“Let me look,” David tells him, and what can Owen do but proffer his hand? It’s heavy—or it should be, so he presents himself as if it is—and Owen can’t feel David’s fingers running along it. It’s an intriguing sensation, or lack thereof, seeing that there ought to be touch. It seems equally intriguing to David, who doesn’t just lean closer to ascertain his lack of effect, but brings his other hand up to wrap both around Owen’s stone wrist. He has such large hands, Owen thinks, and they’re completely ineffectual.
So’s his mouth, when David closes it around Owen’s knuckles. Are there teeth, like he’s testing the value of a coin? Yes, it seems—Owen can see the flash of them, hear the tender scrape, and feels nothing.
Humans can be so interesting, David in particular.
Without a question of Owen’s pleasure on the matter, David straightens, taking Owen’s stone hand with him, and lays it against his neck, bared by the collar of his suit. Owen can see the fibers of David’s beard catching on the rough surface when he speaks, “You didn’t have to do that, you know,” and guides cold knuckles across a neck that’s obviously in motion, none of which reaches Owen. One of the guiding hands slides lower, along Owen’s forearm—not quite to where there’s skin, but with the insinuation of it. David steps back, lowers Owen’s hand along his chest, side, hip. Texture and sheen change; Owen feels nothing. “Sometimes I wonder if there’s an end to your loyalty.”
“To you?” Owen smirks. “Not in this lifetime.”
David smirks back, of course, but there’s a laden quality to it. He hooks Owen’s fingers into the waistband of his slacks, uses them, not his own, to unseat his shirttails. Owen should be feeling skin, right now, and sweat—he has, before—back, and forth, something untold and untoward in the one-sided contact. “You keep saying that, but there was no need to make it so…tangible,” David says, for emphasis but not for lack of words. Owen’s frozen thumb is caught under his belt-buckle. With a twist that—ah, at last, Owen can feel, in his elbow—David uses Owen’s hand to pry the pin free, and a combination of that and his own to make short work of the rest.
The hair that climbs up David’s abdomen used to feel bristly but steadily-smooth, thickening the lower it got. Owen hears the zipper of David’s pants toothing along the stone, conflating with the hiss of David somehow taking…pleasure in this. Owen looks down, sees the shape of his hand obscured by what’s in it, and remembers that there should be heat, should be the rush of another’s blood through veins he can see but not trace, slick flesh hardening (but never to the consistency of his own, now?), the correlation between a gesture and a moan.
What is David thinking, underneath all this? Doubtless, some perverse obsession with other things that are made of stone.
Owen can feel a measure of envy, even if his fists can’t tighten to betray it.
“You’ve proved your devotion a thousand times,” David says, voice lower, huskier, eyes not quite closed as he rocks his hips forward, back, against Owen’s hand—and he brings his own up unto the crook of Owen’s elbow, where there’s still skin to touch. And what a shock, that is, almost enough to ruffle him. “You’re going to remind me that ‘service is its own reward’—” and the next is almost a moan, “—aren’t you?”
Owen smiles, brings his living arm around David’s back, to make this easier. “It would seem I don’t have to.”