Ruelle
Ten days, and his scales are healing.
The dull patches on his left shoulder have shrunk, healthy color pushing back in from the edges. The salve is working, the one I mixed from the sulfur compounds and his extracted venom, a paste that smells like burned matches and looks like clay and is reversing two years of deterioration in days.
I notice the healing over dinner, which is hare. Again. The third hare this week; he hunts every morning now, since the spite jerky incident. The hare is fine.
The cooking is not fine.
“You’ve seen people cook,” I say, picking a piece of charred meat off the bone. It’s black on the outside and raw in the middle. “Haven’t you?”
He goes still. “My mother was an excellent cook.”
“And she didn’t teach you?”
“She tried.”
“What happened?”
“I burned everything. She said I had the patience of a rockslide and the technique of a forest fire.” A pause. “She was not wrong.”
I eat the charred part. It’s crunchy. It’s terrible. “This is an improvement over the spite jerky,” I say.
“It’s burned.”
“Yes. But it’s burned with effort. Effort counts.”
The noise he makes is closer to a laugh than anything I’ve heard from him, and his shoulders drop a fraction. “Eat the other side,” he says. “I cooked that side less.”
“You cooked that side not at all.”
“That’s what I said. Less.”
I eat the raw side, and it’s better. He watches me eat with an expression I’ve learned to read over ten days of living three feet from his face, not the flat guard from the auction hall but something uncertain, the look of a creature who isn’t used to providing for someone and is surprised to find he wants to.
After dinner, I make him turn around. “Salve,” I say. “Shirt off.”
He pulls the vest over his head. I’ve done this every evening for three days, and the routine is fixed: he sits on the stone floor, I sit behind him on the flat rock he dragged in, and I work the paste into the dead patches along his gland line.
The salve requires direct application, my hands on his scales, sustained contact, the compound absorbing over twenty to thirty minutes. I can’t rush it.
I am aware of how this looks. Two adults in a cave, one of them shirtless, the other rubbing medicine into his back with both hands for half an hour every evening. Nothing about this is ambiguous, and both of us have been pretending it is.
Tonight the pretending is thinner than usual.
My left hand trembles once, the tremor spiking, and I press harder to steady it.
Where the salve has been working, new growth is coming in, pearl-white, brighter than the old scales around it.
I press my thumbs along the gland line and feel the tissue respond, less swollen than last week, the channels clearing.
“The regrowth on your left shoulder is ahead of schedule,” I say. My voice is steady. My hands are steady. Everything else is not.
He makes a sound, low in his chest, and the vibration comes through my palms.
“That hurts?”
“No.”
I keep working. My thumbs find a transition zone near his lower spine where the dead scales are flaking and the new ones are pushing through underneath. I press the salve in and his whole back shifts. Not a flinch. A lean. His body pressing back into my hands.
I stop pretending.
My hands change, the pressure shifting from therapeutic to something else.
I stop working the salve into the patches and start touching him: the ridge of his spine, the thick scales across his shoulders, the place where his neck meets his crest, the finer scales there, the ones that flush when his venom responds.
He goes very still. “Ruelle.”
“Don’t talk. Not yet.”
I press my forehead against his back, between his shoulder blades, and the hum of his venom production sits in my sternum. I’ve had my hands on this body for ten days, and every touch was clinical.
This isn’t.
He turns, slow and careful, the way he does everything that matters, until he’s facing me. His gold eyes close, his hand comes up and rests on the side of my face, his palm covering my cheek and jaw, his thumb against my temple, his fingers reaching into my hair.
“You’re sure,” he says.
“I’ve been sure since the second bite. I’ve been sure since you burned a hare for me and watched me eat it.”
His mouth opens, not a smile but something better, something that uses his whole face, the jaw plates shifting, the muscles around his eyes doing a thing I haven’t seen before.
I lean up and kiss him.
His mouth is different from anything I know.
The scales around his lips are finer and softer than I expected, and his tongue meets mine, longer and more dexterous.
I stop noticing the differences and start noticing the kiss.
He kisses me slowly, carefully, like I’m the first thing he’s touched in years that he doesn’t want to break.
My hands are still on his shoulders from the salve, and I move them up, along the sides of his neck, over the bony ridges of his crest, and his breathing changes under my palms.
“Can I,” I start, and don’t finish, because his mouth covers mine again and the kiss deepens and his tongue does something that makes me forget what I was going to ask.
We kiss for a long time. The fire burns low; the glow-stone holds its light.
His hands stay on my face and in my hair, and then one moves down the side of my neck and I tip my head back and his mouth follows, lips against my throat, the place where he bites me every morning. Not biting now. Kissing. The difference makes my breath catch.
“Shirt,” he says.
I pull it over my head and drop it. His hands are on my ribs, and the heat of him against my bare skin erases the months of cold. Every fire I’ve sat beside, every blanket I’ve shared, none of it did what his hands do in three seconds, and the deep chill in my chest comes apart.
I make a sound, the noise a body makes when it stops bracing.
His thumbs move up my sternum. Slow. I’ve touched him before during examinations, hands on his back, his arms, the gland line, and every one of those touches I told myself I was studying him.
This is him studying me. His thumbs trace my collarbone, his fingers follow the line of my shoulders, and he touches the scar on my left shoulder, the one I gave myself at nineteen, tracing it the way I traced his dead patches. Reading the damage. Learning the cost.
