22. Nerina
NERINA
Igo to the spring in the afternoon, two days after the forest.
Not impulsively. I have been thinking about it since I sat at the fire with my hands flat on my knees waiting for them to stop shaking, since I looked at the shelter wall and knew what I was going to write on it.
The thinking has not been complicated. It has been the kind of clarity that arrives after everything else has been stripped away — after the arithmetic and the arrangement and the one more day and Vaelka’s precise accounting of what my presence here costs.
What is left, when you remove all of that, is simple.
Simpler than I am usually comfortable with.
I take the path I know, not northeast, and I move through the trees with the careful attention of a navigator who learned this forest matters and carries the scar to prove it.
The spring announces itself ahead of sight — thermal water and mineral warmth on the air, the smell of the island’s deep heat rising through the rock. I follow it.
The pool is dark and still and steaming in the late afternoon light.
The gap in the canopy above lets in amber, the day going golden at its edges, the kind of light that makes everything it touches look worth keeping.
I sit at the rim for a moment and look at the worn stones and think about the hands that wore them smooth.
Then I unlace my boots and set the knife on the flat stone within reach and take off my coat and fold it and take off my shirt and fold that too and I get in.
The water receives me. Completely. Immediately.
I keep the bound arm above the surface for the first minute and then I let it go because the thermal water has been doing its work since I arrived and I trust it now.
The warmth moves through the muscles of my shoulders, the ache of the arm, the accumulated weight of twelve days of this island and everything it has required of me.
I float on my back and look at the amber light through the canopy gap and I breathe.
I hear the heel strike on the root formation at the rim before I see him.
Deliberate. Announced. He has learned this, or always known it, that this place requires announcement, that arriving unannounced here is a different kind of thing.
I right myself in the water and look up at the rim and he is standing there with the late light behind him and his hair down and the dark coat open at the collar and the burn scars visible at his throat and he is looking at the canopy with the careful aim of a man who knows what arriving unannounced here means.
I am not going to let him aim it anywhere else tonight.
“Maelor,” I say.
He comes down from the rim and crouches at the edge of the pool and the steam rises between us and my wet hand finds the silver-white scarring at his throat, the ones I already know, that I traced in the firelight of the shelter, that I have thought about in the days between then and now with the particular persistence of a mind that has decided something is worth thinking about.
“The second time is supposed to be easier,” I say.
“Is it?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never done anything twice before that was worth doing twice.”
Something shifts in the gold eyes. Not the recalibration I know — something slower than that, warmer, the look of a creature who has been waiting to be seen directly and has just been seen.
He takes off the coat. Sets it on the flat stone beside my knife, which strikes me, as small things do when your attention is heightened, as the most natural thing.
He pulls the shirt over his head and I take him in in the amber light the way I took him in by firelight, the burn scars branching from his jaw across his collarbone and into his chest, the silver threading his dark hair, the breadth of him that I have stopped finding intimidating and started finding simply true, the way certain facts about the world are simply true.
He steps into the water.
It comes to his hips and then his waist as he moves deeper, and I watch him come toward me with the unhurried certainty of a man whose decision was made somewhere back in the trees and is not being revisited, and when he reaches me he stops and we are close enough that the steam rises between us like something the water is trying to say.
I reach up and trace the burn scars the way I traced them before.
Jaw, throat, collarbone, branching into his chest. I already know the map of them.
I trace it anyway because this time I am not discovering, I am choosing, and the difference between those two things is the entire distance between the storm shelter and this afternoon.
He finds the hook-catch scar on my forearm — above the binding, the old silver one he has already put his lips against once. His thumb moves along the length of it. He already knows this scar. He is choosing it anyway.
That is the whole of it. That is the thing I have been circling for twelve days.
I put both hands against his chest and push myself up out of the water and kiss him, and he receives this the way the spring receives everything — completely, without reservation, with the quality of something that has been warm and waiting and is not surprised to be found.
He lifts me and I go, and the warm water moves around us both and I wind my legs around him and feel the full length of his massive cock against me.
My pussy drips — with water or want, I’m not sure — and the deliberateness of this, the fact that we are both here with full information and full intention and nothing being named for the first time, makes it quieter than the shelter and more devastating for the quiet.
He takes his time. I loosen to him slowly, opening, taking him thrust by thrust, the words stripped from me. Just long and full inside me. He grabs my face and kisses me hard. “Your pace,” he says. “You lead.”
My hips push against his. My pussy stretched around him and I want more. He rocks into me. So fucking full. I cry out. He reaches down and works his thumb against me, using the heat of the water and my body to go deeper. His cock finds the deepest part of me and I still want more. “Faster,” I say.
His hips crash into me. His lips press against my skin.
The water splashes between us with each thrust. Shit, I just came.
I grip him and go under, my whole body shaking, my juices flowing hot between us.
He grabs my chin and holds my eyes and keeps moving, slow and deliberate, watching me come down.
“You good?” he asks.
I shake my head. Still trembling. He stills.
“Bend over,” he says. “Hands against the wall.”
I do. My palms flat against the rock, the warm water at my thighs.
I feel his lips press against my back and then the top of my ass, his tongue entering it followed by a finger.
I squirm as his hands spread my cheeks wide, his tongue pressed into me.
Fuck, that’s good. He slides his tongue and finger into my pussy and works me from behind.
“You have awakened desires I have forgotten about,” he grunts into my cheeks, before he stands and enters me from behind, his hands wrapping around my waist and pulling me back until he is fully seated.
He presses on the small of my back and I arch into it and he finds a rhythm — deep, steady, relentless.
One hand moves to my hip to angle me. The other stays on my back, holding me exactly where he wants me, and I let him because I am past having opinions about anything except this.
“I have forgotten what it’s like to fuck someone you lo— like,” he says.
The word that didn’t finish lands in the water between us. I feel it more than I hear it. He crashes his hips into me one last time and lets out a long grunted roar and spends deep inside me — his cock hot, sticky inside me as he finishes.
He pulls out and I spin to meet him. His lips are soft. I kiss him anyway.
I sit on the ledge and spread my legs and look at him. “You should kiss it better,” I say. “It hurts. Because of you.”
His eyes catch mine. He lowers himself into the water and puts his mouth on me. I tighten my thighs around his head and he works his tongue against me, his lips soft, his head moving slowly side to side. I come on his face and my legs go loose.
He licks his lips. “Feeling better, I take it.”
I am breathing too hard to answer. I reach down and touch his face instead.
Afterward we stay in the water for a while.
Not talking much. The light through the canopy gap has gone from amber to rose and the steam rises into it and disperses and the spring holds us both with its ancient unhurried warmth and the forest settles around us as it settled with me since the warm day when it stopped testing and started simply being present.
“The arm,” he says, at some point.
“It’s fine.”
“Ysara’s work.”
“Ysara’s work,” I confirm. A pause. “She told me things about you.”
He is still in the water beside me, close, his arm along the rim behind my shoulders. “What things?”
“That you carry things you haven’t put down. That you’ve been doing it for years.” “She wasn’t wrong,” I say.
He looks at the canopy. The rose light moves through it in the small breeze that comes at this hour, shifting the shadows. “No,” he says. “She wasn’t.”
I put my hand against his chest, palm flat, feeling the beat of him beneath my palm that is slower than a human heart and steadier and has been going for six centuries and will go for six more. “You could put something down,” I say. Quietly. Not a direction. An offering.
He looks at my hand on his chest. He covers it with his own.
That is his answer. The warmth of his palm over mine and how he holds it there, and that is enough for this evening, and the spring holds us both, and the light goes from rose to gray, and we do not move until the cold of the air finally makes the case for the beach.