Chapter 4
Chapter Four
After a full day of charting a careful path through dangerous terrain and biting his tongue every time Sazahk reached for a death trap masquerading as a hot spring, Garin readily lead them to a small hill devoid of the telltale white silica that denoted danger as soon as evening fell.
He hadn’t been so afraid to put one foot in front of the other since crossing that minefield on Tava eight years ago. His life had flashed before his eyes as he’d slid down that hill toward the pool. He’d had plenty of near-death experiences before, given his occupations, but there’d always been something he could do.
He’d never felt that helpless.
Garin shook himself and shrugged off his sodden pack, letting it hit the ground with a squelch. He’d made it. He was alive. That was one more day down in the Dead Zone, twenty-five more to go.
Unfortunately, that was still twenty-four nights and fuel pickings were slim. Given the buildup around some of the pools and geysers, this area had likely been dead long before the qesh had done whatever the fuck they’d done to kill the rest of the Dead Zone. There wasn’t a tree, branch, or shrub to be found.
And Garin was already shivering in his wet shirt. Despite the heat of the sun, Garin’s clothes hadn’t dried and with the cold of the night settling over them, he was in for a supremely uncomfortable time.
“You can share mine.” Sazahk’s voice startled Garin as he opened his pack to take an inventory of what he’d lost to the depths of the hot spring.
Garin hadn’t expected Sazahk to speak to him at all that evening. Sazahk had been reasonable all day after the geyser fiasco, but not exactly chatty. The most he’d talked to Garin since they’d set up camp was to ask him to take his nightly blood test. Then he’d set up his sample kit and even now had his face buried in a microscope. “Share your what?”
Sazahk squeezed a droplet from one of his samples onto a slide without glancing at Garin. “My sleeping bag. Judging by the diminished size of your pack, you no longer possess your own. And your spare clothing is likely soaked, so even were you to wear it all in layers, the night will still be too cold. You risk hypothermia.”
Garin rocked back on his heels. “That’s really not necessary.”
By which he meant it was out of the question.
Twice now, Garin had laid his hands on Sazahk to protect him in a life-or-death situation and twice Sazahk had lashed out in a panic. To say that the qesh didn’t like to be touched was an understatement. The first time, Garin had assumed Sazahk was just a foolish, arrogant prick who couldn’t accept help. But the wide eyes and the red that had engulfed Sazahk’s pretty face as he’d struggled out of Garin’s hands under the spray of the geyser told Garin it was something much deeper than that.
Constraining Sazahk triggered something primal in him. Garin wasn’t about to stuff them both into a tiny sack together.
Sazahk sighed and leaned back from the microscope to fix Garin with a bored stare, the tiniest bit of purple peeking out from under his collar. “It is necessary, actually. The temperature will drop to something unsafe for your wet attire. In fact, you’ll have to take it all off or it’ll have a cooling effect on both of us.”
That was even farther out of the question. So far, far, far away Garin ducked his head and focused on pulling out every article of clothing and exposing them to the air, hoping god would have mercy on him and dry them after all.
Sazahk continued in a dispassionate tone, “I’ll already have a cooling effect on you, seeing as the human body temperature is higher than the qeshian body temperature, but between the close proximity and the insulating blankets, we should both be kept to a reasonably safe temperature.”
Garin’s ears went hot. “I am not stripping down and sharing your sleeping bag, Sazahk.”
With a frustrated growl, Sazahk turned his whole body to face Garin, test tubes forgotten. “And why not?”
Garin glanced in Sazahk’s direction and wanted to throw himself into one of the boiling pools when his eyes traced down the qesh’s straight nose, plush lips, lean chest, and narrow hips before he realized what they were doing. He yanked them back to his bag and searched for their nightly ration bars, hoping they’d gotten tossed to a different part of the bag in the day's chaos and not tossed in the hot springs. “Because it’s not necessary.”
“You realize that my political toxicity and social ineptitude cannot be transferred via skin-to-skin contact, don’t you?”
“What?” Garin snapped his head up to see a horrible gray crawling across Sazahk’s lovely face as the qesh crossed his arms. “Of course I do.” The gray spilled down Sazahk’s throat and Garin’s desire to throw himself into boiling water intensified. “I mean—that’s not—I don’t want to not share your sleeping bag because I think you’re toxic or weird. I don’t want to share your sleeping bag, because I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
Or himself uncomfortable. Garin’s cock twitched. Or himself too comfortable? No, uncomfortable. The whole thing was uncomfortable, and if a certain part of Garin’s anatomy liked it too much, then it would be unbearably uncomfortable.
