Bryn
On the eighth morning I stop pretending.
I am done pretending. My mother flew a glider into magical wards because she couldn’t leave a mystery alone. I walked onto a slave block because I couldn’t either. Pretending I don’t want this male’s hands on my body is a lie I’m not good enough to maintain.
After breakfast, I say, “I found the springs my first night. The lower level. I want to go back down.”
“The hot water will help my shoulders. I’ve been clearing channels for a week and everything from the neck down is sore.”
This is true. It is not the whole reason.
“Yes,” he says.
“Come with me.”
His hands go still on the bread.
His eyes stay on mine for a long count. He knows. I know he knows.
“I will come,” he says.
The springs are as I left them, steam rising off the green-clear water, the moss at the lip untouched.
I strip down to my shirt. Boots first, set beside the basin. Belt. Pants folded. Each piece placed where I can reach it fast.
I stand at the edge for one breath. Then I step down into the water.
It takes my legs. My hips. My stomach. I wade to the center. The water comes to just under my collarbone. I turn.
He is at the edge. He has not moved.
“Get in the water, Vadh.”
He comes. Deliberate. The length of his body unwinds down the steps and into the basin and the water level rises with him. Nearly to my chin. His coils fill most of the pool. I am surrounded by a ring of teal-green muscle under the water, his humanoid torso rising from the coil a pace away.
“Take off your armor.”
He hesitates. I wait.
He does it.
He unbuckles the chest plate. The shoulder guards. The arm braces. He stacks them on the lip of the pool.
His upper body is all scales. Teal-green across the chest and shoulders, the plates broad and flat, overlapping downward like shingles on a roof.
Where the armor has been rubbing for years, the edges of the plates have been polished gold-bright.
Between the plates, in the valleys, the scales are darker, finer, the color of deep water.
The width of him without the armor is different than with it. Broader through the chest than the gold suggested. The plates across his shoulders are thick, heavy, built for impact. At the sides of his torso the scales thin. Softer. His ribs move through them when he breathes.
A pattern of darker scales runs down the midline of his chest, narrowing as it descends. Where his torso meets his serpentine body, there is a seam of softer scales. A place the armor was hiding. The scales there are pale and fine and his pulse moves through them.
“You’ve been hiding that under gold plate,” I say. “That seems like a waste.”
He says nothing. But his pulse, in that soft seam of scales, picks up.
I step forward.
The venom hits.
His scales are in the water, and the water has taken everything his scales are producing. The whole basin is saturated. It soaks into my skin everywhere. My back. My shoulders. The hollows of my throat. The insides of my thighs. Between my legs where the spring feeds up through the basin floor.
My knees loosen. Heat runs up from my ankles, through my calves, into the backs of my thighs. Specific, alive, chemical. The compound reaching places it has never reached through hand-to-forearm contact.
“That’s,” I say, and stop.
“I know.” His voice is lower than I have heard it. “I can smell it on you.”
His tongue flicks out. Long. Forked at the tip. He tastes the air between us.
I move closer. Two steps. The water shifts around my hips as I close the distance.
His tongue finds my shoulder. It follows the curve to my neck. The fork splits at my collarbone. One tip traces the hollow of my throat. The other traces the line of my jaw below my ear. Both tips are wet and smooth, and I feel them register my pulse at two points simultaneously.
The heat between my hips tightens.
I put both hands flat on his chest.
The plates are smooth under my palms. Cool where the water has been sitting against them.
In the narrow channels between each plate, the finer scales give under my fingers, the texture of it, the way it yields where the armored plates do not.
I press my thumbs into one of those valleys and he draws a breath that I feel through both my hands.
I follow the midline down to where the flat chest plates give way to softer scales at his sides. I trace that border with my thumbs. The scales thin here, yield under my fingers. His ribs rise and fall beneath my touch, and I feel each breath enter and leave his body.
His coils move in the water. A loop rises and circles my waist. Scale against the wet fabric of my shirt, then against bare skin at my hips. The compound soaks through at every contact point. The flush spreads across my stomach, my sides. Teal where it is deepest.
I stop.
My body wants to go further. The compound in the water is making everything below my navel ache. I stop because I want to choose the next step when I can think clearly. When every nerve in my body isn’t lit up.
I put my hands flat on his chest. I hold them there.
“Not tonight,” I say. “I want to. Not tonight.”
His coil at my waist loosens from a grip to a hold.
“All right,” he says.
I lean against his chest. The coil at my waist supports my weight. I rest inside the circle of him. His tongue finds my shoulder again and traces down my arm, slow, the forked tips reading the surface of my skin.
I tilt my head back against his shoulder. His face is right there. His mouth.
I lift my chin and rise toward it.
He turns his head. Smooth, unhurried, the way he does everything, and my lips land on the flat of his jaw instead.
I sit back enough to look at him. “You’ll put your tongue on my throat. But not that.”
“The venom is strongest in my mouth.” His voice stays level. The coil at my waist does not. “Your skin has answered everything else. A kiss you would swallow. That is the one test I will not run.”
A lifetime of watching his own body hurt people. That kind of fear doesn’t drain out in a few days, and this one is the oldest he has.
“Someday,” I say, “I’m collecting.”
His coil tightens at my waist. He doesn’t say no.
Something catches my eye. The edge of the basin. A thread of green. One filament of new moss pushing up from the seam in the stone.
And on the far wall, in a crack where the stone is dry and bare, a vine. One tendril. Its first leaf half-open.
“Did that grow just now?”
He stares at the vine. His chest rises and falls under my hands.
“Yes.”
We look at the green. New growth in a dead place. One thread. One vine.
I press my cheek against his chest. His pulse runs under the scales. He puts one hand on my back. His palm covers me from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.
We stay in the water until the steam thins and the light from the corridor shifts.
When we come out, I stand on the pool stone and wring my hair. I squeeze the worst of the water from my shirt hem, pull on my pants, the cloth sticking to damp skin, and carry my boots. He puts the armor back on, piece by piece. When he reaches for the chest plate, I put my hand on his.
“Not yet. Walk back with me without it.”
He picks the chest plate up by the strap. We go back to the main hall side by side, the gold swinging from his hand. His chest uncovered, the scales catching the lamplight, the softer scales at his sides shifting with each movement.
He sets the chest plate on the steps instead of putting it on.
He leaves it there for the rest of the evening.
I eat my meal on my stone. He eats on his. The armor sits on the steps behind him, the gold dull in the low light. We are two people who have seen each other’s bodies sitting three feet apart pretending to eat bread.