Chapter 27 #2
The orgasm goes through him like a wave breaking.
He comes in Indrie's mouth, hot and pulsing, his hand fisted in dark hair and his back arched off the pillow and a sound coming out of him that is guttural and wrecked and too loud for the room.
Indrie holds on. He swallows, or tries to, and Eskil can feel the working of his throat, the effort of it, and some escapes and leaks from the corner of his mouth and trails down his chin, and the sight of it is incredible.
Indrie pulls off. His lips are swollen and wet and his chin is slick and his eyes are glazed, and he looks thoroughly and comprehensively undone. Eskil reaches for him and hauls him up the bed.
He catches Indrie's mouth and kisses the taste of himself out of it. Indrie gasps into the kiss, trembling, and Eskil can feel him, hard and leaking against his stomach, hips making small desperate involuntary motions, seeking contact.
"Your turn," Eskil says against his mouth. He cradles Indrie's head with one hand and reaches between them with the other and wraps his fist around him.
Indrie cries out. His whole body arches, spine bowing, hips thrusting forward into the grip, and the sound that tears out of him is high and broken and helpless. Eskil strokes him with a hand that is sure and steady, his thumb swiping across the head, spreading the wet that is leaking freely.
"That's it," Eskil murmurs against his temple.
"So hard for me. So wet." He tightens his grip and twists his wrist and Indrie sobs.
"I have been thinking about this too. About getting my hand on you.
About watching your face while you come apart.
" He presses his mouth to Indrie's ear. "You get this pretty flush that starts at your cheeks and goes all the way down your chest. Did you know that?
The first time I saw it, on the ship, you were in my lap and you went pink from your face to your fucking navel and I nearly lost my mind. "
Indrie whimpers. His hands are twisted in the sheets beside Eskil's head and his face is pressed into Eskil's neck and his breathing is frantic, short sharp hitching gasps.
"You're so close," Eskil says. It is not a question. He can feel it in the way Indrie throbs in his hand, in the rigidity of his body, in the desperate uncoordinated snapping of his hips. "Just from sucking my cock, Indrie."
He moves his mouth to Indrie's chest. Finds his nipple and closes his lips around it and sucks, tonguing the peaked flesh, and Indrie's back bows off the bed and a keening sound tears out of his throat.
Eskil scrapes his teeth, gently, and suckles harder, and his hand works him in fast tight strokes, and Indrie is writhing against him, fingers twisted in the sheets, incoherent, shaking.
He switches to the other nipple. Laves his tongue in slow circles, then sucks hard enough to make Indrie scream, actually scream, a sound that comes back off the walls, and his hand tightens and quickens and Indrie's whole body goes rigid.
The orgasm rips through him with a violence that is almost alarming.
His entire body seizes, his mouth open on a soundless cry, his back arched so hard his shoulders come off the mattress.
He spills over Eskil's fist in hot pulsing waves, and the sound that finally breaks out of his throat is Eskil's name, cracked into two syllables that do not survive the journey intact.
Eskil works him through it. Strokes him until the aftershocks become twitches and the twitches become trembling and the trembling becomes the boneless slack-limbed collapse of a body that has wrung itself out entirely.
He brings his hand to his mouth and licks Indrie's release off his palm, slowly and deliberately, holding Indrie's gaze while he does it, and Indrie watches him with glassy dazed eyes and shivers.
Eskil pulls him close and kisses him, slow and deep and filthy with the taste of both of them, and Indrie makes a sound against his mouth that is half moan and half laugh and entirely helpless.
They lie together. Eskil on his back, Indrie curled against his good side. Eskil's arm is around him, his hand tracing lazy patterns on the bare skin of Indrie's back, and Indrie's head is on his chest and his breath is evening out in warm slow gusts against Eskil's collarbone.
Eskil kisses him. His mouth, his jaw, his temple, the corners of his eyes.
