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The first thing Charles is aware of when he wakes up is want.
It's not want in a way he can recall ever experiencing it before. His mind feels sleepy and hazy and not really up to such things as summoning memory or drawing comparison, but he thinks that this sort of want must be how starving people must experience hunger. Or how dying people experience breathing, possibly. It's not just want that overpowers, it's a want so bone-deep, it hurts.
He wonders if someone has given him drugs.
That would track, Charles begins to think as awareness of his surroundings sinks in. By the lights and the smells, he's in his school's hospital wing. He twitches his fingers and feels an IV in the back of his hand. So possibly he is currently receiving drugs, present tense.
Except Charles is pretty sure that no one would give him anything that makes him feel like this on purpose.
His hands are trembling, his back is sweating, and his heart is beginning to beat so hard and fast that it's as if adrenaline is what's dripping into his veins from the IV. From a scientific perspective, it would all be very fascinating if it weren't for the utter terror of the situation.
Or for the erection he can see and feel straining against his sheets.
Charles is not entirely without sensation below the waist. This is not the first time he's had an erection since 1962. But this is not- he is certain of this- a normal, everyday, common-or-garden erection. This is something else.
He tries to adjust his sheets and blanket to be a little more respectful of his privacy, and suddenly his mind is flooded with pleasure and pain, every inch of his skin tingling with sensation, every hair on his body standing up. His vision fills up with phosphenes and his breath catches in his throat and his cock throbs like it never has before in his entire life.
Charles holds perfectly still, waiting for this- whatever it is- to abate back to uncomfortable instead of unbearable, and the realization hits him so hard, he can actually taste fear.
That was from the sheet brushing his underwear. From the feeling of friction against his cock from the other side of a wall of fabric.
He pinches the bridge of his nose and- uncharacteristically for him- snarls out loud, "What the fuck is happening to me?"
Beside him, there's a click noise and some tinny static from the intercom on the wall and Hank's voice comes through: "I'm sorry, Professor. We're working on that."
Charles can't help the hysterical laughter that bubbles out of him. He chokes off the sound and presses the heels of both his hands against his eyes. He's sweating so much that his clothes are clinging to him, his body is both aching and tingling, and he can feel his own pounding heartbeat in his bloody cock against his fucking thigh.
"I'm still running the tests on your blood sample," Hank says, "but I have a hypothesis. I wanted to run it by you, to see if you have any insight."
Charles tries to will himself into a state where he can listen to Hank explain the science of the thing. "Yes?"
Hank says a lot of words very fast, with obvious fascination and intensity, but Charles completely fails to hear him over the sound of his pulse in his ears. He thinks he catches new student, secondary mutation, defense mechanism, and pheromone exposure. He thinks they'd be easier to assemble into a picture if he had any more pieces, but he can't bear to ask Hank to explain it again.
The sound of another person's voice- even when that person was Hank- seemed to be making the physical reaction worse.
It takes Charles so long to get control of himself enough to answer that he can hear Hank worrying he didn't hear him and wondering if the comms are broken.
"I'm sorry," Charles says. "I'm a little... I might need to rest."
There's a pause, and then Hank says, "Of course, Professor. I'll check in again in a few hours."
"Thank you, Hank," Charles says, and flips off the intercom.
Charles is trapped on his back while Hank runs tests for three days.
It's a total crapshoot, a desperate flinging of unthinkable amounts of shit at the wall to see what sticks. There are no tests for what's wrong with Charles, and the only observable symptoms are priapism (a word neither Hank nor Charles had previously had cause to learn, which neither of them are excited to add to their vocabularies now) and wild drops and rises in his blood pressure.
The only thing worse than the improvised tests are the improvised cures. Adrenaline helps. Endorphins help. Oxytocin helps. Saline- good up to a point, then bad.
Testosterone helps.
They try vitamins, minerals, proteins, acids, and wait to see what his body does. A clearer and clearer picture is starting to emerge and Charles would desperately like to not be seeing it, if he had any priority other than easing the aching feel of his heartbeat pounding away in his cock.
(He had tried masturbating even before Hank's furtive suggestion that he make the attempt. If anything, it seemed to make things worse.)
