, darlin'," he says softly into the phone.
"You sound lovely," comes the rolling pitch of Natalie's voice over the line. "How's your day?"
Karl looks down at Chris' slackened features and smiles, so widely and blissfully happy that it almost hurts.
"Wonderful. You?"
Natalie laughs, light and teasing. "Just wrestled your two children onto a plane."
"Why are they my children when wrestling is involved?"
"Because they are most certainly your boys," she says with fondness. "Although, your youngest has taken to wearing women's clothes around the house."
Karl rolls his eyes, the hand not holding the phone carding through Chris' hair. He'll have to cut it soon and Karl is going to miss it.
"Queer thing," he says fondly and Natalie laughs again.
"You sound happy," she says after a beat. Her voice is wistful but not sad and Karl is incredibly glad for this small comfort.
"I'm a blessed man," he says instead. He curls his hand into Chris' hair, holding the sleeping man to his chest and reveling in the easy rhythm of Chris' breathing. "Do you think they'll like him?"
"Yes. Stop worrying."
"It's important," Karl sighs out.
"I know."
There is soft silence on the line and Karl studies the fan of Chris' eyelashes on his slightly freckled skin. He catalogs the flush of sleep on Chris' cheeks and the soft part of his lips.
Karl hopes he's dreaming.
"Thank you," he says.
"Their flight lands at seven," she says, and Karl can imagine see her grinning face, sun reflecting on her stunningly beautiful features. "Call me later?"
"Of course."
She hangs up first and Karl stares at the phone, her name blinking for a few seconds before being replaced with the time. He thinks for a moment before setting the alarm and sliding the phone to the ground. He wraps both arms around Chris, shifting until they are pressed comfortably together. Chris sniffs, pressing his face into Karl's neck.
"Alright?"
Karl tangles a hand into Chris' hair, closing his eyes and saying, "Yes, love, everything's fine."
