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They are, as they so often are, in Louis’s charmingly quaint townhouse when Armand finally manages to wrench their mouths apart long enough to ask, breathy and low, “are you familiar with eunuchs?”
It’s not exactly what he’d meant to say, but then asking him to put together a sentence he exactly meant to say right now feels deeply unfair. Louis pulls away far enough to look him in, if not the eyes then the face at least. One brow rises higher than the other. “Familiar?”
”The concept,” Armand says. He’s missing Louis’s mouth on his. “You know what it means.”
”Sure,” Louis agrees. He pushes their chests back together, brushes his nose against Armand’s cheek. ”Why?”
”Well,” Armand says, and then he falters. He’s had this talk only a few times: Riccardo, Bianca, Lestat. Everyone else simply found out eventually. With Louis things are delicate because they matter. He finds himself wanting to do things in stages, the careful reach of a heart for another, things done in increments, looking at each other’s faces for reassurance. He reaches for the top button of Louis’s shirt, unbuttons it. “Well.”
For a few moments Louis doesn’t react at all. His breath against Armand’s cheek, his chest against Armand’s chest. And then a stuttering breath, shaky exhale.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
A look on his face Armand doesn’t recognize, and when he takes the finger of his mind to trace over the borders of Louis’s mind he runs into a brick wall with only a few holes left in. Through the holes all he gets is surprise, and then, from somewhere deeper within something different, and he’s trying to get a hold of it when Louis finally manages to get himself under control entirely, blocks those last few holes too, wood panels and clay.
”I understand,” he says, around something pointy and thick in his throat, “if – if you don’t want me anymore.”
Louis puts a hand on his cheek. A tender look in his eyes, now, a twitch still to his mouth. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “To me. Just – just kiss me. Alright?”
”Okay,” Armand agrees, and does as he’s told. The kiss feels good, feels normal, and Armand melts into it, okay, easy enough, he’s come clean, it’s okay, everything is okay.
–
And yet they do not have sex that night, or the next, or the next, hands to themselves while they make out on the daybed, Armand’s leg between Louis’s, his hips slow and shy against it, but he pulls away before the biting and kissing degenerates into real touching. Skittish hands and thighs, Armand is used to coaxing men out of their fearful shells, but Louis refuses to allow him to assist, pulls away entirely, gives Armand a firm pat on the center of his chest.
Maddening. It’s maddening. His cock, so complicated with its connections to his brain, the rest of his body, perpetually neglected even when everything goes so perfectly for it, how he will get stiff and needy, and then Louis with vague staticy noises radiating from his poorly guarded mind pulls away, does not touch him again.
“Do you not want me?” he asks, finally, Louis’s hands smoothing down his shirt, facing the wall.
“What?”
He says these things as if the message is vague. It isn’t, which means Louis is stalling. Armand props himself up by the arm. “You do not want to undress.”
”It’s not that,” Louis denies. “Just worried about Claudia catching us is all.”
”Claudia is busy with the coven,” Armand tells him. “She knows better than to leave early.”
”Just in case,” Louis says. “Just in case.”
Armand tries to look in his head but there is nothing to look at. The white noise recedes and beyond it there is arousal, nervous energy, the feeling of shaking fingers. It could be about Claudia. He could be worried about being caught. “Fine,” he says. “That’s alright.”
”Tomorrow,” Louis offers him. He puts his hands on Armand’s waist, allows them to travel up and down, hips and ribcage, the soft swell of his chest. He pinches a nipple to make Armand arch into the touch, to make him moan softly, and then he kisses him, whispers, “come over tomorrow” right into his mouth, and Armand melts, agrees, leaves with shaking legs and palms at himself in his coffin until he gets frustrated, falls asleep still thinking about Louis scraping his teeth across a nipple, thinking tomorrow, tomorrow.
But it’s never tomorrow, is the thing. Not the next or the next or the next or the next.