The gray cleared from across Sazahk’s nose, but he still scowled. “I just told you I don’t think our body temperatures are different enough to present an issue.”
“I’m not worried about our body temperatures.” Garin had had enough qeshian lovers to know he didn’t mind a cooler body beside his. Dammit, that wasn’t a helpful thought. “I’m worried about the fact that you panic when I grab you.”
The gray surged back across Sazahk’s face along with stripes of blue Garin knew were never good. “Are you planning on grabbing me tonight?”
Garin recoiled. “No! Of course not.”
“Then we shouldn’t have a problem.”
“That’s not…” Garin pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s not the point.”
Sazahk tapped his thumb rapidly against the base of his microscope as he frowned, blue still rippling over his cheeks. “I’d ask if the prospect of sharing a bed with another man, or a qesh, or whatever else I may be that’s difficult for you to accept in fact makes you too uncomfortable, but frankly, considering the temperature has already dropped to concerning levels during this conversation, I don’t think it matters.”
It had gotten fucking cold. Garin suppressed his shiver and buffed his palms over his forearms. “Male qesh are not a problem for me.” Not in the slightest. And certainly not the particular qesh glaring at him now. Not in the way he implied, at least. “But I won’t put you in a situation that’s too much for you?—”
The blue scoured the gray off Sazahk’s face and Sazahk jabbed a finger into his own chest. “I am the one that offered. I am the one that knows what is and is not too much for me.” Purple added to the bruising mix of color across Sazahk’s throat as he snarled, “Do you think so poorly of me you don’t trust me to know even my own boundaries?”
“I…” Garin opened his mouth, but the words died in the air in front of him. Didn’t. He didn’t trust Sazahk to safeguard himself and now that Sazahk had called him out on it, he felt like an asshole. Shit. The man was a grown adult who had survived this long through what Garin suspected were some fucked up circumstances. “I’m sorry.”
Sazahk dropped his hand into his lap, his purple and blue morphing abruptly into orange as he blinked. “Oh. Good.”
“And you’re right. We should share the one dry sleeping bag we have, and I…” Garin inhaled and released a deep breath. “Should remove my clothing.”
And stop being weird about it. Garin had huddled for warmth before without it ever being anything more than a survival tactic. His Vanguard buddies would give him such hell if they saw him blushing as he pulled his shirt over his head.
“Yes, you should.” Sazahk turned to his samples again, but he glanced back at Garin enough times that Garin blushed harder as he popped the button on his pants.
Sazahk’s eyes flickered across his bare torso and hipbones as Garin shoved his wet pants off. Light green rippled over his cheeks and Garin bit the inside of his mouth to keep from making any facial expressions. Light green was the color Sazahk turned when he took samples of strangely colored hot springs. Meaning Garin’s body was at least as interesting to him as rare geological features?
Garin left his underwear on, too uncommonly body shy to strip down completely, and crouched to clear the rocks from the flattest surface. Screw finding the ration bars. He wasn’t hungry, and Sazahk never seemed to be.
At least the cold kept his cock from doing anything untoward. Like perk up at the feel of those dark, intense eyes on his exposed skin. Garin glanced at Sazahk and saw that the patch of green over his throat had darkened to the color of the pine tree Garin bought the family every Christmas now he had the money.
Shit. He focused on prying out a very stuck and very large rock. Maybe the cold wasn’t quite as much help as he’d thought. At least without a fire and with the sun set, the only light came from Sazahk’s lantern, so the dark gave him some cover.
“We should turn that off.” Garin pointed at the lantern with his chin. “Save its battery.”
“It’s solar-powered,” Sazahk muttered, but he packed up his supplies, nonetheless. “And I thought you’d rather find the rocks with your eyes than your back.”
“I did, thank you,” Garin replied quietly as he retrieved Sazahk’s messily bundled sleeping bag from his chaotic pack. Nudity had an amazingly detrimental effect on one’s willingness to pick a fight.
He laid out the bag.
He straightened it. Shifted it to the side. Shifted it back. Rotated it slightly.
Sazahk cleared his throat. “I don’t think you’re going to find a more comfortable spot in the rocky dirt than you have currently found.”
“No, you’re right.” Garin unzipped the bag, glanced down at his wet underwear, then at Sazahk.
