Chapter 9 #3
"You saw my body's response to its mate.
And you misread it." He dips his head until his forehead is nearly touching Bryn's and his amethyst eyes fill Bryn's entire field of vision, close and deep and fractured with gold.
"I was still hard because of you, Bryn. Because of how right you are for me.
Because the sight of you and the scent of you and the feel of you around me is so overwhelming to every part of me that once is not enough.
It will never be enough. Not because you're lacking. Because you are everything."
Bryn is not going to cry. He is not.
"No matter how many times I have you," Ithyris says, and his voice has gone rough and dark and his eyes are dropping to Bryn's mouth with a heat that is visible, "I will want you again.
After the first time. After the hundredth.
After the thousandth. I will still be hard for you because my body will never be finished wanting you.
That is not inadequacy, Bryn. That is what you do to me. "
The tears escape. Two of them, running hot down his cheeks and over the prince's thumbs, and Bryn is mortified but he can't stop them and Ithyris catches them against his skin and doesn't look away and doesn't comment and doesn't make Bryn feel small for the fact that he is crying in a wet robe in front of the dragon prince because he thought he was bad at sex.
Which, when he considers it from the outside, is so absurd it should be funny, except that it isn't funny because underneath the sex and the shame is the same wound that has been bleeding since he was twelve years old and lost his brother and his mother and his childhood in the same afternoon.
The wound that says: you are not enough. You will never be enough. Stop trying.
Ithyris is looking at him as though that wound is visible and as though the prince intends to spend the rest of his life proving it wrong.
Ithyris kisses him.
Not the way he kissed him in the forest, hungry and consuming and desperate.
This is slow. His mouth covers Bryn's and his hands stay on Bryn's face and he kisses him with a gentleness that is deliberate and thorough and unhurried, as though they have all the time in the world and the prince intends to use every second of it.
He kisses Bryn until his lungs are empty and his knees are gone and he is leaning into Ithyris because he cannot hold himself up.
The prince kisses the tears off his cheeks.
He kisses the corner of Bryn's jaw and the hollow beneath his ear and the bruise he left on Bryn's throat in the forest, pressing his lips to the mark with a tenderness that makes Bryn's breath hitch and a small, wanting sound escape his mouth, and the prince's breath catches at the sound.
Ithyris lifts him. One arm under his thighs, the other across his back, and Bryn is off the ground and cradled against the prince's chest and he should protest because he is not a child and he is not fragile and he has been carrying himself for six years without anyone's help.
But he doesn't protest. He doesn't protest because the prince's arms are warm and his heart is beating against Bryn's side and Bryn is so tired of carrying himself.
He is so tired of being the one who holds things together, and for a few seconds he lets himself be held instead, and the relief of it is so acute it borders on pain.
Ithyris carries him to the bed and lays him down and the robe falls open.
Bryn is bare beneath it, pink and damp from the bath, the scrubbed flush of his skin making the prince's marks stand out in sharper contrast, and Ithyris looks at the whole of him with an expression that is worshipful and wanting at the same time.
His gaze drags down Bryn's body, over the marks he left in the forest, the bruises on Bryn's hips from his fingers, the fading flush on his chest, and lower, where Bryn is hardening despite everything, his cock thickening against his stomach because his body has apparently decided that emotional devastation and arousal are interchangeable states and is responding to both with equal enthusiasm.
The prince pushes the robe off Bryn's shoulders and drops to his knees between Bryn's legs at the edge of the bed.
His hands slide up Bryn's thighs, warm and sure, pushing them apart, and Bryn lets them fall open and the exposure is total and he doesn't look away from the prince's face because the way Ithyris is looking at him, at the most intimate and vulnerable part of him, with that expression of absolute reverence, is the thing Bryn needs more than the touch.
He needs to see it. He needs to watch the prince look at him and see not inadequacy but something worth kneeling for.
"Let me show you," Ithyris says. "Let me show you what you do to me."
He puts his mouth on Bryn.
His tongue is hot and thorough and devastating.
