conjugation
It begins like this: a sunset, an evening, sharp greenness and rose. A kiss, a whisper. A night, stumbling upon them when summer sunlight finally loses its hold.
It begins like this: the sketchbook pressing into Tom’s chest, the corner bruising the soft skin beneath clavicle; Tom’s teeth, pressing into Harry’s mouth, jaw, neck. Soft hollow of his throat. He’s just a little shorter enough that Tom has to bend just a little more.
It begins like this: footsteps in the dark, and then them, breaking apart, stumbling, coming back together. Invisible pull. Off balance. Whispers, whispered curses: soft, soft. Fuck, we need to go, come on, come on. Here. The sketchbook. Here. Take my hand. Rosebushes, gravel, grass. Everything anodyne grey. (Tom can’t see Harry’s eyes, so everythingis only what he thinks is true.)
It is very difficult, when you’re in the dark: your body, starved of one sense, compensates by reaching out with another.
Tom’s body, starved of warmth, reaches out. Nobody is blind if you touch them. Fingers tangle, and then there they are, close in the dark. Stumbling, stumbling.
They don’t go back to the dinner party. At least Harry doesn’t. He practically drags Tom away from the building and the light and the doors and whatever hapless guests-out-for-a-smoke that nearly stumbled upon them. Hand on Tom’s, knife-tight. Tom’s other hand on the sketchbook, in the way he’d hold a scalpel. The difference is little: either could cut him apart just as well.
They make it into the student residences. Ground level, there: the elevator. Lovebite, there: a shadow, purpling, the ghost of Tom’s mouth beneath Harry’s ear. He wants to dissect this, everything. The word and the meaning. Love bites. The sting of a bee, wounding, wounded. There’s something there about penetration, phallic symbolism, daggers and stabbing. But Tom’s insides have already been grasped in a fist (twined gently between unflinching fingers), and spread, exposed to thin air, in graphite and ink.
Life imitates art.
The elevator dings.
Harry fumbles with his keys, which should be something irritating when it registers but is instead charming. Whatever has happened to your steady hands, Tom wants to tease, but Harry’s hand in his is still unflinching. It is only the searching one that trembles.
They step inside the room, which is both more and less familiar than he recalls. There’s the table, the chairs, the kitchenette, the bed. All overlaid by the memory of drawing and being drawn, posing and being posed. Marked down on pages. (Now he is the one who has marked.)
They step inside the room, and Tom sets the sketchbook down on the table. Shoes and socks off: two pairs of bare feet. He leans, ever so casually, against the jamb, and says, “Now what?”
The colour is high in Harry’s cheeks. He was laughing, on the way here, but during the elevator ride abruptly fell silent. You didn’t plan for this either, Tom wants to say, something gleeful, jeering, vindictively satisfied. Something to assuage the unsteady lurching of his heart in his throat (waiting to be plucked out and dissected into pencil on paper) or the very faint tremble in his fingertips (he is no surgeon, not yet).
Harry looks at Tom, helpless, helpless in the way of someone very hungry but not yet given leave to eat. (Amusing, and fantastical, that Tom is thinking of Harry, and giving leave to.)
“I—don’t know. Have you ever—with anyone—?”
“Not to the extent you’re thinking of.”
It is very calm, when Tom says it. Matter of fact. Shameless, even, if one needed to be ashamed of this—which, depending on who you’re talking to, you would, or, alternately, be proud. He is neither. It has simply not been necessary enough to want.
(He very carefully does not think about want.)
“Oh.” Harry exhales, a jerky little puff of air; his throat bobs, and his flush deepens a little more. “Well. I mean—I have. Once or twice. But we don’t have to—it’s up to you—we can just kiss, I guess.”
“Hm.”
A beat. Tom considers this, sort of; mostly, he watches Harry watch him; draws his mouth into the little enigmatic curl that he has found serves these kinds of purposes well, and that, for some reason, comes easily now.
“I don’t want to just kiss,” Tom says, very mildly, and watches the flush in Harry’s cheeks grow darker, the faint tremor in the damp promise of his mouth. “But I would like that. To kiss. Not just.”
