Bryn
Ihave been watching the patterns. The dead stone where he rests. The green where I sleep. The teal spreading up my forearms, deeper every day. I know what we are doing to this building. I know what the bond is doing to his venom. I do not need to explain it to him. He knows too.
On the nineteenth morning I wake against his coils and stay perfectly still.
Light reaches them from the hall, pale and indirect. His breathing is slow beneath me. The scales at my back rise and fall. His pulse runs through the loop of tail that curves around my hips, steady and deep.
I lie there and I count his breaths. Not to learn anything. I am counting because I want to stay inside this minute, and counting gives me a reason.
At some point he wakes. I feel the change beneath me. His breathing catches, then steadies. The coil at my hip tightens a fraction, holding me closer before he is fully aware that he is doing it.
He does not move. He is paying attention to something he does not want to disrupt.
I put my hand on the coil at my hip. I press.
“Morning,” I say.
“Morning.”
“Your pulse does a thing when you wake up,” I say. “Speeds, then settles.”
“It is deciding whether you are real.”
I press my face against the scales so he can’t see what that does to me.
We stay. Two more minutes. Three. Then the day starts the way it always starts, the pour and the channels and the bread, and I carry the morning into all of it.
The stew is getting better. I roast the root before adding it to the pot and the char changes the flavor. He watches me do it the first time and nods.
“The char. My mother used that sometimes with the river fish,” he says.
I don’t know where to get river fish. I hold the thought anyway.
On the twentieth day I find a section of calcification in the lower corridors that is thicker than anything I’ve cleared before. The deposit has narrowed the channel to a slit. I chip at it for an hour. The original carving underneath emerges clean-edged, undamaged.
I carry a piece of the calcification to the main hall and set it on the stone beside our breakfast.
“Look at this,” I say. “The original channel is intact.”
He picks up the chip and turns it in his fingers. The yellowish deposit on one side, the smooth carved stone on the other.
“The calcification is a layer on top of the original carving,” I say. “Every section I’ve cleared, the original stone is intact underneath. Strip the buildup and the channels work.”
He sets the chip down and pours water into my cup. His fingers brush the cup and stay.
“Good,” he says.
“Still just good? I found the original channels intact under all of it, and all I get is the same word as twenty feet of debris.”
“It is not the same word.” His eyes stay on the chip between us. “It is the same sound. The word is larger now.”
I decide to accept that. It might not be the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me with a straight face, but I’ll take it.
On the twenty-first morning I bring him a leaf from the garden. I have been going out to the beds on my own, checking the basil, pulling the overgrown onion back from the border. I hold the leaf up.
I say the Naga word for it. The one he taught me in the anteroom. I get it right. Every syllable. The sounds land where they belong.
He doesn’t say anything. I look at his face and I grin.
“Told you I’d get it,” I say.
On the twenty-first night, it starts with his tail.
I am lying against his coils in the hall, half-asleep, the warmth of the stone and his body blurring at the edges. The lamps are low. The green on the walls catches the last light.
His tail moves first. The tip traces my ankle, slides up the outside of my calf. Slow. Deliberate. Not an accident. Not the unconscious reaching he does in his sleep. This is intentional.
I open my eyes.
He is watching me. The pupils wide in the low light. His hands are still. His tail is not.
The tip traces the inside of my knee. Higher. The teal scales warm against my skin. My breath changes and he sees it happen and the tip moves higher still.
“Vadh.”
“Don’t move,” he says. His voice is quiet. It’s not a request.
The tip of his tail reaches the crease of my thigh and pauses. The warmth of the scales soaks through the thin fabric. My body answers before my mind does. My hips shift involuntarily and his hand comes to my stomach and presses me flat.
“I said don’t move.”
He is playing with me. This careful, restrained male who has held himself still for twenty years is playing with me.
The look on his face is something I have not seen before.
Intent.
Hungry.
Patient in a way that is the opposite of restraint. He is taking his time because he wants to.
His other hand finds the hem of my shirt. He lifts it slowly. His palm skims my ribs, the curve beneath my breast. His thumb traces the underside, and I arch into his hand. His tail presses harder between my thighs.
“Please,” I say, almost begging. I have never said please to him.
“Not yet.” The words hang in my mind. Agony.
His hand closes over my breast. The heat of his palm blooms through my chest and down and meets the heat his tail is building between my legs. I make a sound that has no consonants in it.
He pulls my shirt over my head, then runs both hands on me.
His tail still works between my thighs through the fabric.
He cups both breasts, runs his thumbs across the peaks.
His tongue flicks out and tastes the hollow of my throat.
I am being touched in four places at once and every point is connected and I am losing my mind.
“Vadh. I need you inside me.”
“I know,” he says.
He does not hurry.
His tail slides under the waistband. Not removing them. Just there, the tip pressing against me through the last layer. I press back. My quiet moan makes him press the tip more firmly into me.
He strips the pants from my legs with his tail. One fluid motion. I am bare in his loops and the compound hits everywhere and my back arches off the coils.
The seam is open. Both shafts heavy and dark in the low light. I know them now. I have memorized their weight and heat with my hands.
He lifts me. His coils arrange my body, tilting me back, supporting me from shoulders to hips. I am cradled inside him, open, held. He positions the first shaft at my entrance and holds there.
“Ask me again,” he says.
“Please.”
An agonizing moment passes before he enters me in one slow push. The compound floods from his surface into mine and the stretch is familiar and still overwhelming. I grip the nearest coil and my fingers greedily dig in.
He sets the pace. Not me. His coils control the rhythm, a slow compression that guides me onto him and pulls me back.
Each stroke deep. Unhurried. He watches my face while he moves inside me.
Reading every change. Learning what makes my breath catch, what makes my eyes close, what makes my hips roll against the coils.
He is cataloguing my pleasure and using everything he learns as fast as he learns it.
The second shaft presses against me. He does not wait for me to guide it. He tilts my hips with his coils and presses the second in alongside the first.
Both. The stretch doubles. Both responding to each other. One flexes, the other shifts. My breath leaves my body and comes back wrong.
I don’t care.
His hand finds my breast again, teasing the nipple with a soft touch that nearly puts me over the top.
His tongue seals flat against my throat.
His tail curls tight around my thigh, holding me open.
Both shafts moving inside me in a rhythm that says I’m his, and I am being touched by everything he has.
“Don’t let go,” I say.
He answers by driving deeper, both at once, igniting every nerve in my body.
His coils lock around me and the thrust hits something that empties my skull.
I hear my own voice from very far away saying his name in a way that is not his name.
It is what his name becomes when there is nothing left of me to shape it.
“Don’t stop,” I say. “I want to feel you come.”