Charles can feel himself losing reason, patience, and dignity by the second, and it feels a lot like he's becoming a werewolf. He's not growling and drooling yet, but damned if the thought of humping the furniture wasn't starting to seem like a reasonable option.
The furniture can't provide what he needs, he knows. But he's starting to think he'll die of a heart attack and/or a ruptured penis before they figure it out.
The only thing Hank's sure of is that the answer lies with his mutation. That whatever is broken and in need of fixing, it'll tie into their genes.
Charles tries to be hopeful, but hope is a burned prospect when your existence is being slowly funneled down to nothing but servicing the needs of a perpetual erection.
___
When Hank finds the answer, Charles all but howls.
It's a joke. It has to be.
"You're fucking joking," he says out loud, as though this will shift reality in that direction through sheer shame over how fucking absurd this is.
Hank looks both awkward and sorry. "I can keep trying to make up tests, Professor, but looking at the- the details of your condition and the things we know ameliorate it even a little--"
Charles does not want or need to hear the explanation again. He closes his fists so tight they hurt and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes until they hurt a little, too.
Somehow, he's going to have to get fucked- when he's not in a relationship, is wildly out of practice at flirting, and has never been in worse condition for trying before in his entire life.
Oh, and Hank's pretty sure it has to be a mutant.
And very possibly, based on Charles' reactions to testosterone, a man.
How very lucky for him that the overwhelming majority of other mutants he knows- male and female alike- are his bloody students.
Did he really need to go out to get fucked?, he wondered. Life seemed to be giving it to him and good as it was.
Of course, Life wasn't- in Charles' experience- a mutant.
___
He doesn't really have a choice, he realizes, once he finishes grappling with the situation and he tries to come up with one.
Running Cerebro under these conditions would be difficult, but not impossible. He could find other mutants close by and then insinuate himself near them in bars and clubs, try to pick them up close to the usual way. The thing is that he can't square the morality of that idea. It feels like something a serial killer would do. "Hi, I made a list of potentials who can fulfill my sexual needs and then used technology to hone in on their locations and have started approaching them. You're at the top, fancy a shag?" Abominable. Horrid.
The idea of not disclosing how he found and chose them, just pretending they are coincidentally two mutants in a bar just looking for a good time under the stars, is even worse.
The students are off-limits. Charles does not know how far gone he'd have to be to do that, but from here, he'd die first. That most of them are adults does not matter. He is still their teacher, he is still someone they trust to be in a position of authority over them, and he cannot- will not- betray that trust.
Hank has always occupied a strange space in Charles' consciousness where he is not quite a teacher and not quite a student. He is less morally murky, but in his own way, far more emotionally fraught.
(Raven feels like a ghost between them on the best of days.)
That leaves one possibility.
Just one.
He thought he would rather die than take that one once, but that was before the possibility that he could have a stroke at any moment from the wild blood pressure extremes had worn him down for three days.
Charles doesn't have to hop into Cerebro to look up where Erik is now. He tells Hank that it'd be useless to, between that stupid helmet and Emma's powers, but the truth is that Charles has never let Erik get that far. Erik is nothing if not arrogant, and while he and Charles have avoided direct confrontation, Erik's never actually been hiding. It is not difficult to have private detectives keep an eye on him and report back, and if Emma's ever caught one and let Erik know, Erik must have been happy enough to allow it to continue, because they have always reported back.
In the end, it only takes him twenty minutes on the telephone to find where Erik is.
It takes Charles even less time to catch a bus.
___
As plans go, there are probably worse ones than rolling up to the front door of the house Erik and a dozen other mutants are staying in, chess board under one arm, the other hand holding a heavy overcoat on his lap to hide his erection- oh, very subtle and natural, Xavier, no one will have questions about that- but Charles is very hard put to think of one. Of course, at the moment, he's very hard put to think of anything, but he knows that later on, he is going to remember this with nothing but abject humiliation.
Knocking is a trial of not dropping either coat or chess board, but he somehow manages, and then is left with his fingers dancing frantically on the arm of his chair, trying to breathe through his heart pounding fit to burst and his cock doing much the same. He is shaking and sweating and feels small, stupid, and worst of all, helpless. He can't imagine that Erik's going to make that any easier.
