28. Nerina
NERINA
The fire is nearly out when he comes back.
I hear him before I see him — his footsteps on the sand, unhurried, the particular weight of a man who has made a decision and is no longer arguing with himself about it.
I am still sitting where he left me, my coat around my shoulders, the coals throwing just enough light to see by.
I do not turn around. I watch the coals and I wait and I let him come.
He stops behind me.
"The council voted this afternoon," he says.
"I know."
"You couldn't know. You were on the beach?"
"I know because you came back." I look at the coals. "If it had gone the other way you would have sent someone else."
Silence. The island is quiet around us, no testing, no pressure. Just the dark and the dying fire and him standing behind me in it.
"Seventeen to five," he says. "The expulsion vote. You leave in three days."
A tension in my chest releases, the way a rope goes when the thing it was holding finally drops. I have known this was coming. I have known it the way I have known about the tide, a peripheral certainty, always running. Knowing doesn't change the landing.
"I got what I came for," I say.
It's true. The jewels are real. Bren's treatment is paid for three times over in the weight of what Maelor has already given me and whatever remains in the hoard cache is more than I know what to do with.
I came to steal one thing and I am leaving with everything I needed and a thing I didn't come for and can't take with me.
"Yes," he says.
"Politics," I say. "It was always going to be politics."
"Yes."
I finally turn and look at him. He is standing just outside the reach of the firelight — coat on, hands loose at his sides, those gold eyes finding me in the dark without any difficulty at all.
He looks the way he looked the first time I saw him: enormous and certain and entirely himself.
He also looks like a man who has been carrying something all evening and has brought it here because there is nowhere else to put it.
"How did you vote?" I say.
He is quiet for a moment.
"Maelor."
"I voted to keep you," he says. His voice is even. "Formally. On the record."
I look at him. He looks back.
There is something happening in his face that I have not seen there before.
Not the controlled stillness he shows the council.
Not the patience that has no bottom to it.
Something underneath both of those, something that has been sitting under six centuries of governance and discipline and getting there eventually, and it has run out of room.
"That's a lie," I say.
"It is not a lie."
"You voted to keep me and you came down here to tell me I'm leaving in three days?"
"The vote—"
"How did you vote?" I say again. Quieter this time. Not a challenge. The real question.
He looks at me. The coals shift and settle. A coal drops and sends up a small thread of orange that dies before it reaches the air.
"No," he says. "Damn it."
And then he crosses the distance between us in two steps and his hands find my face and he tips my head back and kisses me, not carefully, not the way he has been careful, not with any of the restraint I have watched him exercise for twelve days, and I make a sound against his mouth that is not surprise because I am not surprised, I am only relieved, the kind of relief that lives in the body before the mind gets to it.
"I voted to take you now," he says against my mouth, "before someone makes me be reasonable about it."
I get my hands into his coat and pull.
He is already working at mine, not rough, not hurried, just certain, the way he is certain about everything, his hands finding buttons and ties in the dark without fumbling because he has excellent vision and apparently has been paying attention.
My coat goes. His follows. The island air is cool against my arms and I don't care because his hands are at my waist and they are warm the way he is always warm, the warmth of a body that runs hotter than the world around it, and I have been thinking about those hands since the spring.
Since before the spring, if I am being precise about it.
"Three days," I say.
"Tonight," he says. "We have tonight."
Yes,* I think. *That's the thing about tonight. It is the only thing that is entirely ours.
He gets me down onto the bedroll — careful about it, one hand behind my shoulders, not graceless, and then he is over me and I can see his face in the last of the firelight, those gold eyes, the slit of the pupils gone wide in the dark, the burn scars at his throat that I have put my hand against twice now and will put my hand against again because I am allowed and I know it and he knows I know it.
"You should know," he says, "that I am not going to be reasonable about this?"
"I know," I say. "I'm counting on it."
A shift moves through his expression that is not quite a smile and not quite anything else I have a name for. Then he brings his mouth to my throat and I stop thinking in complete sentences.
He is not reasonable about it.
He is thorough as he is thorough about everything — complete attention, no rushing, like he is learning her, intending to keep it.
His hands on me like he is cataloguing. His mouth at my collar and then lower and I arch up and get my fingers into his hair and he makes a sound low in his throat that I feel more than hear.
The coat is gone. The shirt follows. The night air on my skin and then his hands covering it and the contrast is almost unbearable.
*"Tell me what you want,"* he says against my ribs.
"Everything," I say. "All of it. I'm leaving in three days and I want all of it."