“Oh,” Harry says, again, and for a moment looks like he isn’t going to do anything, except for stand and stare at Tom. Which Tom would be fine with, ordinarily, except that they’ve been doing an awful lot of that—the drawings are proof enough—and, besides, it’s night.Things are supposed to happen at night that don’t involve sketchbooks.
Tom stares back.
The stillness of Harry is not quite stunned prey. More… anticipation. Hunger? Not quite yet, but close. The same look, he thinks, must be on his face. The draw before the whip crack. Where,Tom wants to say, is your bravery now?
Because neither of them might have planned this and if they’re keeping score Tom has shown his hand by kissing Harry first. This, now, is not so much about reciprocity as it is revenge. Or: there’s power in being the monument that stands still. To make people come to you. Or: if Tom thinks of desire at all, it is nearly always framed in observation.
So it is a waking dream when Tom finds himself being kissed, and he falls into it like the sea drawing clean the shore.
Harry’s lips are soft. He kisses with a gentleness rendered persistent. His hair, too, is soft, the brief glimpse of his shuttered eyelashes very dark, and he smells of night air and champagne and boy,which isn’t so much a distinct smell as the suggestion of clean skin and heat.
Their lips part. The space of a breath, there and gone in an instant. When the kiss continues—or perhaps this is their third kiss? How does one quantify kissing, in general, except as this—the press of teeth—or this—the soft slip of tongue—and this, and this, transposition, permutation of desire?
Three kisses, or four, or five. Six. Here: Harry’s breath against his teeth, his throat. Here: Tom’s teeth against his breath, his throat, and yes, the skin over his sternocleidomastoid. Here: the push and the pull, and the negotiation, and the surrender. Moon and tide and waves and sand. It should disturb him, that this, them, drives him to reach for images, flowery words, the suggestion of poetry. It does not.
If only because here is the place where they have only ever made conversation and art.
They kiss, in short, at length.
When they finally do break apart, to breathe for real, it is not by much: Tom’s back is pressed against the wall, the edge of the doorjamb digging into his spine; Harry is pressed—or pulled—very close to him, stretched up, glasses half-fogged. He takes them off and cleans them on the edge of his shirt: green eyes iris-green, another barrier removed. This act should not make Tom think of undressing, but it does.
“How do you feel,” Harry says, breathless, very low. Tom can tell that the kind of answer he expects is, perhaps, something like desirous, shamefully so,which would neither be inaccurate nor a bad assumption.
“Fine,” he says instead. “Good.”
This, given the hour, Harry’s kiss-swollen lips, and the fact that Tom can feel them both half-hard in their suit trousers, is a comically neutral response.
Harry does not look like he wants to laugh.
“Okay.” Deep breath, his glasses shoved back on. “Okay. Do you want to—I could—?”
He reaches for Tom’s trousers, which is a good sign,Tom’s skin prickles in anticipation—but then no. “I don’t want this to be a hookup,” Harry says, half-muttered. His hand trembles on the edge of the zipper. “I mean—if you want,but—”
There’s that word again. Want.Tom says, too sharply, before he can stop himself, “What do you want, then?”
“This. More. Some kind of us—we could go out—”
“I don’t need to be wined and dined—”
“This isn’t about that,I want—”
“What is it that you want?”
“You.”
They stare at each other.
Tom raises an eyebrow, half-fascinated by that one word's open temerity. How is it allowed,to admit something this openly? To say that, to someone’s face?
Harry forges on furiously. “I want—I don’t know. I want to draw you. Everything. I saw you the first time and I thought that, and I still—I keep—”
“Everything,”Tom repeats, more unsure than he’d like to admit.
“You must know how you look,” Harry says, very slow, very soft.
Yes, I do. But instead he says—and asking questions when the answer is already known is abhorrent, but he does it anyway—“Tell me.”
Harry swallows, blinks owlishly. “It’s not just about the look. It’s—it’s you.God, I can’t even—just. Just. Please.Will you take off your clothes?”
Tom has never been asked. Not, he thinks, like this. “Everything,” he says, and again the air trembles with the temerity in a single word.