Small reverent unhurried kisses that serve no purpose except to map the skin of the man in his arms. Indrie tips his face up into each one, his eyes closed, his expression soft and open and unguarded in a way Eskil has never seen him while conscious.
The wariness is gone. The vigilance. The perpetual low-grade alertness of a man who learned early that the world is not safe and has never unlearned it.
All of it gone, dissolved in the heat and the dark and the slow steady rhythm of Eskil's heart beneath his ear.
Indrie clings to him. His arm is slung across Eskil's chest, his fingers curled against the far shoulder, and the grip has the quality of something deliberate.
Not the desperate clinging of shock or fear but the conscious chosen holding of a man who is exactly where he wants to be and intends to stay.
"Is this what you want?" Indrie whispers. His voice is barely there, a murmur against Eskil's chest. "Me?"
Eskil cards his hand through Indrie's hair. The braid is long destroyed, another casualty, and the dark strands are tangled and damp with sweat and he works through them with his fingers, patient, unhurried.
"I have wanted you since I first saw you," Eskil says.
His voice is quiet, the rough edges sanded down to something almost tender.
"Standing in Armond's quarters with that satchel clutched to your chest and your eyes the size of the fucking moon, and I thought—" He stops.
Laughs at himself, softly. "I thought, there he is. Like I'd been looking."
Indrie goes very still against him.
For a long moment he does not say anything at all. His breathing has changed, the slow even rhythm hitching and going unsteady, and his hand on Eskil's shoulder tightens hard enough that Eskil can feel every finger.
"I thought I was too young," Indrie says.
Eskil frowns into his hair. "What?"
"For you." The words come out flat and quick, the way things do when they have been sitting in somebody a long time.
"You have spent your whole life taking care of someone my age.
And I have spent mine being kept. And I thought that when you looked at me, that was what you saw.
Somebody else who needed rescuing and got it. "
Eskil groans like he's been wounded. Long and heartfelt, from somewhere deep in his chest. "Indrie."
"I am only telling you what I—"
"You are naked in my bed," Eskil says, "with my mouth on your neck and my hand on your ass, and you have brought up my little brother."
There is a pause.
Then Indrie starts to laugh.
It comes out of him in pieces at first, a huff and then another, and then it takes him properly and he presses his face into Eskil's chest and shakes with it, and Eskil can feel the laughter going through both of them.
It is not the polite laugh Indrie gives to patients.
It is not the startled one that gets surprised out of him.
It is loose and helpless and slightly wet at the edges, the laugh of a man who has been carrying something heavy for a long time and has just been permitted to put it down.
"I am so sorry," Indrie manages, and does not sound sorry at all.
"You should be."
"It has worried me for weeks."
"I can tell." Eskil catches his chin and tips his face up. "Listen to me. There is not one thing about you that has ever put me in mind of my brother, and if you say his name again in this bed I will put you out of it."
"You could not put me out of it. You are wounded."
"I would manage."
Indrie laughs again, and kisses him, still laughing, and Eskil kisses him back and feels the tail end of it against his mouth.
When they settle, Indrie's voice is different. Lighter, somehow. As though a weight has come off it.
"Ermin said you were courting me," he says. "And I didn't believe him."
Eskil laughs. Warm and quiet. "Is that what you want? Courting?"
"No, I just—"
"Tell me what you want and it is yours, Indrie." He kisses the top of his head and lets his lips stay there. "Anything. I told you that before and I meant it."
Indrie lifts his head from Eskil's chest. He takes Eskil's face in both hands, small hands, the hands that stitched his wound and cleaned his blood and held his own through the longest night of his life.
His palms press against the scrape of Eskil's jaw and his fingers curl behind his ears, and he is not hesitant. Not uncertain. Not apologetic.
He knows the answer to this question. He has always known it.
"I just want you," he says, and he does not look away.
Eskil holds him. Pulls him closer. Feels the bare skin of Indrie's chest against his own, the press of his heartbeat, the warmth and weight of him.
"You have me," he says, into Indrie's hair.