15. Chapter 15
They could not stay apart.
Lorne had known that before the forest. He had known it in the greenhouse when Valdyr's thumb took the dirt off his jaw.
He had known it in the stable when his own mouth found Valdyr's and stopped a killing.
He had known it in every stolen hour and every garden dusk and every sprig of lavender left on a pillow in the dark.
The forest had changed the knowing. Before, the pull had been a want.
Enormous and constant and technically resistible, a thing that could be managed with distance and discipline and the careful choreography of almost. After the forest it was not a want.
It was a fact, like gravity, like the way roots go down and stems go up.
Their bodies had been together and the being together had rewritten something in both of them, and what followed was not distance. It was amputation.
Three days back in the castle. Three days of masks and corridors and measured intervals. Three days of sitting at dinner with the king's satisfaction filling the hall and Valdyr's stone face at the far end of the table and the bond stretched tight enough that Lorne could feel it in his teeth.
On the fourth evening he went to Valdyr's quarters.
He did not decide to go. His body went. His bare feet carried him through the corridors the way they carried him to gardens and greenhouses and bedsides and kitchens, toward the thing that needed tending. The knock was theirs. Two taps, a pause, a third.
The door opened.
Valdyr stood in it in his shirtsleeves with the collar loose and his hair disheveled in the way it went when he had been dragging his hands through it, which he did when he was agitated, which was most of the time and particularly now.
One candle behind him. The rosemary on the table.
In the drawer beside it, twenty-three sprigs of lavender.
They looked at each other.
Lorne stepped forward and Valdyr's arms opened and they came together in the doorway with a force that was not desperate but certain, two bodies that had found their arrangement and declined to be rearranged.
Lorne's face went into Valdyr's throat and the scent filled his lungs and the tension that had been building for three days went quiet all at once.
"I can't do this anymore," he said into the skin. "The distance. I can't."
"I know."
"Three days felt like..."
"A month. I know."
"Stop knowing things before I say them."
"Stop thinking things I've already thought."
Lorne pulled back to see him. Valdyr's face in the candlelight was planes and shadow, and his expression was not stone. It was open and raw and carrying the same unsustainable weight of pretending.
"I'm not trying anymore," Lorne said. "I'm not trying to stay away from you. I'm done pretending I can live in this castle and not be near you. I'm done walking past your door. I'm done sleeping in a bed that doesn't smell like you and smiling at a king who isn't you, and I am done."
It came out fierce and quiet and level. No anger in it. No desperation. The calm of a man who had been pushed past the limit of what he could carry and found clarity waiting on the other side instead of collapse.
Valdyr's hands settled at his waist, thumbs moving in small circles through the linen.
"Get inside," he said. "Before somebody sees you."
Lorne got inside. The door closed. The lock turned.
They came together in the candlelight.
Not the frantic heat-driven urgency of the forest. Not wave after wave of biology overriding everything in its path.
This was slower. This was two people choosing each other with every faculty intact, without the excuse of heat, without the plausible deniability of instinct, with nothing between them but want and love and the decision to stop pretending either could be refused.
Valdyr undressed him slowly.
The shirt first, his hands finding the hem and lifting, fingers trailing up Lorne's sides, and Lorne raised his arms and the cool air met his skin and Valdyr's palms were on him at once.
Flat against his ribs. Tracing the line of his waist. Broad scarred hands moving over him with an attention that was not urgency but study, learning him again, the way a man goes back to a book he loves and finds new things in passages he could already recite.
"You're thinner," Valdyr said, frowning.
"I've been eating."
"You've been eating what Greta saves you. Which is not enough."
"It's plenty."
"It isn't. I'm going to speak to Greta."
"You are not going to bully the cook into feeding me more."
"I don't bully. I express concern with emphasis."
"That's bullying."
"That's leadership."
Lorne laughed, bright and startled, and it broke the solemnity into something lighter. Valdyr's mouth twitched. The almost-smile, the one his face fought on principle and had been losing to more and more often.
