Bavarian Gentians

Accomplished and accoladed far beyond his forty-four years, Lan Qiren nonetheless had only one goal in life: to prevent his nephew from repeating the sins of his father.

Lan Wangji would not abduct a woman for love—marry her by force—rape her to death—and then die of grief.

Not on Lan Qiren’s watch.

Jiang Cheng’s latest babysitting charge was bigger than he was.

That was a first. Though willowy, Jiang Cheng was six feet tall. Which was to say, much taller than most children.

“Yes, of course, sir,” he’d said to Professor Lan. “I’m available.”

And he was. He just hadn’t expected this nephew, this Wangji, to be sixteen years old, much less six foot two and broad and muscled.

“Who hires a babysitter for a sixteen-year-old?” Wei Wuxian asked when Jiang Cheng got home at ten.

Jiang Cheng shrugged.

“My advisor, apparently,” he said. “I don’t understand why either. Wangji is diligent and independent—not at all some unruly teenager who needs a minder.”

“Maybe he’s an under-socialized teenager who needs a friend.” Wei Wuxian grinned. “Much like someone I know used to be—until he met me.”

“My savior,” Jiang Cheng said, deadpan.

“You know it,” his boyfriend replied, and folded him into his arms, and kissed him.

In the embrace of the man he loved, under his tender kiss, Jiang Cheng caught fire. He hardened—he moaned—he willed Wei Wuxian to respond.

Wei Wuxian drew back instead.

“You’re insatiable,” he said, and his eyes were sad.

Jiang Cheng could have cried. Instead he reached out and clutched at Wei Wuxian’s clothes—his pants—his cock—

“I want you,” he said passionately. “I want you all the time. I love you. This is part of how I love you. Please, Wei Wuxian. I need it. I need you. Please fuck me—I’ll be so good for you—I’ll make it so good for you—”

“Jiang Cheng.” Wei Wuxian caught his hands, and held them in his own, and stilled him. “It’s always good for me. You know it is. That’s not the problem. The problem is that I can’t give it to you—it’s not in me to give it to you—three times a day, every day, the way you seem to need it. The problem is that I can’t seem to satisfy you. Jiang Cheng,” he said again, and paused. “You must know: there are other ways, other people. If you want—”

“No,” Jiang Cheng said, appalled. “I don’t want. I don’t want anyone else. I only want you. You’re the one I love.” He yanked his hands free. “How can you even suggest it? How can you bear the thought of me with someone else?”

“I can’t,” Wei Wuxian said. “I can’t bear it. But the thought of you unhappy is worse.”

“I’m not unhappy,” Jiang Cheng said, unhappily.

Wei Wuxian smiled.

“You’ll appreciate the irony tomorrow,” he said. “In the meantime—love, let’s go to bed. It’s late. We’re both tired. I’ll fuck you in the morning, hard and fast and rough the way you like it.”

A question arose, then, that had never occurred to Jiang Cheng to ask.

“What about you?” he said. “Do you like it?”

“I like everything we do,” Wei Wuxian answered.

No, Jiang Cheng realized, his world shifting. Lurching. You don’t like it, not the way I do. You do it for me.

“It’s late,” Wei Wuxian said again, and held out his hand.

Jiang Cheng took it—

What else could he do, in a world upturned?

—and let Wei Wuxian lead him to bed.

To sleep.

Only to sleep.

“Why are you sad?”

Jiang Cheng, startled at the question, dropped his pen onto the floor.

Bending over to pick it up gave him a moment to collect himself.

Righted, he met Wangji’s eyes across the dining table.

They were very dark, and very clear.

Like night, Jiang Cheng found himself thinking, nonsensically. Like a starry night.

“What makes you think I’m sad?” he hedged.

Wangji said nothing. He just looked at him, with those depthless eyes.

Jiang Cheng felt them peer into his soul.

So he told his sixteen-year-old charge the truth.

