(Untitled)

[adaeo]

Adaeo remembered with a mingling combination of guilt and desire that he'd never met Jaerv in public without a cocktail, before. He would watch the door, lovesick, his great, fat heart growing restless, then draw on his lips with something sticky, one ounce at a time, as if to hold the intoxication there and give it to his lover as a sedative

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[adaeo]

Adaeo was shaking his head, hair trapped still to obey the movement. He was disappointed as Jaerv took him in, unaware of himself, simply repeating in a chain of thought pulled tight enough to warp that the blacksmith would be pleased to see him buckle, he would. He was ready in an instant to let the effort go, to offer up the new direction his life had taken, fulfill his obligations to the church and invite him, then leave. No sense, surely, to sit beneath that judgmental eye and listen to him be nasty.

Then Jaerv said, with the basic, informal aggression that came to him as easily as air, I'll show you how I stand it, and Adaeo remembered him freshly. Even when he smiled inside at the nervous priest's discomfort, he was who he was, tightened, twisted, dark. He couldn't even smile happily.

He coasted to the notion on a wave of religious guilt; would he be moved this quickly from grace? His former lover was only a powerful presence, that was all. It was easy, of course it was easy, to slip back to the role he'd played to perfection at his side. That was all this was. A stumble within the familiar, a relapse. A little, correctable upset. He took a full breath, let it out slowly, envisioned the offense and the unwholesome memory he'd been forced to recollect leaving him on a current of lemon-scented sighing. He could fix this, it was all still under control. He knew what he was doing, go with it, just keep going. . .

"No," he said, a sing-song at first, a gentle demand, "No," beginning in righteousness but ultimately watching his composure slip right back away from him. He fumbled in frustration between the words of his heritage and those he used in Espyn, insisting hotly enough to leave the errors uncorrected, "No, don't just say a thing, like that makes any difference, like it tells me something. If you think you can help me understand how you talk to people that way, as though nothing matters to you, do it. Show me."

The strain in Adaeo as the challenge left his mouth crumbled to a fresh chill in its aftermath; he recognized so little of himself, these days. In ignorance and heartbreak, he decided that this was a mark of success, and palmed his talisman in pocket with one hand while washing down the dust of such direct, indignant argument with his water in the other.

[honeysuckle_raw]

‘No’ with Adaeo did not mean no- Jaerv was not angry. He pretended with a snide, smacking slip of his tongue from the top of his half-sneering lip to the corner of his mouth that he was disinterested, unimpressed by Adaeo’s conviction. No matter how much the Itanian’s voice allied with song even in discord. No matter how sweetly it brushed Jaerv’s softer nerves, where he had his own stiff-jointed sense of play. Despite all Jaerv’s filthy reanimations of his old plaything, despite the poison of his memory, Adaeo remained Adaeo. That he couldn’t change, no matter how he tried to crush him, smear him and make him finally confess a disappointing truth. Adaeo stayed Adaeo, and a part of Jaerv partly unkinked and wanted to stretch high and long to reach the familiar, baiting lilt of No. No. He battened it down with the corners of his mouth diving in deep, headfirst overcompensation.

“What,” he began in a purposefully low drone; he thought he could hammer emotion and meaning out of the conversation if his tone was similar enough to a blunt tool. “You want to get your sticky little hands in my mind now?”

Both of Jaerv’s hands landed with a heavy, fleshy, whole-palmed slap on the tabletop. The sound and force launched him upward out of his seat to sully with a snarl the neutral space between them. “That’s not what you wanted before. You wanted one thing. One thing.”

His hips knocked the edge of the table, rocking it toward Adaeo. “Again.” Another release of spurted motion. “And again.” Another, and the table dislocated an inch with a curt, protesting scrape against the floor. “And again.” Whatever attention he had drawn, to whatever degree his noise had risen above the close simmer of cooking food, he did not loosen his attention for a moment. “I’m not gonna help you pretend to be something you’re not- won’t ever and can’t ever hope to be.” Instead of drawing away all at once, he only barely withdrew, intending to possess the meaningful silence as well as his words before he was gone.

[honeysuckle_raw]

"I do," he countered, the landscape of his voice once prone to hills and pitches, now a flatland, unwavering, tuned to the stricter demands of argument. "I do, as a matter of fact," and for once, he didn't fear the needling humiliation which often followed insisted anything to Jaerv. He might laugh, or dismiss him, or tell him that he didn't know what he wanted, but he knew, he knew. He was here for a reason. If he'd have to repeat it internally until the words lost their structure, he'd do it - he was here for a reason.

