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“I want to have sex.”
Elliot choked. He wasn’t eating or drinking anything, so all he had to choke on was his own tongue. Still, he managed. He was very resourceful that way.
Luke heartlessly ignored his inability to breathe. “I want to have sex,” he repeated, without moving from the doorway. The light filtering in from behind him illuminated the gold of his hair and feathers, making him look slightly more angelic than usual. “With you, I mean. If you want to.”
If you want to , Elliot mouthed.
“What?” Luke’s voice took on that short, snappish tone it sometimes did when he wasn’t up for Elliot’s teasing. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Just, like—” Elliot swallowed the hysterical laughter that was threatening. “Do you mean right now, or…?”
“Forget it,” Luke said. “I don’t know why I ever try to talk to you when you’re reading. You never pay any attention.”
“No,” Elliot said. He closed his book. “You have my full and complete attention.”
The irritated furrow remained between Luke’s brows, but something softened around his mouth. “Okay.”
Okay? What was he supposed to do with that? “What, um… with the greatest possible respect and admiration, which you know I feel for you, I’m just wondering, what brought this on?”
“What brought on my wanting to have sex with my boyfriend?” It was Luke’s turn to look like Elliot was being unbearably stupid, which, to be fair, was more or less how Elliot was feeling just then. “Gosh, I really don’t know, now that you mention it.”
“Will you just— sit down, will you, it’s really not helping to have you looming over me like that.”
Luke closed the door to Elliot’s cabin and sat in the second chair beside Elliot’s desk, the one Elliot had brought in so Luke could sit next to him. There was always the bed, of course, but beds were fraught. Elliot loved being on beds with Luke, but he’d wanted to have another option. He hadn’t wanted Luke to think Elliot was pressuring him to do anything he wasn’t ready for.
“Sorry,” Luke muttered. “I thought you’d be excited. You seem to really like kissing and stuff.”
“I do,” Elliot said. “It’s just, you don’t have to rush.”
“I didn’t realise I was rushing.”
Elliot frowned. “I just mean that it’s okay to wait.”
“So you want to wait?” There was a darkness to his tone that made something in Elliot’s stomach twist.
“No!” In his imagination, this part had always gone a lot differently. “Yes! I don’t know! I want to do whatever you want to do!”
“Okay.” Luke shifted. Maybe the chair was uncomfortable. Maybe that was one other thing Elliot had messed up.
Elliot sighed. “I want to take as long as you want to take, is all. I want to make sure you’re comfortable. I don't mind waiting.”
Luke wasn’t meeting his eye. “You didn’t want to wait with anyone else.”
...oh.
“Is that what this is about?” Elliot slid from his chair to kneel in front of Luke. He put his hands on either side of Luke’s hips. The tips of the flight feathers at the bottom of his wings tickled the backs of Elliot’s hands. “Luke. Look at me.”
Slowly, Luke turned his piercing blue eyes from his own lap to Elliot’s face.
“I have wanted to have sex with you every moment of every day for the last four years,” Elliot said. “I’ve had dreams about it. Some of them when I wasn’t even asleep.”
Luke still looked skeptical. “So why haven’t you tried to?”
That was a little bit like asking why a duck hadn’t tried to breathe underwater. “Because you haven’t?” Elliot paused, but when Luke didn’t say anything, he filled the silence like he always did. “Because I wanted to let you set the pace, make sure you only did stuff you really wanted to do. And, honestly, I’m fine with kissing if that’s what you’re ready for. Kissing you is awesome. I love kissing you. I want to keep kissing you for the rest of my life, so— we’ve got time. Sex can wait.”
The barest hint of a smile was curving the corner of Luke’s mouth, but there was still a hesitation in his eyes. “What if I don’t want it to wait?”
Elliot had died. Elliot was dead. Or he was dreaming. It was difficult to say. This wasn’t how his dreams usually started, but he’d always had what his teachers called a ‘ fantastical imagination.’ It was possible he was inventing new iterations of Luke dreams, still. It was possible he always would be.
His heart was pounding in his throat, too hard for him to speak, so he thought of other ways to respond. He came up with a list of fifty-one possibilities, but one of them was a clear winner.
Elliot pushed forward until he met Luke’s lips.
At this point, kissing Luke was something Elliot had a lot of practice at. He had memorised a taxonomy of Luke Sunborn’s kisses, from gentle to hungry, at all speeds and ranges of depth. But this was a kiss he had not yet shared with Luke. This was a kiss that insisted. This was a kiss with intentions.
Luke made an indiscernible sound into Elliot’s mouth, and his arms reached to grip at Elliot’s forearms, his shoulders, the back of his neck. Elliot pushed himself to his feet, Luke’s mouth following his like a magnet follows another magnet, and stumbled backward until his legs hit the bed.
They did not stop at kissing. They did not stop at peeling the shirts from one another’s bodies. They did not stop at running their hands over hair, skin, feathers. They did not stop, mercifully, when Elliot panted “does this, uh, clear things up?” They kept going. And going. And going.
In fact, they kept going all the way until Luke’s head was pillowed on Elliot’s shoulder, skin sticky with sweat in a way that should have been gross but, somehow, wasn’t.
“I can’t believe we’ve been wasting so much time,” Luke groaned. “We could’ve been doing that all along.”
Elliot laughed, deep-throated and happy, above the bright gold hair he was running idly between his fingers. “No, we couldn’t have. Can you imagine if I’d made a move like that in the beginning? You would've a stroke.” He paused. “Not in the good way.”
“Mmm.” Luke pressed his lips to Elliot’s chest in another new kiss. All kinds of firsts, today. “Was this the good way?”
Elliot leaned down to kiss the top of Luke’s head. “I’d give it a solid B for effort.”
Luke squirmed. “A B?”
“Yeah, loser, I can’t start you out with full marks your first time.” Elliot shook his head in mock judgment. “Because you’ve never practiced, and you know what they say about practice.”
Luke turned, peering up at him with what Elliot recognised now was uncertainty. “Practice?”
“It makes perfect, loser,” Elliot said. “So I’ve got to leave you some room to grow from all the practicing we’re going to be doing.”
Luke’s smile was as blinding as it ever had been. “Practice. Yeah, we’re definitely going to practice that. I mean… if you want to.”
Elliot has always been a fast learner. And thank goodness for that, or else he’d still know only basic math, because the education system in the Borderlands was very patchy. “I want to practice with you every day until I die. Which will probably be pretty soon because we live in a violent premodern society.”
“Can I make a rule against talking about death while we’re in bed together?”
“I don’t see how we can avoid it, unfortunately.” Elliot shrugged. “But I can agree to wait five minutes. That seems fair.”
“Well, as long as it’s fair,” Luke said, rolling his eyes and curling back into Elliot’s side. “Is it normal to be this tired after?”
Elliot stroked Luke’s hair. “Yeah. And you might be sore later. Or maybe not. Your body is pretty used to doing incredible things.”
“Incredible,” Luke murmured against Elliot’s skin.
“If I do say so myself.”
Luke laughed.
Elliot laughed with him. "I love you, loser."
Luke beamed. "I love you, too."
Elliot stretched his arm down the length of Luke's body, marveling anew in the beauty of it. Them, together, in his too-small camp bed, folded around each other. It was a moment he never wanted to end.
It would, of course. The time for dinner would come, and they’d go to the mess, or someone’s arm would fall asleep, or there’d be another stupid war. But they’d have many more such moments, Elliot knew that. And they'd only get better.
Because practice, after all, makes perfect.