–
Which – fine, Armand has experienced every reaction possible. There are only so many possible ones, after all: enthusiasm. Expectation. Fear, disgust, attraction. Predatory eyes with an open mouth, hands drawn back, him on his hands and knees to hide it: yes, something unnatural, every part of him on display, no barriers to hide the scars, the curve of the glans, the slim shaft. Some people, more educated on the physical effects beyond the immediately obvious, would take a second glance at the soft mounds of his chest, the length of his leg, nod to themselves with satisfaction, like his body was a joke the viewer was in on. Sometimes people see his body and they think something terrible happened to him, and then their desire drowns in their pity, and they retreat, pretend to want him still whilst growing increasingly disgusted, and then they leave. This is normal. He is – scared, more than anything, that it’s how Louis feels, doesn’t want it, is sick to his stomach just thinking of it, but it’s normal.
What’s not normal is this:
He tries to fall asleep but Louis, from the other side of the Seine, floods his mind without meaning to, without knowing how to, with the sensory feeling of slick skin on skin, panting breaths, thoughts of Armand’s body underneath his own. A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. Alright, he thinks, immerses himself in the fantasy of seeing himself from this perspective, imagines the mirror image of it, Louis above him, touching him with curious hands, finger over nipple, groin against groin, mouth against an unknown, the cut out shape of something he’s never seen or touched.
–
And yet they do not have sex. In Armand’s office he allows himself be pushed into the wall, allows Louis’s tongue against his ear, his hands under his shirt, his trembling body against his own, melting into the wallpaper, molten between the legs, in his belly, while Louis kneads his chest, tugs on his nipples. He mewls, whines, keens, any noise he knows how to make, and Louis crowds closer, kisses more intently, nips and then bites at his skin, and he’s hard, Armand can feel it, can feel his heartbeat in his lips, how it races against Armand’s own pulse points.
“Please,” he says, finally, “please, please.”
”I have to go,” Louis says, abrupt in a way that seems to catch himself off guard, and he leans in then, kisses Armand on the mouth, squeezes his soft chest again, a two-handed thing. “I have to go.”
And he goes. Baffled, still leaning against the wall with shaking knees, Armand watches him hurry out the door, his jacket still on the floor by Armand’s coffin. He brings two fingers to his mouth, lips slick with blood and spit. He thrusts his hips into nothing, just for the friction of skin to fabric.
An enigma, his American friend. This strange vampire.
–
And yet in the early morning hours: tight grip, thighs trembling, his voice echoing through Armand’s skull, and Armand hoping that he’s the only one listening, the only one whose ears burn as he touches himself to the echo of Louis’s pleasure.
–
“Do you not want me?” he asks, watching Louis get dressed at the foot of the bed, trembling hands pulling on a wrinkled sweater. A feeling of déjà-vu. A sticky spot on the side of his thigh, fluid seeping through two layers of fabric.
“I do,” Louis says, “I want you too much,” and then he slaps his hand over his own mouth as if he hadn’t meant to say that part out loud at all.
Armand arches a brow. “Too much?”
”Dunno,” Louis says, but he looks like he very much knows what he meant. “Just. I wanted to take it slow. Settle into it casually.”
Armand laughs. “You don’t believe in extramarital sex, Louis de Pointe du Lac?”
Louis scoffs. “Not what I meant,” he denies. His eyes flicker towards Armand, then back to the floor. “Just. It was a big deal with my last partner. Don’t want that again.”
Which Armand can understand. The demand of someone else, even when he didn’t want it, the expectations, the toy, the thing, the body –
He retreats. For a few months Armand retreats, even as he listens to Louis’s hands on his own cock, the way he calls out Armand’s name, without meaning to, hopefully without meaning to, he kisses and touches him and he does not strip, does not initiate sex, does not ask for anything, and Armand burns and burns and burns and burns, but he does not push.
