My hands are still on his shoulders from the salve, and I move them up, along the sides of his neck, over the bony ridges of his crest, and his breathing changes under my palms.
“Can I,” I start, and don’t finish, because his mouth covers mine again and the kiss deepens and his tongue does something that makes me forget what I was going to ask.
We kiss for a long time. The fire burns low; the glow-stone holds its light.
His hands stay on my face and in my hair, and then one moves down the side of my neck and I tip my head back and his mouth follows, lips against my throat, the place where he bites me every morning. Not biting now. Kissing. The difference makes my breath catch.
“Shirt,” he says.
I pull it over my head and drop it. His hands are on my ribs, and the heat of him against my bare skin erases the months of cold. Every fire I’ve sat beside, every blanket I’ve shared, none of it did what his hands do in three seconds, and the deep chill in my chest comes apart.
I make a sound, the noise a body makes when it stops bracing.
His thumbs move up my sternum. Slow. I’ve touched him before during examinations, hands on his back, his arms, the gland line, and every one of those touches I told myself I was studying him.
This is him studying me. His thumbs trace my collarbone, his fingers follow the line of my shoulders, and he touches the scar on my left shoulder, the one I gave myself at nineteen, tracing it the way I traced his dead patches. Reading the damage. Learning the cost.
“Here?” he says, his finger resting on the scar.
“Compound test. I was nineteen and stupid.”
“You were nineteen and brave.”
“Those are the same thing at nineteen.”
His mouth goes to the scar, lips then tongue, his breath on the puckered skin, and the tenderness of it undoes something I didn’t know I was holding.
I put my hands on his chest, where the scales are broad and overlapping, and underneath them his heart. I press my palms flat and feel it beating, and from here his heartbeat fills my whole body.
His hands move down my sides and over my hips, his fingers spanning from my hip bone to my lower back, and the size of his hands against my body is something I keep registering and not knowing what to do with.
“You can touch me,” I say. “I’m not going to break.”
“I know you won’t break.” His voice is low and rough. “I’m being careful because I want to be careful. Not because I think you’re fragile.”
I don’t have a counter for that.
He pulls me into his lap, my thighs bracketing his hips, my face coming close to his when I rise on my knees, the firelight on his scales and the glow-stone making his eyes brighter than they should be.
“Hi,” I say, because all my words are for science and this isn’t science.
“Hi,” he says, and his voice is warm and low and undone, and I want to hear him say it again.
I kiss him again. His hands are on my back, my sides, learning the shape of me the way I learned the shape of him with the salve, except this isn’t medicine. His thumbs brush the undersides of my breasts and my hips roll against him and his scales flush bright.
His mouth moves down my throat, my collarbone, lower, his tongue tracing the curve of my breast, and my hand goes to the back of his head, fingers gripping the ridges of his crest. I hold him there because what his tongue is doing is something I don’t want to stop.
He takes his time. His tongue is textured and precise; he learns what makes me gasp and then does it again, and when my back arches against his hand he makes the low vibration in his chest that I feel everywhere.
“Sirath.” His name comes out rough.
He lowers me onto my back, on his furs, his body over mine, his weight on his arms. The size of him above me should be intimidating but it isn’t; his eyes are gold and his face is close to mine and I’m breathing his air.
His mouth moves lower, down my stomach, and I lift my hips and push my trousers off and his hands pull them the rest of the way. Then his tongue is tracing the midline and I realize where he’s going and my hand tightens in the ridges of his crest and I say “yes” before he asks.
He doesn’t ask. He reads the answer in my body and he goes.
His tongue is longer than a human tongue, warmer, the surface a texture I wasn’t expecting, not rough, not smooth, something in between, a fine grain that drags against sensitiveskin until my thoughts dissolve into static. He finds the right place and I say “there” and my voice doesn’t sound like mine.
