Ruelle
He’s been gone for an hour.
I’m in the cave. The vials are still on the shelf, the assay stone on the workbench.
He knew. He knew what bonding chemistry does to a mate’s body, and he didn’t tell me, and now he’s somewhere on this frozen mountain deciding whether to stop the treatment and die rather than keep changing me. As if I didn’t get a say in what happens to my own blood.
I hear him before I see him, claws on granite, the gap in the rock darkening as his body fills it. He comes through and stops.
I’m angry. I know I’m angry; the anger has been building for an hour. I’m about to say something when I see his scales flush.
Before I open my mouth. His throat scales shift color, a wave of response, gold spreading from the gland line, and I haven’t said a word. He’s ten feet away and his body just reacted to something my body is doing that I’m not even conscious of yet.
And I realized something else.
“You reacted before I did,” I say. My voice is quiet. “Just now. Your scales flushed before I felt it spike. You responded to a shift in my chemistry before I was conscious of it.”
He doesn’t move.
“You can read me. Biochemically. You can smell what I’m feeling.”
“Ruelle.”
“How long?”
“Since the beginning.”
“Since the beginning.” I hear myself repeat it. “You’ve known what my body was doing this entire time. Every bite. Every examination. Every time I leaned toward you and pulled myself back and wrote notes in the notebook. You already had the information.”
“Yes.”
“I told you I was attracted to you. I disclosed it. I reported it as a variable because I thought you didn’t know, and I thought honest data required honest disclosure, and you sat there and let me make that speech and you already knew.”
“It’s involuntary,” he says. “I can’t turn it off. I taste the air and your chemistry is there.”
“But you can choose to tell me. And you chose not to.”
“I chose to let you have your body’s privacy.”
“That’s not what you did.”
The silence is ugly. The silence of a breach.
“Can you tell me what you’re reading?” I say. “Right now. In real time. So the information goes both ways.”
“Yes.”
“Then do it. What am I feeling right now?”
He looks at me. Reads me. “Anger,” he says. “Frustration. Arousal.” A pause. “And something I don’t have a word for that smells like the beginning of permanence.”
My eyes burn. I don’t cry.
“Good,” I say. “Keep doing that.”
The silence after his words is different. Naming what he smells cost him something; I see it in his face, the muscles under his scales shifting.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I should have told you.”
“Yes.”
“I was afraid that if you knew, you’d leave.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“I know.” His voice cracks on the word. “That’s the part I can’t stop smelling.”
The silence holds. I’m still angry, still standing here with the anger in my chest like a stone. But the permanence. He said permanence.
I take one step toward him, one step with the anger still in me, and it’s enough.
He crosses the rest, two steps, and his hand is on the side of my face and his mouth is on mine, and the kiss is not gentle and not careful and not anything like the first time.
The kiss of a creature who has been holding back for weeks and just heard his own worst fear named out loud, and the fear isn’t bigger than the wanting anymore.
I seize the back of his skull and kiss him back, hard, my hands shaking, not the blue-ringed tremor. The anger and the wanting are braided together and I don’t try to separate them.
He lifts me, both hands under my thighs, my back against the cave wall, cold stone behind me and furnace heat in front, and the contrast makes me gasp.
“Tell me what you’re reading,” I say against his mouth.
“Want.” His breath is rough. “Anger. Both.”
“Good. Don’t stop reading.”
I pull my shirt over my head. He holds me against the wall with one arm while I work the fastening on his vest with both hands, his scales against my bare skin, the vibration of his venom humming through every point of contact.
He bites my shoulder, and I feel him hold back. The warmth enters and STOPS, like a door opening halfway and catching, not the full flood, not the warmth that pools and spreads and makes my body open. The controlled version. The version that keeps the bonding from advancing.
Even here. Even now.
“Let go,” I say.
“I can’t.”
“The bite. I felt you hold back.”
“If I don’t hold back, the bonding accelerates. Every bite at full strength takes more of your tolerances.”
“I know.”
“Then you know why I’m holding.”
“I know WHY. I’m telling you I don’t care.”
His whole face locks, the discipline holding, and the fact that he can maintain that restraint while his body is pressed against mine and his hands are shaking and his hips are grinding me into the wall makes me furious and desperate and so aroused I can barely think.
“Fine,” I say. “Hold the bite. But give me everything else.”
