Vestige - Chapter Seventeen
Title: Vestige
Rating: NC-17; sexuality and sensuality, nudity, violence, disturbing imagery
Been a while? That's because my internet has been a jerk lately and refuses to stay connected. Through the grace of God, or the deity of your choosing, it's letting me on now. So here's Chapter Seventeen of Vestige! <3 Word count, not sure.... I had this written out on my other laptop, but it will not connect to the router here.... so I managed, barely, to send this to myself via email. Unfortunately, when I tried to paste it to works, it crashed.
If you wanna count, be my guest. xD
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter Seventeen
“You what?”
He cringed from the sharp edge in her voice, feeling slightly silly, but a little scared of her regardless. “We broke up. It... It wasn’t working out between us.”
“You told me not two weeks ago that he wasn’t like any other man you’ve ever been with,” Dorothy snapped. She pointed at him seriously, her eyes glinting with cool fire; Caleb had seen the look many times. She was close to striking him. He thought they had both outgrown such childish things, but Dorothy seemed dangerously close to reaching across the table and backhanding him. “I recall you saying ‘There was nothing before him.’ So tell me what happened.”
But of course he couldn't do that. A woman like her would never understand, would never let herself understand. She closed herself to such spiritual notions. She was deeply rooted in reason and what could be touched; she needed something tangible in which to place her faith.
“Nothing happened,” Caleb explained, but his eyes moved away from her. “We just both decided it was best if we ended it.” There was a threat of tears somewhere, and he tried to throw up a roadblock against them. But a few still managed to inch down his face. “It was for the best.” He said this with some strength, because it was of course, the truth.
Dorothy sighed and reached across the table. Caleb expected some kind of melodramatic slap, perhaps a toss of her drink into his face, like some soap opera. But all she did was hand him a napkin and purposefully look away from his tears. “Clean yourself up,” she told him, and while there was still an edge there, it had softened significantly.
Caleb wiped at his face and tossed the napkin aside. “You don’t usually care about my relationships anyway. When Jason left me, you were ready to throw a party.”
“I did, actually,” Dorothy said with a slight smile. “Just a small gathering of close friends. Some champagne and finger sandwiches.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No, dear. None of this is funny."
“So why do you care so much?,” Caleb demanded of her. He looked around the restaurant, as though someone might be eavesdropping. Like anyone cared about his broken heart.
“I liked him,” Dorothy said simply. She took a sip of her tea and sighed. “And I could tell that he was good for you. It’s strange, really. You’ve never looked more tired or beat up than when you were with him; but there was something different about you. Something, kinder.”
Caleb tried to think of something to say, but was left speechless. She was right of course, Felix had been the best thing that had ever happened to him. Nightmares and visions aside, the man had filled his life with a wild kind of joy.
“Did he handle the breakup well?”
“We both decided...”
“Oh, please,” Dorothy dismissed, rolling her eyes and jabbing her pointed nail in his direction once more. “There has never been a mutual breakup in the history of mankind, Caleb Bennett. And if through some miracle you managed to achieve one, you wouldn't be sitting here crying and miserable right now.”
“He handled it... fine,” Caleb muttered. He thought of that note, stuck through the strings of Felix’s guitar. Thought of how much power and passion and horrible sorrow his words had conveyed. You have loved me and touched me and been inside of me. And you cannot forget me, Felix had written. And of course he was right. There was no way he would ever be forgotten. It was easy to imagine there would never be a moment in which Caleb did not ache desperately for him.
“I don’t pretend to understand you,” Dorothy murmured, fingers tented beneath her chin. “But I think that I do, sometimes. You love that boy, I can see that written all over your face. So tell me the real reason why you ended it. What could make you send someone you loved so much away?”
“I couldn’t protect him.” Caleb had expected the words to come haltingly, but they flowed past his lips effortlessly. “There was no way that I could, and what I couldn’t protect him from...” Here the words failed him, and he looked down at his plate.
There was a light stroke against his hair. “That’s your problem. You’ve always been worried about protecting everyone. You’ve always tried so hard to keep everyone safe; but sooner or later, people have to take care of themselves, Caleb.” She smiled, “Isn’t that what you wanted to tell me? That I have to let go? So do you. You have to let go of trying to be the hero.”
