13. Nerina #3
He withdraws. I get to my knees and take him in my mouth, working his shaft with one hand and his balls with the other.
I take it all, twisting my hand up and down faster and faster.
I feel his balls tighten and then the roar from his throat and I pull back and he comes on my tits, the base of my throat, the side of my cheek, and the fire catches all of it in amber.
His chest is heaving. I meet his eyes, my cheeks flushed. The old scarring at his throat is flushed darker against the bronze, and he looks, finally, completely undone.
“Sorry,” I say. “It started to hurt.”
He looks at me. His breathing is uneven in a way I have never heard from him and I find I am unreasonably, privately delighted about this.
“Don’t apologize,” he says. The corner of his mouth moves. “Next time we will take our time.”
“I’m used to pain,” I say. I sense his face soften to a frown. I turn my eyes up at him. “Just not used to it feeling so good.”
My hand lingers on him. “You’re hung like a dragon,” I say.
He looks at me. Something in his expression does something I will spend a long time thinking about. “I am a dragon,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “I’m saying it as a compliment.”
The storm runs itself out sometime before dawn.
I know this because the sound of it changes, the wall of rain becoming intermittent, the wind dropping from argument to suggestion, the particular quality of silence that follows weather when the weather has finally said everything it had to say and gone.
The fire has burned low. The shelter is warmer than the beach outside it. All of this reaches me with the peripheral attention of a person whose focus is somewhere else entirely.
He is awake. I know this without looking. There is a quality to him when he is still-and-awake versus still-and-asleep that I have apparently learned to distinguish. Information about myself I am going to need time to process.
Neither of us speaks.
The silence has none of the weight it used to carry between us — none of the territorial pressure, none of the negotiation underneath.
It is simply two people in a shelter after a storm, and the fire, and the sound of the tide settling back into its ordinary register after having had opinions about the weather.
I look at the overhang. The wedges have held. The repair I spent two days on has survived its first real test and the rock face is intact and the mooring lines are taut and the ‘Tenacious’ is still on the beach where I left it.
Something about this feels important in a way that exceeds the structural.
I do not look at him. I am aware, with the same clarity I bring to everything I would prefer not to think about directly, that looking at him right now would require me to make decisions about what I am looking at and what it means and I do not have the architecture for those decisions yet.
I will need to build it. I have built things from worse materials.
“The council session,” I say, to the dying fire. “That’s today.”
“At midday.”
I absorb this. “And what are you going to tell them?”
The fire shifts and settles in the silence before he answers.
“The truth,” he says. “That the work is good. That the arrangement is viable. That there are security questions about the corridor approach that require answers I can provide and that removing me before those questions are answered is strategically wasteful.”
I listen to the reasons he is giving. I recognize them as real.
they are not invented, they are not cover for something else.
They are true. They are also not all of the truth, and we both know this, and neither of us is going to say so at five in the morning in a rock shelter with the storm going quiet around us.
“And if they vote to remove me anyway.”
A pause. Longer than the others.
“They won’t.”
Not ‘I won’t let them.’ Not a promise. Just the flat certainty of a lord who has six centuries of authority and seven hundred years of knowing how rooms work and has apparently decided, without announcing the decision, that this is not the outcome.
I look at him then.
Looking at the fire. The gold eyes are amber in this light, the predator’s slit of the pupil softer in the low flame, and the marks at his throat that I pressed my palm against last night are visible above the collar and I am not thinking about what came after that.
I am thinking about it constantly. I am not thinking about it in a way I intend to examine before I have eaten and the sun has come up properly and I have rebuilt at least a partial version of the composure I have spent the last twelve hours systematically dismantling.
“May Lord,” I say.
The corner of his mouth moves. It is not a smile exactly. It is the place a smile would be if he had more practice at them.
“Ashvale,” he says back.
The fire settles. The tide runs its quiet register outside. The dawn is coming in the slow, diffused way of this island, the permanent cloud at the peak softening the light into something gradual.
I have until midday.
I decide midday is a long time away and close my eyes.