“You’re right,” he said. “I am sad. It’s because I’m in love. Love hurts, sometimes. You may already know.”

“I don’t know,” Wangji said. “I haven’t been in love. Does the person you love not love you back?”

Jiang Cheng wondered, for a moment, what life would be, if Wei Wuxian didn’t love him back.

Unimaginable—unthinkable—unlivable.

Wei Wuxian had loved him first.

“He does love me back,” Jiang Cheng said. “We love each other very much.”

“Then I don’t understand,” Wangji said. “Why are you sad?”

His eyes—black, limpid, fathomless—were unreal. Looking into them was like looking upon the absolute. How did a boy of sixteen have eyes like that?

“It’s hard to explain,” Jiang Cheng said, “and I’m not the one who should explain it to you, even if I could.” He set his pen down with an air of finality. “Are you done with your physics?”

For a moment he thought Wangji would press.

The boy didn’t.

“Yes,” he said.

“Dinner, then?” Jiang Cheng said.

“Yes,” Wangji said.

They cooked together, companionably.

They did everything companionably, Lan Wangji thought, he and his beautiful babysitter.

He stole a sidelong glance at him: his beautiful babysitter.

Beauty filled his eyes.

I see you now, he thought, beauty. I see you with my eyes. Before, I knew you only in equations and symphonies. Now I know you have human form. Now I see you incarnate.

But—then—beauty incarnate caught him looking.

But—then—Jiang Cheng smiled.

“Are you worried about me, Wangji?” he asked. “Don’t be. Sadness is a part of life. Here,” he added, and slid a cutting board and a paring knife along the island. “Rinse these, and let’s cut up those two apples for dessert.”

Lan Wangji assented wordlessly, and did as he was told.

But, cutting into the first apple, he spoke.

“In Eden, before the fall, there was no sadness.”

Jiang Cheng stilled.

“Neither was there shame,” Lan Wangji said.

Neatly, briskly, he quartered the apple. Cut away the stem, the calyx, the seeds. Cut each quarter in half again. Lined up the eighths.

Then he set into the second apple.

Jiang Cheng watched him, as if hypnotized.

“Will you get me a bowl?” Lan Wangji asked. “The ones in the cabinet behind you are the right size. Thank you.”

He set the fruit in the bowl, then took it and the plated stir-fry to the kitchen table. Jiang Cheng followed him with two bowls of rice. They sat down, across from one another.

“Eden,” Jiang Cheng said thoughtfully, picking up his chopsticks. “What made you think of Paradise?”

You.

“The fruit,” Lan Wangji said. “The fall.”

They ate companionably too, he thought, as they set themselves to the meal. Jiang Cheng held his chopsticks well, like an aristocrat. Uncle cared about these things.

“Jiang-ge,” Lan Wangji said, when their plates and bowls were clear. Just the apple wedges were left. “Why are you ashamed of your sadness?”

Jiang Cheng didn’t hedge this time. Lan Wangji was glad of it.

“Because,” Jiang Cheng said, “I shouldn’t be sad. It should be enough for me that I love and am loved.”

For a moment it seemed he wouldn’t say more.

But then he did.

“But—it’s not. It’s demonstrably not.”

Lan Wangji held his breath and willed Jiang Cheng to continue.

“So I’m ashamed,” Jiang Cheng finished softly, “of being needy. Of being greedy.”

Lan Wangji breathed out, then, softly too.

He breathed, now, in a world narrowed to the two of them: beauty incarnate, and himself, in beauty’s thrall.

In beauty’s thrall, he asked what he had to know or die.

“What is it, Jiang-ge?” He spoke the question like a secret. “What is this thing you need, that you’re not getting?”

Jiang Cheng didn’t answer.

Not in words.

He simply held Lan Wangji’s eyes, with his own so beautiful (beauty is truth, truth beauty) that Lan Wangji was led inexorably to the truth.

“Oh,” he gasped—

He hardened—

He fled.