His mind drifted to that long, ragged scar that had materialized on his lover’s stomach. He tried to release the image, but it proved impossible. Felix had been intent on ignoring the disfigurement, if it meant that he could stay; but Caleb could not get past it. The torture of his own body had been one thing, but he could not stand by while the man he loved was hurt.
“I’m not trying to be a hero,” he explained to his sister. The waiter returned and interrupted their conversation, however. Caleb looked into his flirty eyes and only felt tired. Those eyes were pretty, but they were not the deep, black stare he had fallen so helplessly into. The man left them, and Caleb looked to Dorothy. “I was trying to do the right thing, by both of us. I want you to understand that. I didn’t want to hurt him.”
“I understand that. I understand that you wanted to do the right thing, though honestly, I don’t understand why the right thing involved breaking up with such a sweet boy. But I can tell that you don’t want to talk with me about it, and that’s fine. I just hope that you did the right thing.” Her eyes shifted down to her hands, perhaps lingering on the golden band around her finger. “Sometimes what we think is right is completely wrong.”
Caleb couldn’t help but think of what Felix had said about his sister. About her having a little poet that she spent her time with. A man with strong hands and gentle eyes, Felix had said. At the time, Caleb had thought the man was daydreaming, having fantasies about the rich older woman he had been dazzled by.
But there was something about Dorothy that made him realize Felix had been right. She was in love with someone, and it wasn't her husband. And she was tortured by it.
He reached across the table and touched her hand. “I hope I’m not wrong,” Caleb told her gently, “For both of our sakes.”
If he was wrong...
There would be no salvation for him or his music man.
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
He was hideously drunk. But not so drunk that he couldn’t realize it. Despite his condition, his grandfather poured him more whiskey and pushed his glass closer. “Drink up, hijo.”
Felix rolled his head loosely and fixed the old man in bloodshot eyes. Those eyes looked far older than they had only days earlier. “No mas,” Felix groaned, “I’m done.”
“Mm, a lightweight,” Vicente observed, and he chuckled as Felix downed the shot of whiskey and slapped the glass down on the table. The past two days had been a blur of drinking; he had tried to shut out the pain in his heart, but to no avail. When he laid down at night, he swore he could feel his man against him, could smell the spiciness of his cologne and the tickle of his curls on his skin.
The drinking didn’t help of course, it only deepened his misery, seemed to make it grow teeth. But he was far too dazed for the pain to bite down with much intensity. The sadness only rolled over him like a soft wave.
“Ah, why is love so awful, abuelo?,” Felix asked in a thickly accented slur, head tipping against his shoulder and eyes falling to half-mast.
“Love is many things,” Vicente murmured to his grandson, sitting back in his chair and lighting a cigar. He puffed thoughtfully for a moment before sending a plume of vanilla scented smoke into the air. “Least of all awful.”
“No, no,” Felix corrected, “Love is awful. Mama loved me, and she hurt me. And Caleb...” Felix drunkenly teetered forward in his chair and slammed his hands on the table between he and his grandfather. His eyes were intense, but deeply wounded and childish. “Why is it always so awful to me?”
“Sometimes love is cruel,” Vicente agreed with some hesitation, “But it is always worth the risk we take. Tell me, do you regret what you had with him?”
Despite his surprise - though minimal in his inebriated state - of his devout Catholic grandfather's mention of his relationship with a man, Felix felt no reluctance. “No.”
“Are you better for having known him?”
A tear managed to break through his drunken numbness, crawling down his cheek. “Yes.”
“Then love is not awful.”
“I wanted to stay with him,” Felix murmured, his head leaning forward onto the table. He thought of Caleb on that beach, that more than anything seemed to plague him. When they could not get enough of each other, and the hot days and nights blended together into a hurricane of sexual frenzy. He thought of him on that beach in the nighttime, looking up at the stars and smiling faintly when Felix had philosophized that they burned just for them.
“I’ll bet they do,” the man had said in his low, throaty rumble. And Felix had known that there could never be another voice that would ever make him feel that way. Just the simple thunder of his tone had been enough to melt him, and Felix could not hope to ever be whole again.
