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Oliver watched Felix through the cracked open door.
This was expected- the gradual crescendo of all of the strings Oliver had pulled, every moment of the last year that he had puppeteered. Well, it wasn’t exactly consummation. That could wait. Still. Oliver ached at the sight of him, at the sweat beading on his collarbone, lazily running down into the dip that shivered ever so slightly with the rhythmic movement of Felix’s wrist.
He had heard the sound, hardly dared to believe it. He had slunk down the hall, lowering his head and getting as far into the light as he dared. He’d seen Felix before, but always with some vapid girl, someone who didn’t appreciate what they had access to with ease. He’d never seen him alone. Why was the door open? Oliver hadn’t accounted for that. It was almost as if Felix, unaware as he was, was drawing him in, into Saltburn’s throbbing heart.
It took everything not to enter the bathroom and take him then.
He almost did. He remind himself he could have fucked Felix at any time. Felix mostly slept with girls, that was true, but it didn’t mean that Oliver couldn’t have changed a couple things, switched a lie here and there to get Felix on his knees in the Brasenose HCR. This wasn’t about fucking him. It was something different, something deeper. And it had to be here. Oliver had read his Waugh. He knew what role he had to play.
No. Oliver forced himself to breathe quietly, slowly, secret. Waiting would make it all worth it.
“All right,” Felix looked at Oliver as he pulled up the drain stopper to the tub. Oliver was brushing his teeth in the mirror, forcing himself to focus on the even movement across his teeth.
“Night mate!” Felix kissed his fingers and tossed them aside. There was no betrayal in his movements, nothing to suggest to Oliver what he had just done. And why would he? It was Felix’s house- everything about it belonged to him, and he belonged to it.
Oliver held the minty sludge in his mouth and through the mirror met his friend’s eyes.
Felix grinned, then strode out of the room, which hummed with his absence. Oliver watched, listened, for Felix to make sure he was out of the way. He heard the click of the latch, strained to hear the rustle of sheets, the stillness of the house as Felix settled down for the night. He felt like a greyhound, straining at the gate, but he had to be patient. Even so, the water swirled down the drain, every second more of it slipped away.
Oliver heard the faint click-click of a lamp pull chain, and his heart took off like a shot. He spits the toothpaste into the sink basin, his heightened senses alert to the almost shocking interplay of texture between paste and saliva. Slowly, he pulled off his boxers, stepping out of them, one foot, then the other. No time to remove his top. The water began to snarl through the old pipes. Slowly, he put one foot in the water, the louder sound covering the light splash. He bent to his knees, then his chest, laying his face against the porcelain, the moment had been waiting for.
The water hadn’t yet lost all of its warmth, and it washed over Oliver’s cheek gently, a smooth hand. Like a lover, he moved his cheek up and down the smoothness of the tub, a tub that Felix had used for years and years, utterly careless of how he rubbed his shape into the enamel. Oliver stirred at the thought, Felix’s erosion, his shape worn into the architecture, Felix everywhere.
His lips felt the uneven rust of the metal drain, the rough contrast to the porcelain of building rust, despite the staff’s attempt to keep it out. He felt the cool, beckoning vacuum of the drain, the vortex swirling the water away. He wondered how much of Felix was down there- all the hair and skin and semen, every picked scab and burst blister. When Oliver had entered the house, it had seemed massive and inhuman, dwarfing Felix’s gigantic frame with its sheer history and weight of the dead relatives’ ghosts who lined the walls. But now, Oliver could see, feel, taste the thick detritus of a life lived in that place- bathed and washed and laundered, Felix flowing the pipes like so many layers of sediment, building the house from the inside.
He sucked gently, taking Felix into his mouth.
He rocked back onto his knees, switching the precious contents around in his mouth. He delighted in the taste of it, the alkaline sting that made his mouth light up like a circuit board. He ached to swallow it, but he could not let himself. Felix was careless with his things, himself, spread out over his room and in undeserving bodies and on sheets scouts took away and laundered. He gave himself freely, openly. Oliver could not afford to be so careless, to greedily swallow what little bits Felix left behind. Out of the corner of his eye, Oliver noticed a globule that had refused to dissolve slithering towards the drain, glistening like an eggwhite. He drove the heel of his hand into the treacherous hole, trapping it within his other hand’s fingers.
He spat from his mouth into his palm. It was diluted, but it was enough.
Moving so that his heel covered the drain Oliver leaned back against the far side of the tub. There was no need to warm himself up. He could feel the blood pulsing, his body alive with electricity. He thought of Felix in the other room- the eldest son, the golden boy, someday the heir to his ancestral dynasty. He would one day father a son, another boy to bathe in this tub and carry Saltburn with him forever, on and on, his line stretching out to the crack of doom. Felix would tire of the college girls, would find some model or actress like his father and dutifully shape up and carry on the family name with her.
Not if Oliver could help it.
He scooped his two fingers into the liquid in his hand and pushed them inside himself, ready, willing. His body was alive at the thought of giving Felix this gift, with performing the role he always wanted, unasked for. When it was done, Felix would love him all the more, would let Oliver fuck him raw and desperate, mother of his children. Oliver quickened at the thought, adding another finger, again and again, greedy, parched, trying to take Felix within him in the most natural way he could. It was carnal, biblical, his hand not Felix but close enough, not letting any drop get away. The friction built as Oliver stayed quiet, trying to straddle the balance between the lucid control he operated in and the wild animal abandon he felt with Felix inside him. He had to stay quiet. If he made a sound, this whole web would unravel, before the final stones were dropped into place. But he wanted to, he ached, he felt his hand become Felix’s massive body on top of him, inside of him, and Oliver came, jerking his foot and exhaling sharply, with the barest whisper of a moan.
The drain growled a final time, masking his ragged breathing.
Oliver sat in the remains of the tub for a long time while the aftershocks worked their way out of him, his breathing slowed and his heart began to still. He slid down the tub and pulled his knees to his chest, rocking back and forth to make sure he lost nothing, and kept every drop of Felix from getting away.
As he lay in his own dark room of the great house, swaddled in her darkness and sheets, he could feel Felix’s seed working his way inside him, taking root.