It takes an eternity for anyone to answer the door and Charles doesn't even recognize the person who does.
His eyes burn like tears from the sweat off his forehead rolling into them and the spit goes dry in his mouth, but he tries nonetheless to sound natural, even casual, as he asks, "Is Erik in?"
The man in the doorway blinks his nictating membrane, giving Charles a brief puzzled look, before he shouts over his shoulder, "Mags! There's a dying man here for you!"
Charles thinks he would be embarrassed if he had the energy.
The man in the doorway disappears and a moment later, Erik takes his place.
Charles is assaulted by about twenty emotions at once. He wants to punch him. He wants to fuck him. He wants to call the police and gibber madly in their direction until Erik is locked away forever, where Charles never has to think about him again. He wants to fuck him. He wants to shout at him for hurting Charles, for leaving him, for taking Raven. He wants to knock all of his teeth out personally in a spray of blood and spittle. He wants to fuck him. He wants to demand an apology. He wants to demand he give up all of this and come back to the mansion and try to be friends, brothers, teachers together again, no matter what happened in the past. He wants to fuck him. He wants to run over Erik's toes with his chair, stab him in the chest, bite his throat out with his teeth. He wants to fuck him.
"Hi," he says.
Erik is watching him in a cool, unsurprised way, as though he's been expecting Charles to show up eventually. It only adds to the kill-him-or-fuck-him boiling inside Charles' head and the temptation to read his mind without permission is stronger than it's ever been in Charles' life. "Hi."
Charles knows, he knows, that it is physically impossible in this situation to pretend nothing's wrong, and yet that is all that he wants to do. He slides the chessboard along his thigh- trying to hide a shiver at the sympathetic friction that beams straight to his cock- and palms it awkwardly in one hand before holding it out to Erik. "Fancy a game?"
Erik folds his arms across his chest, leans against the doorway with a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth, and Charles hates how aware he is at the moment of Erik's face and body and every microexpression he can see in the blinking of his eyes and the curving of his mouth, hates how the excess adrenaline coursing through his veins makes him sketchy and paranoid so it feels like Erik can read him, too. Because the worst part of both of those things is that Charles can't shake the feeling that Erik is enjoying this.
Erik daring to enjoy anything while Charles is just barely pretending to be fine- trying so hard to protect his dignity, his self-image, with secrecy- would be bad enough, but Charles cannot imagine a thing more torturous in the situation he is in now than Erik enjoying it on multiple axes. You destroyed me once, Charles wants to scream. And now I fucking need you and you have the unmitigated gall to look at me like that.
Charles realizes he hasn't heard a word Erik said from the moment he started making that fucking face and tunes back in mid-sentence.
"--concerned someone's looking for you?"
"Who would be looking for me?" Charles asks, a little dumbly. Hatred is beating in his heart while his eyes seem to realize of their own accord that this humiliating new difference in their heights puts Erik's crotch much closer to eye level.
Erik only looks more amused. "I've been expecting your willingness to work with human authorities to turn around on you for quite some time. Is that not why you're here, looking so very in need of my help?"
Charles' mind is nothing but an echo chamber of enraged screams while his body seems to be breaking out in goose-pimples, as if his hair and skin are standing up against his will to beg for Erik's touch.
"I," Charles says, trying to keep his voice from shaking, "have been expecting your open disdain of humans to run you into trouble for quite some time. I think one or the other of us would have heard already if that had happened."
Erik quirks a conceding eyebrow. "I suppose someone would have told me."
Why, Charles wonders, must they have this horrible parody of a normal conversation? Could Erik really not recognize the medical emergency unfolding in front of him?
But he's not ready to crumble. Not ready to beg. He forces himself to speak without clenching his teeth, to try and sound merely curious. "Should I be concerned that you're having me followed?"
"Should I?" Erik asks. "You're the one who's obviously been keeping tabs." He spreads his hands to indicate their surroundings and Charles' presence in them.
It's a fair point to make when Charles is feeling anything but fair. He imagines what it would be like to kiss Erik, hard and bruising, and then sink his teeth into Erik's lower lip until his own mouth fills with blood. His hatred and overactive libido both approve in what feels like a jolt in his stomach of both pleasure and pain. His skin feels hotter and his forehead feels sweatier.
