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The embrace they find themselves in after the first time they tumble into bed together is excused by a semblance of practicality.
Essek is nude in his arms—they are both nude, still sweat-damp but settling into the quiet—and he is leaning back against Caleb’s chest as he nudges small, carefully even amounts of powdered sulfur into pieces of folded paper with the flat edge of a knife. Caleb watches the way Essek’s hand handles the lethal ingredients with the ease of familiarity. Of course, Essek is used to having the ability to cause hurt at his fingertips; he handles it lightly.
They are tucked away in Essek’s chambers in the Tower, as they are more comfortably padded than his own—or because they are closer to the entrance, perhaps, as they had thrown themselves against the first flat surface they had found in their search for long overdue release.
It’s nice, Caleb allows himself to think. This is nice, and undemanding, for now. He has Essek’s bare-skinned back pressed close; he can watch the way Essek folds the packets of paper into small squares and tucks them neatly back into the pocket of Caleb’s coat, which lies spread open over the bed sheet, inner compartments bared like a slain beast.
He will admit readily—to himself, at least—that pillow talk with Essek had been one of his greatest fantasies, during that blissfully unaware time in Rosohna, when Essek was only his attractive teacher, his burgeoning friend.
He would think of lazy afternoons in Essek’s very own lascivious chambers, of being naked and comfortable and smug sprawled over silken sheets, as Essek would side-eye him and speak coldly of complex enchantments, and Caleb would roll over and trace sigils down the length of Essek’s thigh and ask, like this?
It had seemed so easy when they studied together, to imagine sharing similar banter but with greater intimacy. To pour the charged potency between them into sex and into half-academic flirtation.
He had learned later, of course, that the same potency could carve the two of them into their worst shapes, if they let it. Oh, they would have made enemies fit for the story-books.
Instead, there is this: Essek, the angular line of his naked shoulders, and the knife, and the meticulous measuring of explosives into practical amounts for Caleb to carry in his coat pocket.
“You are being very precise,” Caleb says, leaning his unshaven chin over Essek’s shoulder, not quite touching. He wonders if the rub of his beard there would make Essek shiver.
“Of course. It is for you. For your spells.”
“I do tend to just shove my hand in my pocket and grab a handful,” Caleb jokes, nudging the tip of his nose into the mussed side of Essek’s hair, a breath too carefully to resemble tenderness. Trying to be playful with Essek once more is like feeling his way in the dark.
Essek frowns, shaking his head even as his eyes remain trained on his own hands with great focus.
“No. You are very precise, always. You keep your components quite organized. Offense and defense easily reached, ritual components tucked away in inner pockets. You never waste your materials.”
“Observant,” Caleb comments. He wonders if Essek can tell what spell he means to cast just from the pocket he reaches for in battle. The thought of it makes him nervous, he thinks, or perhaps exhilarated.
Even with all that he has not told Essek of himself, he still feels like he is the one who knows nothing. The one who fumbles forward, while Essek watches, and waits.
“Yes, I am quite the spy.”
Essek’s face is doing something one shade too cold and too shades too wry as he pauses.
Then he exhales, leaning his lithe weight back against Caleb, the paper and the small silvered knife still grasped loosely in his hands. Some tension in him seems to leave with the sigh, even as something new coils up, deeper within.
“I know you cannot fully trust me yet—” Essek begins, and Caleb wants to shake him and say, I am letting you handle my spell materials, I am still sore-throated from where I let you fuck me, did you not see me close my eyes in bliss?
Still, he says nothing, because he is not fully wrong. The weight of his trust in Essek is diluted with desire and with a stubborn, stubborn fondness that won’t let go. He cannot be certain of the true contents of what makes that balance scale in his heart dip in Essek’s favor; he spends much of his time rooting through those feelings, turning them just so in the light.