“You’re remarkably self-conscious for a soldier.” Sazahk looked up into the stars. “Bar’in couldn’t care less who saw his genitals. He, of course, had a previous occupation that inured him to nudity, but neither Tar nor Fal’ran are picky about who they expose themselves to either. Patrick may be, but as a human among klah’eel, I’m sure he has other reasons, not to mention his feelings for Fal’ran, which I’m sure present all sorts of uncomfortable anatomical reactions.”
Garin stripped his underwear as Sazahk rambled, trying to avoid an uncomfortable anatomical reaction of his own, and slid naked into the sleeping bag as quickly as possible. He let out a sigh as the covers closed over him. Even before he’d warmed them up, they were a relief after the biting cold of the desert night. “Alright, I’m in.”
Sazahk toed off his boots before crawling in with him. After a paralyzing moment of indecision—Toward or away? Toward or away? Toward or away?—Garin turned away to give Sazahk his back and crammed himself as far into the edge of the sleeping bag as possible.
Luckily, Sazahk was a slender man and they fit without too much tangling, though it was tight. Garin lay on his side with his back to Sazahk and—judging from what Garin felt through the solid line of contact between them—Sazahk lay facing up to the stars.
That wasn’t the most space-efficient way for Sazahk to arrange himself, which meant he must have decided spooning Garin was too much for him, but that giving Garin his back was equally unacceptable. Garin bowed his head and buried his face in the soft interior of the sleeping bag as Sazahk flicked off the lantern. Now he felt bad again.
He was making Sazahk uncomfortable. He definitely was. If only he’d chosen the stupid Kevlar pack. That one wouldn’t have ripped so easily and dumped things into the hot spring. He’d considered it, but that pack didn’t have as many pockets and couldn’t be organized as well, and they weren’t going to be under attack, so he hadn’t thought he’d need the Kevlar pack.
Foolish. He should have been better prepared. Now he had Sazahk stiff and still against his back like he was afraid if he moved, Garin would blow up. The poor man probably wouldn’t even be able to sleep.
“Are you warm enough?”
Garin blinked at Sazahk’s murmured question and his chest loosened. “Yeah. Thanks.”
Sazahk didn’t sound so horribly uncomfortable. He sounded concerned, which was new. And nice.
With his guilt mitigated by Sazahk’s tender tone, Garin’s baser instincts crawled back out of the woodwork. The juxtaposition of the softness of the sleeping bag with the rough fabric of Sazahk’s clothes against Garin’s bare skin heated Garin’s lower belly.
He was naked in bed with a fascinating, and frustrating, but attractive man. They were all alone. Lying under a veritable tapestry of stars. And they’d had a stressful day. They could both use?—
Garin cringed as he plumped up, and his cockhead brushed against the inside of the sleeping bag. God, he did not want to smear pre-cum all over Sazahk’s blankets. He shifted his hips back to make a little space and pressed his ass against Sazahk’s thigh.
Sazahk shifted away. “Do you need more space?”
“No.” Garin cringed as he snapped his hips forward again and his cock found pressure that felt a little too good against the side of the sleeping bag, pulled taut from the tension of a single-person bag holding two people. “No, sorry, I’m fine.”
Supplies checklist.
Garin closed his eyes and summoned up an image of his supplies checklist: everything he’d packed, everything he’d used, everything he might have lost, and everything he still had. He worked through the list until his heart rate slowed, his breathing evened out, and his cock softened. Then he worked through it again until his limbs turned heavy.
Despite the awkward arrangement, between his checklist and the solid warmth of Sazahk at his back after such a nerve-wracking day, Garin drifted off.
Sazahk woke with his lips brushing the delicate skin at the top of Garin’s spine.
His nose filled with the man’s musk. A smell somehow more commanding than the sulfur that surrounded them.
He was so warm.
His mind still soft with sleep, Sazahk curled himself around the hot human body in his arms. Garin was shorter than him by a few inches, not so much that it registered normally, but enough that he fit against Sazahk’s chest with an unnatural perfection.
So warm. Sazahk nuzzled the back of Garin’s neck and?—
His eyes popped open, and he froze.
This was to be expected, he supposed. He licked his lips and took stock of his positioning. At some point in the night or early morning, he’d turned onto his side, facing Garin.
He’d been tempted to do it the night before, if only to make sharing the sleeping bag more comfortable, but it had felt too intimate. He’d ruled out turning the other way due to the chance that Garin might see the scar on the back of his neck.
Garin didn’t have any scars on the back of his neck. Sazahk trailed his eyes along the curve of Garin’s throat, from the hinge of his jaw to the swell of his shoulder. He had quite a lot of freckles, but that spoke of damage from the sun rather than a scalpel.
