Chapter 25 #2
Eskil turns on the couch, carefully, and lifts the hem of his shirt.
The motion exposes the bandaging and the skin around it and the planes of his stomach, and he does not miss the drop of Indrie's gaze.
Not to the wound. To the exposed skin beside it, the line of muscle above his hip, the trail of hair below his navel.
A flicker, barely a second, before the clinical focus arrives and Indrie's eyes go to the stitching where they belong.
Indrie leans in. His shoulder brushes Eskil's arm and Eskil can smell him, chamomile and clean wool and the faint herbal sharpness of whatever he has been grinding in his clinic, and beneath it the warm scent that is only Indrie, the one that lingers and does not wash out.
Indrie's fingers touch the skin around the stitching. Featherlight. Barely contact. He presses along the wound edge, each suture tested individually, and Eskil can feel every point of contact with a specificity that borders on the obscene.
"Any sensitivity here?" Indrie presses along the lower section where the laceration curves toward his hip. His thumb traces the wound edge, close enough to the waistband of Eskil's trousers to make his stomach tighten.
"No, but you could check a little lower if you'd like."
Indrie's thumb stills. He does not look up. The color, which had begun to recede, floods back across his cheekbones. His jaw tightens. He is fighting a smile, fighting it hard, and Eskil is enjoying every second of the battle.
"How is your range of motion?" Indrie asks, straightening.
Eskil raises an eyebrow. “I could show you.”
Indrie purses his lips. "Lift your arm above your head please. Slowly."
Eskil raises his right arm. The wound protests, a pulling sensation, sharp but tolerable, and he extends it overhead and holds it there.
"Any restriction? Tightness?"
"Sweetheart, the only tightness I've been thinking about has nothing to do with my arm."
Indrie drops his hands from the wound entirely. He sits back. His face has gone red to the ears and his mouth is open, and for one glorious suspended moment his composure breaks completely and the look he gives Eskil is pure, radiant, helpless outrage.
Indrie says. "Did you antagonize Bohdi like this while he was tending to you?"
"I can assure you I did not ask Bohdi to put his hand on my cock."
Indrie looks away at once, pressing both hands to his burning cheeks, and Eskil grins at him.
Wide, unguarded, the grin he cannot suppress around this man no matter how hard he tries.
Indrie stares back and the outrage and the embarrassment soften, degree by degree, until what is left is something fond and warm and exasperated and achingly tender.
It is the best thing that has happened to Eskil in three days and he is not going to pretend otherwise.
He reaches down and takes Indrie's hand.
The one that was on his wound, the careful precise hand that was mapping sutures a moment ago, the hand that stitched him closed and applied the salve and held the shears and threaded the needle.
He lifts it to his mouth and kisses the knuckles.
Slowly. Pressing his lips against each ridge of bone.
Indrie's breath catches. A small sound, barely audible, and Eskil is close enough to hear it and close enough to feel it, the slight hitch of his chest, the curl of his fingers against Eskil's lips.
"I haven't seen you in two days," Eskil says against his knuckles. His voice is rough. Two days should not feel like a deprivation to a man who has survived fourteen years on a throne without needing anybody on his arm, and yet here he is. "Are you punishing me?"
"You're not my only patient, your majesty."
The title. Indrie uses it when he is being professional, or when he is being defensive, or, and this is the one that makes Eskil's blood warm, when he is being deliberately provocative and pretending he is not.
The slight emphasis on the your. Formality set down between them as distance, and Eskil wants to take it apart.
"Am I your only lover?"
Indrie's gaze drops. His ears go pink, the concentrated pink that starts at the tips and spreads, and he says, quiet, almost inaudible, "You know that you are."
"I know you've been on the receiving end of some attention from my men." The edge enters his voice before he can file it down. A possessive sharpness he cannot fully suppress. "I wouldn't want to presume."
Indrie fixes him with a look. The heat is still in his face, bright across his cheeks and vivid at his ears, but the eyes above it are not shy.
They are sharp and irritated and luminous with something it takes Eskil a beat too long to identify as offended, and the combination of the blush and the sharpness and the stubborn set of his jaw is so stunning it makes Eskil's cock twitch in his pants.
"You presumed just fine," Indrie says, and his voice is low and steady and his face is blazing, "when you had me walk home with your release leaking down my legs."
The words penetrate the center of Eskil's skull.
For perhaps two seconds his mind is a perfect crystalline blank, wiped clean, emptied of every thought and duty and calculated restraint, and what floods into the vacuum is heat.
Pure, annihilating, bone-deep heat, and with it the vivid high-resolution memory of Indrie in the library, in his arms, walking out the door with his clothes hastily relaced and Eskil's come still inside him.
Every scrap of his fraying restraint goes at once.
He leans down and takes Indrie's mouth.