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Pure empathy, Hannibal calls it, and Will knows he’s right, but he prefers to think of it in more palatable terms. An active imagination, he’d called it once, speaking with Jack. A vivid imagination.
What goes beyond empathy is the fact that Will’s imagination isn’t limited to the reconstruction of motive and thought process, or even emotion. Will can’t help but see—‘reconstruct’ is surely the wrong word, when it’s not a crime scene—everything.
It’s not empathy when it’s the certain knowledge that Alana—Dr. Bloom—likes her legs over a man’s shoulders, her knees almost touching her own ears, her arms thrown over her head, clutching the headboard with white knuckles as he thrusts quickly, roughly, not hovering too close but holding her tight at the hips and propping her ass up at the proper angle to get as deep as he can. She can get off, sometimes, just from the fucking, but if she doesn’t, she’s not shy about pushing his head down after he’s finished: not a hint, a demand, and she’ll dig her heels into his back and clench her thighs around his ears when she comes. Alana also likes to be—or at least likes the idea of being—bent over a desk or a table, fucked slowly and deeply with her forehead pressed into woodgrain and her pubic bone, or, if she’s lucky, her clit, being ground into the edge with every thrust. There’s a flicker of that idea every time she walks into Will’s classroom, and Will sees it every time. (Sees it and fights a rush of blood southwards.)
But Alana isn’t special in this regard, though she is special to Will. This is just part of his “gift,” and it’s maddeningly difficult to suppress. For example: Jack is missionary position and a dutiful dedication to making sure his partner (Bella) is satisfied. Beverly likes to ride, likes to let her hair down, silky down her back, teasing and feathery over her nipples as she slides up and grinds down, slow or fast, clutching the headboard or resting her hands on her thighs as she rolls her hips lazily. Freddie is, perhaps predictably, a bit of an exhibitionist, and undoubtedly demanding. Will doesn’t actually cotton to just how Freddie is demanding until the day he catches sight of her fidgeting with the strap of her purse. She wraps the thin leather band around her wrist twice and pulls it tight, tugging until the leather bites into the skin covering the elegant ridges and curves of bone. Then it’s clear: Freddie likes to be bound and tied and made to submit to more pleasure than she can handle, both receiving and providing.
But Hannibal: Hannibal is different. Because Will just can’t see Hannibal fucking anything. It’s not that it’s impossible to imagine Hannibal’s hips moving in that way: Will can see Hannibal dancing—salsa or tango, spectacularly, just as he does everything else. He carries himself like a man who knows how to dance; it’s something in the self-conscious set of his shoulders and the squareness of his hips, something in the smooth, close tailoring of his bespoke suits. So it’s not the physical movements required that are the problem.
It’s also not any shyness or anxiety about his body or nudity in general. As natural as he looks in his suits, Will finds it easy to imagine Hannibal comfortable in his skin and nothing but his skin. He sleeps naked, Will is almost certain. In fact, he sleeps naked between satin sheets, or one hundred percent Egyptian, 1,000 thread count cotton.
When it comes to Hannibal, all that Will can imagine is what he knows: Hannibal watching while Will jerks off on his dining table. Will just can’t see Hannibal fucking a partner, female or male. He can’t even really see Hannibal touching himself, although he’s thought about it, ever since his own exhibitionist display. (Just a desire to even the playing field, he tells himself.) If he really stretches his imagination, Will can imagine Hannibal fully dressed on his knees between spread legs—an image inspired by the remembered sight of Hannibal’s mouth puckered around a spear of asparagus. As it turns out, it’s not a miscalculation.
It happens on the night that everything happened: the phantom in the chimney, kissing Alana, and then the compulsion to tell Hannibal, to drive an hour just to tell him.
“Dessert,” Hannibal offers, but he opens the oven door and then closes it again, flipping the heat off. He turns back, folding away the towel he’d grabbed to retrieve the hot pan. “Dessert for two later. First, I think, dessert for me.”
“What?”
