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Wei Ying has made up his mind to be petulant long before they return to their quarters for the night, and at last he can enact his irritation. He sighs, expansive and wounded, kicks his boots from his feet with two separate flourishes, and then collapses on the edge of the bed—generously provided by their hosts, the leaders of the minor sect Runan Wang—with his face tipped up toward Lan Wangji and his eyes luminous.
Lan Wangji waits. His husband does not require his input.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says, his voice close to wavering and high above its normal pitch, “this is terrible.”
Wei Ying has a point. Their night-hunt has concluded and the pack of mischievous ghouls living at the bottom of the clan’s well have dissipated, but Lan Wangji could have done without their souvenir. He hums in assent as he tugs the topknot from his hair and pulls it free of its ties. He removes his own boots, and shucks his outermost layer of robe, and pauses.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says again. He kicks his feet against the bed.
For long years, Lan Wangji was uncertain about Wei Ying. He wanted to touch, and he did not. He wanted to take, and he did not. Since they’ve been wed, he has basked in the absence of that uncertainty. When he goes to Wei Ying, Wei Ying opens to him, like a set of cupped hands that come apart to reveal a gift hidden within. Now, he hesitates.
“Come on!” Wei Ying tilts his chin up as if in challenge. “Aren’t you at least going to try?”
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says. “The curse is immutable.” And, luckily, temporary. Vengeful spirits do not care for love or marriage. With that spite, as the dying act of the last of the ghouls, Lan Wangji and Wei Ying are forbidden to touch one another for the duration of the night.
Wei Ying widens his eyes. “Lan Zhan, isn’t our love even more immutable? Really! You won’t dare to try? I’m wounded.” He’s loosened his robes and they slip open as he sprawls, his legs long and his smile easy. “I thought we made certain promises, eh? And I thought your marriage duties were second to none in your eyes!”
The gruesome shock of backfiring qi slices up along Lan Wangji’s arms like the feeling of a knife wound. He draws in a single breath and removes his hands from where they had wanted to settle: Wei Ying’s thighs, soft on the inside. He knows their texture by heart, but he dearly resents that he can’t confirm his own memories. Releasing that breath, he flexes his fingers and looks up from where he’s dropped to his knees. Wei Ying stares back at him, his lips parted.
“All right.” Wei Ying’s voice has shrunk. He licks his lips, leaving them wet in the wake of his tongue. “Ha. All right! Nobody can say you didn’t try.”
Lan Wangji swallows. Wei Ying’s mouth shines burnished red in the lamplight. His skin would taste of salt; they’ve exerted themselves this evening, and Wei Ying’s golden core, his inheritance from Mo Xuanyu, remains young. When Lan Wangji kisses him, almost every time, Wei Ying laughs into the place where their mouths meet. When Lan Wangji fucks him, most of the time, Wei Ying’s whole body goes slack, like there’s nowhere else he could ever need to be if Lan Wangji is inside of him.
Two to three heartbeats pass, and Lan Wangji banishes uncertainty afresh. He sits back, tucking his feet beneath his thighs, and looks steadily at Wei Ying. “Take off your clothes,” he says.
Wei Ying blinks at him, owlish. “Well.” He laughs, glances down at himself, and then bestows a smile upon Lan Wangji. “Ah, husband! So demanding.” His smile remains as he slides his arms free, the inner crooks of his elbows soft and his fingers nimble. His robes pool around him, and then his trousers, his undershirt, all the rest of it. He is made of long lines, the curve of a waist and the wet flash of his tongue between his teeth.
Lan Wangji’s fingers twitch. He schools himself to patience. “Touch yourself,” he instructs.
Wei Ying’s fingers flutter compulsively, as if in deliberate answer to Lan Wangji’s involuntary movement a moment before. “Lan Zhan...”
As ever, all Lan Wangji must do is wait for Wei Ying. He lets his gaze rest where it is, heavy on Wei Ying’s face and body and the thickening of an erection where those soft thighs meet. Wei Ying doesn’t even require his touch—only the suggestion of it and his chest rises and falls quicker; his toes curl, nearly touching the floor, so close to Lan Wangji as to be dangerous. Lan Wangji smiles, and Wei Ying pouts, the tips of his fingers making sweet little dents in his skin. When Lan Wangji tips his head to one side, prompting, Wei Ying says, “You—” and then laughs, and then draws in a slow breath. “Aiya, fine! Fine. How controlling!”
Wei Ying strokes his own thighs, palms flat. He trembles. It’s only a little, but Lan Wangji notices. He bumps his cock with his knuckles and breathes out through his nose.
