Chapter 20 #2
“Oh sure—sure.” Torver wafts a hand. “You just don’t—” he hiccoughs “—know what it looks like to see a man handle his drink! I’m—fi….”
He’d been planning to extoll to Winander the level of quite how fine he is. How absolutely okay he is. He’s never been better in his entire life, actually.
And then his mouth slicks up, a roiling feeling clenches his belly and he has to rush outside to be sick on the cobbles.
The cold, sobering air hits his face, icy spats of rain landing on his neck as he heaves. A departing concert-goer drunkenly cheers him on.
“Go on, lad! Get it all out!”
Embarrassed and entirely too hot, Torver is startled when he turns his back on the mess he’s made.
Lavellin is right there, unglamoured and standing too close.
It’s good at that—sneaking up on him. Its hood is up and it’s allowed the glamour to drop in the shadows of the street, the night glittering around them, torchlight dancing in the puddles.
“Here.” It pushes a large tankard of water into his hands. “Bassen got this at the bar for you. She and Winander went ahead upstairs. She said to meet them down here again in the morning.”
Torver wipes his mouth with the back of his hand before unceremoniously chugging half the contents of the cool vessel.
“Thanks,” he mutters. Then, “Sorry.”
It touches his shoulder. “It happens to the best of us.”
Torver huffs out a laugh. “Even you?”
“Ah,” it says, pushing him gently towards the door of the tavern. “So you admit that I am the best of us?”
“Rolling my eyes,” Torver replies.
“Appreciating the narration,” it smirks.
He wants to say something else, something snide and witty, but his mind is empty, his tongue furry.
Lavellin reglamours itself back into the pretty black-haired woman and opens the tavern door with a mighty push.
The thick oak swings open, the humid scent of people and alcohol still lingering in the space now nearly empty. Torver blinks in the candlelight.
He tries his best to walk in a straight line, not to stumble, as he downs the rest of his water, rinsing his mouth, and approaches the barman.
“Roooom?” is what comes out of his mouth. The barman frowns.
Torver coughs and tries again.
“Can I pay for a room for the night?” he manages sloppily, his tongue trying to escape his mouth. Then he hastily adds, “Please.”
He fumbles in his pockets for coins before internally sinking at the way the barman sucks his teeth.
“Do you not have any rooms left?” Torver jumps instantly to that likely conclusion, stepping back on his heels in frustration. “Fuck! We’ll have to sleep in the stables—horrible! Horrible!” he moans in drunken despair.
He turns towards the door again but the barman says quickly—“No, wait!”
“Hm?”
The barman, a short and broad man, clicks his tongue as if he’s trying to formulate some solution.
“A couple just got the last room,” he says and Torver huffs, assuming that it’s Winander and Bassen who have made him homeless for the evening.
“The last real room, at least,” the barman says, smoothing down his apron. “There’s another, less savoury option. If your only alternative is you and your, um, friend sleeping rough, then you may want to consider it.”
“I’m listening.” Torver lists forward, propping his elbows onto the bar. He sways atop the beerslick counter. A glamoured Lavellin—his ostensible friend—puts its hand on his back.
The barman rubs his hands together, one over the other.
“There’s one problem.” The man’s tone is regretful.
Torver doesn’t try to suppress his caustic chuckle. “Let me guess—there’s only one bed?”
The barman smiles apologetically.
“Not quite.”
The room is wall-to-wall beds.
The barman, who he has learned is also the owner and the keeper of the inn, leads them inside. To the narrow rectangle of available floor space, surrounded by a sea of beds.
The barman places candles in the sconces on the walls and firemances them alight with sparks from the tips of his fingers, looking at a swaying Torver apologetically.
“We switched from straw beds to a straw-down blend, but when the new ones were delivered, they wouldn’t take the old ones back with them.
It’s taking a while to get a job scroll raised for someone with magic strength to come and move them outside to burn,” he grimaces.
“So I’ve just pushed them all in here for now.
If you don’t mind staying in a storage room then, you can take it.
There’s a few old blankets and pillows and things, too.
They’re barely even stained. Half price for the night, shall we say? ”
The wall lurches towards Torver suddenly, and Lavellin steadies him with a hand on his elbow.
“Yesssss, it’s perfect,” he slurs, paying the man.
When he leaves, Lavellin unglamours and collapses into the nearest of its ample choice of beds. The candlelight is orange and flickery.
“I hate to glamour,” it groans, rubbing its hands over its face. “It’s exhausting.”
“Aww,” Torver goads. “Is baby tired?”
“Shut up.” It throws a pillow at him which he tries and fails to dodge, the thing thumping dully against his chest. “You’re still drunk.”
“Maybe so,” Torver crawls across the soft surface of the beds to reach one at the furthest wall.
He mumbles in a long string of barely parsable sounds.
“But at least I’m happy. I’d rather be drunk than thinking about that Beast. It’s alive and we’re heading straight for it—what if Bassen can’t kill it and she wakes it up herself?
Gods, do you think it snores? Bassen snores when she’s asleep sometimes… ”
Humming Emlin’s melodies, he flops onto his back, spreading his limbs into the shape of a star. The straw beneath conforms to his body, supporting his every muscle and he lets out a moan. Half pleasured, half feral.
“Oh, this is comfortable, Lav.” His voice is a low purr, deep in his chest.
“It is,” Lavellin agrees from across the room.
“It’s so nice to be in a bed.”
“It is,” Lavellin agrees again. Torver turns his head in the direction of the sound. It seems so far away, the other end of the room. “How are you feeling?”
Torver shrugs into the soft but stained blankets beneath him.
“I’m not going to be sick again,” he assures it, choosing to ignore the possibility that it is asking after his emotional state.
