Bryn
Iwake on the eleventh morning in the corridor outside his sleeping chamber. He is coiled beside me.
His tail has come to rest alongside the edge of the bedroll during the night, a loop of muscle as wide as my thigh lying parallel to where I slept. He is still asleep. His breathing is slow and even, the scales at his chest rising and falling.
His tail is warmer than the bedroll. If I had known that a week ago, I would have skipped the bedroll entirely.
I look at the loop of tail beside me. The underside of the scales is paler than the top, softer, the grain running in a different direction. I reach down and put my palm on it. The scales are cool in the morning air. His pulse is there, distant, slow.
He wakes. I feel the change under my hand. The pulse quickens. The muscles tighten.
He sees his own tail lying beside my bedroll and I see the moment he registers what his body did in the night.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Don’t be.”
“I sleep better out here than I did in the chamber,” I say. “In case you were wondering why the bedroll moved.”
I keep my hand on his tail. We stay like that for a minute, quiet, the morning light coming down the corridor from the high window in the hall.
I have been thinking since the pool. About his tongue. The way it traced my shoulder and my throat. The fork of it finding two points on my skin at once. The sensation of being read by a sense organ I don’t have.
I have been thinking about it when I work.
When I chip calcification from the channel walls and my hands ache and my mind goes somewhere else.
I have been thinking about it at night, lying on the bedroll with his coils near enough to feel the warmth through the stone.
The thought comes back the same way each time.
The fork splitting at my collarbone. The tip on my pulse.
It has gone further than that in my head. Further than the shoulder. Further than the throat. I know where I want that tongue and I have known since the water rose to my chin and his eyes changed.
His hand rests on the stone near my bedroll. I could reach for it. I could let the morning pass and go to the channels and work and not say anything and come back to this bedroll tonight and think about it again.
I am not going to do that.
“I want to ask you something,” I say.
He is fully awake now. His attention on my face.
“Your tongue. In the pool. You tasted me.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to taste more of me.” I hold his gaze. “Lower.”
The muscles along his jaw plates go still. The faint sheen of venom appears on the scales of his forearms. He understands what I am asking.
“The venom will be stronger there,” he says. His voice is careful. “The skin is thinner. You will feel it more than anywhere I have touched you.”
“I know.”
“You are sure?”
“Vadh. I am sure.”
He uncoils from the corridor. The movement is slow and deliberate. He comes around to face me, and I sit up on the bedroll and the corridor is narrow and he fills it.
His hands find the hem of my shirt, lifting it over my head, his fingers trailing down my ribs as the fabric clears my arms. Then his hands go to my waist, easing the pants down, his palms sliding along my hips, my thighs, and the compound transfers from his scales into my skin at every point of contact.
I sit on the bedroll, bare, my back against the cool stone wall. He put me here. Not with force. With intent.
He lowers himself. The humanoid half of his body descends, his arms bracing against the corridor walls.
His face comes level with my stomach. Then lower.
His breath against my skin. The teal follows the veins on my inner thighs, tracing paths his hands have never taken.
His body has been writing on mine for days.
“Open for me,” he says.
I obey the heat in his voice.
I am exposed and unhidden. He takes me in with the same focused attention he brings to everything.
His tongue flicks out. Long. The fork tastes the air between us first. The tips separate, sampling. Then the tongue extends further and the tip touches the inside of my thigh.
The contact is wet and precise. The compound transfers immediately. I feel the heat bloom where his tongue touches, spreading outward from the point of contact. He traces up my inner thigh in a slow line. The fork drags two parallel tracks of heat along my skin.
He reaches the crease of my thigh and pauses. His breath is hot against me. The exhale hits me, humid, and then the tongue presses flat against me.
Both tips at once. One on either side. The fork opens across me, covering, pressing, and the compound soaks through the thinnest skin on my body and it hits something deep and my hips lift off the bedroll.
He holds me down. One hand on my hip. His palm spanning from bone to bone. He holds me in place as his tongue moves.
The tips separate. One circles while the other presses, and the two rhythms layer over each other until I stop trying to track which is doing what. My body is tracking it for me. My body has opinions I have not been consulted about and every single one of them is yes.
I grip the edge of the bedroll. Cool stone at my shoulders. His hot mouth between my legs. Nothing else.
“Vadh.”
His hand tightens on my hip. He heard me. He does not stop.
The tongue pushes inside me. Longer than I expected. The fork opens and both tips press against a spot that turns my vision white and my hands to fists. I stop breathing for a count I do not measure.
“There,” I say. “There.”
He holds. Both tips against the spot. The pressure is precise, and the heat from the compound at that depth is reaching places nothing has reached before. My hands are fisted in the bedroll and they are not holding.
He pulls his tongue back. The tips trace the outside of me again.
One fast, one slow. Offset. The rhythm he has been using since the pool, the rhythm his body knows.
The compound is layered now, inside and out, the heat from the internal contact meeting the current from the external contact and the two waves crossing and building.
My legs tremble. His grip on my hip firms. His other hand comes to my other hip. Both hands holding me open and still while his tongue works.
He takes me apart.
It starts low. Deeper than the pool. Deeper than his hands. It rolls up my back and takes my teeth, my fingernails, the roots of my hair. Everything he has been putting into my body for weeks answers at once.
I come.
Loud.
His tongue flat against me, his hands pinning my hips, my head knocking back against the stone. His name. Pieces of it. Nothing. I don’t care who hears.
He holds the contact through the aftershocks. His tongue still held against me, lighter, gentler, not moving, just holding while my body pulses against him.
When the last wave passes, he lifts his head.
His eyes are different. The focused attention of before has shifted into something else. He is not reading me anymore. He is looking at me the way you look at something you were afraid to hope for.
He settles back. His coils arrange behind him in the narrow corridor. His face has the expression of a male who has been carrying a weight his whole life and has just felt it shift.
“I need to tell you something,” he says. “About the temple. About what is below us.”
I lean against him with my body still humming.
“Tell me.”
“Not here.” He looks down the corridor toward the lower levels. “I want to show you.”