“No,” Lan Wangji says. He’s hard in his trousers, the layers of his robes a pleasant weight of something that’s nearly friction. “Wei Ying. How would I touch you?” It isn’t a question. It’s an instruction, and Wei Ying receives it as such, his pupils wide black. He draws a breath, quick and fluttering, and adjusts his weight as though preparing for battle. There: he fits a sure hand around the heft of his erection, gasping and bucking up into the curl of his own fist. He digs the tips of his fingers into his thigh, making more than dents now—a series of reddening marks blooms in the wake of his hand, and Lan Wangji’s tongue grows heavy in his mouth. He would cover those little marks with his teeth, biting until Wei Ying laughed and then until he whined.
Wei Ying does whine now, his gaze steady on Lan Wangji. He rocks into the cradle of touch he’s created, the muscles of his legs tensed, and says, “L— Lan Zhan, are you satisfied?” His laugh is reedy, breathless.
Lan Wangji could laugh in turn, if laughter came more easily to him, at such a question. “Hardly.” He tracks the movement of Wei Ying’s hand, the flexing of his wrist. He would bite there, too, only a taste of sweat and the workings of his tendons. “You’ve barely begun.”
The way Wei Ying squirms in answer to that is obscene, his whole body taut with it as if Lan Wangji has said something unconscionably filthy. “Hanguang-jun!” he says, but the sting is made mild by the pretty picture he makes. His cock disappears into his hand, then reappears, flushed and gleaming; his nipples are drawn tight, the color of the freckles that scatter themselves across his face and shoulders each summer. Lan Wangji wants to swallow him whole—forget the curse.
Instead, he says, “What next, Wei Ying?”
Wei Ying is the cleverest person Lan Wangji has ever known, but there are times when he likes to play at being stupid. Cocking his head, laughing, pretending not to understand so that Lan Wangji must repeat himself or make his meaning clearer, all for Wei Ying’s edification. Gratifyingly, he does not play that game tonight. He looks at Lan Wangji with his eyes dark and he nods.
Within moments, Wei Ying is pushing two of his fingers inside of himself, and the insides of his thighs are damp, a sheen of oil that catches in the light. Lan Wangji watches him. He watches the deftness of his fingers as they curl and stretch, his knuckles as they knock against the just-visible curve of his ass, the shaking strain to the muscles of his thighs. Lan Wangji watches, and Lan Wangji burns where he kneels, and Lan Wangji wants everything for himself.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says in a voice that’s almost nothing but a whimper, thready and ravaged already. He coils his hand around his erection, his thumb to the head. His hand is smaller than Lan Wangji’s. When Lan Wangji touches him there, he can cup all of him in the palm of one hand, every part of Wei Ying under his control.
“Lan Zhan.” The way he says it, Lan Wangji could drink it down. The edge of a gasp, the drawn-out syllables. Lan Wangji could press an open mouth to the vibrations of his throat and devour his own name right from the source, if only he could touch his husband tonight.
“Continue,” Lan Wangji instructs.
“All right, all right,” Wei Ying babbles, and he is fucking himself now, his toes curling against the floor and the edge of the bed for purchase and three fingers buried deep inside. “I wish it was you,” he says, sounding stupid with it, sounding the way he does after one too many cups of wine. “Lan Zhan, I wish it was you. It’s good, I mean, ah, it’s good, but that’s only because—because I’m pretending it’s you, and—” He laughs breathily. “Ah, husband, your head will swell, but I just want you. I hate curses!”
Lan Wangji can barely speak. He hates them, too. He would tear apart a thousand ghouls with his bare hands for the privilege of pressing his fingers inside of Wei Ying and feeling the heat of him, the places that no one but Lan Wangji has ever touched.
“Lan Zhan.” Wei Ying’s eyes are wide, open and fixed on Lan Wangji. He licks the swell of his lower lip, and it shines. “I can’t—I need it to be you. I can’t finish without you.” It’s the tone he uses when he’s playing, when he whines and cajoles and twirls Lan Wangji’s hair around his fingers until Lan Wangji loses control and takes what he wants. Tonight, however, Wei Ying’s face is serious. His mouth is open and he is panting, his erection flush with his stomach and his cheeks pink with effort.
Lan Wangji rises up, grateful for his own steadiness. His own arousal aches, no longer pleasant friction but a call to action that he cannot take. He steps forward, once and then again.
