The Key

Chapter 19

“What?” Dan says, eyes half-lidded. He immediately leans in, negating those scant inches, and kisses the corner of Casper’s mouth again. He kisses Casper’s cheek, and Casper has never before considered how much cheek there is between mouth and ear. It’s a long and winding path, and it distracts him thoroughly. “Show you what?” Dan asks, directly into Casper’s ear. One of his hands sneaks higher, escaping the confines of Casper’s arms in order to return to his hair.

Casper can’t seem to open his eyes. “Whatever you like best.”

Dan chuckles hard, and everything inside of Casper seems to coil tighter. “Cas, sweetheart, we don’t have time. Or a couch.” His tongue touches Casper’s earlobe, which is very strange but not unpleasant. “Mostly the couch.”

“We have a table,” Casper begins to say, just as Dan’s lips close around his earlobe. Each wet pull, each scrape of teeth sends a corresponding sensation to elsewhere in Casper’s body, an unexpected variation on sympathetic magic.

“Hm?” Dan asks without releasing him. His other hand escapes as well, dropping low to Casper’s hip. Now when Casper pulls him closer, there’s no barrier of arms between them. Their bodies align all the way down. Their feet try to stand in the same space. Their waists collide, pressing tight, and Casper groans at the heat, ducking his head against Dan’s shoulder.

Dan curses, breathy and beautiful, and he eases Casper away. He forces a gaping chasm of inches between their bodies, and Casper easily overcomes the distance for another kiss. Their mouths meet but Dan keeps it light, stays on the surface, and Casper cannot coax him deeper.

“Cas, we are really not equipped for this,” Dan says, voice low and strained.

“Kissing?” Casper asks, confused, because they most certainly are. His voice has become a low and ruined rasp he doesn’t recognize.

Dan peers at him, again holding Casper’s face between his hands. “You said…?”

“Show me how you want to be kissed,” Casper answers. He runs one hand up and down Dan’s side, from hip to armpit, the long journey of abdomen and torso. His other hand can’t seem to leave Dan’s back, too busy marveling at his shoulder blades. He restrains his wings, forcing himself to keep from holding Dan properly. He could wrap them around Dan and pull their bodies flush once more.

“Oh,” Dan says, and he sounds so disappointed that Casper would change his answer if he knew what to change it to. “No, that’s, that’s good, that’s all we should really…” He trails off, staring at Casper’s mouth. “Yeah. Should stick to just kissing.”

“This is ‘just kissing’?” Casper asks.

“Good point,” Dan says, and kisses him again. He does nothing new, and yet the onslaught of sensation is in no way lessened by the repetition of stimulus. The heat is there, the taste, the scent. The wet pressure and the flow of air from Dan into him, from him into Dan. The calm exhilaration, the needful contentment.

They continue to tug at each other, but Dan keeps their lower bodies apart. This is presumably wise. Dan moves his mouth back to Casper’s ear, and this is indubitably wonderful.

Casper keens softly, not meaning to. “Dan…” He tilts his head at once into and away from the touch, at once providing more access and needing more pressure.

With a smug noise, Dan drops his mouth lower. There are lips and tongue in rapid succession, and then there are teeth.

“Dan,” Casper gasps, his entire body jolting. He holds on too tight, forces himself to refrain even while he desperately needs to move. He needs to flap for balance and cannot move his wings even an inch. His arms, mere arms, must suffice, and this is not enough, none of this is enough.

Dan laughs against the skin of his neck, hot puffs of breath that cool the lingering damp of wet kisses. “What?” he asks. “Nobody ever kiss you there before?”

“No one’s kissed me anywhere before,” Casper answers, one hand on the back of Dan’s head, urging him to repeat this.

Dan moves in the wrong direction. Though still holding on, he sways back intolerable inches. “What?”

“It’s a good change,” Casper hastens to assure him.

“Are you shitting me?” Dan asks, which seems to mean a bad thing. Not a very bad thing, judging by a tone more incredulous than hurt, but a bad thing nonetheless.

