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“I love your colours,” Essek sighs to Caleb one morning. He sits on the edge of the bed, like he so often does, all dressed and made up for the day, having roused from his trance hours before.
It is an image Caleb often wakes up to: the curious spectator, that particular tilt to his chin, a slight edge of superiority to his smile as he watches the ebb and flow of Caleb’s consciousness. It should be degrading, Essek’s clear fascination with the exotic, human vulnerability of sleep, but Caleb finds he much prefers it over waking up alone to the cold expanse of an empty bed.
He slides a hand across the cool sheet, reaching, his limbs still heavy with sleep.
“Your eyes are the same colour as the sky in Rosohna on days of worship,” Essek muses, taking Caleb’s hand into his own. “I used to hate that colour. I was conditioned to, seeing it always hurt my eyes. It was a symbol of pointless religious sacrifice, the comfort of twilight stripped bare and scoured raw by the meaningless burn of the sun.”
Caleb blinks blearily. Essek’s voice is fond with a hint of childlike mischief, the way it often is when he utters blasphemy.
“I never imagined how beautiful that colour could be without pain, until I met you, of course. And your hair…”
Essek’s fingers dance across the back of Caleb’s hand, tapping a rhythm. The soft pads of his fingers touching each knuckle in some kind of secret code. His nails are painted a pale, cool toned gold.
“Flames, sunset, copper pieces – every comparison feels somewhat trite. They’re not inaccurate matches of colour, your hair contains all those shades, but…”
He pauses, tracing his thumb down each of Caleb’s fingers in turn.
“I used to hate the sun, but… When the light catches in your hair, the wealth of warm colour it reveals...” He chuckles, suddenly bashful. “It is almost worth the discomfort.”
Caleb watches him turn his hand over, trace runes into his palm. He inhales sharply, closing his fingers around Essek’s wrist.
“Come. Lie down with me,” he rasps, tugging gently.
Essek smiles warmly but shakes his head.
“I am already dressed, and it’s getting late. You should be getting ready for work.”
Caleb groans loudly. He makes a show of crawling over to where Essek sits and collapsing face-first into his lap.
Essek laughs and combs a hand through Caleb’s sleep-mussed hair. His robes are velvet-soft and smell of bergamot.
“So much sleeping and still greedy for more,” he chides gently. His cool fingertips draw zig-zagging lines into Caleb’s broad shoulders and Caleb sighs a chuckle into his thigh; Essek likes playing connect-the-dot with his freckles.
“It isn’t sleep I am greedy for.”
Something stirs under Essek’s robes. Caleb smirks. Success.
“Tonight, ussta ssussun, your students await.”
-
Ussta ssussun, ‘my brightness’, Caleb knows. He used to think it was a reference to his intellect, or, like ussta ta’ecelle, ‘my sunshine’, a love of his sunny disposition (As Beau had explained between hysterical cackles, back when Caleb would ask her to translate Essek’s endearments for him). Now he knows they are both at least in part in reference to his appearance. Essek seems to favour them over the more straightforward ussta ssin’urn, ‘my beautiful’.
It feels odd, still, to be complemented for something he had no hand in.
“My beautiful boy,” his mother had called him, and 10-year-old Bren, little smartass that he was, had smugly pointed out the self-congratulatory nature of it, given the fact that he was Una’s spitting image. She’d laughed then, and ruffled his hair, and told him there was nothing wrong with that. She also explained, with more gentleness, that his beauty was not just his skin and his hair, but his heart as well. That true beauty lived within.
The falseness of that he learned from Trent Ikithon, who taught him to sharpen his beauty into a blade. With hair shorn short and gaunt features honed into angular grace, he learned how to tilt his jaw just so, how to smile soft and harmless without showing teeth, how to bare skin strategically, filing his own bones into bait.
When his insides were rotten and ugly, Ikithon told him he was in his prime.
After his youth had withered and died, his appearance became a disguise. Mud and filth a safety blanket, protecting him from the world and the world from him.
He wasn’t beautiful after Vergesson, neglected and overgrown, it was easier that way. What was left of him after a bath and a shave was unavoidable genetics. Aquiline nose like the father he killed, lines worn into his skin by years he never lived.
Essek’s beauty is of a different sort. It is deliberate, an art.
Oh, he is he beautiful naked and clean, all sharp angles covered in soft dark skin. His features are finely sculpted, a delicate symmetry of lines and curves.