“I wanted to stay with him forever,” Felix whispered, and the darkness finally swallowed him, pulled him down into uneasy dreams.
Vicente smiled sadly and slowly lifted himself from his chair, moving to Felix and draping him in his coat. He leaned over his grandson and pressed a kiss against his temple, stroking the black silk of his hair back from his forehead.
“Love is never what we think it will be,” Vicente whispered to him. “And it is not so easy to kill. He’ll come back for you.” The old man straightened and swung his cane threateningly at the air. “Or I’ll whollup him.”
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
Felix awoke with a start several hours later. His head was pounding and his mouth was horribly dry and tasted like both the floor of a bar and the bottom of an ashtray. None of these things registered with him, what did catch his attention were the three slashes on his arm.
Blood lay dried and tacky on his skin. The cuts themselves were shallow and non-threatening, but the pain that radiated up his arm before abruptly dissipating was alarming.
Head full of bells and belly churning with alcohol, Felix stumbled through his hangover to the phone.
“...Hello?” The voice was slow and small, but not because of any hesitance on account of the hour.
Despite his fear and the lasting remants of his earlier drinking, Felix was immediately and powerfully weakened by that voice. He sagged against the wall and whispered to him. “Amante.”
“Felix?” Caleb could hear both the unease and deep relief in the blonde’s voice. “Wh-what’s the matter?”
“Were you dreaming about me?”
Silence on the other end of the phone. But eventually, Caleb did answer him. “Yes.”
“What did you dream?,” Felix questioned, looking down at the cuts on his arm dazedly.
“You... You were being cut.”
“On my arm.”
Felix could almost feel the man start from the words, listened to the quiet of his gasp on the other end of the call. “How did you know that?,” he finally asked. “Psychic feelings again, babe?” Somehow, the petname did not sting as Felix had feared, but only warmed him in a way that was quite startling.
“No. They’re right here. I’m looking at them.”
“No,” Caleb almost sobbed, “No, no.”
“I think you’d better get over here, love,” Felix told him. “You were trying to save me by sending me away. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to work.”
“Felix,” Caleb whispered, and the sound of him crying broke the man in a way he could not describe. “I can’t come and see you. I can’t make it worse, I...”
“Come here to me,” Felix whispered to him. His mind felt sharp and clear, and his body was suddenly very warm. For Felix, all thoughts drifted towards that beautiful blonde with his lovely eyes and hard body. “Come here to me, Caleb.”
“No, I can’t,” Caleb told him, a little forcefully this time. But Felix could hear the weakness, he knew it well. There was nothing about his man he did not know, nothing that he could not tell from the tiniest tremble in his voice.
“I don't care about these cuts,” Felix told him. “I used to get hurt worse playing hopscotch at the playground. What I do care about is you, amante. I want to see you. I need to see you. I can't stand being without you. So come here to me.”
“Felix---”
“You’re not saving anyone,” Felix told him. “All you're doing is running away from everything. I have a lot of patience, querido, but I refuse to be treated like some delicate, fragile flower. Get over here.”
Caleb sighed heavily into the phone.
“Fine.”
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
There were no words.
He entered the bookstore, sleepy and dark, and found Felix there. And the fear and horror and uncertainly drifted away like some awful storm cloud. He fell against him and felt the power of his mouth, and found himself desperately running his hands over him. It felt to Caleb they had been apart for a lifetime, not just forty-eight hours.
Felix’s hand unbuttoned Caleb’s jeans and pushed them low on his hips, his body winding backwards slowly. The blonde engulfed his mouth in a kiss, and found himself on his back, across the table. Empty bottles clattered to the carpeted floor, and the room smelled strongly of alcohol. Actually, Felix’s mouth tasted like the stuff.
But Caleb let none of that bother him. He moved into Felix’s mouth with sensuous strokes of his tongue, feeling his lover grind down eagerly against him. When he attempted to form some kind of protest on his lips, Felix looked down at him with his eyes on fire and roughly pulled off the blonde’s pants.
“Felix---”
“Shut up, Caleb,” Felix murmured, not at all unkindly. His own trousers were soon removed, and Felix placed himself between Caleb’s spread thighs. “Ah, I missed you so much. Just shut up and make love with me, Caleb Bennett.”