–
Until:
They are – it counts as casual, to Louis, he supposes: the way they hold hands on their walks, how they kiss, Armand’s eyes closed, the flutter of lash to cheek making him feel small and delicate, how Louis holds him by the wrists to keep him from struggling, the heat of his arousal thick and hard against Armand’s body. He undoes Louis’s wool trousers, first three buttons, and Louis allows his hand into his pants, the back of his hand against his cock through the fabric, Armand’s heart hammering in his chest as he slowly strokes his knuckles over it, the bumps and ridges, the warmth, the wet spot where his tip has been resting.
Louis’s own hands are frozen on Armand’s body. Breast, cheek, an idle groping of fat, his nipple trapped between index and middle finger, Louis’s mouth falling open, eyes squeezed shut, and Armand thinks it’s going to finally happen, this time it’s really going to happen.
“I want you,” he says softly. Louis’s cock, hypnotic and tantalizing, so close, how all he’d have to do is twist his wrist and there it would be, between his fingers, another few movements to be within swallowing distance, his mouth already watering. “I want you so badly.”
But:
”Later,” Louis says. His body tenses, and then he moves his hand, all the way down from Armand’s cheek to his wrist, and he peels his hand out of his pants, tells him “I have to – I have to do something tonight.”
”Now?”
“Mm,” says Louis. He sits up. His lips are wet and swollen from the kissing. “See you tomorrow?”
”Okay,” Armand says. “Tomorrow.”
Kiss to his cheek, and then Louis leaves his side, fine, that’s fine, that’s absolutely fine.
–
Armand knows the reactions. Disgust, glee, a man wanting to eat him whole, satisfied with the proof of his power over the small body beneath. So then, what is this? Louis in his coffin miles away with his hand wrapped around his swollen cock projecting rapidly flickering images of what he thinks Armand might look like, how he might taste, how he might feel in his hand, refusing to find out for himself? Tomorrow, he thinks, squeezing his own cock, like he’s punishing it, like he’s trying to mold it into something else entirely, a clay pot, a glass bottle.
–
“Am I your first man?” he finally asks. His shirt is on the floor, too far to reach for, Louis’s hands, such a short time ago on the curves of his biceps, now searching for his own shirt.
“No,” Louis denies, his shirt already nearly covering his beautiful body again. “Why?”
”Thought maybe you were scared.”
Louis freezes. A beautiful marble statue, a painting of a saint. Armand’s head feels like it’s full of sand. “Why?”
Armand shrugs. “Well,” he says, “this is as far as we ever seem to get, no?”
”Sure,” Louis agrees. “I told you. I just want to –“
”You forget to guard your mind,” Armand interrupts him. “In coffin. I feel you.”
Louis’s mouth falls open. A flash of betrayal. “You listen to me jerk off?”
”Hard not to,” Armand says. “It’s really quite loud.”
Louis squeezes his eyes shut. Embarrassment flashes across his face. “Wish you’d told me before.”
”It’s private,” Armand says. He touches himself to it, he could share, but it doesn’t seem like the time.
“It is private,” Louis agrees. “I would’ve tried harder if I’d known.”
”You think about me,” Armand says. Back of his hand to the back of Louis’s neck. “You said you want me too much. Yet when I try to make your fantasies real you reject me.”
Louis says nothing. Armand listens to Louis’s blood in his veins, his steady breathing. “I thought maybe you didn’t want me anymore,” Armand says. “Or maybe you’re afraid of wanting me.”
“I’m not afraid of being gay,” Louis finally says. He turns his head enough to press a weary kiss on Armand’s finger. ”I’ve been thinking about.”
Armand watches his eyes close, the way his neck flexes when he swallows. “Remember what you said to me? The first time?”
Sure, Armand remembers. The way he’d fumbled into the corners of his mind for the right words and burned his fingers on the scorched remnants of higher thinking on the way through, Louis taking a minute to understand what he’d meant, and oh, he thought he’d known every reaction, but sometimes reactions blend into others, flex and mold and melt into one another, curiosity and compulsive arousal and disgust.
“Oh,” he says. A lump in his throat. Pleasuring himself to the thought of something frightening, disgusting, like he had no choice but to exorcise the thought of him in this way? Now that he’s had the time to reflect, to think about it all? “It is me, then.”