“You’re confused,” Casper settles for saying.

“How has no one ever kissed you?” Dan asks. He keeps staring at Casper’s mouth and wetting his own reddened lips, but he nudges Casper back each time he leans forward.

“Lack of interest,” Casper answers easily, only to be gently thwarted again. They are wasting time when they could be kissing.

Dan stares at him. “What, do people not have eyes?”

“Eyesight has no bearing on my preferences,” Casper replies.

Dan repeats, “On your…” He sways forward only to remove himself, a tease as unintentional as it is infuriating. “But you’ve, you have wanted people before, right?”

“I,” Casper begins, and he recalls, of all people, a demon. He remembers a few details in a new light, and so he says, “Yes.”

“Yeah?” Dan asks, as if this is important.

“She would call me by a different name, much like someone else I know,” Casper replies.

“She call you ‘Cas’ too?” Dan asks.

Casper shakes his head against Dan’s palm. His eyes seek to shut. “She called me ‘Clarence’ instead.” The insult of a human name, rapidly turning into a joke. “But we didn’t know each other very long or very well, and it wouldn’t have worked.” Meeting someone in close combat, and then interrogation, tended to have that effect. Casper’s role had been that of the sympathizer, Uriel’s that of the interrogator, and it occurs to Casper now that he may have been more predisposed to that role than he’d thought at the time.

Has he lusted more often than twice? With a basis for comparison, he ought to be able to find something more, but he doesn’t think so. It seems very little, especially compared to Balthazar or Anna, or even Hannah or Uriel, but it has always seemed like even less.

“I think that’s all,” Casper concludes. “What about you?”

“A little more frequently than that,” Dan admits, which makes sense for a creature of such a short lifespan. “Last time I felt like this, though, it wouldn’t have worked out either. Politically. She had a kid. Mage kid. Great kid.” His expression softens and hardens at once as his eyes slip past Casper’s face. “Somebody else’s bastard, though, and I wasn’t going to risk getting him caught up in succession bullshit. Spent a long time torn up about that.” His gaze returns to Casper’s eyes and he smiles faintly. “Not anymore, though.”

Casper smiles back and immediately needs to distract Dan from the ruffling of his feathers. Dan’s eyes flick to the side, and it’s too late.

“s**t, did I do that?” Dan asks.

“Do what?” Casper says, feigning ignorance. He looks first behind him, and then at the wing Dan’s staring at. “Oh. That… should settle.” He turns his head to check his other wing. “Did you pull any feathers out?”

“I don’t think so,” Dan says.

Needlessly, Casper checks the floor around their feet, which is yet another waste of time that could be spent kissing. He only sees the dropped gloves, having fallen down where they deserve to be. “It’s fine.”

Something in Dan’s expression shifts, something both heavy-lidded and disbelieving. Casper has gotten to know his face very well. “Man, how were you casting that entire time? After the dual casting, I shouldn’t be surprised but…” He shakes his head.

“That was much more difficult than the dual casting,” Casper tells him.

A faint smile touches Dan’s lips exactly the way Casper’s own lips should. “Yeah?”

“I greatly enjoy challenges, Dan,” Casper says. He draws Dan back in, and Dan begins to smirk.

“You saying you want another?” Dan asks.

“Yes.”

Dan shakes his head, but it’s not in denial, not with how he leans in and leans down. They look at each other through half-closed eyes, breathing each other’s air. “You’re a freakishly fast learner, Cas. Seriously no kissing before?”

“It was easier than the dancing,” Casper explains. “Much more immediately rewarding.”

“We should still dance, though,” Dan says. “Tonight.”

“Yes.”

“So you should finish taking those notes.”

“Yes,” Casper agrees, not moving.

“Cas,” Dan says, laughing a little.

It takes Casper a moment. He does not need notes. He doesn’t need to transcribe. He needs to make delivery arrangements and secure Seer Shurley’s cooperation in removing the tablet from its box. He needs to fly and dance and celebrate and keep kissing Dan.