But of course it wore him thin to be so easily dismissed, and jostled sleeping things in him better left to slumber. He said it with a scoff, with a resurfacing of the buried snap of sophisticated aggression that came so naturally to those who'd grown up wealthy, "That is absolutely not true," as if Jaerv could be convinced by the words.

To his credit, Adaeo didn't flinch when Jaerv stood. He drew back at an even pace, trying to convince through a steady demeanor that his words had merit, but the lesson was lost in the sudden, intrusive, unacceptable movement of Jaerv's assault on the table. As instantly as attraction ever happened, the priest was transfixed, mouth open wide enough to let breath journey through undisturbed.

Alone, or in the company of the virtuous, he could convince himself without room for a crack that he'd severed off this ugly part of himself, the one that would indulge this, would delight in it, but when he said, lowly, hoarsely, beside himself with shame, "Stop that," it was not the command of an offended religious figure, but the breathless, unintentional submission to want that had been the motivating force in his Other Life. He needed, needed him to stop doing that.

"Heaven help me," he muttered, the same way he'd have said god after lovemaking, barely a whisper. "Wait, just . . . okay, you've got it. I can't say you're entirely wrong," he confessed, though Jaerv was. Adaeo had tutored himself over the past two years to say the same things; that their relationship was based on his own filthy need to be sinful, and involved no heart.
"We seem to've come to the same conclusion; we shouldn't have been together. I know that, I know. It wasn't . . . the right thing to do. That's what I'm trying to say. I'm not like I was when you knew me before. I'm not. You don't have to believe it right away, you can think I'm acting. But I've changed. I don't do things like this," the tart opening of each word was punctuated with his obvious and brand new distaste for the sexual, however faked, "anymore."

It was at once not at all and -exactly- how he'd pictured the encounter. Now that it was so far out of his control, he couldn't lead lightly to the punchline, couldn't break the tension by sharing a positive turnaround in life with his former lover. His lips felt heavy and awkward; the sentence got lost between them. He breathed out, committed himself to eye contact - now was not the time to play coy - and pried open three silver buttons from his overcoat to expose submission's emblem, crisp and white, fastened around his shirt's collar.

[honeysuckle_raw]

Adaeo’s pert incredulity- his indignation which might’ve seemed for a moment so gleaming with perfect surety- was perfectly plump with doubt. Jaerv did not understand it on intellectual grounds, only understood it as the glossed softness that begged to be thrashed apart. “Stop what-,” he tossed the words between them like wet, raw meat onto hot iron. “Tell me- say it- stop what.” He rushed closer and stopped just short of Adaeo’s face with the violence of a slap, all because of the feather pillow give he had always sensed in him. Adaeo, his, and his supple pleading. His throat faint, his cheeks once powered, his lips firmly and luminously fatty. Jaerv twisted his hands so that his wrists faced outward, and gripped the edge of the table like he wanted to shove it forward into Adaeo’s chest.

It wasn’t the right thing to do, Adaeo was saying. Rage poured in splash to his wet-hot eyes, a glassy spit of boiled sensation. Usually violence came before the completion of its cycle. He hunkered and bulled through to meet anger, wielded it, but this was a darker and older kind, bitter, burned around its edges and not shaped for his handling. His eyebrows strained upward. This expression, usually one of freed concern and relaxed muscle on other people, was a gruesome pull on him, as if his brow wanted to rip loose from his eyelids. Down the long center of his nose his black eyes dropped, and his upper lip flicked upward with the force of a rattling, angry, sooty sniff.

Before he could bloodily dismember what Adaeo had tried to diplomatically unseam, he was faced with what seemed like a strange new gesture- the intent unfastening of coat buttons, what a strange function of fingers. Once Jaerv struggled out of confusion, he could only hastily wonder- what, would Adaeo want it here, now- he was hot between the legs at the same time as he planned to stonily deny him pleasure, as he had sometimes done when they were together, pretending for as long as he could to be bored and telling Adaeo he was spoilt and ‘all used up.’

What else would he have done? He stared. Silent, seeming almost for a moment at peace, even enlightened. Then he reached forward, hooked his finger into the white tab of cloth, and yanked.

[honeysuckle_raw]

No, he would not do this. An actor's confidence stemming from religion told him that nothing Jaerv could threaten would be more upsetting than repeating his filth for him. "Not today," he said, a stone's slide over something it needed to conceal. "I will not do this with you today." Their vulgar communion - the ironic propriety of how sinister and spiritual it could feel - might have briefly drugged him, but he'd staked his claim in the clothes he wore, now, and would hold tight to them as long as his fingers could grip. Jaerv startled him to jolt backward an inch, but not to flee.

