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When he opened the door to Will Graham for their breakfast date, Will gave a little snort of amusement that made Hannibal smile in return. He skated his eyes down the other man – he wore simple trousers, a blue henly and an open black waistcoat, and despite his scruffy hair and stubble made it look very, very good.
“Are you dressing down for my benefit?” Will asked, nodding at Hannibal’s three-piece suit. It was a dark, dusty blue plaid with a paler blue check. He wore a royal blue dress shirt with a purple paisley tie that had champagne highlights, and matching pocket square. Hannibal could see Will’s eyes flickering over it, no doubt mentally logging all the deliberate imperfections in its tailoring.
“Good morning Will, you’re right on time,” he said lightly, and Will flushed at the reminder of his absent manners.
“Good morning, I mean,” he said huffily, and then registered the kind of awkward uneasiness that comes with not knowing how to approach a potential paramour. A handshake, a kiss? Hannibal saved him the trouble and simply stepped back, gesturing for Will to enter.
Hannibal had breakfast warming in the oven, so settled Will in the dining room and then served. Fresh orange juice waited in a bulbous pitcher, along with water glasses and a pot of coffee made fresh with his syphon coffee maker. Hannibal then presented breakfast on elegant white china – fluffy folded omelettes made with smoked ham, goat’s cheese and baby spinach leaves, served on toasted Turkish bread with fresh halved cherry tomatoes sprinkled over the plate.
Will stared at the plate before him for a moment, then picked up his cutlery as Hannibal sat. “Somehow, you make eggs look elaborate,” he said, but without rancour.
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” Hannibal said evenly. Will took a bite of his omelette and gave an indecent moan of approval.
“I hope you weren’t up too early working on this,” Will said gruffly after he’d swallowed, intently cutting his meal into easy bite-sized pieces and pairing them with chunks of bread. Hannibal decided there was a hint of OCD in this plate ritual.
“It’s only nine, but I’m an early riser,” he replied, and poured coffee for them both.
“It feels strange making small talk after… last night,” Will said after a while, waving his fork in the air. He had yet to make eye contact.
“There has been some emotional intensity to our relationship so far that is not proportional to the length of time we’ve known one another,” Hannibal said.
“Is this a relationship?” Will asked quietly. His plate was almost clean, despite their conversation. Hannibal wondered how often he had breakfast at all, let alone a nourishing one.
“It’s a connection, at the very least. With the prospect of further emotional and physical intimacy, I assume, although correct me if I’m wrong. Do we need to expend the effort at this point in time discerning the potential progression of our future interactions?”
“I’m not inclined,” Will said. He aligned his knife and fork neatly on his empty plate and sat back with a satisfied sigh. “If I’m honest, I don’t date much. I don’t really socialise, asides from one friend who has no concept of boundaries.”
“Oh?” Hannibal said, intrigued. Will made a face.
“Beverly. She’s a seamstress, a designer really. Wedding gowns and couture. She says I’m her equal and opposite in our business, and just kind of latched on when I set up shop in Baltimore. She… well, I sent her a text last night telling her how the evening had gone,” Will said, looking embarrassed again. “But then I turned my phone off. So this morning I woke up at six am because she was climbing into bed with me to get warm and interrogate me.”
“Yet she knows you’re gay?” Hannibal asked, wondering what this Beverly’s angle was with Will. He chuckled, tilting his head in a way that made Hannibal want to suck on the pulse at his throat.
“She’s the one who told me I’m gay,” Will said, and rubbed a hand over the stubble on his jaw. “I was… in denial, and then confused, and finally Beverly simply said it to my face. That I’m gay, and I’d feel better when I said it aloud.”
This raised questions in Hannibal’s mind, mostly about how to ingratiate himself with this Beverly or, failing that, alienate her from Will. But also about exactly how much experience Will had with men, as he was perhaps in his mid-thirties and, from what he’d told Hannibal, had only settled in Baltimore around six years ago. If his friend Beverly had been the one to insist he face the truth regarding his sexuality, then it had only happened within the last few years.
“Had you considered yourself bisexual before then?” Hannibal asked, and Will gave an uncertain shrug.
“Well, I knew I wasn’t straight, but was finding it hard to lose the sense of… safety that relationships with women brought, I suppose.”
“When we admit our sexuality deviates from the norm we are admitting that we are vulnerable. We exist in the minority, with a long history of oppression, erasure and violence against us,” Hannibal said, and set his cutlery on his plate, next to his unfinished omelette. Will studied the remains of Hannibal’s meal.
“I can’t guess if you’re gay or bisexual,” he said suddenly, frowning as though the inability to read Hannibal completely baffled him.
“Pansexual, as a matter of fact,” he said, and Will sent him a questioning look. Hannibal gave a one-shouldered shrug. “While the definition can depend on the person who identifies as such, for me it means that I am capable of romantic or sexual attraction to people of all genders and biological sexes, not simply the normative binary.”