Hannibal steps close. Looms.
“You kissed Alana.”
“She’s very…kissable!”
Hannibal’s hands on Will’s hips keep him from backing away, and then they direct him to Hannibal’s vacated dining chair, but when Will reflexively tries to sit, Hannibal squeezes and stops him.
Hannibal turns Will like an object, rotates him with strong, impartial hands one hundred and eighty degrees until Will’s back is to Hannibal’s front. He smooths his hands over Will’s hips and then down, grazing his ass before drawing away. The barest touch of Hannibal’s middle finger brushes the join between ass and thigh before Will is standing on his own, swaying slightly.
“What are you doing?” Will asks after exhaling with a huff.
“You didn’t just kiss Alana because she’s kissable, as you put it,” Hannibal says, and his hands return, one thumb sliding just inside Will’s waistband to hold it steady while Hannibal flicks open the button of his fly and draws down the zipper. “You are—not to put it crudely, but there’s really not a cultured synonym—horny.”
“Is that what’s causing me to imagine trapped animals in my chimney? I’m a Victorian lady fallen to hallucinations to cope with my repressed libido?”
There’s no discernible trace of surprise in the movements of Hannibal’s hands as he continues his work tugging Will’s pants down over the crests of his hips. But he also doesn’t respond. When he’s succeeded in pushing Will’s pants halfway down his thighs, Hannibal slides his left hand under the hem of Will’s shirt to rest warmly at his waist, and he threads just the fingertips of his right hand into the waistband of Will’s boxers, four circles of warmth edged by four arcs of ticklish nail.
Hannibal leans in closer, radiating heat. “Shall I continue?” he asks, and then he noses into Will’s hair and scents the patch of skin just behind and below Will’s ear.
“What can you smell?”
“You’re–” Hannibal pauses uncharacteristically and inhales again, his nose bumping behind Will’s ear. “You want to know whether I can smell her on you.”
“Can you?”
“Yes.” Hannibal’s hand at Will’s waist squeezes. “Answer my question.”
“What?”
Hannibal repeats himself scornfully, inserting a pause between each word. “Shall. I. Continue?”
“What are you going to do?”
“What I intend has many names. I am especially fond of a particular Latin word for it.”
“Fellatio?”
“Yes, but no. The Romans had many ways of expressing the act. My favorite is the metaphorical use of the verb glubo. Its basic meaning is ‘peel,’ as in bark from a tree. And metaphorically, I find that’s rather evocative.”
“Of?”
“Are you going to answer me?”
Will looks down at Hannibal’s fingertips just inside the waistband of his boxer briefs, now tenting slightly. Hannibal’s not wrong: he is horny. (It could just be a side effect of the fear. A subconscious, adrenaline-fueled response. It could be.) Will swallows audibly but finally answers, “Fine, you can peel me.”
Hannibal’s hand slides inside, and he bites off what sounds like the beginning of a pleased grunt at finding Will already half hard. Hannibal’s hand is indescribably soft and warm, and Will is duly distracted by the sensations—stroking, pulling, teasing—that draw his attention into focus between his legs. A bowling ball rolling to find the center of a trampoline. Natural law.
But Hannibal is speaking, has been speaking.
“What?” Will manages.
Hannibal squeezes forcefully around the base of Will’s cock. Will gasps, and Hannibal’s fist releases only to apply pressure again, gradually, until Will’s cock is pulsing in Hannibal’s hand, vibrating against the fine lines that crease his palm.
“I was explaining that I’m fond of the ‘peel’ metaphor because I find it accurate to the experience of fellating someone. To fellate is to expose. To tear away and break down. Because it’s so one-sided and because pleasure is corrosive in the extreme.”
Hannibal steps back a fraction and gentles his hold around Will’s cock. Will blindly stumbles back, seeking to reclaim the comforting warmth of Hannibal’s nearness, but Hannibal lets go and takes another step back.