Left aghast and alone, Jiang Cheng stared unseeing at the remains of their meal.

What had he done? Why had he done it?

It took him a few minutes to gather his thoughts.

Or, rather, to let them go.

He could waste time lacerating and psychoanalyzing himself, or he could try to fix what he had broken.

He would try to fix what he had broken.

Mind a careful blank, he cleaned up dinner.

Then he made his way upstairs to Wangji’s bedroom.

Wangji hadn’t shut the door. He was sitting upright at his desk.

“Wangji,” Jiang Cheng said. “May I come in?”

“Yes,” the boy said.

Only when he was in the room did Jiang Cheng realize there was nowhere for him to sit but on the bed.

So he stayed standing.

“I upset you,” he said. “I’m sorry. How are you feeling?”

Wangji turned to look up at him—then blushed and looked away.

Jiang Cheng felt like a monster.

“Wangji,” he said. “Let me be very clear about something very important: you did nothing wrong. Do you hear me? Do you believe me?”

“No,” Wangji said.

Jiang Cheng could only say what he could say.

“Then tell me,” he said. “Let’s talk this through. What do you think you did wrong?”

Wangji was silent and still.

Jiang Cheng was about to try again, to speak again, when the boy turned, again, and met his eyes, and held them.

“I wanted you,” he said. “I wanted to take you, and make you mine. I wanted to bend you to my will, all night, every night. I wanted you to have no one else before me, no one else but me. I wanted to hide you and hold you in a house encircled by gentians, and never to let you out to see the light of day. I wanted to keep you, mine and only mine, until you died and then I died too, of grief. That’s what I did wrong.”

It was Jiang Cheng’s turn for silence.

He didn’t know what to say.

He didn’t know what to do.

Until he did.

“No, Wangji,” he said. “That’s not what you wanted.”

He sat down, then, on Wangji’s perfectly made bed.

He held out his hands.

“Come here,” he said. “Let me show you what you wanted.”

Who am I, Lan Wangji thought, lost as if in a dream, to deny beauty incarnate?

He stood and turned, so clumsily he overturned the desk chair, and stepped to his bed, and took Jiang Cheng’s outstretched hands in his own.

They were very warm.

Jiang Cheng smiled up at him.

Beauty incarnate.

“You wanted,” he said, “to kiss me.”

So Lan Wangji kissed him.

He bent at the waist, cupped Jiang Cheng’s exquisite face in his hands, and touched his mouth to Jiang Cheng’s voluptuous lips.

Then he drew back, and said, “Teach me.”

Looking up into those eyes, black and limpid and fathomless, Yes, Jiang Cheng thought. Oh, yes.

Wangji leaned back in, and this time when their lips touched, Jiang Cheng parted his own, lightly, slightly.

Slowly, he enacted Wangji’s command, teaching him how to kiss him.

Wangji learned his lesson sweetly and well.

Soon enough, Jiang Cheng was being kissed so sweetly and so well that he was dizzy with it, intoxicated, pleasure-drunk.

He drew himself away.

“That,” he said, “is what you wanted. Sweetness and light. Do you believe me now, that you did nothing wrong?”

Wangji looked at him with a great tenderness.

Jiang Cheng fell, upward, into his impossible eyes.

He fell in love.

But—then—

“No,” Wangji said.

And before Jiang Cheng had sorted up from down Wangji had pulled him to standing—

Swept him up into his powerful arms—

And laid him down, very gently, lengthwise onto his bed.

Then he climbed on top of him, and caged him with his body.

“This,” he said, “is what I wanted—”

And made to devour him.

Jiang Cheng was struggling, trying to free himself from under Lan Wangji’s lips, from under his bigger, stronger body.

In vain, and not in earnest.

Lan Wangji could tell, even if Jiang Cheng couldn’t.

Sex incarnate, Lan Wangji thought tenderly. That’s what you are.

Whore, he thought, no less tenderly. Wanton.

Slut.

