Chapter 9 #2
Harrak's face lights up with the pride of a man who loves his home and is pleased when other people notice. "And these? They live up to whatever they told you?"
"They exceed it."
"Best-kept secret in the kingdom," Harrak says. "Worst-kept secret in the city."
The conversation is easy. Comfortable. Harrak is warm and patient and does not seem frustrated by the pauses while Indrie searches for a word or the moments when he has to repeat himself with different phrasing.
He makes little encouraging gestures when Indrie stumbles, a nod, a tilt of his head, a hand motion that says take your time, I'm listening, and Indrie finds himself relaxing into the exchange in a way he didn't expect.
It is pleasant. Simple. The uncomplicated pleasure of talking to someone who is interested and kind.
Harrak is closer now than when the conversation started.
Not aggressively so, he has moved naturally, the way people do when they are engaged and interested, shifting along the stone ledge to close the distance so they don't have to raise their voices over the noise of the cavern.
Indrie notices with a prickle of awareness at the back of his neck, a subtle alertness, but he does not read it as anything more than friendliness.
He is not accustomed to reading these signals.
He has no experience with them. In Kalkoa, no one moved closer to him unless they intended to hurt him, and the men and women of Valen are physically affectionate in ways he is still learning to interpret.
They clasp arms. They embrace. They sit hip to hip and lean into each other while they talk, and none of it means what it would mean in Kalkoa, where touch was either violence or transaction.
"Are you married?" Harrak asks.
Indrie understands the question perfectly. That is not the problem.
The flush comes anyway. The heat that had been pleasant and ambient turns sharp and specific, rising across his cheeks. He remembers Eskil and the Cara fruit. Remembers Eskil in the lamplight of the cabin, taking his jaw in one hand to make him listen.
He swallows the ache and tells Harrak, "No. I'm not. I don't have anyone."
The words taste like truth and like loss and like something he is giving up by saying them aloud.
Because he doesn't, does he? He doesn't have anyone.
He has a one-sided ache for a man who does not want him.
Whatever Indrie carries, whatever warmth, whatever hope, whatever stubborn foolish flame, it is his alone.
Eskil did not ask for it. Eskil does not want it.
And declaring it here, in the steam and the half-dark, to a stranger who asked a simple question, feels less like an answer and more like a confession.
Harrak smiles. It is a warm smile, open and unhurried.
"Am I interesting to you?"
Indrie hears the sentence and turns it over and it comes apart in his hands.
Do you find me interesting? A friendly question.
The kind of thing a person asks when a conversation has gone well and they would like to know whether the other person enjoyed it too.
Harrak has been kind and patient and easy to talk to and has made him laugh twice, and Indrie is so pleased to have understood the sentence at all that he answers it immediately, with a smile of his own, genuine and unguarded.
"Yes, of course."
Harrak scoots closer, closing the remaining distance between them until their bare thighs are touching under the water, warm skin against warm skin, and his hand comes up to the back of Indrie's neck, large and warm, fingers curling against the base of his skull, and he leans in and kisses him.
The world stops.
Indrie's mind goes blank, completely and catastrophically blank, and then floods with sensation and panic in equal measure.
Harrak's lips are warm and firm against his and his hand is broad on the back of Indrie's neck, and for one fraction of a second Indrie's body does not know what to do, because his body has only ever been kissed by one person, and the memory of that mouth, Eskil's hands, Eskil's low voice in the dark, collides with the reality of this one and the wreckage is instantaneous.
He jerks away.
The motion is violent and graceless, a full-body recoil that has to do with the bone-deep animal response of a body that has been touched without warning by someone it did not expect.
His foot slips on the smooth stones beneath the water, the surface that was so pleasant to sink into moments ago now betraying him, and his temple cracks against the stone edge of the pool.
Pain blooms white and sharp across his vision. He gasps, hand flying to his head, and feels the warm wet trickle of blood begin immediately. A cut. He knows from the sting of it that the rough edge caught the thin skin at his temple and opened it.
Harrak is immediately concerned. His hands are up, reaching for Indrie, his face stricken.
He is talking, rapid worried Rengaran, too fast now for Indrie to follow, and Indrie hears sorry and didn't mean and are you hurt, but the words are muddled by the ringing in his ears and the throb in his temple and the roaring tide of mortification drowning everything else.
Are you interested in me?
Not interesting. Interested.
One syllable difference. He has been in this kingdom for a week and he has learned three hundred words and he can name every bone in the human hand in two languages, and he reached for the jar on the wrong side of the shelf and told a stranger yes.
He had not considered it. Had not imagined it.
That someone might look at him across a pool of steaming water and see something worth pursuing.
That are you interested in me was a question people would ask him now, in this new life, where he is not property, where he is not invisible, where he is a person who is seen.
He is mortified. He is bleeding. He is sitting in a hot spring with water lapping at his collarbone and blood running down the side of his face, and a kind man who did nothing wrong is reaching for him with stricken eyes, and Indrie needs to not be here.
He stammers out an apology. It comes out in a garbled mess of Kalkoan and Rengaran that probably makes no sense in either language, sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean, I didn't understand, it was a mistake, I'm sorry, the words tripping over each other in their haste to leave his mouth, as though sheer volume of apology can undo the last thirty seconds.
He hears Ermin calling his name from across the springs, alarmed.
The boy must have heard the crack of his head against the stone, or seen the commotion, or both.
Indrie cannot face him. He cannot face anyone.
He scrambles out of the pool with the frantic ungainly desperation of a man fleeing a fire, water cascading off his body, his hands shaking, his temple throbbing.
He grabs his clothes from the bench. His hands are wet and trembling and uncooperative. He pulls on his shirt and it clings to his wet skin and the hem sticks to his thighs and it is not enough to be decent but it is enough to be not-naked, which is the only criterion that matters right now.
He does not stop to put on anything else.
He clutches the rest of his clothes in a bundle against his chest, a wet and disheveled armful, and walks as fast as he can toward the exit.
The stone is slippery beneath his bare feet and the lamplight blurs through the water in his eyes, tears or pool water or both, he cannot tell, and he hears Ermin's voice calling after him, closer now, sharp with the alarm of a friend who can see something is wrong and is coming to help.
Indrie does not stop. He cannot stop. He needs to get out of this cavern and back to his clinic and into his bed and he needs to pull the quilt over his head and he needs to stop existing for approximately the next several years.
He makes it through the stone passage and up into the keep, barefoot and dripping, leaving a trail of water on the stone floor behind him.
He is just trying to reach the front entrance as quickly as possible when he rounds a corner and collides with someone with enough force to send his bundled clothes flying from his arms and himself stumbling backward.
There is a strong arm at his waist. One on his bicep.
The grip is immediate and sure, catching him before he can fall, and the hands are large and calloused and the chest he has stumbled against is broad and solid and smells of leather and iron and something underneath both that Indrie would know in the dark, would know at the bottom of the ocean, would know anywhere.
He looks up and he is in Eskil's arms.
The king is staring down at him. Blue eyes wide, lips parted, expression caught in the act of rearranging itself from startled to concerned.
His hands tighten reflexively on Indrie's waist and bicep, steadying him, holding him upright, and Indrie is pressed against his chest with no trousers and his heart hammering so hard he is certain Eskil can feel it through the thin damp fabric between them.
Indrie stares up at him and cannot speak. Cannot move. Cannot do anything but stand in the king's grip and bleed and drip and wish, with a fervor that borders on manic, that the stone floor would open beneath him and swallow him whole.