Nothing But Grace
I want to make sure Hatori doesn't know what hit him. Hatori-san with his demeanor cold as snow, face cool as ice, so indifferent to those who touch him any which way but that way. He glares like sunlight on snow crystals, so bright it hurts the eyes, aching from the back and shooting forward like a warning from the brain. Don't look or you will be blinded. Don't look or you'll see the glimmer and glitter, the forbidden beauty that can never be embraced without being destroyed.
I don't care how he melts or where. All I know is that I want him liquid, boiling into steam, evaporating into mist.
I'm sure he can see it coming. He knows me well by now. The cunning gleam in my eye, the promise of mischief to come. His stethoscope is against my bare breast bone, sliding across my heart and I think maybe he can hear my desire to clutch him in my hands till he runs between my fingers milky clear. But his eyes are ever trained on my chest, lidded and listening to the faint murmur of my heartbeat. I am smiling at him, admiring the shape of his face – the sculptured cheekbones and the clean shave, the reflection of soft evening light against his hair and the shape of his eyes as he looks at me and sees nothing.
He can see my smile without looking at me. It's plain in the purposeful way he doesn't look at my face when he stands back and unhooks his stethoscope from his ears. I have been there before. I know the looks he can give. But not on this day. Doesn't matter. Because I will see him a puddle before he leaves. And I will see myself in that puddle, who I truly am reflected in his reality.
"Your lungs sound better," he comments flatly, leaving me to readjust my robes as he turns to make note of this in my chart. I have to stop him before he can get his back to me. Taking hold of his wrist, I pull myself up from where I sit on my bed. He's so strong and so sturdy, like a big tree, with branches and boughs thicker than my own body that can only break under lightning strike. Some force of nature beyond his control. I turn him to face me, running my hands up the front of his fine linen shirt, fingers curving up his throat and into his hair, pulling him down to kiss me full on the mouth. A hot kiss, open-mouthed and wet and begging for him, my tongue slipping so easily into his mouth to entice him with my taste. It's a shock, even though he isn't surprised, even though he's rigid and does not react for several seconds; soon he's breaking under pressure, and I can practically hear the snapping and cracking of his resolve as his arms move around me, not touching but hovering in an awkward semi-circle. To embrace or push away. He lands somewhere in the middle, hands gripping my upper arms tight, not moving as he reluctantly returns my kisses, warm mouth drawing against mine, harder and harder, until I'm sure my delicate skin will bruise. It's happened before. It can't be helped, and on those days when he apologizes for staining my lips blue, I only kiss him until he can't apologize anymore.
Ah, but it works. He can't stand up to my lightning.
My hands are swift, fluttering like birds down his shirt, unbuttoning buttons faster than he can take a breath, removing the tail from his slacks. I push my hands inside, relishing his bare skin, every muscle firm as clay beneath my hands, tensing from touch. He's my opposite – perfection poured into skin, solid chest giving way to rippling stomach, the V of his groin recklessly exposed by the cut of his slacks. It brings another smile to my face, tracing its outline with my fingertips and making him bite his lip so that my tongue laps against his teeth.
And his body is so hot already, burning up, blistering, melting. I use one hand to tease a dark nipple, the other undoing his belt. I'm tempted to tie him up with it, but wanting to get to the point and not seeing a suitable hitching post nearby, I simply let it hang and go on with unbuttoning his pants. He keeps biting his lip, his only method of defense. I can't kiss him properly as long as he does that. That's fine. I didn't plan on just kissing him. I take my lips down his body instead, over his chest where I barely graze my open mouth over the previously teased nipple, down his stomach, where I revel in the shape and feel of muscle against my lips, the kind of strength and beauty I will never have. I move down, kneeling before him, and carefully extract his burgeoning erection, admiring it up close just because I know it incenses him. To see me there on my knees, looking at it, touching it just so with my fingers, comparing it in my mind to my own – I have slightly more foreskin, his is much darker and smoother, and when it's completely hard it arches upward like a katana, standing out and away, as if it's daydreaming. I rub it with both hands, slowly up and down, and he leans over me, gritting his teeth now. Ah . . . he's gotten much harder. So much more translucent. Less glaring and bright. Everything is darker now – the room as the light fades to twilight blue, his body as it's cast with shadow and flushed deep red, his eyes as his pupils dilate and fix on me, his hard-on as it swells in my hands.
