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Caleb Widogast is going to perish right here in the warmly lit library of his own mind’s creation, and the cause will be Essek—deep in thought, pale brows furrowed —and the way he keeps touching his fucking mouth as he thinks.
This is nothing new, of course; Essek has displayed this habitual gesture from the early times of their friendship. He had hid his first true grins behind a politely folded hand, and he has looked at Caleb from above the curl of his intertwined fingers more times than he can possibly count, two perfect thumbs pressed against his pout. Caleb has watched him rub a silk-gloved knuckle back and forth over his bottom lip in nervousness, and recently, wipe his own blood with the back of a hand and lick his lips to spit pink onto snowy ground.
Usually, Caleb is good at ignoring the sight—he is good at tempering his own desires. Today, the long hours of wet snow and fire and the slow panic of walking right up to Death’s door to knock has him itching with a new sense of impulsivity. Restlessness. Wanting. His muscles are aching; he feels saturated with a heavy kind of longing. He wants to touch Essek’s skin. He cannot stop looking, looking, looking.
Essek does not notice. Essek is scribbling lovely cursive notes across the faded map, while his left hand rests against his chin. He looks beautiful, of course, and so very diligent as he tries his best to be useful, because he still seems to believe his usefulness is the only thing holding their door open for him.
They have not yet had the time to change after the day’s battles, and the sleeve of Essek’s woolen shirt is loose, pooling almost to his elbow. It shows off his lithe wrist and his long musician’s fingers, and the way his usually well-tended nails have grown ragged with rougher living. While he frowns down at his notes, Essek’s index and middle finger are stroking lightly back and forth over his upper lip, asserting just enough pressure to show off the soft give that can be found there. The movement is all Caleb can look at in the room. Back and forth, back and forth. The skin of Essek’s lips is slightly darker than his face. Soft skin, but a little cracked; the air down here is dry.
Essek pauses with his fingertips on either side of his cupid’s bow, humming lightly. His lashes are lowered, lips parting ever so subtly as he taps his lip once, twice—
Caleb grabs Essek’s wrist before he can think better of it.
“Will you stop that?”
The words sound harsher out loud, somehow, as they carve through the quiet of the moment. Essek’s head whips up—he stares back at Caleb with a caught-off-guard expression that Caleb has not seen him make since they had cornered him and cuffed him and called him a betrayer.
“What?”
He looks down on the last few looping notes he had put down on the map, then looks up again at Caleb like he expects to be chastised without understanding why. Caleb works his jaw, frustrated. This was not his intent. What had his intent been, again?
“You keep—” He furrows his brows, tugging at Essek’s wrist until it is resting against the table, a safe distance away. “—touching your mouth.”
“My mouth?” Essek echoes him, his voice slowed like he is unsure if he heard correctly. Caleb huffs and leans in, voice lowering but rising in intensity.
“Surely you have noticed. Surely you—” You must be doing this on purpose , he thinks, wildly. Then, immediately, he kicks himself down for such a thought— as if everything he does is for you. As if everything is a calculation and not simply thoughtless habits. Selfish, selfish you.
Essek, of course, looks genuinely bewildered. It feels so strange to see him, of all people, confused— it feels wrong, somehow, like Caleb has cruelly torn the ground from beneath him—and perhaps he has. He feels a sharply rising need to explain , to claw his way back to the time when this kind of thing felt easy between them. It flares through him like the heat of annoyance, though he knows himself enough to realize the feeling stems from the desperate desire to be properly understood.
Oh, he wants the shock on Essek’s face to be one of fluster, not this ugly kind of bracing for the hurt.
“You do this, ” he explains, reaching up to trace two fingertips over the softness of Essek’s frozen-still upper lip. It feels like the sin of utter indulgence; touching where he has seen Essek touch a thousand times by now.
He feels the rush of air as Essek inhales. He sees his quick glance down and then up again, but he does not move back—in fact, he sits just as still as Caleb does whenever a particularly skittish cat has deigned to lie down in his lap. As if he is afraid of spooking away the touch.
“—when you think,” Caleb continues. He feels lost in thought, his fingertips are burning, burning. “And this…” Slowly, he thumbs at Essek’s bottom lip, trying to recreate the motion he has seen so many times before. “—right before you smile. You did not know?”
It takes a long moment before Essek swallows, a sort of tremble working its way through his limbs, down to the very fingertips still trapped where Caleb holds his wrist down against the tabletop. Then, he seems to gather himself, looking up with a new intention in his eyes. Caleb would be hard-pressed to call it confidence, the vulnerability is far too clear. Still, he looks like he has perhaps deciphered this encounter, at last.