After turning on his side, Sazahk’s arm had found its way around Garin’s waist and one of his legs had slipped in between Garin’s calves, tangling their bodies together.
This was a completely natural situation, biologically speaking. Seeking warmth and contact was instinctual and had nothing to do with any sort of higher-order reasoning. Qesh and humans were both social creatures, and sleeping together was a normal way to build comfort and promote bonding.
It didn’t mean anything.
Sazahk sighed silently and released the tension in his body. It didn’t mean anything, and frankly, it was nice.
The sky had barely brightened and Garin slept heavily, so Sazahk buried his nose in Garin’s hair.
He didn’t remember the last time he’d held someone. He wasn’t sure he ever had. Sexual encounters had never really appealed to him. Sex was all well and good as a near biological necessity and it was a useful tool for decreasing stress, frustration, and for keeping his mind in working order, but the intimacy of it made Sazahk’s skin crawl.
He always ended encounters as soon as mutual release was achieved.
He never cuddled.
Sazahk tightened his grip around Garin’s waist and brushed his thumb along the smooth skin over Garin’s firm abs.
Maybe this was so pleasant because Garin was asleep, and thus inherently nonthreatening. Or maybe it was because Sazahk was doing the holding instead of being held. Or maybe this was a reaction to witnessing the man’s near death the day before.
Sazahk closed his eyes and inhaled Garin’s very-alive scent. All night as he’d searched for sleep, he’d watched a replay in his mind of Garin’s eyes widening when Sazahk yanked him off balance, then the ground breaking out from under him and sending him plunging to his doom.
Garin had tried to protect him. He’d shielded him from the spray of boiling water with his own body.
And Sazahk had nearly killed him.
He clutched Garin tight to his chest and curled around him. Garin made a sleepy noise as he nestled against him. For all that Sazahk ever wanted to help people, he’d almost killed the man he held in his arms.
Sazahk knew his reaction had been instinctual, automatic, arising from a place of trauma. But that didn’t stop the guilt and the shame from coloring his whole body gray. At least Garin, only now beginning to stir, was still too asleep to see it.
He was going to be kinder to Garin, Sazahk decided. More patient. He refused to compromise on his goals, but that didn’t mean he needed to oppose Garin at every turn. He didn’t need to be constantly on the offensive.
That was how Garin had nearly been boiled alive, and that was unacceptable. Sazahk didn’t need to be fond of the man to want to avoid killing him.
Although, the lurch in Sazahk’s heart as Garin made another sleepy sound and laced his fingers with the ones Sazahk brushed over his stomach felt far too much like fondness for comfort.
Sazahk quickly untangled himself, pulling his hand out from under Garin’s and unwrapping his limbs from around the man’s body.
Garin started awake with a sharp inhale. After a moment, he groaned and rolled away, apologizing in a voice rough with sleep. “Sorry.”
“It’s nothing.” Sazahk cringed as he clamored out of the sleeping bag. He should be the one apologizing, taking advantage of Garin’s incapacitation to feel him up. To grope him.
Not that he’d really groped him. Garin sat up, rubbing his eyes, and the blanket pooled around his hips, barely covering the very obvious bulge of his morning erection. Sazahk swallowed. Groping would have been dropping his hand a little lower and wrapping his fingers around that hard length.
He’d thought the skin of Garin’s stomach was hot to the touch. How might his cock, flushed with blood, burn against Sazahk’s palm?
Sazahk spun away and reached for Garin’s bag, digging around for the perennial protein pouches. That was not an acceptable thought to have about a colleague. Especially a colleague he would continue to share a sleeping bag with. But his hands turned green anyway as they pulled the protein pouches out of a ball of wet shirts.
Qesh didn’t get morning wood. It was a fascinating quirk of male human biology, and despite himself, Sazahk wondered about the differences between Garin’s morning erections, and his erections brought about by actual arousal. Would he respond to manual stimulation in the same way? How did he respond to manual stimulation of his cock in general? Sazahk struggled to imagine the uptight, by-the-book, controlling man lost to pleasure.
Sazahk gritted his teeth and shoved a protein pack at Garin in a hand spiraling with gray and green. It was hard to imagine, and he definitely shouldn’t try.
Garin’s eyes tracked the swirling colors up Sazahk’s forearm and frowned at him but accepted the pouch. “Thanks.”
