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I am the sort of animal that needs to be held. --Aja Monet
----
The atoms in Theo’s body are acquainted with disintegration.
It’s a skeleton of loneliness, perhaps. An anatomy of leaving, maybe.
There is an energy of wrongness that thrums between him and Liam in the sheets, in the bed of someone who looks at him like he has any business knowing what it feels like to stay. So Theo runs in a pathetic imitation of the kind of running he could have done when he had a chance to leave Beacon Hills with no strings attached: he runs in a way that matters more. Leg slung through the opening of Liam’s bedroom window, the space between his thighs cut in two by the press of the sill through his sleep-rumpled jeans.
He feels when Liam’s six a.m. gaze is on him. It tempts him, always, to look up even when he knows he’ll swerve away, inevitably.
Liam is the kind of person who looks at him with questions instead of conclusions. It’s the unfortunate side effect of trusting others to have a side to their story instead of resting in the ease of assumptions. Something about that makes Theo’s insides claw themselves up, like he’s not the sort of animal that’s made to be held with such a fascination that’s more boy than scalpel.
“Please don’t leave,” Liam says one morning when he breaks the silence and the stillness of unnamed guilt and rushes instead to the windowsill to grip it with his hands like he probably wants to grip Theo’s knuckles. Maybe Theo’s just fantasizing. He developed a talent for that in the various spaces he’s occupied underground.
“I need to get to work,” Theo says. Because he has a talent at this, too. Giving answers that aren’t an answer at all.
Liam understands this. He doesn’t hate him for it. “Please don’t leave,” he says again, so Theo will drop the act.
“I’m not leaving you,” Theo whispers. “I’m coming back.”
Then Liam locks him into a promise to come back not just for him, but for his mother, too, and a meal that Theo doesn’t even want to unpack the symbolism of when he’s crouched twenty feet above the ground with his smiling shoes pressed to the shaky shingles.
Liam tells him to come through the front door, and Theo seals the deal with a kiss. And he does.
----
Liam splays his hands sometimes across Theo’s belly.
Not just when they’re lying in a casual tangle in bed, but when they’re standing, too. When Theo dismounts from his truck and crosses the flattened green to greet his boyfriend at the close of lacrosse practice, and Liam by habit pushes him away by the soft part of his stomach to steer Theo away from his own sweaty face, scrunching up his nose as he does so as if it’s Theo himself who smells.
This is what stomachs mean to Theo Raeken:
Tara tickling him to torture on the stairs till he surrendered, flannel pajama top hiking up and the burn of the woven runner coursing down his back. Wooden edges pressing into the spaces between his vertebrae. Tara blowing a raspberry against his belly button.
Surrender now, Teeder!
Never!
Michael Junior from third grade colliding the pads of his fingers with Theo’s clavicle and planting his sole against the center of Theo’s stomach so he’ll lie still, spread-eagled, in the recess dirt.
Stomach is the gloved hands of the Doctor in the center wrapping around Theo’s middle to drag him back from the bridge where his heart-to-be beat its last pulse in the water.
Stomach is lying guts up to the surgical lamp and the shadow of the Surgeon, the chattiest of the three, rasping always in an unintelligible stream of self-fascinated observations while he stroked the scalpel across the softness of Theo’s belly like an artist. Blinking eyes open and crinkling his chin downwards past the distant prickle of anesthesia to explore the way he gapes before the eyes of his new guardians. Being grateful for the presence of the straps around his wrists, even when he put up a frail struggle and screamed for the sake of screaming to let him go because it felt like the moral thing to say, because now he doesn’t know if he could rein in his morbid nine-year-old curiosity enough from reaching inside himself and interlocking his fingers with the squishy spaces between his organs.
Stomachs are knives and needles. Book logs and experiments. When he’s old enough and steeped in enough sewer psychopathy to ask: hands unbound from the operating table so they can be of use instead, holding himself apart for them to take out and put back in and sometimes teasingly rearrange.
