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His lips didn’t taste right.
The first time they kissed, it tasted like copper. Thrawn’s collar, his waistcoat, all the way down his front — he was smeared with blood, still slick and dark, fresh from the veins. It wasn’t his own. It soaked his white clothes and left a tang in the air like wet rust, so thick that Eli couldn’t figure out the natural flavor of Thrawn’s lips, what he really tasted like beneath the mess.
It was all lost in blood.
The second time they kissed, it tasted like alcohol.
Thrawn didn’t drink. But the guest they’d had for dinner — the traveler who came in from the cold — certainly did. He’d tipped back on his chair and glued his lips to the bottle all night long, until the fire died and Eli couldn’t keep himself awake any longer. He left Thrawn and the guest alone together, down there in the darkened dining room, without the warm crackle of the fire to distract them. Just Thrawn’s unblinking eyes filmed in red and the traveler’s heavy breaths, tongue sweet from wine.
Later that too-sweet taste of fruit was on Thrawn’s lips too — his hands cold, his body lithe and solid as he climbed into bed and slipped beneath the sheets with Eli. A kiss to his collarbones — to his sternum — to his navel. Then his lips.
“Did you kiss him?” Eli asked.
Thrawn flashed a sharp smile.
“Did you kill him?” Eli asked instead.
Another kiss, long and slow, and Eli didn’t want to know the answer.
The next time, it was powdery and dry, the unexplainable flavor of mushroom flesh on Thrawn’s lips: wet and earthy, the taste of rubber and loose spores like the dirt on a cellar floor. Like the brown grass left behind in the spring when the snow melts, and you use a shovel to leverage the remains of last winter’s dead animals off the ground.
The next time after that, it tasted like rust. The next, like laudanum. The next, like something plucked from underground, damp and hot and rotting in the sun.
Like a disease. Like with every kiss the virus just clung tighter, dug its roots into Eli’s flesh and left him burning up beneath the skin. Like every kiss was killing him.
“But I feel good,” Eli murmured to himself in the morning, his lips tingling, his tongue going numb. He ran his fingers over black spots on his chest, his arms: tender bruises where the flesh was soft, where he half-thought he could press his fingertips into the skin and tear it away. What would it be like to cross that boundary, to slip his thumb into the soft, wet muscle underneath? To draw Thrawn close and guide his fingers there, to feel him inside? To let him kiss that open wound? Thrawn was awake, outside, alive and vital and full of energy, and here Eli lay among the blankets, too tired to move. Still craving that ache in his lips, that hollow feeling in his chest. That kiss.
“I feel good,” he said.