But there is purposeful beauty layered on top in the way that Essek chooses to adorn himself. This is Essek, too: the hand he has in his own creation. The beauty of his skill, his care, his indulgence of colours and textures and scents, hand-picked for sensory pleasure – his own first and foremost, and then bestowed upon Caleb. It is a gift he feels wholly undeserving of but receives gratefully because he knows it to be inherently reciprocal; Essek likes to be admired.
Caleb contemplates this on his walk to the Academy, blaming his blush upon arrival on exertion and the crisp autumn weather.
-
When Caleb gets home from work, Essek is waiting for him, dressed in gold and lilac and inky black, a different ensemble than this morning. He floats in the hallway, open armed, and Caleb lets himself be embraced. As he inhales the scent clinging to Essek’s neck (still bergamot), he imagines Essek getting dressed for him. Long fingers rifling through the garments suspended from a rod in their closet, weighing fabrics in his hand, testing their drape across his wrist.
Essek has expensive taste. He favours luxurious satins that cling to his curves when he moves, soft velvet that envelops his narrow shoulders just so, the sturdy, rougher silks that catch on Caleb’s calloused fingertips as well as the softer, almost translucent kind he often chooses for his undershirts. Some are woven through with gold or silver thread, a private indulgence, skin-warm and shimmering, the mere thought of it heats Caleb’s face.
“I have missed you today,” Essek breathes against the shell of Caleb’s ear.
“And I you,” Caleb sighs, pulling back slightly to hold Essek at arm’s length. “Let me look at you.”
Essek smiles, eyes lowering demurely, showing off the thin line of gold just above his lashes, the same colour as his nails. His lips are painted a dark purplish blue and a pearlescent sheen clings to his cheek bones.
His white hair spirals from his scalp in perfect soft coils that seem to disregard gravity entirely. Caleb thinks of how it gleams like white gold in his conjured amber light. Like often when Essek’s hair is styled this perfectly, Caleb feels the rebellious urge to mess it up. To rake his hands through the shapely curls, to watch them unravel with the friction of a wall or a pillowcase.
His thoughts must be spelled out across his face, because Essek is giving him a look of playful reproach.
“Where is that mind of yours, Caleb Widogast?”
Caleb smiles, an open book.
“Oh, deeply in the gutter.”
Essek shakes his head, smiles, and lets himself be led towards the bedroom.
As soon as Caleb closes the door behind him, he’s pressed up against it with a force that’s half Essek’s hands, half gravity assisting him. Caleb barely has time to catch his breath before Essek’s lips are on his. The paint trapped between their kiss has a pleasant buttery texture and smells of vanilla. Essek’s lips slide open, and Caleb follows suit, letting him in, running his tongue across the points of Essek’s fangs.
Essek’s hands are on his cheeks, his jaws, the side of his neck. Caleb sucks in a sharp breath when they trail across his collarbone, briefly dragging his collar down. He cups Essek’s cheeks to tilt his face, exposing the column of his throat. He kisses a line from below his chin to the tender spot behind his ear, drawing soft gasps from Essek’s lips.
A row of silver earrings cling to the outer ridge of Essek’s ear. They chime softly when Caleb bumps them with his nose. Another way Essek adorns himself. He usually takes them off before sex, but not always. Caleb doesn’t mind their presence. He finds an unoccupied spot and takes the cartilage between his teeth, and Essek squirms against him, biting off a moan. The sound sends a tingle down Caleb’s spine and pools hot between his legs.
“You’re so beautiful,” he breathes into Essek’s ear.
Essek presses closer, pushing their lower bodies together before drawing back slightly to look at Caleb. His pupils are dilated and a warm plum flush blooms on his cheeks and the tips of his ears. He smirks as his eyes fall upon Caleb’s mouth. The paint on Essek’s lips has smudged slightly, it must have transferred when they kissed. Essek likes when his makeup rubs off on Caleb’s skin, a subtle way of asserting ownership. Of course, he leaves other marks on Caleb too, ones that can’t be easily wiped off with a damp cloth.
Essek smiles wider, exposing fangs as he places his thumb on Caleb’s bottom lip and drags it down his chin. Caleb ducks forward, trying to bite at the digit, but Essek is too fast, catching him by the chin.
“Careful d’anthe.” He presses his tongue to the tip of a fang. “I might bite back.” As he says it, he drops his gaze pointedly to Caleb’s groin, where his arousal is very obvious.
