Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Uncharted Territory
Mal’s eyes widened at the admission, then narrowed, and quickly slid away from Griff’s.
There was a certain bile rising in his throat, one he hated more than the taste of rats.
Emotion, a well of it threatening to escape him all at once.
But there were still things he wasn’t ready to say, and he needed a familiar place to shelter.
“It’s fine. I mean, I’m fine now. I didn’t need any stupid letters, anyway. It doesn’t matter.”
The words stuck in his throat, much the way a bit of extra moisture stuck hatefully in the corners of his eyes—but if Griff noticed, he didn’t call attention to it.
“Fucking elves,” Mal added with a bit of extra venom.
He glanced at the nearly empty goblet. They had already demolished a good portion of what was in the bottle.
“Sitting in a tower singing sad songs and having tea parties seems like a waste of several centuries to me. You ought to spend less time around folk like that.”
“Good thing I’m down here to stay, then, isn’t it?” Griff was trying to tease, to lighten the air between them again.
But Mal was utterly serious as he curled the fingers of his left hand around Griff’s and murmured, “It is. Good. You should stay. With me.” He raised his other hand, an explorer mapping the edges of some new land as he used it to push a lock of Griff’s unruly hair out of his eyes, his thumb then trailing over the curve of Griff’s cheek.
The tingling in his fingertips had to be some side effect of the elves’ wine. Mal really had to give it to them—that was one thing they had gotten right, even if they apparently tore apart families and friends by burning mail that didn’t belong to them.
Mal tightened his fingers around Griff’s, gently tugging the other man toward him.
Choosing what he wanted, if not what he deserved.
He didn’t deserve Griff after what he had done, but he was a thief and he had a taste for the finer things that wouldn’t ever be satisfied with less.
He was Mister Dangerous, and from now on, as long as he drew breath, all that meant for Griff was that he would be safe in Mal’s company.
At the tug, Griff tipped forward ungracefully, as if his whole world had just been knocked off its axis, catching himself with a hand at the top of Mal’s thigh and bringing them nose to nose. He seemed unable to look anywhere but into Mal’s eyes. Right where Mal wanted him.
Maybe Griff knew something about staying after all.
Mal gazed back, finding Griff framed in a halo of light at the center of his focus.
If there were any shadows or green-eyed ghosts lingering beyond the edges of this golden glow, beyond this face that was somehow new to him, he couldn’t see them right now.
Didn’t need any more reminders of what was at stake when it was gently breathing over his lips.
“What a lightweight,” he observed, his voice offhand and distracted as his eyes continued their survey of Griff’s face in this fresh light, “tipping over before the toasting is done.”
“What the fuck are we doing?” Griff whispered. With his free hand, he brushed his thumb across Mal’s lower lip, asking a different question altogether. It was a request and a prayer and too tenuous yet to be given breath.
That thumb moving across Mal’s lower lip was all the encouragement he needed to cross the border into a rich expanse of uncharted territory.
Silent questions were answered in the way Mal closed that last sliver of distance between them, breath warm with an aroma of sweet wine and sultry whiskey.
“We’re doing whatever the fuck we want,” he boasted quietly, stealing a brush with Griff’s lips, as if such thievery were inherent to the path they were stepping down together.
“That’s how it’s done in my world. So stay. ”
Running his tingling fingers up into the soft and welcoming texture of Griff’s hair more freely now, he let his hands offer a hint of guiding pressure, an invitation for a deeper, longer kiss.
“A pack of wargs couldn’t keep me away,” Griff assured him in the narrow space between their lips just before they met again.
He ran the heat of his palm down Mal’s thigh, like he needed the feel of fabric and solid flesh there to let him know this was real and not some daydream conjured by the elf-wine.
The kiss took Mal’s breath away, their lips and tongues sharing honey and fire and a hint of bottled summer sunshine; in a world of spirits and liars and things that were never quite what they seemed, Griff’s kiss was the realest thing Mal had ever known.
And the taste was just right. The shape of the thigh beneath his hand and the stubbled cheek scratching against his own seemed to have been pulled right from his own quiet, unvoiced desires, an answer he badly needed.
Hands that had once traded blows with this very body now roamed over it with reverence, Griff’s fingers delving gently into the gold tangles of Mal’s hair, then lowering to frame the sides of Mal’s face like he wanted to remember how he looked in this moment forever.
“I think I like it here, doing whatever-the-fuck with you,” Griff murmured against his mouth before kissing him harder still. He grazed his teeth along the curve of Mal’s ear as he added, “I mean it. I’m staying.”
Mal was only vaguely aware of the words spoken close to his ear, too distracted by the way his pulse was ringing in his head, by so much light coursing through his veins. Heavy breaths against Griff’s neck were his only attempt to answer.
As they traded more kisses, Griff’s hands made their way under Mal’s shirt, feeling out the contours of his chest, the tight flesh of that grim scar. Mal’s own heartbeat quickened in answer, strong and very much alive beneath those stroking fingers.
Griff’s lips moved lower, exploring along Mal’s jaw, then down his neck, sucking a mark into that tawny skin while Mal pressed an encouraging kiss into Griff’s hair.
Shirt hanging half loose as Griff kept on exploring with his hands and lips, Mal let his own hands wander under Griff’s collar, admiring the muscles in the other man’s shoulders and upper back, the ones that tensed up when he swung that maul; the ones that once had been used to swing fists in his direction.
Only now there was something welcoming about them, something tame and pliable and willing.