In the present day, stomachs are the rip of the wolfsbane bullet or two or three to something vital in the middle of him and going down on his elbow with a scream because werecreatures are the kinds of idiots that don’t wear bullet-proof vests, and he in particular is the kind of idiot that after hell unlearns the art of locking the pain away into his throat.
----
In the present day, Theo doesn’t sacrifice himself on purpose.
Contrary to what Liam in his penchant for hyperbole might be inclined to believe, Theo’s basal instinct for self-preservation is hard to unground from his bones. Theo cares--about humans and human-faced animals like him now, apparently--but he also cares about nights with his ears plugged up to Mason’s Spotify and afternoons trading controllers with Alec on the grubby McCall carpet, and awkward caramel lattes with Scott and Stiles over movie debates, and graveyard visits in silence with Corey and early morning gallops in the woods with Malia. He cares about the fizz of peaches and cream soda on Liam’s taste buds. Cares about wrapping his fingers around Liam’s belt loops and pulling him close when he feels okay with wanting him. Cares about Liam’s thumbnail tracing the outline of Theo’s nose when they don’t feel the need to bicker their feelings out.
He cares about these things, enough to care about living.
So he doesn’t sacrifice himself. The bullet finds his stomach, by pure chance, just like the Doctors found him.
----
He wakes flat on his back with the pressure points of his skin warming up the icy metal beneath him. He doesn’t ask where he is, because that would be inane, like asking the ceiling of your own home or the metal of your own bed how you ended up there.
One thing that is different, though, is that he feels his spine. Every bit of flesh around it, too, no pins and needles of abstraction from the short-lived effects of anesthetics long worn thin against his chimera senses.
In the present day, he wakes thinking he is in the present of his past, with the bulbous flare of a surgical light cutting through his eyes from above and exactly three heads silhouetted against them as they bend over him.
There’s a pressure on top of him, too, a set of hands holding him open and another pulling him closed. Fire inches up his spine, reminding him of what it means for him.
Spine is cold table on flaming back. Spine is chilled linoleum pressing against shoulder blades, mouth open to face above, while Tara’s limbs drag her bugging eyes and lolling tongue toward him for punched-chest revenge.
Spine feels like unraveling from the base of one’s skeleton to the roots of the parts of him that were never his to begin with. Maybe somewhere between the third surgery and the sixteenth or the sixtieth, he’s realized that his atoms have already left him, and possibly the pores of his vertebrae are the only vestiges of a kid who hated to be called Teeder.
It’s not always the cold, for him. Sometimes, when Theo blinks and he’s not in a skinwalker prison or he’s time-jumped from the operating theater to a too-open space, it’s Liam pressing his cheek and drool against the fabric across Theo’s chest as they sway in the preserve after a run on the night of the full moon, and Liam fisting his hands at the top of Theo’s spine and then letting his exhaustion slide them down until they open and flatten against the dip of Theo’s lumbar region like the settling of the cobwebs of Theo’s consciousness.
“Scott, baby, just another minute, and then you can ease up,” a woman says above him. Theo wonders if it might be the Geneticist. She was always gentle when she spoke, but carefully so, not with this careless kind of affection.
There’s a third set of hands on him, then. They're planted on his knee because the pit where the Doctors must have opened him must be cleared by at least a foot around to give them a wide enough berth to work within. Except that Theo can't make sense of the ebb of sensation away from his skin grafting into the fingers of those foreign hands, because foreign hands have never taken pain from him before in an operation.
Snip, snip. A clatter of tools too indelicate to belong to the Surgeon. Then a man's voice, lilting yet pragmatic, offering a stash of bandages.
Theo abruptly doesn't know where he is. His spine isn't meant to lead to this scenario, with a curly-haired nurse bent over him with the last bit of suture thread between her teeth, while her werewolf son slowly uncurls his fingers from Theo's knee and Dr. Deaton murmurs supernatural dressing instructions.
How did he get here? Theo wants to ask. But his mouth has other plans and asks instead where Liam is.
"Here," Liam says quietly.
Which is odd, considering that the puppy pack always jests that smoke would billow from Liam's ears if he ever threw himself in front of his boyfriend to play the hero. Even the older pack participates with coy looks and smiles. Liam's never disputed the hypothetical accusation.