”No,” Louis says. He sounds tired, then. “No.”
“You don’t want me.” How many times has he said this exactly? Maybe it would be good to phrase it as a question, but then it feels silly now, since there’s nowhere else for them to go.
“No,” Louis denies, “no, it’s the – it’s the opposite, Armand.”
”Opposite?”
Sigh. Another sigh, and then hands on his face, “you told me something about yourself and it has consumed my thoughts ever since. I think about it – I think about it all the time.”
”Okay,” Armand says. His face feels hot. He’s not sure what to do with this. “And you – you don’t want to see? You don’t want to touch? You only want to imagine?”
Louis laughs, then. “I want to see,” he says, “I want to see and I want to touch and it is – it is uncouth, how much I want it, Armand. You –“
”Then do it,” Armand interrupts him. “Do you think I wouldn’t have liked it? If you liked what you saw? If you wanted to touch?”
”No,” says Louis, though it sounds like he wanted to say yes very badly. “I didn’t want to – I wasn’t sure. What was appropriate. If you wanted me to –”
He trails off, then. Armand’s not even sure how to feel anymore. Offended at the idea that one could only want him if they were some kind of a pervert, flattered at the idea that Louis would want him enough for it to make him feel like some kind of a pervert. Amused with the fact that he is, if anything, a pervert himself.
“You are a strange man,” he says, finally. “Louis de Pointe du Lac. Have you been worried about this for months?”
”No,” Louis says, and then, after a second, “yes.”
It feels inappropriate to laugh. Armand does anyway, a little giggle, like maybe if he’s quiet enough it won’t count. “I tell you I want you,” he says, “because I want you to touch.”
”Right,” Louis says, a little wary still. He allows Armand to kiss his cheek, his lips, his other cheek. “Makes sense.”
“Mm,” Armand hums. “Please.”
They kiss. It’s nice. Louis’s tongue, his hands on the back of Armand’s neck, Armand melting into his body, becoming smaller in a strange way, a new way, kiss, kiss, kiss.
–
A few days later in Louis’s bedroom he presses Armand into the bed and straddles his thighs.
They’ve been kissing. Armand’s mouth is swollen, tingling all over, his body warm and sensitive, already shirtless. He’s been thinking about Louis unbuttoning his pants for the past half hour, straining delicately against the front of his linen trousers, but nothing has come out of it so far except for the gentle kneading of finger to chest, the hint of tongue against nipple. And now mouth to mouth again, Louis guiding Armand all the way down, and a tremble in Louis’s hand –
“I want you,” he sighs into Louis’s mouth. “Please.”
Teeth to his lip, then tongue. Louis hums against his mouth, a teasing tone to it, a sigh in the shape of a word. “Is that right?”
His heart is hammering in his chest. Armand can feel it, can hear it, and he reaches up to put his hands on Louis’s waist, but Louis nips at his tongue, pulls away, says “put them down next to your head.”
A tremble from fingertip to shoulder. Armand whines softly, allows his arms to fall back down onto the mattress, wrist to pillow, hand to blanket. His fingertips brush against haloed out curls.
“Touch me,” he murmurs. If Louis needs permission Armand is more than happy to give it to him. A kiss to his jaw, then his neck, and then clavicle, and Armand wants to touch, too, put his hand inside of those disheveled clothes, but his hands are out of the equation now, a cruel thing to do to him. Maybe this will be the time, he thinks, maybe not, but it feels different, Louis’s hands cupping his soft hips, down to the waistband and then hesitating at the border of fabric and skin for only a moment before they meet in the center of his body.
A shiver through his body. Thigh to ankle, hip to neck, and then Louis’s hand unbuttoning his trousers, not pulling them down, trembling slightly as he traces the opening, each side of open fabric. He sighs. His brows are furrowed. His lovely eyes. Armand smiles, his wonder struck mouth frozen in shape and place, and then two fingers slip inside, softly searching, like they’re expecting something bigger than they’ll find, hovering over his hardness expectantly.