Caleb groaned and tilted his head back, feeling that hot, alcohol tinged mouth roughly linger at his throat. He was bitten and kissed, and he gripped Felix’s arm, listening to the man's breath of pain.
Caleb’s eyes flicked to the wounds on his forearm, belly cramping painfully with frozen fear. But he was melted by those lips and that warm, semi-nude body bearing down on him.
“Felix, Goddammit...”
“Still the same,” Felix purred, as he pushed inside of his lover with one strong roll of his hips. His throat rumbled with a groan as Caleb swallowed him, his head bowing against the blonde's shoulder. Felix felt strong hands grip him, and a strong body rise up against him, eager for him now.
“Did you find my note, lover?,” Felix whispered into Caleb’s ear, voice low and breathy.
“Ah, yeah,” Caleb returned shakily, gripping the musician’s ass and meeting his thrusts desperately. “Felix, yes,” Caleb cried out, and there was something dangerously close to a sob in his outburst, “Yes, yes. Right there.”
Felix nudged his face gently into Caleb’s jaw. And Caleb felt the rough brush of his stubble against him. For some reason, this sparked a tangle of emotions inside of him, the most prominent of these being sorrow.
How had he thought he would be able to live without this man?
Everything seemed to crash down upon him like some unstoppable ocean tide. The past few months seemed to converge inside of him, filling him with an exhaustion he had never known. And yet Felix was there, loving him and being sweet to him with his body and mouth. The horrible realization that Felix could not be saved, that neither of them could be saved, counterbalanced the sweetness and made it almost painful.
They could not be together, and Caleb understood that now. But it was not a matter of sending Felix away, or keeping him at arm's length.
Caleb knew now what he had to do; and the terrifying reality of it was almost too much to bear. But when he looked up and met those onyx eyes, he knew that there was no other choice.
He kissed Felix with trembling lips and let the love carry him away. When his lover filled him, Caleb cried out, lost in the ecstasy and the torture and the exquisite pain.
It would be their last night together.
It would be Caleb's last night.
Rating: NC-17; sexuality and sensuality, nudity, violence, disturbing imagery
Been a while? That's because my internet has been a jerk lately and refuses to stay connected. Through the grace of God, or the deity of your choosing, it's letting me on now. So here's Chapter Seventeen of Vestige! <3 Word count, not sure.... I had this written out on my other laptop, but it will not connect to the router here.... so I managed, barely, to send this to myself via email. Unfortunately, when I tried to paste it to works, it crashed.
If you wanna count, be my guest. xD
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Chapter Seventeen
“You what?”
He cringed from the sharp edge in her voice, feeling slightly silly, but a little scared of her regardless. “We broke up. It... It wasn’t working out between us.”
“You told me not two weeks ago that he wasn’t like any other man you’ve ever been with,” Dorothy snapped. She pointed at him seriously, her eyes glinting with cool fire; Caleb had seen the look many times. She was close to striking him. He thought they had both outgrown such childish things, but Dorothy seemed dangerously close to reaching across the table and backhanding him. “I recall you saying ‘There was nothing before him.’ So tell me what happened.”
But of course he couldn't do that. A woman like her would never understand, would never let herself understand. She closed herself to such spiritual notions. She was deeply rooted in reason and what could be touched; she needed something tangible in which to place her faith.
“Nothing happened,” Caleb explained, but his eyes moved away from her. “We just both decided it was best if we ended it.” There was a threat of tears somewhere, and he tried to throw up a roadblock against them. But a few still managed to inch down his face. “It was for the best.” He said this with some strength, because it was of course, the truth.
Dorothy sighed and reached across the table. Caleb expected some kind of melodramatic slap, perhaps a toss of her drink into his face, like some soap opera. But all she did was hand him a napkin and purposefully look away from his tears. “Clean yourself up,” she told him, and while there was still an edge there, it had softened significantly.
Caleb wiped at his face and tossed the napkin aside. “You don’t usually care about my relationships anyway. When Jason left me, you were ready to throw a party.”