"Hi," says Theo. He tries to double his chin so he can trace the sound of Liam's voice beyond the tips of his muddied sneakers where the werewolf sits. Except his head feels leaden like unmolded steel, and a wince in reaction to the brief flare in his stomach distracts him.
"Hi yourself," Liam says. He doesn't seem to know what else to say.
There's a first for everything.
"Hey," says Scott, because it's his magnanimous duty. And also, he loathes dying of any kind, vicarious or otherwise.
"How'd I get here?" Theo forms the cotton words around his tongue. He realizes quickly why it felt so wooden until just the last few moments. He must have bitten through his tongue, almost severing it, something he hasn't done since he was thirteen. It happens sometimes when he isn't anticipating the pain.
Life in Beacon Hills for the third time, fresh out of hell's ninth circle of ice, must have made him go soft and forget to look for the pain before the whistle of the bullet or the singing of the scalpel. Then again, he hadn't been looking to sacrifice himself, so this was more like ramming into an elm tree at fifty miles an hour when your brain wasn't with you and only realizing when you come back to yourself that your nails have clawed crescent dips into your palms.
Somebody must respond to him, because there’s a rumbling in his ears, but Theo must forget to listen to them when he runs the pad of his sluggishly healing tongue over the edge of his front teeth on reflex and has to suppress a flinch at the blood there.
“And...done,” Melissa announces, snapping off her gloves.
Theo goes to sit up before anyone can stop him. The sooner he can detach himself from the metal beneath him, the better.
The sudden movement jostles Scott’s hold from his knee. Pain flares briefly from his core and the rest of it catches up to him like the keen of a train. Bile mingles with copper in his mouth and fills him up faster than he can mask the look on his face.
Theo lurches to grab the Rubbermaid tub that Melissa had been using as a makeshift biohazard disposal. As he empties his stomach of that evening’s noodles and vegetable rolls, Liam makes a low sound of distress in the back of his throat and scrapes back his chair from the foot of the examination table to tense himself by the doorway. Melissa just casts Theo a half-clinical, half-smiling look with a dry, “Looks like you’ve mastered the art of that.”
“Just another day in the blood poisoning department,” Theo quips over a rasp. “Sorry about the tub. Know that’s a bitch to clean.”
Melissa’s laugh is light.
“Welcome back,” Scott murmurs, echoed with a hum by Deaton as he and Melissa finish cleaning up.
Theo can hear the sounds of the pack moving about the parking lot outside. Some are still hanging around the lobby, and he’s fairly sure that’s Malia clutching a crinkling bag of french crullers against the plastic chair outside the examination room. He only has eyes for Liam, though. Liam, who’s looking strangely deflated, comical only in the way his face is pinched and his eyes are swinging wildly from one end of the room to find a way not to stare directly at Melissa’s tray of tools or the now done-for plastic tub of stomach acid tucked behind Theo.
Theo looks at him and catches his eye. Liam doesn’t need to be told twice before he loses the tension in his shoulder blades and comes back over to help Theo hop down from the table.
“Scott,” Theo says. “Afraid I don’t remember anything after the half-time due to my little involuntary nap. What’d I miss?”
“Don’t worry, you already got to the endgame,” Scott says through a smile stretched loose. Tired, but good. Fingers lax on his own hips.
“Gave ’em hell?”
“Gave ’em hell, and then some when the Sheriff got there.”
“Are you two done with your weirdly cinematic metaphors?” Liam says, unimpressed with either of them. “Can I take Theo home now?”
“Not in my truck, you’re not,” says Theo. “I’m driving.”
Liam parries: “Not with a hole in your stomach, you’re not.”
“You’re gonna put a hole in my car.”
“I’m gonna put another hole in you if you don’t shut up,” Liam promises him. For the first time tonight, he’s sounding more comfortingly like himself.
“Hey, boys, could you threaten my patient tomorrow when he’s healed up?” Melissa says with a pointed look at the teenagers crowding the doorway. “Scott, gimme just a few minutes, I’ll tidy up back here and then I’ll join you in the car.”
