Into This River I Drown

by TJ Klune

  “Do you want me?” I manage to say.

  Please. I can’t do this on my own. Help me.

  He’s silent for a moment, continuing to watch me. I want to look away, embarrassed by the need that echoes in my voice, but I can’t seem to break the connection. Something is holding me there, and though I can’t name it, I don’t want it to go away.

  “I shouldn’t,” he finally says, and I am ready to shatter into a billion pieces, but I hold my tongue and wait. It feels like I wait forever. “I shouldn’t because it’s not what I was made for. It’s not why I came to be. But yes, Benji. God help me, yes. I don’t want anything more than you. I want nothing less than you.”

  I take this for what it is. This is the eighth day since he fell from the sky, since I found him in the crater. Eight days since I found out what he was, since I began to believe there might be something else out there watching over us. Over me. I don’t know if I can believe it all, because I don’t think enough time has passed for my mind to process the monumental implications of Cal’s existence.

  But none of that matters now. I sit up on my bed.

  “Cal?”

  “Yes, Benji?”

  “Will you….” Say it, say it, say it. “Will you come here?”

  There’s no hesitation on his part. He rises from the floor, shaking the blanket off. He looks even bigger than before. Little House creaks under his weight as he walks toward me. I am aware of each breath, each step. He finally stands above me, and I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of wondering. I’m tired of being alone. I reach up and grab the front of his shirt and pull his lips down to mine.

  He grunts in surprise but doesn’t pull away. He’s tentative at first, barely moving. His movements seem shy and unpracticed. It’s only then that I realize he’s probably never done this before, that this is his first anything, and I have to stop myself from groaning. It’s slightly awkward, this kiss; the angle is almost too much, and we’re not quite synced up. But then my tongue touches his lips and he sighs again. His breath goes from him into me, and it tastes like he smells, earthy and strong. There’s a touch of something spicy in there too that I chase after.

  He keeps his hands at his sides as if he doesn’t know what to do with them. I let go of his shirt and wrap my arms around his neck as his tongue touches mine for the first time. A shock rolls up through me and he shudders along with me. He breaks the kiss and presses his forehead against mine, panting as we watch each other. We’re so close together that I can see myself reflected back and I want more. All I want is what he can give.

  It’s like he hears me, like he knows what I’m thinking. One moment he’s leaning against me and the next he’s all hands and collapsing. He falls against me, pressing me back onto the bed. His mouth is on mine again, and gone is the reticence, the inhibitions. He’s still a novice, but it doesn’t matter. His weight is pressed against me, it’s crushing me, but I don’t want him to move away. He moves his lips from mine and drags his tongue down my neck to the hollow of my throat as I play my fingers over the red stubble on his scalp. His breath is hot against my skin and I’m harder than I’ve ever been. I groan when he grinds into me, his stomach against my hips and dick. He pulls back, a look of shock on his face. He grinds again and I cry out. The smile that follows is not one I’ve seen on him before. It’s wicked and dark, as if he knows what he is doing to me and enjoys the hell out of it.

  I want more.

  I reach down to pull his shirt up and over his head. It catches on his chin and he snorts in laughter before pulling it off the rest of the way and then dropping it to the floor. He props himself up above me on his hands. I’m about to snarl at him to lay on top of me so I can feel his skin against mine when he looks between us and then back up at me, the shyness returning.

  “What is it?” I ask breathlessly, running my eyes over his torso, matted in auburn curls that start on his chest and trail down to his stomach and into the top of his jeans. “What’s wrong?”

  He shakes his head. “I’ve never done this before,” he says, sounding frustrated.

  I can’t wait any longer to touch. I reach up and run my fingers through the hair on his chest, rubbing my thumbs along his nipples. The muscle is hard underneath and I explore lower, touching his stomach, his navel. He groans as I roam my hands over him, but my exploration turns into something I never would expect to hear from him: a slight chuff that becomes a giggle. He’s ticklish there, on his sides near his hips, and this realization is something so endearing that I feel like I have the wind knocked out of me.

  I reach the start of denim, and I need to be crushed again under his weight so I hook my fingers into his belt loops and pull him back down on top of me. The first thing I notice is the heat of him. Then it’s the hair on his body, soft and delicious against my own hairless torso. He is still chuckling when he kisses me again and his laughter pours from him into me and I can taste it like it’s a palpable thing. I wrap my legs around his waist and press my heels against the back of his legs, pushing him further into me. We rock together, and I don’t know how much longer I can last if we keep going this way. He’s obviously a quick study. He twists his tongue against mine and begins to reciprocate, moving his hands up and down my exposed chest.

  “Never done this before?” I gasp as he latches his teeth on my neck. “Could have fooled me.”

  His only answer is a low rumble as he kisses my shoulders, my arms, my sides. His tongue slides over my nipples, first the left, and then the right, leaving them wet, the cold air a shock after the warmth of his mouth. He’s going lower, gripping my sides with his big hands, kissing my stomach, swirling his tongue near the top of my shorts. My cock strains against the fabric, pressing up underneath his chin.

