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“I will know.”

He reached for the bottle on the nightstand, the one we had carried, sheepishly, in a sock, from Halden to Delacroix Street. He warmed it in his palm. He looked at me with his hazel eyes, hopeful and afraid and unspeakably tender, and said, “May I?” and I said, “Yes,” and I thought that I would die of it.

I expected that he would let me prepare him, but he wanted to do it himself, and so I lay back against the pillows and watched. He knelt above me with his knees on either side of my hips, and he reached behind himself with one slick hand, and his lips parted and his eyes fluttered half shut as he worked a finger inside his own ass. I could see the muscles in his thigh flex. I could hear the small wet sounds of it and the catch in his breath when he added a second finger, and I put my hands on his hips because I could not bear to do nothing, and he said, “Not yet, let me,” in a voice gone rough. His cock bobbed hard and neglected against his stomach, leaking onto my skin. I wrapped my fist around it, and he swore and rocked into my hand. When he was ready, he tore open a condom with his teeth and rolled it down over my cock, and then he slicked me with lube, and I hissed at the heat of his hand.

He positioned himself above me. He held my cock steady and lowered himself, and the head of it pressed against his entrance and then slid inside, stretching him open, and he threw his head back and let out a low, shaking groan. He sank down slowly, taking me inch by inch, until he was seated in my lap with his thighs trembling against my hips and his hands braced on my chest. I had never felt anything like it, the tight clutch of him, the heat, the pulse of his body around mine. I held perfectly still and watched his face.

“Okay?” I asked, unsteadily.

“So okay. Give me a second.” He laughed, breathless, and opened his eyes. “You feel incredible. You’re so deep.”

“You are—” I could not finish.

He began to move. He lifted himself slowly and sank back down, rolling his hips, and the light lay on his skin like honey, and his eyes never left mine. Each time he dropped onto me, the full length of my cock slid into him and his body clenched around it, and he gasped and bit his lip and did it again. I felt everything. I felt the tremble in his thighs and the tight velvet slide of him, and his heartbeat, fast and strong, while my own faint pulse began to keep time with it. I felt, dimly, at the back of my mind, a new thing waking, a warm thread stretched taut between us and humming. It had been there since the locker room. It was waking now, in the light, in answer to a question.

“Maksim,” he panted. “I’m close. I’m so close.”

“I know.”

“Now. Do it now. Please.”

I sat up. I wrapped one arm around his back and held him against my chest with his legs around my waist and my cock still buried deep inside him, and with my other hand I cupped his face and turned it gently aside, baring the long line of his throat. I saw the garnet rise and fall on its chain. I saw the pulse beating in the hollow under his ear.

“Look at me,” I said.

He looked.

“Do you say yes?”

“Yes.”

“Do you say it freely?”

“Yes.”

“Then hold on.”

I bit him.

It was the gentlest thing I have ever done. I did not tear, and I did not plunge. I set my teeth against his skin and pressed, and they slid in like a key into a lock. He gasped, and his whole body arched, and his fingers dug into my shoulders. Then the blood came, warm and sweet and startling, and the world turned inside out.

I cannot tell you what it tasted of, though I have tried in five languages. It tasted of bread, and of honey, and of a low warm house in the first snow, with a woman’s hand in my hair and smoke in the rafters. It tasted of a boy laughing in a locker room, and a slice of pizza, and a hand against a pane of glass. It tasted of every good thing I had ever lost and every good thing I had never dared to want, and beneath all of it, deep and wide and bottomless, it tasted of him.

And I felt him. He was in me, everywhere: his joy and his fear and his grief, his memory of a little boy in a doctor’s office, his terror of his father’s silence, and his fierce, helpless, undefended love, blazing like a furnace. I felt it all, and I knew that he felt mine, and we hung together in the warm bright light, two men with one heartbeat, unable to speak.

He began to move again, rocking in my lap, driving himself down onto my cock while I drank from his throat, faster now and harder, with a desperate, rolling rhythm that made the bed shake. I slid my hand between us and wrapped it around him. He was slick and hot and aching, and I stroked him in time with his hips. He came first, with a cry that shook his whole body, spilling across my fist and my stomach while he clenched around me in long pulsing waves. I felt it in my own bones. I followed a moment later with a low, broken, wordless sound, thrusting up into him as I emptied myself, and then I drew my teeth carefully out of him and licked the wound closed with a tenderness I had not known I possessed.

The bleeding stopped, and the skin closed. On the side of his neck, just below the ear, over the place where his pulse had beaten, a mark bloomed: a small pale silvery crescent, shaped like a new moon.

We sat there, holding each other, gasping.

“Is it done?” he whispered.

“It is done.”

“Did it— was it—”

“It was not poison.” I laughed. It came out as a sob. “Lex. It was not poison. It was the opposite. It was the exact opposite.”