"Tell me anyway."
He looks at the floor. The water pooling at his bare feet. The hem of the robe dragging on the stone, absorbing the puddle. His toes, pale and pruned from the bath.
"You weren't satisfied."
Silence.
"After. You were still... you were still hard. I wasn't enough. My body wasn't enough to satisfy you and I don't know what good I am as a mate if I can't even provide that, if the one thing I should be able to give you isn't sufficient, and I know what that makes me and I know what Syreth would say and I can't..." He stops. His voice has gone rough and small and he clamps his mouth shut because the sentence was heading somewhere he can't go, somewhere that involves the word worthless, and he is not saying that word out loud in front of the prince. He has some dignity left. Not much, but some.
The silence stretches. One second. Two. Three. Four.
Then Ithyris crosses the room and takes Bryn's face in his hands.
Bryn jolts. The prince's palms are warm and large, cradling his jaw, and he tilts Bryn's face up and Bryn is forced to look at him and the expression on Ithyris's face is something Bryn doesn't have a word for. Not pity, because pity would make Bryn close down and the prince seems to know that instinctively. Not amusement, because there is nothing amusing about the boy standing in front of him. Something broken and fierce and so tender it hurts to look at, something that says I see what you've done to yourself and I am going to undo it, and the determination in it is so absolute that Bryn's breath catches.
"Bryn." The prince's thumbs brush his cheekbones, slow and warm. "Listen to me. You are worth everything to me. Everything. Regardless of whether we have sex. Regardless of whether you ever let me touch you again. I would rather be beside you and never lay a hand on you than be without you. Do you understand me?"
Bryn's eyes burn. He clenches his jaw against it. He is not going to cry again. He has already cried today, on the trail, with the dragon circling above him, and that was more crying than he's done in the past three years combined and he is finished.
"That said." The prince's voice drops. His thumbs keep moving, slow and gentle, tracing the line of Bryn's cheekbones with a tenderness that is at complete odds with the intensity in his eyes. "You are wrong."
"I saw..."
"You saw my body's response to its mate. And you misread it." He dips his head until his forehead is nearly touching Bryn's and his amethyst eyes fill Bryn's entire field of vision, close and deep and fractured with gold. "I was still hard because of you, Bryn. Because of how right you are for me. Because the sight of you and the scent of you and the feel of you around me is so overwhelming to every part of me that once is not enough. It willnever be enough. Not because you're lacking. Because you are everything."
Bryn is not going to cry. He is not.
"No matter how many times I have you," Ithyris says, and his voice has gone rough and dark and his eyes are dropping to Bryn's mouth with a heat that is visible, "I will want you again. After the first time. After the hundredth. After the thousandth. I will still be hard for you because my body will never be finished wanting you. That is not inadequacy, Bryn. That is what you do to me."
The tears escape. Two of them, running hot down his cheeks and over the prince's thumbs, and Bryn is mortified but he can't stop them and Ithyris catches them against his skin and doesn't look away and doesn't comment and doesn't make Bryn feel small for the fact that he is crying in a wet robe in front of the dragon prince because he thought he was bad at sex. Which, when he considers it from the outside, is so absurd it should be funny, except that it isn't funny because underneath the sex and the shame is the same wound that has been bleeding since he was twelve years old and lost his brother and his mother and his childhood in the same afternoon.
The wound that says: you are not enough. You will never be enough. Stop trying.
Ithyris is looking at him as though that wound is visible and as though the prince intends to spend the rest of his life proving it wrong.
Ithyris kisses him.
Not the way he kissed him in the forest, hungry and consuming and desperate. This is slow. His mouth covers Bryn's and his hands stay on Bryn's face and he kisses him with a gentleness that is deliberate and thorough and unhurried, as though they have all the time in the world and the prince intends to use every second of it. He kisses Bryn until his lungs areempty and his knees are gone and he is leaning into Ithyris because he cannot hold himself up. The prince kisses the tears off his cheeks. He kisses the corner of Bryn's jaw and the hollow beneath his ear and the bruise he left on Bryn's throat in the forest, pressing his lips to the mark with a tenderness that makes Bryn's breath hitch and a small, wanting sound escape his mouth, and the prince's breath catches at the sound.