“You’re,” Louis starts saying, and then he pauses, licks his lips. His fingers tremble but they move down, closer to his body. Armand can feel his cock move on its own, a desperately eager thing, hard as it gets. “You.”
“Yes,” Armand agrees, a bit amused, but then there’s the pad of a finger, the slide of a gentle touch down the length of him, and he inhales sharply, a strained “yes, me.”
Louis does not respond. His finger touches and then there’s a second finger, a feather light touch tracing what he finds there, trying to map out the specifics of it, shape and length. Two fingers wide, he finds it, index and middle, Armand’s favorite to suck into his mouth and tongue at, bumping into the ridge of the head of his cock, flaring out gently, and then Louis inhaling deeply, pausing to imagine the anatomy of the organ underneath the fabric.
Armand expects him to move his fingers again, to meander back down to the root, or to continue up to find the slit, but he doesn’t. Two fingers at the little patch of skin, where he’s untouched and sensitive with anticipation even through the fabric, tracing and stroking, a gentle massaging circle. For a while it’s all he does, and when Armand looks Louis in the face his eyes are squeezed shut, his mouth open, breathing hard through his mouth.
“Louis,” he says. It feels good. He presses into the touch, hip and thigh, and he wants it elsewhere too, all over, wants all of Louis’s fingers and palm, oh, how he would like to have him inside of him, would like to gently shake him out of his vacant silence –
Louis shivers, and then he opens his eyes in three quick blinks. “Sorry,” he says, “can I –“
A flash of images, then, straight from Louis’s mind into Armand’s, and he knows him well enough by now to know that he’s not doing it on purpose, just his mind overflowing, spilling into the next closest one, the sight of naked skin and feeling his own hammering heart racing in his chest, Louis taking a shivering little breath, and Armand says, “yes, yes, yes.”
He likes saying yes to Louis. It’s nice. Especially when Louis hooks his fingers under the waistband of his pants and pulls them down to his ankles, and then his hands are underneath the leg of his underwear, oh, yes, he thinks, please, please, do not tease me anymore, Louis’s fingers tracing the delicate seam of thigh and hip, pulling out again, a heavy sigh, and then pulling them down, finally, finally.
Louis looks him not in the eye but somewhere close to it when he does this. “You’re beautiful,” he says, looking at his cheek, at the curve of his hand resting next to his ear. “I want you so much.”
So much it scares him, Armand thinks, and it makes his body fill with affection, with power, with fear. He smiles.
“I want you, too,” he says, and then, so very suddenly, he’s naked, Louis looming over his body with one hand hovering over where he’s straining and eager, the other on the bed by his ribcage. He wants this so much he could tremble his way into coming apart on a molecular level, DNA unspooling into little wisps of strands.
Louis doesn’t touch him right away. Armand twists his hips in a way that’s probably not subtle at all, a buck into the air, seeking any sort of contact, finding nothing, and then he whines. Louis chuckles. Armand can feel the air move right where he’s holding his hand, right there, just too far up, in a way where it’d be so easy for him to think it’s accidental, like if only he told him just a bit lower, just a bit more he might get what he’s looking for, but it’s got to be on purpose because Louis laughs again, a bit of relief in his eyes, like he still didn’t think Armand really wanted it.
And maybe he should take this personally, Louis thinking it’s bad for him to want him, Louis thinking the only reason for him to want Armand is to be fundamentally evil, bad, a terrible predatory force, but then again it’s been several seconds or perhaps even a minute of him naked with Louis so close to him but not touching him, and –
They gasp and then shiver at the same time when Louis finally lays his hand down. He catches the head and most of his shaft in the cup of his palm, a wide, warm pressure of a recently fed vampire, a simple possessive hold. “Louis,” Armand says, unsure of what else to say.
“Shh,” says Louis, though he sounds a bit scared, still. “Just – just.”
