I lightly raked my fingernails down his wiry arms.
"We cannot keep doing this," I whispered, and in response, he bit my earlobe so hard I gasped in pain and delight.
"But why not?" he asked me, and I shivered as he pressed himself more firmly against me, his manhood rubbing up against my thigh.
"Because—ah—because eventually, my family will have me married. And I expect my future spouse will notice me sneaking away to have liaisons in the dead of night. I shall have to—oh—devote myself to the marriage bed and leave you behind, however tedious and miserable a task that might prove." His continually roving hands proved to be a rather delightfully distracting impediment to my forming any further thoughts on the subject.
"Give it all up," he whispered, pressing his lips to the nape of my neck as he flipped me over on my stomach. "Give it up and run away with me."
"Where would we go?" I murmured, reason nearly leaving me as I felt his body flush with mine.
"Doesn't matter," he muttered into my skin, his teeth biting into my shoulder as he pressed himself forward. A blinding, dizzy starburst of pleasure formed behind my eyelids, and all coherent thought left me for the next several minutes as he plundered me. Sweet and rough and pain and pleasure mingled into a single torrent of aching bliss, and my fingers clutched the sheets in a paroxysm of delight.
"Tell me," he asked with his characteristic dry wit when we were done, our legs a sweating tangle and our fingers entwined as we faced each other, "am I quite a handsome fellow?"
I laughed. "Not at all," I said, "but I don't mind it."
"You've never minded it," he said, the corner of his mouth turning up ever so slightly in what might have passed for a smirk.
I grazed his lips with mine, salt and the barest bit of blood an ever-present aftertaste of our frenetic couplings.
"You never did answer whether or not you'd go away with me," he said, pulling back just a bit and gazing at me with a mixture of concern and possession. "Do you think I could possibly suffer you to be packed off to some stranger for a loveless sham of a marriage? Suffer you to make children though you took no joy in the task?"
"Well," I said somewhat doubtfully, "I do like children. It would be…gratifying, I suppose, to be a parent, to continue my family line. To see small faces that looked a bit like mine, to guide them through life and to 'train them up in the way they should go,' as they say."
"Ah, yes," he said sardonically, a bit of a sneer coming into his voice, "train them up to repress every desire, every wayward thought, every stray emotion. Just as you were trained, you mean?"
"It's different," I said in a little bit of a panic. "It's different now. With us. You taught me to embrace myself, all of me. I'm not who I was before we found each other. I'm no longer frightened or ashamed."
"And what good would it do you, all the puritanical scrubbing you say I've undone, if you discard what we possess and continue on in that vile tradition of repression with your own offspring?" he asked me furiously. "How could I bear it, to never see you again, except perhaps for a few stolen moments? If you were happy…I might be content. But you wouldn't be, no matter how you try to convince yourself of the foolish idea that you could somehow learn to be like 'everyone else.' Believe me…there was once a time when I wished that for myself more than anything in the world."
"Society demands it," I said, the words tasting like bile on my tongue.
"Society can stroke its own swollen, self-assured cock and leave us be," he spat. "Why should we care what society demands? When have I ever cared for what society dictated?"
"You haven't," I said gently, "and oh, how I wish I could be more like you."
"Then do it. Come away with me, somewhere we won't be noticed. We can pretend to be related, perhaps. That usually does the trick. A 'Boston marriage,' perhaps, like those women who act as sisterly spinsters living together for convenience, but warm each other's sheets when no one is about."
"But we aren't women," I laughed. "No," he said with that sardonic twist to his mouth again, "no, we aren't." He reached down and put his hand between my legs and I playfully slapped it away.
He narrowed his eyes, but then he took my face in his thin hands. "Christian," he said quite seriously, "I love you, you know," and I closed my eyes for a moment before answering.
"And I love you, Erik."
Fin
A/N: Really, this just sprang from a silly random thought one day - "What if Christine was a man instead of a woman, and Erik was gay or bi?" The interesting thing is, now that I reread over it, despite the fact that I wrote Christian as a gay cisgender man (basically just an AU genderflipped version of Christine) I find it equally as plausible that Christian could be trans (i.e. Christian is a transgender man who has "Christine" written on his birth certificate), since I was very careful not to be overt about gender or naughty bits in order to not spoil the surprise. I like the ambiguity, actually. What do you think? What's your preferred interpretation?