Chapter 17
Indrie
Indrie wakes lying on the couch in Eskil's room with a blanket draped over him and his hand curled around nothing.
He knows it is nothing before he opens his eyes. The absence has a texture. A coolness where warmth was. An emptiness in the curl of his fingers that his sleeping mind catalogued before his waking mind could catch up. He had been holding something. Someone. The ghost of it is still in his palm.
The fire has burned to embers. The room is quiet. Grey morning light lies flat across the stone floor and the basin of water on the table has gone cold, a faint pink skin across its surface. He is alone.
He lies still for a moment. Then the memory arrives.
Not gradually. Not in pieces. It comes whole, cresting and breaking over him, and he is drowning in it before he can brace.
He kissed Eskil.
The recollection hits him like a fist. He remembers it with excruciating clarity.
The way he leaned forward. The way his fists tightened in the fabric of Eskil's shirt.
The way his mouth found Eskil's and pressed, and the whole of him trembled with the enormity of what he was doing.
He remembers the tentative terrified quality of his own kiss, and for one blinding second, one second in which the world was rearranged and remade and nothing hurt, Eskil had kissed him back.
He remembers that too. The hand in his hair. The grip that tightened. The way Eskil's mouth opened against his and the low sound that came out of his chest, a sound Indrie had felt more than heard, and the hot devastating certainty that for one fractured moment the king wanted him.
And then he had pulled away.
Indrie presses his face into the couch cushion and makes a sound he is grateful nobody is present to hear.
It is not a word. It is not a sob. It is the compressed exhalation of a man trying to force a memory back into whatever locked room it escaped from, because he cannot, he cannot, lie here in the king's quarters and think about the look on Eskil's face when he broke the kiss and held him at arm's length.
Indrie rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling.
Well, he thinks. Now you have your answer.
He has been circling this for weeks. Since the ship, since the cabin, since Eskil pressed his lips to his knuckles the first time and Indrie's heart broke so cleanly he thought he heard the sound.
He has been circling the question of what Eskil feels.
Whether the gentleness is kindness or wanting.
Whether the looks that linger are concern or desire.
Whether the way Eskil says his name means anything more than a king being careful with a fragile thing he brought home from a ruined country.
And now he has thrown himself at the man in the most vulnerable moment imaginable. Bare-chested and bloodied and shaking in his arms, clinging to him like a child in a storm, and then, as though that were not humiliating enough, pressing his mouth to the king's and expecting to be received.
The mortification rises again, thick and hot, flooding his face and his neck. He presses both hands over his eyes and lies there and lets it move through him because there is nowhere else for it to go.
He replays the rejection. Not the words.
The space between the words. The way Eskil caught his hand and kissed his knuckles.
The way his lips moved against Indrie's skin as he spoke.
You're in shock. You need to sleep. The care in it.
The tenderness. The way it was packaged in something soft enough to almost, almost, disguise the fact that it was still a no.
And then the hand. Eskil sitting on the floor beside the couch and reaching back and finding Indrie's hand and not letting go.
Holding it through the night, because it was the whole night, Indrie knows this, he knows it from the stiffness in his own body and the quality of the light that Eskil sat on that floor for hours with his back against the couch and his hand wrapped around Indrie's and did not move.
Indrie does not know what to do with any of it.
He presses the heels of his palms against his eyes until he sees sparks and then takes his hands away and sits up.
The room sways briefly. He is dehydrated, he can feel it in the thickness of his tongue and the ache behind his temples, and the residual effects of the shock have left a bone-deep fatigue that makes his limbs feel filled with sand.
He swings his legs off the couch and his bare feet touch the cold stone and the sensation grounds him. Cold. Solid. Real.
He is a physician. He knows about trauma response.
He knows the clinical terms for what happened to him last night.
The dissociation, the tremor, the grey-white skin, the ice-cold hands.
He knows the body's cascade in the aftermath of a near-fatal event, the flood and the crash that follows it, the desperate reach for physical contact as a nervous system tries to settle itself against another body.