Scott raps his knuckles against the lintel in assent. Theo shoots him an admittedly weak two-fingered salute while Liam hauls him out of there, sneakers tangling around each other and squeaking against the tiles as they cross the lobby.
----
Theo drifts in the passenger seat of his own truck. A double-edged benefit of having spent so long alone is that his mind fills in the blanks of nonexistent dialogues with details and analysis. It’s not hard for him then to feel in the unfamiliar leather cupping his body the metaphor for how his position against the pack and everything else he knows has been upended.
His back presses against the leather, sweat cooling on his skin from where his body had purged the burned wolfsbane through his pores, and stiffening the cotton of his ruined shirt against the seat. Sweat he is accustomed to. Warmth and the frightening instability of soft things underneath him, not so much.
His stomach knits back together. Tears itself apart with butterflies that knot together. He couldn’t control the wavering of his scent now even if he wanted to.
Liam’s nose is scrunched up when he drives. Grooves appear in different places in the marble of his sculptured form based on the depth of his worry. Lines stretch out in dried crimson in the valleys of his knuckles as they wrap around the steering wheel. There are flecks of it across his cheek, too, looking deceptively like pits or even bullet holes in his skin if Theo didn’t have chimera sight in the dark. Theo rolls his head to the side to watch Liam, swallowing against the silence that has cloaked them ever since they bickered over the seatbelt for the show of it, and then clambered inside one after another and dropped the act and surrendered themselves to the exhaustion of their thoughts.
Theo begins to trace his eyes over the slopes and edges of Liam. A mouth that never presses together, open always just slightly between wonder and lingering boyishness. The evidence of blood lends him an even more youthful cast. Theo has the wandering thought that if he looks at Liam now, somehow he’ll be able to see how he looks to Liam, too.
“You did well back there,” Theo finally says before he can help himself.
“It’s not the first time we’ve encountered the same shit in the same place in the same town.” Bitterness.
“Sure. But I was talking about back at the clinic.”
“We’re anchors,” is Liam’s simple reply. “It wouldn’t have done any good for your healing for me to explode.”
Theo doesn’t know which thread to tug first from the gnarled edge of that declaration. They came close to declaring it once, aloud--anchors--unwilling as either of them are to have any part of their supernatural control tied to the pulse of another human being. Theo remembers how they stopped the truck somewhere off the road the night of the zoo, to catch some sleep before the hunt against the hunters began again, and Liam had been staring at him with his fingertips still absently massaging the corner of his jaw, a question in his eyes that wasn’t so much a question as it was the reluctant epiphany of an answer.
Are you my anchor?
Theo knows this feeling. He understands. Liam’s first anchor left, smart enough to realize that Beacon Hills holds nothing but single days of joy amid the sea of tragedies, and Liam deserves to be able to steady himself on someone--something--that isn’t born with the same irresistible instinct to leave.
Theo, too, was gutted the first time he stopped to process the fact that all Liam had to do was wrap a hand around his wrist back at the darkened sheriff’s station upon the descent of the Ghost Riders, or shove him stumbling back with the flats of his palms against Theo’s chest by the ambulance with vitriol on his tongue, and the gall of their fight and the rush-and-tug of their touch against each other would pull his pulse back from the edge like nothing else he’d experienced around another person before.
He hadn’t paused to consider this until it was safe to--no, not until he was forced to--because spending months in the blink of the street lamp in the parking lot behind the deli was a poor method of self-distraction from disturbing truths.
So he’d turned the word over and over on his then-unbitten tongue: anchors. And he’d recalled how it had sounded like joy in the mouths of the pack members. Felt like acid in his throat in contrast. Feels now like a scalpel twisting in his chest, like atoms of combustion.
“I’m awake now,” Theo points out, in the present.
“What?”
“I’m awake now. Let it out, then. Yell at me. Pull over and punch me. Get it out of your system.”
“I can’t--I’m not--” The huff that leaves Liam through his nostrils sounds like pain. The steering wheel groans under his grip.
