His sleep is deep: he doesn’t stir as a small noise escapes you, the choking catch of a sob in your throat as you cover your mouth with your hands. Tears threaten to spill as you stare at him. It can’t be real. Surely he’s a mirage, a ghost, an enchantment – you must have imagined him enough times, and what is there to mark this as something apart from your fantasies? He’s so still he might be the portrait of a man.
You stumble towards him, still expecting the scene to vanish and for you to find yourself alone with clothes strewn on the bed in front of you, made a fool by hope once again.
‘Bisclavret,’ you say, involuntarily. You didn’t mean to speak. But now that you’ve said his name once, you can’t stop yourself repeating it, over and over, as faithful a litany as any of your prayers for his soul. You approach your own bed as nervous as a maiden, your hands resting on the coverlet for a moment before you snatch them back, afraid to be caught doing something forbidden. It cannot be permitted for Bisclavret to be here, sleeping, human, alive. It’s too much of a miracle to have been worked without the hand of a saint, and there are no holy relics within these stone walls.
He opens his eyes.
For a moment there’s a hint of wolf, of wildness, but it fades as his expression sharpens into alertness and he sees you.
You freeze, waiting for the moment he recalls where he is and backs away, shuttering himself behind a mask of decorum. This loyal knight of yours was unwavering in his service and unflinching with a sword, but cautious with his counsel and his affections – and now he knows everything, has the truth of you clear as confession, and all he does is lie there and look at you.
And then he smiles.
It’s the hesitant, unpractised smile of a man who hasn’t long had a mouth to smile with. It spreads slowly across his face, unselfconscious joy diffusing gradually but without restraint. Tears threaten at the sight of it, and you take his hands and kiss them, swearing your fealty to him, returning to him a hundredfold the oaths he swore to you. You turn his hands over and press a dozen small kisses to his palms. The soft skin beneath your lips is a marvel. You still half-expect him to melt away beneath your touch, but his hands in yours are real, his breath mingling with yours is real, his lips under yours are real and warm and unhesitating, even as you hold back, uncertain, ready to withdraw the moment he spurns your affections.
He pulls one hand free of your grip and raises it to tangle in your hair, pulling you closer. You let out a soft groan of surprise and allow yourself to be led by him, the miracle of his resurrection made ever more marvellous as your fingers trace his collarbones, his neck, the contours of the face you thought you’d never see again.Real. What right has this impossibility to be so real? You kiss his temples, his cheekbones, the hollow of his neck just below his jaw; follow the blue veins beneath the pale skin with your tongue and your lips.
The soft thud of the door closing jolts you back to reality, andyou recall your knights, bearing witness to this reunion. Their tactful retreat would once have sent shame burning through you, or fear, that you should be discovered in such a state of desperation, but in this moment all you feel is relief, because they’ve left you here alone with Bisclavret.
‘Bisclavret,’ you whisper, lips almost touching his ear, speaking the name not in mourning or remembrance but to bear witness to the living man. ‘Bisclavret.’
His breath catches. When he speaks, his words are uncertain, shaped with great care: ‘Am I real?’
It’s the first time in two years that he has spoken, and his voice is hoarse with the remaking.
‘Real enough,’ you say, pressing another kiss to his neck, hands creeping down to his waist, feeling the warmth of him. ‘And if this is some vision, I’ve no wish to wake from it.’
‘Nor I,’ he says, and his smile is familiar and new all at once. His hands are hesitant as they trail across your skin, but it’s not uncertainty: it’s wonder. Bisclavret has been so long robbed of his hands.
The thought makes you interlace your fingers with his, lifting your joined hands to kiss his wrist.
You say, ‘I missed you.’
And he who was there says, ‘I know.’
He knows everything about you. You’ve never been laid so bare. ‘I mourned you,’ you tell him, even though he knows. ‘I grieved. I was lost in it. I thought the loss of you would never stop hurting.’
‘I’m here now.’ He’s all angles, worn thin with all that the wolf stole from him. His bones press through his skin, fierce enough to cut you open, but you’d gladly bleed on that altar if it were the cost of holding him.
‘Will you leave again?’ you ask.
He stills. ‘Perhaps,’ he says at last. There’s tension in his body that wasn’t there before, and you regret asking. But he has more to say. ‘The wolf,’ he confesses, ‘is not banished for good, but . . . but I think I will be able to come back.’
You press yourself close against him, trying to dispel the thought of it. ‘I’ll be here when you do,’ you say, and it’s the most solemn oath you’ve ever sworn. He will never wander exiled in the forest again.
He kisses you so carefully, his lips gentle as butterfly wings against your neck. In that kiss is all the softness of a man who was shaped for teeth and claws against his own nature.
You say, ‘If I undress you, will you lose yourself?’
His answer is a long time coming. When he eventually speaks, his lips are so close to your skin that you can feel them, trailing feather-light across your neck as he shapes the words with warm breath. ‘Not like this,’ he says, ‘not with you here to remember me.’
You remember him. You’ve already committed every plane of his body to memory. But you’ll remind yourself of them again and again until he is branded indelibly into your mind. You’ll whisper his nature to him, shape his name in kisses, bring him back with your touch over and over again.
You help him tug his clothes over his head, press kisses to his skin, resting your lips over his heart as though you can taste the beating of it. His ribs, his stomach, the ongoing miracle that is Bisclavret, alive,here, your mouth on his skin. You take your time, unfastening his braies, kissing the crook of his knee, his thighs, marking and memorising every inch of him with all the devotion of a pilgrim. And he is a saint, something holy in this, prayers manifest in living form. It is a sacrament you have been starving for.
His hands are in your hair again, tangling there, pulling youclose; he drags his fingers across your scalp and around your neck. ‘If I undress you,’ he says, very softly, ‘will you lose yourself?’
You close your eyes. Feel only his touch and the heat of him against you.
