He kissed Levi’s jaw. Then his neck, below the ear, and Levi gasped. Asher held still with his mouth on the spot and listenedto the gasp fade before he bit down, just a little. Levi yelped. A small, high sound — surprised out of him. His hand slid from Levi’s jaw to his throat.
Levi’s body had remembered it wanted to be alive because Asher reached in and reminded it, and afterward Levi had cried against his chest and held on. This was the same thing. There was a wrong word in Levi right now —maybe— and the word was in the way, and Asher knew how to move things that were in the way.
“You’re not just spending the night,” Asher whispered, his mouth against Levi’s ear now. “You’re staying. Say it.”
“Asher —”
He squeezed. Enough that Levi felt the edges of it — the airway narrowing with the promise of closing. “Say it.”
Levi’s mouth fell open and Asher smiled, because he knew that open mouth, he had seen that open mouth dozens of times. It was the mouth Levi made when he wanted to be kissed and couldn’t admit it. Levi was asking. Levi’s body was asking even while Levi’s voice stayed quiet, and Asher loved him so much in that moment he could barely hold it.
Levi’s hands were on his wrist, but the grip was going soft. His fingers were loosening, one at a time, the tension draining out of them — and Asher felt that too, and he wanted it, because a hand that stopped fighting was a hand that had decided. The fight was leaving Levi the way it always did, the way it had left him in every room Asher had ever cornered him in, and what came after the fight left was the part Asher lived for.
This is what the flat water and the thin air was about. This is what was missing from every room I’ve ever been in. You, underneath me, arriving. Choosing to stop fighting.
He was hard against Levi’s hip. He wasn’t hiding it. The arousal and the warmth and the quieting of the disconnection were the same event happening in different parts of his body atthe same time. Levi could feel it — Asher could see Levi feeling it, the awareness in his eyes, the small shift of his hips that was involuntary and that they were both going to pretend was involuntary.
He wanted to be closer. He was pressed against Levi with his full weight and it wasn’t close enough. He wanted to be inside Levi’s chest. He wanted to live behind Levi’s ribs where the heartbeat was. Pinning was the nearest approximation and the approximation wasn’t enough, and it would never be enough. The not enough was its own kind of ache — better than the empty ache, richer, the ache of wanting more of a thing he already had. He could live with that.
He loosened his grip on Levi’s throat and pressed his forehead against Levi’s. Their noses touching. Breathing each other’s air. “Say it, Levi.”
Levi closed his eyes and Asher watched the tears track down his face, catching along the tube that still marred his face. He wrapped his arms around Asher, his hands shaking, and whispered, “I’ll stay.”
42
Taste Test
Player One
“Staythere.”
Levi was at the sink, heaving into the drain. Asher tried to feed him, just to make it easier, since Levi still gagged sometimes if he fed himself, but he insisted he could do it. His body was rejecting things less often after a week of being at Asher’s house, but it still happened. There was some part of Levi, even subconsciously, that was fighting him, like it was insisting on giving up, and Levi refused to see a therapist about it. Or talk about it. Or do anything other than choke down bread, and let Asher put the meal replacements through the tube.
But today…today Levi saidstay therein a voice that had an edge, thin and tired but present. It was the first pushback Levi had given him that wasn’t the barely-there, empty compliance of a man who had stopped caring what happened to his body.
Levi’s mouth had made those words. Levi’s lips and tongue shaped the defiance and pushed it across the kitchen at him and Asher’s body responded to the mouth before his brain caught up with the words, because he was going to act on the thing he had noticed every time Levi couldn’t make himself eat.
He was holding the spot.Asher’sspot. The place where a marking defied the game’s programming lived for so long. Every time Levi gagged, or threw up, or seemed diminished in some way, he held that spot. He probably wasn’t even aware he was doing it.
But Asher noticed.
Asher crossed the kitchen in four steps.
“I told you to stay —” Levi groaned as he spat into the sink.
Asher spun him around and pressed him back against the counter’s edge with his hips.
“Asher, what are you —”
“You told me to stay,” Asher whispered in Levi’s ear. “I don’t stay.”
Levi tried to duck under his arm. Fast — faster than Asher expected, with a sideways lurch toward the gap between Asher’s body and the refrigerator. Asher caught him by the waist and Levi’s hip hit the counter’s edge.
There. Fight me. Push.
“Let go of me —” Levi’s hands came to Asher’s forearms.
“No.”
