I eat the charred part. It’s crunchy. It’s terrible. “This is an improvement over the spite jerky,” I say.
“It’s burned.”
“Yes. But it’s burned with effort. Effort counts.”
The noise he makes is closer to a laugh than anything I’ve heard from him, and his shoulders drop a fraction. “Eat the other side,” he says. “I cooked that side less.”
“You cooked that side not at all.”
“That’s what I said. Less.”
I eat the raw side, and it’s better. He watches me eat with an expression I’ve learned to read over ten days of living three feet from his face, not the flat guard from the auction hall but something uncertain, the look of a creature who isn’t used to providing for someone and is surprised to find he wants to.
After dinner, I make him turn around. “Salve,” I say. “Shirt off.”
He pulls the vest over his head. I’ve done this every evening for three days, and the routine is fixed: he sits on the stone floor, I sit behind him on the flat rock he dragged in, and I work the paste into the dead patches along his gland line.
The salve requires direct application, my hands on his scales, sustained contact, the compound absorbing over twenty to thirty minutes. I can’t rush it.
I am aware of how this looks. Two adults in a cave, one of them shirtless, the other rubbing medicine into his back with both hands for half an hour every evening. Nothing about this is ambiguous, and both of us have been pretending it is.
Tonight the pretending is thinner than usual.
My left hand trembles once, the tremor spiking, and I press harder to steady it. Where the salve has been working, new growth is coming in, pearl-white, brighter than the old scales around it. I press my thumbs along the gland line and feelthe tissue respond, less swollen than last week, the channels clearing.
“The regrowth on your left shoulder is ahead of schedule,” I say. My voice is steady. My hands are steady. Everything else is not.
He makes a sound, low in his chest, and the vibration comes through my palms.
“That hurts?”
“No.”
I keep working. My thumbs find a transition zone near his lower spine where the dead scales are flaking and the new ones are pushing through underneath. I press the salve in and his whole back shifts. Not a flinch. A lean. His body pressing back into my hands.
I stop pretending.
My hands change, the pressure shifting from therapeutic to something else. I stop working the salve into the patches and start touching him: the ridge of his spine, the thick scales across his shoulders, the place where his neck meets his crest, the finer scales there, the ones that flush when his venom responds.
He goes very still. “Ruelle.”
“Don’t talk. Not yet.”
I press my forehead against his back, between his shoulder blades, and the hum of his venom production sits in my sternum. I’ve had my hands on this body for ten days, and every touch was clinical.
This isn’t.
He turns, slow and careful, the way he does everything that matters, until he’s facing me. His gold eyes close, his hand comes up and rests on the side of my face, his palm covering my cheek and jaw, his thumb against my temple, his fingers reaching into my hair.
“You’re sure,” he says.
“I’ve been sure since the second bite. I’ve been sure since you burned a hare for me and watched me eat it.”
His mouth opens, not a smile but something better, something that uses his whole face, the jaw plates shifting, the muscles around his eyes doing a thing I haven’t seen before.
I lean up and kiss him.
His mouth is different from anything I know. The scales around his lips are finer and softer than I expected, and his tongue meets mine, longer and more dexterous. I stop noticing the differences and start noticing the kiss. He kisses me slowly, carefully, like I’m the first thing he’s touched in years that he doesn’t want to break.
