15. Chapter 15 #2
Lorne laughed, breathless, and the laugh came apart into a moan as Valdyr's fingers found the place that unmade him, and Valdyr caught the sound in his mouth and kissed him through it.
The tenderness and the intensity and the dry vulgarity all at once, so entirely him that Lorne could no longer separate the wanting from the loving. They had never been separate things.
"Now," Lorne gasped. "Valdyr, now, I can't wait."
Valdyr withdrew his hand, and positioned himself, and pressed in.
Without the heat, without the haze, Lorne felt every part of it. The stretch, the fullness, the slow thorough taking of space that his body gave up willingly, the slick easing the way, the sensation of Valdyr inside him settling into place with the rightness of a key going home.
Valdyr's forehead came down to his.
"All right?"
"More than. Move. Please."
He moved. The rhythm was deep and unhurried, each stroke complete, and Lorne felt it everywhere and not only where they were joined.
In his chest. In his throat. In his fingertips where they gripped Valdyr's arms. It was the pace of a man not chasing anything, building something instead, layer on layer, on the stubborn conviction that how a thing is done matters as much as whether it gets done.
"You feel incredible," Valdyr said at his ear, wrecked and honest. "Every time. I don't have the words."
"You have plenty of words. Most of them vulgar."
"Fine." A stroke that went deeper and harder and took Lorne's breath. "You feel like you were made for my cock and I could stay inside you the rest of my life and it wouldn't be long enough."
"That's very..."
"Vulgar? You asked."
"I asked for nothing of the sort, you..."
The rest went out of him, because Valdyr had slid a hand under his hip and lifted and the new angle put every stroke against the place that turned his vision to static.
His hands scrabbled at Valdyr's back, nails dragging over scales, and Valdyr growled, low and chest-deep, and Lorne felt it down his spine.
The pace tightened. Not frantic. Building.
The deliberate patience giving way to something more honest, the bodies taking the decision off the minds.
Lorne got his legs around Valdyr's waist and pulled him deeper and their scents ran together in the warm air of the small room until there was no line at all between honey and woodsmoke.
Valdyr's hand found Lorne's where it gripped the sheet.
Their fingers laced. He pinned it beside Lorne's head and the grip was firm and Lorne's fingers tightened in answer, and the plain enormous intimacy of holding hands while the rest of them spoke another language entirely cracked something open in Lorne's chest.
"I love you," Lorne said.
It came without planning. It surfaced the way seeds surface, pushing up through the dark toward light, unstoppable and green.
Valdyr's rhythm faltered. His breath caught. His eyes found Lorne's, and the expression in them was one Lorne had never seen.
He had catalogued that face in every configuration it had. The stone of the general. The dark intensity of the alpha. The reluctant almost-smile that had to be earned with teasing. The volcanic fury of the stable. The unguarded focus of the hidden hours.
This was all of them at once, and his eyes were bright with something that was not candlelight.
"Say it again."
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you. I love you. I..."
Valdyr kissed him, and the kiss took the words and everything under them, and his hips drove forward and Lorne cried out into his mouth.
"I love you," Valdyr said against his lips, broken and raw, out of the place behind the lock that was no longer locked, out of the room that had stood empty for forty-five years and was now so full it could not hold itself.
"I have loved you since the garden. Since the dirt and the bare feet and the bloody flower.
Every day since, and every day after this, and after that if there is an after, and I... "
He stopped. His jaw clenched. It was too large to get out of his mouth.
"I know," Lorne whispered. His hand came up to Valdyr's face, and his thumb crossed the cheekbone and came away wet. "I know, my love. I know."
They came together, not quite at once but close.
Lorne first, the whole thing rolling through him enormous and warm, his body clenching and his voice breaking on Valdyr's name.
Then Valdyr, following him over with a groan dragged up from somewhere deep, driving forward and holding, his face pressed into Lorne's throat.
Into the throat.
Lorne felt his mouth there. The press of lips against the soft curve where neck met shoulder. The heat of his breath. The tremor in his jaw and the war going on inside it.
The teeth. Close. The pressure of fangs against skin, not breaking, not piercing. Just there. A question asked with the body instead of the mouth.