  “You don’t have to,” I say, arching my back as he reaches under and squeezes my ass. “You don’t—” But he’s already mouthing me through the cotton. I can feel the sharp graze of his teeth, the swipes of his tongue. He pulls the shorts down over my hips and then his mouth is on me, hot and harsh. There’s too much saliva, yes, and his teeth get in the way, but it’s still like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Either he’s doing something so very right, or everyone I’ve been with was doing it wrong. I’m approaching the edge already, and I don’t want to lose control now. I don’t want it to be this way. I need more. I need so much more.

  I reach down and push him off me, and the look he gives me would be almost comical if not for the swollen lips, the saliva on his chin. He looks like he is going to protest, but I shake my head at him and he stills.

  I pull him back above me, my dick straining against my stomach. I brush my fingers over his chest and stomach and with a practiced twist of my hand, I unbutton his jeans. He’s watching me again, and when I wrap my fingers around his cock, his eyelids flutter gently. I brush my thumb over the slit, rolling my fingers around the head. “I want more,” I tell him as his eyes widen. I pull my hand out of his jeans and spit into it, then reach back down and get him wet. He groans again.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he pants.

  I laugh softly. “You’re not that big,” I tell him, even though the weight in my hand suggests otherwise. He’s also uncut, which is something I’ve never experienced before. There seems to be so much more skin than I’m used to and I have to keep from hyperventilating at the thought of angelic circumcisions. There’s so much I don’t know about him, but at the moment, it doesn’t matter.

  He’s trying to be serious, even though his eyes keep rolling up in his head. “I can’t hurt you,” he says as I use my feet to push his jeans and boxers down to his knees. “I’m supposed to protect you.” He falls forward and bites gently into my neck again.

  “You won’t hurt me,” I say, writhing against him. “You won’t let it happen. Please, Cal. Please.”

  He pauses against my neck and I hold my hand still. His muscles tense. His length in my hand is hot and his shoulder is pressed against my mouth. There are those freckles there, the one
s I saw the night he fell. I count them with my tongue, first one, then two, and three and so many more. “Please,” I whisper.

  He growls, low, and without warning, I’m flipped over onto my stomach and Cal falls against me, pressing his cock against my ass. His tongue is in my ear, his teeth catching the lobe. He rubs his dick in the crack of my ass, and I can feel him leaking against me.

  “Do I scare you?” he whispers hotly. “Are you afraid of me?”

  “No, no. No, you don’t. I know what you are. You don’t scare me. You don’t. You can’t.” I’m babbling, I know, but I can’t find a way to stop.

  “Do you trust me not to hurt you?” he rumbles in my ear, grazing his lips against the shell.

  There’s no question, and not just because of what he’s going to do to me. “Yes,” I groan. “Yes.”

  “And you know that I am here to protect you?” he says, rutting against me harder.

  “Yes, I know! Please!”

  “You called me here, and I came for you.”

  “I know, oh God, I know!” My own dick is digging into the mattress, the pressure a thing of beauty. But it’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough. I reach up and slide my hand into the drawer, finding an ancient tube of slick. I don’t know how long it’s been in there, or even if the stuff expires, but I don’t care. My fingers brush against a box of old condoms, and I grab one and hold it over my shoulder. “Do you know what this is for?” I ask as he pauses.

  “Yes, Benji,” he says, sounding amused and annoyed. “I’m not an idiot.”

  I press my right cheek into the pillow. “I know you’re not. Do you need to wear this?” This has to be the weirdest conversation of my life.

  Hurry, hurry, hurry.

  He scowls. “No. I’ve never been with anyone but you. This is my first everything.”

  I figured that, but it still annihilates me to hear. “But I’ve been with—” I try, only to have him cover my mouth with his big hand.

  “I don’t want to hear about anyone else,” he hisses in my ear. “I don’t want to hear it from your mouth. I don’t want to know. I never did. I never watched because I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t. It hurt my heart. You can’t hurt me now. I don’t need that.”

  “Cal….”

  “Do you trust me?” he snaps.

  “Yes,” I say quietly, because I do.

  “Then put that down. You won’t hurt me. I won’t hurt you.”

  I drop the rubber back in the drawer and hand him the lube.

  He uses his fingers first, and he’s slow and careful, heeding my warnings that it’s been a while. He’s quiet while I tell him what to do, no doubt listening for any sounds of discomfort from me. There is pain, but it’s negligible. There is burning as I’m stretched, but I welcome it. He kisses the base of my spine and adds another finger when I tell him to. He kisses my back again when I start to shake at his intrusion.

  It’s enough.

  He props me up on my knees when I tell him I’m ready, that it needs to be now. There’s a moment when he pushes himself in when I think it’s going to be too much, I’m not going to be able to take him, and I grit my teeth. But I crash through that ceiling, and when his hips are pressed against my ass, there is no more pain. There is only him rising above me, beginning to move back and forth. He’s grunting, holding me at my shoulders, grazing my neck with his fingers. I cry out at a particularly deep thrust and he leans on top of me, his face in my hair, his breath on my neck, and I’m reminded of the days when I felt that breath alone in Little House. Those days of coming home to nothing but memories like ghosts, drowning in a river I couldn’t see. I can remember those feelings, but even after this short amount of time, it’s like peering at them through a murky haze.