Essek slides his hand down from Caleb’s chin over his throat, and all the way down his torso until it lands at his belt. He looks at Caleb, one eyebrow raised, his face infuriatingly, beautifully smug. When Caleb nods Essek sinks to his knees, his hand still anchored on Caleb’s belt.
Caleb watches him undo the buckle and the front of his trousers with nimble fingers, gleaming with rings that clink together softly as he works.
“So hard already…” Essek teases as he pulls Caleb’s erection free. “You are an easy man, Caleb Widogast.”
Caleb moans as Essek’s fingers wrap around him, the rings slightly cooler than Essek’s skin.
“Well, you are – ahhh – a difficult man to resist.”
Essek chuckles at the sound Caleb makes when he swipes his thumb over the head of his cock.
“Were you thinking of me, throughout the day?”
“Always,” Caleb says, his voice rough with want. “I’m always thinking of you.”
Essek grins and tightens his grip. “Good,” he purrs, before taking Caleb into his mouth.
Caleb clenches his teeth to keep from crying out at the soft, wet heat that envelops him. He leans his head back against the wall, letting his eyes flutter closed. He opens them back up when he feels Essek’s nails digging into his thigh.
Looking down, he sees Essek drag his lips down his cock, smearing his pale skin with deep, shimmering indigo, like smudges of liquid galaxy. The image is dizzyingly obscene. White lashes dip against dusk-dark skin like wisps of starlight, then tilt upwards, revealing ravenous, piercing violet as Essek blinks up at him.
Then, the dirty patches of night sky are swallowed greedily when Essek takes him deeper, his finely shaped nose buried in the coarse, copper hair at his base. A loud, drawn-out moan escapes Caleb’s lips as Essek’s tongue swirls around him. He presses his back heavily against the door, legs trembling with the exertion of keeping himself upright.
Grasping for something to anchor himself on, he winds a hand into Essek’s hair, watching it curl around his fingers like wedding rings. His fingertips are still dusted with pearlescent powder from where he’s touched Essek’s cheek earlier. He curls his hand into a fist and gives a gentle tug. Essek moans around him and the vibration of it nearly makes him keel over with need.
Despite his playful threat, Essek doesn’t bite. He gives Caleb only the softness of his fanged mouth, licking and sucking and breathing warm through his nose. His eyes have fluttered shut, focused on his task with the dedication of a man in prayer. A heretic, kneeling. And yet Caleb is the one who is coming undone, moaning and whimpering worship and praise.
With another tug on his hair, Essek looks up once more, eyes watering from Caleb’s length down his throat. The gold paint on his lids has smudged a little in the inner corners. He grips Caleb’s hips tighter and pulls them towards him, encouraging Caleb to thrust into his mouth. His beautiful painted mouth, his perfect hair, the neat silver lines on his eyelids, all ruined in service of Caleb’s pleasure. Beautiful, delicate, elegant Essek, swirling his tongue around Caleb’s cock, chasing him down with hot, insistent pleasure, tendrils of wet heat shooting up his spine and singing in his nerves and filling his veins with liquid fire threatening to make something explode—
Essek clamps his hands on Caleb’s trembling hips, holding him up as his legs shake and spasm when he comes in Essek’s mouth with a ragged cry. Essek swallows around him again and again until he finally pulls off his softening cock and lets Caleb slowly slide down the door to collapse against him on the floor, head resting on his shoulder.
They sit like that for a time, Essek stroking soothing circles into Caleb’s back as he catches his breath.
“Is this what you thought of throughout the day?” Essek asks finally. “When you were thinking of me?” His voice is still somewhat hoarse despite the tease.
Caleb draws a steadying breath.
“Among other things,” he admits.
Essek chuckles, triumphant, and Caleb is so very fond.
“What else?” he inquires greedily.
Caleb sighs and pulls him closer.
“Your beauty,” he confesses into Essek’s hair. “The way you looked at me this morning. How beautiful you look all buttoned up and put together. How beautiful you are in disarray.”
He leans back to look at Essek and reaches out to wipe a golden tear track off his cheek. It’s terribly ineffective, spreading out the paint rather than removing it.
“How lucky I am to get to see you like this.”
Essek smiles at him, disarmed.
He brings up a hand to cradle Caleb’s cheek, then slides it down to his chin.
“It’s a good colour on you,” he says, wiping his thumb at the stains he left there earlier.
“I know.” Caleb grins, glancing down at his crotch, the matching smudges there.
Essek snorts, an inelegant, uncontrolled sound. Another privilege only a lucky few get to experience from him.