"Did it ever occur to you that I needed to know you weren't too close?" Charles asks. "That I could never feel safe after this, knowing you didn't even have to be in the room to do it again?"
Erik's expression takes a turn for the mortified, which feels to Charles like a tiny victory, even as his chest starts to ache from the hard, fast beating of his heart- a reminder that he still needed Erik to fix this and making him feel any kind of shame would get Charles no closer to that goal.
"You betrayed us first, Charles," he finally says, quiet and condemning.
Charles' vision becomes nothing but red and the next thing he knows, he's launching himself at Erik- to fuck him or kill him or both, he himself isn't sure, but he needs to put his hands on him here and now, before he collapses under the weight of it.
Except that Charles does not have working legs and feet to help him carry out either goal, and he finds himself spilling onto the ground, his chair careening backwards from the motion of Charles trying to propel himself.
Erik just manages to catch him before his teeth meet the pavement, and from the stunned look on his face as he does, Charles realizes that Erik can feel him and can feel something wrong- the heat of his body and the excessive sweat and the endless, sickening tremoring that's plaguing him in every muscle.
Erik's fingers are soon pressing against his neck, feeling for his pulse, and his eyes are filled with a damnable concern. "Charles," he says, with a quiet kind of horror, "what have you done to yourself?"
Charles can feel the resentment radiating from his own face as he looks up at him. But inside he knows: time to stop playing. "Take me inside. Alone."
___
Finding a room to be alone in takes a while. Every aspect of Erik's rental house is set up to be communal. It has three bedrooms, but each one has four beds in it- or at least four mattresses on the floor. The single bathroom they pass has a rusted shower drain, cracked tile, and the hygiene paraphernalia of at least seven people packed on every surface and peeking out of cupboards. The eat-in kitchen is packed full of mutants smoking cigarettes, stuffing envelopes, cleaning guns, and God alone knew what else.
There were also, Charles noticed, empty beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays, and abandoned bongs Goddamn everywhere.
Erik manages to find them space in a utility room between a washing machine on four spindly legs with a ringer mounted on the open top and four drooping clotheslines hanging from the ceiling. He has to order three more mutants out of the room to get even that. In a show of silent consideration Charles wouldn't have expected, he lets Charles have the space by the washer while Erik stands under the clotheslines and projects an air of being utterly unbothered by the wet towel brushing his arm or the brassiere dripping water onto his shoe.
"We are still looking for new students," Charles says, before Erik can ask. "We found a girl, whom we thought could only hover a bit above the ground." He rubs his forehead. "She had a secondary mutation we didn't expect."
Erik shakes his head. "You never did adequately prepare for hostility and surprise abilities."
It takes all of Charles' very worn down self-control not to spit on him. "Yes. Well."
"What else could she do?" Erik asks. "What did she do?"
Charles raised a trembling hand to push his hair away from his face. "I haven't been in the best place to understand or retain the science of it," he says, trying not to weight it with undue sarcasm or bitterness, not sure if he quite succeeds, "but it's- it's some sort of pheromonal attack. Something that started in my endocrine system and seems to be affecting everything."
"Making you sick," Erik says.
Charles laughs and this time, he doesn't try to hide the bitterness. "It's more than sick. It's--" He hisses out a breath. "It's unbearable."
Erik doesn't probe into that, which Charles takes as a kindness, but he asks the question Charles knew he would have to answer but had still somehow hoped wouldn't come up. "There's some reason you think I can help. What is it?"
Charles wants not to sound grave as he says it, but the other choice is raw, pained, and needy, and he can't bear to imagine Erik's reaction to that. So he says it the same way he'd share the news of a cancer diagnosis. "From what Hank's tests can tell, I need to have sex. With another mutant. Preferably a man."
Erik doesn't laugh, but Charles can tell by the reappearance of that dreadful smirk that it's a very near thing. "And you thought of me first? How flattering."
Charles feels his lips purse up as though he's bitten straight into a lemon. "It felt less immoral to ask you than to put some other helpless person in the uncomfortable position of having to accept or refuse me in the condition I'm in."