So Armand shuts his mouth. The muscles of his belly tremble under the touch. Louis’s hand goes flat, an experimental shape, and then he presses gently down, like he’s massaging his cock into his stomach, like he’s kneading dough, a fondling logic to it. He moans softly, unsure of how it feels exactly. It’s almost like how Armand touches himself when he won’t get hard: a squeezing roll of his soft penis between his fingers until he grows bored of it, no obvious endpoint to the sensation, and it feels different when he’s so stiff. The tissue doesn’t yield to the touch, but Louis doesn’t try to fight it, gets his fingers in the motion, the distinct feeling of the tip of a finger pushing into the same spot he’d been stroking absently.
“How is it?” Louis asks him. He presses his face into Armand’s chest, lips finding his nipple, not quite sucking on it. Armand’s nipples grow tight and hard on each side of his chest with the anticipation of teeth.
“It’s different,” Armand says. “Good.”
”Mm,” Louis hums into his chest. Armand can feel him hard and thick against his thigh, the wetness seeping out of the tip. The flat of his palm strokes a slow line from nearly root to the tip, back down again. He’s avoiding the root of him, Armand can tell, but he’s not going to say anything, he’s not. He wants nothing more than to reach down for Louis’s cock but his hands are still up by his head. He whines, and Louis must think it’s because of the way he’s touching him because he takes his hand away entirely, a worrisome, wretched event, but before Armand can complain he’s got fingers around his cock, a sudden grip, tight but not painful, perfect, it’s perfect.
Armand’s mouth falls open. Four fingers competing for space around his aching length, the pad of his thumb tracing the sensitive tip as the others squeeze, massage, the pit of his belly spasming wet-hot. He doesn’t usually touch himself like this, not enough room for his hand to move, not much of a point to it, but Louis is new, Louis doesn’t seem to care, strokes softly, firmly, perfect, like maybe he’s spent this whole time coming up with ways to touch him just right, the selfish man he is, the perfect, lovely man he is, the –
“Louis,” he says, but Louis does not respond, just sucks his nipple into his mouth in earnest. It sends sparks down his body, right from nipple to nipple, from nipple to his cock, blood throbbing softly all through the veins there. He keens, arches his hips into the touch, and Louis does not stop him, does not change his pace or the way he’s touching him at all, squeeze, squeeze, and he thinks he manages a drop of liquid because for a few seconds the slide of Louis’s thumb is easy and quick before it gets dry and rough again. It feels good right there, at the edge of the slit or the spongy ridges, feels good where the overlapping fingers move clumsily, out of sync with the thumb, so much sensory input at once he’s shaking with it.
It feels good. It’s difficult to feel anything but good, and a little bit of righteous anger at the fact that it took Louis so long to agree to do this, to make him feel good, to keep his hands to himself instead of putting them on Armand’s poor neglected cock, to let him stay cold and untouched –
Louis nuzzles his cheek into his chest, then, the soft flesh of it squishing and flattening underneath the pressure, tells him with his eyes closed, “I want you in my mouth.”
Armand shivers, a full body thing, Louis’s fingers stroking his length up and down, delicate and light.
“Louis,” he sighs, pushes into the touch, and Louis bites at his breast, blunt and bloodless, kisses the skin, and then he kisses down the length of his body, Armand helpless to stop him even if he wanted to, a gentle look in those still-nervous eyes, oh, his heart swells looking at him. He’s not mad at all anymore. His poor Louis, teetering at the edge of companionship, perhaps, certainly teetering at the edge of hip bone, scraping his teeth over the jut of it. Armand puts his hands underneath his own head so he doesn’t touch Louis’s shoulder at the ghost of his breath over his inner thigh, the way he sighs at the sight of him, finally getting a good look between his legs, like he’d been denying himself, another short laugh out of Armand, and then the tip of his tongue at the scar, healed and nearly luminously white in places, dark in others, tracing the place he was torn apart with worshipful licks.