Here are the articles of clothing that make up a suit—not any suit, a generalisation, but suits that are, generally, both quality and affordable, both tailored and secondhand: blazer; tie; cufflinks; shirt; trousers; boxers. His hands tremble only the faintest bit when he unknots his tie and sees Harry doing the same. A mirror that looks back, watching. Tom strips off everything, lays it on the chair where it drapes as if in a facsimile of himself.
Harry, now in trousers and shirt, collar open, is staring.
The look in his eyes is somewhere between the assessing-observational one Tom’s come to recognise when he draws, and that of, again, the starving man, as yet restrained. It feels like the barest edge of power, a cliff and the sea below, standing here bare, wearing only Harry’s gaze.
“I want,” Harry says, a confession that is also a dare, “to touch you.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Not”—an almost audible swallow—“not yet. I want to draw you first.”
“Really.Now, Potter.”
“... okay.”
Harry goes. Only because Tom has said so. (Given leave.) An intriguing possibility, that. Intoxicating. Words to Harry’s graphite on paper. Effect, meet cause, meet potential.
They meet, again, mouths and hands. Short and sharp and sweet. Burning. Tom has lost count of the number of kisses, if they have ever stopped.
Harry pulls away after a second and presses his forehead against his. “I want to do so much, you have—no idea,” he pants, into Tom’s mouth.
“I have some ideas.” Tom curls his hand around Harry’s hip. Harry, in answer, smooths the flat of his palm up along Tom’s spine.
When he reaches Tom’s nape, he cups it, protectively, and tugs.
“Come to bed.”
Tom goes.
They sit on the bed. The mattress is firm. The sheets promise unspeakable things. Harry runs his hands over Tom’s spine, shoulders, collarbones, ribs. Tom knows that should he tell him to put his hand on his neck and squeeze, he would. This knowledge is almost as satisfying as the sensation of skin on skin, the touch gentle as yet, exploratory, searching out the shapes Tom's body might hold. Taken together, it feels decadent, epicurean. One person should not be allowed this much gluttony.
(Does Harry sculpt? Tom should ask him. Later. And the thought of a later is, too, probably some kind of greed.)
“I want to touch you,” Harry whispers, again, and Tom is reminded of the boy whose bed he is in, who can cup desire in his palms and have it not curdle, and he says, quietly, “Yes.”
The hands drift lower, counting ribs and stray marks, the trail of hair that begins somewhere below his navel. Tom cannot tell if this is acclimatisation or a tease. Both seem equally likely, given the way Harry is staring at his thighs.
A hand curls around his cock, and he gasps. He has to grab Harry by the hair just before his head lowers to his lap.
“No,” he says, and watches him wilt. Corrects himself: “Not yet.”The hand around his cock squeezes. Pure tease, then. God.Their next exhales come out as matching shudders.
“Let me touch you,” he tells him. Not quite a question.
Harry obeys. It makes him both more and less real. No small thing, even for Tom, who has never settled (never dared to settle?) for anything remotely small, to reach out and unbutton his shirt the rest of the way.
White cloth shrugs off onto white sheets.
The belt, the buckle, the leather through the loops. The button and the zipper. Careful, slow, a return squeeze just because he can. The flinch-gasp of his chest, now bare; a little broader than Tom, perhaps, his breathing already less regular. Uninhibited. Harry occupies space in the world without apology or restraint. This unselfconsciousness, as he watches Tom touch him, lifts his hips to let Tom drag both his trousers and boxers down in one go—
If a thing feels real and looks real, is that not enough to make it real?
This boy, who makes want seem both enormous and enormously simple. Tom might be the most hungry person he’s ever met, and still, here he is, in Harry’s bed. Both of them revealed, explicit. Too good to be true—too real,really. Something so raw it becomes indecent when magnified. Tom can only take him in in glimpses, flashes of skin and dark hair, a scar across his ribs, shallow, vaguely reminiscent of lightning.
He traces it. Harry’s breath shudders, more. The scar curls toward his navel in a trailing afterthought. A line to unfold him, unzip, unravel. He puts his mouth to the curling edge and licks, down.
