Page 52 of Angel of Thursdays

His other hand found the buttons of the blue oxford, his fingers working the first one open and the second one, and his hands were not as steady as they should have been. The buttons were standard, 11.5 millimeters, four-hole. His fingers knew buttons if nothing else in this moment, and still the third one stuck because his thumb pressed too hard and the fabric pulled instead of releasing. A quarter-millimeter deviation.

May made a half-laugh sound against his mouth, then his hand covered Cassiel’s on the button and undid it for him. The gesture was generous and terrible.

The shirt opened. May’s chest was narrow, the skin warm, a mole below the left collarbone that Cassiel’s thumb brushed over. He would put his lips there later, maybe his teeth.

Cassiel moved from the arm onto the couch cushions, May falling with him. May’s hand was on his belt.

“Bedroom,” Cassiel said.

The word came out brusque, the same tone he used when telling Peter to close the door. He heard it. May heard it too. His mouth twitched, the grin threatening to surface, and the mirth in his eyes said he’d seen the mismatch and was choosing to find it charming rather than bossy.

“Copy that,” May said.

They got up. May pulled him by the wrist—down the hallway, past the bathroom, through the red curtain into the bedroom where May dragged him onto the bed and hit the lamp.

Warm. Not 2700K—closer to 3000, maybe higher, an approximation that would have mattered an hour ago. Cassiel swallowed hard and felt his shoulders drop. The lamp was one right thing in this unfamiliar space. The bed was a queen with flannel sheets, hastily made. They were not his sheets in his apartment under his light. Everything stripped away except the person, the real right thing, pulling him down by the front of his shirt.

May started a joke. Cassiel heard the intake of breath, the setup—and then that breath and those words stalled and what came out instead was a low, unsteady exhale against Cassiel’s neck, against the cologne there, which under May’s warmth smelled like something he didn’t recognize as his own.

A few seconds later May tried again and his own breathing overrode it. Whatever the sentence was, it dissolved. Cassiel kissed him before May could try again and when he leaned back all that remained was May, breathing too fast, skin flushed.

Cassiel’s hands moved. His mouth couldn’t form language and his fingers couldn’t stop. The not-speaking was just fine. That, at least, was familiar. His hands knew how to handle small things, the tolerances, the points where pressure produced response. But May’s body was new and Cassiel’s predictions kept being wrong. His hand found a hip and the angle was off, the bone not where he’d anticipated.

May’s skin under the lamp showed scars that Cassiel had only glimpsed. The one on his left hand was familiar, one he hadn’t learned the story behind, if there was one at all. There was a longer one along the left side of his ribcage, raised and smooth, healed clean. Cassiel’s thumb found the ridge and traced it. May’s breathing changed under his thumb. The geography made sense to his hands in a way it couldn’t to his mouth. Something opened, something repaired, something closed again.

Cassiel had seen a flash of it, months ago, when May’s shirt had ridden up mid-stretch and he hadn’t been able to look away. And now he touched it freely. He stayed on the scar, because the body was telling him something now. He noted the scar’s coordinates. He would return to them.

May’s hand came to the back of his head, fingers curling in Cassiel’s hair.

“Drawer,” May muttered, then when Cassiel didn’t move immediately, reached for the drawer on the nightstand himself.

Cassiel’s hands always wanted to be doing something. The fidgeting, fixing, often deliberate, sometimes involuntary. This was far from involuntary. Cassiel poured the lube, coated his fingers as May lay back, dark eyes fixed on him.

He pressed his fingers just outside, testing. May hissed, swore, wriggled and said keep going, and so he did. One finger, then two, adjusting the angle by feel, determined to get this right. May’s stuttered breaths turned into shallow moans and Cassiel could hear nothing else.

May drew his knees up, and Cassiel moved over him. The lamp’s warmth fell across May’s shoulder and chest, the light playing at the tips of his hair, a halo around him.

“Kiss me?” May said. It sounded like a question. Cassiel answered.

The first minute was negotiation; the pace of his thrusts and May’s breaths not yet aligned, two separate cadences looking for the right downbeat. A catamaran. The word surfaced from a video he’d watched at 2 a.m.—stability produced by two hulls in parallel, the space between them structural. The space between his rhythm and May’s narrowed until they found it, locked now, the stability both immediate and startling.

May’s hip shifted, a sound pressed into the pillow that was ragged and surprised and brand new to Cassiel’s ear. He repeated the exact action with the same pressure and same angle. The sound came again, shorter, bitten off, and it made Cassiel’s hands shake. The tremor started in his right hand from too much sensation, all of it wanted. He pressed his palm flat against May’s stomach.

May waited. A hand came up to cover Cassiel’s, fingers lacing through. Then the tremor passed, and Cassiel’s hand resumed, and May’s fingers squeezed once and released.

Then fingers grabbed his wrist again. May paused; a hesitation visible only because Cassiel was calibrated to detect deviations of fractions of a second, and this was a deviation. The fingers that had been following, accommodating, mirroring, were now redirecting.

“Here,” May said, and moved Cassiel’s hand.

The redirect—May knowing what he wanted, the precision of the placement, the word stripped of every register Cassiel associated with May’s voice⁠—

Cassiel’s composure broke in stages—his breaths first, then his hands. His eyes closed. He pressed his face against May’s shoulder—the skin, the muscle, the warmth of the hollow above the collarbone, seeking the dark enclosed space he always sought when everything ran too loud, except this wasn’t overload, or it was, but it had never mattered less.

The anger was here, still, did not go away just because he was inside him, because May was around him. The precision that managed everything was failing, lived in the other room where May had said you don’t get to and Cassiel had heard it. The failure had not killed him. His hands were imprecise as his words and the person underneath him hadn’t left.

A sound escaped against May’s shoulder and Cassiel’s hips stuttered, lost their rhythm. The sound came low, pressed into skin. Cassiel would have swallowed it anywhere else. Here the walls were close enough to hold it, here where everything was graceless and urgent. He felt May’s hand tighten on the back of his neck and then May said his name—Cassiel, emphasis harsh and punched out on the el—and that voice undid the last of him.

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