III
It's the only place to escape from chatty nobles, wandering stylists, and the prying cameras of journalists starving to discover just what Gloss Rosewood would want with a man like Blight Bythesda this far past the curfew of anyone associated with the Hunger Games. Breezing through the moonlit club, Gloss brushes bodies with midnight guests who grab his ass, trace his abs, and wrap their nails around his wrists in drunken attempts to drag him into their writhing, dancing flesh pits. He can do little more than smile and grind his teeth. He is a Victor, he is a product. These people are buyers, sponsors, and potential appointments. They know Gloss by name, a third of them know what he looks like in bed, and his kill count has never made less of a difference. Not in this arena. This hotel is the playground Snow has built for them.
Gloss emerges from the crowd and onto the rooftop proper, crossing the balcony to its furthest side and all but collapsing against the barrier next to a man whose eyes are as vacant as his posture, drained and exhausted and rimmed with red. Blight's dark hair has been groomed out of his face, his beard trimmed to length, the gray streaks dyed to Capitol standards, lest the cameras find him looking slightly imperfect.
Holding the barrier with both hands, Blight leans his weight on his arms, stress furrowing his brow. He smells like himself, thankfully. Chamomile, pine needles, and the oil he brushes through his beard at dawn. Gloss watched him once, naked after a shower, running his fingers through the messy tendrils before tenderly brushing it through. Gloss had then come up behind him, traced his sides with the palms of his hands, and kissed his neck before leaving to play house with a stranger.
Gloss places a hand on Blight's shoulder and expects him to flinch. Instead, Blight leans into the touch and takes a long breath that shudders into his lungs, closing his eyes as Gloss rubs a thumb against the soft blue fabric at his shoulder. This building is precarious, Gloss notices. Dangerous for a man in Blight's mood. This balcony isn't protected, unlike that of the Tribute Center. There is no faint, shimmering forcefield. Only a fall that ends not with a flash, but with a bang.
Gloss observes the thrumming Capitol and its shimmering parade lights below. Burdened by the ghosts of foreign hands still burning his body, Gloss wonders if it would hurt to hit the ground. Wonders if he would feel it at all. He refocuses on Blight, whose deep brown eyes follow the foot traffic below, pinks and reds and white-yellow flowers glittering on his irises. It isn't difficult to imagine that he's wondering the same thing.
"Gloss, I — god, I can't even believe it." Blight's eyes are raw and red from scrubbing his palms over his face in exasperation. "Of all the kids. Of all the goddamned kids, it had to be Elwood's little girl."
Gloss chews his lip, willing Blight's old stories to return to memory. Mosaic and Rosette, Blight's little siblings. A rotting cottage, a working father, a conflicted mother who loved a lonely woman in the dark. No Elwood. No mention of a childhood friend or first love.
"You remember that night, don't you, Gloss, when you came into my suite panicking about Cashmere and told me you wanted to die?"
Gloss holds his breath; releases it when Blight only waits for an answer.
"I kissed you," he says, because he doesn't want to remember the rest.
"But first, you told me to kill you." Blight wrings his hands over the zooming city, shoe tapping, tapping, tapping on the smooth concrete. "I don't think I've ever understood that as much as I do now. When they called Johanna, I just heard him — just heard him gasp and whimper like a wounded animal."
"The man you hugged during the Reaping," Gloss thinks aloud.
"I think I only recognized it because it sounded just like when he hurt himself crashing his bike into log piles when we were kids," Blight goes on, heedless. "Stupid things. He could be so dense."
"Maybe he was dense," Gloss ventures, "or maybe you were just unadventurous."
Blight smiles softly, almost hesitantly, if a man of his conviction could ever be capable of hesitancy. "Is that what we're calling recklessness now? Adventurous?"
Gloss laughs softly; tries and fails to snuff out a swell of fondness in his chest. Any other time, for argument's sake, he might launch into an anecdote about him, Cashmere, and Blueberry Beauty #11, but tonight, he doesn't want her bitter name in his mouth. Not now, not with Blight. 'Seven,' she called him, all Career, all indignant, like he hadn't earned their respect long before she earned his.
"Who is he to you?" Gloss asks gently, carefully, after a long time. He hopes his voice comes out even; hopes it betrays nothing. It's one of the rare times he feels the need to mask his emotions from the man next to him.
"Elwood?" Blight's brows tremble before his features smooth over. He gulps down nothing. "A friend. My best friend."
A heavy pause. Stories below, a man swallows flaming swords on a parade float, risking his life for a crowd of shrieking technicolor Capitolites.
Gloss sighs, half exhaustion, half strange, undue relief.
"Did you think he was my—?"
