13. Nerina #2
He turns and looks at me with an expression I have not seen on him before. Not the authority register. Not the recalibration. Something that is slower than both of those, and warmer, the expression of something that has been very still for a very long time beginning to move.
“Broad shoulders,” he repeats.
“Structurally,” I say. “I’m making a practical observation.”
“Of course.”
“About load-bearing capacity.”
“Naturally.”
His voice has dropped into a register I have not heard before and the rain is loud on the rock above us and the shelter is small and the warmth coming off him is doing something to the cold of the air between us and I am looking up at him because there is nowhere else to look and he is looking down at me with those gold eyes that have stopped doing the recalibration and started doing something else entirely and the practical observation I was making has entirely vacated the premises.
I become aware that my back is against the rock face.
I become aware that I put it there.
I become aware that I am not moving away from it.
“Nerina,” he says. Just my name. Not ‘little lass’.
Not ‘you’. My name, in that dropped register, with the rain running off the rock above us and the storm making its case outside and the firelight from the rebuilt fire catching the wet bronze of his skin and the silver of his hair and the gold of his eyes all at once.
I have been rained on and worked half to death and this island has been trying to discourage me since I arrived and I am on the wrong side of three days of insufficient sleep and I am looking up at Maelor Vhastyr, Lord of the Black Spire, who came back to the beach when he didn’t have to and fixed my wedge and ran my stern line in a storm and said my name like it was something worth saying, and the dormant thing that woke up in the hot spring yesterday is no longer dormant and is no longer a thing I am managing.
I reach up and put my hand against the burn scars at his throat.
He goes very still.
Not the controlled stillness of authority. The stillness of something that was not expecting to be touched and has stopped everything it was doing to be present for it.
“How far down do they go,” I say. Quietly. Not a challenge. Just the question I have been not asking since the first day on the beach.
His eyes do something I have never seen them do before.
“Further than you can see from here,” he says.
I reach for the lapels of his coat and push it back off his shoulders.
Not a request. He lets it go. The shirt underneath is dark and simple and I take the hem of it and pull it over his head and he raises his arms and lets me do that too, and then he is bare to the waist in the firelight and I look at him the way I look at things I am trying to understand properly.
The burn scars run further than I thought.
From the jaw down the throat, across the left collarbone, branching into the chest in the way of old fire damage that had time and reach before it was stopped.
I reach out and trace the line of them with my fingers, not tentatively, not with performance, the same calm directness I bring to everything — following the raised skin from his throat down past the collarbone and flat against his chest where the scarring fades into the bronze of him.
My fingers rest there.
“Does it hurt,” I ask. Sincerely.
“Not anymore,” he says. “But I recall the pain sometimes.”
I lean in and press my lips against the scar at his throat. Hold them there for a moment. Then I pull back and look at his eyes, the gold of them shimmering amber in the firelight, and my expression has come down from the register I usually keep it at.
“The phantom pain,” I say. “I know it well.” My hand moves to my forearm without my directing it, thumb finding the hook-catch scar the way it always does.
He looks at me. Something is building in his eyes that I have not seen there before and do not have a name for and do not need one.
My hand returns to his chest, palm flat against the skin. “Any others.”
“Show me yours first.”
I pull my coat off and drop it on the sand. Then I take the hem of my linen shirt and pull it over my head. The firelight is warm on my skin. I point to my forearm. “You’ve seen this one.”
He takes my wrist and raises it and presses his lips to the scar there, the way I pressed mine to his throat.
“I also have this one.” I point to the left of my navel, an old scar, white and faded, a docking hook that caught me wrong in the second year on the wharves.
He holds my eyes and bends and kisses that one too.
He reaches for the waistband of my canvas trousers.
“I don’t have any scars down there,” I say.
A small smile creases his face. It is the first full smile I have seen on him and it does considerable damage to my composure.
He stands and pulls the top of his own trousers down to reveal a small scar just below the left hip — old, clean-edged, precise rather than accidental. I look at it, then look up at him, then kneel and kiss it. My hands find the waistband and I pull the trousers down and he steps out of them.
“You are very capable, aren’t you?” he says.
His cock has stiffened and arched upward in the firelight and I look at it with wide eyes, then lean forward and press my lips gently against the shaft.
“No scars there,” he says.
“I know.” I look up at him. “It just looks like it hasn’t been kissed in a while.”
I reach out and cup his balls in my palm — large and full and smooth, and slide my tongue up the shaft to the head in one slow movement.
He pulls back and sits down in the sand beside me. He looks into my eyes and something in his face has the quality I now recognize as a decision being made at considerable cost to his control, the hesitation of six centuries of discipline meeting something it does not have a protocol for.
“I’m sorry —”
He kisses me. Hard and immediate, his lips dry and warm with a few grains of sand in them from the beach, pressing into mine with the conviction of something that has stopped apologizing for itself mid-sentence and decided to be certain instead. I close my eyes and kiss him back.
His hand moves to the waistband of my canvas trousers and removes them.
I find his cock with my hand and stroke it slowly, feeling it stiffen further against my palm.
He wraps his arms around me and draws me forward until I am straddling his waist, his cock pressed against me, and I am aware of the heat of him and the warmth and the way soft skin against skin feels after days of cold and salt and nothing gentle anywhere.
He shifts and rises to his knees, taking me up with him. His cock is pressed against the front of my pussy, the heat of it, the moisture, the blend of soft skin against soft skin. I reach between us and guide him inside me.
“Fuck,” I moan. “It hurts. Go slow.”
He pulls back and kisses my lips again, then tries again slowly. With each rock he penetrates a little deeper.
“Oh shit, that feels so good,” I breathe.
“You feel amazing,” he says. His voice has gone somewhere I have never heard it.
My lips press tight against his skin. He pushes me down gently, going deeper, and he spits and lets it sit on the shaft of his cock, pulls out and works it up and down over the head and re-enters me.
“Fuck yes,” I moan. “Fuck yes.”
He starts to fuck me faster, not deeper, faster. My pussy loosens around him and soon his balls are slapping against me.
“I’m going to c—” I moan, and explode onto his cock.
He keeps rocking. “Stop,” I manage. “I can’t.”