“Oh,” Tom feels more than hears Harry exhale, and now: hands in Tom’s hair, close against his scalp, tight but not pulling. The tip of his cock is a mere inch away from Tom’s mouth.
This, now, is torture, this slow and measured control, when all he wants to do is to pull Harry up against him, put his hands all over his body. But instead he lowers his head down and licks, just lightly, where the head of his cock is flushed dark pink and faintly leaking.
“Oh.”
“Mm.”
“Fuck—”
His hands tug on Tom’s hair, a sensation too solid for real pain, and Tom releases with a pop,a little reluctant. He makes a point of looking Harry dead in the eye, his mouth already a little wet. The warm colour across Harry’s cheeks spreads warmth in his own abdomen.
“Sorry,” Harry says, unsteady. “I didn’t want to—”
Which—the way he just throws around the word want,the casual prefix of didn’t.“What do you want, then?” Asking this is a balm. He could ask Harry, really, for anything. He asks for this, his desire, ripe as a vineyard grape in the summer sun. Ready to be unspooled and swallowed whole.
“You. Everything.” A helpless repetition, an echo made seductive by rawness and desperation. “I—”
He breaks off, shuddering, when Tom draws his hand up against Harry’s rabbiting heart.
“You,” Tom says, still keeping eye contact, “want to fuck me.”
Iris green brilliant against black; Harry’s pupils visibly dilate just a little more. A kind of déjà vu even if the medium is now bedsheet rather than paper.
Breathless, jerky nod.
Tom feels himself smile. He does not know what the expression will look like, before it forms; probably something satisfied, esurient.
“Show me.”
Harry keeps lube in his nightstand.
A middlingly expensive brand, the bottle half empty. Silicone, gleaming on his fingertips. Tom lies on his back, lets Harry wedge a pillow beneath his hips. A finger, then two. Slow. He has done this much before but the sensation is still nearly startling. Harry’s hands are not quite like what he’s dared to allow himself, in his past imaginings; the feel is different than watching them move on pencil on paper, than the occasional brush of fingertip on skin. There is both more and less economy of movement that Tom is used to. When he works in a third finger, curls—sparks.Tom’s back arches. Before he can stop himself, he lets out a low sound.
Harry’s face shifts. This Tom can easily read: desire, delirious. As if he’s the one being touched. He wants to ask Harry what he thinks of him, whatever the answer will take in the form of destruction.
“Are you—can I,” Harry says. Concern tempers the raw edges of his words, just enough so the richness of it is almost sickening. Tom wants to put his hand around his throat and squeeze.Make him stop talking, so he can just look. Or—
“Ask me.” Beg.“Tell me”—how much you want me—“exactly what you’re going to do.”
Harry’s eyes are dark. It’s not an easy thing, probably, to translate your words from want into action. Tom is pushing him, here. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
Because, despite—or because of—the wideness of Harry’s pupils, he rasps, “I’m going to fuck you.”
Tom has asked for precisely this, but still he thinks: oh.
It is easy to guard against huge things, the immensity of the moment. Only now the tiniest seconds have crept in and frozen.
Tom is made hollow and then overfull. Harry sinks in, half-inch by inch, breathing very short and sharp. His nose brushes against Tom’s neck: either of them could turn, mouths already open, and bite.
The room wavers, too-sharp, hazy. Condom wrapper, strewn carelessly by the lube, a sight at once mundane and titillating and distinctly unsexy. Heavy breathing, regular in irregularity, bizarrely cliché. Muscles Tom didn’t know existed except in his textbooks strain and then ache. When it comes down to it, everything you know resides in flesh.
He’s glad that there are no mirrors in sight: he prefers, whenever able, to look as put-together as he can. This is almost the opposite. There’s something distinctly undignified in this, the wetness, the sounds, the faint sticky trails on his thighs, his stomach. Tickle of wiry hair against his skin. He thinks, absurdly, incoherently, of feathers.
And yet when he looks at Harry—really looks, forcing the obscenity of it into focus—there’s also some distinct kind of beauty. Something base, more dirt than rawness, but fundamental all the same. He sits up and pushes Harry backward, against the wall. A stray pillow resists and then flumps off the bed. It is the only thing that protests.