“But I want—I want you to know—”
Caleb stays very quiet, watching him. Watching the way Essek’s pupils dance back and forth as his gaze unfocuses, his pale brows tensing ever so slightly. He looks beautiful deep in thought, beautiful and more than a little unreachable. Caleb feels like he is looking at him from across the wide expanse between heavenly bodies; he is a humble and distant admirer.
He is looking at the half-profile of Essek’s face in the low light, and so he doesn’t see Essek pressing the handle of his knife into his hand, only feels the cold weight of it suddenly against his palm. When he looks down, Essek is folding Caleb’s fingers around the metal, one by one.
“This is a good knife, you know,” Essek says, conversationally. “I had it made for general practical usage, as well as for fighting, in emergencies.”
Caleb holds the knife. It is small and neat, the edge looks sharp.
“What are you doing?” he asks, very carefully. He watches the knife in his own hand; almost swallowed up by it, while Essek’s dark, lovely fingers slide down to wrap around his wrist.
“It’s nothing. Just let me—”
He has never heard Essek cut himself off this much. Like he is biting off his own sentences the moment he hears them in his mind. Caleb tries to soften himself, to be lenient with whatever Essek needs. So there is a long moment while Essek brings the hand with the blade towards his own throat where he does not resist. Then, with a note of alarm in his voice:
“Essek.”
“I am not asking you to cut me.”
“Then what?” Caleb asks, accent thick. The knife sits so easily in his hand.
“Just this.”
Essek relaxes further against him, his head falling back against the perch of Caleb’s shoulder. He tugs at Caleb’s wrist again—the knife touches skin with the flat edge of the blade. The metal must be cold to the touch, he thinks, easily felt.
“You want this? The threat?”
He watches as Essek’s eyes fall shut, chin tilting up ever so slightly. Caleb moves the knife with him, adjusting the angle on instinct.
“Not the threat. The trust. The giving in.”
Frowning, Caleb cards the fingers of his free hand through Essek’s pale locks. He tightens his fingers, pulling Essek’s head further back until his neck is taut, held safely in place.
Ever so slowly, he traces the blade along the hard knot in Essek’s throat, down the lovely architecture of his tendons. Essek’s mouth falls open.
“You’re getting off on this,” Caleb almost scoffs, though softly.
“Yes,” Essek wets his lips. “I suppose I am.” It is a parody of the whispered admittances of Caleb’s daydreams. It is the most honest Essek has sounded tonight.
Adjusting his grip, he places the knife ever so lightly in an angle beneath Essek’s jaw, like he is readying him to be sliced open. Essek goes very still, his lids lowering.
“Like that? Is this how you would have me?”
His voice has grown honeyed with danger. Essek only makes a small noise in his throat. His arms lie lax against his side, unprotesting.
And it pisses him off—something in this sudden display of utter vulnerability, when he knows Essek has teeth and claws for days.
If this is a test of Caleb’s capability for cruelty, what will he think when he finds out that every terrible suspicion is true?
“Please,” is all Essek replies, the word stretched gossamer-thin over air. Then, barely recognizable: “ Caleb .”
“Fine,” Caleb says. “I have never needed a knife to take a life before.”
He tosses the knife onto the bedcovers in disgust. Then he leans in, curling his arms around Essek, and his hand slides up to fold around Essek’s throat instead. Like this, the broad span of his palm covers so much of it. His mouth finds Essek’s ear, tone growing conspiratorial, cruelly intimate.
“I would barely need my magic, even. If I really wanted to.”
He feels more than hears Essek’s whimper as he presses his fingers down slightly, the roughened pads of them finding the pulse points with ease. Oh, Essek’s heart is racing so very fast; the sweetest little thump-thump-thump-thump—
Caleb wonders if his pulse is high with arousal or fear. Are they playing, still? Is this good for either of them?
“Not when you have put yourself in such a compromising position in my arms. Could you cast quick enough? Hmm?”
“No,” Essek breathes. “Maybe. No.”
“I don’t think you could, Süßer. ”
“No.”