It’s not sensitive there. Sometimes it hurts, when the internal scar tissue pulls taut and awkward, or when the skin doesn’t quite stretch right, but it doesn’t feel like much. It’s smooth, he knows it’s smooth now, but Armand always remembers it as rough, and wet, sometimes sunken into the flesh. Louis licks at him like he can’t stop, and it feels weird, a strange sort of embarrassment at the attention even as he watches Louis’s hips grind into the mattress in quick circles, even as his fingers trace the length of his cock again until they finally close around the glans, wet from spit he never saw transfer from Louis’s mouth to his fingers, and the slickness of it, the firm massaging motion –
Embarrassment and arousal, yes, Armand knows of it. He props himself up on his elbows to get a better look, though all he can see is the top of Louis’s head, the way his hand rests on his belly. He likes to look, sometimes. Check that the sight of it matches the feeling. His erection is starting to flag like it tends to do, but Louis says nothing, noses his way up to the root of his cock, softening right before his eyes, licks a strike up all the way to where his fingers are still working the head like a lump of soft clay. There’s a sensitive spot to the left of the glans, right underneath it, and Louis’s tongue works at it like it knows exactly where to go, makes him suck in a surprised breath, an involuntary kick of his ankle, and his cock throbs despite the softening, tries to get all stiff and ready again. It succeeds, mostly, too, Louis’s lips brushing his own fingers, the spongy softness of the head, his cock trying to make its way inside his mouth. Greedy thing, Armand thinks, and then the fingers of Louis’s other hand wrapping around the root of his cock, a few short, tight, strokes before the fingers stray down to touch his scar, right where his wet mouth just was.
“Louis,” he says. He doesn’t really know what else to say. He feels vulnerable, suddenly, and then just as he’s thinking about this, about how usually people treat his cock like an afterthought, as if it’s completely normal or as if its presence is irrelevant to the proceedings of the event, Louis takes away his fingers so he can swallow him whole, all the way to the root, easy and quick. Not much of him to swallow, and certainly not enough for it to be a struggle, but Louis makes a noise like he’s never been anything but hungry, like this is the first time he’s been full all the way, like Armand has filled a gaping hole somewhere within him, his fingers firm and insistent at the site of his nothingness, prodding and massaging as if looking for something, his lips tight around his shaft, as if there’s much more to it than there is.
He knows what he’s got. He knows what his body is, and what it isn’t, and what people like, and what is fashionable now and what was fashionable then. Louis’s eyes are closed. The tip of Armand’s cock grazes the roof of Louis’s mouth. His tongue, strong and precise, strokes the curve of his glans, the length of his shaft, the shapes of his veins. He’s been on the brink for what feels like years, Louis’s lips on the delicate strain of his cock and tongue right under the glans, swallowing tight and strong, fingers persistent and patient right underneath his bottom lip, and then the thumb of his other hand right at his hole, just where the skin changes texture, stroking slow, small circles, as if just to feel his body respond, and Armand imagines him sliding in, imagines him filling him so perfectly, claiming him with his fangs in his throat, the way he swallows around nothing, how his cheeks hollow as he sucks, and he starts shivering, and it’s pleasant, then, to know he’s going to finish this time, a buildup that ends in a release, not always the case with his body and made all the more satisfying when it happens from the rarity of it.
“Close,” he says. “Louis,” and then he can’t stop, “Louis, Louis, Louis,” as his cock grows white-hot, as the knot in his stomach tightens, as his thighs tremble, his hole clenching underneath of Louis’s fingers, and then it snaps, his body and brain, and he can hear Louis gasp as much as he can feel it at what must’ve been the barriers of his mind tumbling down at the strength of it, the overwhelming white noise, wave after wave of contracting muscle, nothing coming out of his twitching cock to the instinctive, palpable surprise of Louis, who keeps sucking until Armand pushes his head away, doesn’t take his hands away until Armand tries to haul him up so he can kiss him again, an effort that he forgets as soon as he gets a glimpse of the heavy jut of Louis’s erection between his shaking thighs.