“Why are you looking so much at my mouth?”
Essek’s voice is soft and silken with newfound suspicions, and the reality of it—of the words , and their implications—they make Caleb grow conscious of what he’s truly doing. What he is encouraging, while they are wasting their precious time preparing for the end of the world, with his friends merely walls away.
Exhaling with a sudden cold wash of realization, he makes to pull back. This time, it is Essek who catches his wrist, stopping his touch from leaving Essek’s face.
“Caleb. You will not do that to me and then suddenly grow shy.”
There is an unsteadiness in his tone, but Essek’s eyes are steely with resolve. It is only fair to him to admit his intentions—his impulses, his irrational wants. Perhaps he can be laughed at, rejected, and safely ignored.
“Fine, then. I like looking.”
What do you think of that, Essek? Have you noticed my eyes on you? Have you basked in my attention, or cringed away from its burn?
Then, softer, “I thought you were— being purposeful with it.”
“I can be,” is Essek’s only response.
It is Caleb’s turn to stay very still when Essek turns against his hand, held in place against Essek’s cheek. Keeping a lazy, razor-sharp kind of eye contact, Essek breathes into his palm, testing the waters. A kiss follows; chaste, but slowed enough to turn heady.
Caleb’s head is spinning, he feels like a freshly inked page carelessly wiped into muddied smears. There was— He had an intention, earlier—
Watching his every reaction with the attentiveness of an experienced arcane experimenter, Essek tilts his face to take Caleb’s thumb into his open mouth. At first, he lets it simply rest like that against his tongue, allowing for Caleb to flinch away.
When Caleb only stares, and stares, and leans closer like into the coaxing warmth of a campfire, Essek lowers his eyelashes and allows the hot space of his mouth to close around his thumb.
“Essek,” Caleb starts. He sounds half-strangled, he can tell, but his throat will not cooperate in clearing whatever he is choking on. “I— oh. That is, ah.”
“Mhm,” Essek hums, and hollows his cheeks, and gives a slow suck that seems to drag at something lodged deep in Caleb’s guts. The air shudders out of his lungs.
His hand has grown tight around Essek’s wrist, the pulse there a heavy thumpthumpthump against the skin. It sets off a rush of heat to his belly, his thighs, to feel Essek so equally affected.
Leaning in, Caleb curls the fingers of his hand around Essek’s cheek as if in a dream, the moment slowed like a lingering fantasy. Essek grows lax in his grip, jaw slackening, allowing Caleb to hold him like that; with his thumb still hooked against the slickness of his inner cheek. The position bares Essek’s sharp teeth as he tilts his head back—equal parts danger and submission.
Caleb can see the inside of his mouth. Gods.
Slipping his thumb out until it rests against the corner of Essek’s mouth, Caleb swallows hard and tries to realign his thoughts somewhat.
“Better than looking, is it not?” Essek sounds so breathy. He is so fucking cute. Caleb needs to know what those sharp, spit-slick canines are like against the press of his tongue. If they’ll cut him, make him bleed. If his own wanting mouth will feel the plushness of Essek’s lips better than his fire-calloused fingertips had done.
Their foreheads are almost touching as Caleb cups Essek’s chin, lifting it gently.
“Certainly,” he confirms, “…a good mouth, I think. But I would like to see for myself.”
There is the shock of a breath against Caleb’s hand. Essek’s expression shifts through a series of emotions, his eyes glazing over. Then, he leaves the perch of his chair to sink to his knees before Caleb.
Oh— Oh.
Blood rushing to his head, Caleb stops him with a hand to his shoulder before he can reach for Caleb’s laces.
“Ahh, I should say—I mean, I was intending to kiss you.” Caleb’s mouth is so very dry, he feels clumsy in a way he hasn’t for a long time. “If I may.”
“Oh!” Essek is very clearly blushing too, a flattering darkening that spreads until the white roots of his hair. He goes to rise again, quickly, brushing off his soft leather pants. “—Of course. Well, that is embarrassing. I thought you wanted—“
Instinctively, Caleb presses his hand down on Essek’s shoulder, keeping him where he is. After a moment of tenseness Essek relaxes beneath the grounding weight, and Caleb releases a breath of his own.
“You did not presume wrong. I just wanted to—”
“Kiss me,” Essek says in a whisper.
Caleb is already leaning in when he realizes that might have been an echo, and not a request.
