"I'm sorry," Lethe says again. Steadier now. Quieter. His hands find his satchel and he's packing it with movements that are too fast, too jerky, rolling bandages without his usual precision. "I'll. The wound. I'll bandage it. Let me just."
He tears a strip of linen. Steps forward, the minimal distance necessary. Presses the bandage to Zazyrus's forehead with fingers that tremble. Secures it with tape. His touch is feather-light and brief and he doesn't look at Zazyrus's eyes. He looks at the wound. Only the wound.
He finishes. Packs his satchel. Stands.
He leaves without looking at him.
The cage door closes. The lock turns. The footsteps retreat, faster than usual, and Zazyrus sits against the wall with his hands flat on the cold stone and the ghost of Lethe's hips beneath his palms and the arousal still thick in his blood and the boy's scent still in his lungs.
He wants to punch the wall.
He wants to drive his fist into the stone until his knuckles crack and the pain overrides the sensation and the memory of the contact and the sound he made and the look on Lethe's face. The startled, flushed, wide-eyed look that held fear and heat in equal measure, and the heat is the part that is destroying him, because the heat means the boy felt it too. Felt something. And Zazyrus responded by grabbing him and growlingdon't touchand the boy stuttered an apology and left without looking at him and Zazyrus may have just destroyed the only good thing in this pit.
He doesn't punch the wall.
He sits with it. The way he sits with everything. The rage and the want and the guilt and the fear that he has done something irreversible, that the boy will not come back, or will come back different, guarded, the walls rebuilt thicker than before. He sits with the memory of Lethe's fingers on his shoulders and the waythey clenched, hard, and the way the boy's pulse beat visible and fast in his throat and the way he didn't pull away.
Zazyrus presses his palms against the stone and closes his eyes and breathes.
The thought is dangerous. The thought is a crack in a dam, and behind it, pressing, is the full weight of everything Zazyrus has been refusing to examine. The want. The warmth. The way the boy's face looks when he smiles, when he flushes, when he talks about kittens and the sea. The way his voice sounds when he saysyou'll be alrightand means it. The way his hand felt covering Zazyrus's, warm and sure and deliberate.
Zazyrus opens his eyes. The cage is dark and cold and empty and the boy is gone and the stone beneath his palms is unyielding and his horns still buzz with the phantom of a touch that lasted less than a second and undid him completely.
He doesn't punch the wall.
He waits.
Chapter thirteen
Chapter 13
Lethe should be terrified.
He has had plenty of time to think about this. The walk back to his room after the hasty bandaging. The hours since, spent tending to other creatures, restocking supplies, cleaning instruments, performing every small task available to him with a focus that is clearly, obviously displacement. He's been thinking about it while his hands worked and his voice narrated and his body moved through the routine, and the thinking has been comprehensive and obsessive and has led him to a conclusion that should alarm him far more than it does.
Zazyrus grabbed him.
Zazyrus grabbed him with both hands, claws on his hips, and pulled him forward and made a sound that was low and raw and unmistakable. Zazyrus's hands on his body were hard and urgent and his eyes, when Lethe met them, were black and burning and his voice, those two words scraped out of his throat, was the sound of a creature on the edge of control.
Lethe should be terrified.
He turns the memory over in his mind the way he turns everything over, methodically, examining each facet. The grip. The sound. The words. The heat in those black eyes. He holds each detail up to the light and compares it against the catalog of violence he carries in his body, the comprehensive archive of what it feels like to be grabbed by someone who wants to hurt you. He compares and contrasts with clinical precision and arrives, again and again, at the same conclusion.
It wasn't the same.
When Demos grabs him, the grip is proprietary. Fingers on his wrists, his arms, his throat, hands that hold him in place because his place is determined by someone else and his body is a thing to be positioned. The grab is followed by more grabbing, by the systematic removal of resistance, by the methodical reduction of Lethe to a body that endures.
When Zazyrus grabbed him, it was reaction. Instinct. A body responding to a stimulus it didn't expect, and the grab was not followed by more grabbing. It was followed by words. By a warning. By Zazyrus telling Lethe the boundary, giving him the information, and then his hands opening. One finger at a time. Releasing Lethe with a deliberateness that cost him visibly, obviously, in the shaking of his arms and the tension in his jaw and the sound of his breathing, which was not the breathing of a creature in control.
He didn't hurt Lethe. He grabbed him and he didn't hurt him and he told him to stop and then he let go.
And Lethe heard the fire in his words. And Lethe saw the heat in his gaze. And Lethe felt, beneath his own shock and the jackhammer of his pulse, the specific, undeniable, devastating awareness of Zazyrus's arousal.
He's not afraid.
He's not afraid at all. Not even a little. And that's the part that should alarm him, the part that violates every survivalrule he's built for himself over six years. A beast twice his size grabbed him with clawed hands and growled at him from inches away and Lethe's body responded not with the familiar cold flood of dissociation. With want. With the immediate, visceral recognition of a body that desired his, and his body answering, traitorous and alive, with desire of its own.
He sits on the edge of his cot and presses his hands over his face and breathes into his palms.