“I know you’re angry, Liam. And you should be. I was reckless--cocky--overconfident, and the hunter got the best of me, and if it weren’t for you and Scott I--”
“Shut up,” Liam forces out. “Shut up.”
“You’re shaking. That’s good, just let it out.”
“There’s nothing to let out.”
“Bullshit. Stop playing whack-a-mole with your emotions because it’ll kill you inside. Just pull. Over. And. Hit me.”
The soft Jesus Christ is ripped from Liam’s chest with more accidental gentleness than Theo would have expected. The truck is drifting over to the shoulder, and part of Theo perks up at how familiar this is, almost welcome, compared to the disembowelment of this anchors bullshit.
But when Liam brakes and throws the car into park, he doesn’t draw back his fist and clock Theo across the cheekbone like Theo thought he would. He’s shaking, just like Theo had pointed out, but not for the reason Theo had assumed.
Liam drops his forehead forward against the sharp bones of his knuckles on the wheel. He breathes in and out through his mouth. A wet sound.
“I’m not angry,” he mumbles.
Theo wants to argue, but the scent of grief wafting toward him in the stifling space of the cabin gives him pause.
Still not looking up at Theo, Liam whispers, “Theo, why do you--why do you always expect me to express how I care about you through anger?”
Theo clenches his jaw and trains his eyes on the monotonous view of nighttime outside his window. “Maybe because I know you have the emotional bandwidth of a fucking dime,” he lies.
Liam shakes his head. “That’s not it.” A rustle as he rolls his head to look at Theo sideways. His bangs fall into his eyes and he doesn’t shake them away. “I think you don’t understand that I can be angry, but not angry at you.”
“I don’t think there’s really a distinction to be made.”
“Theo,” Liam breathes like it’s punched out of him. “You almost dying is not a reason for you to be punished.”
And then suddenly Theo becomes aware of the scent of Liam’s tears.
“Don’t cry,” he whispers, shutting his eyes. “Please don’t cry.” I can’t handle it.
“You can’t stop me,” is Liam’s response, defiant as ever between the sniffles.
“I’m not worth crying over.”
Liam gives a mangled laugh. “Okay, keep telling yourself that.”
“I didn’t die.”
“Yeah, but you almost did.”
Almost happens all the time, Theo wants to tell him. Almost drove over a bridge. Almost walked into pedestrian traffic and spilled the coffee. Almost spilled the coins from the console. Almost is just a reason to do better next time.
“I didn’t want to die,” is what Theo admits quietly to the night instead.
That gives Liam pause. He lifts his head, silently demanding that Theo do the same. And as much as the animals within Theo sharpen their claws against the pull of another dictating what he should do, he can’t help but lift his own head and look back at Liam.
Liam’s eyes are cut open and running like rivers.
“I didn’t know that,” he says.
“Me neither,” says Theo. “I think. I think...I only realized right before I went unconscious.”
Liam is looking at him with a completely different light to his gaze now. Not understanding, but one more puzzle piece closer to knowing.
Theo wonders if he’s thinking about that morning at the windowsill, the half-spoken invitation to come through the front door. Theo knows he himself is thinking of the weight of his hand against the wood of the Dunbar-Geyer door in the minute before he thumbed the doorbell.
Hands are not made for gentle brushes on lintels and picture-perfect banisters. Not for him. Hands are Liam’s fist cocked to aim for his nose. Hands are fingers scrabbling for a scalpel to stab the eight-legged omen under the skin of his own back. Hands are Tara’s nails pushing past his ribs with blunt force, and Theo’s fingers wrapped around the butt of a hammer before two terrified shades of parents, and claws digging one by one into the gaps between the vertebrae of Lydia’s spine, and they’re talons swimming in the blood-pouched guts of Scott McCall in the rays of the full moon on the library floor.
Hands are made for dismemberment.
And still Liam understands the swirl of everything Theo can’t articulate in the thickness between them. He uncurls his hand from the wheel and reaches across the console to wrap around Theo’s clenched fist in his lap.