Even so, Essek opens like a flower for him as Caleb holds his chin steady and kisses him, slow and careful and deliberate. It could almost be called chaste, if not for the way that Essek’s mouth still hangs open, allowing Caleb to trace the earlier path of his fingers with the tip of his tongue. When he finally angles his head and licks in, Essek gasps , the noise loud and shuddering in the quiet.
Oh, Caleb wants to touch his hair so very badly—to card his fingers through those travel-mussed curls and cup his palm over the fuzz at the back of his skull—but Essek is still so tentative in his movements, lip trembling as Caleb presses kisses to the corners of his mouth; coaxing, apologetic.
Kiss me, Caleb thinks deliriously, tracing two thumbs across Essek’s smooth cheekbones, kiss me, Essek, please—
It’s strange. Essek leans into every touch like he is starving for it, but whenever he reaches back for Caleb he appears to stop himself: his fingers barely brushing Caleb’s knee, his nose soft against Caleb’s cheek before he angles his head away again, sighing gently.
Caleb pulls back eventually, taking in his expression with great attention. This close, Essek smells of scorched wool; there is soot in his hair and dried blood on his left ear. He is flushed in the face, mouth open as he heaves for air.
Pretty, pretty, pretty.
But still so caught-off-guard, still with exhaustion framing his lilac-gray eyes.
“Essek?” Caleb asks, out of breath himself. He is looking for something familiar in Essek’s expression, and finding little. The lack of a response stokes a sudden worry in his belly.
Carefully, he cradles Essek’s face close, his legs framing Essek’s body where he still sits on the floor. Between the press of his thighs, Essek feels fine-boned, almost fragile. There is something desperate in his blown-wide eyes, and for the life of him, Caleb cannot tell what exactly it is he is desperate for.
He feels the power imbalance of their position like a whip across his back, nausea rising in the back of his throat. This is familiar, but he has never— He has usually been the one to—
“Essek, have I hurt you?” he can’t help but ask, the words barely audible. Too terrible to think of.
The question seems to shake Essek out of his stupor. Confusion rolls over his face again.
“How would you have hurt me?”
He sounds well-kissed and oblivious, but there is still something that tugs at Caleb in an unpleasant way, like old muscle healed wrong—something about the way that Essek had gone so easily to the floor at his suggestion.
“This is not—you do not have to indulge me in this, you do know that?”
It is the wrong thing to say, going by the coldness on Essek’s face. He still does not get up, but he stiffens beneath Caleb’s touch.
“Can I not simply want this for myself?” Essek asks, chin lifting slightly.
“Of course. Ja. I just—“
Hesitant, Caleb traces both thumbs beneath Essek’s eyes, watching him to make sure the gesture is not unwelcome. Essek’s lashes flutter, though his expression doesn’t change.
His eyes do widen slightly when Caleb leaves his chair and kneels down on the carpet as well. Even like this, Essek has to tilt his face upwards to keep his gaze, but it still feels easier.
“I scared myself, a little,” Caleb admits. “I just wanted to be certain.”
Finally, some tension seems to release in Essek’s shoulders, and he looks up at Caleb with some form of half-amused resignation in the set of his mouth.
“…No. Your concerns are fair. You are not the first man to put his hand on my arm in a darkened study, when I did not expect it.”
There is a pause. Warmth returns to Essek’s face.
“This was not that, Caleb. I—Caleb, you must know that. When you touched my mouth. When you kissed me. I liked it, when you kissed me.”
Essek speaks like he is confessing—to deep-rooted desire, or perhaps to a great crime. Then, fainter: “I like it when you kiss me.”
Caleb finds himself releasing the slow breath that had been stuck in his chest.
“I am glad, then. And I also, I do deeply—“
“…desire me?” There is clearly amusement in Essek’s eyes now; delight in the corners of his mouth.
“—admire you. Well, yes. Both. Essek, you must know that.”
“Perhaps,” Essek says. It sounds, if possible, even more fragile than his admission of his own emotions. Caleb understands him; the only confession more terrifying than I want you is, of course, I think that you want me, too.
Indulgently, Caleb allows himself to drag his thumb across Essek’s full lips once more. He follows the movement easily to the corner of his lip, when Essek smiles beneath his touch.
“I am glad you are here,” he confesses in return.
“With you?” Essek asks, and the lack of clarity in the Common tongue hides his vulnerability with elegance. Essek is here, fighting by their side. Essek is here in the library, figuring out ancient maps with him. Essek is here on the floor, both of their knees surely hurting, allowing Caleb to want him, in all his selfish ways.
“With me,” Caleb confirms, and hopes it is enough.