Taking Me Over
By Silk

"I can wash myself," he tells me.

I know he can. But I want to do it. I want him to know it's my hands on him. He's such a sensual creature. He always has been.

This is like making love. He closes his eyes and leans back against the tub. He's nearly asleep. But he can still feel me. Touching him. Loving him.

I wonder how long it's been since he felt safe. I wonder if he feels safe here. He must. There is such trust in the way his body lies calm and unflinching under my fingers. He knows I don't want to hurt him. Even though I did once.

"Curt?" I whisper. I don't know what I want to say. But I can't stop myself from speaking his name out loud. I've dreamed this too many times. I need it to be real.

"Mm?" He opens his eyes and looks right at me, into me, and my chest feels tight.

"I...I need to do your hair." He seems almost disappointed, and I realize that we've both come too far to give in to fear now.

I dunk his head under the surface of the water and rinse his hair clean. It's going to have to be cut. It's so knotted, tangled. I think I'll do that myself, too. If he'll let me.

With his hair slicked back, his face scrubbed clean, he looks so fucking innocent that I want to cry. I pull him out of the tub and wrap a towel around him. He's shivering. Shaking, actually.

I know it must be withdrawal, but my heart wants to believe that it's a reaction to being in my arms again. "Are you cold?"

"Not as long as you're holding me," he whispers with that gut-wrenching honesty that drew us together even as it drove us apart. Sometimes I think that's why we failed. He sees too much. He wants it all. I wasn't ready for someone with that kind of clarity of purpose.

But I am now.

*****

He's so thin. I trace the outline of his ribs with my fingers, and he buries his face against my neck. His breath feels hot and harsh on my skin, and it suddenly occurs to me that I'm being thoughtless, if not cruel. "Do you want me to--?"

"Please," he murmurs brokenly.

I reach under the towel and take his half-hard cock in my hand. As soon as I touch him, he's rigid, gasping my name as he comes. I wipe him clean with an edge of the towel and kiss him. He gazes up at me with those fucking eyes that never stay the same color more than a minute at a time. "Thank you."

He's thanking me? For doing something I've dreamed about for months? I whimper, I know I do, and I dig my fingers into his scalp with bruising intensity. I kiss him again, this time making it crystal clear where this is coming from. It's not pity. It's not even fucking lust. If you love someone, you want to relieve their pain any way you can.

"Don't thank me for loving you. I can't help it," I whisper into his ear. He rubs his cheek against mine, and I can feel his jaw working.

"You should try to sleep," I say. He feels so fragile to me, and yet...his heart is beating furiously against mine. I don't know where I get the strength to let go of him.

"No," he protests, winding his arms around my neck to burrow more deeply into my chest.

"Curt-"

"Don't wanna," he murmurs, exhaustion slurring his words. "Wanna stay with you," he manages to say.

"If I go to bed, will you come with me?"

He nods and presses his mouth to my neck in a kiss that's as natural as breathing.

*****

Getting him into the bedroom isn't hard. In a way, it's where we both want to go. But I don't want to take advantage of him. He trusts me. He shouldn't. Not after everything we've been through.

But for some fucking reason, he does.

He's barely awake now, out on his feet. I help him into bed, but he keeps reaching for me like he's afraid that I'll take off. "Ssh..." I brush my lips across his forehead. "Sleep."

"I'm scared to close my eyes."

"Nightmares?"

Curt shakes his head. "What if I'm dreaming this? What if you never found me...and I'm still lying there in the alley?"

"You're not."

"But how do I know?" Curt cries out, his storm-gray eyes searching mine for an answer, any answer. Suddenly I don't think there is an answer good enough for him.

"What if...I'm d-dead?"

Oh, God. I pull him against me so hard that neither one of us can really breathe. "You're not dead," I chant, willing him to believe me.

He raises trembling fingers to caress my cheek. "You're real," he says. That last word hits me like a sucker punch to my gut.

Fuck, I am real. He made me real. I've always felt like an impostor, shedding my persona the way a snake sheds its skin. I don't know when I stopped feeling like that. Except...

Suddenly I don't want to be anyone else. I want to be me because that's who Curt loves. I'm not sure Curt was the one who was lost. I think it was me.

We fall asleep with our faces so close, we share the same breath.

*****

I don't know what woke me up. My hand instinctively searches for its mate and finds nothing but cold sheets where his warm body should be. All at once I'm afraid. Where is he? Did he leave? The thought alone is enough to rouse me. I throw back the covers, the soles of my feet hitting the floor almost simultaneously.

That's when I see him. His silhouette is barely distinguishable from the window where he's curled up. Once my eyes adjust to the darkness, I can see that he's still naked. His knees are drawn up to his chest, almost protectively, and his chin is resting on top of them. A tiny dot of fire flares to life, then fades back into the blackness, and I realize that he's smoking.

"Found my cigarettes, I see," I joke weakly to cover the monumental sense of relief I feel. He's still here.

"Didn't think you'd mind," he rasps in that gravelly voice I love.

"I don't." Pause. "Couldn't sleep?" Are you okay? Are we okay? God, I don't even want to ask that. He might tell me...that it really is over.

I can feel his eyes on me, even though I can't really make out the expression in them. I smell the smoke that he exhales, its tendrils slowly winding around me like a lover's arms. He splays his free hand across the window pane and whispers, "I always felt like I was on the outside, looking in, y'know? I didn't know how to get there...where I wanted to be...and it wasn't your fault."

"Curt-" This is worse than I thought. All this time, I thought I pushed him out, and he thinks he was never there in the first place. How could he believe that? Doesn't he know he got so deep inside me that he finally found the real me? I close my eyes so I can't see how little I've made him in his own eyes.

A harsh, wet noise forces me to open my eyes again. I don't want to make him cry anymore. I need to hold him...but I'm afraid that my touch hurts...even more.

"Don't you see what you've done?" he asks in that ragged whisper that breaks my heart all over.

I can't move. Not even to shake my head.

Suddenly he laughs, but it's not a pure sound. It's mixed up with the sorrow that I feel. He grinds the tip of his lit cigarette against the glass to put it out before turning to look at me. Even in the dark, his eyes seem to gleam. "You let me in. So far in that...now I'm sitting here...by the window...looking out."

It takes a few seconds to penetrate. "I love you."

"I know." All of a sudden he's grinning. "I finally know. I can feel you. In here." He taps his chest with his index finger.

I almost miss his mouth when I kiss him. Almost.

But almost doesn't count anymore.

End