"No concern about my comfort when it comes to accepting or refusing you in the condition you're in? Not a very ethical approach to propositioning me."
"Were there literally any other person on Earth that I could approach more ethically, I would do it," Charles says, heat suffusing his face while his chest begins to hurt again. He can feel blood throbbing in his temples and is afraid that if he looks at his penis, it will be as purple as the absurd shirt Erik has on. The humiliation seems to be making him upcycle into another high.
Erik's smirk tones down a little- but only a little. "Why not ask Hank? He's always liked you well enough. Surely he understands all the nuances of the situation to make an informed decision." Every word is laden with increasing mockery.
STOP!
The word bursts forth not from Charles' mouth, but his mind, and hard enough that Erik reels back from him under the pain of it.
Charles lays his head in his hands, trying to breathe. To calm. To rein himself in.
He can feel Erik touching his neck again. Feel his own pulse painfully beating against Erik's fingertips.
Erik's sounds a little kinder. "You're getting worse."
"You bring it out in me," Charles says automatically. Then he winces and slumps his shoulders. "It gets better and worse. It just doesn't go away."
Erik turns his hand on Charles' neck. It feels somewhat more like a caress, although that could be Charles' fevered imagination. "What will happen? If it isn't stopped?"
"As we don't know if it's ever happened before," Charles says, trying to gulp down air, "Hank has no idea. But with the way it's been going, I could have a stroke, a heart attack, or even an aneurysm."
Erik rubs a circle into Charles' neck with his thumb, which feels far more incredible than it ought to. "Yesterday, I would have guessed you'd roll the dice with the heart attack before you asked me for help."
"The thought did occur to me. But then I thought, what if I had the heart attack and lived, but it still didn't go away?"
Erik chuckles, low and sardonic. "I believe that. It sounds like you."
"Yesterday, I would have thought you would do nothing but mock me and then send me away," Charles says.
"I have been mocking you," Erik says, "but I haven't sent you away."
"Still thinking it over?" he asks.
"No."
The word makes a panicked lump form in Charles' throat. "Oh?"
"Charles," he says, in a tone full of both mockery and pity, "how could I send you away?" He lowers himself down until their eyes are level- a gesture Charles ordinarily hates, but chooses not to protest in this moment. Erik grins a wide shark grin- hungry, with just a few too many teeth. "I'll be able to tease you about this for the rest of our lives."
It's the hunger in Erik's eyes and smile that stops Charles from pulling away or saying something cruel but satisfying. His own live wire of a body needs that hunger too much- needs it to come, needs it to live.
Wants to know what it tastes like.
Charles slumps forward again and tips his head sideways against Erik's hand. "Well, it's hardly Keats, but it'll do."
Erik goes with it, rubbing his knuckles along Charles' ear like he's petting a cat. Charles likes it more than he would have thought.
"Your life will be in my hands," Erik says, very quiet.
Charles closes his eyes and nods. Tries to smile. "Well. It won't be the first time."
___
Erik takes him to one of the bedrooms after shooing everyone else out of it. The room still reeks of three different kinds of smoke (Charles spots a clove cigarette in an ashtray perched atop a milk crate nightstand), but they are alone and Erik says nothing about lifting Charles from his chair and easing him onto a mattress.
Charles' heart is still beating a fierce tattoo against his ribcage but it's been doing it for so long and so hard now that it's hard to tell if there's any anxiety to it at all. He doesn't feel any of the nausea he associates with fear, which is nice, but his entire body is buzzing out of control with need while he doesn't even know where to put his fucking hands, which is not.
Erik doesn't sit on the mattress with him, like Charles might have expected. He stands by the wall, stone-faced with a cagey vibe that Charles wouldn't have picked up on if he weren't a (barely functioning at present) telepath. He realizes for the first time that this is probably a function of trauma and survival for Erik, keeping expressions neutral no matter what to avoid exposing any weakness. He wonders if that means Erik's afraid.
He considers asking, but then Erik grabs the hem of that hideous purple shirt and pulls it over his head and all other thoughts are banished out of Charles' mind. The memory of even having any other thoughts is completely obliterated when Erik steps out of his trousers and underwear in one move.