“Come here,” Liam says softly. Except he doesn’t wait for Theo to come, just closes the distance between them anyway, and leans over with one thigh pressed against the cupholder to take both sides of Theo’s face in his hands and kiss him. Theo’s eyes fall shut and his mouth drops open to accept Liam’s sweetness and kiss him back.
They push the air back and forth between them, sharing from two lungs that, loath as they are to admit it, pulse as one. Theo doesn’t have control anymore over what his body does--wants to leave, wants to stay; wants to cry, wants to drop his fangs and bite down--so before he knows it, his own hands have come up to encircle Liam’s wrists as if he were going to push him away, except that they both know better by now.
It’s hands around wrists like don’t leave me. It’s a warning of skin against skin like don’t stay.
Liam pulls back to breathe and Theo’s wolf almost wants to snarl in desperation. Their eyes are twin sets of gold in the dark.
“You didn’t want to die?” Liam asks him in confirmation, far too belated for their conversation now.
The way Theo surges back into him, squeezing Liam’s wrists, is achingly loud enough to let Liam know his answer.
They kiss and kiss, lips moving and softly devouring. The smack of their mouths against each other deafens Theo, drives him to insanity. Liam has always tasted like an ironic blend of salt and sour cherries. He tastes like something that doesn’t make sense, so Theo tilts his head to the side to be able to dip deeper, lick inside him and taste more of that veiled meaning on the roof of his mouth.
Both of them are aching in tandem when Liam murmurs against his lips: “Back seat?”
----
Liam’s hand is splayed across Theo’s belly again.
The sutures are invisible behind the bandage taped over the spot where Theo’s flesh has already spent the last hour knitting itself back up. Slower than normal, even for him, but good again as new. Tender but not in a way that makes Theo’s skin crawl this time.
Liam is two fingers deep inside Theo with his other hand as Theo straddles Liam’s lap with his knees pressed up against the leather of the back seat. Theo wants it to burn. He’s heard that this part is supposed to sting. The unfamiliarity of the painlessness, replaced with an almost-fullness that disconcerts him, is almost too much to bear.
The last few times Theo was on his knees like this, the gesture of supplication never stopped the pain. Didn’t prevent the horror show of Tara’s slow embalming in the December creek as Theo watched knelt on the bridge over her. Didn’t stop the Puther pack beta from feeding himself into Theo’s open throat with a groan. Didn’t keep Tara from shoving him to the floor to face his last death for the one hundred and twenty-seventh time in a row.
“Is this okay?” Liam asks him quietly. Theo doesn’t know how to answer him.
Liam pumps in and out of him more slowly. Theo raises himself on his knees to pull away and drop down harder, seeking the friction and the burn.
“Don’t let me hurt you,” Liam murmurs.
You don’t hurt me enough.
“I’ll be fine,” Theo mouths back against Liam’s jaw, where it’s easier to hide unintentional lies because Liam can’t see him.
Liam’s free hand wraps around Theo’s cock trapped beneath him, and the awkward angle at which he jerks him, knuckles knocking into both their stomachs, is enough to remind Theo that this is real. He drops his head against the bare heat of Liam’s clavicle and keens.
Liam brings a third finger to his hole and pauses there: waiting. Theo pushes back, begging.
Don’t let me leave.
Liam pushes back in, and this, only this, is enough to threaten Theo with the danger again of softness.
Don’t let me stay.
This is what knees mean to Theo Raeken: begging for more lashes and getting what he asked for.
This is not what knees should mean for Theo Raeken: petitioning punishment and receiving the flowering touch he needs instead.
Liam’s hand leaves Theo’s dick, wet and sensitive between them, so it can wander upward across his spine and thread itself into the hair at the back of Theo’s head. “Can I put in another one?” he whispers into Theo’s ear.
“Yeah,” Theo whispers back.
“Breathe,” Liam commands him.
The fourth finger circles his rim and teases its give.
“Breathe,” Liam says again, and pushes in.
Theo turns his head to bury his brow in the space behind Liam’s ear. His mouth is open, teeth aching to lock around the cartilage there.