“I did, actually,” Dorothy said with a slight smile. “Just a small gathering of close friends. Some champagne and finger sandwiches.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No, dear. None of this is funny."
“So why do you care so much?,” Caleb demanded of her. He looked around the restaurant, as though someone might be eavesdropping. Like anyone cared about his broken heart.
“I liked him,” Dorothy said simply. She took a sip of her tea and sighed. “And I could tell that he was good for you. It’s strange, really. You’ve never looked more tired or beat up than when you were with him; but there was something different about you. Something, kinder.”
Caleb tried to think of something to say, but was left speechless. She was right of course, Felix had been the best thing that had ever happened to him. Nightmares and visions aside, the man had filled his life with a wild kind of joy.
“Did he handle the breakup well?”
“We both decided...”
“Oh, please,” Dorothy dismissed, rolling her eyes and jabbing her pointed nail in his direction once more. “There has never been a mutual breakup in the history of mankind, Caleb Bennett. And if through some miracle you managed to achieve one, you wouldn't be sitting here crying and miserable right now.”
“He handled it... fine,” Caleb muttered. He thought of that note, stuck through the strings of Felix’s guitar. Thought of how much power and passion and horrible sorrow his words had conveyed. You have loved me and touched me and been inside of me. And you cannot forget me, Felix had written. And of course he was right. There was no way he would ever be forgotten. It was easy to imagine there would never be a moment in which Caleb did not ache desperately for him.
“I don’t pretend to understand you,” Dorothy murmured, fingers tented beneath her chin. “But I think that I do, sometimes. You love that boy, I can see that written all over your face. So tell me the real reason why you ended it. What could make you send someone you loved so much away?”
“I couldn’t protect him.” Caleb had expected the words to come haltingly, but they flowed past his lips effortlessly. “There was no way that I could, and what I couldn’t protect him from...” Here the words failed him, and he looked down at his plate.
There was a light stroke against his hair. “That’s your problem. You’ve always been worried about protecting everyone. You’ve always tried so hard to keep everyone safe; but sooner or later, people have to take care of themselves, Caleb.” She smiled, “Isn’t that what you wanted to tell me? That I have to let go? So do you. You have to let go of trying to be the hero.”
His mind drifted to that long, ragged scar that had materialized on his lover’s stomach. He tried to release the image, but it proved impossible. Felix had been intent on ignoring the disfigurement, if it meant that he could stay; but Caleb could not get past it. The torture of his own body had been one thing, but he could not stand by while the man he loved was hurt.
“I’m not trying to be a hero,” he explained to his sister. The waiter returned and interrupted their conversation, however. Caleb looked into his flirty eyes and only felt tired. Those eyes were pretty, but they were not the deep, black stare he had fallen so helplessly into. The man left them, and Caleb looked to Dorothy. “I was trying to do the right thing, by both of us. I want you to understand that. I didn’t want to hurt him.”
“I understand that. I understand that you wanted to do the right thing, though honestly, I don’t understand why the right thing involved breaking up with such a sweet boy. But I can tell that you don’t want to talk with me about it, and that’s fine. I just hope that you did the right thing.” Her eyes shifted down to her hands, perhaps lingering on the golden band around her finger. “Sometimes what we think is right is completely wrong.”
Caleb couldn’t help but think of what Felix had said about his sister. About her having a little poet that she spent her time with. A man with strong hands and gentle eyes, Felix had said. At the time, Caleb had thought the man was daydreaming, having fantasies about the rich older woman he had been dazzled by.
But there was something about Dorothy that made him realize Felix had been right. She was in love with someone, and it wasn't her husband. And she was tortured by it.
He reached across the table and touched her hand. “I hope I’m not wrong,” Caleb told her gently, “For both of our sakes.”
If he was wrong...
There would be no salvation for him or his music man.
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
He was hideously drunk. But not so drunk that he couldn’t realize it. Despite his condition, his grandfather poured him more whiskey and pushed his glass closer. “Drink up, hijo.”
Felix rolled his head loosely and fixed the old man in bloodshot eyes. Those eyes looked far older than they had only days earlier. “No mas,” Felix groaned, “I’m done.”