He knows that touch-seeking after trauma is well documented.
That the urge to press yourself against the nearest source of warmth is not desire but survival, the body's oldest and most primitive way of confirming it is still alive.
He knows all of this.
He would tell a patient all of this. He would sit them down and explain it calmly, in measured tones, with the gentle authority he uses when somebody needs to understand that their body's response is not a failing but a function.
Trauma responses are normal. They are the body's way of processing an event that overwhelmed its capacity to cope.
What you felt afterward, the need for contact, the confusion, the reaching, that is human.
It is not weakness. It is not something to be ashamed of.
He would say this to a patient and mean every word.
He has a harder time saying it to himself.
Because a patient would not have kissed their king.
A patient would not have leaned forward with their fists clenched in a man's shirt and pressed their trembling mouth against his and poured six weeks of wanting into a single desperate feather-light contact.
A patient's trauma response would not have selected, with the unerring precision of a heart that knows exactly what it craves, the one person in the world whose rejection would cost the most.
Indrie presses his fingertips to his own lips. They are dry. Slightly swollen. If he concentrates he can still feel the impression of Eskil's mouth against them, the roughness of his jaw, the warmth of his breath in the instant before.
He drops his hand. Stands.
His body protests. Every muscle has stiffened overnight from shock and adrenaline and hours spent curled in one position on a couch not built for sleeping, and the first few steps are an exercise in controlled wincing.
He looks down at himself. Still shirtless.
The ruined one is a crumpled heap on the floor where Eskil dropped it, stiff with dried blood, unwearable.
His sleep trousers hang loose on his hips.
His feet are bare and dirty from the streets.
He needs a shirt. He needs to go. He needs to leave this room before Eskil comes back, because he cannot face him right now, cannot look into those blue eyes and find the careful measured gentleness of a man trying not to hurt somebody he pities.
There is a shirt draped over the arm of the chair beside the couch.
Indrie stares at it. It is not the bloodied one from the floor.
It is clean. Folded, or near enough. Dark grey linen, too large for him, and when he picks it up and the scent reaches him he has to close his eyes and breathe through the ache, because it smells like Eskil.
Woodsmoke and iron and the warmth of his skin.
Eskil left it for him. Before he went. While Indrie was sleeping. He found a clean shirt and put it where Indrie would see it and then walked out without waking him.
Indrie puts the shirt on. It falls to his mid-thighs and the sleeves hang past his hands and he has to roll them twice at the wrist before his fingers are free.
He stands in the king's quarters wearing the king's shirt and thinks, with a clarity that is either ruthless or kind and he cannot tell which: Stop it.
Stop reading into everything. Stop building a palace out of every gesture and every glance and every shirt left on a chair.
He is kind. He has always been kind to you. That is not the same as wanting.
But he had not said no.
The thought arrives unbidden and will not be pushed down.
Eskil had not said I don't want this. He had not said don't touch me.
He had not said you have overstepped or this was a mistake or I do not feel the same.
He had said you're in shock and you need to sleep, and his hands had not been steady, and his pupils had been blown dark, and for three seconds, three seconds Indrie will remember until the day he stops breathing, the king had kissed him back with a hunger that had nothing whatsoever to do with pity.
Indrie stands in the middle of the room and argues with himself.
He stopped. He pulled away. That is the answer.
He pulled away because he thought you were confused. Because he thought the shock was making you reach for something you would not reach for otherwise.
But he would have reached. He would have done it any night.
Any hour. Any moment Eskil was close enough and looking at him like that, with the softness he tries so hard to hide and the ache he thinks Indrie cannot see.
Indrie has wanted to kiss him since the deck of the ship in the moonlight, since Eskil took his hand and pointed it at the north star and the world went quiet.
He has wanted to kiss him in the clinic, and in the hallway, and every single time Eskil has lifted his hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to his knuckles and looked at him as though Indrie were something he did not deserve.