Charles has seen Erik naked before. Months of traveling together in close quarters, sharing motel rooms, dressing side by side, passing each other coming out of the shower, and on one very memorable occasion, getting very annoyed because Erik took a piss beside him while Charles was brushing his teeth.
But, he is realizing now, there is a wide gulf between seeing Erik naked because he happens to be naked and seeing Erik naked for him.
Charles doesn't know what to do first and clumsily starts fighting buttons on his shirt and trousers at the same time, one with each hand, tripping over himself and making a hash of it. Erik starts to come over to help but naked Erik getting within touching distance of him is more than Charles can stand and he literally rips his own shirt in half and tosses it aside.
Erik laughs at him, hovering his face dangerously close to Charles', his knee nudging Charles' knee, his cock in plain view where Charles could grab it any time he wants. "Was that necessary?" he asks, cupping Charles' face in his hands.
Charles manages to send the button on his trousers flying. "We are four days of pheromonal distress past 'necessary'," he says, and closes the distance between them with a kiss. Erik makes a surprised noise into his mouth, but kisses back.
Charles has never kissed anyone with beard stubble before, never tasted the mouth of someone who has recently had a beer and a joint at the same time, but it feels good, tastes good, like even just this little bit of touching him is already soothing the pain and replacing it with something else entirely.
Erik strokes his neck, his shoulders, his chest. Runs his hands over Charles' nipples, down Charles' belly, and opens his trouser zip for him before he demolishes that, too. The rasp of the zipper through his underwear makes Charles yelp like a wounded animal against Erik's lips as he's reminded just how sensitive he still is.
Erik breaks the kiss so he can grin at him again. "From a zipper, Charles?"
"Four days," Charles reminds him, and yanks him back into kissing him because he was not remotely ready to stop.
Erik keeps touching him, keeps kissing him, and picks up Charles' hands to put them on his body. The feel of Erik's chest hair under his fingers is electrifying, making his hands tingle and all of the hairs on his own body stand up. It's intoxicating and Charles wonders if it's like this all the time, or if it's the pheromones, or if it's a side effect of the magnetic energy from Erik's mutation, or both. Or maybe just the fact that it's Erik, under his hands after all this time.
(Charles remembers...wanting, once. And thinking that perhaps Erik wanted, too. And maybe--
Maybe.
He hasn't let himself think about that in a long time.)
Erik manages to get Charles' trousers and underwear off on his own, and Charles hisses sharply at the feeling of air on his cock. He looks down and is relieved to see it is not the livid purple of a bruise after all, that it is a bit harder than he's used to getting since Cuba, but that it is still just an erection.
When he looks up, he sees that Erik is looking, too.
Charles resists the urge to ask what Erik thinks. He has never been particularly self-conscious about his penis and does not intend to start now. Instead, he is holding his breath, waiting to see what Erik will do.
Erik strokes the inside of Charles' thigh in and out- close to his cock, and then back. Physically, this doesn't do much for Charles- his thighs are not a place where he has retained much in the way of sensation- but his gaze stays fixated on Erik's fingers, watching them come so very, very close. He tears himself away from the sight to look up into Erik's eyes.
"Shall I?" Erik asks, and it is difficult to tell if he is mocking or if he is asking.
Charles feels just the barest sense of hesitation. "When I've done it," he says, "it- it hasn't worked. I don't know if it will be different when you do it."
Erik gives him another hungry shark-smile. "If it doesn't, then I suppose we shall have to try something else." Then he wraps his hand around Charles' cock in a strong, sure grip that leaves Charles gasping and groaning.
He cannot arch up against Erik's hand like he wants to. His brain is crying out for his hips to snap up and thrust against Erik's palm and he can't. He's forced to be patient, to let Erik stroke slowly up and down with maddening gentleness, which Charles is pretty fucking sure he's sadistically doing on purpose.
He mutters something out loud to this effect- his coherency is going to hell and he can barely hear himself think over the feeling of Erik's hand on his cock, forget speaking, and Erik chuckles against his ear. "I think I like you better when you're not getting what you want as fast as you want it, Charles."