Will nodded as though he were unsurprised, then made a sharp, awkward hand-wave at Hannibal’s plate. “You don’t finish your food. You cook these divine meals, and your servings are hardly too large to eat, but you don’t eat it all.”
Hannibal felt a secret, complex glee rise up in him at this observation – nobody had ever noticed this before either, for which he was normally glad. Yet he liked that Will could spot these things about him, the subtle tells to his true identity. “I choose to eat slowly, and savour every bite. However I find it difficult to interpret physiological hunger signals, and have since I was a child.”
“The inability to interpret hunger signals is usually precipitated by a period of prolonged-” Will started to say, almost automatically, as though he couldn’t control the words coming from his mouth – then his brain seemed to catch up, and he stopped abruptly. He looked up, meeting Hannibal’s gaze, and held it. “By a period of prolonged starvation. As a child.”
“Just so,” Hannibal replied, with a sad half-smile. “My body’s rhythms were altered at a crucial stage in my development, and so exists in a perpetual state of feast or famine, with no in-between and no method to communicate my needs correctly. I eat either sparingly or compulsively, if left unmanaged.”
“I’m sorry,” Will said, dropping his eyes back to Hannibal’s plate. Hannibal let the silence drift on, marvelling at the insight Will Graham could glean from an unfinished meal and the cut of a suit jacket. He suspected the man possessed near-pathological empathy, an excess of mirror neurons that had not been burned away by adolescence. He wanted to drink from Will’s mind and glut on his thoughts.
“Will you show me your workshop?” he asked, and smiled when Will nodded hesitantly.
*
They took separate cars across town to Will’s shop, Hannibal having taken one look at Will’s old beaten station wagon and decided the interior was probably coated with dust and dog hair. Will’s shop was dark when he unlocked it, but he called out for his assistant anyway, receiving no response. They don’t see clients on Saturday, Will explained, but his assistant Matty made deliveries, and so was in and out of the shop all day.
“Sorry, it’s a bit dusty, and there’s always scraps and bits of thread everywhere,” Will said self-consciously, leading the way through the curtained door at the rear of the shop front. They went into a short corridor with two doors for a small change room and bathroom on the left, and a tiny kitchen on the right. Will pushed open the door at the end of the corridor and led the way into his workshop.
It was lovely in its own way. A spacious room that had modern-looking glass doors that took up the entire rear wall. Beyond them was a small garden, a lush jungle of plants and vines that spilled out of their beds and climbed the high courtyard walls. The room itself was cluttered with large cutting tables, sewing desks and dress forms that wore clothing in various states of completion, with bolts of cloth standing in metal bins. One wall was set with shelves and containers of threads, and findings like buttons and zippers. A wheeled clothing rack had coat hangers with odd shapes hanging from them, cut from thick card or board. By the windows there was a drafting table, to catch the light.
“So. My kingdom,” Will said dryly, waving his hand to encompass the room.
“It’s lovely. A working space that holds echoes of the things you accomplish here, even when silent and still,” Hannibal said, stepping carefully between tables to study a basket of tiny white bone buttons.
Behind him, Will snorted. “If that’s a polite way of saying it’s a nice mess, then thank you.”
“What are these?” Hannibal asked, letting his fingers wander over the oddly shaped cardboard cutouts. They were grouped with several shapes per clothes hanger, with tiny pencil markings on them and a slip of paper with a name written on it. Some of the names he recognised from Baltimore society events.
“Slopers,” Will said, coming up behind him at the rack. “I take exact measurements, as I will with you, and draft pattern pieces that fit precisely, yet have no embellishments or ease. It’s the building block for any clothing that’s made for each client in the future.”
“Flat representations of a person’s shape,” Hannibal mused. While Margery Lautner and he had been close, he had never seen her workshop or been privy to the majority of work that went into his clothes. “You make maps of the physical existence of your clients, a record of the space they inhabit.”
“I just make clothes,” Will said, and Hannibal could feel he’d stepped closer, so close the heat of his breath tickled the back of his neck.
“Your clothes are more than the sum of their parts. As are you,” Hannibal said. He felt Will’s fingers ghost up his shoulder blades, over the ridge of his shoulders and down to curl around the lapels of his suit jacket. He set his back straight and arms back, and Will slowly pulled the jacket from him.
“Your clothes are the sum of something else’s parts,” Will said, laying the jacket on a table beside him. It would probably be covered in stray threads. Will ran his fingers down the line of his spine, over his waistcoat, and Hannibal gave a little shudder of sensation.
“I am an eccentric European socialite,” he said mildly, and Will chuckled behind him.
“You are hardly that alone, although I can’t decide what else you are,” he said. His fingers drifted over Hannibal’s lower back. “This waistcoat would sit better if there was a cinch here to draw in the excess fabric. I’m assuming the lack of fitted tailoring and rear cinch are deliberate?”