He licks over him, flat and wet and deliberate, and Bryn is still tender from the forest, still loosened and sensitive, and the sensation is sharper now, almost too much, his nerve endings raw and overworked and screaming with a mixture of pleasure and the particular intensity that comes from being touched in a place that is already marked.
The prince pushes his tongue inside him and Bryn cries out and his hands fly to Ithyris's hair and grip and the prince groans against him and the vibration makes Bryn's thighs shake.
Ithyris works him open with obscene, patient thoroughness, his tongue pressing deep, tasting the remnants of himself inside Bryn, and the wet, intimate sounds of it fill the quiet room and Bryn would be embarrassed if he had any capacity left for embarrassment, which he surrendered somewhere on the forest floor and hasn't reclaimed.
The prince draws back just long enough for Bryn to hear the quiet click of his claws retracting, and then two fingers press into him, thick and careful, replacing the tongue.
Then three, his fingertips finding that place inside Bryn and pressing against it, stroking over it with a precision that makes white light explode behind Bryn's eyes.
He curls his fingers and Bryn arches off the bed and his cock leaks onto his stomach and the prince watches it happen with dark, hungry eyes, his mouth wet and swollen, and he tells Bryn he's the most beautiful thing Ithyris has ever seen, that the sounds Bryn is making are going to kill him, that he wants to hear Bryn scream for him.
Ithyris strips. He stands and pulls his shirt over his head and unfastens his trousers and pushes them down and Bryn sees him fully naked for the first time, properly, without the haze of adrenaline and the forest light, and the sight drives the air from his lungs.
The prince is enormous. Broad and dense with muscle, the violet scales cascading down his chest and stomach and the V of his hips, and his cock is thick and hard and straining toward his stomach, the head dark and wet, and he wraps his hand around himself and strokes once and his eyes flutter shut and when they open they are black and fixed on Bryn with an intensity that makes Bryn's whole body clench.
The prince crawls over him on the bed and settles between his thighs and the weight of him above Bryn is heat and pressure and want, and Bryn pulls him down and kisses him, tasting himself on the prince's mouth, and he reaches between them and wraps his hand around Ithyris's cock and the prince groans into his mouth, rough and animal, his hips bucking into Bryn's grip, and the feeling of that enormous body shuddering because of Bryn's hand is the most powerful thing Bryn has ever experienced, including running a kingdom.
"Inside me," he whispers against the prince's lips. "Now. Please."
Ithyris lines himself up and pushes in.
The sound Bryn makes is not a sound he's ever made before.
He is still open from the forest, still slick from the prince's earlier release and the prince's tongue, and Ithyris sinks into him easier this time, one long, deep slide that bottoms out with his hips flush against Bryn's, and the fullness is just as overwhelming, the thick stretch of him filling Bryn until he can feel the prince in his throat, but the pain is gone and what's left is pure, bright, devastating pleasure that radiates outward from the place where they're joined and fills every part of him.
The prince fucks him lovingly.
There is no other word for it. Ithyris moves inside him with long, slow strokes, pulling almost all the way out and sinking back in deep, and his forehead is pressed to Bryn's and his eyes are open and watching Bryn's face and his hands are gentle where they frame Bryn's head, his fingers threaded through Bryn's short hair.
He adjusts his angle and finds the place that makes Bryn shake apart and hits it on every thrust, steady and deliberate, and Bryn is gasping and clawing at his shoulders and wrapping his legs around the prince's waist to pull him deeper.
"You're perfect," Ithyris breathes against his mouth. "Feel what you do to me, Bryn. Feel how much I want you."
He reaches between them and wraps his hand around Bryn's cock and strokes him in time with his thrusts, his thumb working the head, smearing the wetness leaking from the tip, and the dual sensation of being fucked deep and stroked tight destroys whatever is left of Bryn's composure, which was already in ruins and is now beyond recovery.
He comes with a sob, his body clenching around the prince, his cock pulsing in Ithyris's fist, spilling over his fingers and onto Bryn's stomach, and the orgasm pulls sounds from him that he will never admit to making, broken and raw and the prince's name, the prince's name, the prince's name.