“Turn around,” he instructs, as calmly as he’d once dismissed Will’s fumbling apology for turning up at Hannibal’s before breakfast. Will recalls that moment now: heart in his throat, nerves strung tight as wire, and his mind still half caught in a nightmare. He barely knew Hannibal then, but he can’t say he knows him any better now.
His instructions given, Hannibal draws both his hands free from Will’s body and waits. Will turns and immediately gets caught in Hannibal’s stare. Hannibal steps close again, so close Will can feel his breath—calm, slow—on his cheek. Will’s heart thuds in his chest, and he’s paralyzed by the fear-hope-worry that Hannibal is about to kiss him. So he’s caught by surprise when it’s not Hannibal’s lips but Hannibal’s fingers that make the next contact.
The fingers peel Will’s shorts off him, ‘peel’ being the only truly accurate descriptor here given the sweat-sticky state of the cotton. It was sweat from fear, before; it’s nervous (or, perhaps, excited) sweat now.
“Sit,” Hannibal commands. He smoothes an imaginary wrinkle from the breast of his jacket and tugs to straighten his cuffs while he watches Will stumble out of his shorts, working them down from around his knees to his ankles and then off. Will sits at the very edge of the chair, clearly uneasy about contact between his bare ass and fine upholstery. He sits with his legs almost together, spread just wide enough to aid in balancing himself in his precarious perch.
Hannibal bends over slightly and presses all four fingers of each hand to the insides of Will’s knees, pressing them wide apart as he drops between them. As he drops to kneel with his toes braced under his feet, the leather of his shoes squeaks in protest. Will twitches at the sound.
“Nervous?”
“No.” Will’s tone petulant, and it does nothing at all to disguise the fact that he truly is quite nervous, his pulse visibly jumping under his skin. He wraps his fingers around the arms of the chair and holds tight, knuckles bleached from the pressure.
Hannibal drags his thumbs up the insides of Will’s thighs, varying the pressure from too light to even tickle this second to hard, muscle-deep pushes the next. Hannibal’s eyes follow his thumbs until they reach their destination, where one hand wraps around Will’s testicles, thumbing slowly along the seam, and the other moves to push away the folds of Will’s oversized shirt crowding around the base of his cock.
Hannibal makes sure to catch Will’s eyes as he shuffles forward just one more inch. “But you should be nervous, Will. I am going to kill you.”
“Kill me?”
Hannibal’s answer, at first, is to swallow Will’s cock, taking it all the way in to bump at the back of his throat. Will’s hips jerk, beyond his control, and Hannibal tightens his grip around Will’s scrotum in warning. “Jesus,” Will gasps. “Fuck.” Hannibal swallows, the sensation an exquisite, rolling wave at the tip of Will’s cock, and then he draws back slowly until only the head of Will’s cock is in his mouth, resting on Hannibal’s tongue with the threat of his front teeth hovering just above—a detectable presence and perhaps a mild threat. (Or perhaps a guillotine.)
Hannibal takes Will’s cock back in again by inches, the suction agonizingly good for all that it’s not near fast enough to get Will off. Will’s hands float up from the arms of the chair, but he catches them before they land on Hannibal’s head to push. (Hannibal’s hair, like everything else about his person, is persistently impeccable, resting in its familiar silken curves, each hair precisely aligned with its neighbor.)
With Will’s cock finally fully seated again, Hannibal pauses. He swallows and listens to Will’s grunted “Fuck!” and swallows again and breathes, his nostrils flaring. Finally, he eases his hand away from Will’s balls and moves to brace Will’s hips with his palms, his fingers curving around Will’s sides, and his thumbs a firm pressure anchoring his lower abdominals. Will is pinned, held, at Hannibal’s mercy. (Or lack thereof.) Hannibal draws back an inch and tilts his head to catch Will’s eyes for a brief second. It’s too quick to catch, whatever was there in Hannibal’s gaze. Whatever it was, it wasn’t nice, and it wasn’t gentle. Adrenaline courses through Will’s veins, and his pulse skips and bucks and ratchets up to a bumping rhythm.
