23. Chapter 23 #3
He gave up the last of his control at that.
He fucked me like a man who'd stopped being able to be careful, deep and desperate, and Daska held me steady through all of it, his mouth at my throat, his hand sliding down to find my clit and rub tight circles in time with the wolf's driving hips until I was sobbing between them.
Two men, one at my front and one at my back, neither measuring, neither keeping score, they kept finding each other in it, Daska's hand covering Rivik's where it gripped my hip, a glance passing between them over my body with no rivalry in it at all, only a shared and steadying wonder, as though I were the fire they were both warming their hands at and glad, each of them, that the other was warm too.
I came apart a second time with Rivik buried deep and Daska's fingers on my clit and both their names broken in my mouth, clenching hard around the wolf until he lost the last of himself and spilled hot inside me with his face buried in my hair, shaking.
And Daska held the both of us through it, murmuring low that he had us, that we were safe, that this was allowed.
What came after was slow, and tended, and wholly mine, Daska taking his turn while Rivik held me and murmured filth and tenderness into my ear in equal measure, the two weathers trading places over and over through that long firelit night until I lost count of which hands were whose and stopped needing to.
I never once, though, lost track of who they were, the patience and the fire, the bear and the wolf, each so wholly himself that even blind and boneless between them I always knew which of them was reaching for me.
And between the two of them the thing I'd been certain I'd lost forever at the Savoy came flooding back into me, the very opposite of the careful grey numbness I'd called peace for two years.
I felt everything, so much of it that the tears came again, and this time they had nothing of grief in them.
For the length of that firelit night, held between two men who'd each proven they'd sooner suffer than cage me, I felt allowed to be loved this much. Perhaps that was healing, not the wound closing over, but discovering it had been lying to me all along.
* * *
Later, I lay quietly, watching the sparks from the fire burned low to embers, and I was warmer and more thoroughly held than I'd been in my entire life.
Daska at my back, his heavy arm over both of us, his breath already gone slow and even.
Rivik curled at my front, one hand still laced through mine as though he'd forgotten how to let go, his amber eyes half-closed and soft in a way the daylight never let them be.
I took stock of myself as Daska had taught me to, a healer's inventory of my own body, and found what wasn't there.
The ache was gone.
It had been with me so long I'd stopped naming it, the low constant wrongness that lived under my breastbone, the pressure that had been getting worse all summer, the thing Dev fretted over and I brushed off, the tiredness that sat in my bones like cold in stone.
Tonight it had eased to almost nothing. My chest felt open and light, as though whatever had been sitting on it had, for a few hours, decided I was worth setting down.
I didn't understand it and I was too warm and wrung-out to chase the understanding, but I filed it away as I filed everything, a small clean fact set aside for later: I feel better when I let myself be loved; that has to mean something.
I should have slid straight into sleep. Both of them had, the wolf and the bear breathing in a slow shared rhythm on either side of me, their bodies still finding each other even in sleep, a hand of Rivik's resting on Daska's forearm where it lay across me.
The word came to me plain and astonishing in the dark.
This is my family; I made it, and it's mine, and no one handed it to me.
And then, unbidden, into the warm dark, came what I didn't want.
Because the fire had more than one warmth in it now, and lying there counting my impossible blessings I found there was a space at the edge of it; a golden, absent space.
I thought of Tau, of the measured wolf-tongue he'd used so I'd understand every word the day he chose to make my life a choice instead of a fight, of how he watched me feed his forgotten women with something naked in his face before he covered it with a grin, of a loneliness under all that gold that I'd started, lately, to be able to read as clearly as I now read Daska and Rivik.
I thought of him alone at his king's fire tonight while I lay wrapped in warmth, and something in my chest, the same chest that had ached all summer and didn't ache now, pulled toward that absence like a tide.
I wanted him here.
The realisation went through me cold and clear. I didn't want Tau instead of these two; I wanted a place for him beside them, at the edge of the same fire.
Too much, the old voice whispered. Two men asleep in your arms and already you're reaching for a third.
But the quieter truth felt less like greed than recognition. I pressed closer into the warmth of the two men who were already mine and lay awake wanting a third, no longer certain I was wrong to.