“You never really told me how I look,” Tom says, and rolls his hips down against Harry for emphasis. He’s so hard the head of his cock taps against his abdomen every time he moves.
A jagged gasp, humid against Tom’s jaw.
“Tell me.”
“I—oh, god. Beautiful. Too—too perfect to be touched.”
Perfect.The word startles, sharp, fine, a clean knife blade, and Tom relishes it. He rewards Harry by increasing the pace, just slightly. Runnels of sweat mark his torso, now, just beneath smudges of fingerprints and teeth.
“And yet you’re touching anyway,” he says, keeping his voice steady, just to get a rise out of him.
“I—wanted. I want to.”
“And you got what you want.”
“More,” Harry pants, and jerks up into Tom, warm palms trying to find purchase on his hips.
“More?”
“It’s more than I imagined—that you’d give me—you feel really good,fuck—oh, please—”
Tom, breaking, reaches down a hand to his own cock, fist moving in time to their frantic rhythm. That you’d give me. He is, generally, not the giving kind. Still: this, too. That there is this shared greed. (Does greed diminish or augment, when shared?)
“And still you want more?”
“I—need—”
So. This is how it is. He has pushed Harry from want into action into need. If this is victory, it’s overshadowed by the ache of desire. He understands, suddenly, why Harry wanted to draw him. He wants to paint Harry, him with his hands and him and his hands.
Harry’s voice breaks on oh, god, please.
Tom’s wrist judders, twisting, at the head of his cock, swollen and urgent. The clench—eliciting a near-whine from Harry's throat—is involuntary and not entirely due to his own hand.
“Not yet,” he says, just to hear Harry plead again.
He does. He begs, magnificently.
Tom wants him so much his mouth hurts.
(And there: now, the both of them have said it, and it has transmuted into something done.)
His orgasm climbs the horizon and glints off the haze in Harry’s eyes. Darkness and green. The way he looks at him, or perhaps the way Tom wants to look at him, is a profane sacred thing.
Harry says Tom, please, god.Later, it will be funny, that Harry places two three-letter noun-beings next to each other separated only by this unique brand of supplication.
“Harry.” Tom, not quite able to say anything else, names him as if beloved. “Harry.”
The climax is nearly as good as its anticipation, because when he comes, Harry does too. It’s a mess. White splatters both their torsos. Harry goes very still, shuddering, and warmth trickles down his thighs.
Breaths slip away as fast as they appear.
He discovers new things.
A foreign ache in his thighs, his back. A foreign warmth next to him, after some kind of haphazard shower, which does nothing to sluice off the memory, or the lingering bruises and scent. Tom lies, half-awake, in a foreign bed, listening to Harry snore. Letting himself be willingly smothered, except this, somehow, is less strangling than he’d imagined.
He thinks about hearts and mouths and eyes and hands.
He is thinking about a particular someone, nothing in particular except of him.
The summer dark is warm, open, but Tom closes his eyes. He does not need the reality when the shape of Harry’s body is already imprinted behind his eyelids. This, he thinks, will haunt him, hidden from knowing, another secret to be tucked away to be broken down in quiet. A division, when he goes forward and looks back: not the before or the after, but the lines, stroked across, in between.
He shouldn’t be here and still he is. It’s not quite comfort, but comfortable all the same.
The morning after: summer rain. Wet warmth against windows. Tom learns new things, like the sound of Harry’s voice upon waking. He tucks away the precise shade of sleep-glazed green, the way his hair curls at the ends, giving when touched. Harry asks him what do you want for breakfast and the mundane domesticity of it softens the shape of the word want.Tom’s answer comes without unease, and he can tell Harry tucks this new knowledge away as well, readily as he slides his glasses up his nose. Lovers’ gossip, you see, is desire.
They make the most of the day. Tom sits uncovered on the unmade bed. Harry, half-distracted, makes a start on that drawing. (“This isn’t medical illustration anymore.” “Has it ever been?”)
When Tom says his name Harry looks at him, and it is simple as a prayer.