“Right,” Casper says anyway. He straightens the chair, putting it again sideways in relation to the table. He sits. He takes up the pen and he looks at Dan until Dan drags his chair closer and sits as well.

“No rush,” Dan tells him, and when Casper glares, Dan laughs.

“The sooner I finish this, the sooner I can be kissing you,” Casper says, and Dan stops laughing.

Dan leans in close, a hot line of temptation. “Making up for lost time, huh?”

Casper keeps his eyes steadfastly on the tablet and the paper before him. “Balthazar has been telling me for years that I’m missing out. He’s going to be insufferable.”

“He married?” Dan asks, and the excessive amount of practice in keeping his wings still once again comes to the fore. Casper pulls at the corners of his own mouth in a way he hopes indicates laughter.

“He’s the opposite of married,” Casper answers, and Dan laughs for him.

“So he’s been out having your share of the fun,” Dan says.

“That’s fine,” Casper says, steadily transcribing. “He can’t have you, so it evens out.”

Dan leans in, and through the threadbare fabric of two shirts, Casper feels the press of his lips against his shoulder. Turning his head, Dan lays his cheek down on the spot he’d kissed. Casper tilts his own head, pressing his cheek to the lightly tousled hair crowning Dan’s head. Dan’s arm crosses his back, pressing against both wings, for his hand to grip the back of Casper’s chair. It is quiet and lovely, and Casper hastens to complete his busywork to better appreciate it.

“That symbol’s on the box too,” Dan murmurs. “What’s that one mean?”

“This one?”

Nodding gently, Dan shifts his cheek against Casper’s shoulder. “Yeah.”

“Concisely and ignoring roughly twelve layers of meaning, it means ‘angel’,” Casper replies.

Dan hums. “And not concisely?”

“‘The winged people.’ ‘They who live’ with the concept of life linked to magic, which is in turn linked to the concept of flight. ‘They who soar,’ which is almost a pun.” He doesn’t try to explain it. He can’t make it funny. He’s not Uriel.

“So it’s all about the wings, then,” Dan says.

“An angel without wings is dead,” Casper reminds him.

“Or Lucifer,” Dan says with a small sound of amusement.

“Or Lucifer,” Casper agrees, moving on to the next symbol.

Casper keeps working and Dan keeps asking. Casper stays intentionally vague and the mood stays languid. Dan’s hand leaves the back of the chair to pet his wings again, fingers threading through feathers, and Casper fights to keep his eyes open.

“I’m glad you wore these,” Dan says, head still on Casper’s shoulder. It’s a good place for him, though the angle can’t be comfortable for Dan’s spine.

“Wore…?” Casper prompts. His clothing, old and borrowed and thin, doesn’t seem to be the answer.

The petting stops, Dan evidently remembering he’s not allowed to touch. “The wings. Glad you caught my eye.”

Casper turns his head and presses his lips against Dan’s hair. He would reach for Dan’s free hand, but he has a pen in his own and too much writing to do. He has too much of everything to do, but he closes his eyes and inhales Dan’s human scent.

After tomorrow night, he will never have this again.

“I’m glad, too,” he says, and he means it just as much as he doesn’t.

Very soon, within the year, Dan is going to hate him. Perhaps within the month.

Dan lifts his head from Casper’s shoulder, a foreshadowing of further loss. “You all right?”

“I’m not looking forward to leaving,” Casper says.

“I’m just saying,” Dan says, “if you did stay until the wedding, I could walk you home. All the way home. Except, y’know, not walking. Combustion carriage.”

All the more reason he can’t stay.

“Gonna be leaving on patrol anyway,” Dan continues. “Gotta get to the border and do the annual sweep, catch all the s**t we chase to the outskirts during the rest of the year. Might as well swing by the university on the way out and pass this off. Nothing like a wagon-full of knights to keep old demon treasure safe en route.”

Casper stops writing. “You’d deliver it yourself?”

“I’m not gonna pass up an excuse to see you, Cas,” Dan tells him.