Lorne got both arms around Valdyr's head and held him there, against his throat, against the gland, against the exact place a mark would go.
And Valdyr shook against him and did not bite.
Because it was not his to take. Because the mark would change everything. Because the cost of it would land on Lorne and not on him.
Because love, for Valdyr, had come to mean holding back the one thing he wanted most.
Lorne held him through it. The aftershocks moved through both of them.
The candle guttered. The rosemary on the table put out its own small note and the lavender in the drawer answered it, and between them and around them the blended scent of what they were to each other, not sealed, not permanent, and by now deep enough that anyone standing on the wrong side of that door would have known everything.
Afterward, Lorne sprawled across Valdyr's chest, which had become his position, draped over the man like a cat on a warm stone with one leg thrown across his thigh and his fingers idling on the scales of his forearm.
Valdyr's hand was in his hair, slow and rhythmic, the petting motion that comforted the alpha at least as much as the omega.
"Tell me about the hives again."
"You've heard about the hives a hundred times."
"Tell me again."
Lorne smiled into his chest.
"Eight of them. All along the south wall of the kitchen garden, where the sun hits first. Blue and yellow, because bees navigate by color and I wanted them to have something cheerful to come home to.
I mixed the pigment myself, woad and marigold.
The first year the paint ran in the rain and the whole row looked like it had been attacked by an artistic puddle. "
Valdyr's chest rumbled. Not a laugh. The Valdyr equivalent, amusement conducted through a man who refused on principle to admit that things were funny.
"Arin looks after them now. She's good. She's loud, which the bees have opinions about, and she uses the metal hive tool no matter how many times I tell her the wooden one is gentler, and she'll go on using it, and I've made my peace with it." A pause. "I miss them."
"The bees."
"The bees. The sound they make first thing, when the sun comes over the wall and they start to warm up and the pitch changes.
It starts low, almost a rumble, and then it lifts and spreads, and by mid-morning the whole row sounds like it's singing.
I used to stand in the middle of it with my eyes shut and just listen. "
Valdyr's hand moved in his hair.
"You'll have them again," he said. Quiet. Certain.
Lorne's fingers stilled on the scales. "Will I?"
"I'll build you an apiary. Wherever we end up. Eight hives, blue and yellow, with a lavender bed beside them."
"Wherever we end up." Lorne turned the words over. The future tense. The we. The assumption of a life on the far side of this castle and this king. "You say that like it's a certainty."
"It is."
"Valdyr..."
"It is. I don't know the how yet and I don't know the when. But that you and I will have a life that is ours, with bees in it and lavender and a bed big enough for the pair of us, is a certainty. I'll make it one. That's a promise."
Lorne was quiet a long while, his hand flat on Valdyr's chest over the heart, the beat of it steady under his palm.
"Lavender and rosemary."
"Obviously."
"Obviously," Lorne said, and the word was a smile and a promise together.
It happened without planning.
Later. Much later. The candle down to a stub and the room nearly dark, one thin line of moonlight through the gap in the shutters.
Lorne in Valdyr's lap with his forehead against his throat, breathing him in.
Valdyr's hands in his hair. They were talking about nothing, about the hives, about whether lavender or rosemary was the better smell, an argument that was ritual by now and beloved for it.
And Lorne felt so safe and so loved and so entirely himself that something inside him let go all at once.
Not gradually. All at once, the way a fist opens. The way a held breath goes. The way a seed splits in the dark.
He tilted his head back.
He bared his throat.
The movement was slow and deliberate and it was not submission.
It was nothing like the baring the king demanded, exposure extracted as a form of obedience.
It was the opposite of that. It was trust. It was an offering, given freely, by a man who had spent months having his choices taken from him one at a time, choosing this with clear eyes.
Valdyr went rigid under him.
His breath stopped. His hands closed in Lorne's hair, not pulling, only clenching, the involuntary grip of a body receiving a signal it had been waiting on since the first breath of honey on a night wind.
The tremor started in his hands and went up through his arms into his chest, and Lorne could feel the whole war of it.
Lorne reached up. His hand found Valdyr's jaw, and his fingers were steady. Steadier than they had been for anything else in months, because this was the thing he was most certain of in his life.