Bryn
We eat in the anteroom. He made the stew while I washed.
His coil presses against my hip at the counter.
The same spot. The same warmth. We have been inside each other’s bodies.
We have repaired a building together. And he is beside me while I cut root vegetables and I do not want to be anywhere else on this earth.
He tears the herb. Drops it in. The scent fills the anteroom.
“It needs fish,” I say.
“The trader comes in ten days.”
“Ask him.”
He nods. The slow nod from the first time I asked for berries. Filing the possibility that food is something you can have preferences about when you are not eating alone.
In the evening I go to his sleeping chamber.
He is coiled on the stone. The lamp is low.
I sit down beside him. I put my hand on his coil.
“I’m staying,” I say. “Not because of the seal. Because of you.”
He turns his body toward me. The coils shift. The loop nearest my legs opens and I lean into it.
Then he reaches for my face. His fingers along my jaw. The pad of his thumb on my lower lip. He tilts my face up. He has never done this. Before, he has always asked first, the stillness, the tail at my ankle, and let me be the one to cross. He has waited. He has held still.
He is not waiting.
His mouth comes to my throat. Not the tongue.
His mouth. The jaw plates part and I feel the pressure of his lips, the softer scales at the inner edge, held against my pulse.
Then his hands find the hem of my shirt and he pulls it over my head and his hands are on my bare back before the cloth hits the stone.
The warmth hits bare skin and my back arches into the contact.
The coils move. The loops arrange around me, opening, drawing me deeper into the center of his body. I push my pants down and his coils take them the rest of the way. I am bare inside him. Every inch of my skin reading his and his reading mine.
His tongue finds my throat and seals flat, both tips against my pulse. Then lower. Down between my breasts. Down my stomach. The fork opens against me. I am already there, already aching, his mouth and his coils arriving at the same answer from every direction.
I do not guide him. His body knows mine the way it knows the channels and the grooves and the pour.
Both at once.
They press into me together. The stretch is real and total and my breath leaves my body. My body opens because my body has been opening for him since the river.
Full. Both. The coils tighten.
“Vadh.”
“I know.” He is breathing hard. “I feel it.”
He moves. A slow roll. Deliberate. The coils around my body shifting in a wave that starts at my calves and travels up to my ribs. The wave pushes me onto both shafts and releases. A rhythm that matches breathing.
I match it. My hips rolling against the coils.
His heartbeat. I feel it inside my own chest. His pulse alongside mine, two rhythms overlapping, and then not overlapping. Matching. The same speed. The same depth.
Both shafts pulse together for the first time. Synchronized. Both crests hitting at the same time. The sensation starts deep and spreads outward and I cannot find the edge of it.
His tongue returns to my throat, tasting my pulse through my skin. Reading me the way I read stone.
My hands find his face. My palms against the jaw plates. My thumbs on the softer scales below his eyes.
“There you are,” I say. As if I have been looking.
His jaw plates shift under my hands. His eyes are on mine. Not patient, not controlled, not the measured restraint I have watched him carry for weeks. Open.
The deliberate pace breaks.
Both shafts drive deep. The coils lock around me.
I come, feeling my walls grip his shafts.
His face in my hands. His name on my tongue. The sound fills the chamber and comes back from the walls. I clench around both and he follows. Both releases at once. The flood pouring through me and the green rising through the floor and the walls and the chamber alive with it.
“Vadh.” My voice is wrecked.
“Yes.”
“Your scales.”
I run my hand down his chest. The warmth. But something has changed. The faint sheen of venom that has been on his scales every time I have touched him, the wetness that is part of what he is, the baseline secretion that has been there since his venom came in.
It is gone.
I press my palm flat against his chest. The scales are warm. Smooth. Dry.
I have never felt this. I have never touched the scales themselves. Without the venom, the texture is different. Smoother. The edges of the plates more distinct. A thing I have never been allowed to touch.
“Vadh. Your scales are dry.”
His eyes are open. Something between disbelief and recognition.
“For the first time in my life,” he says. “My scales are dry.”
I go still.
Dry. All of him. Even the mouth he has guarded for twenty years.
“Vadh.”
He is already looking at me. He got there first.
“Kiss me.”
He does not move for one breath. Two. Then his hand comes to my jaw, fingers finding their places one by one, the careful grip he gives everything he is afraid to break, and he tilts my face up and lowers his mouth to mine.
The jaw plates part. His lips are softer scales, fine-grained, warm.
They press against mine, careful, then not careful.
My mouth opens under his and the fork of his tongue touches my tongue, slow, tasting, and the sound he makes into my mouth is low and broken.
Twenty years of never, ending against my lips.
I kiss him until I run out of air. I kiss him for every meal eaten three feet apart, for every morning he coiled over that bowl alone. His hand cradles the back of my head. His coils draw me in.
When we break apart, his forehead rests against mine. His breath is unsteady on my lips.
“Again,” he says.
My word. The one I handed him over a torn leaf in the garden, over every syllable my mouth got wrong. Given back.
I give him again.
I hold him. My body inside his coils, my hands on his dry chest. The bond is complete. Nothing leaking. Nothing spilling. The constant seep is over. What his glands make waits now, held, until he chooses to send it. Into the grooves. Through the channels. Nothing wasted.
His arms are around me. Two bodies inside a bond that has found its depth.