He lifts his head and looks at me. In the dying firelight his eyes are molten, that gold gone to something deeper, something that has been sitting under the governance and the patience and the six centuries of getting there eventually, and it is here now, and it is looking at me like I am the only thing it has found worth looking at in a very long time.
*“Then you’ll have it,”* he says.
And I do.
He starts with his mouth.
His lips at my collar and then lower, no hesitation, no asking, moving down my sternum and then across my ribs with the focused attention of a man who has decided to take his time and means it.
I get my fingers into his hair and hold on.
His hands move over me like he is memorising, the inside of my wrist, the curve of my hip, the backs of my thighs, every surface catalogued and filed.
I am already shaking by the time he gets where he is going and when his mouth finally finds me I arch off the bedroll and bite my own knuckle to keep the sound inside.
He does not hurry. He works me with his tongue slow and relentless until I come apart the first time with my hand pressed to my own mouth, the sound swallowed into my fist, my whole body clenching and releasing while he holds my hips flat against the ground and rides it out.
I am still shaking when he lifts his head and looks at me with those wide dark eyes and starts again.
“I can’t,” I say. “I—”
He does not stop.
The second one hits harder than the first. I grab his hair and pull and he lets me, still working, his tongue pressing exactly where I need it, and I come on his face with my back arched and my knuckles bleeding where I bit them and no sound at all because I have run out of sound.
When I finally pull him up by the shoulders and get my hands at his belt he lets me do it, patient while I work the buckle with fingers that are not entirely reliable.
I get my hand around him — thick and hot and already wet at the tip — and he exhales against my neck like something that has been held for a very long time being let go.
“Now,” I say. “I want you now.”
He lines himself up and pushes in slow, one long stroke, and I feel every inch of it, the stretch and the fullness and the weight of him settling into me, and I hear myself make a sound I do not recognise, low and broken and entirely honest.
“All right?” he says against my temple. His voice has gone somewhere wrecked.
“Don’t stop,” I say.
He doesn’t stop.
He moves in me slow and deep, the bedroll rough at my back and the night air cold on my skin and his chest burning hot against mine, and I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper and he goes.
His cock filling me completely with each thrust, his hips finding mine in the dark, the slick wet sound of it between us.
I get my mouth against his throat and bite down and he groans — a real sound, unguarded, nothing of the governor in it — and drives harder.
“Look at me,” I say.
He lifts his head. Those gold eyes in the last of the firelight, the pupils gone wide and dark, and whatever is behind them is not the lord of this island or the guardian of anything. It is just him. Six centuries of a person, looking at me like I am the only thing worth looking at.
I come a third time with him buried inside me, my nails in his back and my face pressed to his collarbone, the orgasm rolling through me in waves while he keeps moving, relentless, working me through every pulse of it.
He follows me over moments later, his whole body going rigid, his cock pulsing hot and deep inside me as he finishes, his face pressed into my neck and a sound coming out of him that I am going to carry for the rest of my life.
We stay locked together. Both breathing. Both wrecked.
I think: this is the night I will count from.
He rolls to his side and pulls me with him, my back against his chest, and we breathe.
Whatever comes after — the crossing, Blackwake, Bren healed and whole and standing in the light. I will count from this.
Three days,* some part of me notes, still keeping the tally. *I have three more days.
Tonight,* the rest of me answers back. *Tonight is not three days from now. Tonight is now. Be here.
I am here.
I think: this is the night I will count from.
Whatever comes after, the crossing, Blackwake, Bren healed and whole and standing in the light. I will count from this.
Three days,* some part of me notes, still keeping the tally. *I have three more days.
Tonight,* the rest of me answers back. *Tonight is not three days from now. Tonight is now. Be here.
I am here.
He pulls me close afterward and I let him, my back against his chest, his arm across my ribs, both of us breathing. The ash of the fire is pale at the edge of the pit. The stars are doing their work above the cloud cover, invisible but present, as they always are.
"Maelor," I say.
"Yes."
I can't finish it. I have the words. I have had them since the spring, maybe before, maybe since he knelt in the volcanic mud and fixed my brig's hull without being asked, but they are the kind of words that once said become part of the record, and I am leaving in three days, and I don't know what the record does to either of us if I say them now.
So I say: "I'll fix the shutter."
His arm tightens across my ribs. Not much. Just enough.
"I know you will," he says.
We lie there until the cold finally makes its case for sleep, and neither of us says the thing, and both of us know the thing, and the island holds its quiet around us like it is keeping the secret too.