Liam opens him up as slowly as ever. Slick with lube and heat, the sounds of wetness a rhythmic pulling between them. Theo aches everywhere. He pushes forward, leaking against Liam’s stomach, against his own. He pushes back, and Liam coaxes him down with that hand ever present and tangled in his hair.
Maybe it burns now, and Theo didn’t notice it, but the pleasure takes the edge off it and he can’t focus on any pain when everything about Liam is signaling to him that this is not his punishment. This is them, and bodies, and language.
Theo thinks if Liam spreads his knuckles any wider inside him, warming up his walls, he’ll find his release too quickly. “Want you,” he pants into Liam’s skin. “Liam, how do you want me?”
Liam pulls his fingers out and grips himself to guide his tip to Theo’s entrance. “Just like this.”
Now there’s a sting in the back of Theo’s esophagus. He’s often imagined what it would be like to be with Liam for the first time, and it’s almost always involved this--Liam taking him--but it’s never been quite this image, with Liam sitting there, quivering but reining in his anticipation so he can wait for Theo to make the next move.
Anchors throbs against the confines of his throat. Maybe it doesn’t have to be all about losing control to another.
Theo shifts his head down so he can peer between their bodies and watch as he lowers himself onto Liam. Can watch as Liam disappears inside him, wetness swallowing him up, punching a moan from both of them in turns and filling Theo with a foreignness that can’t possibly be this good.
Theo can’t take it, all of a sudden. “Fuck me,” he growls. “Just fuck me.”
Liam’s brow scrunches, but he’s young and impatient and not one to question such a request so easily. His hands press around the bones of Theo’s hips and he fills Theo, sudden and deep, with a force that makes Theo whimper and throw his head back. Liam raises him up and drops him back down again, jostling Theo’s tenuous balance on his knees, so he topples forward a little except for Liam’s hold on him keeping him in place. There’s the burn, now. The welcome drag and line of fire every time Liam pushes in and out of him. Theo squeezes his eyes shut with teeth clenched and tells himself to take it, just take it, and goad Liam, even, into slamming into him harder, because this is what he wants and what he deserves.
“Harder,” he bites out. “I want this to bruise.”
Liam manages to fuck into Theo a few more times before Theo’s words register with him and his hips stutter, then jerk to a halt. “Theo.”
“Why’d you stop?” Theo struggles against his grip. “Liam. Why’d you stop.”
“Theo,” Liam says again, breathless and only half-coherent from wrenching his consciousness away from his arousal, but even then Theo can hear the threads of sorrow in his tone. “I don’t think this is what you need.”
“You don’t know what I need.” Theo squirms around Liam, seeking that pain again, but it’s fading far too fast.
“Guess not. But you do.”
And that--that makes Theo suddenly breathless.
Liam releases his death grip on Theo’s hips, looking like he regrets the reddening finger marks there, and skates them upward to settle softly instead at the dip of his waist. Theo understands more from the gesture than he would like to admit. He raises himself on his knees and presses back down more slowly than before, more gently, feeling every inch that fills him with flesh and awareness. And Theo wants to cry.
“Yeah,” Liam breathes. “Yeah. Yeah. Like that. You’re doing beautifully.”
Theo rides him like he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. But every time he sinks down, another atom of him detaches and rearranges with another.
“Look at me, Theo,” Liam coaxes him.
Theo does.
In the glow of the truck, Liam is blue like the mountain peak. Theo is the green of the valley, caved in, carved out, pierced through by the river that runs from the mountain through him.
Theo looks at him and wants to wrench his eyes away. Theo looks at him and feels like he’ll drown if he looks anywhere else.
Then Liam slips one of his hands between them and tugs at Theo’s cock with long, tentative movements, bubbling a sound like unlost youth from Theo's mouth. It's slow and just a bit tortuous--the kind where Theo wants to beg for more--but then Liam dips his head forward and licks a stripe up the center of Theo's chest, and Theo is lost to a shudder. Theo can feel the shape of Liam's smile in his mouth against his sternum. Liam flattens his tongue against Theo's pec again and draws another stripe, then another, slow and leisurely. When he gets to one of Theo's nipples, he closes his lips around it and gives it a light suck that has Theo devolving into high-pitched gasps.
