Chapter 122: Sirène 2(M)
ÉTIENNE
The words landed differently than they ever had from anyone else. Not as demand or pressure or the implicit announcement of what would be required of me. She said it as a fact about herself, as if she were offering it to me freely. Like I was allowed to decide what to do with it.
I moved over her, and she watched my face. She kept watching, not closing her eyes, not retreating into her own experience and leaving me alone in the transaction. She stayed with me. Her legs wrapped around my waist, and I pressed into her slowly, watching her the way she was watching me, and the sound she made this time was different from all the others — lower, fuller, like something had been answered.
I stayed still for a moment, just breathing.
Some part of me was waiting for the floor to drop out. For reality to clarify itself into something I recognized.
She cupped my face with both hands.
"Where’d you go?"
I blinked.
"What?"
"You disappeared for a second."
"I’m right here."
"Physically."
Her fingers tapped lightly against my chest.
"The rest of you is halfway across the country."
I laughed despite myself.
"Sorry."
"Don’t be."
She leaned closer.
"Just come back."
I moved.
The rhythm we found was slow and then not slow, and she rose to meet each movement, and her hands traced my back like she was reading something written there, and I had my face pressed to her neck and I could feel her pulse against my lips and I was present for every second of it. Not watching from a distance. Not managing the experience to make it survivable. I was just inside it and with her.
"Étienne," she said my name. My real name, not the alias.
Something broke open in my chest at a cellular level, because some part of me had started to absorb that other name as the person I was on most days. Lately, it had become harder and harder to distinguish between the two, to separate the man I pretended to be from the one I actually was. I pulled her closer just as the warmth became complete, consuming and mine, and I let it be.
Then I woke up.
The room’s ceiling came back first. Then the specific quality of early morning silence, the kind that existed before the household found its rhythm. The sheets were tangled around my waist. My body was warm in a way that had no external source, and I lay there for several seconds before I understood why, and then I stared at the ceiling and said nothing.
The dream lingered, heavy and far from good.
It had felt real in the particular way that mattered. Not photorealistic or logically coherent. Emotionally real. The patience she had shown matched things I had actually observed about her. The way she had stopped when I tensed, which was not a fantasy I had invented but a quality I had cataloged and filed away and apparently been carrying somewhere private.
How she kept her eyes on my face the whole time. As if she needed proof I was really there.
I pressed my knuckles to my lips and stared up at the ceiling.
It had been good. That was exactly the problem.
I had spent years building a very coherent and functional story about myself: that intimacy was something I survived rather than something I participated in. That the absence of dread was simply the absence of experience, not evidence of actual capacity. That what I had been through had not broken me so much as clarified me, stripped away the parts of me that could be naive enough to want something like what other people seemed to want without thinking about it very much.
The dream disagreed with all of that. Quietly, specifically, without aggression, it had just sat down across from my entire architecture and said, "Some of this is not as fixed as you think."
I was not sure I wanted to know that.
It would have been simpler — genuinely, practically simpler — if the dream had been bad. If desire had arrived the way it usually did for me, attached to something coercive, which was all I really had to work with experientially. I knew how to handle that. I had a methodology built from years of necessity.
For this, I had no method.
I closed my eyes briefly, as if that might pull me out of it.
It didn’t.
The silence settled around me.
Then, slowly, awareness returned to the rest of my body.
There was this damp, uncomfortable warmth against my skin.
I froze.
For a moment I simply stared upward, already knowing what it could be.
The realization came with an almost absurd sense of embarrassment, even though no one else was here to witness it. I turned to Marguax first to see if she was still sleeping, then glanced beneath the sheets covering me and what was underneath them, too.
The evidence was unmistakable.
A dark stain spread across the front of my underwear and the inside of my trousers. My face tightened. Not from shame exactly. More from surprise.
It had been years.
Long enough that I couldn’t immediately remember the last time a dream had reached through whatever walls I normally kept in place and left a physical mark behind.
I let out a slow breath and rubbed a hand across my eyes.
I sat up. My hands were steady. That felt dishonest somehow.
Then something else crept up at me. How was I... How was I on the bed? I had been on the floor. Had she? The idea turned my face red.
No.
Absolutely not.
Or maybe.
Goddess.
My expression tightened.
There were only a handful of possibilities, and each one felt mortifying in its own way.
Margaux was still asleep. At least she appeared to be.
The early morning light spilled across the room in pale bands, catching in the dark strands of her hair. She lay on her side facing away from me, one arm tucked beneath the pillow, breathing slow and even.
I stared for several seconds.
Then, feeling ridiculous, I carefully leaned over. But nothing happened.
Even when I slowly lifted a hand and waved it once in front of her face.
Then again.
Nothing.
A faint frown pulled at my brow.
She didn’t react.
Not even a twitch.
"Good," I muttered under my breath.
Then, after a beat: "That’s normal."
The fact that I felt compelled to test it at all was probably not normal.
Still, uncertainty lingered. Carefully, I reached through the mate bond.
The connection had become familiar enough now that finding it required little effort. It existed somewhere beyond language, an awareness that was neither thought nor sensation yet shared qualities with both.
I brushed against it lightly.
It was however quiet and closed.
Sleep could do that.
I’d learned that already.
Choice, exhaustion, and unconsciousness. The bond could fade into the background under those right circumstances.
I waited another moment.
But still, nothing happened.
There was no flicker of awareness.
No indication that she was secretly awake and witnessing the collapse of my dignity in real time.
Relief arrived so quickly that it was almost embarrassing.
"Right," I whispered.
Margaux then shifted slightly in her sleep and I could not help but think about how she had been in my dream.
The way I had also been in that space. Howe I had ansswered to her and moved toward her, and there had been nothing waiting on the other side of that wanting except more wanting, and I did not know what to do with that information except to hold it at arm’s length and look at it with extreme suspicion.
I got up and moved as far away from her as I could manage. The best thing to do was to clean up. It was the most reasonable course of action.
I ran water in the basin, pressed my wet hands to my face, and looked at myself in the glass briefly, which I tried to keep brief.
The person in the glass had slept. Had dreamed something warm and explicit and voluntary and had woken up disturbed, specifically by the quality of the warmth. Not the content. The warmth.
I let my hands fall and reached for the towel.
I thought: it was a dream.
Then I thought: Was it?
I set the towel aside and stood in the hush of a house that was not mine, carrying a name that was not mine, and felt the slow, tectonic shift of something I had believed settled proving itself otherwise.
It would have been much easier, I thought again, if the dream had been bad.
Then I started to strip.