Chapter 12
Nothing else in the bathroom interested me anymore as I watched Inkiri take off his clothes. He wasn’t trying to be sexy, and I wasn’t leering, but this was my chance to really look at him without too much awkwardness.
What stood out most to me at first glance were the well-developed neck and shoulder muscles, but with those horns, they had to be. Another thing I had missed even though I’d been naked in bed with him was a line of darker blue skin running down his spine, all the way to his very, very shapely ass.
I squinted. That line looked more like scales than skin, but he turned to take his strange shoes off before I could be certain. Since I had seen his cock already, the next strange thing about him was those feet.
They weren’t like a cat’s exactly, but it was the most apt comparison. Like the rest of him, they were hairless and smooth, and I could see the skin folds for his retractable claws.
When he was done with the shoes, he went about undoing his double braids. I finally saw that his ears were pointy. That was sort of adorable. Or maybe that was the wrong word for pointy ears? I liked them, in any case.
Without a word, he stepped in front of me and pulled my tee up and over my head. I let him. Like I had at him, he looked at me. Then he touched my hair.
I felt him carefully run his fingers over the strands. “What would you call this color?”
“Oh. Dark auburn, I guess? Or brownish. Red-brown. Really, just go with brown.”
He tilted his head back and forth, then smiled. “I like your sense of humor, sweet thing. But I know well enough that your hair is beautiful, whatever you call it.” He leaned in close until the tips of our noses were almost touching. “You are the first human with green eyes I’ve ever met.”
He said that in such a low voice that it made me feel exposed. Or desired. I wasn’t sure there was a difference with him.
I cleared my throat and looked down. “My grandma’s Irish. Or was. She died before all this happened. It’s why I wanted to go to Ireland to begin with.”
Inkiri nodded. “I’m sorry for your loss, sweet thing.”
I shrugged. “Thanks. On the bright side, my mom and dad are still around. I guess their divorce saved them after all, although I’m not sure they were ever really lovers to begin with. Oh, and my mom’s sister. She only loves a well-made screwdriver.”
“Your aunt is a craftsperson? Where is your family now?”
That was just… I couldn’t. I started laughing.
Loud. I laughed until tears filled my eyes and I was holding my belly.
It wasn’t an innocent, normal kind of laughter either.
I hadn’t laughed in over two years, and the laughter burst out of me like a cork out of a bottle of bubbly after it had been given a really good shake.
It went on for a while. Inkiri looked on, sort of helpless, and started clicking at me. Eventually, I sank to the floor and let the laughter ebb, my head light.
“Gosh, you’re fucking hilarious,” I said when I could speak.
“Are you well?” Inkiri squatted next to me and stroked my back, his gentle fingers feeling along the peaks and valleys of my spine.
“She just… A screwdriver is a cocktail. With alcohol. My aunt likes drinking. Sorry, that just cracked me up. They’re all back in the States. We email and video chat sometimes.”
Which, really, described the relationship I’d had with my parents not just for the last two years, but long before that.
Between being a lawyer and being a manager respectively, they had very quickly lost interest in parenting, especially when my greatest achievement by third grade was my glorious tree role.
My pet theory was that having a kid had just been on their list of things to do after marriage, and that was that.
They’d quickly handed me off to the next best au pair and gone back to living their own lives.
“You don’t miss them,” Inkiri said, not a question.
I shrugged.
He inclined his head. “I haven’t seen my fathers in… Hmm. Our years are different. But I was little. We exchange cordial letters regularly.”
I blinked up at him. “You exchange cordial letters? Why haven’t you seen them for that long? And why only fathers? You all were so obsessed with uteri, so how come?”
Inkiri pulled me back into a standing position and peeled my pants off. And the cat socks. The bout of laughter had been enough to push my embarrassment away, but I cupped my junk even if there was nothing sexual about Inkiri’s touch or the way he was acting.
He saw. “You want to touch yourself? I could do that for you.”
So much for nothing sexual. I blushed. “I’m not—jeez.” I dropped my hand. “There. I’m not touching myself, okay? Just want to get clean.”