Obedient, Wei Ying scrambles backward. His fingers stay inside himself, deep. Lan Wangji sheds his robes and crawls onto the bed, leaking against the front of his trousers, only exactly as careful as he needs to be to avoid brushing Wei Ying’s skin with his own. His knees pen in Wei Ying’s, his hands planting themselves to either side of Wei Ying’s face. He is so close, and could so easily take Wei Ying’s hair and pull it, gather up the back of his skull in one or both hands and kiss him with teeth. Lan Wangji does none of that, and continues to burn, and cups himself through a single layer of fabric as he says, again, “Continue.” He hardly recognizes his own voice. It hardly matters: Wei Ying’s breath is hot, his mouth kissing distance from Lan Wangji’s, and every handstand Lan Wangji has ever done has been in service of this, of the ability to suspend himself over his wanting husband with one hand, covering him entirely while touching nothing, and slip the other into the front of his trousers. He hisses as the calluses on his fingertips brush the swell of his erection. Wei Ying makes a soft noise like a cornered animal, and seems to remember himself at last.
“Hanguang-jun,” he says. “Please.”
Lan Wangji shuts his eyes, only for a moment. He cannot touch Wei Ying. The consequences to their respective meridians are not worth it. He can’t. His hips shudder forward into his own hand, a poor substitute for any part of Wei Ying.
“Wei Ying.” The name tears out of him in a low rumble. He looks at his husband. Wei Ying’s nipples are hard and the hand that is not buried inside himself is trembling, resting with fingertips against his belly. Something wet shines in his eyes, stark with wanting. Lan Wangji is desperate to bite him, to take him, to pick him up and sink his teeth into the soft and yielding parts of him. He does not. He says, instead, exactingly even and trembling only a little, “It is my voice that guides you. I am with you.”
Wei Ying gasps around one single wretched sobbing sound. “All right, all right, Lan Zhan, you’re right. You’re always right! Nobody fucks me but you. It’s always you, gege.”
“Yes,” Lan Wangji says, and decades of self-discipline cannot keep the animal satisfaction from his voice.
Wei Ying touches himself, his hand shaky around the flushed-red strain of his cock, and he fucks himself, his own fingers under the compulsion of Lan Wangji’s orders, and his orgasm bows his body into the prettiest possible shape, his back a curve like a crescent moon. He is so close to touching Lan Wangji that it is dangerous. He is silent only at the precise moment that he comes, as if the pleasure of it has stolen his voice. “Lan Zhan,” he says on an exhale, little shocks still tightening his body, spilling still into the spaces between his fingers. “Lan Zhan, I could feel you. How did you do that? Hanguang-jun—”
His hands are falling away, his fingers slipping out and wet, and Lan Wangji fucks forward into his own grip and thinks how easily he could replace those fingers with himself, filling Wei Ying the way he was meant to be filled without a care for the spiritual consequences, and Wei Ying is looking up at him with his throat bared and his muscles loose, and Lan Wangji squeezes his own cock, hard, and comes, his pulse hotly insistent in his ears and wrists. He rocks down into his own hand, riding out every gripping moment of pleasure and watching as Wei Ying’s eyes track every twitch of his cock with hunger in his expression.
There’s softness there now, Wei Ying’s smile returning to his face and shaping his mouth. He stretches, long and purposeful, his limbs brushing exactly as close to Lan Wangji’s as they can without angering the curse. Lan Wangji is closer to satiated, but still he burns, with baser needs still: to gather Wei Ying up, to kiss his smiling mouth, to clean him and care for him and fuck him again and then begin the process anew. He allows himself one shuddering breath out, petulant with desires refused.
“I really could feel you,” Wei Ying tells him. The corners of his eyes crinkle as his smile widens. “You’re sure that wasn’t some secret cultivation trick? The mighty Hanguang-jun and his phantom cock?”
Lan Wangji rewards him with a smile, although he would have smiled regardless. He doesn’t answer—let Wei Ying wonder and think on it and squirm at the thought anytime they are parted. With some effort, he draws himself away from Wei Ying and the radiating heat of his body. He will find a way to care for him throughout this night even without the ability to touch.
Wei Ying’s eyes don’t leave him. Lan Wangji can feel the weight of his gaze as he moves, finding a spare white inner robe to toss to Wei Ying. If Lan Wangji cannot hold him as he sleeps, that will need to do. “Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying starts. The sound of him licking his lips carries across the room. “Tomorrow, in the morning—”
Lan Wangji turns back to him. He looks at his husband, from the arches and worn-rough heels of his feet to the spill of dark hair around his shoulders. “In the morning,” he says, or rather promises, “then you will feel me.”
The shiver that draws itself in a perfect line up Wei Ying’s body will be enough to stay Lan Wangji’s hand for one night.