At some point Liam's suckling morphs into soft brushes of his lips across the planes of Theo's torso. This time, Theo doesn't know what to do with his hands. Hands like monsters, hands like foreign beasts. He scrabbles for purchase on the top edge of the seat on either side of Liam's head and white-knuckles it.
This time, Theo does cry.
"Baby," Liam rumbles into Theo's collarbone. He pulls back, freeing his face from Theo's skin for just a moment to look at him. "Is this good crying or bad crying?"
Theo rocks against him just a little faster. "'S good. It's good," he pants. "Don't stop."
He squeezes around Liam's shaft, and Liam groans. Tips his head back over the seat to watch Theo riding him through hooded lids.
"You're so good," Liam says hoarsely. "You're so good, you're so good."
Theo is close to crying out. He doesn't know what to do with his mouth, what to do with his hands. He grips the top of the seat tighter until there's a creaking under the strain, pins and needles in his knees as he lifts himself up and plows back down, Liam responding to him in a litany of praises and Theo joining him with little moans and pants of incoherence.
Then Liam changes the angle of his hand wrapped around Theo's dick, and Theo chokes, "Gonna come, gonna come."
Liam strokes faster. Twists his wrist in a way that has Theo seeing stars. Liam's cock splits him open further as Theo sinks deeper and squeezes on every upstroke. Before he knows it, Theo is throwing back his head and coming with a cry. Salt on his face and wetness in his mouth. Liam pumps him, milks him almost dry, and even then keeps his fingers wrapped loosely around Theo's spent cock as he drives himself up inside him to overstimulation in tandem with Theo's movements.
"Liam," Theo chokes out.
"I got you," Liam says, raw, like a promise. He moves both hands up to cradle Theo's face and guide their lips together.
Theo feels Liam shuddering underneath him and inside him when he climaxes. Liam pours little sounds into the space between their mouths, unable to kiss seamlessly through the force of their coming. They simply pant against each other, mouths open, tongues brushing, as Liam spends himself inside Theo's walls and fills him with a warmth that makes the moisture threaten to spill again from the corners of Theo's eyes.
Mouths aren't meant for something like this, Theo thinks. His mouth was crafted around lies and deconstruction. Silver tongue that could weave its way in and out of anything.
Not a clumsy, wooden weight that chases the addicting taste of Liam still after a thousand kisses.
And not the tongue of wrung-out honesty when Theo blurts out, "Fuck. I think I'm in love with you and I'm terrified."
Liam's pulsing inside him still. He draws his head back, but doesn't let go of Theo's face. Just cradles him there between two hands, achingly, with the pads of his thumbs caressing the edge of his cheekbones the way Theo might have done the doorbell those weeks ago.
"Don't be scared," Liam whispers, not to be futile but to be earnest. "I love you."
The way and shape of how he means it pours into the blue of his eyes. They'd long dropped their shift and faced the petrifying nakedness of their human color in the moonlight.
Theo has the absurd and irrational notion to apologize. He's come to a halt in his movements, just staring down at Liam and Liam staring up at him. All tenderness, all humanity. Theo adores him. Would fling himself into the moon and combust if asked, if it could better express how Theo adores every inch of him.
So he detaches his fingers one by one from the edge of the seat and teaches himself what to do with them. He sinks them into the strands of Liam's hair and twists the locks around his fingertips to feel the warmth of Liam's skull beneath, and dips his head down to meet Liam's mouth again in the middle.
Night chills against the sheen of sweat on Theo's shoulder. It's all right, this time. It doesn't remind him anymore of nights after operations or waking from nightmares in his truck. Or even the sweat that comes with his being alone.
Perhaps that's because Liam is slowly teaching him to rearrange his body parts into a semblance of stability, Theo thinks. Perhaps, he thinks, this could turn into an anatomy of staying.
----
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. --Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”