He remembers how he had crowded it into the wall when it wouldn’t glamour, its hand on his back at the bar.
Everything, all at once, so that his brain stutters.
“Let’s sleep, hm? We’ve got a busy day of travelling tomorrow. ”
After a stagnant second, Lavellin agrees.
It strips to its undergarments and Torver watches it, only half-aware he’s doing so.
Everything is soft and warm, the world shifting drunkenly around him.
Lavellin blows out the candles, plunging the room into a darkness that is at first absolute, but that lifts as his eyes adjust. He can see it at the far end of the room, settling into the bed it had chosen.
“Goodnight then,” it tells him.
“Goodnight,” he replies, kicking off his boots and struggling out of his trousers.
He crawls under the blanket of the bed beneath him and stretches his limbs to its four corners. He expects sleep to take him instantly, but it doesn’t.
Something feels off—wrong. Despite his drunkenness, his tiredness, he doesn’t drift off. Instead, the spinning room holds him, frowning and conscious, at its edge.
The longest time passes before Torver can admit to himself what the matter is. Even longer before he, alcohol still coursing through his veins, has the stupidity to do something about it.
“Lavellin?” he whispers to the air.
“Yes, my sweet?” The reply comes from the dark like the voice of a spirit.
“I can’t sleep,” Torver says. The alcohol on his own breath makes his nose tingle. “I think…I think I’ve gotten used to having you close. You know, when we had to share that tent. That boat was, um, small as well. This…now, it feels—weird.”
He swears he can hear the soft parting of its lips, how it smiles through the words. “Oh. Is that so?”
“Yeah, I mean—um,” Torver suppresses a burp. “I… I don’t think we’ve slept so far apart since we met… You know, this room is pretty big, isn’t it?”
Torver doesn’t have the wherewithal to be embarrassed, just looks into the darkness where he knows Lavellin is resting.
“Give me a second.”
Torver’s face aches when he grins; he’s been grinning all night, with the crowd, at the bard, at the fae who is now shuffling through the room, crawling over the beds to get to him. He feels himself shift with the mattresses, a weight settling next to him. A voice close.
“Is this better, sweet thing?” Its breath is ambrosial and tickles the lobe of his ear.
“Yes,” he shuffles into the pillows. “This is more—normal. I’ve become…accustomed to you being—close.”
Lavellin chuckles.
“You’re drunk,” it croons, lazily putting its arm over him. Torver melts into the touch of its bare skin against his. He can’t see it in the dark but it’s warm and smooth, almost silky.
He doesn’t know what he intends to do, doesn’t know what he wants to happen. One of Emlin’s boisterous choruses is looping in his head.
“Yes, and I’m right,” he garbles.
“You should savour being right,” Lavellin teases. “It’s such a rare occurrence for you.”
“Shut up,” he pushes lightly on its hard, muscled shoulder.
It rolls a little with the movement—and then rolls back. And when it stills, he doesn’t remove his hand from its body. His wanting fingers flex on its shoulder, then its collar, then its chest.
It doesn’t move away from his touch. Just looks at him steadily through the dark. It fills his palm as he runs his hand slowly down its front.
He finally stops himself where its ribs begin to splay into the flat expanse of its stomach. It watches him through pale, sparkling eyes.
His heart is pounding, heat pooling in the base of him.
“Torver,” it says his name quietly, warningly. Its rs roll. A soft trill that sends a shiver down his naked back.
Torver moves closer. He’s not thinking straight, he knows he’s not. Because now he’s imagining things that are making his undergarments feel tight.
And with all of the bitter waters inside him, he suddenly, violently, wants its wine-sweet tongue in his mouth. Wants that lean hand around his throat. He wants it to bite him with those gold-tipped teeth, wants it to fuck him like it hates him, wants it to—
“Torver.”
He loves the way it says his name. Loves the fucking fire it lights inside of him. The scratch in his stomach; blood rushing to his aching cock.
He takes Lavellin’s hand, fingering the bones of its wrist, scraping its thumb across his parted lips and into his mouth. He sucks on it gently, watching its pupils blow wide, and—
“Torver.”
His name again in its sweet little mouth. He wants it so fucking badly. Wants to be inside it, to adorn its perfect body like an earring. Eyes beady with drink and with lust, he realises that he’s rocking his hips against its leg. The sweetest friction he’s ever known. What he wouldn’t give to—
“Torver, stop.”
The pad of its thumb caresses his tongue as it retrieves its hand from him.
“You’re drunk.” Lavellin cups his face, presses its forehead to his. “I can hear your heart racing. We should…we should sleep.”
“No—I—”
Torver burbles some sounds he’s not sure he ever intended to be words. The rejection is a stinging, deflating thing.
But Lavellin kisses the end of his nose. As if it can read his thoughts.
“You were wrong about me,” it says.
Torver, blushing, rolls away. Allows a gap of sacrosanct air to flow between them.
Shame snakes behind his teeth like coiling smoke, his lust dissipating as quickly as it came.
“You said that if I knew…” Lavellin’s wet thumb brushes the bare skin of his arm. “That I wouldn’t want you. But I know your secret, Torver. And I still do.”
He looks into its face, its opaline eyes. Those full lips like the petals of a rose. Before he can do anything, it folds him into its warm arms, nestling his face into the soft place where shoulder gives to chest. Where he can hear the wild beating of its heart, how it pulses under him.
“You’re drunk,” it says again.
“I’m drunk,” he repeats into the sultry warmth of its skin.
“Get some sleep, sweet thing.”
Those words and the velvet heat of its arms enveloping him are the last things he remembers. Sleep, deep and drunken, claims him at last.