Content: Arthur/Louis Bloom, NSFW, Genital dysphoria

Arthur's hand is still in Lou's trousers, his palm curled around him in a way that makes it feel as if he's holding all of him. The sweat on Lou's body glistens in the dim light of the apartment and the spaces between his ribs empty and fill with shadow as he pulls air into his lungs. He clings to Arthur's forearm with a grip so loose he may as well not be clutching him at all.

There were many long minutes before where Arthur’s fingers moved softly under layers of dark cotton, circling a spot that made Lou tense and shift urgently beneath him. There's something about the way Lou directs him - with a press of his hand or a breathy request - that makes it all so comfortable and simple. Arthur likes the quiet, shivering moan Lou makes when he cums, the delicate arch of his body, how his eyes close in a way they rarely do when he's awake.

Lou's breathing slows and Arthur slips his hand out and trails it up and over the shallow slope of his stomach. The grip on his forearm tightens before finally dropping away, and they lay side by side, entwined, and close enough to be on top of one another. It's intimate; the sated kind of quiet that envelops them after sex.

"I don't like to look either," Arthur admits with shy hesitancy, "You know... at myself."

"I know," Lou says. It's an embarrassing reminder that he's read and re-read every page of every journal Arthur has ever filled; and Arthur wonders, idly, how many times he'd mentioned his own genitals and how many times he'd put down in writing how much he wished they were different. "But that's not a problem I have."

Silence stretches between them and Arthur knows that Lou could abandon the conversation like he's abandoned so many others, that he will look away or change the subject and it will be one more thing that lingers - purposefully forgotten. But he continues.

"When you're touched, something has been given to you. Whether you're hit or kissed or fucked, someone has left something behind for you to own. But when you're seen something has been taken from you that you can never get back."

This makes sense, in a way. Arthur looks across the room, at the little plant beside the television, and thinks about how Lou lets him touch but not see, how he's felt Lou shudder against his palm but has never watched him cum against his hand. There is a voraciousness to sight that he's always understood, how being looked at feels like a part of you is being chewed and swallowed. And throughout his life people have consumed him the way they might consume shards of glass - as if he's a form of torture to endure. But Lou stares at him with a hunger that makes him crave being seen. He's never looking past him, toward some stranger he imagines him to be, or that he wishes he would become; Lou simply loves the feeling of glass in his mouth.

There were times, long ago, when Arthur felt a desire so delirious and frantic that he knew it would kill him. And in those times he would see a man who looked the way a paintbrush stroking over his lips felt. Everything they shared was tethered to love like a raft attached to a ship by a miles-long stretch of thread - the same thread Arthur feels the tug of when Lou looks at him. And he knows that if that thread pulls taut enough, Lou will let him break apart the glass of his body and eat it shard by shard.