To say that he was caught by surprise shamed the sentiment. He expected Jaerv to quiet, to take in that moment of alteration with understanding and sit, let him speak, change the tone. He expected him to see that he truly hadn't come to fulfill some smutty hunger. They could speak as adults.

The brutal thievery left him dumbstruck, a hollow little sound pressed out between his lips that strangled itself into offense at the tips. He put his hand where the collar had come from, tugged forward by its momentum, and responded childishly in phrase, so childishly, so terribly unadvanced, but devastatingly sincere. He couldn't take that from him; it -meant- something!

"Give it back!"

[honeysuckle_raw]

“Today, today,” Jaerv mocked. The nastily performed sweetness on his own tongue was oily and frivolous, nothing at all like what he actually heard when Adaeo spoke. “You can’t even commit to that much. Even you know it. Tomorrow, a week from now- you’ll want it. You’ll be in heat.” The words were a little duller than before, exercised and gaunt; he himself could grow tired of the same recycled shaming, but he swung it reliably, bluntly. It was as close as he could edge through expression to the marrow of what he meant. It seemed that time should have toughed the meaty layers of their interaction- should have thickened it and better protected his one bone-dry desire: Adaeo. Adaeo gently unsticking glazed food from itself, Adaeo’s pebbling laughter, Adaeo drugged by the gore of his orgasm. Adaeo doing exactly this: inviting Jaerv like a schoolboy with skimpy, stamping little legs in neatly-pressed short-pants to rustle and molest him. Asking to be nipped back in line.

Jaerv held one end of the torn-free collar over Adaeo’s head like a lure, far enough away that he’d have to lunge for it. With a single, irreverent nod of wrist, he flapped it in taunt. “You want this? Is this what you think you’re all about now? Beg me for it.”

[honeysuckle_raw]

"No, no, no!" The words came from him each time like a brick falling down, he was wrong, Jaerv was wrong - in more ways than Adaeo could fathom suddenly understanding - and he couldn't let him plant these unholy phrases on him to grow where they willed. He snipped them down, one by one, with a blunt, decisive, scissoring 'no.'

At once the need to insist incorrectness was lost, his face, his form, his eyes all focused upward on the spectacle Jaerv made and the trick he wanted Adaeo to put on. He remembered with a visible flush of hot pink cheeks the first time he'd heard him say those words, pressed over him, stamping him down ragged and half-limp into his desk. Adaeo couldn't remember how he'd managed to convince him. What had he promised, what had he threatened, what had motivated his victim to plead for his own destruction? It was a sick, ugly magic Jaerv wielded, but had lost just enough of its potency that he didn't tearfully oblige, this time.

"I am -not- some silly circus creature to perform for you!" With sarcasm's scornful heat he accused the whole of Jaerv's affection for him as if that were what he'd wanted all along, a costumed monkey, an obedient dog with a red ball balanced on his nose, and he'd failed at making Adaeo entertaining enough. "Sorry to disappoint you." Then, more cooly, more eager, fixated so uselessly on an object rather than its significance and feeling for all the world as if Jaerv had stripped him of his ordination, "That belongs to me. I'm asking you politely to give it back."

[honeysuckle_raw]

At the helplessly even, uselessly identical and heavy protests, Jaerv laughed. It was not a sincere sound, nor was it gloating, but the rough exhale of a reaction in its earliest, breathily primordial form. Let Adaeo protest! Let him waste his breath with those objections that served only as evidence of the little aristocrat’s spoiled nature- the fact that he could not sink into real argument because he could not overcome this predominant hurdle of overwhelming disbelief that anyone could go against his wishes. Jaerv had dragged him over it by the hair before- he had shoved him off its edge, drowned him in delight below.

Now he was almost playful and certainly satisfied. He had won nothing, really, but the instant gratification of disturbing Adaeo seemed enough like happiness that that’s what Jaerv took it for. A book of Ashay’s he had once accidentally read, one of those that romanticized lovers’ arguments, had theorized that there could not be argument between people without passion. Adaeo was flushed; did it matter why? Jaerv felt closer to him, viscerally, perversely.

He crushed the collar up inside his hand, then buried it with a shove below the line of his belt. “It was never yours. And it never will be.” With a rough push forward of the table, he edged out into the open space beside them.