Lorne's hands found his shirt and pulled, and Valdyr raised his arms, and then Lorne's hands were on the broad chest and the scars and the scales that came up off his forearms onto his shoulders and armored the sides of his ribs.
Smooth and cool under his fingertips, overlapping in a pattern that was organic and exact.
"I love these," Lorne murmured, tracing one.
"I've said so before and I'm saying it again.
I love the way they feel. I love the way the pattern changes here, at the edge, where they go over into skin.
I love that they're warm when you're warm and cool when you're settled and that I can feel your pulse through them if I press.
" He pressed. It beat against his fingertip, steady. "I love that they're part of you."
Valdyr caught his wrist. Not hard. Holding. The candlelight found the gold flecks in his eyes, which Lorne had only discovered recently and only ever at this distance, and which had felt like finding a door in a wall.
"You say things like that and you have no idea what it does to me."
"Tell me what it does."
"It makes me want to keep you. Permanently. In every way a person can be kept."
"That isn't the terrifying declaration you think it is."
"It should be."
"It's the best thing anyone has ever said to me."
Valdyr pulled him in. The kiss was thorough and unhurried and tasted of the wine he had been drinking and the chamomile Lorne had been drinking and, underneath both, the thing that was only theirs.
They undressed each other the rest of the way, slowly, hands on skin that was not new but was newly chosen. Touched not because heat demanded it. Because touching had become a language and they were getting fluent in it.
Valdyr lifted him onto the narrow military bed that had never been adequate for one man his size, and Lorne reached up, and Valdyr came down after him.
Their bodies lined up. Chest to chest, hip to hip, Lorne's thighs opening around the breadth of him, and the full length of the contact set the bond humming through both of them. Not the roar of the heat. A hum. Deep and resonant and settled.
"Tell me what you want," Valdyr said against his throat, and his voice did the rough thing that tightened Lorne's belly.
"You. All of you. The way you were in the shelter, but here. In this bed. Where we spent all those nights just holding on to each other while I wanted this the entire time and couldn't have it."
"You could have had it. You only had to ask."
"You told me you'd pin me to this bed if I touched your scales again."
"That was a warning, not a deterrent."
"There's a distinction?"
"There really is."
Valdyr's mouth curved against his throat, and Lorne felt it, the rare smile that lived against his skin and nowhere else in the world, and his chest ached with it.
Valdyr's hand went down his body slowly, finding the places he had learned in the shelter.
The spot below his ear that made him shiver.
The crease of his hip that took his breath.
The inside of his thigh, where the skin was thin and where a rough finger drew a line that lifted Lorne's hips off the bed.
"I learned things about you out there," Valdyr said into his skin. "I've been thinking about them."
"What things?"
"Things I want to do again. Properly. Without the heat making both of us half mad."
"I wasn't half mad. I was fully mad. You were the measured one."
"I was holding on by my fingernails while you made sounds that would have broken a monk, and I am not a monk."
"You were restrained."
"I was dying."
"You were perfect."
His hand slid between Lorne's thighs. Lorne was already wet.
Not the desperate overwhelming slick of the heat but the warm steady arousal of an omega in reach of his alpha, his body doing what it did for Valdyr and no one else.
The proof of it. The biological fact that no decree and no ceremony had ever been able to override.
His fingers found him and slid in, and Lorne's back came off the bed and his hands flew to Valdyr's shoulders and the sound that came out of him was open and unguarded and joyful.
"There it is," Valdyr murmured, dark and warm and unbearably tender. "That's what I wanted to hear."
He worked him open with the same deliberate thoroughness he brought to everything, patient and precise, reading Lorne's body the way he read ground, finding the places that made him gasp and the ones that made him grip hard enough to leave marks.
His fingers curled and Lorne's vision went white and he caught his own lip between his teeth to keep it in, and Valdyr's free hand took his jaw, gentle and firm, and tipped his face up.
"Don't. I told you. I want every sound."
"These walls aren't thick enough for every sound."
"Then the castle can listen. I don't give a shit."
"You're impossible."
"And you're the prettiest thing ever to be in this bed, which includes me, and I am very handsome."