“I think the optimal next action for us to take is to stay here for one more day.” Sazahk took himself as far from Garin as possible without being intolerably awkward. “There are a number of pools and microbial mats I’d like to sample in the area, as well as geysers to observe, and you can use the time to mend your pack and spread your clothing and supplies out to maximize the surface area exposed to the sun during the day’s hottest hours.”
“To dry my things, you mean.” Garin’s lips quirked around the protein pouch tube.
“Yes, that’s what I said.” Sazahk fiddled with his own pouch before scarfing down a tasteless, chalky mouthful. “And don’t bother with a lecture about being careful around the dangerous things. I’ll be careful.”
“I’ll consider the lecture given.” Garin set his empty pouch aside and moved to stand before stopping himself, a hand clutched around the edge of the blanket.
Right. Naked. And shy, for some reason Sazahk couldn’t comprehend. Garin’s chest and back bore plenty of scars and sun damage, freckles scattered between pale lines and gnarled starbursts of ill-healed flesh, but they also had the prerequisite defined musculature and low fat percentage to be considered highly attractive. The covered bulge Sazahk had glimpsed a few minutes ago indicated that the size of his genitals was at least average, perhaps above average.
From what Sazahk could gather, Garin had no reason not to preen. He could, maybe, be missing a testicle. It wouldn’t be the most uncommon torture technique and most of Garin’s record was redacted, so something like that could be hiding in the files. He didn’t show any other signs of similar torture, though, such as missing eyes or fingers.
Garin cleared his throat and when Sazahk glanced at his face to see him blushing, he realized he’d been staring.
“I’m wondering why you’re shy.”
Garin made a strangled sound. “What?”
“Objectively, your body and face have all the markers of health and hardiness that science has identified as making up attractiveness in the human species.” Sazahk crossed his legs as he studied Garin. “Most of those markers are effective cross-species, meaning that qesh and klah’eel would generally find you attractive as well. You’ve seen mirrors, I’m sure. You must know this about yourself. So why, when it’s a matter of survival and comfort, have you been so cautious with nudity around me?”
Instead of loosening his grip, Garin’s knuckles turned white around the blanket. “It’s not about what I look like.”
Sazahk cocked his head. “Then what is it about?”
“It’s…” Garin’s face scrunched, then he blew out a sigh. “It’s nothing. It’s a habit.”
“A habit, that doesn’t…” Sazahk trailed off when, in a rush of movement, Garin shoved the sleeping bag down and stood up, fully nude. He was—Sazahk swallowed around his dry mouth—exactly as objectively good-looking as Sazahk had assumed. Long-limbed and lean with a well-sized, half-hard cock and two testicles nestled in a well-trimmed thatch of dark hair.
“Happy now?” Garin raised his eyebrows and Sazahk dragged his eyes up from noting that he had been circumcised.
Sazahk gathered his wits, scattered by the sudden expanse of skin before him, and shrugged. “My happiness isn’t affected either way. I was merely curious about your psychology.”
“My psychology is fine.” Garin crouched beside his pack and pulled out everything that had gotten wet. Which was everything.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.” Sazahk assembled his supplies, keeping his gaze on his work instead of his naked companion, and slung his pack over his shoulder. “I’m going to investigate the pink pool over there.”
“Be safe.” Garin laid a shirt and a pair of pants out over a rock as the sun broke free of the horizon.
“I will,” Sazahk scowled, but refrained from rolling his eyes.
Stepping around a brilliant orange mat and halfway to the pink pool, curiosity about what lay before him drove out all thoughts of Garin’s physiology and psychology.
For most of the day, at least.
Fixation with everything around him kept Sazahk focused. Life in the Dead Zone. The ecosystem was fed through the energy and unique chemistry of the thermal pools, and it seemed to have never been exposed to the defoliants that had ravaged the rest of the area, but it was life nonetheless, and it was fascinating.
And was its fecundity really only due to the defoliants never having been massively deployed against this area? Or was it that somehow, in some way, the persistent organic pollutants had been broken down? And if they had been, could whatever have broken down the pollutants here be scaled up to clean the rest of the Dead Zone?
For hours, these questions occupied Sazahk’s mind, with only the briefest of incursions by other rogue queries. Such as: how had Garin gotten the particularly vicious scar that cut across his left ribs? And were all his freckles from time spent in the military, or had he spent hours in the sun as a child as well? Did he enjoy poring over the maps he sat studying so closely? Had he been trained to sew holes in packs or had he learned to sew growing up? Did he find it uncomfortable to shave with a dry razor, or was he accustomed to it?
And then the recurring question: how would Sazahk resist the urge to cling to him again that night?