Caleb pauses, brushing his mouth over Essek’s cheekbone. He feels washed clean with old viciousness.
“I have strangled people to death before, you know. Even my weak arms can do that, when you know the proper way.”
“I would fight you,” Essek says, immediately. His rib cage flutters against the vice of Caleb’s thighs. He is all soft-limbed bareness, like a skinned animal, his usual coat stripped.
“It would be too late. You would not be able to move your arms. You would not be able to breathe.”
He leans in close, rocking their bodies together, knowing his breath is hot on the corner of Essek’s jaw.
“You would not be able to stop me.”
Jerking slightly, Essek whispers something in Undercommon. His eyelids are still halfway lowered, lashes fanning out in stark white. Numbly, Caleb wonders what he said.
Please don’t , perhaps. I love you , more likely. I love you, so I’d let you—
Caleb brushes his thumb back and forth across the line of Essek’s jugular and feels sickly drunk on unwanted power.
This surrender—this pathetic submission he calls trust—is not something Caleb wants. The taste of it in his mouth is rotten-sweet, even as he keeps digging his teeth in. Who is truly the rabid-mouthed dog between the two of them?
“Could you live with that?” Essek’s voice is small but unrepentant. Is he aware that he is the one being cruel, now?
“Yes,” he says. “It would ruin me.” They are not statements that cancel each other out.
“I don’t want you to,” Essek says in a rush, then. His hand comes up—not so caught, after all—and grasps at Caleb’s wrist. Not pulling, simply holding him with the loop of two fingers. “Do it, I mean. Not really.”
“Did you think I might?” Caleb keeps holding him. “When you put a knife in my hand.”
“No,” Essek says, quietly. “Of course not.”
“I am not going to harm you, Essek.”
“I know. I know. I knew that.” Essek’s hand slides up to rest on top of Caleb’s on his throat, slim fingers framing Caleb’s own. Then, as if he can’t help himself: “But you could have.”
In Essek’s mouth, it sounds like both you would be capable of doing it and you might have done so, had events unfolded slightly differently.
“You and me both, Essek. You know this.”
“I’m sorry.” Essek looks up, at last. Perhaps he sees the dullness in Caleb’s eyes, or the tightness by his mouth. Caleb knows he is not apologizing for treason. “I am selfish, still. I did not consider how the handle of the knife might hurt you more than the blade. I only wanted…well, the weight off my hands for a moment.”
“I do understand,” Caleb exhales, and there is again the sweet ache of this echo between them; the volatile ricochet of similar dark musings.
Such a scene could have been good for them both, perhaps, had it been softened by further distance from the truth. Polished down by time, and by talk. Like this, it is ugly. A gift offered, still bloodied from plunder, unclean.
Still, he wants it even so.
He slips the hand on Essek’s throat away, tightening the other in his hair again as he leans down. Slowly, he presses a kiss on the skin of his throat where it is stretched taut for slaughter. Essek trembles distinctly beneath him for several long moments.
Caleb kisses him again, wetly, stubbornly wanting it to be heard. He kisses a small row down the curve of where the blade had touched him earlier. Essek makes a strange aborted noise, almost as if in pain, and Caleb stops with his mouth by the dip between his collarbones.
Then; the shakiest little laughter.
“Tickles,” Essek says in a voice barely audible. Caleb closes his eyes.
When he pulls back, Essek is looking at him hazy-eyed and somber-mouthed, and Caleb pins him with his glare before he has the chance to grow soft with either humor or horror again.
“Thankfully,” Caleb says, “there are many things the two of us are capable of doing, that we are never going to act on. That is a good thing.”
Essek slips his hand down to intertwine their fingers, hiding away some potential for gruesomeness in the warm space between their palms. It is a temporary solution.
“Thankfully. Yes,” he sighs. He looks tousled and tired as tension bleeds from his every bone, and Caleb nods, satisfied.