“Inside,” Armand gasps, as much of a request as it is a plea, and he’s about to reach down to slide two fingers inside of himself but Louis catches him by the wrist.
”Won’t last,” he says, and he’s almost panicked with it, like he’s taken aback by his own body, his own desperation, and Armand wraps his hand around his cock instead, hot and heavy and thick, and he can feel it move, the way it throbs, and he’s touched enough penises in his time to know he’s not lying about lasting. He gives him a long stroke, root to tip, and Louis collapses against his side, half on his back, half on his side, a beautiful tangle of limbs and trembling muscle that Armand wants to lick over, wants his tongue in every groove. His foreskin is soft, stretched taut around the swollen girth of him, the slide of Armand’s hand easy and tight.
”Mm,” says Louis, his hips stuttering wildly underneath Armand’s hand. His cock is wet all over, more spilling from his slit with each fluttering throb. He’s beautiful. He’s lovely, and Armand is in terrible trouble, and maybe they shouldn’t have done this at all. He kisses him right on the mouth, remembering abruptly it’s what he had meant to do all along, Louis’s finger coming to rest right on the slit of Armand’s soft cock, too focused to truly trace the velvet valleys of it, his soft mouth, even with the fangs out. Armand’s hand cradling the weight of his sac, how it moves in his hold, just barely, and Louis panting into his mouth as he writhes.
“Armand,” he says, and then his hand is around Armand’s arm, his grip strong and tight, “there, there, there,” and then suddenly wet warmth, all over Armand’s hand and wrist and arm and side, Louis’s body clenching and twisting, his tongue and teeth all over Armand’s mouth, those sweet hips Armand likes to squeeze so much twitching as his balls pulse in Armand’s hand, a soft palmful, his cock throbbing like he’s desperate, burning alive, Armand taking a peek at the border of his mind for the overwhelming relief, the way his toes and the corners of his mouth have gone numb, how he’s still thinking about Armand’s body, the scars, how his cock had felt almost like a stiff cigarette in his mouth, how it’d been the most erotic thing he’d ever experienced.
It’s almost funny. He smiles, and Louis smiles back, instinctively, right against his mouth, breathing hard and ragged, Armand’s teeth and Louis’s tongue. It’s silly. It’s sweet.
“Hi,” he says finally, still smiling. Their bodies are sticky. The blankets are sticky. Armand touches the pool of drying semen with one finger. Fascinating, the texture, no matter how many times he comes across it. So viscous.
“Gross,” says Louis, and wipes it off of Armand’s finger with a mostly clean square of the blanket before he can do anything with it. He wants to protest, but Louis leans forward and kisses him instead, so he doesn’t. Tongue to teeth, tongue behind teeth, tongue to tongue, yes, much better, even with the cloud of Louis’s uncertainty above them, unsure of whether the lead up was worth it.
“It was lovely,” Armand tells him once they pull apart, and then, when it suddenly occurs to him it might be good to manage his expectations, “I don’t – every time.”
Louis’s face goes smug. “Mhm?”
“Just how it works. Or doesn’t.”
”You’re perfect,” Louis says, and he seems to really mean it too. Like he’s worried Armand might disagree, or that he’ll be in trouble for saying it.
“You,” Armand says, a barely perceptible lump in his throat, “are the most gorgeous man on the continent.”
He is. The generous swell of his buttocks, strong thigh into knee into sweet calf into the gentle curve of an ankle. The soft waves of the muscles of his arms, his delicate waist, and that smile, how he looks at Armand with his eyes half shut, the breeze of his breath across his cheek, his nose.
”Mm,” hums Louis. He reaches for Armand’s hand, laces their fingers together. “Just this continent?”
“Every continent,” he says. He goes in for a kiss, then, eyes half-shut, a bit lopsided but reciprocated, Louis’s lips wet and shiny. “Will I see more of you? Now that we’ve seen one another?”
”Oh,” says Louis. Small smile. Shy, almost. Armand considers the softness of the corner of the mouth, the cupid’s bow. “You can see as much of me as you want.”