“So I’d see you again in…”

“About two weeks, yeah,” Dan says, smiling.

Casper doesn’t know how to answer, and Dan’s smile fades.

“What?” Dan asks, clearly assuming Casper is upset.

Accordingly, Casper reaches for a reason to be upset. “And after that, when would I get to see you again? Until my project is finished and I’m able to move?”

Dan’s head lifts in understanding. “You want to space it out.”

Casper wants a delivery method that will not require them to meet. He needs a delivery method that would allow Seer Shurley to receive the package in his place, as, outside of the pretense of a masquerade ball, Casper cannot be seen with his wings and not be cause for alarm. Should Dan himself arrive and find Casper missing, the transfer would never be made.

“I’d rather wait a few months twice,” Casper tells him.

“I can see what I can shift around,” Dan says. “But if I’m not on the delivery wagon, it might be three months until I can visit.”

“If you come this month, then it could be six more months until the next meeting,” Casper counters. Is that a long time to a human?

Dan visibly hesitates.

“Will you write to me?” Casper asks.

“Yes,” Dan promises immediately. “And I’ll send an extra sheet of paper inside, so you don’t have an excuse not to write back.”

Casper makes his mouth smile. “Then I think three months twice is the most feasible course of action.”

“Yeah,” Dan says with a sigh. “You’re right.”

Casper resumes his transcription. “Oh,” he says, as if as an afterthought. “All requested materials on this project go to Seer Shurley’s office. The tablet would be much safer there, too. I use communal areas.”

“No offense, Cas,” Dan says, settling back against him, “but your patron is a stingy dick.”

Relieved to have been so readily believed, Casper replies, “We get by.”

Having barely set it back down, Dan lifts his head. “We?”

Casper looks at him, their faces again brought close. “Hm?”

“Who’s ‘we’? All you sponsored people?”

Casper doesn’t know any. He falls back to a subject of relative safety. “My siblings.”

“You’re supporting them,” Dan says. There’s something in his tone and eyes Casper doesn’t immediately understand.

“We’re supporting each other,” Casper corrects. He tears his eyes away from Dan’s mouth and resumes writing.

After much too long, Dan settles back against him. “It’s good pay, you know. In the Men of Letters. Enough to raise a family on.”

“I think it’s rather premature to be talking about children, Dan.”

Dan flicks him on the outside of his thigh but doesn’t lift his head. “Smartass. Just meant, four adults, you’d be fine. All of you.”

Using a pen on paper feels slower than carving into stone with his blade. Everything drags, and the ink is slow to dry. The need to keep from smudging it is absurd. He focuses on this rather than the unease inside his abdomen.

“Do you think they’d want to move with you?” Dan asks. “Or would you be sending money back?”

“They’d want to move,” Casper answers, bent on his task. It’s very difficult, to keep from leaning into this fantasy. “I don’t know if that would be with me. I think we could all stand a little time apart.”

“Sounds like family,” Dan says with a sigh. “High tensions?”

“Cramped living.”

“That would do it,” Dan says. He nuzzles into Casper, making himself comfortable, and the lie of it, the sheer amount of falsehood burns.

“Everything I do, I do for them,” Casper confesses, not willing or able to look at Dan as he speaks. “All my research, this project, even… even coming here, Dan.” Especially coming here. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for them.”

After a long moment of holding still, of holding Casper, Dan says, “It’s never been about some project, has it.”

Casper bids his body not to tense. Remaining relaxed ought to be impossible, but Dan’s arm around his wings is a marvel in itself. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Dan says, “I pegged you for a lore junkie, but it’s more than curiosity. You don’t have the luxury of curiosity, do you? Too busy supporting your family.”

“I don’t have the luxury of a lot of things,” Casper admits. The truth tries to well up, so he breaks off a piece of it and releases that instead. “I shouldn’t even have this.” And he presses his cheek to the top of Dan’s head.

“Too bad, ’cause you got it anyway,” Dan says, blithely dismissive of that confession. He tightens his arm around Casper, making it so much worse. “You done copying that yet?”

