He pulled back an inch. Levi was looking up at him with his eyes streaming and his mouth open and his chest heaving, and what Asher saw in his face wasn’t fear. It was exhaustion.
The ice cream stayed down.
“What do you think,” Asher asked, his thumb moving across Levi’s pulse, “when your stomach growls and you don’t eat?”
Levi’s jaw worked. “Fuck you.”
Asher’s chest did the warm thing again. He scooped another spoonful and held it out. Levi’s mouth was a line.
His hand went back to Levi’s throat. The cartilage shifted under his palm — that small, undeniably painful give of a windpipe under pressure, but now it felt different, because under his hand right now was a person he was not going to kill. He was going to feed him.
Levi’s mouth opened on the gasp that couldn’t come. Asher slid the spoon in and kissed him.
Levi kissed him back harder this time. His hand came off Asher’s wrist, threaded through his hair, and pulled. He swallowed against Asher’s mouth, let out half a sob, and didn’t stop the kiss. Asher’s whole body was hot. His cock pressed hard against the front of his pants, and he was so far from ashamed of it that he almost laughed. This was working. Levi was eating. Levi was kissing him. Levi’s body was telling him the truth his mouth wouldn’t.
He pulled back. His hand stayed on Levi’s throat — resting now, not squeezing. “Tell me. What’s the thought?”
Levi’s face crumpled, and what was underneath was raw and young and hurt, and Asher’s stomach dropped because that face had always been the face that broke him.
“That it doesn’t matter,” Levi whispered. “That none of it — that she was right. That it was a game…or maybe it still is a game, and I mean nothing…all of it means nothing, and I—I’m sitting in my apartment with a tube in my face, and no one is coming, and it doesn’t matter if I eat because it doesn’t matter if I —”
He stopped.
It doesn’t matter if I’m here.
She did this. Marianne. She told him it was just a game, and he believed her, stopped eating, and Asher had not been there. The not-being-there was the part Asher could not forgive himself for.
He was here now.
He held out another scoop.
Levi looked at the spoon, then at Asher, his chin trembling.
Then he opened his mouth.
Asher’s chest cracked open like a door. He put the ice cream on Levi’s tongue, slowly, and watched as Levi’s mouth closed around the spoon. His eyes closed, and he swallowed, tears tracking down the sides of his face into his hair; Asher watched them go and wanted to lick every one of them off.
“This is real. This isn’t the game. Your body wants to be here, Levi — it’s been telling me so this whole time. It’s just waiting for the rest of you to believe it,” he said softly. “I love you, Levi. I’m not going to let you disappear.”
He’d say it again tomorrow. He’d say it the day after that, and every day going forward until it stuck.
You’re not allowed to leave me.
He kept that one behind his teeth. There would be time for it later. For now, there was the spoon and the mouth and the swallow, the slow melting carton on the bed, and Asher’s free hand still on Levi’s throat, because letting go of the throat felt like letting go of the proof that Levi was here.
Levi cried through ten more spoonfuls.
He took his hand off Levi’s throat and set the carton and the spoon on the ground and lay down, pulling Levi against his chest. Levi came willingly — boneless in the way that meant he was done fighting for the day, and Asher would take that. Levi’s face was on his sternum, his hands clutching at Asher’s shirt.
His chest was so full he could barely breathe.
“Tomorrow,” he said into Levi’s hair, “we try something real. Eggs again. If your throat closes, I’ll open it. If you gag, I’ll hold you. If you cry — “ he kissed the top of Levi’s head — “I’ll hold you for that too.”
Levi didn’t answer. His fingers just tightened in Asher’s shirt.
Asher closed his eyes and held him, and with every breath Levi let out against him, he felt the aches in his body vanish. His heart hurt a little all the time now, mostly because he worried about Levi in a way he had never worried about anything before, but his physical discomfort? The soreness in his muscles and the burning in his thigh? Those meant nothing when Levi was near and close and his.
He was going to feed Levi every day for the rest of their lives.