“Mm, a lightweight,” Vicente observed, and he chuckled as Felix downed the shot of whiskey and slapped the glass down on the table. The past two days had been a blur of drinking; he had tried to shut out the pain in his heart, but to no avail. When he laid down at night, he swore he could feel his man against him, could smell the spiciness of his cologne and the tickle of his curls on his skin.
The drinking didn’t help of course, it only deepened his misery, seemed to make it grow teeth. But he was far too dazed for the pain to bite down with much intensity. The sadness only rolled over him like a soft wave.
“Ah, why is love so awful, abuelo?,” Felix asked in a thickly accented slur, head tipping against his shoulder and eyes falling to half-mast.
“Love is many things,” Vicente murmured to his grandson, sitting back in his chair and lighting a cigar. He puffed thoughtfully for a moment before sending a plume of vanilla scented smoke into the air. “Least of all awful.”
“No, no,” Felix corrected, “Love is awful. Mama loved me, and she hurt me. And Caleb...” Felix drunkenly teetered forward in his chair and slammed his hands on the table between he and his grandfather. His eyes were intense, but deeply wounded and childish. “Why is it always so awful to me?”
“Sometimes love is cruel,” Vicente agreed with some hesitation, “But it is always worth the risk we take. Tell me, do you regret what you had with him?”
Despite his surprise - though minimal in his inebriated state - of his devout Catholic grandfather's mention of his relationship with a man, Felix felt no reluctance. “No.”
“Are you better for having known him?”
A tear managed to break through his drunken numbness, crawling down his cheek. “Yes.”
“Then love is not awful.”
“I wanted to stay with him,” Felix murmured, his head leaning forward onto the table. He thought of Caleb on that beach, that more than anything seemed to plague him. When they could not get enough of each other, and the hot days and nights blended together into a hurricane of sexual frenzy. He thought of him on that beach in the nighttime, looking up at the stars and smiling faintly when Felix had philosophized that they burned just for them.
“I’ll bet they do,” the man had said in his low, throaty rumble. And Felix had known that there could never be another voice that would ever make him feel that way. Just the simple thunder of his tone had been enough to melt him, and Felix could not hope to ever be whole again.
“I wanted to stay with him forever,” Felix whispered, and the darkness finally swallowed him, pulled him down into uneasy dreams.
Vicente smiled sadly and slowly lifted himself from his chair, moving to Felix and draping him in his coat. He leaned over his grandson and pressed a kiss against his temple, stroking the black silk of his hair back from his forehead.
“Love is never what we think it will be,” Vicente whispered to him. “And it is not so easy to kill. He’ll come back for you.” The old man straightened and swung his cane threateningly at the air. “Or I’ll whollup him.”
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
Felix awoke with a start several hours later. His head was pounding and his mouth was horribly dry and tasted like both the floor of a bar and the bottom of an ashtray. None of these things registered with him, what did catch his attention were the three slashes on his arm.
Blood lay dried and tacky on his skin. The cuts themselves were shallow and non-threatening, but the pain that radiated up his arm before abruptly dissipating was alarming.
Head full of bells and belly churning with alcohol, Felix stumbled through his hangover to the phone.
“...Hello?” The voice was slow and small, but not because of any hesitance on account of the hour.
Despite his fear and the lasting remants of his earlier drinking, Felix was immediately and powerfully weakened by that voice. He sagged against the wall and whispered to him. “Amante.”
“Felix?” Caleb could hear both the unease and deep relief in the blonde’s voice. “Wh-what’s the matter?”
“Were you dreaming about me?”
Silence on the other end of the phone. But eventually, Caleb did answer him. “Yes.”
“What did you dream?,” Felix questioned, looking down at the cuts on his arm dazedly.
“You... You were being cut.”
“On my arm.”
Felix could almost feel the man start from the words, listened to the quiet of his gasp on the other end of the call. “How did you know that?,” he finally asked. “Psychic feelings again, babe?” Somehow, the petname did not sting as Felix had feared, but only warmed him in a way that was quite startling.
“No. They’re right here. I’m looking at them.”
“No,” Caleb almost sobbed, “No, no.”
“I think you’d better get over here, love,” Felix told him. “You were trying to save me by sending me away. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to work.”