“Almost.”

“Is it ’cause I’m interrupting a lot?”

No. “Yes.”

Dan pulls away, a prelude of things to come. A minute more, and he scoots back his chair to retrieve his gloves from the floor. Then he folds his arms on the table, eyes on the slim box containing Michael’s blade.

“What are you thinking about?” Casper asks, needing the distraction from his own mind.

“You,” Dan says frankly.

Casper smiles with his mouth. He is not tempted to do so with his wings.

“You’d really be willing to move?” Dan asks.

“If the offer still stands after I finish my project, then yes,” Casper replies, and he means that. It’s a false pretense all the way up and all the way down, but he means this.

He’s had very few fantasies.

He’s indulged in even fewer.

“That’s not really an ‘if,’ Cas,” Dan says, and he’s right, though not in the way he thinks.

“Then you have my answer.”

“Are you sure?” Dan asks.

“I don’t like where I live,” Casper says bluntly. “None of us do.”

“Oh,” says Dan. “Yeah, we’ll find you something better.”

And Casper says, “I’d like that.”

At last, Casper finishes transcribing. He sets the pen down and begins to restore the writing kit to its original state, but Dan catches at his arm, saying, “Leave it.”

“I need to wait for the ink to dry,” Casper says. “I might as well–”

“Yeah, you might as well kiss me,” Dan says, and then it’s happening, an uncontrollable impulse fulfilled before it’s even felt.

They kiss, twisted toward each other in their chairs.

They kiss, Dan tugging Casper back up to his feet.

They kiss, even as they fumble their way around to the other, unoccupied table. Casper doesn’t understand why until Dan backs up against it, until Dan hops up onto it, and then Casper stands in the gap between Dan’s knees, abruptly understanding everything in the world worth knowing.

This time, they immediately press for closeness. Casper cranes up for each kiss, nearly pulling Dan back off the table. Dan leans on him harder, hands on his shoulders, then an arm around his neck. Is this what hunger is? This might be what hunger is.

He breaks the kiss to lavish oral attention on Dan’s neck. In this position, it’s closer than his mouth, and Casper puts the access to good use. Dan’s skin tastes different than the inside of his mouth; Casper knows because he checks, multiple times. From mouth to neck and back, on each side, he checks.

Dan laughs, a short but deep rumble. “Can’t make up your mind, huh, Cas. Mm.” He leans into it when Casper performs the same act upon Dan’s earlobe that Dan had done to him. Dan threads his fingers through Casper’s hair, urging him to stay, to escalate. His other hand tugs at Casper’s wing.

“There’s so much of you,” Casper tries to explain, even though this makes little sense. Even with an extra inch of height on him, Dan is far smaller than Casper, being wingless. And yet.

“You got me,” Dan says, and Casper is not prepared for how much this hurts .

“Don’t,” he says against Dan’s neck, and it comes out too sharp.

Dan releases his wing. “Sorry. They’re so f*****g soft, man. It’s like having giant handles on you. Can’t help wanting to hold on.” One hand on Casper’s nape now, the other still in his hair. He scratches his fingernails against Casper’s scalp, and it is bliss with an ache.

He sets his mouth against Dan’s and silences himself. He silences himself as much as he stills his wings, and even the joy of touch begins to grow foul. It is false, not stolen but given in exchange for a lie, and Casper could shake Dan for letting it be this easy.

Dan breaks the kiss, not so much pulling back as straightening up. His hands keep Casper’s face tilted toward him, or perhaps this is something Casper does himself. “Too much?” Dan asks with a calm sort of concern, not at all cloying. “You’re getting all tense again.”

“I want to be with you,” Casper says.

“Good,” Dan tells him. He brushes his hands through Casper’s hair, rocking his head from side to side as Casper leans into the alternating touches. Dan’s knees press against his hips, gripping him like a more welcoming pair of tongs. Dan’s legs line his, knee to boot against the outside of his thighs. “Keep doing that.”