The tables were turned.

Jiang Cheng needed to be taught what he was.

And to accept it, without sadness, and without shame.

Lan Wangji—afire, engorged—would teach him.

He felt it in his marrow, the moment Jiang Cheng noticed his massive cock—

Because he paused in his struggling—and moaned—and canted his hips, all the better to relish it—the massive cock he clearly needed—against his greedy body—

And then he resumed his struggles with renewed vigor.

He was hard.

Lan Wangji tore his mouth free, and brought it to Jiang Cheng’s ear.

“What I want,” he said, “is what you want too.”

Then he aligned their hard cocks and thrust them together.

Jiang Cheng made a helpless noise, the sweetest sound Lan Wangji had ever heard.

Then, “No,” Jiang Cheng said. “Stop. Wangji, stop— Let me go—”

Lan Wangji had to smile, at that.

“Why?” he asked.

Why?

Jiang Cheng couldn’t think. Not with that enormous, delicious cock rubbing up against his need, his neediness.

“Because I don’t want it,” he said, and heard the obvious lie in his voice.

Wangji dismissed it, as it deserved.

“Try again,” he said.

“Because you’re sixteen,” Jiang Cheng said, and at, again, the obvious falseness of his protest he felt tears spring to his eyes.

“Again,” Wangji said.

“Because I’m taken,” Jiang Cheng said desperately. “I’m someone else’s, someone who loves me,” and at the thought of Wei Wuxian’s radiant and great-hearted love the tears spilled.

Wangji kissed them.

He kissed Jiang Cheng’s tears.

He kissed them away.

Then he spoke, with utter ruthlessness.

“This man who loves you,” he said, “can’t give you what you need. He can’t satisfy you,” and at the echo of Wei Wuxian’s own words Jiang Cheng knew himself defeated.

He stopped struggling.

He went still.

He would stay still, he resolved.

He would not participate in his own rape.

Wangji laughed.

“A brave effort,” he said, “and convenient—”

And he started stripping the clothes off Jiang Cheng’s body.

Jiang Cheng let him.

What else could he do?

Wangji’s movements were deliberate, controlled, efficient.

When Jiang Cheng was naked, Wangji started on his own clothes.

They were all white, Jiang Cheng had noticed. Virginal white.

He closed his eyes against the irony.

He closed his eyes not to see Wangji’s splendid body come into view.

To stave off imagining it, he pictured a lotus pond.

He was drawing his first blossom into existence, petal by petal, when Wangji spoke.

“Jiang Cheng,” he said, speaking Jiang Cheng’s name for the first time.

His voice was deep and clear and evoked depthless fathoms. Like his eyes, Jiang Cheng thought, and opened his own—

To the sight of Wangji’s splendid body.

Jiang Cheng was only a man.

He feasted his eyes.

Wangji wrapped both hands around his magnificent cock, and gave it a stroke.

Jiang Cheng felt it as if it were a touch on his own cock, and moaned.

He felt his hole twitch, flutter, ache, with helpless desire, and he moaned again.

He felt Wangji sense it—how?—his helpless desire.

Wangji’s hands stilled.

“So that’s what you want,” he said, and his deep voice was dark with wonder.

Then he let go of his magnificent cock, and reached toward the bedside table.

Lan Wangji had known abstractly that men could fuck each other, but he had never connected the fact with himself or with the beautiful babysitter who until tonight had been a madonna in his boyish fantasies.

But now, he thought as he reached for the rosehip oil he kept by his bed, he knew his madonna was a whore.

And he knew what his whore wanted.

And he would give it to him, the best he’d ever gotten it.

“You want to be fucked,” Lan Wangji said, not stumbling on the word he’d never once said before in his life. He’d never had occasion to until now. “You want to be pounded. You want to be abused.”

Jiang Cheng stubbornly said nothing, but Lan Wangji heard his breath hitch and saw his eyes widen, as they fixed themselves on what Lan Wangji was doing with his hands.