Charles kisses him again so that he can bite his lip- hard. He does not taste blood, but he can feel the flesh swelling between his teeth before Erik pulls free with another laugh.
"Are you trying to make me beg you?" Charles asks. That may be closing to happening- every wave of sesnsation that jolts through his cock makes Charles feel closer to babbling any pleading nonsense that might come tumbling out.
"You? No," Erik says. "I don't have the urge to get old holding your cock, waiting for you to grow past your pride."
Charles wants to protest, but then Erik gives him another slow stroke and any sounds he might have been planning to make are swallowed up in a groan.
Erik keeps waging his war of slow, steady stroking and for a while, Charles just closes his eyes and tries to lose himself to the sensation. To the feel of Erik's hands, the warmth of Erik's breath against his neck, the feeling of another body near his.
He doesn't know how long he floats in this pleasurable ether, but he is drawn sharply back to Earth when he feels a change- Erik's body gathering close to his, the grip on his cock vanishing and then reappearing differently. Charles open his eyes, looks down, and sees that Erik is holding both of their cocks in his hand, stroking them together.
"Oh God," Charles moans and buries his face in Erik's shoulder.
"Good?" Erik asks, his voice grown huskier.
"Fuck yes," Charles whispers.
Erik takes a few slow, steadying breaths. His hand is getting shakier and the pace of it between them is picking up a lot faster. "Good."
Charles bites his lip, tries grabbing Erik's hair, his shoulders, his ass- just trying to find some way to hold on while he can feel the heat and pressure building between them. Shakily, he puts his hand between them, wraps it around Erik's, feels Erik's fingers and cock against his palm.
Erik is the one who groans and hisses now. "Fuck."
Charles tightens his grip and starts guiding his hand into holding tighter, moving faster. Erik doesn't quite thrust against him, but his whole body is starting to move with it, to lean into it, as if to silently beg Charles for more.
Charles is close, he's so close, and it's completely on instinct when he blurts out, "I want to taste you. Can I-- can I please?"
He nearly comes right there just from asking.
Erik moans, but doesn't answer in words. He pulls his hand free of Charles and turns over so fast that Charles is nearly dizzy with it.
Erik's cock is hard, wet and glistening from Charles' hand. Charles licks his lips, his cock achingly hard, his balls heavy and full. He's aching to touch, to taste and to feel, so he reaches out and wraps his fingers around Erik's cock, but before he can so much as touch his lips to it, he can feel Erik's tongue touching his.
Charles opens his mouth to say something, but then Erik is sinking down onto Charles' cock, engulfing it in a hot, tight, wet heat and Charles can't think of anything to say because it feels so utterly fantastic that for a minute he stops breathing altogether.
He squeezes Erik's cock hard and in one quick motion shoves it in his mouth, almost all the way to the back of his throat.
Fuck, he thinks. Fuck, fuck, fuck--
Every touch of his tongue, every brush of his teeth, every time he sucks it as hard as he can, he can feel Erik answering him. Lick for lick, nibble for nibble, sucking so hard his cheeks hollow inward. He feels Erik dart his tongue just underneath Charles' foreskin and Charles might have fucking screamed if he hadn't had his mouth full. He squeezes Erik's testicles instead.
Erik comes first, hot and salty in Charles' mouth, but Charles only goes a minute longer.
(It is the longest minute in the world.)
Charles' heart is still pounding, his skin is still hot, and both of their bodies are now slick with sweat. But it's different than it's been the last few days. There's some release in his nerves, some rush of chemicals in his brain that lets him feel at ease for the first time in days.
Erik pulls off of Charles' cock and turns around, crawling up until they're face to face. Kisses him softly on the lips, with no tongue or teeth at all. It's sweet, even tender, and Charles wishes it could go on forever. He collapses limply on Erik's chest and lets out his first unstrained breath in days. He hadn't even realized how much everything had hurt until it stopped.
Charles knows he should probably thank him- or say something nice, at least, that's less awkward than "thank you," but his body won't let him do it.
Erik holds him close while he passes out instead.
In the last haze of consciousness before he completely falls asleep, Charles thinks he might have mumbled, "Love you."
But Erik doesn't hear, and when he leaves in the morning, Charles has already forgotten.