Hannibal said nothing, but dropped his chin down to his chest to hide his small smile. So many tiny details that he and Margery had incorporated over the years, easily dissected by Will Graham. The minute adjustments in fit, so small as to be hardly noticeable, that made the fabric of his clothes sit uneasily on him, rumple and strain in ways that most people wouldn’t notice but would subconsciously attribute to girth and softness. Because that was the point – to look soft.
Will’s hands threaded around Hannibal’s waist, going to the buttons of his waistcoat. He’d pushed up the sleeves of his henly and Hannibal watched his strong forearms dusted with hair, his clever hands that undid the buttons down his front with quick flicks and twists of his fingers. He was being undressed by an expert. He allowed Will to pull the waistcoat down his arms and off, and it was carefully laid aside too. Underneath, Hannibal wore plain black suspenders over his blue dress shirt.
“The shirt you wore last night fit better,” Will grumbled, pinching up excess fabric around Hannibal’s ribs. Next he touched the seam between sleeves and shoulder. “These armscyes are too low. Looking at your clothes is like viewing a Picasso – the work is exquisite but everything is distorted. I can’t make sense of it no matter how I turn my head.”
Hannibal turned, and Will’s hands were still raised, but having to now face each other, Will looked like a deer caught in headlights. He stared intently at Hannibal’s tie, and the silence hung heavy between them – Will had seen underneath the upper layers of clothing, and if this was just about exploring the tailoring then they could stop there. Hannibal was sure it wasn’t, though, and reached up to tug loose his tie, dragging the silk tail free of the double Windsor knot, enjoying the whispering sound. He laid that aside on top of the waistcoat.
“Your collar is too tight, I don’t even know how you function like this,” Will said absent-mindedly, and reached up to undo the two buttons on the collar stand.
“Make me something that fits,” Hannibal murmured. “Make me your design. Not what’s fashionable, or expected or even appropriate – make me something that is an expression of how you see me.”
Will was steadily working down Hannibal’s buttons, revealing the definition of his chest and sandy chest hair that was running to grey. Hannibal wasn’t a vain man, but he knew his body was toned and defined for his age. He had a little softness around the middle, but was comfortable with the reminder that it had been many, many years since he’d faced starvation. Will dragged the shirttails free of the trousers, the cloth still trapped by the suspenders. He was wrinkling everything horribly and Hannibal didn’t care.
“I feel the urge to make you something so austere the clergy would balk at its plainness,” Will said, plucking at the suspenders in a distracted way. “Something that cuts away every bright, gaudy shadow you’ve cloaked yourself in before. That doesn’t embellish you – simply frames you.”
“I find the way you discuss clothing extremely erotic,” Hannibal confessed, and Will gave a little huff of laughter, looking up at him for a brief moment of eye contact.
“It’s not the clothes. I’m being possessive, and you like it,” he replied, and snapped one suspender so it struck his pectoral muscle and nipple on the rebound. Hannibal hissed at the small sting of pain.
“Yes. I like it very much,” he said, and cupped the back of Will’s neck to yank him in for a kiss.
It was hot and wet and messy, and Hannibal stumbled back as Will surged in close to him, all tongue and lips and teeth. He managed to get himself propped against the table behind him, where his suit lay in pieces; Will pushing between his thighs, rubbing against Hannibal so he could feel the hard line of Will’s cock in his trousers pressing against his own. He sucked Will’s upper lip, and then bit the lower one, licking away the tiny hurt, and Will moaned and rutted hard against him. He shoved the shirt from Hannibal’s shoulders, the suspenders going with it, and broke their kiss long enough to dip his head and suck down hard on Hannibal’s neck.
“You’re going to leave a mark above the collar,” Hannibal panted, hips bucking up into Will, wanting more of the delicious friction of cloth and zippers and Will’s cock somewhere underneath all of that.
“Good. Everyone will see,” Will said, and went back to sucking, scraping his teeth over the bruising skin. Hannibal moaned, tipping his head back for better access, wanting to grab at Will but needing to brace his hands on the table behind him so they both didn’t crash backwards – although he truly wouldn’t care, at this point.
Will’s thrusting against him was growing unsteady, and Hannibal shifted his weight to free one hand, shoving it under the hem of Will’s henly and dragging his nails down the smooth skin of his back – Will gave a ragged moan, driving against Hannibal, both of them grinding and thrusting and reaching for something barely there. Then Will gave a sharp cry of release, and Hannibal allowed himself to tip over the edge into orgasm too, closing his eyes against the bright shocks of pleasure that raced down his spine and into his gut, coming in his trousers like a teenage boy.
Will slumped against him, and Hannibal kissed his hair, breathing hard, the arm braced on the table to hold them both up now shaking. He was sticky and sweaty and felt absolutely divine.
“I think you ruined my suit,” Hannibal said when he finally had his breath back, and felt Will shudder with a choked-off laugh against him. He turned his head and licked some of the sweat from Hannibal’s chest.
“Good,” he said, and reached around Hannibal to sweep the jacket, waistcoat and silk tie to the dusty floor.