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“You’re ashamed of me, aren’t you?”
The words are quiet, not really a question, maybe not even directed at the Bull. Dorian’s sitting up in the dark, blanket wrapped around him against the cold, shoulders hunched but head raised to study the man in bed beside him. But he hasn’t noticed that the Bull’s awake. He’s just murmuring, soft and resigned, to himself and the darkness and the relative chill.
“It’s fair,” Dorian goes on. “I can’t even touch you when people will see. I talk a grand game of refusing to live a lie about myself, and yet here I am, tiptoeing around and hoping no one notices this. And all the while you’ve been nothing but open, and nothing but patient. But surely I must disappoint you.”
The Bull rolls to his side to show his open eye, and Dorian doesn’t gasp but stops breathing entirely. For a long moment they watch each other, Dorian no doubt mortified at his confessions being heard, while the Bull wrangles with his half-asleep mind to choose the careful words that won’t send Dorian scrambling. That might have been the cause of Dorian’s quiet speech, actually, summoning up the will to leave, since usually when the Bull wakes in the morning, he’s long gone.
After too long Dorian exhales, and his shoulders drop. “You don’t need to answer that,” he says, sharpness coming back into his voice in what the Bull had eventually figured out was self-defense mechanism. Push ‘em away before they get in too close and all that.
But he’s been sleeping in the Bull’s bed, which positions the Bull well within his personal space.
“It’d be nice,” the Bull says then, and his voice is rough with sleep. He clears his throat. “If you wanted to be open about it. If you wanted to stay at night. But I’d rather you were comfortable.”
“I might never be,” Dorian snaps, and then lets out a sigh. When he speaks again it’s soft again, maybe regretful. “I don’t think I know how. That can’t be what you want in a -- whatever we are.”
The Bull doesn’t sit up, doesn’t make any movements too suddenly, but he does reach out a hand and leaves it on Dorian’s nearest knee. Dorian shivers, but his hand comes down to rest above the Bull’s.
“Think you could be up to giving it a try?”
A shaky breath out; Dorian’s hand tightens for a moment before carefully relaxing again. “You would want that? Even if I…”
“Even if you never managed,” the Bull says.
He doesn’t want to look too hard at the fear clenching in his stomach, doesn’t want to notice how much he wants Dorian to stay this time, or every time, or just… not leave at all. He confronts it anyway. Living in denial never seemed like much of a life, even before he met Dorian. But that was part of the problem, of course -- another entry of the list of the things the Bull wants to help him with. He could keep Dorian here until the guy learned comfort with himself, or at least acceptance, but only if Dorian wanted to stay and learn it.
It’s not just for Dorian’s sake. It’d be simpler if that was the case; the Bull knows how to give up on someone even though he hates it every time. But lately, or maybe a good chunk longer than he realised it, he wants to see Dorian’s smile, all those walls dropped, the way he stretches out against the Bull and meets his eye without shying away. He wants to know he did that. His fingers tighten on Dorian’s knee for a moment before he controls the movement and relaxes the hand, and Dorian mirrors the action against that hand.
“I don’t want you to do this as, I don’t know, a favour, or because it’d be good for me, anything like that,” Dorian says, but his fingers don’t loosen like the Bull’s did. “I don’t need to succeed to survive. If you want me to go, I won’t fall apart.”
That’s the first mistake the Bull made, he realises now. Caring too much about what Dorian’s getting out of this, so Dorian thinks it’s a one-way street. Did he ever tell Dorian what he wanted, other than the first night when he said I want you, and asked for a watchword?
It’s a terrifying admission to make, and the Bull isn’t used to the desires driving him to make it. Oh, desire in the usual form, he can announce without a problem, and always has done, but these deeper tugs at the base of his throat and the itching in his hands to keep touching, these things never got mentioned in the Qun. The mercenary life didn’t give him precedent either. But this is what Dorian needs to hear, so the Bull sucks it up. “Maybe I will.”
“Tell me to go?” Dorian’s face doesn’t fall insofar as the Bull can see, but Dorian’s hand falls away. “It’s all right. Like I said--”
“Fall apart,” the Bull clarifies.
Dorian falls silent, his mouth following his hand, and the Bull finally sits up, to stare him in the face, in the glittering of the eyes that the Bull can barely see. He reaches his free left hand to touch the face the dark hides, and feels Dorian’s open mouth and the breath that sucks in and gusts out. When the Bull moves his hand to cup the whole right side of his face, Dorian leans into it.
It takes some time like this before Dorian speaks again. “I didn’t know.” His tone is reverent, his voice a whisper, and his hand creeps up to meet the Bull’s again, on the other side now.
“I couldn’t exactly be ashamed of you when I never said it,” the Bull replies.
He feels, rather than seeing, Dorian’s small smile. “I lied,” Dorian says. “I might just have fallen apart as well, if you had shown me the door.”
The Bull twists his hand around to grasp Dorian’s, and pulls them both back down against the mattress. With a huff of air that’s probably distant cousins with a laugh, Dorian allows it, and lands sprawled against the Bull’s side, left leg over the Bull’s corresponding leg and left arm across the Bull’s chest. When the Bulls turns to press them chest to chest, Dorian just adjusts slightly to cling from a different angle.
“What a pair we make,” he says, against the Bull’s throat. “How long did that take us to say?”
A moment to respond; the Bull tightens his hold on Dorian just to make his point, trusting for once that Dorian will want to stay with him. It’s a heady kind of feeling, probably going straight to his ego, but Dorian’s hair smells like the rest of him only more so, and it’s soft against the Bull’s lips. Not ashamed, he thinks, never ashamed.
“Too long, probably,” he says, “but we got there, didn’t we?”
He doesn’t notice falling asleep until he opens his eye to sunlight pouring through the roof, leaving glowing lines across Dorian’s slack face, charmingly smeared kohl and all. There’s a day’s work waiting for them, but the Bull settles himself back against Dorian and closes his eye again. He’ll see the same brilliant body next to him when he wakes up properly, later.