19. Chapter 19 #4
"You have no idea," Eskil says, and his voice is broken in a way Indrie has never heard it, "what you have done to me.
Every night since the ship. Every fucking night, Indrie.
" He thrusts deep and Indrie gasps and clutches at him.
"Lying awake in that bed with my hand on my cock, thinking about the way you sounded when I was inside you.
The way you tightened around me." His teeth scrape the shell of Indrie's ear.
"I'd work my own fist until I was raw and it was nothing.
Nothing next to the feel of you. The scorching tight heat of you pulling me in like you never want me to leave. "
Indrie whimpers, face burning, the words going through him like a brand.
His cock is trapped between their stomachs, dragging against the hard ridges of Eskil's abdomen with every thrust, and the friction is maddening.
He is getting close. He can feel it building, deep and molten and inevitable, gathering at the base of his spine.
"You're so fucking beautiful like this," Eskil says, rough enough to scrape.
He pulls back enough to look at Indrie's face, flushed crimson from his cheeks to his chest, lips bitten red, eyes glassy, and the sound he makes is halfway between a groan and a curse.
"Flushed and leaking in my arms, begging me to touch you.
To kiss you. To fuck you." He drives into him hard enough that the desk jolts and a stack of books topples from the edge and hits the floor with a thud neither of them notices.
"Please," Indrie gasps, and he does not know what he is asking for except everything. "Eskil, please, I'm so close, I can't—"
He is clinging to Eskil's shoulders, nails digging crescents into inked skin, legs shaking where they are wrapped around his waist, and he can feel every inch of him, the thick drag against his walls, the relentless pressure, and his own cock aching untouched against his belly.
Eskil bites his shoulder. Not gently. Hard enough to leave the impression of his teeth, hard enough that the flare of pain cuts through the pleasure and then folds into it, becoming part of it, until Indrie cannot tell the two apart.
Indrie comes.
It tears through him and drags everything with it.
He cries out Eskil's name, or something that was Eskil's name before it shattered, and his whole body convulses, clenching hard around Eskil's cock as he spills between them.
Hot and wet, striping his own stomach and Eskil's, pulsing with every aftershock, and Eskil fucks him through it, his pace faltering but not stopping, his grip white-knuckled and shaking.
"Fucking gorgeous," Eskil breathes, and his voice is a ruined thing. He stares down at where Indrie's release is striped across both of them and makes a sound like a man being gutted. "Coming on my cock without a hand on you. Fuck, Indrie, you don't even know what you do to me—"
His thrusts go deep and uneven and Indrie, oversensitive and shaking, wraps himself tighter around him and takes it, takes him, every punishing stroke sending shocks through his wrung-out body that are too much and still not enough.
Eskil buries himself to the hilt and holds, hips flush against Indrie's body, and Indrie feels him come.
The thick pulsing heat of it, the way he throbs inside him, the way his whole body shudders and his arms tighten and his forehead drops to Indrie's temple and he breathes out.
The feeling of being filled, of Eskil's warmth spreading inside him, marking him, is the most intimate thing Indrie has ever experienced.
More intimate than the ship, more intimate than the fruit, because there is no poison driving this and no death waiting in the wings.
There is only Eskil, choosing this. Choosing him.
They stay like that a long time, breathing together, heartbeats hammering against each other.
Eskil's arms are still around him and he is still inside him, though his grip has loosened and his thumbs are tracing slow aimless circles on the insides of Indrie's thighs.
Indrie's legs are still wrapped around his waist and he does not want to move.
He does not want the moment to end. He wants to live in it.
He can feel Eskil's release seeping out around where they are still joined, warm and slick, and the sensation makes him flush all over again. Not with shame. With something possessive and wondering. He wanted me before the fruit. He chose me. He is inside me because he wants to be.
Eventually, carefully, Eskil eases out of him.
Indrie winces at the separation, at the emptiness, at the cool air on skin that was so recently filled, and makes a small involuntary sound of loss.
Eskil catches his mouth immediately, kissing him soft and sweet, as though to say I am here, I am not leaving, I am right here.
And then Eskil is kissing him everywhere.
Sweetly, reverently, the desperation burned away and what remains achingly tender.
His lips on Indrie's mouth, his jaw, the tear tracks on his cheeks.
The bruise blooming at his shoulder where his teeth left their mark.
The hollow of his throat. The tip of his nose, which makes Indrie huff a wet laugh and duck his head.
Eskil helps him dress. His hands are tender where they were rough moments ago, smoothing Indrie's shirt over his shoulders, retying the laces at his collar with careful fingers.
He pauses with the laces in his hands, his face close to Indrie's throat, and presses a kiss to the hollow above the healing wound.
The press of his lips is featherlight, as though the place is something sacred, as though it is the site of a miracle he still cannot quite believe in, and Indrie closes his eyes and holds his breath and lets himself feel it.
Eskil straightens. He is looking at Indrie the way a man looks at something he never expected to have.
The roughness is gone from his face, the furrowed brow, the clenched jaw, the anger and the cynicism he wears the way other men wear mail, and what is left is so open and so devastating that Indrie has to look away and then look back, because looking away is worse.
"Stay the night," Eskil says. Not a command. An invitation, low-voiced and careful, extended with both hands open.
“I should…” Indrie swallows and shakes his head. “I need to go back to the clinic. Tonight.”
The words come out on reflex, born from weeks of telling himself he cannot have this, of training himself to leave before he is asked to. Of bracing for the moment the tenderness ends and the transaction is revealed. He says it, and then does not move.
He is still sitting on the desk. His clothes are rumpled and there are marks on his neck and his legs are unsteady and he has just told the king he needs to leave and he is not leaving. He is sitting on a desk in the library looking at Eskil's face and his body will not obey his mouth.
Eskil watches him not move. His mouth twitches, not quite a smile but the muscle memory of one, and he waits.
Neither of them says the actual reason out loud.
That Indrie does not want to sleep in the clinic.
That both of them know it. That the reason bled out on a street beyond the south gate and left a stain on the stones outside his door that he can still see when he closes his eyes.
"The offer to stay is open whenever you want it," Eskil says. Simply. As though he were stating the position of the north star, a thing that has always been true and will always be true and requires no argument. He does not make Indrie refuse it twice.
Indrie looks at him. At the tousled braids, at the reddened mouth, at the blue eyes watching him with a warmth so steady it could heat a room, and asks, hesitantly, stumbling over the words the way he stumbles over everything that matters, "Can I see you again? If this is– If you want–"
"If you do not come to me," Eskil says, and his voice leaves no room for doubt, "I will find you instead."
Indrie smiles. The one that reaches his eyes and softens the worried line between his brows.
He has not smiled like this in so long that the muscles ache with it, and he does not care.
He does not care that his hair is a disaster and his clothes are wrinkled and there are marks on his neck and his legs are shaking.
He does not care about anything except the fact that Eskil is looking at him as though he is the answer to a question the king has been asking his whole life.
Eskil takes his hand and kisses his knuckles — their gesture, their promise, the thing that has meant you can have anything you desire since a cabin on a ship in the middle of an ocean — and lets him leave.
Indrie walks through the library door and down the corridor and out of the keep, and his feet do not touch the ground, and the night air is cold on his flushed skin, and the stars above Valen are the same ones Eskil taught him to find on a ship's deck when he was deciding whether to drown.
He chose not to.
He chose this.