"Just a question," Gloss says quickly. "That's all."
Blight's dark gaze burns into him. Gloss avoids it; doesn't feel like mulling over the deep brown, searching for thoughts and coming away with questions he never musters the courage to ask. He attempts to drown himself in the faraway parade music, but fails to escape the Tribute Center looming ahead of them, a gray gargoyle surrounded by its dancing worshippers. Eventually, he resigns himself to meeting Blight's eyes again; finds he's imagined them a hundred times over in the dark; finds he ought not take them for granted now, when Blight's right next to him, watching him think.
"It's been too long since I've seen your face," he says softly.
Blight smiles, weak, thin, like it takes all of his energy to conjure it. "It's been too long since I've heard your voice."
:
Somehow, it always ends up like this: some room, clothes falling to the floor, hands and mouths roving each other's bodies.
"I can't keep my hands off of you," Gloss breathes, nearly inaudible over the whisper of stirring sheets and desperate, keening breaths.
Blight smiles, lustful, weary, pulse thrumming against Gloss' palms as he's pressed into the mattress. The sight goes straight to Gloss'—
"Then don't," Blight whispers. "Don't stop."
Gloss smooths his hands under Blight's fine cashmere tunic and pulls it right off of him, burning himself on overheated skin along the way. Years ago, Gloss quickly found that he loved Blight's sounds: his moans, his chuckles, his sharp, perfect gasps. The other man's skin is pure silk beneath his palms, alive with goosebumps as Gloss smooths down his body, presses open kisses to his neck, traces the curves and dips of his chest with his tongue. Blight grips his shoulders harder, palms tight on the bare skin, and ever-thoughtful, ever-Blight, soothes the sweet pain by rubbing his thumbs over the faint marks he leaves behind.
"Ariadne designed that shirt for you, didn't she?" Gloss murmurs. "She's the only designer on team Seven who believed me when I said you look marvelous in blue."
"I don't have an eye for fashion," Blight breathes. "Blue is your color. Your theme."
Gloss smiles into the crook of his jaw, laughing softly as Blight's beard tickles his nose, his lips. "I can share." He slips his hand into Blight's boxers, cupping warm, velvet skin, and Blight grinds up hard into his touch, pooling heat in his stomach like a comet.
"Oh, Gloss, goodness."
Blight fumbles his hands up Gloss' body in the blind dark, tangling his fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck. Gloss takes gentle hold of the man's dark hair and kisses him slow, a languid slide of tongue. He feels Blight work his boxers off of his legs, the fine fabric slipping to the floor and pooling with the rest. Gloss breathes a chuckle against his lips when he feels Blight gently push a glass vial into his hand: oil to use between them.
Blight smooths his hands down behind him and pulls gently, tenderly lifting Gloss by the thighs. "On top of me, sugar. Please," he breathes.
For Gloss, sexual freedom is a rare privilege. Gloss values what little of it his circumstances afford him; values Blight's tender care, his thoughtful touch, the patient give and take. Despite living a life of taking others' sexual requests, rarely does Gloss deny Blight's wishes during times like these. Doesn't need to. Couldn't fucking dream of it.
The tree rings on Blight's shoulder undulate as Blight grips Gloss's waist and helps guide his up-and-down movements, the cold glow of the city quelling with the shadows and setting his body alight. Gloss' hips freeze involuntarily, overwhelmed by a full-body chill when Blight wraps a hand around him and starts slowly blowing his mind. He muffles a breathless moan against the curve of Blight's neck, willing himself to act less like a man who hasn't been touched properly in months.
"Goodness, Gloss," Blight gasps, pulling away from his mouth to pant against his cheek, still pumping his fist up and down to the time of Gloss' rolling hips. Gloss catches his breath just in time to hear Blight's blissful moan; to watch his eyes flutter shut, to feel his body tighten beneath him. "Yes, Gloss… just like that. I love how you feel, sugar. I love…"
They come in massive waves, tensing in each other's grasp as pulse after pulse drags them into oblivion.
The longer Gloss gazes at the man — his naked chest, his sharp nose, his open, wet mouth — the more he dreads seeing him leave. He wraps his fingers in Blight's hair and pulls him atom-close, kisses him deep, paralyzes him with slippery lips and too much teeth and tongue.
Blight's grip slackens on Gloss' waist, fingers smoothing down his sides. After a long moment, Gloss slides off of Blight and falls onto the bedsheets beside him. The room is silent save for the sound of their trembling breaths.