Even so, even as I'm watching him melt before my eyes, he's still so amazing. He's still too painful to look at. So I look away, back to his arousal, and I brush my lips to the head, then rub my cheek against it. I brush it across my whole face, across my closed eyelids and the bridge of my nose and my slack mouth, so that he can feel my breath and lips and hair and eyelashes all giving in to him, to this thing that brings us together in the strangest way – connects us as lovers and men and family and accursed. I know he's staring at me, and I wonder what sort of heat this must make him feel, from deep in his psyche and deep in his body, me in this state of disgrace willingly accepting his power over me. I open my eyes slowly, admittedly high on this feeling – because I know I still have the control – and gaze up at him with my smallest, most cunning smile.
The first beads of precum seep from the tip, and the expression on his face is pure weakness as he can't help but let it out. He has turned to water now. I take him in my mouth and suck.
"Akito!" He grunts my name as if angry at me for what I'm doing, but how can I be blamed when he wants me to do it? His length in my mouth is so hard and sweet, so easy to swallow despite its width and length. I have my nose pushed into the gloss of curls at the base, taking him in relentless swallows, each one demanding only one thing from him. I have suffered so many foul things entering my mouth that I don't even have a gag reflex anymore, and in no instance would I ever find Hatori foul. Taking him like this is a pleasure only I want to know, making him grunt like a wild animal as he grabs my hair, so rough it's painful. He's ferocious, he's fearsome, he is the dragon taking his prize, but what he doesn't realize is that the treasure's all mine.
I sense his last deep pulses and the shudder of his thighs to be his final boiling point, and I pull away with a long, hard suck all the way up his shaft, making him yell and come just as my lips reach the head. I only catch a small amount of his orgasm in my mouth before releasing him completely, taking the rest in the face with the oddest sense of satisfaction. It almost makes me laugh, the absurdity of it, but I feel so in control of this moment – arching my neck as his come runs down my face and slithers over my throat, hot in the way of intimacy and secrets. He's jacking himself now, forcing the rest of it out as a continuous tremor passes through his body, that body like artwork or a force of nature, nothing like an ice sculpture, not even a waterfall, something beyond earthly and having reached divine. A demigod of flame, a flame too bright to behold.
It makes me not so sure I have succeeded.
Because now he's softening in his own hand, and I'm looking at him with one eye closed, face sticky and opalescent in a pale shard of twilight, licking the come from my lips. He stares at me, panting, licking his own lips and acting surprised that there's blood smeared there. He's hunched over, shirt and lab coat hanging open and loose, pants still miraculously fixed around his hips. He tucks his limp dick back within the folds of his slacks and straightens, running his hands through his hair. I wipe some of his stain from my face, licking it off my fingers, thinking I have tasted dragon's fire and no one else will ever know how sweet it is. But Hatori's not looking at me as he buttons his shirt and tucks it back into his pants. I realize that I'm seeing the ice convalescing before my eyes, even after I molded it into perfect flame . . . the flame simply freezes over.
I can't keep the disappointment from my face. Hatori throws a rag at me and tells me to clean myself up. He adds that this type of behavior isn't good for my health and to watch myself in the future.
Frozen. Solid. Opaque.
He gathers everything in his medical bag, his back to me. I just stare.
He turns to go, his long strides to the door painfully casual. He's gone.
I look down at the floor, the dark spatters of his release soaking into the cool wood. I can't see myself in them at all. I fear if I could, I would hate what I saw.
Between the tall buildings are snow coated alleys
Between us is nothing but grace
Snow rides the wind down and drives past the window
Falling all over your face
I fly out the window and then ride the wind down
You fit me into my place
You're beestung here
Start with your eyes when they eye me in twilight
Picking up pieces of mine
Tie me up with the twine in your eyelight
String me from heaven to time
You beestung me
Between the tall buildings are snow coated alleys
Between us is nothing but grace
Help me up when you hear me behind you
Falling all over the place
It's not too late
-"Beestung," Kristin Hersh