I push off the wall. Push HIM. He goes back, lets me, and I follow, my legs wrapping around his waist, and he catches me without effort, my weight nothing to him, his hands closing around my thighs and tightening.
“Sit down,” I say.
He sits, stone floor, back against the wall, me in his lap, thighs bracketing his hips. I rise on my knees and push my trousers down while he works the fastening on his wrapping.
The urgency between us is physical and real, his hands as impatient as mine, and when the fabric clears and I press against him, the ventral slit opens. Both shafts. Already extended. Hot, the ridges catching the glow-stone light.
I wrap my hand around the nearer one and he makes a sound that fills the cave, his head dropping back against the wall.
“Tell me,” I say. My hand moves. “What you’re reading?”
“You’re everywhere.” His voice is raw, stripped to the wire. “I can taste, you’re, Ruelle... please...”
“Please what?”
His gold eyes open and find mine. “Please don’t stop.”
I lower myself onto the first shaft, slowly, his hands on my hips guiding, and when the first ridge catches inside me the sensation jolts through my whole body.
I take another inch. Another ridge. The width stretches me open, and the burn edges into something better.
I take the rest, my hips flush against his, both of us breathing hard.
He’s hot inside me. Not warm.
I move, and he moves with me, his hands on my hips, not guiding now but gripping, his hips rolling up to meet mine, each thrust pushing the ridges through me, the drag of them sending a pulse of sensation that builds on the last one.
“The second,” I say. “Give me the second.”
“Ruelle.”
“I said give it to me.”
His hand reaches between us and guides the second shaft against me, the angle different, the ridges spiraling the opposite direction from the first, and I bear down.
The pressure is extraordinary, two shafts, two angles, and when the second enters alongside the first I stretch around both of them and the noise I make is nothing I’ve ever heard come out of my mouth before.
The counter-rotation of the ridges pulls sensation from two directions at once; when he moves, both shafts shift in tandem, each ridge dragging against its opposite, and the layered sensation erases everything in my head that isn’t this moment.
His tail wraps my left thigh, the grip tightening, pulling me closer, the scaled surface dragging against the sensitized skin of my inner thigh. The tip slides higher, along the inside of my thigh, slow, deliberate, and the pressure of it against my skin adds another layer I wasn’t braced for.
“I didn’t say you could do that,” I say. My voice is gone, whatever’s left of it rough and low.
“I know.” He doesn’t stop. The tail keeps its rhythm, slow, circling, not entering, pressing where the nerve density is highest, at the place where our bodies meet, and the precision takes the last of my language.
Both of his shafts inside me, his tail against me, and his mouth moves to the bite site at my throat, lips pressing the bruise his fangs left this morning.
He gives me everything except the one thing I asked for: everything physical, everything muscular, every part of him working to take me apart, and the venom stays held.
I hate it. I love it. The combination of full physical surrender and venom discipline coils tighter with every thrust.
I put my hands on his face, hold his jaw, make him look at me. “You carved me a shelf,” I say. “You burned food for me. You let me put my hands on you when no one else would. That’s not eating. That’s not what he told you.”
His jaw works under my palms, the scales shifting.
“You’re not what you think you are.” I say it with both of his shafts inside me and his tail against me and his hands on my body and his venom held back behind locked jaws. “Sirath. You’re not.”
He makes a sound, raw, broken, from somewhere deeper than his chest. His hips drive up and both shafts push deep and the ridges catch and pull and his tail tightens on my thigh and the coil snaps.
I break around him, both of him, the ridges pulling through me in two spiraling directions, and the clench drags him over the edge with me. His control shatters at the same moment mine does.
He shudders against the wall, his arms locking around me, and even at the peak, even in the break, the venom holds. The restraint survives the orgasm. The cost of that holding is visible in his face, in his jaw, his spine, the fine tremor in his arms.
After. Both of his shafts still inside me, his arms around me, his forehead against my shoulder. The glow-stone hums. Our breathing fills the space.
“I hate you,” I say. My voice is quiet.
“No, you don’t.”
“No.” I press my lips against the top of his head, the bony ridge, the scales. “I don’t. I love you.” A breath. “And I hate that you won’t let me.”
His arms tighten, his face pressing into my shoulder. “I love you too,” he says, so quiet I almost miss it. “That’s the problem.”