  But he’s here now, with me. He wraps his arms around my chest and pulls me back up onto my knees, my back against his sweaty chest, forcing me to sit in his lap. He rolls his hips underneath me, and I turn my face until my lips find his.

  As he rises and falls beneath me, one arm around my chest to hold me to him, the other starting to jerk me off, I close my eyes and lean my head back against his shoulder. There in the dark, I see the blue, I feel the blue, and it’s overwhelming and it’s huge and it’s overtaking me. I can’t handle it anymore and spill over onto his hand. He feels this and hears my cries and snaps his hips once then twice, and then there is warmth erupting in me and it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt. His groan becomes a whine in my ear and I tremble against him.

  I can feel it, then. His heartbeat. It’s strong as it pounds inside his chest. This causes my eyes to burn and I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s unexpected. Maybe because it makes him more human. He was alive before, but now I know he’s alive. He takes a deep breath behind me and then lets it out.

  As we collapse on the bed, him still lying atop and inside me, pressing his lips against the back of my neck, I have a moment to think that things aren’t changing…. No. It’s not like that at all.

  As he wraps a big, gentle hand around my throat, finding my lips again, I realize that everything has already changed completely and I can’t go back to the way things were. Not after this night. Not after knowing what this could be like.

  The angel Calliel kisses me again, and I begin to think about the future. About the possibilities that lie ahead. About the fact I no longer seem to be alone, because I know he will choose to stay. We’ll continue as we are now and things will be better than they were. I think these things. I think of these things and more.

  But….

  Even as he gives a contented sigh in my ear, even as I pull him closer, isn’t there something at the forefront of my mind? Something aside from the postcoital glow, aside from my wishes for the future and my hopes of the present. Things have changed, oh yes. Make no mistake about that. But that’s the funny thing about grief and anger combined; even while buried in newfound happiness, it claws and it whispers. It begs. It howls.

  It screams.

  It doesn’t let go. And it demands retribution.

  cross your heart hope to die

  I am surprised, when I finally pull myself out from under Cal to get something to

  clean us up with, to find it’s not even ten o’clock at night. It feels like days have gone by, the violence in the store this morning a distant memory. It could be the postfuck glow, or it could just be everything piled on top of everything else. I don’t know.

  I need to talk to Abe tomorrow, though for the life of me, I don’t know what I’m going to tell him. The truth seems like a good place to start, but since I’m not completely sure of the full truth, I don’t want to end up making this worse.

  I just need to figure out what to say to him.

  But first, I need to figure out what to say to myself.

  Always with the damn questions, I can hear Cal growl already.

  No. I have to push through it.

  I clean myself in the bathroom, a pleasant ache in my ass that I haven’t felt in a

  long time. I look at myself in the mirror and try to see if I’ve changed outwardly to match the hurricane on my insides. I can’t tell. I still look like me. I look closer. There’s a small, dark bruise above my clavicle on the right side of my throat. I touch it, and it burns slightly. Cal likes to mark, it seems. There are red marks on my hips that stretch toward my back. His handprints, from digging into my skin, holding me to him as he thrust into me. They are fading already, but each finger is still clearly outlined against my pale flesh.

  Changes, even on the outside.

  I take a wet cloth out to the bedroom, light from the bathroom spilling out. My mouth goes dry and I almost stumble at the sight. Cal nude, stretched out on my bed, his white skin almost glowing in the dark. He has his arms folded up behind his head, the hair under his arms as dark red as the curls on his chest. His chest and stomach rise slowly with shallow breath. His dick lays spent against a thatch of pubic hair. He has long, hairy legs, muscled and relaxed. For a moment, I wonder i
f he’s posing and I want to scold him again about vanity, but I can’t seem to make any words come out.

  I reach him to find his gaze on me, watching every step I’m taking, my every movement. There’s a low huff of air as I clean him off, the remnants of spunk caught in the red trail on his stomach, the muscles there clenching. I let my gaze trail up his body, and once he’s sure I’m looking at him again, he flexes his arms behind his head. I still my hand on his stomach.

  “You like that I’m big,” he says knowingly, his grin all teeth.

  “Vanity,” I accuse him weakly. I drop the cloth on the floor and climb onto the bed, suddenly unsure about where to put my hands, where to lie down. This hesitation only lasts a moment as he reaches up and pulls me down on top of him, pressing my face in his throat, his chin against the top of my head. My dick finds this a wonderfully interesting place to be and stirs, but there are other things on my mind.

  Cal rubs my back slowly, making lazy circles that cause my skin to tingle. He kisses the stubble on my scalp and rumbles underneath me, a low sound I can feel in his chest.

  So many things to say, to ask, and I can’t seem to focus on a single one.

  But apparently there’s been something on his mind too, because he’s the first to break. “Benji?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why were you at his house?”

  I’m confused. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Griggs.”

  Oh. That. Fuck. “Why do you think that?” I ask, trying to buy some time. For what, I don’t know. He’s surely felt me tense against him.

  He doesn’t sound fooled in the slightest. “Because you lied to the sheriff earlier today. You might have fooled him, but I can tell when you’re lying.”