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 andnarrows 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.
Sidney's hands work the button of Erath's trousers and Erath lifts his hips so Sidney can pull them down. The fabric drags over his thighs, and Sidney has to lift up off him to get them all the way off, and when he settles back over him Erath is bare and waiting and unbelievable. His thighs are heavy and dusted with the same dark hair, and his cock is hard against his belly, thick and flushed and already wet at the tip, curving up toward his stomach. Sidney's mouth goes dry just looking at it. Sidney loses a second just looking at all of it.
Erath's hands return to Sidney's waist, to the borrowed denim there, and his fingers pause at the button and his eyes find Sidney's face. Waiting. Always waiting. Sidney nods, and Erath opens the button, and Sidney is the one who shifts to push the fabric down, who works it past his hips, who kicks it away along with everything else, who comes back to straddle bare thighs with nothing between them. The first full press of skin against skin pulls a breath out of both of them at once and Sidney has to brace one hand flat against Erath's sternum just to steady himself against the sheer overwhelming amount of him, all that warmth, all that bare skin he is suddenly allowed to touch.
Erath's cock is hard against the inside of Sidney's thigh. Sidney can feel the weight and heat of him, the wet smear where thehead presses against his skin, and the knowledge that Erath wants this does something to Sidney that no reassurance could have done. Erath doesn't press up into him. Doesn't grind or chase. He stays where he is, hands at Sidney's hips, thumbs resting in the dips of his hipbones, and lets Sidney feel the want without being subjected to it.
Sidney rocks down, experimentally.
He watches Erath's jaw go tight. Watches his eyes flutter half-closed and his fingers flex against Sidney's hips. He does it again, slower, dragging his own cock along the length of Erath's, skin sliding against skin, and the friction lights him up from the inside. Erath exhales through his teeth like the restraint is costing him something. His head tips back against the cushion, the long line of his throat exposed, and a flush has come up high on his cheekbones, and Sidney watches a single bead of sweat track down his temple into the dark of his hair.
It is costing him something. Sidney can see it. The careful stillness of a man holding a flood behind his ribs, and the sight of it undoes Sidney more than any roughness ever could.
He reaches between them and wraps his hand around Erath's cock.
Erath's whole body goes rigid. A low sound breaks out of him and his hands spasm at Sidney's hips. He's heavy and hot in Sidney's palm, thick enough that Sidney's fingers don't quite close all the way around, and already so slick. Sidney spreads the wetness with his thumb, watches Erath's mouth fall open, and starts to stroke him slow. He learns the weight of him, the velvet shift of skin over the hard length underneath, the way Erath's stomach jumps when his thumb finds the spot just below the head. He watches Erath's face the whole time. Watches the god of death come apart by inches under his palm. Watches the dark eyes go unfocused, the lashes flutter, the lips part on every downstroke. The expression on Erath's face is something Sidneyhas never seen on anyone, let alone on him: stripped bare, helpless, grateful, like he is being given something he didn't dare ask for.
I'm doing that, Sidney thinks, with a kind of wonder. He has all the power in the room. The man who could unmake him with a thought is lying beneath him offering up his throat, his cock leaking into Sidney's fist, and Sidney is the one who decides what happens next.
Erath's hand comes up, slow and visible, to Sidney's face. A question. Sidney turns his cheek into the palm and Erath's thumb brushes his lower lip, and Sidney takes it into his mouth without thinking — sucks lightly, tongue curling around the pad of it — and the sound Erath makes is wrecked. His hips finally lift, helplessly, pushing his cock up through Sidney's slow fist.
"You can," Sidney says against his thumb. "You can move."
Erath moves. He rolls his hips up into Sidney's hand and into the cradle of his thighs, slow and deep, and his other hand finds Sidney's cock and closes around it and Sidney's breath stutters out of him becauseoh. The warmth of that grip, the deliberate care of it, the slight roughness of his palm and the way his thumb sweeps in a slow circle on every upstroke. Erath watches his face the entire time, gauging, adjusting — a tighter grip when Sidney's breath catches in approval, a slower pull when his eyes flutter closed. He is learning Sidney the way a scholar learns a difficult text, patient and exact.
They move together like that, both of them caught in the other's hands, foreheads close, breath mingling. The firelight shifts over Erath's chest, over Sidney's spread thighs, over the slick place where their cocks slide alongside each other and where their joined hands work between them. Sidney can hear the small wet sounds of it — the slide of skin, the catch of Erath's breath every time Sidney's thumb finds that spot that makes him twitch in his fist.
Erath's hand slides from his hip to his ass, fingers pressing along the crease, slow and asking. Sidney gasps in a breath and presses back against his fingers, seeking, guiding. Erath murmurs something under his breath, low and unhurried, and his fingertips go suddenly slick. Warm and luxuriously wet, with the faint shimmer of something Sidney can't quite see in the low light.
Sidney snorts, breathless. "Did you justsummonlube into existence?"
"Mm." Erath's mouth twitches at the corner. "Would you prefer I go and find a jar?"
"Fuck no. Don't you dare leave."