“We’re infatuated.”

“Yeah,” Dan says, and he ducks his head back down for another kiss.

Casper strokes the line of his back, and it is a line, just one line for an entire back, the length of his spine all that matters. The musculature is strange, important pieces missing. His hands try to seek them out anyway. What needs to be said weighs down on him, and eventually, he finds the way to say it.

“It’s been four nights,” he murmurs against Dan’s mouth.

“I know we’re rushing,” Dan says, and their noses slide against each other. Their foreheads press. “But we’re about to slow the f**k down, so screw it.”

Dan kisses him deep and full, and when Casper remembers himself enough to try to pull back, there are teeth. There’s a bite to his lower lip, a slow, scraping pull of sensation, and Casper abruptly understands why humans display teeth to show joy, to indicate pleasure. He groans and pulls at Dan where his wings ought to start, but even through Dan’s jacket and shirt, it’s clear there’s no soft down to scratch in appreciation.

His attentions make Dan squirm, and so Casper finds he cannot stop. He makes Dan twist and press into him and, once, remarkably, giggle. The sound is bright and joyful and, in unwitting wisdom, Dan refuses to make it again.

“Not for nothing, Cas,” Dan huffs against his neck, “but you can touch below the belt, too. I’m not up on a table for my health.”

“I’m not finished with above the belt,” Casper informs him, which seems an unnecessary thing to say. He slips a hand around to Dan’s front to demonstrate, fingertips crossing over the neat stitching of his jacket and the pectorals beneath. He strokes back the other way, his knuckles across Dan’s abdomen.

“Hold on,” Dan says. He takes his hands off Casper to better rid himself of the jacket, but his knees tighten on either side of Casper’s waist. Beneath the jacket, there’s what feels like two shirts, one layered over the other, and perhaps an undershirt beneath even those. It’s more layers than Casper has seen on any one person in centuries.

The kissing resumes as it should, as it shouldn’t.

He stops his hands from sliding across smooth fabric. He holds rather than strokes, and he gains unwanted distance, even with his upper thighs still pressed against the table’s edge. He’s more out of breath than he should be for so little exertion, or perhaps it’s simply the tightness in his chest forcing the air out.

“I want you to know,” Casper says, “that the time we’ve spent together, it’s been the best experience I’ve had in years. Decades.” Centuries.

“We’re not saying goodbye until tomorrow, Cas,” Dan tells him.

“If I start now, I might have enough time.”

“Cas,” Dan says, exasperated and fond and impatient for touch.

“I mean that,” Casper promises. “I didn’t expect you. I couldn’t have expected you.”

Dan cups his face, and though his eyes are only green, not a blaze of blue-white, they are still shining.

“I wasn’t prepared for you, but now, if I could let you change my priorities, I would. But that will have to wait until I can complete my project and separate myself from my patron. And then, if you want me, I’ll do all that I can to be yours.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘if’?” Dan demands. Though clearly offended, he doesn’t push Casper away. If anything, he holds him closer, tighter, and Casper’s body rejoices in being so held.

“Situations change,” Casper says. “It’s been four days, Dan, I’m being reasonable.”

“You don’t get to promise yourself to me and call me inconstant in the same sentence, Cas.”

“I’m not,” Casper says. “But you are an extremely loyal man with a great number of responsibilities, and situations do change. As much as I may wish otherwise, I am not a suitable match for you and–”

“Bullshit,” Dan interrupts. “I don’t care about your station, and even if I did, we’re getting you a new one. My granddad was a Man of Letters and he married a queen , so don’t you tell me that’s not respectable enough for you to be with me.”

“It’s more than that,” Casper tries to say.

“We can get you a surname, too,” Dan continues over him. “I’ve already talked to my dad about it. It would go to your siblings, too, if you wanted. You’d legally be a family, with all the rights that go with it, not just a bunch of people who met in an orphanage. So you go home and you tell them and you all decide on what you like, and when I come visiting in a few months, I can make it official.”

“Dan,” Casper says.