“Felix,” Caleb whispered, and the sound of him crying broke the man in a way he could not describe. “I can’t come and see you. I can’t make it worse, I...”
“Come here to me,” Felix whispered to him. His mind felt sharp and clear, and his body was suddenly very warm. For Felix, all thoughts drifted towards that beautiful blonde with his lovely eyes and hard body. “Come here to me, Caleb.”
“No, I can’t,” Caleb told him, a little forcefully this time. But Felix could hear the weakness, he knew it well. There was nothing about his man he did not know, nothing that he could not tell from the tiniest tremble in his voice.
“I don't care about these cuts,” Felix told him. “I used to get hurt worse playing hopscotch at the playground. What I do care about is you, amante. I want to see you. I need to see you. I can't stand being without you. So come here to me.”
“Felix---”
“You’re not saving anyone,” Felix told him. “All you're doing is running away from everything. I have a lot of patience, querido, but I refuse to be treated like some delicate, fragile flower. Get over here.”
Caleb sighed heavily into the phone.
“Fine.”
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
There were no words.
He entered the bookstore, sleepy and dark, and found Felix there. And the fear and horror and uncertainly drifted away like some awful storm cloud. He fell against him and felt the power of his mouth, and found himself desperately running his hands over him. It felt to Caleb they had been apart for a lifetime, not just forty-eight hours.
Felix’s hand unbuttoned Caleb’s jeans and pushed them low on his hips, his body winding backwards slowly. The blonde engulfed his mouth in a kiss, and found himself on his back, across the table. Empty bottles clattered to the carpeted floor, and the room smelled strongly of alcohol. Actually, Felix’s mouth tasted like the stuff.
But Caleb let none of that bother him. He moved into Felix’s mouth with sensuous strokes of his tongue, feeling his lover grind down eagerly against him. When he attempted to form some kind of protest on his lips, Felix looked down at him with his eyes on fire and roughly pulled off the blonde’s pants.
“Felix---”
“Shut up, Caleb,” Felix murmured, not at all unkindly. His own trousers were soon removed, and Felix placed himself between Caleb’s spread thighs. “Ah, I missed you so much. Just shut up and make love with me, Caleb Bennett.”
Caleb groaned and tilted his head back, feeling that hot, alcohol tinged mouth roughly linger at his throat. He was bitten and kissed, and he gripped Felix’s arm, listening to the man's breath of pain.
Caleb’s eyes flicked to the wounds on his forearm, belly cramping painfully with frozen fear. But he was melted by those lips and that warm, semi-nude body bearing down on him.
“Felix, Goddammit...”
“Still the same,” Felix purred, as he pushed inside of his lover with one strong roll of his hips. His throat rumbled with a groan as Caleb swallowed him, his head bowing against the blonde's shoulder. Felix felt strong hands grip him, and a strong body rise up against him, eager for him now.
“Did you find my note, lover?,” Felix whispered into Caleb’s ear, voice low and breathy.
“Ah, yeah,” Caleb returned shakily, gripping the musician’s ass and meeting his thrusts desperately. “Felix, yes,” Caleb cried out, and there was something dangerously close to a sob in his outburst, “Yes, yes. Right there.”
Felix nudged his face gently into Caleb’s jaw. And Caleb felt the rough brush of his stubble against him. For some reason, this sparked a tangle of emotions inside of him, the most prominent of these being sorrow.
How had he thought he would be able to live without this man?
Everything seemed to crash down upon him like some unstoppable ocean tide. The past few months seemed to converge inside of him, filling him with an exhaustion he had never known. And yet Felix was there, loving him and being sweet to him with his body and mouth. The horrible realization that Felix could not be saved, that neither of them could be saved, counterbalanced the sweetness and made it almost painful.
They could not be together, and Caleb understood that now. But it was not a matter of sending Felix away, or keeping him at arm's length.
Caleb knew now what he had to do; and the terrifying reality of it was almost too much to bear. But when he looked up and met those onyx eyes, he knew that there was no other choice.
He kissed Felix with trembling lips and let the love carry him away. When his lover filled him, Caleb cried out, lost in the ecstasy and the torture and the exquisite pain.
It would be their last night together.
It would be Caleb's last night.