Bryn
On the fifteenth day I go to him.
I have been planning this since the pool. I have been waiting for him to come to me first. He has not. He smooths the stone where I sleep. He clears the vine from my window. He puts berries in the bread. He does not cross the distance.
So I will.
He is in the main hall. Late afternoon light falls through the upper openings in long bars. He has not put the armor back on in days. The chest plate sits on the stone near the supply room entrance like something he set down and forgot to pick up.
He is bare from the waist up. The teal-green plates of his chest catching the late light. The darker midline descending. The softer scales at the seam.
I start across the hall.
I am halfway there when he moves.
His coils unwind from the steps. The sound of scales on stone fills the hall, fast, and he is coming toward me, and his eyes are not patient. The eyes of a creature that has been holding still for twenty years and has stopped.
“Bryn.”
My name in his mouth like a thing breaking. He reaches me before I reach him. His hand goes to the back of my neck, and his mouth finds my throat and the sound he makes against my skin is low and desperate and I have never heard it from him before.
“Vadh…”
His hands are on my shirt and the fabric tears.
He doesn’t stop. His coils wrap around my legs, my hips, lifting me off the stone, and his hands pull the pants from my body with a motion that has nothing to do with care and everything to do with want.
His mouth moves from my throat to the hollow of my collarbone, and his tongue presses flat against my pulse.
“I can’t,” he breathes against my skin. “I can’t wait anymore.”
Twenty years of restraint breaking open in his hands.
I am bare inside his coils. The teal deep at my wrists and throat. His color, written into my blood.
His mouth is at my throat, my jaw, the corner of my lips. It goes no further. Even now. Even with twenty years breaking open in his hands, that one door stays sealed.
The seam at his lower body is open. I look down between us and my breath catches.
Two shafts, both out, both heavy, both dark teal and slick.
I have felt one against my thigh in the pool. I have imagined. I did not imagine this.
“Two,” I say.
“Yes.” His voice is rough.
I reach down. I wrap my hand around the nearer shaft and his whole body shudders. The scales on it are the finest on his body. Smooth between the ridges, textured on them, and hot. He makes a sound, a sound that has been locked inside him for years.
“Bryn.” My name again. Ragged. “I need…”
“Yes.”
He does not wait for me to guide him. His coils shift my hips, tilt me, position me, and the first shaft presses against me and then inside me and the stretch is real and I grip the plates at his shoulders and the heat floods from his body into the deepest part of mine.
The heat from inside meets the heat from the coils on my skin and the venom reaches places nothing has ever reached and my head empties.
“More.” The word comes out ragged. Begging. “Vadh. More.”
He drives deeper. The coils compress around my body, a rolling pressure that pushes me onto him and pulls me back. His hands grip my hips hard like he owns me. Each finger finding its place.
This is the grip of a male who has stopped being careful.
The second shaft presses against my stomach, trapped between my belly and his body. I reach for it. I wrap my hand around it and the one inside me flexes. The nerve line between them carries every touch in both directions.
“That,” he says. His jaw plates are locked. “Don’t stop.”
I grip and squeeze. His coils answer with a thrust that lifts my whole body and drives the first shaft so deep my vision whites out at the edges.
His tongue traces my throat. Both tips. He tastes my pulse while he is inside me, and the dual contact sends a line of heat straight down through my chest to the place where he is buried.
I’m close.
It comes from every direction. From his coils on my skin. From the shaft inside me. From my hand on the second shaft and the sound he makes when I tighten my grip. Everything feeding everything.
“Look at me,” I say.
He does. His pupils are blown wide. The look on his face is not patience, not control, not the measured restraint I have watched him carry for weeks. It is want. Pure, raw want, naked, wrecked, and aimed at me.
The coils compress. One hard wave. Every loop tightens. The shaft inside me drives deep. The one in my hand jerks in my grip.
I come.
The sound I make fills the hall. My body grips him and does not let go. The wave runs through my legs, my stomach, my chest. I hear it come back to me off the stone walls. His name in pieces. I am loud. I am his. I do not care who hears it.
He holds me through it. His arms locked around me. His face buried in my hair. His body shaking with the effort of holding still while I break apart against him.
“Your turn,” I say against his chest, my voice wrecked. “Let go.”
His coils lock. Every muscle fires. Both shafts pulse as he holds it in as long as he can.
I feel both releases, the flood pouring through me, the heat of it making everything brighter and louder and I hear his voice.
Not my name. A word in his own language, pressed into my hair. Low and broken and full.
The green spreads. Moss across the stone. Vines pushing up through the floor joints. A fern uncurling between two flagstones. Flora erupting across surfaces that were gray an hour ago.
He pulls me closer as if he’s afraid to let go. Every coil tight. His chin on the top of my head. His breathing hard against my scalp.
I put my face against his chest. His pulse is fast under the scales.
“Look at the wall,” I say.
He turns his head. His eyes shift from want to wonder.
“That’s us,” I say. “That’s what we do.”
He wraps his coils around me. My body pressed into his body. The hall greening around us.
Later, when he sleeps, I carry my bedroll from the corridor to the stone beside his coils. I do not ask.