He tilted his head this way and that. “Okay. As to your questions, Raikenga are called from their families when they are quite young and visit only after the first… I’m not sure how to explain.
Maybe after the first stage of education is best. Parents might be a better word instead of fathers, but my learning tells me parents are often seen as a man and woman pair here.
In our language, we have a single word, not ‘mother’ or ‘father’ as you do.
And we have only one pronoun for hangua and hangu-naga.
We learn to use ‘he’ when speaking with humans since it seems to be how you mostly see us. ”
I tried to make sense of that information as I walked over to the shower. Inkiri seemed satisfied and started a bath.
“Really, I’m fine showering,” I said.
“You wash, then we soak” was the response he gave me with his back turned, and because that meant I got to look at his pretty blue ass all over again, I didn’t argue. That was just how gay I was, shut up by a nice set of cheeks. Ah, these things I was discovering about myself.
I found a generous selection of soaps and shower gels in one of the baskets lined up by the wall and went about scrubbing myself clean.
The rain showerhead was really nice, and it steamed up the room.
Inkiri filled a bucket in the sink and soaped himself with a sponge he kept soaking in the bucket.
Once he was all lathered, he dumped his bucket back out and walked over to me.
I looked up at him. “Uhm…”
He smiled at me before stepping under the stream to wash the suds off. He had to be careful with his horns and the showerhead, even though the shower was really spacious.
“Done, sweet thing?” he asked after lowering his head to my neck and licking my wet skin.
I trembled and felt my blood change course—which would be very obvious—but cupping that budding erection to hide it would make him think I was on the road to pleasuring myself, which wouldn’t help at all. I decided to be a man and deal with what my body was doing all casually when the time came.
Despite not knowing what he thought bathing entailed, I said, “Sure,” trying to sound more confident than I felt.
He nodded. “Let’s get in, then. I’ll hold you, make sure you don’t slip and hurt yourself.”
I almost objected to that, but then…I was frail. They all thought so, and being frail among these guys was much nicer than anything I’d been before. So I took Inkiri’s hand when he offered it, and didn’t complain when he helped me into the tub.
As it turned out, that bath water was just plain water, nothing else added. It was pretty warm for summer, but not uncomfortably so. Inkiri had cracked a window before we got in, and the magpies were cawing outside while we had a view over the rooftops of the rest of the town.
It was pleasant, and I hadn’t had pleasant for a very long time. If I hadn’t been sitting in a tub with a being whose monstrous feet were tangling with mine, I could almost have imagined that the apocalypse had never happened in the first place.
I thought about what Inkiri had said as I trailed my hand through the water in front of me, then asked, “So, basically, you went to boarding school pretty early?”
“Raiken might seem like a school, so it would be similar for you, but the purpose is different.” He took my right foot and started massaging it.
“You see, bagua used to fight each other.
Over borders, over taxes, over any little thing you could imagine.
It used to be that conflicts were settled in blood, and quite often, whole family lines were eradicated.
“That was when single houses ruled their territories, much like your royalty during the Middle Ages. The schools in those times were more like your schools, but unlike your schools, they were not centralized, even if they did exchange knowledge and writings among each other.
“About four hundred of our years ago, a group of students who also happened to be the sons of influential houses came together, and they proposed a different kind of government. It took them some time, but eventually, they instituted the Raiken.
“The children of the influential and less influential houses go there, though generally, no more than eighty percent of a generation are required to attend. Four brothers out of five, so to speak. All Raikenga are provided the same education, but of course we grow up with those who might have become our enemies otherwise. After a certain time spent there, we may choose to go back to our houses or remain in the Raiken to fill public positions within its structure.”
“You mean, you all become teachers after going to school?”
He shook his head. “No. The Raiken isn’t just a school. I explained badly. The Raiken does many things that the houses used to do. Street maintenance and governing cities. Taxes. Defense too. We don’t have a military, we only have the Raiken.”
My jaw dropped. “Wow. That’s a different way to do government.”