Heedless of his sky-blue bedding, he was coating his cock with oil.

He made a show of it, for his whore’s benefit. He posed, and stroked, and fondled.

He heard his whore’s breathing quicken, and shallow, and saw his hand move toward his own cock.

“No,” he commanded.

Jiang Cheng whimpered then, a high, pained, pretty sound, and obeyed. His hand fell back onto the duvet.

“Hush,” Lan Wangji said, though he meant the opposite. The noises Jiang Cheng made inflamed him. “Don’t whine, Jiang Cheng. There’s no need. I’ll take care of you tonight. You’ll get everything you need.”

He felt himself drawing on a deep and ancient well of instinct and intuition. Men, he thought, had been fucking each other since the fall. There was nothing new under the sun.

He let go of his cock. Instinct and intuition guided his next movements, smoothing them so that they were natural and effortless and artless. He positioned himself between Jiang Cheng’s legs—folded them open—and brought the tip of his slick and weeping cock to Jiang Cheng’s hole.

He looked, then, into his whore’s eyes.

They were wild with desire.

“Beg me,” Lan Wangji said.

Jiang Cheng’s stubbornness fell away like it had never been.

“Please,” he begged. “Wangji— Please fuck me—”

“Again. Better. Say what you are.”

Jiang Cheng sobbed.

“Fuck me— Please— Fuck me like the slut I am—”

“Again. Better. Who do you belong to?”

Lan Wangji saw it—dawn, then morning, then noon—high noon—the truth in Jiang Cheng’s wild eyes—

“Please fuck me— I’m yours— Please— Wangji— Please fuck your whore—”

Lan Wangji pressed in.

With one long, relentless stroke, he sank his cock into heaven.

The pleasure annihilated him.

He pulled out—

Then stroked in again.

He did it again.

And again.

Lost in it, drowned in it, surrounded by it—pleasure, supreme and addictive—he proceeded to fuck his whore.

With single-minded purpose—the pursuit of pleasure, higher and higher—he fucked the ass wrapped around his cock.

He heard himself, dimly, grunting with each thrust into it, like a mindless beast—the mindless beast he was—the rutting animal—

He heard his whore’s pretty, punched-out sounds of high pleasure equal to his own—

His whore’s pleasure inflamed his own—

“Whore,” he groaned— “Jiang Cheng— Beloved—”

“Lover,” he heard— “Wangji—”

“Yes,” he said, and exerted himself—gathered his wits—

Noted Jiang Cheng’s reactions—

Listened to instinct—

Went where intuition led him—

Devoted himself, single-minded now on his beloved’s pleasure, to his beloved’s pleasure.

He would fuck his beloved to pleasure’s peak—

He would fuck his beloved to the stars and past them—

To heaven’s gate—

Into heaven—

He did.

He fucked his beloved until, screaming and spurting, Jiang Cheng came on his cock.

He came loud and long.

At the sight of it—the wonder of it—the beauty—

Lan Wangji came too.

It was the end and the beginning of the world.

Jiang Cheng was in love.

He would keep the memory, he would hold the sight, of Wangji in climax in his heart of hearts until his dying day. He would hear it—Wangji’s voice as he came—upon the moment of his own death. He would see Wangji’s eyes—the absolute in his eyes—when his life left his body, when it passed to the other side of the veil.

He knew it beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Wangji roused, at that moment.

He rose onto his elbows, and looked Jiang Cheng deep in his eyes.

Jiang Cheng knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“I love you,” Wangji said. “I’ll love you till I die.”

Jiang Cheng smiled, sweetly.

“But will you hide me and lock me in a house encircled by gentians, to be yours and only yours until I die?”

“No,” Wangji said.

“No?”

Wangji’s eyes were the living embodiment of the absolute.

“Only if you ask me to.”

There was a secret house, on a secret street.

Men who knew, knew that in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas—

They could find gentians there for their own houses.