“Here?” he says, his finger resting on the scar.
“Compound test. I was nineteen and stupid.”
“You were nineteen and brave.”
“Those are the same thing at nineteen.”
His mouth goes to the scar, lips then tongue, his breath on the puckered skin, and the tenderness of it undoes something I didn’t know I was holding.
I put my hands on his chest, where the scales are broad and overlapping, and underneath them his heart. I press my palms flat and feel it beating, and from here his heartbeat fills my whole body.
His hands move down my sides and over my hips, his fingers spanning from my hip bone to my lower back, and the size of his hands against my body is something I keep registering and not knowing what to do with.
“You can touch me,” I say. “I’m not going to break.”
“I know you won’t break.” His voice is low and rough. “I’m being careful because I want to be careful. Not because I think you’re fragile.”
I don’t have a counter for that.
He pulls me into his lap, my thighs bracketing his hips, my face coming close to his when I rise on my knees, the firelight on his scales and the glow-stone making his eyes brighter than they should be.
“Hi,” I say, because all my words are for science and this isn’t science.
“Hi,” he says, and his voice is warm and low and undone, and I want to hear him say it again.
I kiss him again. His hands are on my back, my sides, learning the shape of me the way I learned the shape of him with the salve, except this isn’t medicine. His thumbs brush the undersides of my breasts and my hips roll against him and his scales flush bright.
His mouth moves down my throat, my collarbone, lower, his tongue tracing the curve of my breast, and my hand goes to the back of his head, fingers gripping the ridges of his crest. I hold him there because what his tongue is doing is something I don’t want to stop.
He takes his time. His tongue is textured and precise; he learns what makes me gasp and then does it again, and when my back arches against his hand he makes the low vibration in his chest that I feel everywhere.
“Sirath.” His name comes out rough.
He lowers me onto my back, on his furs, his body over mine, his weight on his arms. The size of him above me should be intimidating but it isn’t; his eyes are gold and his face is close to mine and I’m breathing his air.
His mouth moves lower, down my stomach, and I lift my hips and push my trousers off and his hands pull them the rest of the way. Then his tongue is tracing the midline and I realize where he’s going and my hand tightens in the ridges of his crest and I say “yes” before he asks.
He doesn’t ask. He reads the answer in my body and he goes.
His tongue is longer than a human tongue, warmer, the surface a texture I wasn’t expecting, not rough, not smooth, something in between, a fine grain that drags against sensitive skin until my thoughts dissolve into static.
He finds the right place and I say “there” and my voice doesn’t sound like mine.
He stays. The warmth of his mouth is constant, not the wet heat of a human mouth but something deeper.
“Right there. Don’t move.”
He doesn’t move. He holds exactly where I told him and does something with the tip of his tongue, a slow circling pressure, and I hear myself make a sound that I will never put in any notebook.
“How are you doing that?”
He can’t answer; his mouth is busy, and the vibration of the sound he makes instead goes through me and I stop asking questions.
I’m loud, and I don’t care. I’ve been quiet for months, quiet in the towns that turned me away, quiet on the roads, quiet in the auction hall, and I’m done being quiet.
I say his name and I say other things that aren’t words, and his hands are on my hips holding me steady because my body is trying to come off the ground.
He finds my rhythm and holds it, the texture of his tongue, the steadiness of his grip, my hand in his crest, my heels against his back, his scales under my feet.
I come with his name in my mouth and his hands on my hips and his tongue inside me, and the noise I make fills the cave.
After, he rests his head against my thigh, and I’m shaking, not from cold. He shifts up beside me, his weight settling on the furs, and I reach for him.
My hand finds the ventral slit, which has opened, the scales around it flushed and finer than anywhere else on his body, softer, the skin between the scales bare. When my fingers trace his opening he goes rigid, a full-body response, the temperature in the cave rising.
“Tell me,” I say. “Show me what you like.”
His hand covers mine and guides me, showing me pressure, speed, where the ridges are most sensitive. He’s hot under my fingers, the heat coming through the skin, and when I find the right pressure his breath stops.
“There?”
“There.” One word. His voice is wrecked, and I’ve never heard him like this, stripped down, nothing held back. The controlled, careful creature who measures every sentence has been reduced to single words, and I did that, and the power of it hits the same way the venom does.
I keep going. His hand drops away from mine because his body has taken over and his hands are gripping the furs, his breathing ragged, his eyes closed, his jaw open. I watch his face while I touch him because his face is doing things I’ve never seen and I don’t want to miss any of them.
When he finishes against my palm, his whole body shudders, and a sound comes out of him, low, raw, broken open, older than language.
Then he goes still.
We lie on the furs. The fire is low. I press my face into his neck, his arm around me, his scales bright where I’ve been touching him, the healthy color spreading. His free hand rests on his chest, open, the fingers loose. Still.
The notebook is on the shelf where I left it. I don’t reach for it. I don’t want to. I want to stay here, in the warm, with his arm around me and his heartbeat in my ear.
“Sirath?”
“Mm.”
“Your cooking is terrible.”
What comes out is a laugh, a real one, and it moves through his chest and into mine, and it’s the best thing I’ve heard in months.
I close my eyes. I stay.