In the quiet, he wonders where Cashmere is. Perhaps washing off her makeup in a sink, playing their argument in her head like a record on repeat. Or perhaps she's occupied for the night, ordered into the bed of one of the Capitolites whose ear she whispered into during the chariot rides. A shudder spills down Gloss' spine like liquid guilt. Guilt that he couldn't stop her, guilt that he can't fix it. Watching Blight naked in the sheets beside him, chest rising and falling, Gloss imagines he's wondering much the same about Johanna Mason. Is she crying into her pillow? Is she lying awake in fear? Is she homesick? Should he be with her?
Gloss silently rises to an elbow, observing the other man in earnest, words tingling on his tongue. A smear of Gloss' essence glitters on Blight's chest, inviting enough to lick it right off. Dark velveteen hair runs down from his bellybutton to the plain of short curls between his legs, and his manhood lays spent against his stomach, still glistening with oil.
Blight opens his eyes. Gloss doesn't doubt that he sensed he was being watched just by the slightest change in Gloss' pattern of breath. He's always been casually hypervigilant. "Something's on your mind."
Gloss' tongue suddenly feels thick in his mouth, his thoughts cloudy. It reminds him of sitting across from Cashmere on the train, willing his eyes to focus on her as she gripped his knee and told him, 'Dont. Talk like that.' But it's times like these that Gloss is most vulnerable with Blight — times like these when his tongue is loose and his thoughts are slippery, his mind too clouded by sex to give his words a second thought. He doesn't heed her warning. He's too far gone for that. "I saw you with Elwood during the Reaping, and somehow I got it into my mind that—"
"I'd moved on."
"You'd moved — for god's sake, Blight, I can finish my own sentence."
Blight lazily lifts one hand in surrender, the least sincere white flag Gloss has ever seen. Gloss immediately forgives him.
"You know it's dangerous to think that way about you and I, Gloss." He takes a long, heavy breath and languidly traces the divots of his own chest with his fingertips, an absent habit that creates wandering trails in the dark fuzz that covers him. "It complicates things."
"I'm not the only one of us who does it, Blight. Don't lie to me, you're guilty of it too."
Blight doesn't open his mouth, but he looks at him for a long while, eyes roving his face, then reaches over, squeezes his hand once, and refocuses his eyes on the unlit floral chandelier that shimmers above them.
"Blight."
A quiet sigh; a flutter of eyelashes in Blight's silhouette. "Gloss."
It sounds exhausted, teetering on the border of fondness and irritation. Whatever Gloss intended to say freezes on his tongue. There's a low, burning pain in his gut as the last of his willpower, his hope, his energy, shrivels in his chest and dissolves like ashes in a windstorm. He realizes that that's exactly how Blight must have felt while mentoring his best friend's daughter with the aching knowledge that this was the beginning of the end of her life. Suddenly, he feels childish for making tonight about himself.
"I apologize. I shouldn't have—"
"No need, sugar. There's nothing to be sorry for."
But there is. Gloss spies the faintest glimmer of tears on Blight's bottom lashes; doesn't miss the slow shudder of his breaths. Before Gloss can say another word, Blight sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the bed to face the massive window. He pulls a tissue from a box on the nightstand, dabs his eyes, cleans his abdomen, then balls it up and tosses it into the wastebasket.
Against his better judgment, Gloss reaches out to touch him. He only manages to graze the tattoo on his shoulder before Blight stands and begins to redress.
"I have an appointment just before breakfast."
Gloss drops his hand back to the mattress, his stomach caving in on itself. "So early? Snow's secretaries usually schedule them for—"
"I booked it myself," says Blight. Brown freckles swirl down his spine in the dark, set alight by the glistening city until he pulls on his tunic and covers them whole. "I took the night to think, but Johanna needs sponsors. I don't have much time for myself. For us." He meets Gloss' eyes in the middle of his scramble for clothes, but doesn't maintain the contact for long on that word: 'us'. It sounds too heavy, too burdened for two lost men who sometimes — often — choose to be lost together. It's another indication that Blight is, in fact, guilty of it too.
"Look at me," Gloss says softly. "Blight."
Blight pauses in the middle of slipping on his shoes and stands upright to meet Gloss' eyes, a silent question in his tired expression. What now?
"I want to fix this."
It's what Blight said to him years ago on the night this all started. Blight wanted to fix it, he wanted to help him, he wanted to stop the inevitable, but he couldn't, and Gloss had only said, 'but you can't,' and then Blight had said—
"What can I do?" Gloss sits up straighter, a plea in his voice. "I want to help you, Blight, but I don't know how."
For a long time, Blight stares at him, his dark eyes glittering with the thoughts that roil in his mind. It takes him a few long moments of silence, of working his jaw, of chewing his lip — then, all at once, something seems to click.
"Help me train her. Johanna. Please."
Gloss releases a soft sigh. Relief. "Consider it done."