Ithyris lifts him. One arm under his thighs, the other across his back, and Bryn is off the ground and cradled against the prince's chest and he should protest because he is not a child and he is not fragile and he has been carrying himself for six years without anyone's help. But he doesn't protest. He doesn't protest because the prince's arms are warm and his heart is beating against Bryn's side and Bryn is so tired of carrying himself. He is so tired of being the one who holds things together, and for a few seconds he lets himself be held instead, and the relief of it is so acute it borders on pain.
Ithyris carries him to the bed and lays him down and the robe falls open. Bryn is bare beneath it, pink and damp from the bath, the scrubbed flush of his skin making the prince's marks stand out in sharper contrast, and Ithyris looks at the whole of him with an expression that is worshipful and wanting at the same time. His gaze drags down Bryn's body, over the marks he left in the forest, the bruises on Bryn's hips from his fingers, the fading flush on his chest, and lower, where Bryn is hardening despite everything, his cock thickening against his stomach because his body has apparently decided that emotional devastation and arousal are interchangeable states and is responding to both with equal enthusiasm.
The prince pushes the robe off Bryn's shoulders and drops to his knees between Bryn's legs at the edge of the bed. His hands slide up Bryn's thighs, warm and sure, pushing them apart, and Bryn lets them fall open and the exposure is total and he doesn'tlook away from the prince's face because the way Ithyris is looking at him, at the most intimate and vulnerable part of him, with that expression of absolute reverence, is the thing Bryn needs more than the touch. He needs to see it. He needs to watch the prince look at him and see not inadequacy but something worth kneeling for.
"Let me show you," Ithyris says. "Let me show you what you do to me."
He puts his mouth on Bryn.
His tongue is hot and thorough and devastating. He licks over him, flat and wet and deliberate, and Bryn is still tender from the forest, still loosened and sensitive, and the sensation is sharper now, almost too much, his nerve endings raw and overworked and screaming with a mixture of pleasure and the particular intensity that comes from being touched in a place that is already marked. The prince pushes his tongue inside him and Bryn cries out and his hands fly to Ithyris's hair and grip and the prince groans against him and the vibration makes Bryn's thighs shake. Ithyris works him open with obscene, patient thoroughness, his tongue pressing deep, tasting the remnants of himself inside Bryn, and the wet, intimate sounds of it fill the quiet room and Bryn would be embarrassed if he had any capacity left for embarrassment, which he surrendered somewhere on the forest floor and hasn't reclaimed.
The prince draws back just long enough for Bryn to hear the quiet click of his claws retracting, and then two fingers press into him, thick and careful, replacing the tongue. Then three, his fingertips finding that place inside Bryn and pressing against it, stroking over it with a precision that makes white light explode behind Bryn's eyes. He curls his fingers and Bryn arches off the bed and his cock leaks onto his stomach and the prince watches it happen with dark, hungry eyes, his mouth wet and swollen, and he tells Bryn he's the most beautiful thing Ithyris has everseen, that the sounds Bryn is making are going to kill him, that he wants to hear Bryn scream for him.
Ithyris strips. He stands and pulls his shirt over his head and unfastens his trousers and pushes them down and Bryn sees him fully naked for the first time, properly, without the haze of adrenaline and the forest light, and the sight drives the air from his lungs. The prince is enormous. Broad and dense with muscle, the violet scales cascading down his chest and stomach and the V of his hips, and his cock is thick and hard and straining toward his stomach, the head dark and wet, and he wraps his hand around himself and strokes once and his eyes flutter shut and when they open they are black and fixed on Bryn with an intensity that makes Bryn's whole body clench.
The prince crawls over him on the bed and settles between his thighs and the weight of him above Bryn is heat and pressure and want, and Bryn pulls him down and kisses him, tasting himself on the prince's mouth, and he reaches between them and wraps his hand around Ithyris's cock and the prince groans into his mouth, rough and animal, his hips bucking into Bryn's grip, and the feeling of that enormous body shuddering because of Bryn's hand is the most powerful thing Bryn has ever experienced, including running a kingdom.
"Inside me," he whispers against the prince's lips. "Now. Please."