Bunching up a handful of Griff’s shirt, Mal delivered his appraisal of all his new discoveries with an eloquent “Mmm.” Any pain in his hands was hardly felt, dulled by the heady cocktail of elf-wine and emotion as he grew more opinionated on the course of their evening, catching Griff’s lower lip between his teeth and pulling gently, a further invitation to leap into the dazzling unknown.
Layers fell away.
Boots, scarves, belts; Mal cast them aside with the same regard he showed for keeping his things neat back at the cottage—none.
Shirts were hastily discarded too, a few buttons popping and rolling away unseen.
Then Mal impatiently tugged off Griff’s pants, though he took extra time and care with the bandages over Griff’s right leg, and kept his eyes carefully away from the dark line of a scar he knew sat just below the other man’s waistline.
What Mal withheld in conversation, he made up for in generosity with his hands, with his mouth on Griff’s neck, his tongue darting more than once along a swath of skin there to absorb this marvel that was as curious, in a way, as the chest of silver coins: the taste of someone new.
When Mal urged him to lay back with some gentle pressure on his chest and then knelt between his thighs, Griff hardly seemed able to draw a breath as Mal’s gaze swept over him, unflinching in the pale starlight.
Griff was dripping before Mal had even touched him, already aching for Mal’s hand that slowly reached out to feel him, and for Mal’s hot breath that gusted over his most sensitive skin.
His mouth was usually so full of boasts, but now it was full of Griff instead, and he found he rather liked the taste.
Griff put some new tangles in Mal’s messy hair where he threaded his hands through it, urging him forward, deeper, more, until after just a few minutes of this he was warning, “Mal, if—if you don’t stop—”
Mal grinned, pulling off just long enough to urge Griff farther down onto the cloak they had spread over the ground.
“Bet I can make you forget your own name,” he murmured.
“But you’re always going to remember mine.
” With that, he swallowed Griff again not quite to the root, but as close as he could manage without gagging.
Not bad for his first time with another man, he guessed, because Griff was babbling in some other language and his foot was twitching against the ground.
He caught a few words here and there: King. Lord. Beloved.
But when he came, it was with Mal’s name on his lips.
And while he floated off someplace else in the moments after, Mal’s fingers ventured lower than where they had been, teasing Griff’s thighs, stroking lightly between his cheeks in a careful new exploration before retreating.
When Griff came back to himself, he took one look at Mal and arched a dark brow. “You going to keep these on all night?” he teased, hooking his fingers into the waistband of the pants Mal was very obviously straining against.
He groaned as Griff put on a little show, popping off the buttons one by one with his teeth. Mal provided plenty of encouragement with the searing heat of his gaze as he watched Griff work those pants down off his hips until they, too, were cast off into the night.
The skills Griff had apparently learned with his hands and mouth over the years were ones Mal could only describe as somewhere north of masterful.
What good sense the foreman lacked in matters of thievery, he made up for with the instinctual way he opened his throat to fit Mal all the way down the back of it, welcoming him in as far as he was willing to go.
“What—?” Mal gasped, his eyes blinking open at the unexpected sensation, his breath catching.
“The fuck?” he demanded, trying and failing to even raise his head to get a good look at Griff, marveling at this display of magic.
He pressed his head back against the grass instead, very aware of a faint trembling in one of his legs and the heat building between them.
If there were stars or a bright moon or even the dark queen’s servants ogling them from the thickets, Mal didn’t see any of it. Everything that wasn’t the mercifully tight clench of Griff’s throat was utterly lost to him for a time.
He eventually regained some breath and enough composure to realize that he was stroking Griff’s hair, had Griff’s head cradled against his chest. They were both flushed and hot and sticky, and yet Mal was fully uninterested in untangling himself after so long apart.
He was tired. He could feel it in the weight of his limbs, and in Griff’s too, but what he wanted more than sleep was to be inside of him.
So when Griff took their joined hands and sucked Mal’s fingers into his mouth, coating them with plenty of spit in the absence of the oil Mal was sure he had read about somewhere, he found a second wind, let Griff guide his fingers and guessed the rest with the other man’s increasingly ragged breathing telling him he was on the right path again as he stroked him gently open.
When Mal finally pushed inside him, he did so with the same brash determination with which he’d entered the Mire.
Pursued another high for them both with one hand wrapped around Griff, his mouth on Griff’s claiming every kiss offered to him there, and the same lust with which he chased after the elusive treasure.
They moved as one, fluid motions of Mal’s hips rolling through them both until they cried out again and again, no longer a collision of opposing forces.
Later still, the moon having made over half of its journey across the sky, they drifted toward sleep together wrapped up in one of their cloaks and nothing else. Griff’s arm was draped over Mal’s waist, cradling the other man against his chest.
“It wasn’t fine,” Griff whispered into the crook of Mal’s neck, soft enough that if Mal was already asleep, it wouldn’t wake him.
But Mal was still up, hardly breathing, silently taking in every word. Daring to hope for something for once: that this night on which his life had irreversibly changed was real, that this version of Griff who loved him was real and not some elf-wine fever dream.
“When I didn’t come to Thrallkeld, when you didn’t get my letters—nothing about what happened was fine.
You weren’t fine, and hell, I wasn’t fine.
Far from it. I tried to drink myself to death.
And when that didn’t work, I tried finding other ways to drown.
” Griff’s arm tightened around him a fraction, his fingers gently brushing over the bits of scarred skin he could reach there, keeping Mal warmer than he had been in years.
“It damn near destroyed me, missing you.”
Mal still said nothing, though the grass became a little damper as he listened.
A few moments later, he snuggled deeper into the sanctuary of Griff’s embrace and let himself be held.