It’s fucking, what Hannibal eventually works up to, his head bobbing over Will’s lap. Hannibal is fucking Will with his mouth, the movement of his neck somehow a successful mimicry of riding hips framed by splayed thighs, or, in this case, broad, besuited shoulders. Will kept himself still before, but he’s grateful for Hannibal’s hands now, and still he has to push his ass down into the chair and tuck his ankles behind the chair legs and move his hands back to a white-knuckled grip on the chair arms in order to stay still.
Hannibal’s rhythm started quick with short strokes and tight suction, but now he starts to stretch and vary the pulls of his mouth. He teases the hard tip of his tongue against Will’s frenulum, and when he can feel Will’s abdominals clenching tight in almost-there pleasure, he relaxes his mouth and lets his saliva leak to make everything wetter and slicker, but not nearly fast or tight enough. He resumes his rhythm when he feels Will tensing again, this time from frustration.
Will gets lost in the time-bending circularity of it all: push and pull, excite and frustrate, give and take, tease and deny. When he manages to pull his focus back from between his legs enough to listen (and manages, then, to not attend only to the delectably filthy wet slurps and gulps of Hannibal’s mouth around him), Will hears his own collection of God and please, please and uh, fuck, oh and more, and he cringes with some small part of his self-consciousness that has managed to survive Hannibal’s assault. He cringes, that is, for a lean second until Hannibal drags just his bottom teeth up the underside of Will’s cock and bumps them over his frenulum.
“Fff–” Will loses even his ability to swear, biting hard into his bottom lip and looking up at the ceiling while Hannibal’s hands press harder into his hips and his mouth descends. The upstroke is all teeth, top and bottom, a pressure balanced on the knife edge between pleasure and pain. It’s uncomfortable, impossible to ignore, and it pulls at every thought in Will’s head, a brute force method for finding the single thread that, when pulled, makes everything unravel. A grazing bump of Hannibal’s front teeth—perhaps, possibly (unlikely) accidental—tips Will over the edge. The first pulsing spurt of his orgasm bathes the roof of Hannibal’s mouth, but the spurts that follow are buried in deep heat. Hannibal’s throat works around his cock to swallow, and the sight of the subtle shifting of muscle below Hannibal’s jaw provokes an aftershock of pleasure followed by the smothering descent of a wave of overstimulation, rolling in under Will’s skin like a sudden tide. Will fumbles with clumsy hands to push Hannibal’s head off and away.
Hannibal removes himself to stand again, and Will gapes uncomprehendingly at seeing Hannibal unchanged except for his red and swollen lips; he can’t seem to look away, even when Hannibal’s gaze grows more intent and pins him just as effectively as his hands had done.
“Didn’t you say you were, ah…going to kill me?” Will is compelled to ask, trying to fill the strange silence.
And there is something Will has only rarely seen before on Hannibal’s face: a flash of a grin. “I did indeed, and I have.” Hannibal drops his gaze to Will’s now wilted penis. “La petite mort.”
Will chuckles, despite himself.
“It’s not really a joke, Will,” Hannibal chides, turning away to tend to their dessert in the kitchen. “You have just given me your life.”
“My life?”
“In a manner of speaking.” The grin appears for a second time, and Will relaxes. It is a joke, then. It has to be. (Doesn’t it?)
The following day is the day that Hannibal takes two lives, neither of them Will’s. When Will arrives on the scene, Hannibal’s eyes track him from the moment he steps across the threshold. The expression on his face, even from afar, is everything it wasn’t but could have been after sucking Will off: vulnerable, open, wrecked. It’s in his eyes, mostly, and in the set of his mouth. And it comes through in his first words with Will standing in front of him, looking down at him. “I was worried you were dead,” Hannibal says, and it’s true.
“Of course I’m dead,” Will answers. “You killed me.”
Hannibal smiles, causing a fresh drop of blood to well up from the split in his lip. Will understands now: it’s not a joke. It’s a point of no return.